“When you get the light to be at the exact angle,” Kipman tells me, “that's where all the magic comes in.” Then the photons enter the goggles’ two lenses, where they ricochet between layers of blue, green and red glass before they reach the back of your eye. To create Project HoloLens’ images, light particles bounce around millions of times in the so-called light engine of the device. You essentially hallucinate the world, or you see what your mind wants you to see.” Eventually they hit the back of your eyes, and through that, you reason about what the world is. “If I could magically turn the debugger on, we'd see photons bouncing throughout this world. “Ultimately, you know, you perceive the world because of light,” Kipman explains. Project HoloLens’ key achievement-realistic holograms-works by tricking your brain into seeing light as matter. “And the analog universe has a fundamentally different rule set.” “It's about the analog universe,” he says. The next era of computing, he explains, won’t be about that original digital universe. He gives me an abbreviated history of computing, speaking in complete paragraphs, with bushy, expressive eyebrows and saucer eyes that expand as he talks. He sits beside me, then stands, paces a bit, then sits down again. Kipman leads me into a briefing room with a drop-down screen, plush couches, and a corner bar stocked with wine and soda (we abstain).
Right from the start, he makes it clear that Baraboo will make Kinect seem minor league.
When the motion-sensing Xbox accessory was released, just in time for the 2010 holidays, it became the fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time. Seven years, if you go back to the idea he first pitched to Microsoft, which became Kinect. Nervous, because he’s been working on this pair of holographic goggles for five years. The headset is still a prototype being developed under the codename Project Baraboo, or sometimes just “B.” Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs, is a nervous inventor, shifting from one red Converse All-Star to the other.