Depending on the resolution, it could replace your monitors at work (assuming the headset is light, comfortable, etc). Using a wireless keyboard and mouse, you'd have your computer with you anywhere in the home or office.
As a developer, having a wall of holographic desktop screen space in front of me would be amazing. My home office would look much better too!
I have no idea how far away this version of HoloLens is from that reality though.
I think the 'depending on the resolution' is key. Its not really a matter of software to me, its whether or not the hardware can deliver the necessary resolution to replace a monitor that's typically 1.5ft from your face. If you can break the dam by executing on the hardware the software will flow. (I wonder how Hololens compares to Magic Leap's technology.)
I think it would be very cool to just have 3 tripods on your desk (a ball on a stick) that represent 3 screen spaces. You could reach out and move them around, telescope them up and down in the physical world and the headset could use them for triangulation to render an accurate monitor on each. You'd still have a keyboard and mouse in the first iteration and then slowly overtime give way to other forms of input.
Thinking about how our eyes really work - you don't need the same resolution. You only need proper eye tracking and the right amount of resolution in the center of your vision (or wherever). You only need it to render what you are looking at - I'm sitting about 2 feet away from a 27 inch screen.... I'm never looking at the entire thing in such a way that I need all that detail at every point. Sure, I need it to be there when my eyes dart around... but as long as that's done, it will look just as real.
Given something more adaptive, there's no reason you couldn't have a ginormous holographic wraparound workspace... or whatever your imagination can come up with.
Very much this, being able to have 6 or 8 virtual displays projected on a wall would be great.
I know that this tech could do so much more (one giant display the size of the wall) but the different displays is nice bec it allows me to silo things into different categories.
Many years ago (close to 20) I saw a cool demo of a palm-able chording keyboard, and looking around it seems that a few brave souls have actually attempted to bring the idea into production.
A good keyboard only UI (I don't trust small scale pointer input), and you could move the entire traditional PC interface over into a very discreet package.
The web would be the one place where changing UI paradigms would be hard, the web pretty much insists on fine motor skills clicking one of hundreds of visible links on a page.
It's what I first thought of when I tried the Youtube app on Google Cardboard. The app has you in a theater with a main viewing screen, but then littered 360 degrees around you are other videos you can watch or cycle through.
All I could think was how awesome it would be to have half a dozen virtual screens (that I could manipulate) for programming. It would well justify the cost of a good device because six monitors would be probably just as expensive.
After seeing that Autodesk is finally iterating on some of their software to support the rapid protoyping/3D printing community in major ways, I'd like to see what kinds of tools Autodesk could come up with. I see Holo Studio as the MS Paint of "Holographic computing" or whatever we're calling it now.
Is that a killer app, I guess not, but if this HoloLens device is really running Windows 10, and the API's are baked into the OS, that puts it MILES ahead of where Google Glass was, and developers will be able to do something more interesting than take photos and share them on Google+.
Can you expand and maybe source that comment. "Initially funded" to me suggests that the R&D was funded by people/companies for the purpose of carrying pornography.
"Popularised by" is often suggested, or even "first exploited commercially for" - either of these seem far more likely. I just can't see Daguerre, or whoever (Wedgewood, Fox-Talbot, ..), getting pay-checks from people/companies that want to publish porn?
I'm not saying, yet, that you're wrong - history is often surprising.
By wire recordings you mean the audio recordings on wires that predate reel-to-reel and such. Are there existing audio porn recordings from the 1890s? It seems strange with the cost of the tech that anyone would even want it as a recording when the people who could afford it, given the massive difference in income and the availability of prostitutes, could order a live rendition. Stranger things have happened though.
Telegraph? Morse or semaphore porn, ... I'd have thought that was really an exception to Rule 34!?
Where I work we sell shipping containers filled with products of various kinds. It would be incredible to fit a customer with these and walk them around the containers, open the doors, and interact with what's inside.
Normally you'd need a large open space (and a forklift) to demonstrate the product but with this? You could do it in a large room.
I think this is actually the killer app for anyone too.
Imagine shopping at Amazon and being able to manipulate a product in your hands before you buy? Want to buy studio monitors for the PC but don't know where to place them? Whip out your HoloLens and put them wherever you want!
How would that piece of art look on your wall? What about the other wall over there?
IKEA? Hmm... which couch looks best in my living room?
Imagine seeing a marker shooting into the sky, like an old movie premier spotlight, that marked the locations of your friends and family? Or just anything.
At an amusement park and don't know where the nearest bathroom is? Follow the blue arrows on the ground and you'll find it.
Star Trek's Holodeck. Enter a large laser tag room with these on. Now you can project anything in the room. Unlike Oculus you can actually run around and play in the environment because you can see where you are going.
I argue it is going to be in the field of CAD editing and display. The whole field is totally set up for these "displays" (which at the bottom of it is what they are) and the bulk of 3D models are being produced in that field and are ready to immediately integrate.
A greenhorn tradesperson way out in the middle of nowhere looking at some broken machinery and having no idea why it's failed, calling up their boss with 40 years of experience, and having the boss, sitting on a comfy couch back at the office, look at the problem, explain it and draw diagrams of how to fix it in 3d space infront of the greenhorn.
Where is your imagination racing to?