Events have been going virtual for a full year now, with the pandemic preventing physical meetings and forcing companies to innovate. But no one’s taken it quite as far as Microsoft Ignite — which just introduced us to an avatar of the guy who made Avatar.
Today at the developer conference, James Cameron — yep, that Titanic dude — and Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté joined Microsoft for a fully virtual tech conference featuring “holoports” of the two, in which 3D capture technology is used to beam a lifelike image of a person into a virtual environment. Sure, we’ve seen it on stage during concerts, where great artists and actors living and dead have made virtual appearances. But never as an integral part of a conference.
“This has been the dream for mixed reality, the idea from the very beginning,” said Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman, one of the key folks behind Microsoft’s Hololens. “You can actually feel like you’re in the same place with someone sharing content, or you can teleport from different mixed-reality devices and be present with people even when you’re not physically together.”
Laliberté has been toying with virtual reality for years, he said, but nothing quite met his needs until Microsoft Mesh, a cross-technology platform also unveiled today at the show. Mesh lets app developers build persistent virtual environments for collaboration, communication, and more. Mesh pushes the boardroom scene even further, allowing people from around the globe to share holograms. Yes, you can toss a virtual key to someone else. It sounds silly, but it opens up vast new worlds, thanks to computation so complex it’s hard to fathom.
“It’s like the metaverse,” Greg Sullivan, director of mixed reality at Microsoft, told Digital Trends. “When someone who’s not in the room with you hands you a hologram, it’s a pretty powerful experience.”
With the help of Mesh, Laliberté plans to create Hanai World, a social mixed-reality platform that he’s thought about for years and would connect live and digital entertainment experiences into single events. For his part, Cameron plans to also create shared experiences across the virtual and physical worlds.
Microsoft is thinking of Mesh as a platform, and says it will release SDKs to allow any developer to add this capability to their apps — hence the announcement at the Ignite developer conference. The initial demo apes a design review on purpose — it’s a natural opportunity for this type of collaboration, Sullivan said, and any time you can avoid flying someone to a factory to inspect a prototype product, a company will be saving money. Other potential applications include remote support and training, manufacturing, and more.
Architects and engineers could physically walk through a holographic model of a factory floor under construction, seeing how all the pieces of equipment fit together in three dimensions, potentially avoiding costly mistakes. Engineering or medical students learning about electric car engines or human anatomy could gather as avatars around a holographic model and remove parts of the engine or peel back muscles to see what’s underneath.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.