
Microsoft's HoloLens and the future of luxury car buying - MarlonPro
http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-hololens-volvo-s90-showrooming-experience/
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hugh4
Strikes me as a combination of (a) gimmick, and (b) solution in search of a
problem. How far are you really going to get through the car-buying process
without being able to see a physical vehicle?

This technology may have its uses, but selling cars isn't one of them.

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tempestn
Not just luxury car buying. I've been convinced for a while that AR and/or VR
will be the future of almost-anything-buying. It's one significant
disadvantage to buying things online now: you get way more choice, but it's
often difficult to be really sure what something will be like, going only from
2D pictures and a text description. And in some cases - clothing in particular
- even if you have exact specs and great images of the item itself, it isn't
terribly useful without context. (Cars would fit in that category too.) With
VR though (and help from 3d cameras and body mapping), shopping for clothes
online could be a better experience than in person. You could virtually try on
10 shirts faster than you could get into a fitting room in the real world, and
see them from arbitrary angles as well. Or take furniture. Rather than looking
at pictures, how about seeing exactly how that side table will look _in your
living room_? The possibilities are endless.

Admittedly until we get true "virtual reality" you won't be able to tell how a
pair of pants or a couch or whatever actually feels, nor will you really be
able to virtually test drive a car (which as the article suggests is a pretty
significant part of the buying process) but it will still be a completely
different world from e-commerce today, and in many ways better than shopping
in brick and mortar stores, even aside from the convenience of not leaving
your home and the infinite selection of the internet.

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Animats
I'd like to see some non-fake pictures of what you see through Microsoft's
device. Remember, it cannot darken anything; it can only add light. Yet their
demo videos clearly show dark virtual objects against a lighter background.
That's fake.

Applications will either require a dim room, or will be bright shiny lines on
top of the background.

~~~
wcarss
I agree that Microsoft would have push well beyond the established best of AR
technology in order to darken things in the hololens, but I can't tell what's
likelier: that they're totally lying in their demonstrations, or that they
have kept some bit of truly state-of-the-art-advancing innovation a secret.

It would be very easy to lie, but it is also difficult to believe that
Microsoft would bet so hard on selling this product as revolutionary when it
provides a fundamentally weak experience.

So Animats, is there something concrete that you're basing this claim off of,
or just a general knowledge of AR technology and its limitations? I genuinely
want to know--I've spent a lot of time wondering about this, and I've seen
good points on both sides.

For anyone curious, Abrash does a great job of explaining why darkening is so
hard here[1] and this reddit-speculator[2] does a great job of highlighting
some incidents where hands-on hololens reviewers specifically noted "dark
projection" during their user tests.

I've heard that the field of view is smaller than videos make it appear, and
also that the image it displays is not fully opaque, but nothing that suggests
that they can't darken. If it turns out they can, it would be a pretty big
deal, and if it turns out they can't, hololens may be a dud.

[1] - [http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-
hard-...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-
anytime-soon/) (3.5 years old)

[2] -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HoloLens/comments/30koy9/hololens_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HoloLens/comments/30koy9/hololens_and_the_projection_of_darkness/)
(7 months ago)

~~~
Animats
Reviews [1][2] indicate that 1) Microsoft won't let reviewers take a picture
of what the device really shows, and 2) the demos seen by the reviewers aren't
nearly as good as Microsoft's videos. Microsoft has made progress in getting
the weight down, and the tracking is apparently good enough.

[1] [http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/wearables/microsoft-
holo...](http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/wearables/microsoft-
hololens-1281834/review) [2] [http://www.digitaltrends.com/vr-headset-
reviews/microsoft-ho...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/vr-headset-
reviews/microsoft-hololens-hands-on/)

~~~
wcarss
Hm, I may have been unclear -- I didn't mean to question your claim that
Microsoft is not showing us real pictures/video, as they clearly are not.

I was (and am) curious about the ability to display darkness, which you
specifically claimed the hololens cannot do, and it sounded as though you knew
so for sure.

Every indication from hands-on demos is that it can actually display black,
which is surprising and impressive, but no one I've seen has _explicitly_ said
so, so it may still turn out to lack that ability. I'd love to find out :)

The primary difference that seems to be reported between videos and demos is
(as told in your links and mine) that the field of view is extremely limited,
which is understandable, but does make the videos misleading.

Anyway, thanks for the links!

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_Every indication from hands-on demos is that it can actually display black,
which is surprising and impressive, but no one I 've seen has _explicitly_
said so, so it may still turn out to lack that ability. I'd love to find out
:)_

When our team tried it, it looked like it displayed a very dark grey - if not
necessarily black.

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rbanffy
So, you are going to spend a significant amount of money on a luxury car and,
somehow, you don't have the willingness to go there in person actually
experience the car and you settle with a simulation?

That's a lot of enthusiasm.

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AndrewKemendo
Our company can do this today free to everyone worldwide with markerless 6DOF
AR on an iPad/iPhone. Just need the 3D model of the car. Don't even need to go
to a showroom, you can do it in your driveway.

