Holograms Are On the Way

This week Microsoft released a video of its “holoportation” technology, where someone stands in a circle of cameras and is then “holoported” into your room, which you see through a headset. This isn’t virtual reality, because you still view the room as normal, but now your friend appears to walk around in it with you. If you have the camera setup on your end, and your friend has a headset, they can see you wherever they are. For a while I had predicted we would all have “smart walls,” like wallpaper made out iPhone screens that could make a wall look like a portal into your friend’s house. But now I think technology will go the other way, and in a few years we’ll all have glasses that overlay our friends onto the world around us, what’s called “Augmented Reality.” For those of us with friends and family in far-flung places, it will be fantastic, because we could have a weekly breakfast with someone in a different time zone.

Learn More: “Holograms Are On the Way”