A wild hologram developed by Microsoft
Posted on: 06/Jan/2020 11:22:38 AM
New! Microsoft has developed a hologram that will transform someone into a digital speaker of another language!
The presentation
Microsoft unveiled the technology during a keynote at the Microsoft Inspire partner conference this morning in Las Vegas. Microsoft recently scanned Julia White, a company executive for Azure, at a Mixed Reality capture studio to transform her into an exact hologram replica.
The digital version appeared onstage to translate the keynote into Japanese!
The process
Microsoft informed that it has used its Azure AI technologies and neural text-to-speech to make this possible. It works by taking recordings of White’s voice, in order to create a personalized voice signature, to make it sound like she’s speaking Japanese.
It may be noted that Microsoft has shown off holograms of people even earlier. But the translation aspect is a step beyond what has been possible with HoloLens!
At present, it resembles as though it is just a demonstration. One would need access to a Mixed Reality capture studio to even start to take advantage of this.
Microsoft’s studios are equipped with lighting rigs and high-resolution cameras to capture a fully accurate digital hologram of someone, which is not something that can be done easily at home with the smartphone just yet.
Inference
As such, Microsoft’s demonstration is certainly impressive and it speaks to the company’s ambitions with Azure, HoloLens, and beyond. The HoloLens 2 might be targeted at businesses for now.
However, Microsoft is attempting to build software and services that will scale to wherever augmented reality might end up heading.
