Possible Screen Tech

[Motor_Mouth]

I've been doing some thinking and I am starting to believe that HoloLens is going to be far better than I first imagined. If you look at the video of the stage demo, you'll notice that some parts of the overlay are translucent, while others appear completely opaque. Originally I thought this was probably down to the way it was composited for the show and what you would actually get from the device would be consistently translucent, always showing part of the background through it.

What I am now thinking is that the lens may contain an LCD substrate that can block background light for selected pixels, allowing you to have properly opaque holograms in front of you, like the robot, which has black wheels and dark shadows, despite being displayed over grey carpet. You couldn't get shadows behind your wall screens without something like this, either. It would work exactly the same way as any LCD display - they display black by completely blocking the backlight so, if your backlight is actually the environment, it would still work for creating black and/or making completely opaque holograms.

It would be just like an alpha channel in an image and it means this concept I've had in my head of a washed out overlay could be very wrong. If I am right, then it increases the usability of this by several orders of magnitude because it will work in any lighting conditions.

 

[Motor_Mouth]

OK, I have been informed that what I've described here is, in fact, something that Microsoft have been granted a patent for. That makes me think that I may indeed be onto something, which suddenly has me about a hundred times more excited than I already was (which was pretty, damned excited).

 

[grahamf]

I've read reviews stating that the opaqueness was pretty good, so I suppose something like this makes sense.