Microsoft is making fast progress with HoloLens, the device that you can wear over your eyes to blend 3-D virtual objects with reality.
Microsoft hopes that the holographic gadget becomes its next big computing platform, with applications ranging from video games to design, education, and architecture. The company hasn’t yet said precisely when it will release HoloLens, just that it will be available “in the Windows 10 time frame.” But it’s unclear what that means. That operating system is due this summer.
When Microsoft unveiled HoloLens in January during a press event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, it looked like a bulbous pair of black ski goggles (see “Microsoft’s New Idea: A Hologram Headset to Rewrite Reality”). Reporters invited to try the device afterward didn’t use such a sleek device, however—they had a more rudimentary headset that was tethered to a computer and a so-called holographic processing unit. This was my experience when I went to Redmond in March to check it out (see “Reality Check: Comparing HoloLens and Magic Leap”).
This week, though, at it its Build conference for software developers, in San Francisco, Microsoft brought hundreds of self-contained HoloLens units that looked just like the black gadget with red accents that it showed off in January. The idea was to let attendees try them out and get the developers interested in making apps for the device.
On Thursday, I got a chance to see how far Microsoft’s come with HoloLens: I participated in a 90-minute demo session at a hotel in San Francisco with a few dozen other reporters who “built” and tried out a simple app for the device. (I use quotation marks because we didn’t actually do any coding; rather, we assembled different pieces, such as pre-written scripts and 3-D spheres, and enabled different kinds of interactions, such as gesture and voice control.)
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