Release date and price
Microsoft has announced the HoloLens will ship in "Q1 2016" to select developers, for $3,000 (AU$4,150, £2,000). That's much pricier than the Oculus Rift's $350 or the HTC Vive which shipped to devs for free, starting with the US and Canada.
You also have to be a Windows Insider and only two devices can be requested - though you'll still have to shell out $3K for each. There's no word on when other countries will receive the kit just yet. In theory, there's no reason why English-speaking devs from any key market shouldn't be able to get hold of a HoloLens, but Microsoft is likely to want to keep tight control over sales initially, so it can provide support and guidance on mixed reality best practice.
HoloLens at E3 2015
We got a glimpse at its potential in gaming with an immersive - though impractical -briefing for the upcoming Halo 5: Guardians for Xbox One. From the voice of Jennifer Hale to a model of a UNSC Leviathan Supercarrier and Spartan Captain Sarah Palmer, the demo helped prep Home Entertainment Editor Nick Pino for a 12-on-12 battle that, it should be noted, his team won by a landslide.
One negative to come out of the show was the knowledge that the viewer's limited field of view isn't likely to get much better anytime soon. While the hardware isn't final, said HoloLens head Kudo Tsunoda, the field of view, which feels like looking through a mobile computer monitor, won't be "hugely noticeably different either."
Note: Microsoft didn't allow any technology, including cameras, inside the Build 2015 HoloLens demo room. The images below were taken of a HoloLens inside a glass case located outside the demo room.
HoloLens, Microsoft's AR viewer, feels like the future of computing.
The headgear I tried at Build 2015 is still described as "early development hardware," and it definitely felt like it. But the potential and how close HoloLens is to achieving it is remarkable.
The moment I tried on HoloLens during a "Holographic Academy" session with other journalists, I thought, "This is like having a PC on my face." It's not that fully functional yet, but that's how the headgear and what you see and can do with it make you feel.
There were no Mars missions or Minecraft-inspired games in the HoloLens session I attended. Instead, I became a developer for 90 minutes, crafting an application in Unity and adding layers of HoloLens functionality as I went. Every time a new function was added, like gesture controls and spatial sound, I got to see how it translated into the HoloLens experience. The session was intended to show how easy it is to develop for HoloLens, but it also demonstrated what users will experience once it's available.
HoloLens: build and comfort
HoloLens is essentially made of two rings, a thicker one along the outside that contains all the important innards and a slimmer one on the inside that wraps around your head. The inner ring has a roller in the back to tighten and loosen it, and it slides forward and backward so you can adjust how close HoloLens is to your head. HoloLens isn't supposed to sit on your nose, but I found the rubber nose guard that comes with it inevitably fell on my nose no matter how many times I pried HoloLens forward. Thankfully, it's optional and comes off easily. HoloLens felt a lot better for me with it off.
I also had a hard time getting HoloLens to fit just right every time I put it on. I had to regularly re-tighten, re-situate, and realign the headgear. When everything was synced up and it fit nicely, the holograms were in full view and it felt right. But if it was too tight, too high up or too far forward, it hindered the experience. Standing in one spot and not moving too much created the best overall viewing experience. The adjustment issues cropped up especially when I was moving around, which is part of the fun when wearing HoloLens.
If you have short hair or it's pulled back, you might not have a much of a problem as someone with long, loose hair, like myself. It may have been my unskilled adjusting abilities, but I had a slight headache whenever I took HoloLens off, like I had been wearing a baseball cap that was two sizes too small.
Early verdict
HoloLens isn't perfect, either in software or hardware. But it's getting there, and if Microsoft can fix its issues, HoloLens is going to be an immersive entertainment device that could easily find a place in the work world, too.
Despite its faults, using HoloLens was, in a word, delightful. With more robust applications, more reliable functionality and an improved viewing experience, HoloLens could become the AR viewer to own. It may also transform the everyday technology we use and how we interact with the world. These are lofty ideals and HoloLens as-is won't accomplish any of that yet, but the possibilities are there.
HoloLens is the most fascinating hardware I've tried in a long time. While we still don't know how long its battery lasts nor how much it costs, HoloLens seems like it has unlimited potential. Not only that, it feels like it can live up to its potential. And that's exciting.
Digital reality
I tried three different applications with the HoloLens. I also got to watch several people using the Holo Studio 3D building tool, which has the most sophisticated controls, using a combination of gaze, gesture and voice commands to let you design objects you can see in the real world, so you know they're the size you want before you spend time and money 3D-printing them.
The most engaging was playing HoloBuilder; inspired by Minecraft and built with the help of the Minecraft team, this is a game that lets you build a digital landscape that exists in your physical space. Think the giant LEGO setup in the basement of Will Ferrell's house in The LEGO Movie, only invisible until you put HoloLens on, and built both on top of and underneath your furniture - and even extending under the floor and into the walls.
Using voice commands and the air tap gesture and my own real feet, I walked around a village, tickled a sheep to stop it falling off the table, dug through a (real) bench to make a hole, blew up some TNT to drop zombies into the lava pool that was in the chamber I'd dug through to, then blew a hole in the wall and lit a lamp to see the bats flying through the caverns in the wall.
Like Minecraft, half the fun is that your creations are obviously digital, but seeing them perched on real tables and benches was even more fun. This combination of virtual and physical worlds was delightful and immersive and shows the obvious gaming and entertainment potential here.
But the other two apps I tried were actually more impressive and certainly more useful. Making a Skype call from HoloLens is a good way to try out voice and gesture commands; you can look at the person you want to call in the address book - which is a grid of faces - then air tap to call them. The video call doesn't jump around the room if you move; it sits in one place unless you look too far away and then it moves back into view, or you can pin it in place.
The person you're calling doesn't need a HoloLens; they see in Skype what you're looking at and they can draw diagrams on the video that appear in your view. So if you're helping someone change a tyre or fix their dishwasher or fit a new light switch, you don't have to explain what they need to look for or pull out or unscrew - you can take a pen and show them.
This would fantastic for teaching and training, for remote support or for getting an expert opinion; imagine a remote handyman who could give customers advice (and charge them for it) or a repair service that always turns up with the right part because you've shown them what they're fixing in advance. It would also be a really interesting way to have a meeting where you're collaborating remotely on physical objects, not just the usual documents and presentations.
Remote working is something NASA has to do, but the OnSight system the Jet Propulsion Lab is building with Microsoft made me feel like I was walking on Mars. Some years ago I visited the Supervisualisation Lab at the university of San Diego, where they have a wall of screens that can show a life-size image of Mars using the photos sent back by the Mars Rover and I could look out at Mars like looking out of a window. HoloLens meant I could step out onto the surface of Mars and walk around, bending over to look at rocks, turning round to see the view and looking up to see the sky. This is where I most wanted to have peripheral vision because with HoloLens you only see what you're looking at; as you turn your head, the Rover suddenly comes into view and it's a rather large surprise.
OnSight isn't for digital tourism, delightful as that is; there are tools to tell the Rover where to go next to take photographs and samples - and the terrain that looks flat and easy to drive over on a PC screen is revealed as a treacherous series of slopes and ditches the Rover can easily fall down when you see it in 3D, so JPL scientists can look for an easy route before they air tap to give the Rover a target to photograph or burn with its laser.
They can also collaborate; other people in the landscape show up as stylised avatars, and a handy dotted line shows you where they're looking (HoloLens knows that, so it can show you), which avoids all the creepy 'uncanny valley' problems of realistic avatars. This is something we're going to have to work out social conventions for; when you say goodbye to someone miles away on the telephone it's easy to hang up, but when you can still see their avatar just turning away and ignoring them feels slightly rude. (Equally, watching someone use HoloLens is disturbing because they're turning and crouching and reaching out for things you can't see, and it's hard not to think they look strange.)
Walking around Mars with another scientist, or walking around an unfinished building and seeing where the walls will be, or being able to pull a virtual engine out of a physical car to see how it fits together so you can work out which screws to undo - there's a huge range of possibilities here, because this is far more than just a gaming system. And Microsoft is sensitive enough to privacy issues to have avoided the creepy feeling of using augmented reality to spy on the public world that Google Glass is so prone to. HoloLens doesn't just tag the physical world with information you can get other ways; it adds a realistic 3D digital world on top of (and underneath) it in a way that feels like magic and is delightful to use.
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