Cortana for Hololens

[Motor_Mouth]

Of course it is. It is running the new Cherry Trail Atom SoC, which means 80% more graphics performance than my Thinkpad 8. Given that my Thinkpad 8 can already do all of those things and a whole heap more, I think I have a very firm grasp of what HoloLens will be capable of doing for me. I don't play games, I don't do YouTube or Netflix, I use my PC to get work done. All I want to do is sit on a bus with a window open in front of me and do all the same things I do on my PC now - email, surf the web, listen to music, create a bit of music, do some design work. I have no expectation of it revolutionising what I use my PC for, just how and where I use it.

 

[grahamf]

Then riddle me this: Why does an Oculus Rift need a very powerful system with dedicated graphics to do less then what you're dreaming the Hololens can do? All your movie examples are created by very powerful computers, and they take as long as they need to process everything as opposed to having to render live.

 

[Motor_Mouth]

Because Oculus Rift is made for fully immersive gaming, it needs to be able to draw realtime ray-traced shadows, plus particle effects and everything else we all expect from a top-shelf gaming experience today. HoloLens doesn't need to do any of that. And where Rift has to draw every single pixel, HoloLens just has to draw a few things for you to see and interact with. I'll give you an example. This is a PNG image without a background -

It is just 117kb because the PNG format is smart enough not to save information for pixels that are cut-out by the alpha channel. This next one is the same picture, except I have added a background -

You can see that, because it includes a full background, it is 770kb, more than six times larger, even though I used exactly the same settings when saving each. That gives you some idea of how much harder it is to render every pixel in a scene instead of just the "hero" elements.

 

[Somna]

GM made the first electric car but it was a market failure, and later on the Tesla Roadster came along and created demand for electric cars.

Market failure? Um.. you may want to look at that one again. Not exactly the thread for it, but GM was forced to make them, refused to sell them at any price, and when people's leases were up, took them back and literally buried them. The market loved them, GM did not.