Virtual reality has been a major topic of discussion over the last year, with the release of headsets like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. VR can put you in completely different places, but it doesn't change how you look at your real-life surroundings. That's what augmented reality is for, and that's why Microsoft designed the HoloLens. The HoloLens isn't a VR headset. You can see completely through it and look at anything around you. Instead, it projects holograms over your surroundings, combining the real environment with computer-generated elements like floating app windows and three-dimensional models.
The technology used in the HoloLens is leaps and bounds beyond anything Google Glass has accomplished, but it's also much more expensive and a lot bulkier. Microsoft hasn't announced a retail version of the HoloLens yet, but if you really want to try it, you can order the Development Edition for $3,000. It's a self-contained Windows 10 system built into an AR visor, and because it doesn't require any sort of pairing with a smartphone, tablet, or PC, it can function completely on its own. Because it's development hardware, we won't give it a formal score. This HoloLens is not intended to be a consumer product, and that's reflected in its price and ergonomics. It's still an incredible piece of technology, and potentially indicates how we will work with computers in the not-too-distant future.
Design
The HoloLens consists of a big black headband and a transparent black visor. The headband wraps completely around your head above the ears, with thick, fixed arms that connect to the visor and an adjustable, padded back strap with a wheel that extends or contracts to fit the size of your head. The left arm features a power button and five-LED battery indicator on the back, a micro USB port for charging with the included cable and power adapter on the underside, and two buttons that adjust display brightness on the top. The right arm has a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom and volume control buttons on the top. The arms also feature their own speakers, small orange rectangular protrusions that project sound toward the wearer's ears. The speakers offer clear sound for the user, but because there are no headphone earpads to isolate the sound, people around you might hear whatever you're doing on the HoloLens if you keep the volume turned up.
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The visor contains the bulk of the electronics. It's a large, smoke-colored plastic shield on the front of the headband that extends over the front, protecting the various sensors and the display. The display consists of a transparent pane over each eye, angled to catch the images projected by emitters built above them. Multiple sensors, including four environment cameras, one depth camera, and an ambient light sensor, cover a wide arc in front of the user.
Besides the HoloLens itself and the included Clicker peripheral (explained below), the Development Edition includes a baseball cap-like peg-in-hole plastic strap, short and long nose bridges that click into the nose section of the face mask, a micro USB cable for charging the device, a USB power adapter, and a hard-shell zip-up case.
Hardware
The Development Edition is designed to be a wearable computer, though it isn't close to a full PC in terms of power. It uses a 32-bit Intel CPU to drive the device, with a separate Microsoft-built Holographic Processing Unit (HPU 1.0) for the holograms. It has 2GB of RAM and 64GB of flash storage, and features both Bluetooth 4.1 LE and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Microsoft hasn't specified a display resolution for the HoloLens, beyond that the emitters produce 2.3 million points of light projected by two "HD 16:9 light engines."
Since the HoloLens is a self-contained system, you can use it without any wires. You charge the headset via its micro USB port. Microsoft says the battery should last between two and three hours of use, which is in line with our experience during the testing period. It takes about two hours to reach a full charge.
How Hololens Holograms Work
Microsoft's entire concept is based around projecting holograms for an augmented reality experience. The HoloLens visor does a very good job of this, thanks to its extremely bright light emitters. They work with the wave guides on the lenses in front of your eyes to display crisp, colorful images floating in three-dimensional space (to your point of view). Both floating windows for apps and simulated three-dimensional objects are vivid and clear before your eyes.
But the holograms don't exist in your complete field of vision. The lenses and projectors only display holograms within a limited rectangular space in the center of your view. If you move your head away from the hologram you're looking at, it will vanish before it hits the edge of your sightline. This is jarring, and prevents the HoloLens from producing a truly immersive augmented reality experience. It's a fairly large display field, but it doesn't come close to the complete field of view offered by the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual reality headsets. Of course, those headsets don't let you see through them to see all of your actual surroundings (though pass-through camera modes let you see what's in front of your VR headset in a rectangle about the size of the HoloLens display).
Keeping the HoloLens display lined up with your eyes is vital, as the display's boundaries can otherwise be obscured. I found the visor dipping low on occasion when testing, which made the top of the picture fade away. The included nose bridges in two different sizes can keep the visor lifted at the right angle when used with the adjustment wheel on the back of the headband.
I had to tighten the headband to a somewhat uncomfortable extent to keep the visor aligned on my relatively large head. Keeping the headband tight helped make sure the lenses were aligned, but it also put a lot of pressure on my brow, and my forehead felt sore when I finally took the headset off. The HoloLens is a bit more comfortable with the headband pulled back to give a little more slack, but then I had to constantly adjust the visor to keep my eyes aligned with the lenses. That means my fit choices were either annoying (regular adjustments) or ultimately painful (an overly tight headband).
Environment Mapping
While the HoloLens can't display holograms to cover your entire vision, it can at least position them through your entire surroundings. The multiple cameras and sensors on the visor constantly scan the area around you, mapping walls and other obstacles and tracking your location relative to them. This makes the HoloLens surprisingly accurate for its placement of holographic windows and objects. In our rectangular, flat-walled test room, I easily placed Web browsers, apps, and settings menus along the walls like virtual windows, surrounding myself with objects that stayed in place as if they were physically mounted on the walls. The HoloLens sensed the location of the floor and tables as well, accurately lining three-dimensional holograms around them so they didn't appear to be floating around like ghosts.
The environment mapping is less reliable in more open and cluttered areas. PC Labs itself is a large, uneven workspace with multiple aisles, benches, desks, offices, and windows, with a block-patterned, three-color floor to further confuse the sensors. The HoloLens identified the walls of the lab accurately, but made holograms flicker and glitch when I placed them around the open aisles. The visor clearly struggled to figure out whether or not the benches and their shelves were walls or not, and if the wide red and blue stripes of the floor were physical boundaries or flat.
Control
You can control HoloLens with the included Clicker peripheral or with physical gestures. The Clicker is a small one-button remote that simply lets you click on whatever you're looking at, using a small dot in the center of your view as a cursor. The Clicker generally just performs the click function and relies on head motion for moving things around and selecting them. Hand motion is used almost exclusively for the drag-and-drop command, where you click and hold with the Clicker and your hand in view of the visor, then slowly move your hand to drag objects where you want them to go. This is mostly used for resizing windows and holograms, and scrolling up and down documents in Edge.
Physical gestures are fairly reliable once you get used to them, but they'll make you look and feel pretty silly. The two main gestures are Bloom and Air Tap. Bloom involves holding your hand with your fingers together and pointed straight up, then opening up your fingers. The gesture brings up the Start menu, which lets you access all of the apps and features. It's hard to do without wanting to follow up with a shout of "Magic!"
Air Tap involves holding your index finger up and bringing it down toward your thumb. You don't need to touch your fingertip to your thumb, but I found it makes the gesture slightly more reliable. This is the basic click gesture, activating any item the dot in the center of your field of view is floating over. You can also hold the gesture to drag objects. I found myself wanting to mutter, "I am crushing your head," while Air Tapping.
Both gestures need to be performed in view of the headset's sensors. The area is a bit more forgiving than the holographic display's frame, but generally you get the best results by keeping your hands within the boundaries of the display when gesturing.
Besides clicking and using air gestures, the HoloLens supports voice commands and features Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant. Simple commands like, "Remove," and, "Take a Picture," close windows and take photos (with holograms) of whatever you're looking at. You can also use Cortana to input text, which is useful if you don't want to pair a separate Bluetooth keyboard to the HoloLens, since entering text using Air Taps with a virtual keyboard is tedious.
Software
While it's intended for developers, the HoloLens offers a surprising amount of compelling software for general use. As a Windows 10 device, it has access to the Edge browser, Skype video conferencing, and a variety of other Microsoft and third-party apps on the Windows 10 app store. These apps, which aren't designed with holograms in mind, appear as floating windows you can virtually fix on your walls or floating in space.
Microsoft Edge works just as well as it does on a standard PC. I could access Gmail and YouTube easily through the Web browser, which displayed both in desktop mode. A separate YouTube client, called HoloTube, displays a more leanback-friendly interface for browsing videos, and lets you detach the app from whatever location you placed it and make it continuously float in the center of your vision wherever you look.
The Holograms app is an entertaining way to decorate your environment with holograms and experiment with the headset's location tracking and placement. It presents a window with a variety of static and animated three-dimensional holograms. Tapping one pulls it out of the window and lets you place it anywhere around you. Once a hologram is placed, you can resize and reposition it as you please. These holograms are treated as persistent decorations in your HoloLens interface; even if you close the Hologram app, the holograms will stay put as long as you use window-based apps like Edge. (They will disappear, along with any windows you have open, if you load a HoloLens app that completely takes over your view.) The holograms are persistent in their virtual locations, meaning you can walk around them and look at them from any angle.
HoloStudio builds on the Holograms concept by letting you construct entire scenes of holograms out of various components and using different tools. You can connect multiple parts together, duplicate your constructed objects, and color them to create much more elaborate dioramas than the individual pre-built objects from the Holograms app.
As mentioned, a Skype client is available on the HoloLens as well. It offers full voice and video call support, projecting a window in front of your vision with the person you're calling (like VidWindows in Reboot). Because the HoloLens doesn't have a camera on you as you use it, the video feed from your end shows whatever you're looking at, complete with any holograms you want to share with the caller.
Games
Fragments is one of the most visually impressive demonstrations of what the HoloLens can do for gaming. It's an augmented reality game that puts you in the shoes of a detective who must scan "memories" (incomplete crime scenes) and identify clues to locate where a hostage is being held. The game scanned our test room and used its shape to define both the virtual crime lab and the memories I investigated. I walked around the room watching different fragments of the scene come together as I focused on them, then tapped various clues to get closer looks. Each clue added another detail I could then use to narrow down the search area using a series of location filters, eventually finding out where the crime was happening in time to rescuse a hostage. It's very similar to the AR glasses used by agent Norman Jayden in the game Heavy Rain, only I was wearing the glasses instead of watching a character on my TV use them.
Young Conker is a more kid-friendly game where you guide a cartoon squirrel around different levels to collect coins, solve puzzles, and reach objectives. It's much more simple than Fragments, but it similarly uses the shape of your room to determine how to play. Conker will follow the cursor in the middle of your view, running over different obstacles created by the contours of your room's walls and furniture.
RoboRaid is a first-person shooting gallery, similar to many virtual reality games on the Samsung Gear VR. You need to look around the room to aim your cursor at attacking robots and hit them with lasers. Instead of tapping a touchpad on the headset like in a Gear VR game, you Air Tap to fire. Physical movement is a big part of this game, and this is where the benefits of augmented reality over virtual reality shine. You can freely move around to dodge laser fire, and since you can see everything that's physically around you, you don't run the risk of knocking things over like with vision-obscuring VR headsets.
An Augemented Glimpse Into the Future
Even as first-generation development hardware, Microsoft's HoloLens is a very impressive example of cutting-edge technology. This self-contained augmented reality device can project holograms and run apps all around you, letting you turn your entire surroundings into a desktop, or completely overhaul your environment with different effects that follow your walls and furniture accurately. The limited field of vision is the headset's biggest weakness, though, along with a bulky, uncomfortable design.
The HoloLens still has a way to go before it finds itself in offices, schools, and homes everywhere. There are some big improvements in field of view and comfort that must be made before this is a feasible consumer technology. Perhaps in five years, everyone will have access to the eventual grandchildren of the HoloLens, with glasses, goggles, and visors that can display holograms anywhere you look. For now, though, this is a $3,000 headset that offers a very tempting glimpse at a promising future.
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