We decided to find out if what Microsoft says is true: remote volumetric telepresence and collaboration can and will be done, sooner than people think and — despite obvious technical hurdles — it will be the killer app of Augmented and Virtual Reality.
Rewind. It took the personal computer roughly 15 years to hit an inflection point and become a consumer product everyone had to have. At first its killer app, email, which most people first got at work, didn’t seem so revolutionary. Hardly anyone outside the company was using it. The network effect, a phenomenon whereby a service becomes more valuable when more people use it, hadn’t kicked in. New technology always penetrates the enterprise before the home. Once people started getting Internet online services with a personal email address, it made the PC something everyone had to have at home. The telephone is another great example. The more people who got one, the more people had to have one.
Similarly, messaging and social media are the killer apps of smartphones. Our need to connect with other people follows us, no matter where technology takes us. New technology succeeds when it makes what we are already doing better, cheaper, and faster. It naturally follows that Telepresence should likewise be one of the killer apps for both AR and VR. A video of Microsoft Research’s 2016 Holoportation experiment suggests Microsoft must have been working on this internally for some time, maybe even before the launch of the HoloLens itself.
Telepresence, meaning to be electronically present elsewhere, is not a new idea. As a result, the term describes a broad range of approaches to virtual presence.
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