What They Say
TechRadar Pro reported that Cisco has shown a new Webex collaboration tool that is said to be able to exploit a combination of augmented reality headsets into web conferences. It calls the technology ‘Webex Hologram’.
Webex Hologram is said to be compatible with a number of existing AR headsets such as Magic Leap and Microsoft HoloLens.
ZDNet got this from Cisco to describe Webex Hologram:
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A cloud rendering technique that allows the light field to be partially rendered in the cloud with final render adjustments done in the headset. This allows the scene on the headset to be immediately updated, eliminating the motion sickness associated with other experiences. This technique also optimizes compute power by pushing the bulk of compute off of the headsets, thus bypassing headset limitations, and instead leverages the full power of cloud servers to deliver a superior experience. The innovation in our rendering allows Webex Hologram to run adeptly over today’s internet, including LTE.
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Innovations enabling a simple capture of the light fields, as well as compression and transmission of the light fields over the internet. Cisco’s compression techniques enable uploading the capture to the cloud and transmission from the cloud down to the headset, all within a typical broadband connection range.
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Light fields for exceptional holographic quality. While light fields themselves are not a new invention, they do offer advantages over volumetric video. For example, light fields can represent a real-world given point in a scene as different colors when viewed from different angles. In contrast, the volumetric video will typically limit representation to the same color. With Webex Hologram, this difference allows light fields to be better at representing shining and reflective objects, such as human eyes.
At the moment this is a pilot programme with a few select users.
What We Think
Well, that follows the Alfred Poor rule that “anything that calls itself a hologram, never is”. Although the verbiage in the description ticks the right boxes in terms of buzz words, I see nothing here that convinces me that this is anything beyond stereo 3D.
Building this on top of Webex is ambitious. I remember the first chat I had with Zoom some years ago when the firm said that it was started by people from Webex that realised there had been some bad technology decisions that made it hard to improve, so they started Zoom so that they could start again in a different way. Cisco doesn’t have a stellar reputation for developing its acquisitions. (BR)
