Say Hello to This Cortana Hologram
Halo’s Cortana enters the real world with this internet appliance. [Jarem Archer] has built an amazing “holographic” home for Cortana of Halo and Windows fame. The display isn’t really a hologram, it uses the age-old Pepper’s ghost illusion. A monitor reflects onto 3 angled half mirrored panels. This creates a convincing 3D effect. Cortana herself is a 3D model. [Jarem’s] wife provided gave Cortana her moves by walking in front of dual Kinect depth-sensing cameras. This motion capture performance drives the 3D Cortana model on the screen.
The brain behind this hack is the standard Windows 10 Cortana voice assistant. …read more
It’s no secret that today’s conversational assistants leave a lot to be desired. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad they are at hearing what we say and even worse at interpreting it. But one thing that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is the one-directional nature of conversations we have with Siri, Cortana and the rest. These systems don’t know how to… 
