What is mixed reality?

- So, let's talk a little bit about what Mixed Reality actually is, and we'd mentioned this a few slides back. Mixed Reality certainly started the concept from Microsoft started with the HoloLens, which is a fantastic device, and really adds virtual holographic objects to your real world, and so you see through the glasses, you can see the real world, and you're placing holograms around the real world that you can interact with which is fantastic, and it's also untethered.

So, it's one of the only untethered devices out in the market now that really has a, it's a head-mounted computer with holographic lenses that you can see through. It's quite an incredible piece of machinery equipment, and that's where Mixed Reality started, and a lot of people who built apps for HoloLens, including us, used Unity to do that. Now this latest set of headsets that comes out, the Immersive Headsets, these are as they name might suggest, immersive, they're enclosed. - Yep.

- But they use some of the same technologies, right? - Yes, they are very much aware of your surroundings. They do not require any sort of external hardware to track the movements of the headsets and the controllers. It is all, the technology is all incorporated into the headset which is able itself to track the two controllers. So, really what keeps you tethered to a point in space is your computer. If you have a laptop, we spoke about this before, you could put your laptop in a backpack, and walk around with the headset with all the dangers is possible.

- (laughs) I'm not sure when you can't actually see what you're doing, that you'd wanna walk around the way you're going. You wanna walk around, but yes, there are backpacks that you can get now that people are making where you can put a high-end laptop in the bag, plug in a headset, and be more mobile with your immersive headset. - But that is very much to say, underlying the fact that this is not tracked by anything else but itself. - Yeah, and that's great because you can just take your laptop and your headset and go into any room, any place, any location, set it up, and you can start working.

You don't need to kinda configure the space to get working. - Yeah, it's very much up and running in a few minutes. - And there's quite a range of these now. So, there's five or six of these in the market that are pretty similar specifications. There's a couple that are maybe a little higher spec than the others, but if you're shopping around to buy one, and you haven't got one yet, then a lot of it is probably gonna come down to personal choice and comfort, really. It's not really to do with specification of the hardware.

It's really more about what feels better when you put it on your head, and what's more comfortable. So, actually while we're talking about the technology that you were just mentioning, the inside-out tracking where the device maps its surroundings. It essentially does a scan of where it is, and the things that are in that space. This is technology that actually started way back, and probably people might remember the Kinect product, which we've got a picture of here on the slide.

That was a technology that has evolved and actually it shouldn't be surprising that within Microsoft, a lot of the same people that worked on that product ended up working on HoloLens because it uses that kind of scanning technology within the headset, and then that has been taken and placed inside the immersive headsets now as well so that they can scan their surroundings, use the information to map where you are, do head tracking, coordinate a whole bunch of movement and space so that objects could be placed and feel as if they're in the right space.

- Pretty obvious that Microsoft has been working on this kind of technology for quite a while now, and yeah, this is the latest result of all this research that have put in the past few years.