Introducing Holoportation, the Future of Human Communication

[LJ Ellis]

Introducing Holoportation, the Future of Human Communication


In the future, humans will be able to interact with holographic 3D models of other people in real-time, resulting in a type of simulated teleportation. Microsoft researchers are calling this technology holoportation and they're actively working to make it a reality.

The first step in holoportation is capturing 3D models of humans using advanced motion-capture cameras. Then, the high-quality models must be transmitted in real-time to all parties involved. Finally, a mixed reality display is needed to tie it all together, such as Microsoft's HoloLens [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/166656-Hololens-Dev-Kits-Ship-in-March].

"This technology allows users to see and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in their physical space," explains [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0] Microsoft. "Communicating and interacting with remote users becomes as natural as face to face communication."

In addition to real-time communication, holoportation would allow people to play back past sessions, which would result in a catalog of virtual memories that could be accessed at any time.

As you can see in the video, holoportation is still in its infancy -- particularly with regard to the compression and reconstruction of the models. However, if you want to get an idea of what to expect, Microsoft will begin shipping out HoloLens dev kits [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/166656-Hololens-Dev-Kits-Ship-in-March] on Thursday.

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[Sniper Team 4]

So we're talking like Jedi Council and the Umbrella Board meeting here, only it's all VR instead of some of them being in the actual place? This sounds pretty cool.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

I'm down. I'm super down for this. This is fantastic! Imagine the possibilities with this kind of tech! I can just imagine holoportation plays becoming a thing in the near future!

 

[Jadak]

<_< next logical step: Holo Webcam Girls.

Was just thinking that...

Much more interesting approach to 'VR' porn than the head mounted cameras.

 

[Vigormortis]

So, in effect, the same sort of tech Valve [footnote]And I believe Oculus, but I'm not entirely certain.[/footnote] are working on?

Cool beans. The more people we having working on this tech the faster it will become a (workable) reality.

This sort of thing is one of the more exciting possibilities of the Vive. That being, upon donning your VR headset, you can join your friends/family/colleagues in a virtual space (say, a theater or living room) and 'interact'. Very much like the video in the OP, only with the added capability to render yourself in any space. In fact, along those lines, Valve's already added a 'theater mode' to the SteamVR API, allowing the user to enter a virtual space, within which sits a very large display or displays, each of which can render any video input the user defines. (movie, video game, etc)

After decades of false promises and failed starts, VR and AR are finally becoming a reality. It'll be exciting to see where this all goes.

 

[FalloutJack]

So, this is holo-communication much like Star Wars, and that teleportation's being thrown in as a buzzword, right?

 

[Dimitriov]

Could we, could we just not? Why must the world keep getting lamer? I'm well aware that I am probably in the minority, and especially on this site, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone would want this.

It's like our civilization is working harder and harder to climb up our own collective ass and transform reality into some kind of dystopian fantasy. What on earth is the need for this?

For me, this and virtual reality and AIs seem like part of a desire to effectively end human interaction with reality. I get escapism but these things all feel like attempts not to just escape from reality for a bit, but part of the road to trying hide from reality forever.

Completely harmless and maybe even kind of amusing in itself, but just another step towards a future where the human race makes itself completely irrelevant forever. That's how it feels to me.

 

[Karthikaqpt]

I am literally speechless. I'm watching the future unfold in a matter of years.
This is going to be used as a security system.Watch this type of holus technology here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0IjYJXBohI

 

[Freyr]

Could we, could we just not? Why must the world keep getting lamer? I'm well aware that I am probably in the minority, and especially on this site, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone would want this.

For me, this and virtual reality and AIs seem like part of a desire to effectively end human interaction with reality.

Well, for one point it looks to be great for highly dispersed teams that work together. It'd be great for (for instance) modding teams I have been involved in, or our moderation team here that are widely split across different countries and huge distances from each other. Those sort of groups will never, ever meet physically IRL because the travel and accomodation would be unaffordably expensive. At the moment, we just meet up on IRC or teamspeak every so often.

This would be immeasurably better because about the only thing missing would be actual physical contact such as a handshake. It's practically as good as meeting in person in every other respect though.

 

[fix-the-spade]

<_< next logical step: Holo Webcam Girls.

Pornhub is way, way ahead of you.

In fact I can see porn being the saviour of VR, since it seems the one things with such reliable demand that you can sell anything at any price and somebody out there will want it.

 

[Silverbane7]

looks interesting.
has many uses outside of those it was likely developed for (McPet here we come i guess lol, and i was only talking about the pornhub getting one earlier last week) but it can have some good uses too they may not have considered.

for example, children who are isolated because of their locality (or because they are kicked out of schooling for reasons) could interact virtualy with other children in holoclasses. teaching some amount of social interaction without having to be physicaly there (imagine if you were a kid in the mountains because your family studies them, and you were too far away to go to regular school. this would allow you to make real world friends who are real, rather than ai teachers and student substitues)

or for old people. how often do certain societies call us out for not keeping our old people with us in our homes and patiently looking after them? even when said old people dont *want* to live with us damn whipersnapper kids? with this, they can have their privacy, but we can all eat (virtual) sunday lunch together no matter where we are physicaly. no complaints because some of the grandkids are vegans, and grampa like his roast beef, because no one (untill they invent holosmell lol) can smell or see the items being eaten.

and imagine the wedding implications.
your mother and father are in another part of the world, and cant come to the wedding. your best friend might be on routine space station mantanance and that could be a year till they come back planetside (yes, thats farther future but still) you could still have the wedding you want, where you want, and they can still be there in holo, if not in person

but yeah, it will likely be the porn industry that seen the first use of this. after all, most stuff, the first question seems to be 'can i use this for porn?'
VHS beat out betamax because vhs was easier to use and cheaper to mass produce. if betamax had been the cheaper alternative, that is what we would have all been using in the 80's and 90's lol.
question will be, which is going to beat out the other....
the partial lense type is handy but not cheap. the vr headsets for pc and ps4 are still pricey but the winner i think currently will be the mobile phone type.
after all, most of the world can afford some type of smartphone if they want it. there are phones being made in india (i think?) that cost so little to make (depends on how expensive they sell them tho lol) that anyone with a fiver could likely buy one (again, depends on if they keep the difference in manufacturing costs or pass em on to the consumer to get cheap tech out to the public) and thus, access the vr stuff. but again, it all depends on what people *want* and mostly that is access to free porn and free entertainment lol.

 

[Pyrian]

This is the future. But I think it's too soon. The lag will be awful for quite some time.

 

[Recusant]

Let me say by way of preemptive defense: this is actually kind of neat.

That said, this is not "simulated teleportation". It is not teleportation of any kind, in any way. It's a 3D video phone. That's all it is. You can see and hear a representation of the person on the other end, but that's it. Calling it teleportation is like saying that in 1995, Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman were "teleported" into thousands of a locations across the country simultaneously whenever a theater showed The Shawshank Redemption.

I knew we were in trouble when everyone in the tech world started referring to a glorified ViewMaster as "virtual reality", but at least that line of thinking made logical sense. This is an interesting development, but it's a refinement of an existing if unpopular technology, not the Second Coming, Escapist.

 

[mad825]

Yes, anyone hoping that you might get some use out of your pricey oculus rift then you're shit out luck. This kind of tech is reserved for augmented reality.

Even then Holoportation is a bit of a joke, why do I need to see the whole body? What does seeing someone's legs add the conversation? At least with skype I don't need to fully dress myself for the occasion in a comfy chair.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Sounds kind of neat, despite the misnaming as it is neither holographic nor teleportation.

Could be used in a lot of instances but I still think that regular text and voice communication will rule for the foreseeable future.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Oh, for fuck's sake! First we had a segway without handlbars called a "hoverboard" by the absolute cretins on some marketing team, now we've got AR conferencing and we're calling it Holoportation, despite having nothing to do with either holograms or teleportation.

"Now, imagine being able to teleport to any place, with anyone, at anytime ... and that's what Holoportation is all about."

Oh, Christ. Even if we're going by the twisted logic of "AR is teleportation", you don't go anywhere, it's everyone else who comes to you. And as for "any place", I think what they meant to say was "any place that has a series of specialized and expensive 3D cameras set up around the room."

I know all technology gets more accessible with time, but I really have to wonder how many people are going to bother setting up all these cameras in their homes, and have the money to do so, when they can just turn on their webcam and get the same basic experience. I know, I know, it's not in 3D, but it is in a higher fidelity, and you really don't gain anything by having some low quality representation of some person crudely projected into your living room.

Although, there are some advantages to it, I guess. Such as the ability to communicate with lots of people at the same time by having them all in the same room, but then again, you can tile lots of webcam feeds across your screen anyway. Oh, and lets not forget that the more people you have, the more taxing it is on your internet. While the same is true of video as well, any advancement in internet technology that would make this more feasible, will improve video as well.

Also, it's pretty easy to take your laptop into another room to have the conversation there, or even just bring a camera phone, but this new technology has no portability what so ever, and I really don't see how it ever will, since you do need multiple camera angles to fully capture the 3D object..

Could we, could we just not? Why must the world keep getting lamer? I'm well aware that I am probably in the minority, and especially on this site, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone would want this.

It's like our civilization is working harder and harder to climb up our own collective ass and transform reality into some kind of dystopian fantasy. What on earth is the need for this?

For me, this and virtual reality and AIs seem like part of a desire to effectively end human interaction with reality. I get escapism but these things all feel like attempts not to just escape from reality for a bit, but part of the road to trying hide from reality forever.

Completely harmless and maybe even kind of amusing in itself, but just another step towards a future where the human race makes itself completely irrelevant forever. That's how it feels to me.

I can't really understand it either. We've had the technology to see each other while communicating over long distances for a while, but now, as long as we invest in some expensive cameras, we have the technology to create blurry, low quality 3D versions of people in our very living room ... hooray!

Despite my cynicism, I am keen to see technology moving forward, and this does interest me from a technical standpoint, but it really looks like a novelty, or rather, a solution to a problem that has already been solved already in a much cheaper and more convenient manner.

Could we, could we just not? Why must the world keep getting lamer? I'm well aware that I am probably in the minority, and especially on this site, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone would want this.

For me, this and virtual reality and AIs seem like part of a desire to effectively end human interaction with reality.

Well, for one point it looks to be great for highly dispersed teams that work together. It'd be great for (for instance) modding teams I have been involved in, or our moderation team here that are widely split across different countries and huge distances from each other. Those sort of groups will never, ever meet physically IRL because the travel and accomodation would be unaffordably expensive. At the moment, we just meet up on IRC or teamspeak every so often.

This would be immeasurably better because about the only thing missing would be actual physical contact such as a handshake. It's practically as good as meeting in person in every other respect though.

What exactly can this AR communication do that regular old webcams can't achieve? Obviously it looks cool, but what practical problem does it solve that can't be done already?

 

[Freyr]

What exactly can this AR communication do that regular old webcams can't achieve? Obviously it looks cool, but what practical problem does it solve that can't be done already?

Looking cool is a reason in itself. But seriously, giving reasonably full sized 3D people who can move around in a more or less shared space with you, letting you see full body language etc? That's a useful step up.

When it comes to "something simlar can be done already", that's just progress. In yesteryear I can imagine people saying that webcams were pointless because we already had telephones etc.

 

[CrystalShadow]

So we're talking like Jedi Council and the Umbrella Board meeting here, only it's all VR instead of some of them being in the actual place? This sounds pretty cool.

It's to do with hololens, so it's AR instead of VR.

The difference is one puts the 'virtual' objects in your actual environment, the other makes the environment virtual as well.
Though...
There are VR equivalents of this in the works, but they tend to involve being with someone in a non-existent environment, and not using your real appearance.
(eg, the way MMO's and the like come across if you use them strictly for social purposes.)