E3 Mincraft+Microsoft+Hololens video

[Heptagon_ru]

MIcrosoft Hololens allows to view the world with players in it in 3D on your table.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgakdcEzVwg

It is surely interesting, but is is useful? Maybe it will add fun for admins and mods, but the game process for an ordinary player looks lame.
Is it the right way to go in MC evolution?

What do u think guys?

More news are promised for the upcoming Minecon (London, July 4-5).

[DOM]

I do think that this system will be useful, but not in the way that WE (the older PC minecraft community) would use it.

I have come to realise that the bulk of the Minecraft community is scewed heavily towards the single player and specifically towards younger players. As a single player, theer is no way to get a panoramic view of your creations unless you have flying powers in your single player world. I used to render maps of my single player worlds using a 3rd party tool, just so that I had a nice overview of the world around my base. The Hololens would help those players by giving them the option of looking at the whole map from a 3D perspective.

Another way that the tabletop 3D view can be used is by parents. Since a large population of minecrafters are younger, parents are left in the dark about what their kids are doing on the 8inch display of their tablet. With the Hololens the parent can watch their children play and help them out if needed by showing them paths or warning them of incoming zombie hordes.

Finally, another use for the Hololens feature that I dont think many people are covering, is shown at the beginning of the video. Having a projector screen that can be put on ANY surface is amazing! That means you can play Minecraft on a IMAX display on a train if you wanted to!

I do not think that the system will be efficient enough to be a useful tool for the Admins on large servers. I believe that having a vanished, no-clip enabled admin and block logging is much more efficient at finding culprits in an area of the map.

[Pernix_8D]

Sorry, I'm too annoyed by Lydia to watch the entirety of the video. :3

So far it seems like a cool idea, not overly useful for me personally, but cool.

[DOM]

Sorry, I'm too annoyed by Lydia to watch the entirety of the video. :3

I think that Lydia is a great PR person for Mojang. Much better than the nerds coding the game.

[Marius49]

Yea ... for Minecraft is not that useful. But if they use this for a RTS or something similar, like Civ 5, it will be awesome to control your units in real time on a table while catching a glimpse of your own map. That will also take rid of the minimap we often find in strategy games, that if the table can cover most of the map ;).

[Heptagon_ru]

Sorry, I'm too annoyed by Lydia to watch the entirety of the video. :3

I have similar feelings, she uses too much shiny hollow words, which I hate in our corporate emails from top managers, brrr.
So here is the link for you, starting after her speech: https://youtu.be/xgakdcEzVwg?t=1m24s

DOM, thanks for the ideas, I did not think of those applications, very interesting.

Oh, right, Marius, strategy or city sim games - could be great fun.

[Pernix_8D]

I think that Lydia is a great PR person for Mojang. Much better than the nerds coding the game.

I suppose you're not wrong. She doesn't lack confidence.


I have similar feelings, she uses too much shiny hollow words, which I hate in our corporate emails from top managers, brrr.
So here is the link for you, starting after her speech: https://youtu.be/xgakdcEzVwg?t=1m24s


Thanks mate :P

[InsaneJ]

Hololens as it is now is worse than Kinect. Reason being that the FOV is so terribly low it's practically useless.

These videos are rendered at the same FOV as the camera so it looks great. But as soon as you put on the glasses it falls apart. You have to keep your distance from objects or else your camera will clip through them. The holograms are viewed through a keyhole in front of you so you are constantly moving your head around to see an entire object like the one in the demo video, or you need to be standing way back.
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You guys are always giving me a hard time for wanting to use a higher FOV. Put on Hololens and you'll agree with me for a change ;)

Then there's the point of interaction. You can't grab objects so you're stuck with the 'finger gesture' or using voice commands just like with Kinect, which really sucks.

Technically it's pretty nifty. But the hardware they are planning on using is an Intel Atom platform. No way you are rendering a 4K video on the side of a building with that. This means large videos inside of your home are going to be YouTube quality, not IMAX.

At this point Hololens is nothing more than a gimmick. You really wouldn't want to pay money for this, let alone play Minecraft on it. However all these faults are things that can be solved with better and additional hardware (like the Oculus Touch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfpqXj9gtBs) for example) so in the future it might turn out kind of nice. But knowing Microsoft they are going to release a half-assed version and stay compatible with that version forever so we'll never get to the good version we'd actually pay money for.

Hololens is really great, except when it's really terrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfC8RoQcez0

[Pernix_8D]

Based on the video J posted....