MICROSOFT'S HOLOLENS WILL HAVE A CUSTOM AI CHIP!

Microsoft's augmented reality headset, the HoloLens is an exciting product, but it is not quite ready for the public. The company has released the next version of the hardware will have an AI coprocessor built in to help the headset recognise real-world objects. 

This will help the device to know where to project the holographic images over the world in front of it, but the HoloLens needs to be able to tell what is around it. This kind of object recognition is called computer vision, and Deep Neural Networks excels at it. These binary systems can be difficult to work with since it needs to be trained by first feeding it a huge amount of data and it needs to perform many operations in parallel; sometimes these modern chips do not accommodate as well as it could. Microsoft is developing its own chip to solve these problems as it squeezes Deep Neural Networks into the HoloLens headset. 

The brain of the current model is a multiprocessor called Holographic Processing Unit, it handles the information fed to it from the device's sensors, including head tracking, inertia and infrared. A second version of the Holographic Processing Unit is currently in development and Microsoft has announced that this iteration will be built with an AI coprocessor. Since the HoloLens is designed to be self-contained, the new chip will allow the headset to recognise and process the world around it without needing to be connected to any other hardware or cloud server. The device will run continuously powered by its own internal battery. 

You can learn more about the Microsoft HoloLens by watching the video, below!