Hololens

Microsoft’s HoloLens

The HoloLens that Microsoft will ship will be a Star Trek-style visor that wraps around your head but doesn't isolate you from the world, with the Intel SoC and custom Holographic Processing Unit built in. What I tried out in the labs hidden (rather cheekily) under the Microsoft visitor centre didn't look like that, but the engineers and developers who built it say the experience I had with the developer rig is essentially the same.

The HoloLens developer rig is built into a frame that slips onto your head and gets strapped into the right position; there's a sensor array over your eyes to track where you're looking and sensors on the frame to track how your head moves and the Holographic Processing Unit hangs around your neck on a strap (it's about the size and weight of a car radio). Someone needs to help you fit it and before you do that you have to get the distance between your pupils measured. And when you have it set, there's a power cord coming down from the ceiling rigged to move with you as you walk.

All of that will vanish into the final product, so what I tried is very obviously early hardware - like the custom developer kits Microsoft makes for early Xbox developers. Microsoft didn't let us photograph the developer rig, and you need a special camera to capture the HoloLens view so our images were supplied by Microsoft; they're a rather idealised version of the slightly grainier view I sawMICROSOFT HOLOLENS

 

Microsoft’s Latest HoloLens Is Here, and It’s Amazing

The HPU, as Microsoft calls it, isn't that much of a misnomer (less so than suggesting that a retina screen has the same resolution as the human retina, say). What you see isn't a holograph or a hologram; it's a projection - but it's being projected onto holographically printed lenses, which lets Microsoft produce very cheaply the extremely complex lenses that turn the projection into the 3D image you see.trickntechs.blogspot.in

The HPU turns the graphics into the right signal to project onto those lenses as well as processing information from the sensors that tell it where you're looking and how you're moving your head. It will speed up voice recognition and spatial sound processing, too.

That doesn't just let you see the digital world projected around you; it lets you see it on top of the real world. You can see the person standing next to you and talk to them, avoid walking into walls and chairs and even look at a computer screen, because HoloLens detects the edge and doesn't project over it so you don't need to keep taking it on and off as you work. You can take notes or answer email on a computer with a keyboard or a pen instead of trying to force that kind of close up work into the world of gestures and gaze.