Hololens is not perfect! Interesting link here

Everyone knows this. It's AR, not VR.

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

No VR/AR is perfect. But Hololens has a lot going for it - wireless, standalone, no lag/motion sickness, reportedly excellent resolution (no SDE), huge support platform (Windows, whetever you may think of it, is massive), will come with immediate funtionality with a whole range of mature applications, collaborative (multiple users can do something together and see each other as opposed to VR where you are cut off) etc.

It's a different beast to VR and will have different use cases, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the impact the Hololens might have.
If the only criticism is a small FOV (which undoubtedly will be something they could expand in the future) then it's already made incredible strides.

I am an advocate within my company for both VR and AR and can see great (but different) uses for both.

"Ashles" wrote:
No VR/AR is perfect. But Hololens has a lot going for it - wireless, standalone, no lag/motion sickness, reportedly excellent resolution (no SDE), huge support platform (Windows, whetever you may think of it, is massive), will come with immediate funtionality with a whole range of mature applications, collaborative (multiple users can do something together and see each other as opposed to VR where you are cut off) etc.

GearVR already achieved many merits of Holones: 'Wireless', 'standalone', 'no lag/motion sickness(?)'.
And I doubt whether the narrow FOV of Hololens is just a minor technical problem. Hololens achieved the excellent resolution thanks to the narrow FOV. And its form factor may limit the range of FOV in future. Translucency of objects may be inherent.

Augmented VR can achieve most of merits of Hololens in a proper way. Of course, Hololens has a more fashionable form factor than most of VR HMDs, but it may again cause the privacy issue as Google glass did.

GearVR is VR, not AR. I have no idea why people keep comparing the two. It's augmenting reality VS simulating reality, it's two different concepts with wildly different applications and different hardware designs.
I immediately think of the industrial, medical, and oil sector for AR, as a practical every-day tool for machinists (where the FOV should not be so big that it can simulate reality, for safety reasons), while VR is more for simulating and training purposes.

Google glass was a big miss, probably because of the SDK and the whole app-store thing, and it really wasn't that great (facebook and google maps on an overlay, whoopdeedoo). You can create content for Hololens with Unity, which makes a world of difference.
I'm really excited about Hololens :)

I want to get the hololens and write an app for it that just shows a depth view (since it contains at least 1 Kinect), so I can use it as a short range night vision headset. :)

Both CastAR and Hololens are quite interesting. I'd like to get both.

Although as additive light devices both are limited to only rendering things that are brighter than the background (for example, the hololens can't render black text over a white wall). So no horror games with dark shadows moving around your room. :(

"kojack" wrote:
I want to get the hololens and write an app for it that just shows a depth view (since it contains at least 1 Kinect), so I can use it as a short range night vision headset. :)

Both CastAR and Hololens are quite interesting. I'd like to get both.

Although as additive light devices both are limited to only rendering things that are brighter than the background (for example, the hololens can't render black text over a white wall). So no horror games with dark shadows moving around your room. :(

I would think black text/image could be achieved by incorporating a blocking-out effect, similar to how blocking allows your hand to appear to pass in front of the image. The only problem then might be a lack of ambient light in the room, which might be solved by haloing the black to compensate.

I too am really excited about AR, maybe even more than VR. I want to see the day that I can use AR to interact with a virtual item within a real room. I've always wanted to be Tony Stark, sans alcoholism. :D

P.S. Congrats on re-enlisting your happy avatar!

"vizionvr" wrote:
P.S. Congrats on re-enlisting your happy avatar!

"vizionvr" wrote:
I would think black text/image could be achieved by incorporating a blocking-out effect, similar to how blocking allows your hand to appear to pass in front of the image. The only problem then might be a lack of ambient light in the room, which might be solved by haloing the black to compensate.

If they had a monochrome lcd layer behind the waveguide, they could black out areas of the real world from contributing to the view (like finer granularity HHGTTG peril sensitive sunglasses). But it's just clear glass, the waveguide is purely additive with the world.

Projectors work the same way. They can't shine black areas onto a white screen, instead they brighten everything else up so the unlit areas look dark by comparison. That would work with hololens (if at least one of those 5 cameras is colour, not all IR/depth), brighten the view in some regions to make others look dark, but because of it's tiny fov you'd notice a bright rectangle.
For example:

The words there are formed by brightening the surrounding area, not by darkening the letters. But the greater view fov than hologram fov would cause that rectangle.

"zenplay" wrote:

GearVR already achieved many merits of Holones:

Not really (I have one).

'Wireless', 'standalone', 'no lag/motion sickness(?)'.

Gear VR is wireless and that's a huge plus.
It's standalone but only to the extent a phone's memory and processor allows. The Hololens will have much greater processing power and ability to render experiences a phone cannot.
And the lag/motion sickness is definitely still there in Gear VR (albeit much reduced). Hololens works in a different way that by all accounts actually has eliminated this problem. This is still very important for mass adoption of this new tech.

And I doubt whether the narrow FOV of Hololens is just a minor technical problem.

The FOV is reported as being smaller than in Jan so this may be a deliberate decision. Clearly it is something that can be changed. What it means to the experiences themselves we wont know until we get to play. Also we dont know whether the plan is to expand in the future.

Hololens achieved the excellent resolution thanks to the narrow FOV. And its form factor may limit the range of FOV in future.

Why? And also we are very used to having immersive experiences with far worse FOV - TV/monitors already massively resrict our FOV of an experience. A 3-d mobile FOV, that is relatively much lasrger and actually creating holographic objects in front of you is already an amazingly different experience.

Translucency of objects may be inherent.

I'm not sure why you'd think that - feedback even from the demos is fairly unanimous that this isnt the case even now.

Augmented VR can achieve most of merits of Hololens in a proper way. Of course, Hololens has a more fashionable form factor than most of VR HMDs, but it may again cause the privacy issue as Google glass did.

Which is why Microsoft, very deliberately I suspect, is marketing the use in a completely different way to Google Glass. It's much more an indoor media and experience related activity rather than google Glass which was targeted as an out and about device (which ultimately backfired badly).

The main thing to remember (as other posters have mentioned) is that Hololens is not meant to give the same experience or even be in competition with VR. It is a different tech with different strengths/weaknesses.
Hololens is intended to create realistic looking objects/apps in your actual environment! This is completely the opposite to VR and utterly awesome in its own way.
I would suggest that anyone not equally excited about Hololens has not given enough thought to the range of possible applications which could be amazing.

And I continue to be baffled why people worry so much about early incarnations of any tech not instantly being everything it might be in the future.
When TV first came out the inventors weren't worried because it was incredibly lo res and only black and white and the refresh rate was terrible and it wasnt even HDMI enabled. They concentrated on the TV shows being fun, on the experience. That's where the focus needs to be now for VR/AR.

However I imagine the serious developers probably are all already busy behind the scenes, currently creating great VR experiences of the future about which we know nothing.

VR/AR now is not like it was in the early 90s. The tech is already good enough to convince people this is here to stay and only going to get better.
I spent all of Saturday putting a simple VR experience on the heads of hundreds of children and adults (prob age range 4 - 85). Their reactions were amazing. Most wanted it to be theirs as soon as they got home.
What they're going to see over the next year is going to blow a lot of people away.
And Hololens is going to do it in a different way.

"Ashles" wrote:

It's standalone but only to the extent a phone's memory and processor allows. The Hololens will have much greater processing power and ability to render experiences a phone cannot.

High-end phones have evolved fast. There has been a spec race among vendors and users still demand greater processing and rendering power for gamining and etc., and now there is the mobile VR.

And the lag/motion sickness is definitely still there in Gear VR (albeit much reduced). Hololens works in a different way that by all accounts actually has eliminated this problem. This is still very important for mass adoption of this new tech.

Let alone motion sickness ( since GearVR still lacks in positional tracking ), reviewers of Hololens have reported lags and shudders of virtual objects when their heads moving.

Why? And also we are very used to having immersive experiences with far worse FOV - TV/monitors already massively resrict our FOV of an experience. A 3-d mobile FOV, that is
relatively much lasrger and actually creating holographic objects in front of you is already an amazingly different experience.

TV/monitors are stationary whereas the view of Hololens is not. Unless its FOV covers most of our view, its usability would be restricted. The effect of holographic objects popping in and out as you move your head would be noticeable and irritating.

I'm not sure why you'd think that - feedback even from the demos is fairly unanimous that this isnt the case even now.

Most demos were performed under theater-like dark light settings. I doubt if it works so well in a normal office environment.


I may be overreacting because there are some people claiming that VR is gone and AR is the future.
Hololens might have a potential to be adopted soon in practical applications. However, it seems to have been overhyped by MS. When first intoduced, TV was not portrayed as if it would surround all your home and office environment.