Microsoft Hololens: Some First Observations

I recently ordered and received a developer edition of Microsoft’s Hololens. This is me looking goofy wearing it at the USV office:

TL;DR: the Hololens is a well executed preview of an amazing augmented reality future.

Compared to the Vive and Oculus (VR, I know the difference) the Hololens ships fully ready to go. Unbox, put on your head and go. It even arrived with its batteries charged. Nothing to download onto a separate computer. No cables for tethering. Just put the Hololens on and go.

Speaking of that. Make sure to take the 1 minute required to figure out how to properly adjust the headband (look at the image on the enclosed mini manual). The bridge of your nose will thank me later.

The immediate first impression after turning it on is that the experience of seeing reasonably high res, brightly colored images float in space in front of you is utterly awesome. It is one of those moments of recognition that this will be an important type of user experience without a doubt.

Equally important is that the HoloLens solves what I called The Missing Mouse Problem: It has built in ability to recognize your hand gestures. Definitely do the gesture walk through so that you know how to select and activate items. Again, this immediately feels like a real breakthrough.

To see how immersive the experience can be I highly recommend downloading and playing RoboRaid. This is the game that was seen in the preview video for the HoloLens where you have robots attacking you that come out of the walls. Within seconds of playing you completely forget that there are not actually robots coming out of your walls!

Another small but important contributor to the suspension of disbelief is the clever HoloLens sound system. Instead of having to wear headphones there are built in speakers that sit right above your ears. You hear beautiful directional sound but others around you have very little “secondary” sound.

Having said all of this, the HoloLens is far from a mass market consumer device. It is bulky and heavy. It is expensive (the developer edition right now costs $3,000 – unclear what a final price point might look like). Two other small nits: the use of Windows feels, well, weird. And after the initial amazement add the quality of the visuals one quickly wants them to cover the entire field of view (learn not to look with you eyes but turn your head for maximum effectiveness).

Unlike Google Glass though, the Hololens is the correct starting device to build. HoloLens will find early adopter usage and there are clear commercial applications for warehouses, maintenance, etc.