Hololens

This post was meant to be published a few weeks ago, but I hope is still relevant.

Microsoft organized an event tour across several countries to showcase the Hololens and Toronto was one of the lucky cities that they would be visiting. My wife and I were very interested in checking it out since we think there are opportunities to use them in our latest work - Bildk (http://www.bildk.com) and ErdeShare (http://www.erdetech.com). Unfortunately for us the event was full when we learnt about it, so we signed up for a waiting list and wished for the best.

Microsoft was very kind to open new venues so the people in the waiting list had an opportunity to have a hands-on session with the device. So here I want to summarized the experience.

#The event.

Beforehand you have to select the day and hour that you will be attending to the event, which actually made the process very easy since there were not huge lines or people bumping you around to touch the hololens. I have to say I was impressed by the organization and the attention to the details.

The session consisted in two parts. First a 10-15 minutes slot when you would be interacting with the device and after that a Q&A session with representatives of Microsoft.

There were not allowed any recording device once you entered to the venue, so I owe you some pictures, but I would try to do my best to describe the experience.

The first thing you needed to do, before even seeing the device, was to calculate your Interoupillary distance (IPD) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpupillary_distance).

Microsoft had a device which calculated this for us. It wasn’t clear at the moment how they will perform that once the hololens are widely available but I would guess that it might be solved by some calibration the very first time a person will use the hololens. I also hope that it will have profiles so the hololens can be easily shared between family members. Given the fact that Hololens will be running Windows 10, the multiple profiles feature seems highly probable.

Next, the moment I was waiting for, my first time using the hololens. I can’t remark this enough but it my opinion, this won’t be a dead-on-arrival gadget or even a gimmick. I truly think that Microsoft has something revolutionary here and I really want to see this being used massively in productivity-oriented scenarios.

For the demo, I was directed to enter to a sort of portable room that was simulating a living room area. I was playing Project X which is a sort of first person shooter where the player has to kill aliens coming from outside the walls and furniture. I peeked one of the computers in the room and there was a debugging session of Unity3D opened. My guess is that was monitoring the game running on the hololens when I was playing.

The game itself was highly immersive, maybe a little too much for the sake of the demo. The graphics were fantastic, but I was so distracted trying to not get killed that I couldn’t enjoy the graphics as much as I wanted to. My wife, which is not a gamer, was a bit frustated because she expected another kind of demo, but we both were really impressed by the Hololens.

#A narrow field of view

There was a lot of talk about the somehow misleading presentation of the hololens, due to the narrow field of view. I could verify that in fact, the field of view is limited, but in practice wasn’t a deal breaker.

This image illustrate very well the FOV issue:

In the image above (courtesy of Microsoft), you can see the borders and have a pretty clear idea of the issue. However, since blending with the environment is one key feature of the hololens, this limitation is actually less bothering in practice. Once you start interacting with walls and furniture pieces, you rarely notice this limitation unless one of the rendered objects is being cropped, I guess this is something that UX designers have to keep in mind if they want to target the Hololens. However, Project X did a pretty good job to make me forget about this.

After the demo, there was a Q&A session with two very nice Microsoft Technical Evangelists ¹, who gave us a great presentation and kindly answered our questions. This part of the event was very informative and an excellent opportunity to interact with Microsoft people about this tech and its opportunities.

In overall, I enjoyed very much the experience and can’t wait to have my hands on a SDK soon.

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