{"id":1042,"date":"2012-01-08T21:10:24","date_gmt":"2012-01-08T21:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1042"},"modified":"2012-01-08T21:12:07","modified_gmt":"2012-01-08T21:12:07","slug":"building-a-holodeck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/01\/08\/building-a-holodeck\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a Holodeck"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Well almost\u2026<\/p>\n

Last year the guys at Microsoft released a video showing their vision<\/a> of how people might interact and communicate using technology in the future.  In one scene two classrooms, one in the US and one in India, are linked by a window of sorts, each showing a view into the other classroom with the pupils drawing pictures and writing to each other onto the windows.  It\u2019s hard to describe unless you\u2019ve seen it, but I\u2019ll out the video on the bottom of the post.  <\/p>\n

Over the Christmas break I spent a little time catching up on all the various article and videos I hadn\u2019t had a chance to watch in the last few weeks of the year.  One of them was a fascinating video from The Verge\u2019s<\/a> visit to Microsoft\u2019s Applied Science\u2019 s Edison Lab where they are starting to build real technology which could power the vision described in the video last year.  <\/p>\n

Ok I\u2019m a geek, but there is some fantastic technology in there, a lot of which I\u2019ve not seen before though I don\u2019t know if others are doing the same sorts of research.  It\u2019s also interesting to see Kinect units being pressed into service in new ways too.  At least it\u2019s not just the hacker community thinking up new ways to use it.<\/p>\n

Whilst the 2019 video showed this sort of technology in use within a school, it\u2019s clear that it would find applications all over business.  In a world where work is increasingly delivered by teams of talented people distributed around the world, this sort of natural link between locations could be huge benefit when working in that sort of virtual team.<\/p>\n

Anyway, here\u2019s the video and below it the original Vision 2019 video.<\/p>\n