Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates held a
Reddit AMA today, and, as you could have probably guessed, someone
asked him about the company's recently announced HoloLens technology.
Gates' verdict? He's excited, but says it might be a few years before
we see the true potential of the technology.
"The HoLolens is pretty amazing,"
Gates said. "Microsoft has put a lot into the chips and the
software. It is the start of virtual reality. Making the device so
you don't get dizzy or nauseous is really hard--the speed of the
alignment has to be super super fast. It will take a few years of
software applications being built to realize the full promise of
this."
For its part, Microsoft doesn't think
HoloLens is like anything else out there. It doesn't compete directly
with the likes of virtual reality headsets such as Oculus Rift or
Project Morpheus because HoloLens is "something different,"
Microsoft says.
Someone else asked Gates what he thinks
the next 30 years holds in terms of advancements to technology
overall. Gates said he foresees lots of progress, including
mechanical robots being used to pick fruit, among other things.
"There will be more progress in
the next 30 years than ever," Gates said. "Even in the next
10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will
be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a
hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level
of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will
be used very extensively."
The full AMA is a fascinating read.
Though Gates doesn't answer questions about Xbox or gaming directly,
he does talk about his various humanitarian efforts, his dogs, and
machine super-intelligence, among many other topics. You can read the
full post here.
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