Microsoft is focusing on developers, not the general public, for the latest in HoloLens events and announcements. The good news for the public is that, in doing so, the conversation is shedding light on what is behind HoloLens and what to expect once availability happens.
Do not expect to be mentally transported into another world; you remain in a familiar place where virtual characters may join your space. You’re looking at sessions of mixed reality, not virtual reality.
Engadget features editor Joseph Volpe asserted that “any and all comparisons to emerging virtual reality tech and related gaming or entertainment applications should be excised from the conversation for now. It’s not ‘immersive’ as one Microsoft rep stressed to me, clearly keen to avoid the confused commingling of AR and VR buzzwords. It’s ‘complementary."”
The development edition will ship in the first quarter of 2016, for $3000.
This is an augmented reality headset; some watchers call it an “untethered wearable.” HoloLens works all on its own: all the hardware necessary to run any program is inside the headset, said Popular Science. Microsoft’s definition of its HoloLens: The first holographic computer running Windows 10. You get to place holograms in your own physical environment.
From mixed reality to virtual reality, though, the immediate perception of a headset development on the horizon is gaming. Nonetheless, the HoloLens creators point out that it has been engineered for productivity as well as design.
“HoloLens is very much a powerful tool for business, science and education—both Volvo and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are actively experimenting with it,” said Engadget’s Volpe.
Developers can check out HoloLens at the Microsoft store on 5th Avenue in New York City where showcasing has begun.
For Bryan Lukfkin in Gizmodo, a key role the user’s eyes will play was noteworthy. “With the HoloLens, the ‘cursor’ is your eyes. You look around a real room you’re in and select holographic images that appear in your goggles by hovering the cursor in the middle of your field of vision over the object.
To interact with the object, you ‘air tap.’ In front of the goggles by pointing your index finger in the air and making a fast swipe down motion. Voice commands are also at your disposal.”
Edward Baig of USA Today shared the experience: At the store, Baig found himself shooting at robotic aliens firing at him as he fired back at them, floating around him. They seemed to hide inside the walls of the room and he went after them. He could see them through a built-in X-ray feature.
Those were games; Lufkin described a demo which indicated how businesses and other organizations may use HoloLens for presentations.
Goodbye yawnfests of having to watch 23 charts on a white screen.
“The idea here is that you can replace boring PowerPoints with holograms. (How appropriate for Microsoft!) In the demo, I stepped into a fictional boardroom pitch for a luxury watch. I looked at real table in the room and saw a large hologram watch blown up to the size of a golden retriever.
I could move the cursor with my eyes to different points of interest on the watch. When I looked at the band, a pop up told me what the links were made of. In another spot I was given info about the battery.”
“What I can tell you is that the technology is ‘mindblowing,’ said Baig. He said that “when digital becomes part of the physical and vice versa, the most promising reality is that you’re in for a treat.”
Said Michael Nuñez in Popular Science: “It’s true that the HoloLens already has all of necessary computing power to be used as a legitimate productivity tool. Now all it needs is a killer app.”
He said the HoloLens is powered by a CPU, graphics process unit (GPU), and something that Microsoft is calling a “holographic processing unit” (HPU), which interprets and processes data from the device’s sensor array.
Scientia — PASADENA, Calif. – The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins.
Planck is a European Space Agency mission. NASA contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments, and U.S., European and Canadian scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.
Best Map Ever of the Universe This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. By analyzing the light patterns in this map, scientists are fine tuning what we know about the universe, including its origins, fate and basic components. Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA’s Planck Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.
The map results suggest the universe is expanding more slowly than scientists thought, and is 13.8 billion years old, 100 million years older than previous estimates. The data also show there is less dark energy and more matter, both normal and dark matter, in the universe than previously known. Dark matter is an invisible substance that can only be seen through the effects of its gravity, while dark energy is pushing our universe apart. The nature of both remains mysterious.
“Astronomers worldwide have been on the edge of their seats waiting for this map,” said Joan Centrella, Planck program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These measurements are profoundly important to many areas of science, as well as future space missions. We are so pleased to have worked with the European Space Agency on such a historic endeavor.”
The map, based on the mission’s first 15.5 months of all-sky observations, reveals tiny temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, ancient light that has traveled for billions of years from the very early universe to reach us. The patterns of light represent the seeds of galaxies and clusters of galaxies we see around us today.
Map of Matter in the Universe This full-sky map from the Planck mission shows matter between Earth and the edge of the observable universe. Regions with more mass show up as lighter areas while regions with less mass are darker. The grayed-out areas are where light from our own galaxy was too bright, blocking Planck’s ability to map the more distant matter. Normal matter, which is made up of atoms, is only a small percent of the total mass in our universe. Most of the matter in the universe is dark – that is, it does not emit or absorb any light – so creating a map of its distribution is challenging. To make the full-sky map, the Planck team took advantage of the fact that all matter, even dark matter, has gravity that will affect light traveling to us from near the very edge of the observable universe. Planck mapped this light, called the cosmic microwave background, with exquisite precision over the whole sky, enabling scientists to create this matter map. Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA’s Planck Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.
“As that ancient light travels to us, matter acts like an obstacle course getting in its way and changing the patterns slightly,” said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for Planck at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The Planck map reveals not only the very young universe, but also matter, including dark matter, everywhere in the universe.”
The age, contents and other fundamental traits of our universe are described in a simple model developed by scientists, called the standard model of cosmology. These new data have allowed scientists to test and improve the accuracy of this model with the greatest precision yet. At the same time, some curious features are observed that don’t quite fit with the simple picture. For example, the model assumes the sky is the same everywhere, but the light patterns are asymmetrical on two halves of the sky, and there is a spot extending over a patch of sky that is larger than expected.
Peculiar Features in Patterns of Ancient Light The Planck mission has imaged the oldest light in our universe, called the cosmic microwave background, with unprecedented precision. The results fit well with what we know about the universe and its basic traits, but some unexplained features are observed. The top map shows Planck’s all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background, whereas the bottom map shows the largest-scale features of the map. One of the anomalies observed by Planck, and hinted at before by previous missions, is an asymmetry in the temperature fluctuations of the ancient light across two halves of our sky. Temperature variations are represented by the different colors, with red being warmer and blue, cooler. The extent of these variations is greater on the hemisphere shown at right than the one at left. This goes against the accepted simple model of our universe, which holds that the sky is the same in all directions. Scientists are in the process of incorporating these and other anomalies into their picture of the universe. Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA’s Planck Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data. Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
“On one hand, we have a simple model that fits our observations extremely well, but on the other hand, we see some strange features which force us to rethink some of our basic assumptions,” said Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency’s Planck project scientist based in the Netherlands. “This is the beginning of a new journey, and we expect our continued analysis of Planck data will help shed light on this conundrum.”
The findings also test theories describing inflation, a dramatic expansion of the universe that occurred immediately after its birth. In far less time than it takes to blink an eye, the universe blew up by 100 trillion trillion times in size. The new map, by showing that matter seems to be distributed randomly, suggests that random processes were at play in the very early universe on minute “quantum” scales. This allows scientists to rule out many complex inflation theories in favor of simple ones.
“Patterns over huge patches of sky tell us about what was happening on the tiniest of scales in the moments just after our universe was born,” Lawrence said.
This tone represents sound waves that traveled through the early universe, and were later “heard” by the Planck space telescope. The primordial sound waves have been translated into frequencies we can hear. They sound like a constant humming and are made up of a primary wave (the lowest tone) and higher overtones. The “whooshing” oscillation sounds you hear were produced during the processing to make this sound file. Before there were any stars or galaxies, 13.8 billion years ago, our universe was just a ball of hot plasma — a mixture of electrons, protons, and light. Sound waves shook this infant universe, triggered by minute, or “quantum,” fluctuations happening just moments after the big bang that created our universe. As these sound waves propagated through the young universe, they left imprints on the matter and light, much like patterns made by waves on the surface of a pond into which a stone has been dropped. These patterns were imprinted as slightly brighter and darker patches in the light. By mapping this ancient light that has traveled to us through space and time, Planck can essentially see the sound echoes of the early universe. For this sound file, the patterns in the sky observed by Planck have been translated to audible frequencies. This sound mapping represents a 50-octave compression in going from the actual wavelengths of the primordial sound waves (around 450,000 light-years, or around 47 octaves below the lowest note on the piano) to wavelengths we can hear. Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA’s Planck Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.
Planck launched in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the theorized big bang that created our universe. This relic radiation provides scientists with a snapshot of the universe 370,000 years after the big bang. Light existed before this time, but it was locked in a hot plasma similar to a candle flame, which later cooled and set the light free.
The cosmic microwave background is remarkably uniform over the entire sky, but tiny variations reveal the imprints of sound waves triggered by quantum fluctuations in the universe just moments after it was born. These imprints, appearing as splotches in the Planck map, are the seeds from which matter grew, forming stars and galaxies. Prior balloon-based and space missions learned a great deal by studying these patterns, including NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which earned the COBE Team the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Planck is the successor to these satellites, covering a wider range of light frequencies with improved sensitivity and resolution. Its measurements reveal light patterns as small as one-twelfth of a degree on the sky.
“Planck is like the Ferrari of cosmic microwave background missions,” said Krzysztof Gorski, a U.S Planck scientist at JPL. “You fine tune the technology to get more precise results. For a car, that can mean an increase in speed and winning races. For Planck, it results in giving astronomers a treasure trove of spectacular data, and bringing forth a deeper understanding of the properties and history of the universe.”
The newly estimated expansion rate of the universe, known as Hubble’s constant, is 67.15 plus or minus 1.2 kilometers/second/megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years. This is less than prior estimates derived from space telescopes, such as NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble, using a different technique. The new estimate of dark matter content in the universe is 26.8 percent, up from 24 percent, while dark energy falls to 68.3 percent, down from 71.4 percent. Normal matter now is 4.9 percent, up from 4.6 percent.
The Planck Space Telescope: Revealing the Ancient Universe
With its biggest orbit maneuver since 2006, NASA’s Mars Orbiter will prepare this week for the arrival of NASA’s next Mars lander, InSight, next year.
A planned 77-second firing of six intermediate-size thrusters on July 29 will adjust the orbit timing of the veteran spacecraft so it will be in position to receive radio transmissions from InSight as the newcomer descends through the Martian atmosphere and touches down on Sept. 28, 2016. These six rocket engines, which were used for trajectory corrections during the spacecraft’s flight from Earth to Mars, can each produce about 22 newtons, or five pounds, of thrust.
“Without making this orbit change maneuver, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would be unable to hear from InSight during the landing, but this will put us in the right place at the right time,” said MRO Project Manager Dan Johnston of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter passes above a portion of the planet called Nilosyrtis Mensae in this artist’s concept illustration. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The orbiter will record InSight’s transmissions for later playback to Earth as a record of each event during the critical minutes of InSight’s arrival at Mars, just as MRO did for the landings of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover three years ago, and NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander in 2008.
InSight will examine the deep interior of Mars for clues about the formation and early evolution of all rocky planets, including Earth.
MRO will continue its studies of Mars while preparing for the InSight arrival. MRO collects high-resolution imaging and spectral data, as well as atmospheric and sub-surface profiles. It has returned several times more data about the Red Planet than all other deep-space missions combined. It will also continue providing communication relay support for Mars rovers and making observations for analysis of candidate landing sites for future missions.
After the InSight landing, plans call for MRO to perform a pair of even larger maneuvers in October 2016 and April 2017 — each using the six intermediate-size thrusters longer than three minutes. These will return it to the orbit timing it has used since 2006, crossing the equator at about 3 a.m. and 3 p.m., local solar time, during each near-polar loop around the planet. To observe the InSight arrival, MRO will be in an orbit that crosses the equator at about 2:30 p.m. local solar mean time.
The last time the mission performed a maneuver larger than this week’s was on November 15, 2006. That maneuver fired the intermediate-size thrusters for 76 seconds to establish the original 3 p.m. Local Mean Solar Time (LMST) sun-synchronous condition after a six-month period of using dips into the upper atmosphere to alter the orbit’s shape. The spacecraft has three sets of thrusters. It used its most powerful set — six thrusters, each with 170 newtons, or 39 pounds of force — for about 27 minutes to first enter orbit when it arrived at Mars on March 10, 2006. It uses eight smaller thrusters most frequently, for small adjustments to course or orientation.
Even after the planned 2017 maneuver, the spacecraft’s remaining supply of hydrazine propellant is projected to be more than 413 pounds (about 187 kilograms), equivalent to about 19 years of consumption in normal operations.
