Shared Reality: Watch VR Wearing HoloLens

Watch and interact with virtual reality wearing Microsoft's mixed reality headset.

Virtual reality (VR) has been around for decades, but it isn't until Oculus Rift appeared on the scene that it showed the potential to go mainstream. Now we have the HTC Vive, Google Cardboard, and a growing list of entrants trying to grab a share of the market.

It's a given that the hardware will continue to improve with Facebook and Google funding, but what about the experience itself? If you want to see what someone is creating in a virtual world, you also need to enter that world wearing your own VR headset. Drew Gottlieb, a student studying computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, realised there is another way thanks to the Microsoft HoloLens.

While the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Google Cardboard or Daydream headsets all offer fully-immersive VR environments, the Microsoft HoloLens offers mixed reality. That means you still see the real world, but new objects can be inserted into it.

So it follows that whatever objects are visible in VR should also be visible in mixed reality creating a shared virtual space. A developer just has to choose which objects to show, and that's exactly what Gottlieb did as a proof-of-concept.

In the video above you see Gottlieb wearing a Microsoft HoloLens and a fellow student wearing a HTC Vive and holding two positional-tracked controllers. The former connects to the VR session that the latter is active within and shares the cubes being drawn in that virtual world. So while the VR host experiences the full virtual world, the augmented reality (AR) guest only sees what is being is created.

As the virtual space is shared, the Microsoft HoloLens tracks the position of the cubes, meaning they can be walked around and viewed from any angle. Since it's real-time, you can see new cubes as they are being created. It's also possible for the Microsoft headset wearer to create objects using the controllers and the HTC Vive user will see.

Remember, this is just a proof-of-concept and, therefore, is very simple, but it shows how much potential there is for VR and mixed reality to work together and create a collaborative environment. It also bodes well for VR as a spectator sport.

Now imagine this system scaled up to automatically detect an entire room, supports multiple VR and HoloLens headsets, and gives them all tracked controllers to hold. There's a huge range of potential applications from entertainment right through to engineering and information sharing.