I totally agree. AR made and makes ZERO sense to my non-technical spouse and family. Holographic makes total sense. It's a clever rebranding and it will help sell ALL AR platforms, IMHO.

There are various times in history when vacuum cleaners, cell phones and browsing the web would have made ZERO sense to your non-technical family.

People will learn new words that define new things and then suddenly it will seem the most natural thing in the world to call it by that name.

Portable tape players were cool. Then suddenly Sony made one, and we now all (those of us old enough) remember fondly our first or favorite walkman, whether it was and actual Walkman or not.

Smart Phones were hot tech, but our non-technical families didn't really get the point until suddenly those "smart phones" were "iPhones".

Web searches were a mystical dark art, with all your Alta Vista voodoo, until there was a single box with an algorithm that did a pretty good job finding what you meant... and then many competitors later, someone called one of those boxes "Google" and now that's the verb we use.

Marketing, sales, adoption drive the names things come to be known by. Sure, in reality it's Augmented Reality, but if in 5 years everyone's talking about their sweet new Holographic ski goggles, it's still AR in the mainstream.

A rose by any other name

Hologram/holographic is already a word. It has a very specific meaning. It is not a new conjured word like Walkman or Iphone, which were just one implementation of a portable tape player or smart phone.

It also has a rather general meaning for the majority of non-experts.

We re-appropriate words all the time in English, and it's generally a fine thing to do, specialists' consternation notwithstanding.

My mp3 player is still an actual Walkman.

What are you talking about? The walkman was the first portable tape player commercially available.

Also what Google brought that Altavista didn't have was that it actually returned relevant results, not pages of spam where webmaster cranked as many keywords as they could (including "Pamela Anderson", always).

I was talking portable players, not cassette tapes specifically. There were various options for tape, and 8-track and the like before the Walkman, all of which were portable and played music but none in the way that made the Walkman take off, obviously.

Sometimes people learn new words, other times keeping old words (usually modified) works better. To take your example, in Turkish the word for vacuum cleaner literally translates as "electric broom", and cell phones are commonly called "cep" which actually translates as "pocket". Or consider the British who still use electric torches (that's a flashlight for all you non-Brits).

We Brits also call a cell phone a "mobile phone" which describes perfectly what it is.

In the US, a "mobile phone" is a cordless phone with a base.

As an American, I don't agree.

All the companies are branding as "mobile." I don't think they really even sell household corded phones anymore, we don't have to be specific about them.

If I wanted a corded phone, I think I'd have to use that specific modifier to get one.

Anyway, back to the point--say "mobile phone" to Americans and they know it's a cellular phone.

Seconded. "cellphone" and "mobile phone" are basically interchangeable to me. Though, honestly I'm more likely to just refer to it as a "phone" and use a qualifier to refer to the non-mobile variety (e.g. "house phone" or "land-line")

we just say "torch"

and just about everyone says "hoover" not vacuum cleaner

I bet it would take along time for most people asked "how does a vacuum cleaner work?" to use the word vacuum, apart from as a name for the object.

Nah, "hoover" is just your dialect. American here, grew up in CA, and I've never heard or said "hoover".

But yeah, I wouldn't say "vacuum" as a method of action unless you really drilled down. (Something about "pump" and "sucking", but I'd have to think for a bit to get to the actual physical "vacuum" aspect of it.)

You're right, I meant to type "in the UK" somewhere but it seems I forgot

In Indiana, a lot people said "sweeper" and they "sweeped" the room with it.

Can confirm, Hoosier here.

Also 'clicker' for remote.

True, but that word is pretty clearly gonna be Hologram. Augmented Reality isn't as fun to to as as Hologram or Kleenex.

Browsing the web - yes

But vacuum cleaners and and cell phones contain the name the explanation of what they are and do. "augmented reality" doesn't. Holographic... it does a better job, at least for some people.

How does "cell phone" explain anything useful about that particular type of phone? Using the word "cell" for a specific geographic area covered by a particular radio tower is itself a rather vague and general analogy. You could use "cell" for any element of a larger structure or organism I guess, but it wouldn't explain anything specific.

"Mobile phone" could have made sense to someone even before the introduction of mobile phones. But I think the word "cell phone" only took on meaning after the introduction of the device itself.

The cell(ular) in cellphone refers to the handoff between cell towers as you move around.

In comparison Radio tends to have a single tower that sends radio waves and does not care about who is listing. The advantage for cellphones is you can reuse the bandwidth from the same small set of frequencies across the country AND maintain a phonecall durring a handoff (where raido keeps forcing you to change stations on a long trip). The issue is the phone's need to rebroadcast their position constantly which eats’ battery life. It's even worse when they fail to connect to a tower as they just keep trying until the battery fails.

Granted, an end user might care, but MMX or SSE mean little to most Intel customers. 'with techron', 'dual turbo', 'LED TV's', 'tessellation', 'electrolytes'

I wasn't referring to "cell", I was referring to "phone". Just like with "vacuum" and "cleaner". You don't need to be an engineer to understand that the first one is used to make phone calls, and the second one to clean.

Augmented reality, on the other hand...

It makes no sense at all if you think of an actual hologram, but makes perfect sense if you think of a Star Trek hologram. This is like a wearable holodeck. Just add a haptic body suit (no doubt in the works)!

Note to self: Add to list of things I should make.

Hacker news comments probably aren't the best place to store personal notes.

Because "Make Holodeck" is such a personal and valuable idea

From their marketing material, they pretend they figured a way to fake depth. If true, that would be a huge step compared to classic stereoscopic technologies or other cumbersome devices.

However, I doubt this is the case, else they wouldn't just slap this announcement at the end of a boring Windows 10 presentation. I mean, all I could remember about this presentation was: "Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10 with HOLOGRAMS using Windows 10! Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10."

I don't think they are pretending they figured out a way to fake depth, it sounds like they have created a compact head-mounted light field display, which is absolutely a huge step forward. Unlike classic stereoscopic technologies light field displays let your eyes refocus the image because the displays recreate the direction of the from the object as well as the color and intensity. NVIDIA demoed a compact head mounted light field display recently that explains the concept. See it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451746

No need to fake it... if you can get the retinal projection accurate enough, with fast enough eye tracking, the depth is as real as anything else you'll see in real life...the goal would be to have it feel completely natural.

... and to do it, as well as motion tracking and environmental feature identification, in real-time with as little latency as possible, and do it on batteries.

I keep feeling like watching the Longhorn demo at PDC 2003...

They added the third chip, besides CPU and GPU, they call it HPU (holographic processing unit), which could speed things considerably. If they hooked it directly to ccd then they could really grok terabytes of data on battery.

Magic is not possible. Whatever the HPU does is still constrained by physics. They can't explain away the engineering problem with an invented new name for a device we know nothing about except that it defies the laws of physics WRT computation.

What we do know is that fixed function ASICs can be can be 10s to 100s of times more power efficient than general purpose (Von Newman) computing.

So noting they have described defies the laws of physics.

So, where would the terabytes per second come from? ... on a head-mounted device?

I really hope they get the accurate tracking and depth and getting objects to "stick" where they belong in 3d space correctly, without moving out of place or floating in a wrong way, with quick head movement. If they can do that, most of the battle is won and it will be amazing.

Edit: although, of course they'll need some intelligence on the surroundings to identify surfaces and stuff. But imagine like re-decorating your work room, adding scifi textures or something, and maybe pipes or whatever ;p

They didnt, otherwise they would show you eye view instead of third person impression of what its supposed to look like to the user.

Most likely it suffers the same shaky snap laggy tracking like every other AR setup.

But they showed footage "through the eyes of the wearer" and they let press have a hands on demonstration, so it's not like they can really fake anything.

I did see a tiny bit of judder in the footage that was supposed to be exactly what the person wearing the glasses would see, but it was hard to tell.

In the video I saw at the conference presentation, the "holograms" were always in front of the person's appendages, obscuring things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6sL_5Wgvrg&spfreload=10

Peter Bright said it didn't suffer from that - see the Minecraft section of his review: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/hands-on-with-hololen...

> intelligence on the surroundings

In case any reader here weren't aware how Kinect works, it sends to the developer a 2D image of the depth. Of course as walod says, there's work to do to identify surfaces (as you can see on the image below, background elements are excluded).

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/hands-on-with-the-xbox-one/micro...

You still need to blur objects that should not be in focus or you’re going to get mixed depth information.

EX: http://www.photographyblogger.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06... Now picture an infocus immage behind the blurry background pen's.

>even though it is technically wrong.

Pretty much everything in this space is incorrect on some level. People casually call the Oculus "VR" when its just a HMD. The VR is going to be the software that works with the HMD. This is like calling a joystick a game.

Personally, I like the hologram branding. Its like the Star Trek holodeck, which invokes a really neat sense of futurism.

Oculus VR is the name of the company. Oculus Rift is the name of the product.

> People casually call the Oculus "VR"...

What people? Things I've never heard anybody say:

"Can you hand me my Oculus air quotes VR?"

"Dude, I spilled deer urine all over my Oculus virtual reality!"

I can imagine a northern european saying it in english, but those guys kind of sound like lolcats anyway:

"Sven, can I has Oculus virtual reality?"

Personally, I dislike the hologram branding - yet another corruption to spread confusion. I understand the motive, I just don't like it.

Its turned into shorthand for "seeing objects in space that aren't really there". They could have also gone with "compugraphic hallucinations" or "pink elephant computing".

Visidraft might be useful for an idea at our company. The video looks good but the "Get Visdraft Now" button doesn't do anything. Is it available yet? Pricing?

Sorry, send me an e-mail: [email protected] and we can talk.

All they had to say is: you can play Minecraft on this. Sold!

Don't let my kids see this :)

Well, "stuff superimposed in front of a live video" got re-branded as AR, so AR which was intended to be this kind of crap needs a new marketing name.

It will work. Until somebody comes up with an actual holographic device. I hope the name rights won't be gone by then...

MS just has to purchase that company and say they just made the next generation, problem solved.

You're probably right.

So sad...