In-Depth Analysis: What's Inside HoloLens?

[JoeCogan]

Another case for the mysterious "black" color projection can be found in almost all of the hands on articles on the web (including Thurrott's). While none have actually mentioned the color "black", they all report the bats flying out of the virtual hole in the wall. Last I checked, bats are usually black or very dark brown. Especially the blocky Minecraft ones.

I can't wait until MS posts a Sinofski-esque 8000 word blog about the HoloLens tech. This is fascinating stuff...

 

[Kukulcan67]

Sorry, please don't laugh at me. I am trying to make some sense of the "light bounces a few million times" before sent to the lens/eye. I can only see two uses for that:
- The light from the laser (we are talking about lasers, right?) must be blurred enough before it reaches the eye (not sure if that would be necessary)
- The bouncing is for fanning out (is the right word?) the laser beam like the magnetic field fans out the cathode ray.
So we would kinda have like 3 light fields, two for bouncing the beam around to direct it the correct position of the third one that bounces it to the eye in the right angle.

Don't understand enough about light fields to know if this is even possible, but I can't find any other explanation that makes more sense (because I can't find any at all). Sounds like SF(and would probably revolutionize VR too), but from reports about resolution Hololens is beyond what a "standard" light field display should be able to do.

 

[Motor_Mouth]

The "background" is the real world, which of course you can't black out. There's no "background light" in the device (there's no screen). If you turn the light source ("light engine") off, you don't see black, you see the real world behind the transparent lenses.
EDIT: oh I get it, you probably mean there's some way the lense can block the light from the real world selectively? Yea that would be the only solution, but I wonder if that would be technically possible. The lenses certainly can't do that actively, so there would need to be something that MAKES the lense block light. Interesting to speculate about.

Not only would it be possible, it would be relatively easy. All you'd need is a single strata of LCD behind the "light engine" to selectively block the background, just as it blocks the backlight in a conventional LCD panel to create black. And just like an LCD panel, it wouldn't be able to do it perfectly, hence there being some translucency remaining. It would be just like the alpha channel in an image file. Apparently Microsoft even hold a patent for such a system.