Microsoft HoloLens

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Dear lord, I was just watching a summary of Microsoft's Window's 10 presentation when they pulled out this little gambit from out the blue.



The potential on this thing is just enormous, it's just mind blowing technology.

What a time to be alive.

I'll believe it IF it ever actually happens.

MS does not have a good track record for meeting expectations.

There's nothing particularly new about this, VR has been around since the early 1990's. While making it pervasive might be novel and exciting in the beginning, it may very well prove to be an annoyance after the 'newness' wears off.

This isn't VR this is AR.

This is very interesting and definitely the best AR device that's been shown off.
There's been a few articles from people who got to try it.
At the moment it's looking pretty good but rather prototypey.
It only has around a like 45 degree field of view from the sounds of it. But I haven't seen anyone complain about the tracking, and apparently it can make virtual objects quite opaque. The Minecraft demo is actually real, puts Minecraft blocks all over your living room and you can dig into the wall and stuff like that. So are the modelling applications. And it has hand tracking and voice control and markerless inside-out (cameras on the device itself) head tracking.
And people also got to try fitting a light switch with wires and stuff and someone on a Skype call could draw virtual labels on the real wires and the labels remain fixed to the wires.
from the sounds of it though it's like not a thing you'll be able to get this year.
But it is very exciting even if just in the prototype proof of concept stages.

Article I saw said it is not vaporware, but will be coming out this year. Sorry I don't feel like looking up the link.

There is still a very good chance Microsoft cans it before release.

Even if it does release, it probably will be canned in a few years due to low sales just like their iPod killer, iPhone killer, iPad killer, and iMac killer...

There is a good chance it will not see public release and just be a business product.
If it does release publicly and sold at a breakeven point or profit, it will be expensive.

Microsoft claims it has a high end CPU, a high end GPU and a holographic processor.
$1000+? maybe... or higher.

I was hoping Microsoft would respond with an  Watch killer...

I'm more jazzed about the Amazon Echo. I know a guy who has one. I signed up for an invite - Amazon's just testing them now to make final tweaks, or else I'd buy it now. Guy says voice recognition is better than Kinect's. So you get a Siri and music player all controlled by voice. There is a API and so I imagine soon someone will make it able to control your home automation stuff. Sound quality is good and device has about 7 mics - it can hear you all over the house. They might be data-mining all the time, or the device might be asleep until you call it by name. I tend to believe the former, but I don't care. Easy enough to defeat it if needed. Oh, yeah - you can control it with your phone from anywhere - wake your kids up with Bach or Cheech & Chong, ...

I am far far more excited for augmented reality technology than smart watches and am very glad Microsoft has made such a leap forward in the software and tech. Even if it isn't consumer ready yet, what they've demonstrated is far above any whole system that has been shown previously.
Also I kinda think "Holographic Processing Unit" might just be a marketing term.

The price is a worry. The Oculus Rift remained affordable because it was mostly using technologies made very cheap by the mobile market (tracking sensors, high resolution small displays). The HoloLens though is using a few technologies that are not mass market yet, like transparent displays at the very least. I will be curious to see the price point it can reach.

Actually Oculus Rift isn't affordable, it's not even ready for the consumer market.
Development kits cost upwards of $400+ for the basic version.

It doesn't help that Oculus Rift uses parts made by Samsung.

The cheapest VR for the consumer market currently is Samsung Gear VR, which costs ~$200, if you already have a Galaxy S5 or S4.

So far it hasn't made a splash worth mentioning and it has been out for almost two months

VR especially won't hit it big, because people do not want to wear headsets/glasses.
Most people don't even wear their prescription glasses as required or regularly.

AR failed to make a big splash, even with Nintendo building it into 3DS and giving away free AR cards.

Both AR and VR will remain niche until you can find a way to do it on a decent scale without headsets/glasses/small screens.

I'd rather buy an  Watch, I'd get way more use out of it.

Augmented Reality is a logical extension of Virtual Reality, in much the same way that EPIC processing is a logical extension of RISC processing. Because of AR's inherant virtuality, it is still VR at heart.

The DK1 costed $300 and the DK2 costs $350 and the consumer version is going to cost less than $350.
I consider that affordable especially when you consider that 3 years ago a VR headset would cost you thousands of dollars and have various issues and very little software support.

But anyway, my main point was not about whether $350 is affordable, it was that I worry that the HoloLense might cost reasonably more than $350


Yes it does. As opposed to like custom developed screens or something like that. Mass production lowers price and speeds up manufacturing quite a lot. The Rift DK2 uses a screen that was used in over 10 million phones so the production line, the economies of scale, all very good. Use something more custom and less widely developed and a less proven technology and the prices are going to be higher because there'll be less economies of scale and more R&D costs.

It is an "Innovator edition", they're not promoting it much at the moment and the release was more to get content further developed (which is happening). The next release with the Note 5 will likely make a bigger splash.

Have you used a VR headset? Preferably Gear VR or the Rift DK2 or the Crescent Bay prototype Oculus is currently showing? The experience is pretty wonderful and I think people will wear headsets for it, especially given how light the latest prototype is. Even with the developer kits and stuff while the experience isn't perfect yet and stuff if you actually try it you can see what's so great about it and it's easier to see people using it.
I've showed like 20 different people my Rift DK2 and all but one of them thoroughly enjoyed the experience and most were quite excited about it.


I agree watches are certainly a more user friendly form factor but you have to also take into consideration the experience. I mean a smartphone is a much more user friendly form factor than a tablet but plenty of people still buy tablets, because the experience of more screen space is valuable.

AR does have an issue here actually because the intention is to be mobile and a lot of people care how they look when out and about.
VR doesn't really have that issue, you don't walk around in public wearing a VR headset. So as long as it sits fairly comfortably and the experience is good it will appeal to a lot of people.
And the experience of VR is very good.

Now, AR in its current form does have some hurdles to get over still, less so than a smart watch I think. But the experience would be so much cooler than I am very excited for Microsoft entering this space and innovating there. Smartwatches are useful devices sure but there's not that much extra functionality they can add to your life, but an AR headset can literally augment the world around you and that has tremendous potential. Even if it's not ready to hit the consumer market yet, the potential is so huge that I am very excited for what Microsoft is doing.



AR is an extension of VR sure and the two field will probably merge and we'll have devices that do both but they are different and at the moment, Microsoft HoloLense is not a VR device. It cannot put you in a wholly virtual environment. It would need a much larger field of view as well as complete opacity.

@Santarii

Samsung is going to kill Oculus Rift before it reaches consumer hands.

Samsung has repeatedly copied and/or used the technology they were producing for their competitors.
This includes Nokia, Blackberry, Apple, Dell etc...

VR will find a niche, but it won't be a mass market hit.
It will be a flash in the pan at best.

Remember when Avatar set the recording for the highest grossing movie of all time globally and was seen as the savior of 3D movies?
Remember how much people raved about Avatar's 3D effect?
Remember everyone claiming traditional 2D movies were a dying breed?

People quickly abandoned 3D movies.
What was the reason behind it? People hated wearing glasses to watch the movies.
Hollywood lost a lot of money and Avatar broke even.

Why did 3D TVs die within the first year? People didn't want to wear a headset to view the 3D content or pay the increase in price.

Market research doesn't lie.

I mean those glasses free 3D Android smart phones failed to sell.

The best selling 3D device is Nintendo 3DS, which by all market metrics is considered a massive failure at 50M units sold.
Nintendo even found out most people played with the 3D off.

We literally go through the whole 3D/VR/AR technology is the next big thing about every ~12 years.
Hell we went through this in the 90s the last time.

The only company that has a shot at getting VR technology to take off in any meaningful way, is Samsung.
Samsung has the money, the employees, the resources and the means of production.

Samsung is the currently the number one manufacturer of:
*TVs
*Blu-ray players
*Appliances
*Smart Phones (Apple is tied with them now)
*Processors
*Smart Watches
*RAM
*Mobile GPUs
*Hard Drives
*Screens
*Gyroscopes
*Nearly every other electronics part

Facebook will eventually pull the plug on Oculus Rift, when their losses hit a certain amount.

Both companies will be lucky if they get anyone outside of Sony to product 3D content.

Let's not forget you have to find a good navigation input device that isn't reliant on motion controls.
Motion controls are hated by techies and gamers far and wide, along with touch screens.

Back on topic:
Microsoft claims Hololens is not AR or VR, but a new technology entirely.

Now lets talk about how Android makers sold significantly less phones in 2014 compared to 2013, yet Apple was able to grow sales and tie Samsung as the biggest smart phone maker.

There's a big difference between wearing glasses for 3D on a screen and wearing a headset for virtual reality though. 3D screens just add a bit of depth, virtual reality headsets put you inside an actual virtual environment that you can look around. Consumer do feel that wearing glasses is not worth adding depth to a monitor, but having tried the Oculus Rift DK2 and having shown it to a lot of people, I'm fairly certain that, at least with the improvements in weight and resolution that the latest prototype and future consumer version bring/will bring, consumers will definitely want to get that experience even if it means wearing a headset. VR is a whole different experience to just a 3D display.

Yes there was a VR boom in the 90s, the difference was the technology wasn't there at ALL. Literally anything remotely acceptable was tens of thousands of dollars, and the best we got on the consumer level was the Virtual Boy which didn't even go on your head it was on a stand and had no tracking, a tiny field of view, tiny resolution, was only red or black colours, and didn't even have 3D rendering.
The technology is now actually here though, and at a consumer viable price point.

I don't think Samsung are going to kill Oculus. A big part of that is because Oculus and Samsung are actually working together. Gear VR is "Powered by Oculus" and uses the Oculus mobile SDK as well as being co-developed with Oculus, and also Gear VR uses the Oculus store.
Also yes Samsung has a lot of talent, but so does Oculus. They might not be as big a player but they have amassed a LOT of experts in the field. I mean they have John Carmack, who basically invented first person 3D games. And Michael Abrash. They also have the person who invented cascaded displays and near eye lightfield displays. And then a load of other talent. As well as a few acquisitions of experts in vision tracking and industrial design and various other areas.

The other thing is, Gear VR and the Rift are different markets with different trade-offs. The Rift is tethered and Gear VR is mobile, but Gear VR you can only render from a smartphone and with the Rift you can render from a desktop PC, which means you can push much higher resolution and much greater graphical fidelity. Also positional tracking (leaning as opposed to just rotating) hasn't been achieved yet for Gear VR.

"Both companies will be lucky if they get anyone outside of Sony to product 3D content. "
This is just plain false. There are a tonne of developers making content for the Rift. It's a technology that has very much excited game developers. Big players like Valve are on board and pushing for it. Some pretty big games already have support for it like Elite: Dangerous and Eurotruck Simulator, Among The Sleep, as well as a lot of indie devs developing smaller games and experimenting too.

Eventually AR will replace VR though, once AR can also do VR (or when VR can also do AR, same thing really, when they converge).

Back on topic:
If Microsoft are claiming that then they are wrong. That would be literally as ridiculous as saying the Rift isn't a VR headset or that the PS4 isn't a games console.
Hololense is the epitome of Augmented Reality, there is no device closer to that term in existence. They're using the hologram terms because it's more catchy to consumers and that's fine, but it is still an AR device.

@Santarii

We'll agree to disagree for the most part.

Though I will say this much:
Linux, Mac, Steam OS, and others still lack the majority of the content Windows and consoles have due to the "lack of profitability" from these platforms.

Android trails iOS in app releases due the unprofitable nature of the Google Play Store (It's really just Android users are hell bent on pirating everything).

Smart TVs are still having trouble getting content.
Chrome Cast and Amazon TV lag behind Roku and Apple TV in content.

Xbox One and Wii U are both lagging behind PS4 in content, despite both having a higher attach rate than PS4.

The point is until you prove your market is viable and profitable, you won't get content from the main content producers.
Both AR and VR have a long way to go to prove this.

As for gaming consoles:

PS2 was labeled as a computer in the EU and a DVD player with gaming functionality in the rest of the world.
Xbox was the gaming PC
GC was the gaming console

Xbox 360 was the Full HD console with media playback
PS3 was classified and marketed as an HD multimedia center with gaming functionality
Wii was the motion controlled gaming console

Xbox One is officially "The All in One Entertainment System!"
PS4 is the Next Generation HD multimedia system with gaming functionality
Wii U is the gaming console