Razorfish's Emerging Experiences division is experimenting with merging the technology of Microsoft's new HoloLens augmented reality headset with its Kinect motion gesture hardware. The result may help to create a version of Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck.
Razorfish says it has been trying to develop a way to interact with a Hololens hologram without actually wearing the headset:
We paired the Kinect with a HoloLens and have mapped the Kinect's understanding of people and space with the anchoring system of the HoloLens. The key was creating a common coordinate space within a physical room. We transform the Kinect's output to our common coordinate system and broadcast the Kinect on a network so that multiple devices can subscribe to it. Each subscribed HoloLens shares a set of anchors that is tied to our room's coordinate system. By using the anchor sharing service multiple HoloLens can share our common coordinate system. When we first saw the Kinect's data within the HoloLens we were pleasantly surprised at the dimensionality that the HoloLens is able to add and the sense of presence the Kinect's data has within the HoloLens.
It's still very early days but this use of two of Microsoft's technologies is certainly promising, and we suspect that more experiments like this will be developed in the months and years to come.
