Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

I played with Hololens at Build this week. I believe, after seeing it, using it, and even developing a little with it, that this device is truly revolutionary, and Google is wasting its money in Florida.

I shook my head back and forth like a dog trying to dry itself off, and the images I saw barely wiggled. The images are bright enough to completely occlude reality. The software dev stuff is from MS, so it is polished, simple, and powerful.

Voice recognition on the device, for example, is just handled by calling the voice functions in the core library, then GIVING IT A STRING. It listens for this plain text string. That's it. Sooooo simple and powerful.

> So fundamentally VR has more potential than AR.

Fundamentally, VR just has a different potential than AR.

> Not to mention the need to carry AR with you wherever you go if you want to use it in the "real world", power it, compute, etc.

You need to carry the VR headsets and their host-devices with you too.

I believe we should clearly delineate the definitions of VR vs AR first.

Virtual Reality should be things like The Matrix. A reality that an individual experiences without modifying the real world for anybody else. Current technology simply shoves a screen right up against our eyes but the goal is obviously to plug that content straight into our very brains.

Augmented Reality should be things like an audio speaker or a video display; devices that "inject" manmade media into the real world; devices which generate reproducible experiences that everybody, even animals, can see, hear, touch and smell.

In AR a single device may provide content passively to multiple viewers. Like your music system or television or a hologram generator. Even your pets can see and hear whatever's playing and they certainly don't to purchase or wear anything.

VR aims to interface with your neurons and you're guaranteed to experience the full content. AR projects content into the real world which may or may not bounce on to our senses.

TL;DR: VR replaces reality. AR enhances reality. But that's just my opinion. :)

I think there are rooms for both VR and Augmented Reality to co-exist.

The motion tracking is almost perfect.

The picture stuck to the window almost perfectly, which as someone in VFX I find very impressive.

Tracking head orientation and location is possibly the hardest thing to get right(next to object recognition)

Watching this video made me think, there's no reason why a VR setup couldn't similarly map the surroundings and incorporate that into the virtual world. One limitation of VR is that you can't really move around in the virtual environment, because you will bump into things in the real world (barring an omni-directional treadmill or similar). But if the system mapped out your real-word surroundings and either simulated or even just walled off any real-world objects and boundaries, you would avoid running into things, while having much more freedom to explore the virtual environment.

I'm not saying this would remove the use cases of AR, just that it could be a significant enhancement or enabler to many VR experiences.