Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works in I Love all Things Tech, and we are continuing our catch up episodes with Microsoft from the listener Rob who asked that we follow up, and we're going to talk about what the company has been doing since. One thing I did not talk about in
the last episode was Microsoft's work in mixed reality. Mixed reality is sort of a broad category of technologies that merge the real world and the digital world in various ways, and it's kind of like a spectrum. So if you have a system that mostly relies on the real world and it has a very light touch with digital information, we would call that more of an augmented reality solution. You're augmenting the experience of being in the real world
with some digital information. If you have one where most of the information a user will encounter comes from a computer, that would be virtual reality. The term mixed reality started to pop up when it became clear that there's a gradient between these extremes, and sometimes it's hard to classify a particular piece of technology as being augmented versus virtual or anything else, so we use mixed reality instead. Anyway.
We first heard about Microsoft's work in this field in twenty with the introduction of the Windows Holographic later known as the Windows Mixed Reality and the Hollow Lens. This had the code name of Project Baraboo back when it was in development, and a lead developer on the technology was a guy named Alex Kipman, who had first proposed ideas that would become intrinsic in the Hollow Lens platform way back in two thousand seven or so. He worked
on the technology that would become the Connect. And while the Connect, which was an Xbox peripheral, never really cut on in a big way with gamers, the technology itself was really impressive. It could sense depth through its camera systems,
one of which was an infrared camera. It had this projector that would shoot out infrared dots, and by the deformation of the the UH infrared spectrum, like seeing how close or far away it was, it could determine how how deep the scene was and thus if you started walking toward it, then the Connect would detect that you
were actually approaching it. So it used this to uh learn about just your controls, were to implement just your control so you would program just your controls in your game, and then through moving in front of this connect device of the user could actually command his or her Xbox and it could do some pretty cool stuff when paired
with the right software and hardware. Hackers loved the connect because it let them do all sorts of stuff, like they could make a three D scanner, so you could put a real three dimensional object within view of the connects camera, slowly rotate the object and scan the entire thing, and then you would get a virtual representation of that object. Paired with a three D printer, you could actually make copies of stuff, or you can make a action figure
of yourself if you really wanted to. Or you could use the connect to give robots a source of optical
information helping with robotic vision. There were tons of different potential applications for the connect Sadly, most of them did not involve the Xbox, and since the connect was marketed as a console peripheral and not a device meant for makers and hackers, the company eventually withdrew all support for the hardware, but Kitman's worked with the company would continue, and he had been working seriously on the holographic goggles that would evolve into the Hollow Lens for at least
five years. The vision Kitman has of augmented reality is a truly transformative one. So imagine a device that allows you to interact with the digital world through your interactions in the physical world. You could potentially turn any surface in the physical world into a computer display or an interface. You can control software with gestures or with voice. You can transform the world around you with digital overlays that only you can see through your holographic goggles, which is
pretty phenomenal. The Hollow Lens demo video included doing things like snapping a virtual video display to a physical wall. So imagine you put on a headset, you know, special hollow goggles, and in this headset you can see this virtual screen. It's floating in front of you, and you can resize the screen however you like, so it takes up as much or as little of your field of
view as you like. And you position the virtual screen within the physical room that you are occupying, so you can still see the room because you're looking through goggles, right, You're not looking at a headset that has a closed off section. Now you're still looking at the world around you, but this pair of goggles can also generate images itself, creating things that appear to be in your room but aren't. Like that video screen. So you choose to place the
screen on a wall in front of you. Right, you're looking at a blank wall. You put this virtual screen on that wall. It locks into place, and you look away to something else, like to your right or to your left. The screen stays put. It stays where you locked it in the physical location. So it's acting like it's a physical television screen that's been mounted to the wall and maintains persistence even when it's not inside your
frame of you. So if you started playing a video on that screen and then you are to look away, the video continues just as it would on a physical television, and if you glance back at the wall, you would see the video still playing out on that virtual screen. Now, let's say you want to lie down and you decide for the heck of it that you're gonna move the screen from the wall to your ceiling, so you lock
it into place into your ceiling overhead. So now you're laying on your back and you're watching the video playing out directly above you. That's a simple implementation of augmented reality, which is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it gives you an idea of what was possible.
Other applications could be much more serious. Imagine putting on a pair of these goggles and looking at a complicated piece of machinery that has broken down, and the goggles, which have external cameras on them so it can see what you are seeing, can process all the information that they're taking in. They can identify the machinery based on
the shape and the configuration. They know what the problem is because they can see if there's a missing piece or whatever that might be, and then it can display instructions on top of your field of view to guide you step by step on how to remove or replace pieces and what you need to avoid doing. It highlights the relevant parts of the machine for every step. So let's say that there's a particular gear that you need
to remove. It actually creates a highlight on top of the physical gear you're looking at, so that way you know, oh, this is the piece I need to take off next. It's kind of like an expert guide you the entire time. The implementation for augmented reality I would love to see would involve having the chance to view an area as
if it were a different era of history. So imagine that you are walking down the streets of London and then you take a virtual look at what the city would have looked like back in the time of Henry the Eighth or Oliver Cromwell. But then, I'm a history geek, so that's not necessarily something that everybody wants. It's just the version that I always think about. The Hollow Lens had three different processing units. You had your typical CPU,
your central processing unit. You had your graphics processing unit or GPU, but then you also had the HPU or holographic processing unit. The original Hollow Lens got a lot of positive press coverage, but it never came out for consumers.
Microsoft had determined the device was important, but wanted to keep refining it before trying to enter a consumer marketplace with it, because users would need the vice to be incredibly intuitive so that they could learn how to use it and interact with it in a seamless way, and it would need a lot of content as well, you know, stuff to do. Once you bought it without applications, it would just be a nifty piece of hardware, a very expensive one, and you would just put it on your
head and that would be it. So instead, Microsoft chose to focus primarily on enterprise uses of the Hollow Lens, which created a much more narrowly focused set of parameters for the goggles, and that meant developers didn't have to worry about all the crazy stuff that happens out in the wide world in general. They could concentrate on specific use cases, like in manufacturing or in medicine. If you reduce your variables, it becomes way easier to develop software applications.
As it turns out, but Microsoft is reportedly working on the successor to the Hollow lens. Reports have leaked that the Hollow lens too, will have a better battery life and improved features, as well as being lighter and cheaper than the original Hollow lens. I'm recording this episode in June, and later this year the company is likely to give more details about the successor of the Hollow lens. The code name for it is the Sydney, like the Australian city.
I know that it's gonna be less expensive than the original Hollow lens, at least according to all the rumors. But I suspect it's still not going to be marketed to the average consumer just yet. I think it's still going to be an enterprise level device, not something that
the average person would go out and buy. And while the Hollow Lens was not offered up to consumers, Microsoft did partner with a lot of hardware manufacturers to provide the platform for mixed reality applications, which was that Windows Mixed Reality originally called Windows Holographic. It's part of the Windows TIN operating system, and it's compatible with head mounted displays, so you can go out and buy one of a half dozen or so headsets that run on Windows Mixed Reality.
Those headsets range and price from about two hundred dollars to about five dollars, and they require a connection to a PC that's running Windows tents, So the Hollow Lens itself is its own computer. You don't need a separate computer to run the Hollow lens, which is why it's
incredibly expensive. The developer kit version of the Hollow Lens cost about three thousand dollars, but the headsets that you can go out and buy those would be tethered to a PC, which limits their usefulness because you can't just go out into the world wearing these things and have an augmented experience everywhere you go. I've got a lot more to say about what Microsoft has been up to over the last few years, but first let's take a
quick break to thank our sponsor. So while we're on the subject of mixed reality, I should also mention that Microsoft has backed off of plans that it had made to create VR support on the Xbox platform. Back in sixteen, Phil Spencer, the chief of Microsoft's Xbox division, had said that the code named Project Scorpio Xbox platform would end up supporting high end virtual reality experiences similar to what
you could get with a PC. Since then, Microsoft has seemed to kind of reconsider this, and I don't really blame the company, because virtual reality has not taken off in the consumer space like people thought that it might. Part of that is probably due to a very high cost of entry into the platform, because you have to have a pretty good PC, and then you have to have the headset, and then there's all the applications or
software for it. It gets really expensive, really fast. Another good reason might be that there's there's a lack of compelling content and experiences out there. Now. There are several developers who have created really fun or really interesting VR games and other applications, but there's not a very large library that is convincing enough to enough people to buy
into the tech anology. Mike Nichols, the chief marketing officer of Gaming, said in a two thousand eighteen interview that the company has no plans specific to Xbox consoles in virtual reality or mixed reality, so we're looking at pure
PC experience for that sort of stuff. Now. I'm recording this episode a little less than a month after E Threeen, the big video game industry event that happens every June in Los Angeles, California, and during that event, Microsoft announced a few things about its future in the world of gaming, specifically console gaming. It sounds like the next generation of Xbox will have at least a couple of different versions
upon launch. Phil Spencer referred to consoles in the plural, and other company communications seem to indicate that the successor to the Xbox One will likely have more than one version, so there might be an entry level and then maybe a more expensive one with more bells and whistles on it. It may, but it's not. It's not definitive. But it may support backwards compatibility, which is something Microsoft has been
trying to do with its various consoles. That means that you should be able to run older Xbox games on the new hardware, which may mean that the new hardware will have similar chip architecture to the existing consoles, or it could mean that it will run a virtual console to emulate the older hardware. Microsoft also hinted at a future video game streaming service. This service would let you access video games over a device running a thin client,
meaning the device itself is not doing the heavy lifting. Instead, Microsoft's computers would run all the games and stream the experience to you. So technically, I mean, from a very high level, what is going on is when you press a button on your controller or your mouth or your phone or whatever it may be, the command shoots through the Internet, gets to Microsoft's hardware that then executes that command,
and then that shoots the results back to you. So let's say you're playing a game where a is jump, you press a the command goes through the Internet to the machine, the machine executes the command to jump, The result gets shot back to you, and you see your little character jump, hopefully with very little latency, or else you're gonna feel like there's something lagging every time you play. This is not the first time anyone's tried to do this. Lots of companies have tried this, but very few have
managed to make it succeed. On Live, which is no longer a thing. Tried to do this years ago. But Microsoft's goal is to create a streaming experience that will let you play a video game on a lot of different potential platforms without having to worry about having the latest hardware to run the game. So you could potentially run this on a PC, on a console, maybe even
on a phone. So Microsoft might not jump head first back into the mobile market, but it may make a service that runs on smartphone platforms and brings console style gaming two phones. Something else Microsoft has been backing away from is supporting the Windows seven build of its operating system. Windows seven launched in July two thousand nine, so we're
coming up on its ninth anniversary. Microsoft has committed to providing extended support for the operating system until twenty twenty, but the company recently announced that Microsoft staffers would no longer be answering Microsoft Community forum questions about Windows seven. And you might think, Hey, that operating system is nine years old. Why should we expect Microsoft to spend time
answering questions about an antiquated operating system. Well, first, the company's commitment to supporting the OS until January would be one reason. If you say you're gonna do something, you should probably do it. But another is that Windows seven is still a very popular operating system. In fact, according to stat Counter in May, Windows seven an accounted for
nearly forty percent of all Windows based machines worldwide. Windows ten, which is the current operating system from Microsoft, makes up So in other words, Windows seven, just two versions back, is on almost as many machines as the current operating system as for Windows eight, which is sandwiched between Windows seven and Windows ten, it only makes up a little less than eight percent of the market share of all Windows machines. And I'll remind you there is no Windows nine.
They went from eight to ten. So with Windows seven being second place only to Windows ten and still having a year and a half left of support on its agreement with Microsoft, or Microsoft's agreement with the public. I should say it seems premature to me to pull staffers from answering questions about the platform. If you know that almost half of your users are still on Windows seven and that you've said you're going to continue supporting until twenty I think it's a little weird to pull staffers
from answering those questions. On While I'm on the subject, Yep, there are still people out there running Windows XP as their operating system. Windows XP came out in two thousand one and its last service pack was released in two
thousand eight, so that was a decade ago. Stat Counter estimates that nearly three percent of all Windows machines out there are running Windows XP, which sounds like it's a small amount, but when you think three percent of all the Windows machines out there and there are millions of them, that's a lot. It's amazing to me that there are still people running Windows XP. Recently, Microsoft announced that it intended to acquire the company get hub. So what is
get hub. Well, it's a hosting service for get g I T, which is probably not that helpful if you're not familiar with what get is. So here goes get is a way to keep track of changes in files in an effort to make collaboration and coordination not become nightmare fuel because if you've got a team of developers working on code, then you've got people making changes to
this code and you need to track that. But digital files are really tricksy because you can make copies of them, and then you can end up with conflicting versions, or you might find that some changes you made in one
version are breaking the code somewhere. So maybe something that was working in a previous build is no longer working, and you may need to work backward and find a version of the software that was working just fine before you implemented changes, and then see what happened so that you can try to repair it or maybe build out the new code without breaking the older stuff. Now, keeping track of these different versions is incredibly important, but it's
also time consuming it's not much fun. So get is a system that does the tracking on behalf of developers, and it's frequently used to manage source code, although not exclusively anyway. Get hub is a hosting service with the functionality of get, along with some other additional features like access control, so you can make certain that only people who are authorized to access a particular type of code
can do that. The service has millions of users, some of whom are working on open source projects on public project pages, so anyone can go in there and see the source code and make changes to it and that way. You know, again, tracking those changes is very important, So you know what has happened. Microsoft's announcement prompted a mixed reaction from developers, which is to be expected. Some worry that Microsoft is going to change things up in a
way that will discourage open source code development. Others see it as a positive event and that Microsoft will bring support and development to the hub as a whole. Nat Friedman, who will head up get hub under the Microsoft deal, has said that the company intends to operate get hub as its own entity, helping it do what it does on an even larger scale, and possible lee actually using get hub as something of a model for the rest
of Microsoft rather than the other way around. Microsoft has also been working on uh more serious moves into the world of artificial intelligence. AI has been a big area of research and development for more than a decade, but we're starting to see a growing number of implementations and stuff that the average person actually has a chance of encountering in day to day life. Because for years, AI applications were largely the realm of research labs and industrial applications.
It wasn't something that the average consumer typically would encounter. But today we see AI, or at least aspects of AI narrow AI incorporated into stuff like thermostats, personal assistants like Siri or Alexa, and car systems, among other things. So in twenty sixteen, Microsoft created an Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, employing around five thousand people in fields like computer science and engineering to work on AI developments and
practical applications like their own AI assistant, also known as Cortana. Today, more than eight thousand people work in that same area at Microsoft and investors investors are are watching with interest because AI could help transform Microsoft yet again. More on how that could happen in just a second, but first
let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So Microsoft is incorporating AI into products like Office three sixty five, which is the cloud based suite of productivity software the company offers. There's a feature called inc analysis, which can look at handwritten notes in something like a power point
presentation and interpret it, converting it into text. Or you could use the Stylus input device to write in the margins of a virtual document and the AI could interpret those notes and incorporate them into the document itself, or possibly even make the change using natural language processing, which is a very simple phrase that describes the fiendishly complicated task of teaching computers what we mean when we speak plainly.
Microsoft uses this to analyze information and an effort to create greater value for users, though this can also get a little creepy at times. It's similar to what companies like Google and Apple are doing, and that these companies are creating AI processes that can analyze your work and your email messages in an effort to proactively make things easier for you. So and a simple example might be. Let's say you purchase tickets to go to a sporting event,
and you buy them online. You get an email about it. The AI identifies the email. It identifies that the email is about these this sporting event. It looks at the ticket, It knows when the sporting event happens, it knows where it happens. It knows where that is in relation to where you are because you're holding some sort of device
that has your GPS coordinates as part of it. There's a location element to this, and so on the day of the sporting event, you get a notification and it tells you, hey, traffic is unusually heavy today and based upon where you are and where the sporting arena is, you need to leave in the next forty five minutes in order to make it on time. That's the sort of stuff that AI can do, and like I said, it can get really a little creepy if you think about it too much. Um it can be helpful, but
there's also very real concerns about privacy issues and safety. Clearly, it has to be implemented in a responsible way. And AI has tons of other narrow use cases. I've only given a tiny, tiny glimpse into it. You can see stuff like image recognition or machine learning, or pulling relevant information from enormous data sets. These are all different aspects of artificial intelligence. Recently, Microsoft signed a deal with Britain's Marks and Spencer retailer to test and AI implementation in
stores and corporate operations. But that's about all the information I have on this partnership right now. I'm not certain how the AI is going to be incorporated or what it will be meant to do right now, but it is another example of how Microsoft is moving ahead with its work in AI. And another technology that has a lot of buzz around it I wish it would stop getting exhausting is blockchain. And I've talked about blockchain a lot over the last year, but here's a quick refresher.
Blockchain is a process that groups together bundles of records into blocks. So those records could be transactions of some sort, but it puts these all into a block, and then the blocks form a chain, so you've got a linear block or linear chain of blocks. I should say. That's where it gets his name blockchain. So each block in the chain contains a history of all the previous blocks in the chain, so not just the blocks, but the actual transactions that have happened to create those blocks. They
become part of the shared history. So it's kind of like looking almost like a fan only tree, being able to trace ancestry from one person all the way back, say twelve generations. Same sort of thing is that we're talking about an actual record of transactions. Uh, when someone updates a record that updated record joins a new block, and all future blocks will have a history of that update, but they'll also have the history of the versions of
the record before the update happened. Blockchain is most frequently associated with the digital currency Bitcoin in the media because Bitcoin relies upon blockchain technology to track and verify all transactions that use the currency, which keeps anyone from trying to spend a virtual unit of currency twice. Because the entire bitcoin community has access to the shared ledger of transactions and they can see when a unit has been spent.
It's also how new bitcoins are distributed. But never mind, I've talked about bitcoin in another episode, so we're not going to go into it here. The important thing is blockchain can be used for all sorts of applications, not just currency. Microsoft has partnered with a firm called Ernst and Young to launch a blockchain system that would track content rights and royalties management for creators, with video game creators being among the first to take advantage of it.
It's supposed to streamline the process of tracking and collecting royalties payments, something that traditionally has involved a lot of third parties and middlemen, so video games present a particularly complicated problem for royalties. Take a game like Grand Theft
Auto five, because it's not just the game. That game happens to have a lot of licensed music in it, and some of those licenses that have been agreed upon might also involve paying royalties to the copyright holders of the songs that were included in the game, So royalty payments may not just go to the software developer. They also might have to go to the copyright holders of
various songs. And sometimes one entity will buy the rights to a piece of content, so royalty payments should go to them instead of to the original holder of the rights, because now the rights have shifted, and then that person might end up selling the rights later on. This makes the process of figuring out who you owe money to really complicated, so the idea is that the blockchain approach
would simplify this. However, this is not the first time someone has tried to use blockchain for this specific purpose, and one of the big challenges of blockchain is that's difficult to scale up to larger too larger scales, so there's some question as to whether or not Ernst and Young and Microsoft can pull this off. So it's too early to say at the moment, one future product that will come out of Microsoft is the Surface Hub too.
I mentioned the surface earlier in the last episode. Microsoft's touch and gesture controlled smart white board is the hub. So the Surface Hub to you, is something you can mount on a wall and it has a base that allows you to rotate the board from portrait mode into landscape mode, so you can turn it ninety degrees just like you would with a phone. Like if you're holding a phone upright and then turn it to its side, you can switch from portrait to landscape. Same sort of
thing with this. It's so it's much much larger. The screen of the Hub two is fifty and a half inches on the diagonal. It's got a three to two aspect ratio, and the rate the resolution on this is greater than four K. It's higher resolution than four K. It also comes with a four K webcam that plugs
in via USBC that allows for video conferencing. UH. There's a concept video of this thing that shows people using the video chat while working with shared documents on the same screen, using touch controls to send commands and make changes in real time. In addition, you can link up to four of the hubs together, plugging them in through this USBC approach and putting them side by side and create a truly enormous display. There's no telling right now
how much it's gonna cost when it debuts. The original fifty five in surface hub whiteboard would set you back a cool nine thousand dollars or so. Today an eighty four inch one, the really big one would cost more like seventeen thousand dollars. So this is not something I would expect to see in the average home. Microsoft has also been trying to make a bigger move into the educational world. It recently acquired a startup company called flip
Grid that's a video app company. They create an app that let's let's students record and share educational videos with each other. Microsoft had been working with flip grid for more than a year before they made this acquisition. Google has been dominating in the educational space, largely due to the relatively low cost of Google Chromebook devices compared to Windows based computers, and Microsoft has recently contributed money to a group that is fighting against a California proposal called
the California Consumer Privacy Act. Now the act would require companies to reveal what data they collect from users and how they make use of that data, specifically in using that data to sell to people to make money from ads, and it would require those companies to allow users to opt out of having their information sold. Several companies, including Microsoft, do not like this idea at all, and have paid money into lobbying against it and to make a campaign
against the policy. Other companies that have also contributed include Uber, Google, Amazon, and for a while Facebook, although Facebook has since withdrawn its support from the group. Supporters of the proposal argue that people should have a say in how their information
is used. The opposition, however, mostly in the form of company statements, argue that the proposal itself is flawed and that while reputable companies should always treat customer privacy as a top priority, the the implementation of the proposal as it is written would hinder innovation. How true is that?
I don't know? I do know that companies do not want to their business models impacted by having this policy UH brought to fruition because it would mean that an extremely lucrative stream of revenue could potentially get cut off, and that is terrifying to these companies. I keep telling people Google is not a search company. Google is an advertising company, and we are the product. It is. It is you and I generating the information that Google can
then use to sell stuff to advertisers. So if that were changed through this law, if this law got enacted and then people could opt out, it could severely hinder
the way Google makes money, at least in California. And depending upon how Google has been built out its systems, and this is true for all these companies, not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, depending on how they've built out their systems, it might mean that they would have to completely rebuild their systems in such a way that it did not gather that in for nation, Um, it's not.
You could just argue, just don't sell it. But anyway, it looks like it's gonna be an ugly fight in California. Microsoft has been the news recently in the United States because well by recently, I mean June two, eighteen, because the companies work with the United States Immigration and Customs
Enforcement Division or ICE. In ICE became famous for being responsible for separating migrant families as they attempted to enter the United States, even those that were seeking asylum and particularly famous for placing children in separate camps from their parents. The practice was widely called out as being inhumane and cruel, and this had a ripple effect on companies that had accepted contracts from ICE to provide various services in hardware,
including Microsoft. There were calls for Microsoft to cancel those contracts that came from both internal and external sources. Is Late in June two eighteen, Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for an end to the separation policy, though by that time thousands of families had already been affected, with no immediate solution as to how to reunite them. So Microsoft CEO Nadella said that they were absolutely opposed to the the process of separating families. He said it
was abhorrent. However, he also said Microsoft's contracts in no way related to the practice of separating families. Rather, they were for stuff like handling email service, or messaging systems or document management. I don't know that that necessarily satisfied the critics who said you shouldn't do business with this group at all, but it seemed to be his approach to saying, look, we're not responsible for tearing those families apart.
While not saying out loud, that's a big contract and it's a lot of money, So your mileage may vary on how you view that particular approach. One final bit of information, I don't want to end on that particularly distasteful notes. So on June twenty, geek wire published an article stating that Microsoft had bought an office complex in Washington, not too far from its headquarters campus, and they spent
two hundred fifty million dollars buying this thing. In addition, the company is in the process of renovating its home campus and replacing old buildings with new, larger ones, and the new layout will allow for eight thousand additional employees. So it looks like Microsoft is gearing up to grow some more, which might be encouraging news after hearing about all those layoffs that it had been doing over the past several years. Now, where's Microsoft going next? It's hard
to say. I imagine I'm going to see a lot more information about cloud services and artificial intelligence. And it is really interesting to think of the fact that maybe in five year years when you say the company name Microsoft, you'll be thinking of a very different company than the one that was creating, operating systems and productivity software suites. That's the company I always associate with the name Microsoft. I think of ms DOSS, I think of Windows, I
think of Word and Excel and power Point. But in another five years we might be thinking about artificial intelligence, and we might be thinking of blockchain. If they can get that working properly for their various applications, it may be a very different world. I'm excited to see. And besides which that means that in five years I can do another update episode, So that's something to look forward to.
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