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Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

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Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#1

Post by rmccoy6435 »

Microsoft shipped out their HoloLens development kits within the past few weeks. If you happened to receive one: what has your experience with it been like? Information is relatively sparse online recently about the HoloLens, and I kind of expected more blogging to be done about user feedback and what kind of projects are being worked on, but for the most part there hasn't really been all that much posted.

I intend on doing a project with one in the next few months and I want to get other developers feedback on the device and kind of a general synopsis on the feelings regarding it, as the emulator can only give so much "immersion".

There also hasn't been much discussion about this device on HN (at least for a few months) and I'd like to know how developers feel about it: pros, cons, first impressions, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#2

Post by Gaessaki »

I've been doing development on it for a bank for about two months now.

Things I like:

-Let's you have an infinite number of virtual monitors with applications such as word, outlook, browsers etc. -Developing for it is really easy with tools like Unity -Battery life is not too shabby, rarely have to take it off to charge while I'm doing something -Great demo piece

Things to work on:

-Field of view isn't terrible, but could still use improvement -Price point precludes a lot of consumer applications -Feels like you're always wearing sunglasses indoors. This takes away from the augmented reality bit as it can be pretty hard to interact with the real world sometimes (e.g. hard to read my real monitor when I have it on) -Gets kind of uncomfortable on your nose after a while, though that may depend on your face morphology -Interacting with voice commands in an office setting can be awkward/amusing -My colleagues think I'm never working

Re: Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#3

Post by rmccoy6435 »

Gaessaki wrote: post #2

I've been doing development on it for a bank for about two months now. Things I like: -Let's you have an infinite number of virtual monitors with applications such as word, outlook, browsers etc. -Developing for it is really easy with tools like Unity -Battery life is not too shabby, rarely have to take it off to charge while I'm doing something -Great demo piece Things to work on: -Field of view isn't terrible, but…

The price point is what was explained to me by a developer/project lead as the hardest hurdle. It's a hard sell when someone sees it's $3,000 and not available to consumers for at least another year or two. I have a two pronged question: Is this something you approached the bank about, or is it something they approached you about, and what is your level of autonomy on it (as it is the banking world and there are heavy restrictions on stuff).

Also, what steps did you take to fully learn the technology (MVA, Blogs, VRDC, etc.)?

Re: Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#4

Post by ylem »

I had a high school student working with me last summer who did some development on it (no previous experience with unity/c#). His goal was to visualize crystal structures. My main comment is that the FOV is small and the question of what makes for a good user experience is still open. I wish I had more time to play with it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#5

Post by evbots »

Gaessaki wrote: post #2

I've been doing development on it for a bank for about two months now. Things I like: -Let's you have an infinite number of virtual monitors with applications such as word, outlook, browsers etc. -Developing for it is really easy with tools like Unity -Battery life is not too shabby, rarely have to take it off to charge while I'm doing something -Great demo piece Things to work on: -Field of view isn't terrible, but…

Is there any kind of image stabilization? Or is that not needed?

Re: Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#7

Post by toolbox »

Last year I was able to play with one for a couple of hours. The most impressive and exciting part for me was that it wasn't bad. I don't know about others, but I had expected an unpolished feel, and to be continuing to say "oh this will be great when they ______". The latency is much lower (comparable to modern VR) than I expected; the occlusion of virtual objects by real ones works surprisingly well, even with weird shapes; even the gesture recognition worked well. My overall takeaway was that it was much further along than expected. It was genuinely fun to play with, and I felt able to walk around my office while wearing it. Obviously the FOV is an issue to be worked on, but overall I was just impressed. I wish I still had one I could play with.

Re: Ask HN: What are your impressions of the HoloLens so far?

#10

Post by doublerebel »

I've been making apps on it since mid last year. It's an amazing device, the image stability and quality is very good and in a well-designed app the small FOV becomes an afterthought.

Clicking/selecting objects with gaze is often an antipattern. Much better to use alternate input.

Analytics is kind of a mess.

Everybody recommends unity but performance will suffer. I wrote my own framework instead. Most of the open-source code is bad, if you have figured out how to make apps it's a competitive advantage. MS wrote literally thousands of new APIs for UWP and mixed reality so many many features are barely documented with no real world examples.

It's a totally new paradigm in UX. Most designers fall back to poor decisions like using small buttons or overly detailed models.

Feel free to ask anything specific I'll do my best to answer.

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