Homework 9

For this assignment, we were to give a critical analysis of the Microsoft "holoportation" technology demoed here:

In this demo, we see the Microsoft engineer "holoports" his colleague into the room with him, and sets his daughter up in a lab elsewhere in the building and holoports her into the room with him as well. He is only simultaneously appearing in his colleague's room, however, so only he can see them his daughter and she cannot see him. This technology appears to require an entire array of cameras surrounding the "play" area, and in order to make the illusion more convincing, they set up identical furniture in each room to improve immersion. Additionally, they had to be wearing the Hololens to see the holograms. Now I want to speak about the pros and cons of this technology given what has been discussed in class over the course of this semester:

Pros:

• Holoportation allows people to interact with each other in incredibly immersive ways when they are otherwise unable to physically interact for reasons of geographical distance or otherwise. Like the example given in the video, this acts as a revolutionary way for family and friends to connect if they do not live together.
• The Hololens uses a special kind of tracking called Inside Out Tracking, which doesn't require any sort of markers or special objects in the environment to track off of. This means that in most cases, any room could be usable for Holoportation, if the technology improves enough to not require cameras to be spread all over the room.

As can be seen in the screenshots, each room contains the wooden block as the center of the room to give the illusion that they were in the same room together

Cons:

• Like we spoke about this week, when we rely on avatars or graphic images of ourselves, it can diminish the hierarchies of power relationships if people cannot truly conduct themselves as they would like. In the screenshots above, we can see that in the view of the Hololens, the colors are not very accurate, which could contribute to this issue.
• Mass-adoption of this technology will greatly hinge on being able to minimize the entire setup to work without outfitting an entire room to support it. Until then, adoption would be extremely limited to, essentially, those with tons of money to throw at the problem. As it stands in 2019, The Hololens 2 still cost $3,500 for the device alone, which would imply that the Holoportation technology is very far off from being consumer-ready.
• The experience can be easily disrupted if any of the holograms actually collide with each other. As can be seen in the video several times, the engineer demoing the tech has to move out of the way of the hologram. Admittedly, that can be seen as a positive or a negative. On one hand, your brain might believe that you actually need to move out of the way of this virtual projection, or you might need to be constantly vigilant about it so as not to break the illusion.