I wonder how this will play out with IP, given that Lenovo has been manufacturing a Windows Mixed Reality headset using Microsoft's VR/AR tech? They'd have to tread very carefully to avoid stepping on any MS patents etc. with inside-out tracking.
Also, once again (as with Valve vs. HTC) we see the pattern playing out:
1) Platform owner develops new tech to be used on their platform, tries to foster an ecosystem
2) Third parties develop products based on the tech
3) Third parties launch competing platform because in the end, platforms are more profitable than hardware
4) Market is fragmented and we can't have nice things
What makes you think Microsoft intended to keep hololens-class devices manufacturing to themselves?
This could be a relationship just like PC OEMs like Lenovo already have, licensing things with a royalty. The prominence of the AR apps in windows (preinstalled in many cases) well before the hardware that Microsoft made themselves was ready for mass adoption makes it clear that they want Windows and that ecosystem to have a play in AR and VR.
We've seen hardware plays like this in the past with the Surface design which seems to have too odd of a cadence and release cycle to be purely motivated as a product offering. The design was meant to be an influence on the market, which helped windows machines remain relevant in a space where Apple sees devices like the iPad fitting.
> What makes you think Microsoft intended to keep hololens-class devices manufacturing to themselves?
Nothing, but they'll be wanting HoloLens-class devices to be running Windows. This thing runs Android.
> We've seen hardware plays like this in the past with the Surface design which seems to have too odd of a cadence and release cycle to be purely motivated as a product offering.
As you say, the Surface was aimed squarely at heading high end iOS devices off at the pass.
Microsoft doesn't care too much about hardware. They care a whole heckin' lot about Windows. (Just like Valve with Steam, for instance.) The hardware is ephemeral, owning the platform is where it's at.
The platform that Microsoft wants to push is not just Windows. It's Azure. The HoloLens 2 keynote made a big deal out of opening the ecosystem to Apple and Android clients.
Yeah, Microsoft thinks that Azure can be the backplane/glue binding all the AR ecosystems and the various overlays you may want shared between experiences.
(Which is often an interesting Big Deal in cyberpunk novels; it's not the hardware or the operating system, it is who controls the database connecting the real and virtual worlds.)
And their fancy Windows core thingy (I'm sorry, I've forgotten the name) that makes everything rely on the same core code but with different UI things.
Platforms are great, and I'm honestly pretty pumped about Microsoft's more-open-source future.
> Nothing, but they'll be wanting HoloLens-class devices to be running Windows. This thing runs Android.
The article states that Lenovo doesn't have strong opinions about which OS the hardware runs, so it sounds like Lenovo has hedged to also support Windows on the hardware when the time comes that Windows on ARM is out of Beta (around the time that the HoloLens 2 releases?). Microsoft will still have a play to convince people to buy the Lenovo hardware and run Windows on it, the hardware sounds classed to be capable of it, and that's probably a good competition for all involved.
From my 9 years working in Microsoft China, I think Lenovo, Microsoft, and China all have a very good relationship. I’d be very surprised if Microsoft took action against Lenovo, I would be astounded if they went anywhere near where the Chinese government would admonish them.
I wouldn't be surprised here if Microsoft was even intentionally lending the IP. Microsoft doesn't want to be the sole hardware vendor in a category, so encouraging HoloLens clones is probably somewhere on their explicit agenda.
I don't think Microsoft is that dumb. They have business in China that they want to protect. They will certainly have China advisors available to their board to prevent such miscalculations. And that is assuming Microsoft considers Lenovo's product as an infringement (they might not); Lenovo may have paid for whatever IP they have used - or they may have found creative ways to avoid it.
It is sad that all the comments are basically implying that MS, or any company by extension, should just accept IP infringement by Chinese rather than take action against it.
How the hell did we get in this mess....
Why don't companies understand that Chinese market is a one off access. The moment some Chinese company copies IP, that access is gone. It's a very myopic strategy to accept such losses as a trade-off for doing business in China.
Maybe, but China makes up a very tiny fraction of msft revenue. The only reason they would give in to threats from China would be if they believe that in the future the piracy problem in China will go away for them.
The only place I see such devices are highly polished demos to show the 'capabilities of AR/VR'. I've never seen such headsets used for anything even remotely useful (not considering gaming as extremely useful). I think the AR/VR craze is just here because we have nothing really new at the moment and investors want to pour money into something.
I run psychology experiments (motor control/spatial decision making) in VR and and its been a gamechanger in the last few years. Create your experiments completely in software to allow them to copied, modified, and distributed much more easily.
That is an absolutely fascinating application that I've never considered before. One could design all sorts of experiments, not just exclusively spatial reasoning.
Imagine allowing a class of undergraduate students to participate in a version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and draw their own conclusions as to potential flaws in its methodology.
Or, as a philosophy student: allow students to engage in a real life rendition of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, where a student "competes" against his or her classmates and various versions of text generation algorithms from simple Markov chain generators, to OpenAI's GPT-2 and beyond.
These devices are powerful enough to perform regular desktop workstation tasks. But selling general purpose wearable computers is not cool, as is not cool selling hackable mobile phones. So apparently makers will keep making sexy locked-down devices in hope it surely sells out this time. Open it up - no-no, they won't be fools to do such mistake.
Disclaimer: I have a wearable computer with head mounted display (Vufine+, ~$200) and one-handed wireless keyboard (Twiddler 3, ~$200). The rest is Raspberry Pi Zero W and a powerbank. All devices are off-the-shelf, no soldering whatsoever.
I'm curious, what kind of work do you do with this setup and how much mileage do you get in a day out of it (work wise, not charge wise)? If you had any issue with it that you could rectify immediately what would it be?
Also engineering—meaning physical engineering, not software. Think: CAD, simulations, architecture, manufacturing. You could do a virtual walk though of a factory before breaking ground, or just look at the output of a numerical simulation to get a gist of it instead of spending time writing summary tools.
When VR controllers get there you could program an industrial robot arm just by doing the activity yourself in a simulated environment.
Personally, if I was an architect, I'd have bought into this stuff heavily. The ability to let people walk around the house I've just designed and request tweaks before the foundations are poured would be _immense_.
> Is there a market in there somewhere, or is it a whizz-bang gimmick like 3D TVs?
There's very little similarity between VR and 3D TV. The latter was mostly driven by marketing teams whilst the former was and is mostly driven by enthusiasts.
> I've seen a lot of VR gaming, or at least, I did, approximately 18-12 months ago, but it really seems to have petered out.
The Quest is about to be released. That's where most of the excitement is at the moment as it's a new form factor and potentially a new market.
I've used a Google Glass, Oculus Rift, Cardboard VR systems and seen a demo of Oculus Rift. Is the Lenovo ThinkReality a real competitor? The market hasn't picked up VR for gaming and AR has flopped so far. How about high end systems for engineering and design. There could be a case where engineering speed and collaboration could increase from using a few of these systems at any company doing hardware design.
I've used the original Hololens and one of the things that stuck with me was how well-polished it was from an OS standpoint. Microsoft has worked hard on Windows Holographic and it shows.
If this device can run Windows Holographic I think this could be really great. Lenovo already works with Microsoft to run it on some of their budget AR headsets but it is unclear to me whether Microsoft will grant them permission to use it on something that's a more direct Hololens competitor. I get the impression that running their own android-based holographic OS will not be the best though.
I was also impressed by the original Hololens. The hardware, however, needs some improvements. The headset was a bit heavy for long term use and the resolution of the AR image was not as good as I had expected. The software and SDK were solid; what stood out to me was the realtime spatial construction of the environment.
You're mixing AR and VR into the same bucket when the use cases are fairly different. ThinkReality is a competitor to HoloLens and Magic Leap, both of which (and this, too) are still in the dev kit / proof of concept phase. VR systems work just fine and are technically mass market ready, they just cost too much and the market for people who want to strap a heavy thing onto their face for long periods of time is smaller than a lot people expected.
Headset VR like this is indeed being evaluated mostly for non-consumer applications right now, including manual labor guidance (think mechanics and surgeons), team collaboration, and 3D design, but the price and capabilities are at least a generation away from being appealing to most companies.
I don't think AR has flopped so far, but when it's used well it's not perceived as AR.
For example, my car has a rear camera, which overlays where you are going depending on the position of the steering wheel. This is reality augmented, but since it feels so natural, nobody thinks about this as AR.
I disagree that the steering guide lines on a reverse camera are AR. A key aspect of AR is that it is environment-aware. An image overlaid on a video is not actually aware of “reality” at all.
Yeah the steering guides are not really AR but the rectangles that pop up on the thing you’re about to hit and turn colors based on how close your definitely are AR.
You’re interacting: you have your controller, the steering wheel, and you are manipulating an object, the car, and the computer inside your car is using sensors to determine how you are performing inside your environment, and providing you with virtual information combined with real world information so you are better equipped to do your job, than without the additional information augmented to you reality.
I'd put it closer to the HTC TyTn or first Google phone levels. It's still an enthusiasts thing, and there's no barrier for entry other than knowing what you want.
Once it becomes something that people want without knowing why, then it'll be iPhone level.
I think Oculus Quest could be the iPhone of VR. Keep in mind that the iPhone gen 1 didn’t sell well at all compared to just about any other iPhone generation.
It’s not about selling well. It’s revolutionizing the field. I don’t think the quest would be considered that.
It’s great and will bring more people to the market but it is still to be seen if that price point for something only a single person can enjoy at a time will be a game changer.
The iPhone brought mobile internet browsing into mainstream consciousness; we were already addicted to the Internet before it arrived, so it's no wonder that iPhones and smartphones took off.
The Oculus on the other hand has to provide not just good ergonomics, but also content that showcases the hardware well.
I had a Galaxy S7 and GearVR headset in 2016. Some of the games were cool like a TRON-style Pong game, but most of the content was awful, stuff like "explore a famous museum", which was all badly optimized, pixelated 3D video.
Even if Oculus launched with a VR version of a product that's known to be highly sticky engagement wise (e.g Fortnite), I don't know if people would go for it. Fortnite is already on every device anyway, are people really so into it that they want to be fully immersed visually when playing?
It already has. Four of my buddies that play Rocket League almost exclusively have dropped AU$300 on a headset because we showed them Beat Saber at a LAN party, and they haven't stopped playing it since.
I can't speak for ThinkReality, but HoloLens (2) is definitely not intended to be an Oculus competitor but for industry applications. I'm confident that consumer-grade AR/VR for anything but enthusiasts is at least a couple of device generations away.
AR is essentially in beta. There are no consumer-oriented products and the improvements between generations are huge. Much, much too early to say it has failed.
There are plenty of consumer-oriented products if you count the average phone. iOS and Android have both made big plays around AR. While it's not "goggles AR", it's also seeing a slow but steady adoption by consumers in the boring, but still important to AR handheld way.
You'll see people randomly using the measurement tools and other "boring" AR utilities all the time now, and then there are games like Ingress, Pokémon Go, and the soon to be released Harry Potter AR game, which all have rather large consumer adoption.
AR is getting so prevalent it's already "boring" or just a part of the user experience for consumers. What that means for eventual adoption of "goggles AR" for consumers is an interesting question. It's probably going to come down to form factor preferences and how many people want their main computing device to be in their pocket versus worn on their head, or how easy it is for the device to "flex" between roles as interest/necessary.
Also, once again (as with Valve vs. HTC) we see the pattern playing out:
1) Platform owner develops new tech to be used on their platform, tries to foster an ecosystem
2) Third parties develop products based on the tech
3) Third parties launch competing platform because in the end, platforms are more profitable than hardware
4) Market is fragmented and we can't have nice things