February 5, 2018 | Just teleport yourself to chat with loved ones: You can even play back the meeting as a memory.
While teleportation is still in the realm of science fiction, Microsoft has introduced “holoportation” – a 3D, real-time hologram of someone who is a world away, but still interacts with you.
It’s a newly revealed project coming out of Microsoft Research’s Interactive 3D Technologies team and using HoloLens, the company’s augmented reality headset.
It also has a special camera rig setup to allow you to see, hear and interact with real-time holograms of “remote participants” in 3D, as if they are actually in the same room with you.
Microsoft hasn’t quite detailed what the camera rig requires, however it is able to capture how a person is moving around in their environment. This allows a HoloLens user to see an augmented real-time capture of that person in their own environment.
Of course, it doesn’t provide the sense of smell or physical touch, and due to current HoloLens technology, the hologram of the other person will appear in the middle of your field of view. That means it may look like they are floating or standing inside your couch or table.
Still, aside from needing a special camera rig, what’s been shown of the technology is impressive. It gives us a glimpse of how the way we communicate could evolve from 2D video calls like FaceTime.
Alex Kipman, head of the HoloLens project, showed holoporation technology during a TED talk earlier this month, and had NASA scientist Jeff Norris join him on stage via holoportation. This allowed Norris to talk to the audience about how NASA is applying the HoloLens to research.
The video, which you can see here, is mind blowing to watch, but it should be noted that the HoloLens is still in development stages (the dev kit alone right now costs $3,000).
Forget Facebook, Skype and Snapchat, a professor in Dubai believes “HoloPortation” will be the new social media craze in less than a decade.
The honorary professor at Amity University and founder of Dubai Solar Schools, David Provenzani, said humans will be able to teleport anywhere through holographic figures of themselves. The virtual meetings can be recorded, which means users can send or “post” their interactions to other humans, and play it back as “memories”.
Microsoft has already invented a programme as such, where a staff member got to interact with his daughter through HoloPortation. He recorded their entire interaction and played it back.
“This will help with communicating with people that are physically distant to us. HoloPortation is an example from Microsoft and I can suspect that, within five to seven years, we will have technology that we can apply to our house and HoloPort ourselves in another room, to have a meeting, to talk or to interact with family and friends,” Provenzani told Khaleej Times at the sidelines of the “A Journey to the World of 2040” conference by Amity University.
“I would suppose this would be the new social network. So, now we use Facebook, where we share photos and videos, but in the future, we will post our HoloPortation sessions because you can record them and play them back as memories.”
Because the holographs are 3-D images, the Microsoft employee was also able to zoom-in and out of the holographs, making him and his daughter appear much smaller and easier to view. However, users can also keep the holographs to human-size.