The latest TED talks have been happening this week in Vancouver, BC, under the banner “Dream”, and featuring talks from Scandal (and lots more) producer Shonda Rhimes, Mythbuster Adam Savage, the father of Linux Linus Torvalds, former Presidential candidate and climate advocate Al Gore, and “our own” Alex Kipman, the man in charge of both Kinect and the HoloLens.
During his talk, Kipman showed off some new HoloLens demos, including one where he “teleported” a NASA engineer from across the street on to the stage at TED.
Speaking to reporters at TED, Kipman compared the launch of the Kinect to the much slower ramp-up for HoloLens. Saying that “there’s nothing development kit-ish about it”, Kipman said that the current $3,000 HoloLens Development Kits are consumer ready now, but Microsoft doesn’t want to release a product that “can do 12 things … and now it is collecting dust.” He compared it to the Kinect, which he said sold 10 million units in 60 days, but it was “just not ready.” Kipman said he was in no rush to push the HoloLens out to market (especially at a $3,000 price tag, we hope), and Microsoft seems content to continue its strategy of pushing the HoloLens to academia while keeping up the buzz in the consumer world with demos like this one from TED.
While the official TED videos from TED 2016 “Dream” aren’t yet available, someone was good enough to capture Kipman’s talk and post it to YouTube, you can check it out here:
Hopefully this unofficial video will remain available at least until the official TED videos are released.
