News : How Skype Movie Talking Works on the HoloLens
When you wear a holographic computer on your face, you build up some things and lose others. That’s certainly the case when using Skype in Microsoft’s HoloLens. Some movie talks will work better because your caller can see what you see, rather than your face—but others just feel weird.
As you’ll see in the above movie, I recorded a call to myself from Skype on my laptop to Skype on the HoloLens. For the most part, it worked rather well and about the same as it would inbetween regular computers and smartphones.
You’d wear the HoloLens and use Skype to have a friend assist you in a task.
You don’t miss observing another person’s face when you’re just movie conferencing with yourself, but you might if you’re actually talking to another person. You can hear them, and see what they see, but that’s something most of us have experienced by toggling inbetween front- and back-facing cameras on our phones. Imagine you could never toggle back to the front-facing camera and you’ll understand the dilemma with using HoloLens.
Microsoft may use holographic representations as a stand-in for your face in the future. We’ve already seen how a Kinect can make that happen, but you can’t truly hook one up to the HoloLens (nor would it be practical to do so).
Instead, the headset’s mobility tracking and speech recognition could inform the movements of a rendered hologram of your choosing and send that to the other caller. They’d still see what you see, but a holographic representation of you as well so it at least feels like they have someone to talk to directly.
Imagine you could never toggle back to the front-facing camera and you’ll understand the dilemma with using HoloLens.
But that’s just conjecture. Microsoft already wants you to look at movie conferencing from a different angle, as their movie above demonstrates. They believe that sharing your line of look with another is just another method of communicating, and a more practical one.
Instead of just calling someone up for a talk, you’d wear the HoloLens and use Skype to have a friend assist you in a task. When you’re remote and need help with something, you don’t want to send movie of your face but rather movie of what you’re doing.
Skype on the HoloLens supports this method of movie conferencing fairly well. It gives you a pen and arrow implement for marking up your space and pointing at specific objects. The arrow instrument is as elementary as air tapping where you want to mark an object, but it’s rather difficult to be precise with the pen implement due to the HoloLens’ limited field of view and serviceable yet imperfect hand-tracking abilities.
Using Skype in the HoloLens should prove useful in several practical applications. In fact, it feels like a useful upgrade when you use it the way Microsoft encourages you to. However, if you’re just having a conversation with another person this format feels a bit weird. The pen and arrow gimmicks make it joy, but eventually Microsoft will have to find a better solution for standard conversations. Or, if not, we’ll just have to commence standing in front of a mirror.