It’s actually three technologies that will work together: Windows Holographic, which will enable 3D imaging in all future builds of Windows 10. Windows HoloLens, a headset for viewing and interacting with 3D images. And finally, the HoloStudio application will let you make your own holograms.
Microsoft teased the possibilities in a video: a HoloLens-wearing man played a 3D version of Minecraft. A HoloLens-wearing woman walking through an office, talking to a colleague on an image floating in front of her. Another user walked within a planetary scene. In a more everyday context, the weather report popped up on a family room rug, with 3D imaging augmenting the data.
The HoloLens itself is “the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever known,” said chief inventor Alex Kipman. The headset will be completely wireless, with its own high-end CPU and GPU – and it will have a third chip, a holographic processing unit, or HPU.
“It will understand your gestures and voice,” Kipman promised, “and spatially map the entire world around us.” And unlike AR solutions we’ve seen up to now, the HoloLens will not need markers, external cameras, or a tethered phone or a PC to help it process the data – “terabytes of information from all of these sensors, all in real time,” he described.
For the real-time demo of Windows Holographic and the HoloLens, a woman built a flying robot using a 3D ‘toolbox’ that floated in her field of vision along with the object itself. She could pick items from the toolbox and apply them to the hologram, and move the hologram as she examined her work.
Finally, Kipman unveiled HoloStudio, an application for making your own holograms.
Free upgrade
Myerson’s announcement of free Windows 10 upgrades may have been the most significant of the keynote, considering the company’s past practice, which has relied on some minor revenue from consumer upgrades but more importantly sparked new computer sales.
For the first year after Windows 10’s official release – Microsoft said only that would be “later this year” – customers running either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on personal computers or tablets will be able to upgrade free of charge to the new OS. The same one-year grace period will hold for Windows smartphones running Windows 8.1.
Microsoft declined to get specific, however, on pricing and packaging for Windows 10 after that first year, saying in a question-and-answer period that it had yet to work out those details. Nor would the company say whether there will be a Windows 10 upgrade for customers who own a Surface or Surface 2 tablet, which are powered by the largely shunned Windows RT operating system.
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