Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Microsoft HoloLens: what it’s really like”.
This is microsoft, hololens, it’s the company’s augmented reality headset. We saw early versions of this last year, but now it’s more than a prototype. This week it started shipping to developers and commercial customers who have paid three thousand dollars to experience the AR headset and all of its glory, but what’s it really like to wear it? I’M Lauren good reporting for The Verge, and this over here on. My right is my colleague Tom Warren. If you have followed the verge of stories about Microsoft, you probably know who Tom is.
This is the main event, the hololens itself, so it’s definitely not unobtrusive but considering its size. It’S actually pretty lightweight. You put it on by fitting this interior band around your head, and then you use this twisty dial in the back to just to fit. It can either rest on your nose or just above it.
Air tapping is how you select things when you’re gazing at all of the virtual stuff in the world around you there’s also a hand gesture called the bloom that tells the computer to go back to the Start menu so yeah. This thing is an entire computer on your head. It runs on Windows 10, which means that, in addition to hololens specific apps, you can do just normal stuff to like browse the web. You can see how the air tapping becomes more than just a select function in a game like Robo raid, which Tom played for a while the other day while wearing hololens.
So you tap to place it on the wall and it’s going to scan your environment. You walk around and it will scan them, so you can see it pulsating off the walls over there. This makes the best use, I think, of the spatial sound that you can hear in the headset, so you can hear stuff when it’s attacking you from behind. So there you go basically you air tap and you shoot at these little robots here. You can also air tap your way through holo studio, which is in all seriousness, a holographic app for making other holographic apps. But if you’re not into making apps, you can do stuff like make a Skype call to the verge office back in New York, say hi Neil, I Clara you say this is um. This is Tom Warren uh he’s he’s currently talking to us on the hololens. Oh wow dancing what he seems yeah.
This is crazy, so what you’re really experiencing with hololens is mixed reality. Some stuff is real. Some stuff is not unlike a big all-encompassing, VR headset, like oculus rift. You can still see some of the things around you, while you’re browsing the web or playing games things like walls or chairs, or this table.
It also feels slightly less dangerous than a VR headset, because you actually have spatial recognition and a sense of depth. So you know, maybe you won’t hurt yourself trying to lean on an imaginary desk, but the way it’s built also means that it’s way less immersive than Microsoft has promised it to be. It’S like the difference between looking at a projection of stars on your wall versus sitting in the middle of a pitch-black planetarium.
The graphics you’ve been watching in this article are the video outputs we got from Microsoft, but when you’re actually wearing it, the field of view is limited and that probably won’t change once Microsoft ships this to consumers. So we had some fun with this new version of hololens. It’S clear that Microsoft envisions this initially as something that will be used mostly for enterprise applications and in education and gaming too.
What it will mean for the consumer market is still really a big unknown, and Microsoft is hoping that app developers might help shape that it’s definitely improved from the hololens prototypes we’ve worn before, and the experience of using it is way cooler than what it physically looks. Like but it is still a headset on your head and as cool as it is, it’s a relief to take it off and return to the real world after a while. What should I read on the verge today? We have 34 new articles so far this morning, Neal. I must be so happy. .