LONDON: The technology giant, Microsoft has unveiled a device called HoloLens, different experience from using Glass.
IT’S generally wise to take demonstrations of new technologies with a grain of salt. That was especially true for the Microsoft HoloLens — the hologram-projecting glasses that the giant unveiled.
Microsoft’s demonstrations are highly scripted and completely controlled. The company was cagey about how well the system worked in more spontaneous environments. Recording devices were barred. The hardware shown to the media was only a prototype, a two-piece unit that included a heavy battery attachment and a cord that tethered the machine to a computer.
All those caveats aside, the HoloLens is wondrous. And it suggests that interacting with holograms could become an important part of how users use machines in the future.
The HoloLens isn’t a gimmick. Microsoft has clearly put a great deal of engineering work into this project. When users put on the device, which looks a lot like ski goggles, users see three-dimensional digital controls like buttons, lines and pictures as well as the sheep from the video game Minecraft superimposed on the world around them.
More important than the device’s performance, though, is its apparent utility. The promise of virtual reality is held up often in tech circles these days, but the practical uses have always seemed limited. Microsoft has spent a lot of time thinking about why people would use holograms.
In another scenario, one that Microsoft developed in conjunction with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Martian landscape that had been captured by a rover on the planet. A desktop PC mounted in demo room showing a two-dimensional map of Mars. When users will click a spot on the two-dimensional screen, they could look around the room and see a flag in that spot.
In the third scenario, Microsoft showed off HoloStudio, an app that allows novices to design 3-D objects and then to send them for 3-D printing to make them real. Microsoft hasn’t yet revealed the HoloLens’s release date or price.
HoloLens will inevitably draw comparisons with Google Glass, the much mocked computerized spectacles that Google has been peddling over the last couple of years. There are certainly similarities: Both devices mix digital images and daily life, and both make users look silly when they wear them.
But using HoloLens is a significantly different experience from using Glass. Whereas Google’s system mostly keeps the digital images out of users field of vision and is thus more suited to be used in public, the HoloLens immerses users more deeply in a digital environment. Glass is meant to be more like a replacement for their phone — a way to get a quick dose of information at a glance — while the HoloLens seems more like a substitute for the personal computer.
