Minecraft Augmented Reality

[DNoved1]

http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us

If you scroll down a bit they have a picture with minecraft stuff.

Spoiler

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Seems neat. Thoughts?

[FlowerChild]

Seems neat. Thoughts?

I think we just found out why MS was so interested in buying Minecraft :)

Personally, I'll believe it when I see it. Have seen too many gimmicks like this come and go over the years to immediately jump on the hype-wagon. However, I will say that if MS is willing to blow billions on Minecraft just to promote this thing, they've probably got something good on their hands that actually works.

[Taleric]

Lol! What a perfect vehicle for VR, get all those parents to buy an "it" gift for their kids cause heck they like MC anyways.

Very gimmicky :P

[FlowerChild]

Lol! What a perfect vehicle for VR, get all those parents to buy an "it" gift for their kids cause heck they like MC anyways.

Very gimmicky :P

Hehe...well, it may be an excellent way to promote what might be an otherwise serious technology. There's a long history of this kind of stuff going all the way back to pornography being a big part of what put a VCR into so many households back in the 80's.

It really has me wondering. Back when MS bought MC I was thinking they had a quick turnaround planned on a sequel to justify it. Seeing this thing gave me a real "oh...so that's what they had planned" moment :)

[FaceFoiled]

There's a long history of this kind of stuff going all the way back to pornography being a big part of what put a VCR into so many households back in the 80's.

I wonder how that went back then. "Pictures meetings between the big guys from Betamax and VHS, Cigars and scantily dressed women handing out glasses of scotch." If I am not mistaken, it was the adult industry that ensured VHS won over Betamax.

[DNoved1]

Personally, I'll believe it when I see it.

I think it's likely that it isn't actually Minecraft itself being shown, but rather a 3D model, so likewise.

Based on some interviews/reports it'll have a mixture of practical and entertainment uses. Also, it won't be released to developers until this Spring, so I wouldn't expect a Minecraft Hololens app until next year at the earliest (just guessing of course).

Still, I do think a more hands-on approach to building will be quite interesting, fully closing the boundary between Legos and Minecraft. (Since, with the Hololens you would be able to 'pick up' a block with your hand and place it down elsewhere.)

[FlowerChild]

Still, I do think a more hands-on approach to building will be quite interesting, fully closing the boundary between Legos and Minecraft. (Since, with the Hololens you would be able to 'pick up' a block with your hand and place it down elsewhere.)

With no tactile feedback mind you. There's a satisfaction to working with physical objects that I don't think this will be able to achieve, no matter how good it is.

[ion]

just imagine a stampede in my room when i try to clear the creepers. lulz!

[Sarudak]

Haptic feedback is in the works! ;)

[FlowerChild]

Hehe...I'm definitely getting old when each time I see a new technology like this my mind immediately jumps to the potential for abuse and overall dangers it represents.

Take the whole AR concept. Yes, this is all well and good and happy fuzzy bunny land until someone hacks your system to make the stairs in your home look like they begin a foot out from where they really do. In altering our perceptions in this manner we're opening up the possibility of others manipulating our perceptions in unprecedented ways and obviously not always with our best intentions in mind. In some ways it's like letting a stranger put something in your drink and gulping it down with no idea what the effect will be.

I've come to develop a real love/hate relationship with technology over time, and whereas when I was younger I'd be amongst the first to jump at the chance of embracing each new innovation, now I find myself retreating further and further away from each new device. Take the Xbox One for example. In the past I would have been all excited at the prospect of owning one. Now it's "no way in hell I'm voluntarily putting that Orwellian nightmare in my living room" :)

[johnt]

All I want out of hololens is to be able to play a multi-player tabletop wargame, with soldiers actually marching across the table top. If it can do that, I don't care if all the rest of the stuff is really possible. I just want to see my Warhammer 40k army marching across the field.

[johnt]

And re: abusing the hololens -- I wanted to write an app that creates little elves that walk around in your peripheral vision that disappear if you look at them directly.

[FlowerChild]

I think all I want out of AR in general is a chance to live a full life without waking up in a dystopian nightmare where everyone is wearing a headset projecting corporate controlled imagery directly onto their retinas :)

[Ethinolicbob]

We were looking into this kind of thing a few years ago, then companies like Google announced they had been working on Glass for years (essentially half the technology)
Figured at that point we weren't being innovative so much as connecting the dots of what was happening already, and late at that.
Biggest problem we came across was depth perception. Having an overlay basically has to take into account for where the eyes are focusing, eyesight prescription etc.
There were a couple of solutions, either another sensor to monitor the eye and adjust the image accordingly, but there was too much lag between the 2 processes. Then there was another group who were playing with sending the light right into the focal point of the eye. Not sure what became of that.
The other part of the technology was basically environment awareness which had already been done many times over by people playing with the kinect etc.
It's cool to see that it is happening. I am pretty eager to check it out and find out how :D

[FlowerChild]

There were a couple of solutions, either another sensor to monitor the eye and adjust the image accordingly, but there was too much lag between the 2 processes. Then there was another group who were playing with sending the light right into the focal point of the eye. Not sure what became of that.

I did some reading on it last night, and I think the latter is actually what MS are doing. I remember getting excited over a decade ago (probably more) when Sony was working on a similar concept. Cool to see it seems to be becoming a reality.

Hence my love/hate. Lots of cool stuff happening here, it just also happens to scare the shit out of me :)

[FlowerChild]

Hehe...just had an amusing thought with regards to this:

Some of you likely remember a time when "talking to yourself" was considered a sign of insanity. If you saw someone on public transit doing so, you usually gave them a wide birth. When people began walking around with cell phone headsets, there was a period of adjustment as a result, where I knew I was caught more than once thinking someone was a total loon and wondering how they had scored such a nice suit despite it, before realizing they were talking on a phone. With time, this slowly faded into the background, and we don't think twice about it anymore.

So, how about seeing things becoming the new norm? Guy waving his arms around at invisible attackers while sitting on the bus? No problem.

It seems technology is finally fulfilling the promise of bridging social divides :)

[Nyoike]

Some of you likely remember a time when "talking to yourself" was considered a sign of insanity. If you saw someone on public transit doing so, you usually gave them a wide birth.

I'm still not used to this. I always think they're going crazy for a few seconds before I realize that they most likely have a wireless earpiece on.

As for the Hololens, out of everything that they showed, Minecraft is the least exciting thing for me. In fact, I could really care less about Minecraft being brought to it. However, being able to view a model for something you're working on in real time and in 3D space as well as the virtual (what I presume is) Mars environment is absolutely amazing.

It is hard to say whether it is actually like what is shown in the videos, as the video is just a lot of simple post processing tricks. "Post" processing in real time would take a lot of computing power to achieve the effect shown.

[FlowerChild]

It is hard to say whether it is actually like what is shown in the videos, as the video is just a lot of simple post processing tricks. "Post" processing in real time would take a lot of computing power to achieve the effect shown.

From the first hand accounts I read from people that were trying prototype versions, it doesn't sound like they're exaggerating all that much with that video. There seems to be an issue at present where your peripheral vision isn't fully covered which means you can still see the unmodified really real world out of the corners of your eyes even if you're standing on the surface of Mars, but I think they're working on resolving that. The prototypes are also tethered in terms of being wired to a PC while the eventual consumer version isn't supposed to be. I read one really cool account about how it was rather disorienting for the guy trying it when he turned around on the surface of Mars, and his desk and computer were sitting there as if they too were on it. The system can selectively make objects either be overlayed with virtual elements, or remain unmodified so that you can continue to use them in the altered environment (so say continue to use your really real computer on the surface of not so real Mars).

And yes, the Mars thing is actually a Mars thing based on recorded data from probes (not real time for obvious reasons including the speed of light being an issue). My understanding is that they're collaborating with NASA on that project.

There's an awful lot of excitement about all this online right now if you do a quick search.

I'm not very excited about the Minecraft thing either really, as I doubt it's something I'd want to play given it probably contains even less actual gameplay than vanilla creative mode, due to the whole "god's eye view" thingy. However, I do acknowledge it's a pretty brilliant marketing strategy.

[Daisjun]

Some of you likely remember a time when "talking to yourself" was considered a sign of insanity. If you saw someone on public transit doing so, you usually gave them a wide birth. When people began walking around with cell phone headsets, there was a period of adjustment as a result, where I knew I was caught more than once thinking someone was a total loon and wondering how they had scored such a nice suit despite it, before realizing they were talking on a phone. With time, this slowly faded into the background, and we don't think twice about it anymore.

I remember getting my iPhone when it first launched in Australia. It was the first real smartphone you could store a sizable amount of music on. So there I'd be listening to music on the train when I get a phone call, click the headset to receive it: 'Hey how are you?'

I couldn't work out why everyone was staring at me until I realised that the whole train had been silent, then there's me going from listening to music to talking to an imaginary person in front of me. I actually now make the effort to unplug my headphones and hold the phone to my head to take a call just because of how ridiculous it looks.

And I think therein lies the problem with this kind of tech. Until someone develops a VR system small enough so it's not noticeable as being anything other than a normal set of glasses, it's not going to catch on.

[FlowerChild]

And I think therein lies the problem with this kind of tech. Until someone develops a VR system small enough so it's not noticeable as being anything other than a normal set of glasses, it's not going to catch on.

Well, on the bright side there, if they do reduce them to the size of regular glasses, we had a good twenty years or so there where laser surgery made getting rid of glasses a possibility before further technological progress put them back on us :)

[Katalliaan]

I could see it being useful in designing something that's going to be 3D printed. Model it in your preferred software, and then see it in actual scale before you actually use materials on something that's done incorrectly.

I wonder how they'll handle things blocking the view of AR objects - the computer would have to be aware of what's in the room and how it would affect the AR scene.

[FlowerChild]

I wonder how they'll handle things blocking the view of AR objects - the computer would have to be aware of what's in the room and how it would affect the AR scene.

I think it has stereoscopic cameras mounted on the headset to handle that, which is another "AAAAAHHHH!!!!" element of this for me :)

Keep in mind that this is MS, so they actually have a fair amount of experience dealing with this kind of consumer level device due to the Kinect and such. It's a simpler technology to be sure, but they've likely already been working on a number of these problems, like room mapping, for many years now.

[magikeh]

I could see it being useful in designing something that's going to be 3D printed. Model it in your preferred software, and then see it in actual scale before you actually use materials on something that's done incorrectly.

I wonder how they'll handle things blocking the view of AR objects - the computer would have to be aware of what's in the room and how it would affect the AR scene.

I could just imagine working on a car or something, accidentally snapping a piece of cowelling or some shit, shrugging my shoulders and just printing a new one. Or better yet, overlay manuals. Wanna change the timing belt? Here is what needs to be taken off in what order, and when you go to put it back in, have a nice overlay of all the proper torques/spacings/patterns for the bolts and whatnot. Fuck that would be gorgeous. (Then I also wouldn't need to remember which bolt went where because the computer would recognize which bolt on the bench belongs where)

But hey, a man can dream :)

[DNoved1]

They've got demos for instructing (not quite an overlaid manual, but the same idea), and modeling items for 3-D printing according to this. (A Quick Trip to Mars and A Long Way Yet, respectively.)

[johnt]

And I think therein lies the problem with this kind of tech. Until someone develops a VR system small enough so it's not noticeable as being anything other than a normal set of glasses, it's not going to catch on.

People aren't going to walk around in public with these.