Microsoft has created Star Wars-style holographic communication

Microsoft sure seems to be having a ton of fun
with HoloLens while the rest of us wait for it to
stop being a research project and become a real
thing that we can purchase and use. But in the
meanwhile, those research projects are bonkers. The
latest is called " Holoportation ," a term that sounds
ridiculously corny until you see it demonstrated, at
which point the sci-fi terminology feels completely
justified.

Microsoft's I3D research group has figured out
how to create a live hologram of another person
to be placed in another room. A massive array of
3D cameras in one room captures an entire
person's movements and speech in real time, then
projects them into another room where a HoloLens
user can see them and interact with them. It's
hard to fully explain in prose, but watch the video
below and you'll get it: it's exactly like the
hologram communication you've seen in Star Wars.

As you can see, it requires a ton of hardware
(and, one assumes, a ton of computing power) to
make it work. But once it's all set up, you can not
only communicate with a hologram in real time,
you can also record the interaction for playback
and even shrink down the holograms to set on a
table.

It's been over a year since we saw our first
demonstrations of HoloLens, and presumably
Microsoft plans to find a way to release a
consumer edition soon. Interactions like this one
probably won't be in the cards for a while, if only
because it requires too much hardware to pull off.


But pretty soon we'll begin to see what
researchers and developers who don't work at
Microsoft can think up. The developer edition of
HoloLens — which costs $3000 — should start
shipping in just a few days.