What’s just out of range of view when you are on Zoom? I have carefully staged a corner of my basement into a 4-foot-wide illusion of professional workspace. Some just use virtual backgrounds. A colleague got a new shower curtain and sets up in her bathroom—the only space in her house with 4 walls and a door that she could claim as hers!
Put Your Pants On. Microsoft Mesh Is Here.
But what happens when meeting participants can teleport into your space? As part of its annual Ignite conference this week, Microsoft unveiled a new platform called Microsoft Mesh that is designed to create a kind of virtual world where users who don compatible AR and VR headsets can interact with each other as if they were in the same room. (You can watch the official introduction trailer here.)
Microsoft Mesh will allow people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences. As Yahoo Finance says, “Imagine it’s time for a meeting. Instead of clicking on a Zoom or Google Meet link, you put on an AR/VR headset. And rather than stare at co-workers through tiny windows, you interact with their avatars in a virtual space and pass “objects” to one another.” Microsoft calls it a “holoportation.”
Not the first holograms
Holograms themselves are not new. Jimmy Kimmel and Kacey Musgraves tried an awkward high five as holograms at the 2014 Country Music Awards. An exhibit that opened at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in 2017 allows students to interact with and ask questions of Holocaust survivors. That same year the world’s first hologram theater opened in Hollywood. However, all of these are one-way presentations, without real time interaction.
PORTL launched a phone booth like device in 2019 that plugs into a standard outlet and enables “holoportation” to meetings. Another company, Spatial went free in 2020, aiming to become the Zoom of virtual collaboration.
WIFM
We are, it seems, getting closer to holograms in more mainstream use. That may have you tuning into radio station WIFM. That’s “what’s in it for me,” also known as the natural human nature reaction to change. In a move guaranteed to have my teenage son holler “mom, you’re missing the point,” I immediately wondered so many things….
- Can I put my head on Heidi Klum’s body and have that be my Avatar? (A holographic head on an actor’s body is how Michael Jackson performed at the Billboard music awards in 2018.)
- Can we finally get together for family holidays? And will your hologram avatar be able to eat?
- How does avatar-human interaction add another layer to intercultural communications? Even the Holocaust Museum acknowledged, albeit as a positive benefit in this context, that students were more open to asking a hologram questions as they weren’t afraid they would hurt someone’s feeling. They knew it wasn’t a real person. Will the virtual nature of it make us more civil or less civil?
That last one triggers so many ethical questions. I think of my guests on today’s show—two daughters who appear white. Their mom is bi-racial and looks black, their dad is white. How many times have they felt teleported into another reality—in conversation where someone didn’t know their true identity? And how did that impact the interaction?
Maybe “mixed reality” has always been here, at least philosophically. Now technology will make it more literal. What questions does this new technology raise for you?