Gadgetory

oh sorry you're dead I just think of how ridiculous I must look right now hey guys this is Austin is the microsoft hololens the future well there's been a lot of talk about virtual reality headsets the whole lens is something a little different you're able to walk around and fully interact with the world with straight Minority Report stuff like floating web pages and Holograms for a Developer Kit it actually comes with a pretty solid unboxing experience open it up and you'll see the hololens comes with a cool carrying case inside though is where the real magic aids what really jumps out of me is just how polished the hololens already feels compared to early VR headsets like oculus this looks like a product you could buy today which I guess shouldn't be a huge surprise coming from a company like Microsoft the crazy thing is this is fully untethered there's no need to be attached to a PC to handle stuff like rendering or needing to set up a bunch of sensors around your room there's some serious power inside too Microsoft is still being very vague about what actually makes it all work there's some custom silicon inside but it seems like a lot of the heavy lifting is being handled by the sensors it doesn't get warm or even uncomfortable after wearing it for a while and the battery will last around three hours which is impressive for what's essentially a full holographic computer that lives on your face pull the hololens on run a quick scan of the room and you're ready to go the thing that makes the hololens special is the holographic display this isn't like a traditional screen as it's fully transparent until there's something to actually see it only does this make interacting with the real world dead simple since your vision isn't obscured it also means the Holograms can be incredibly sharp what really blew me away is the tracking it's almost perfect walk around the room move around as much as you want it doesn't matter if you put a browser window against a wall it's not going anywhere which can actually lead to funny problems like forgetting where you put something in real space it's easy to imagine a desk setup where you're using the hololens and you have different browser windows and research projects on your desk on the wall in front of you this is really cool stuff a lot of what makes this special comes down to this being something that adds to your vision not replacing it altogether you can still see everything around you and talk with people but there might just be aliens flying around the room or a browser tab on the wall behind them the biggest learning curve is control the hololens relies in a couple gestures like clicking with one finger and opening your hand to pull up a menu these work where they can get a little tiring to constantly have your hand held out in front of you to select things what's interesting is that the screen doesn't work off excisional resolution since its measured and raised light but there's clearly more detail on the hololens than any VR headset I've ever tried even small Tech's from across the room is readable which is something that even the recording can fully get across the biggest issue is the field of view it's fairly small so I'm recording with this super-awesome iPhone mount so this is actually pretty close to what you would see through the hololens so you can see it looks nice in the tracking is good however example if I look at something like this the field of view is not enormous so you can see that it's still a little bit transparent alright so you can kinda see behind that window and everything the field of view it's decent enough and especially with things that are kind of transparent like that like this looks fine this looks fine it's only when you get to bigger more complex things that you really realize that it's a little bit lacking there's also some color shifting you can notice in the screen especially in pure white areas but again it's really not that bad it's clear that Microsoft focused on the hard stuff like making the tracking work and fitting all this Hardware inside a fully portable headset the hololens really is something you have to try to fully appreciate with the hardware already being so polished the biggest thing holding it back seems to be getting developers to actually create software for it but since it's running a version of Windows 10 it's not too crazy to port stuff over and since this is one of the very first developer kits it's just going to take time I've got to give a huge shout out to my friends Adam and Glen from master shapes for letting me borrow their hololens and shoot a video they're awesome and so is the hololens this is absolutely the future so what do you guys think about the hololens let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one