WPC 2015 in Orlando, Florida, Day 2. Focus on Hololens (Worldwide Partner Conference)

 

For day 2 (Tuesday 14th), I will present THE ONE session that, according to me, is the one that could not be missed. This is about Microsoft Hololens and its technical featured reveiled so we, as a partner, can start to engage our customers and start coding.

To ensure I’ll be part of that session, I stood up in front of the door one hour before the beginning of the session !

Here is a brief summary of the session :

Market differentiator: Why is it so different ?

Let list the various technologies that we could find

• VR, Virtual Reality: full immersive 3D experience, but with some limitations (pixels, no interraction with the “true” reality)
• AR, Augmented Reality: 3D experience, data notification, can suprempose the reality, …
• Mixed Reality : integrated 100% blending of digital (voice/sound, vision, …) with reality AND interraction with both reality and digital (in 2 ways).

==> Hololens is positionned on the latest category.

Technical parts:

• Microsoft has been working on 2 areas in conjonction : inputs and outputs, where both of them are using the power of Windows 10 , and possibly Microsoft Azure to interract with IoT
• inputs : Gaze (to fix your attention to some areas), gesture, holographic cameras, AND patial mapping (understands 3D geometries of the real-life and track its movement)
• output : Light & colors, scale, spacial sound (immersive), “world locking” (i.e. consider true content; consider virtual content and place it in front of someone, or event the content can follow that person!)

All this is done and process at OS-level using Windows 10 (i.e. for exemple, interraction with Cortona becomes possible).

• Coding stand point:
• it is a Windows 10 ‘regular app’
• it uses Unity 3D, where Microsoft has officially made a partnership with

     (side note: Microsoft is also partnering with Oculus)

Here is an impressive enhancement of a true-motorbike on stage, during the Keynote, where the “user” could augment the reality and interract with it. That was an astonishing demo that cannot be nice with the two pictures below  !! (with poor quality photo, besides)

 

 

Some partners have already provided 400 use cases to Microsoft of their potential usage; its power is phenomenon. Here are the possible areas that HoloLens could address:

At the end of the session, although the organizers kicked us out, many people were still asking many questions… and I was one of them.

So lets move on to the next generation of User Experience between human and machines, with Hololens, Windows 10 and MS Azure !

Imagine the future of shopping with HoloLens and Microsoft Azure…

As I am extremely lazy (hence I love automation to kill repetitive boring tasks and I’m in IT !!), every time I go shopping with my shopping list I am facing the following question:

“Wouldn’t that be that great to have an application that tells me the optimized path to shop everything I need in a minimum amount of time ?”

Lets dream slightly to think about an App on a mobile phone :

• You would have entered before-hand a shopping list (on the left below)
• The apps would walk you through the supermarket thanks to arrows modeled on the telephone
• Whenever you reach a product present on my shopping list, it is highlighted;
  • each product would have a RFID tag, so that the App knows precisely its price, its ingredients (handy for allergies or specific diet), the total cost of my cart, …

A better version with V2

• Now as you are approaching and facing articles, the application knows you are allergic to a given ingredients or that you want a “full fat free”. Hence, it automatically scores it out non matching items and highlights relevant ones!
  That would be such a great amount of time spared !!
• Then you keep on following the green arrows (notice you have on the top left hand side, a small top-view map of your location in the supermarket)

An even better version with V3 and in 2015
Now we are in the near future,

• instead of using the small mobile phone,
• or instead of picking a Gen-Code reader at the entrance of your supermarket

With the usage of HoloLens, you would be able to walk in your supermarket:

• according to an optimized path,
• picking up rapidly, without spending hours in reading all ingredients (allergies or specific diet),
• as you pickup the articles, you would visualize tons of information related to the product (may be cheaper prices with 5 miles), all those information flies toward Microsoft Azure into a centralized datastore where AI and anonymized recommandations could be performed,
• have the total of your bill all summed up for you, with the corresponding discounts if applicable.

  

Final version with V4 and in 2016 … This is the laziest variant of it !
Imagine all this, sitting comfortably in your sofa ! while watching TV for instance or doing gym! and get the order delivered for you ! All this would be powered by Microsoft Azure with its IoT offering, where the Azure Machine Learning would be offered as a service and will predict you your needs !!
Well this dream is not that far, with :

• HoloLens, MS Azure, Machine Learning, EventHubs, Stream Analytics, IoT and Windows 10 !

Remixed image © Bretz Marilyn licensed under the Creative Commons Cultsofa
Then you’ll have more time to go out, enjoy meeting real people, and have fun… away from those technologies ;-)