The Surface Hub is one of the more interesting members of the Windows 10 family, representing a purely enterprise device that stretches up to 84″ diagonally and fuses a variety of technologies to provide an intelligent advanced collaboration solution. Holoportation is the 3D virtual conferencing technology that uses HoloLens and other devices to bring people together in an interactive augmented reality environment.
Now, as ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports, Surface Hub chief Jeff Han and a number of Microsoft researchers working on Holoportation have left to create a new stealth startup, perceptiveIO.
Jeff Han, whose LinkedIn profile lists him, as of May 2016, as Co-Founder and CEO of perceptiveIO Inc., was the founder of Perceptive Pixel. In 2012, Microsoft bought Perceptive Pixel — and ultimately used that technology as the foundation for its large-screen Surface Hub conferencing systems. (Han seemingly left his post as Partner General Manager of Microsoft’s Surface Hub Devices Group some time around October 2015, according to LinkedIn.)
PerceptiveIO’s web site doesn’t shed a whole lot on what the company is planning to make beyond “beautifully designed and engineered systems at the intersection of novel hardware and software.”
Time will tell what impact these departures will have on Surface Hub and on the Holoportation initiative. We’ll stay on the lookout for more information, and let us know in the comments what impact you think this might have on the development of those products and technologies.
