Today I went to Jaron Lanier’s house, and we traded demos. He showed me his favorite demos on the Hololens. Since Jaron was one of the key drivers of that project, it was particularly interesting to see which demos he liked the best.
The Hololens is a magnificent piece of engineering. The way it tracks the world around you to superimpose 3D graphics, using three different technologies in tandem (depth camera, edge tracking vision algorithm and inertial sensor) is a thing of beauty.
I hadn’t seen the Hololens since last summer, and I could really see that an entire team of people have been working hard to build demos for it. In general, everything noe looks more polished and better thought out, and the interaction is much smoother and more intuitive than it was ten months ago.
In return, I showed Jaron pretty much the opposite demo. Not AR, but VR. No fancy cutting edge hardware, but just a SmartPhone (with a pair of Wearality lenses). Not software written by a large team of designers and software experts, but just a VR-ready 3D modeler that I wrote myself in HTML5 in a few hundred lines of Javascript, running in a web browser.
By analogy, Jaron was showing me his fancy Tesla, and I was showing him the little electric car that I’d built from scratch on weekends in my garage. We both had a great time.