A quick analysis on Holoportation

After doing some quick research on Microsoft's Holoportation, at face value it seems pretty cool. Holoportation is basically 3D capture in combination with the Hololens, where users can communicate with each other in 3D rather than 2D via webcam. This allows for a more personal experience when communicating with someone who might be far away in reality.

The concept is definitely interesting, it's something we've seen in futuristic science fiction, like when space adventurers talk to their space adventurer friends via holographic projection, and it's actually coming to life. And the technology is already available. With the use of depth information captured from cameras and the Hololens, 3D models of objects or people can be captured live, and their textures can be mapped and streamed to the viewer.

Though this is a really cool feature and though there are definitely some good applications that Holoportation could be used for, I don't think it will catch on any time soon. The HoloLens alone is very expensive (anywhere from $3-5000 via Microsoft's webstore) and it's just not an accessible piece of technology. I never actually tried the Hololens myself but when the class was able to demo a zombie shooter game with the Hololens, I noticed a few things that some students complained of. One was getting the lens to register hand movements correctly, and I also noticed that the wearer treated the Hololens as if it were VR lens, meaning that the wearer wouldn't move from their spot in hopes of getting either a better picture of what was happening on the lens or in order to register hand gestures. The cameras also pose as a potential issue. More recently, Holoportation went mobile and now only requires two (rather than what looked like 4 in the video screen capture above) but that's still a lot of tech to lug around in order to get this to work. And with these cameras, which capture depth information, there's a question of how much data would need to be captured and sent to the other viewer. Microsoft plans to move Holoportation to be feasible over cellular data, but that would come at the cost of lower resolution/quality.

I think with time though, as technology like the Hololens becomes less expensive and even as cameras become cheaper, Holoportation will have room to flourish. Data will also become cheaper within the next couple of years. I keep thinking back to a time when I only had minutes on my phone, I couldn't even text people because I didn't want to pay for that data, and this was really only less than 10 years back. Now there are plans with unlimited data usage that cost the same as what would have only been unlimited talk with 1000 texts or something back in the day. Maybe now, this project seems out of reach, and maybe I'm a little doubtful because of other attempted science fiction gadgets that exist but are nowhere near easily accessible(hoverboards and self-tying shoes). And maybe I just don't see all of its potential for usefulness because of its massive pricetag, but again we'll have to see how Holoportation technology develops over time with respect to the development of other technologies.