Have you ever wanted to be able to stand in the same room with someone who was thousands of miles away? Have you fantasized about being able to enter one of Star Trek’s Holodecks? With some of the new technology coming out of Microsoft for the HoloLens, that fantasy might not be so outlandish anymore. Introducing Holoportation, an admittedly cheesy name for what happens to be one of the coolest advancements in interpersonal communication history.
With Holoportation, you can conference with another person in real time while engaging in a completely 3-dimensional space. In the video above you can see the technology at work, and it’s definitely something incredible. By standing in rooms surrounded by sensors, two people wearing HoloLens are able to see each other in the same room. The technology uses these sensors to create and then subsequently texture a model of a person, and then project it onto the other person’s HoloLens.
It doesn’t stop there: the technology behind Holoportation lets you bring in props to show off to the person you’re conferencing with, so that you can better interact with them. Beyond just communication, you’re also able to do something that’s truly mindblowing: relive a memory. When you’re done with your Holoportation conversation, you can have the conversation recorded, shrink it down, and watch it from an outside perspective. The experiences that are made possible with this new HoloLens technology are breathtaking, and if adopted could very well completely shift the nature of how we communicate with one another, and how we experience things like international business, family gatherings, and long distance relationships. When HoloLens finally finds its way to the general public, we can only hope that advancements like it are going to be able to break into the mainstream of long distance communication.
