We talked to Microsoft’s Alex Kipman and other industry leaders about what the blending of real and virtual means for human interaction with tech.
Alex Kipman knows about hardware. Since joining Microsoft 16 years ago, he has been the primary inventor on more than 100 patents, including Xbox Kinect’s pioneering motion-sensing technology that paved the way for some of the features in his latest creation, the holographic 3D headset called the HoloLens.
But today, sitting in his office in Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Kipman is not talking hardware. He’s discussing the relationship between humans and machines from a broader philosophical perspective. Whether we interact with machines through screens or stuff that sits on our heads, to him, it’s all “just a moment in time.”
The Brazilian-born Kipman, whose title is technical fellow at Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group, enthusiastically explains that the key benefit of technology is its ability to displace time and space. He brings up “mixed reality” (MR), Microsoft’s term for tech that mixes real-world with computer-generated imagery and will, some day, according to Kipman, seamlessly blend augmented and virtual reality. He says that one of the most exciting features of MR is its potential to unleash “displacement superpowers” onto the real world.
Humans attach value to the feeling you get when physically sharing a space with another person, which is the reason I took a 10-hour flight to have a face-to-face conversation with Kipman. “But if you could have this type of interaction without actually being here,” he says, “life suddenly becomes much more interesting.
“My daughter can hang out with her cousins in Brazil every weekend, and my employees don’t need to travel around the globe to get their job done,” he continues. “With the advent of artificial intelligence, we could still be talking, but I’m not even here anymore. One day you and I are going to be having this conversation, you’ll be sitting on Mars, and I’ll have been dead for 100 years. Our job as technologists is to accelerate that future and ask how we do that.
” Microsoft is betting on mixed reality to help launch us into the future. Which brings us back to hardware. The availability of the right device at the right price will be a factor in whether consumers adopt MR (though devices alone aren’t likely to jump-start a MR revolution, if the slow sales of VR systems are any indication). While the HoloLens is the only self-contained holographic computer on the market (unlike the Oculus Rift or HTC Vine, it doesn’t need to be attached by cables to an external device), the $3,000 smart glasses have served more as proof of concept than a consumer product.
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Windows Mixed Reality headsets. [Photo: courtesy of Microsoft]
Now Microsoft wants to change that. This fall, the company is launching the Windows Mixed Reality Headsets, its first major attempt to sell the concept to the general public. Though still closer to virtual reality than a perfect AR/VR hybrid, the new device repackages some of the main features of the HoloLens—such as its advanced tracking and mapping capabilities—at the more affordable price range of $300-$500. The headsets will be available in different forms via a number of hardware partners, including Dell, HP, and Samsung, and will enable users to create 3D spaces that they can personalize with media, apps, browser windows, and more.
As Microsoft sees it, introducing a platform that lets anyone in the general public build their own digital world is the first step in achieving that leap into the world of tomorrow. “If you believe, as we do, that mixed reality is the inevitable next secular trend of computing, it’s going to involve productivity, creativity, education, and the entire spectrum of entertainment, from casual to hardcore gaming,” Kipman says.
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Kipman points out that in these shared real/virtual environments, our relationship with computing changes from a personal to a collaborative one—from devices storing your own individual content, to common creative spaces mediated by technology.
This has profound implications for how we will design apps in the future, according to Kipman. If, for example, you create a virtual statue and place it as a hologram on top of a table in your living room, another person with a different mixed reality device should still be able to see your statue when they enter that room and move it around if they wish. That’s because the device does not store your content, but rather scans and maps the environment to determine what objects (both real and virtual) inhabit it.
“These concepts require you to redefine an operating system in the context of mixed reality,” Kipman says. “You have to build a foundation that goes from the silicon to the cloud architecture that enables this shift from personal computing to collaborative computing. And these things take time.” Kipman smiles. “Until it doesn’t, then it just picks up and you’re like, What happened?”
Source: Fast Company