SAN FRANCISCO—While much of this morning's keynote at Microsoft's Build developer conference here was focused on the visuals of Windows 10, the company's executives less-than-subtly highlighted a number of Windows and Azure cloud technologies focused on a class of computing devices that will never display the Windows "Start" bar: smart, screenless networked devices that are usually categorized as the "Internet of Things" (IoT). The promotion of free Windows 10 for embedded devices is part of Microsoft's goal of a worldwide installed base of 1 billion Windows 10 devices within the next few years, but Microsoft also sees IoT as a major driver of growth for Azure and Windows Holographic.
During a demonstration of HoloLens, Microsoft's Alex Kipman and a member of the HoloLens team demonstrated an Arduino-based robot enhanced by services tied to Windows Holographic and the HoloLens. The robot demo included pop-up 3-D interfaces for both the features of the physical robot and a "holographic" extension of the robot existing only in software.
HoloLens also provided terrain mapping and obstacle recognition from the perspective of the robot's operator, creating way-points for the very simple robot to navigate to avoid Kipman as he stepped into its original path. These sorts of navigational capabilities, which are inherent to the spatial computing and sensor processing of Windows Holographic, could potentially be used for more autonomous systems coupled with Kinect sensors or other sensor hardware.
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