[MUSIC]
>> Computers essentially give people superpowers.
We're still confined to the rectangle of
2D monitors and pixels. The limitations of the screens
on our desks and our pockets can complicate
meaningful human interaction with our relationship with the world around us.
That's changing with the rise of mixed reality.
Instead of a gap between our reality and the technical world,
we're seeing this integrated technology into our reality.
Hi, I'm Jason Waskey.
I'm the Creative Director for the Mixed Reality Capture Studio.
I'm here in San Francisco on
our stage, surrounded by 106 cameras,
getting ready to be turned into a hologram.
When we think about the future of human-computer interaction.
We know it'll be some form of mixed reality.
Mixed reality is the augmented reality,
virtual reality, and everything in between.
It's a technology but really at its heart what it is,
is a continuation of what we, as humans,
have been doing for a very long time,
think about the invention of
photography where we add sound, color.
Well, you know, for mixed reality,
we need to add depth.
So here, at our capture studio,
what we do is we take a mess of cameras.
We point them at a single area and we
capture real humans, real authentic performances.
We turn them into holograms, and those
are able to be used wherever you are,
whether you're in virtual reality,
augmented reality, or mixed reality.
Microsoft has a long history
on the technical side of mixed reality.
We build HoloLens which is the first and still
only self-contained holographic processing unit.
We use advanced artificial intelligence and
computer vision techniques here to build our holograms.
All that technology is great, but it
really needs great content for it to come alive.
One of the first and coolest ways we've
seen people start to integrate
the volumetric holographic capture
with the things that they do with around arts and entertainment.
So thinking about what we do,
it's a little bit of a cross between sort of being on
stage and being on sort of like on a film set.
So you have to take those two things and combine them
together, and find new ways to tell stories.
So we've worked with folks,
we have worked with dancers,
with ballets, where we've had
artists interactive and dancing with each other in the space.
We've done some really great things with the New York Times,
for the great performers series.
We did a really wonderful piece, a
companion piece for Blade Runner, where we filmed
multiple actors and they help tell a story that expanded
and changed the story of what you saw in the film.
One of the really cool things about
volumetric technology, about having a hologram right in front of you,
is that makes the subject matter
more approachable, more available.
You can learn more information about what you're seeing,
about having it right in front of you.
So you think about that from an education and training standpoint,
Imagine using it as a medical student to teach
better methods for physical therapy
about the gait of someone who's
learning to build the strength of some place
they were injured, or better yet, and things
that we've seen in the past with people that we've
had come to the stage that sense of learning
from the people who were actually there about
the next best thing to being there with
the person is having a hologram of the person,
life-size, standing there, talking
to you just as I'm talking to you.
It's that power, that availability of
volumetric and 3D experiences
that we are really super excited about.
I feel like I know that we've hit
gold because for the last part of a decade,
almost every single team member has managed to bring
some element of their family or even their pets into the stage.
Our general manager has actually
been bringing his kids, his two boys,
in here since I think they were about
four to five each, and then we've
started to see them grow into young men.
It's that sense of having those different versions of
personal memories that really are a treasure that
as we move into the new world of mixed reality,
but those will be the moments that
everybody gets a chance to experience moving forward.
Technology moves at a funny pace,
150 years ago, it took dozens of people,
days to make a single scene for a film.
Today, we shoot, we edit on our mobile phones. Post it everywhere.
Someday Mixed Reality will be the new normal and volumetric,
well volumetric will be part of that experience.
For now, for us, we're focused on getting
the most authentic human performances
to as many people as we possibly can.