Is the Microsoft HoloLens the Future? #Helpful Post

Uh, sorry. You’re dead. I just think of how ridiculous I must look right now. Hey

guys this is Austin. Is the Microsoft Hololens the future? While there’s been a lot of

talk about virtual reality headsets the Hololens is something a little different. You’re

able to walk around and fully interact with the world with straight Minority Report stuff

like floating web pages and holograms. For a developer kit it actually comes with a pretty

solid unboxing experience, open it up and you’ll see the Hololens comes in a cool

carrying case. Inside though is where the real magic is. What really jumps out at me

is just how polished the Hololens already feels. Compared to early VR headsets like

Oculus this looks like a product you could buy today which I guess shouldn’t be a huge

surprise coming from a company like Microsoft. The crazy thing is that this is fully untethered,

there’s no need to be attached to a PC to handle stuff like rendering or needing to

set up a bunch of sensors around your room. There’s some serious power inside too but

Microsoft is still being very vague about what actually makes it all work, there’s

some custom silicon inside but it seems like a lot of the heavy lifting is being handled

by the sensors. It doesn’t get warm or even uncomfortable after wearing it for a while

and the battery will last around three hours which is impressive for what’s essentially

a full holographic computer that lives on your face. Put the Hololens on, run a quick

scan of the room and you’re ready to go. The thing that makes the Hololens special

is the holographic display. This isn’t like a traditional screen as it’s fully transparent

until there’s something to actually see. Not only does this make interacting with the

real world dead simple since your vision isn’t obscured but it also means the holograms can

be incredibly sharp. What really blew me away is the tracking, it’s almost perfect. Walk

around a room, move around as much as you want, it doesn’t matter. If you put a browser

window against a wall it’s not going anywhere which can actually lead to funny problems

like forgetting where you put something in real space. It’s easy to imagine a desk

setup where you’re using the Hololens and you have different browser windows and research

projects on your desk, on the wall in front of you, this is really cool stuff. A lot of

what makes this special comes down to this being something that adds to your vision,

not replacing it all together. You can still see everything around you and talk with people

but there might just be aliens flying around the room or a browser tab on the wall behind

them. The biggest learning curve is control, the Hololens relies on a couple gestures like

clicking with one finger and opening your hand to pull up a menu. These work but it

can get a little tiring to constantly have your hand held out in front of you to select

things. What’s interesting is that the screen doesn’t work off a traditional resolution

since it’s measured in rays of light but there’s clearly more detail on the Hololens

than any VR headset I’ve ever tried, even small text from across the room is readable

which is something not even the recording can fully get across. The biggest issue is

the field of view, it’s fairly small. So I’m recording with this super awesome iPhone

mount. So this is actually pretty close to what you would see through the Hololens, so

you can see it looks nice and the tracking’s good however for example if I look at something

like this the field of view is not enormous. You can see that it’s still a little bit

transparent, right so you can see behind that window and everything. The field of view,

it’s decent enough especially with things that are kind of transparent like that, like

this looks fine, this looks fine, it’s only when you get to bigger, more complex things

that you really realize that it’s a little bit lacking. There’s also some color shifting

you can notice in the screen especially in pure white areas but again it’s really not

that bad, it’s clear that Microsoft focused on the hard stuff like making the tracking

work and fitting all of this hardware inside a fully portable headset. The Hololens really

is something you have to try to fully appreciate. With the hardware already being so polished

the biggest thing holding it back seems to be getting developers to actually create software

for it but since it’s running a version of Windows 10 it’s not too crazy to port

stuff over and since this is one of the very first developer kits it’s just going to

take time. I’ve got to give a huge shoutout to my friends Adam and Glenn from Master of

Shapes for letting me borrow their Hololens and shoot a video, they’re awesome and so

is the Hololens. This is absolutely the future. So what do you guys think about the Hololens?

Let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one.