Metaverse One

 At its Build Developer Conference in San Francisco today, Microsoft provided some new details on its HoloLens virtual reality device it announced back in January. HoloLens is a head-mounted, holographic computer with a depth camera that provides a mixed-reality experience for a range of applications. I briefly covered the HoloLens in a previous post  and was hoping Microsoft would share more about the unit today. It seems someone in Redmond was listening to my geek prayers. Today Microsoft showed off various HoloLens applications that work with Windows 10 and even one that controls a Raspberry Pi robot. They also announced support of HoloLens by the Unity3D game engine. The Verge has a great recap of the day's announcements and HoloLens in the video below. Another demonstration today during the Build Conference keynote session showed the integration of HoloLens with Trimble’s SketchUp 3D modeling software and the Trimble Connect collaboration platform. While...

 The idea of immersing ourselves deeper into an augmented and or virtual reality has captivated many of us thanks to sci-fi books like Snow Crash and Rainbows End . It has also created an explosion in growth the past few years of Head Mounted Displays (HMD) and augmented reality glasses projects. AR glasses and HMDs have been around for some time but people really started to get excited about augmented reality headwear when Google announced Glass back in 2012. So let's start the review here. Google Glass : Before the recent announcement of it being discontinued  but now "graduating" from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division (that will report to Nest's Tony Fadell), Google Glass was a $1,500 type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). It was developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Tailored mainly to work with Google products, Google Glass disp...

Today Google went public with its plans to offer augmented-reality glasses, which it’s calling Project Glass. In the concept video they released, the glasses interacts with what you're seeing and saying, provides many features of a smartphone including a planner, navigation system, camera and more. They made a previous announcement that these glasses would be available by the end of the year, but now say that these will not ship in 2012. I am very skeptical about the first release of these glasses living up to the concept video. Even though the Google[x] team states, "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do", I know that if it doesn't do exactly what they showed, there will be some upset people in the blogosphere. I hope that Google delivers or I feel that th...