Vuforia Brings a Discoverable Holographic World to the HoloLens

The Microsoft HoloLens mixes the digital world with the physical one, allowing you to coexist with holograms of your choosing. But those worlds won't fully blend until we can experience it all together and create for each other. Vuforia could make that possible in the near future.

Vuforia is a set of tools that help developers build augmented and mixed reality experiences. One of the prominent abilities, as demonstrated in the video above, is the ability to automatically render holograms when the cameras see a flat image. Basically, the image will display flat to anyone without a mixed reality device looking with just their eyes. Those with a HoloLens, however, will see a hologram in place of the flat image on the paper. That opens up a number of possibilities of how we can share mixed reality experiences out in the real world.

Of course, the HoloLens hasn't been designed for outdoor use, especially when walking around in public. It requires Wi-Fi, and while you can achieve that with a cellular data hotspot, you're essentially forcing the headset to do something it wasn't designed to do. Nevertheless, Vuforia's toolkit has some use indoors and it sets the stage for future generations of mixed reality hardware.

We will, eventually, utilize augmented reality tech that looks more like a pair of eyeglasses than a partial motorcycle helmet—something we can wear comfortably out in public. Until then, it's nice to know there's a holographic world being developed, ready for us to discover once we have the technology capable of seeing it.

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Cover image by Vuforia