holoportation: virtual 3D teleportation in real-time (Microsoft Research)

I really think that in the future people will use something like holoportation[0] to work at home or remotely across the world. Because like you say sometimes it makes sense to be present with a person to accomplish a task. It is very hard if they are trying to describe something when it would only take half a moment to visually look yourself and understand the direction the person is coming from. Holoportation looks very neat I really hope I get to try it one day. [0]:▶ this video

You have that backward > If I’m in a room with no chairs, there would be no chairs unless one is added visually. > They wouldn’t walk through my bed because they aren’t in my room. If you're sitting on your bed with your AR googles there is a bed in your room. If they are standing in their room they'll be standing or sitting through your bed. They have no concept of where your bed is because your bed doesn't exist in their room. Tons of AR demos try to show this feature. Tons of companies are working on it. Most believe it's a mass market feature. ▶ this video link link link But it's unlikely to work because each person's surroundings don't match every other persons. One's at a desk, One's at a cafe, One's in their bed, One's on their soft. They aren't each positioned in a way they can all appear in each others AR. Maybe this will make it clearer. Imagine you're on your bed laying down. You want to AR video conference with your friend. They're in the bathroom. Where does their AR project your body? Your body is laying down. There's no place to project your body in the bathroom that fits you lying down.

Depends what you mean. 3D/360-degree? It's sort of doable using cameras and software to stitch and interpolate all the different angles but you're still viewing from a fixed perspective. That works in the current crop of VR headsets. Same with 3D/180-degree (or similar wide angle but not 360 3D stuff). I've watched several on my Rift dev unit. Getting into "real" 3D, like being able to view from any angle is trickier but there are experimental and in-development methods of doing this. The easiest works for CG stuff (just look at your 3D content in your headset). The more realistic it gets, the closer to a "movie" in 3D. Combining video footage with CG environments is a nice little "cheat" that's already been played with as well. But the real challenge and (as I see it) the ultimate goal in this space is being able to use something like multiple light field cameras or RGB+depth cameras (think Kinect) arrayed around a room or environment and capturing both live video and the 3-dimensional structure of the surroundings and any objects or people. The depth data from the various angles needs to be combined and "textured" with the video data in order to create something approaching a real 3D recording of something over time (so maybe they'll need to advertise as 4D movies). Even cooler is when you can compress all of this data and stream it over networks to be decoded on the other end. The result will be like 3D telepresence where you're all but transported to another location. Microsoft has been working along those lines and it makes sense since they have Kinect and Hololens. This is the sort of thing that will be the real "killer app" for VR/AR as far as I can guess: ▶ this video