Microsoft MSFT -1.12% showed off some nifty demos of HoloLens, its augmented reality headset, last week during the company’s annual conference for developers in San Francisco. In a live, on-stage demo, Microsoft demonstrated how you could pin videos and calendars wherever you want in your house or play with a 3D-animated puppy.
The demos were impressive, but trying HoloLens for yourself is a whole different thing. On Thursday, I got a chance to do so, and I got an opportunity to develop a rudimentary app using the company’s tools.
Let me start with what seemed like the biggest shortcoming: HoloLens limits your field of vision to a smallish rectangle in which you can see the digital information projected onto the display. It felt constrained. I couldn’t see anything in my periphery; I had to be looking almost directly at the holographic objects to see them. This takes away all the immersive qualities you might be expecting from the videos Microsoft was showing off.
In the 90-minute session, a group of peppy, blue-shirted Microsoft “mentors” guided us through the building of 3D holographs using a custom software development kit built with Microsoft’s Unity game engine. We then added things like gesture and voice control as well as audio to the 3D models. Once the models were built in the development kit, we exported them to Microsoft Visual Studio and then loaded them onto the HoloLens through a USB port. With headsets on, were able to do things like gesture with our finger to make holographic spheres fall onto other holographic objects or onto real objects like a couch or coffee table. We could also set the virtual spheres in motion with voice commands.
Despite the limitations of the field of vision, HoloLens is an impressive and promising gadget. I’ve had the chance to try a number of other augmented reality headsets (no, Magic Leap still won’t let me near whatever they’re doing), and the worst problem is always the latency between your head’s movements and the visuals in the glasses. There’s always some delay, and it makes me feel nauseous.
That’s a problem Microsoft really seems to have solved. Objects stick in space where they’re supposed to. It looks like they exist in the environment around you. When I turned my head, the holograms moved accordingly with no delay. It was the most seamless experience I have had with this kind of technology. After a fair amount of use in the 90-minute session, I felt perfectly fine.
A lot of this is aided by the robust array of cameras and sensors Microsoft has embedded in the frames of the headset. Like the Microsoft Kinect device for the Xbox game consoles, HoloLens maps your environment in real time. By knowing exactly what’s in front of you and where you are in the environment, the software is able to position objects much more steadily than other augmented reality glasses I’ve tried.
Microsoft is continuing to keep a tight lid on the details of the hardware, but you can see at least five cameras and some other sensors collecting visual information in the frames of the headset. Other headset include accelerometers and gyroscopes to help sense where your head is positioned and how you’re moving around, and it’s likely Microsoft has included these kinds of sensors in the HoloLens as well.
During the demo, we were able to add wire meshing to the 3D scans of the environment. This allowed us to see how the glasses were picking up information and processing it in a real-time scan. People and furniture showed up as wire blobs that closely matched their real shape and size.
In other augmented reality glasses I’ve tried, there’s usually only a single camera in the frame. That camera picks up what you’re looking at in order to pin objects in space, but the experience usually isn’t very good. Objects don’t stay pinned where they’re supposed to very well. After 10 minutes of wearing them, I usually have to take a break.
HoloLens also handles sound impressively. In the Unity software development kit, developers can pin audio to specific objects. Then, as the HoloLens user walks through a space the sound changes based on his proximity to various objects much like it would in a real environment. (The audio is delivered through two small speakers in the headset.)
With the interest in augmented reality and virtual reality taking flight in the past year, Microsoft is up against a growing list of big players that includeGoogle GOOGL -1.33%, Facebook and others. I’m not convinced this is anything people would wear regularly around the house like Microsoft shows in its demos, but companies are still searching for a use case with this technology. The strongest ideas are usually around enterprise applications that could do everything from helping someone fix a complicated piece of machinery to designing a building. Microsoft has built unique piece of hardware that could play an important role in this emerging space.
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We still don’t know how much the HoloLens will cost or even when it’ll be out. The hardware may still improve before the official launch, and Microsoft may address the issue with the limited field of view. At the conference, Microsoft put a good amount of attention on the device in hopes to get developers excited about it. It may be that Microsoft isn’t quite sure what the killer apps for HoloLens are going to be and is hoping that developers will figure it out.
PhillyAR 