Computer Vision News - December 2019

Exclusive Interview 24 to attach things to the real world by uploading a spatial map of an environment to the cloud and having other devices able to align to it by uploading some information from their device to the cloud. The cloud can compute the relative alignment between the coordinate systems so that my understanding of space can be shared with other devices and their coordinate system can be aligned to mine. Therefore, wherever I place information they can retrieve it in the context of their representation of the world. That’s currently in public preview. The team in Zurich have been very much focused on contributing some of the key computer vision work to enable that. It’s a service that wilbe one of the fundamental services under Minecraft Earth which is a new augmented reality game currently in early access release. In it, you can have multiple people play together in the same spatial context. So, I would see some Minecraft elements somewhere in the world, and someone else that is in the same experience as me can see that in the same place in the world on their device. This service works on iOS, Android, as well as HoloLens, so it’s cross-platform. Azure Spatial Anchors enables real world sharing of these holograms and experiences in games, in the same way that HoloLens and phones allow people to communicate and share information. Think of it like Post-its that you can attach to the world. You are clearly very passionate about this, and the community is very passionate about HoloLens. I think we can safely say that your gamble succeeded! Before we move on, do you have a funny story or something that we wouldn’t know that you could tell us about HoloLens? Before I joined the project actually, as they were ramping up production of the first HoloLens device, one of the machines in the production process had problems and the experts needed to help were far away in Redmond. The person in the factory was trying to fix it and was on the phone with people in Redmond but it was difficult. They suddenly thought: ‘Hey, we have a few HoloLens’s here, I’ll put one on and then you can see what the problem is through Skype.’ This enabled them to solve the problem quickly without needing anyone to travel. This is actually now a built-in feature on HoloLens 2 called Remote Assist which can be deployed right away for enterprises! It is a tool available now in Teams, which is our modern communication platform Best of ICCV 2019