Notes on Hololens
Although Hololens has been available in its ‘Enterprise Edition’ for a few months, we haven’t seen many in Australia. Microsoft is only shipping them to Windows Insider developers with registered US delivery addresses, so it took a bit of delivery slight-of-hand to get one of them, finally, to a friend in Sydney who invited me to have a play.
Yes, the field of view is horrible. Just 14º, say the specs, and that agrees with what I experienced. Does it matter? Less than you might expect. Because you are still wholly immersed in the real world, a narrow view into a synthetic overlay environment, while not great, is not a show-stopper.
I’ve been told the problem lies with the fabrication of the Hololens displays, which can’t be made larger without significantly decreasing the yield. Fabrication problems can only be sorted by making lots an improving the process, so while I presume this display will get bigger, it will not happen overnight.
More interesting to me were some of the UX decisions made by the Hololens team. To select a hologram — which are quite literally, floating in space where you place them — you ‘click’ on it. The click motion is done with the finger, outstretched, then curled toward the palm. The Kinect within the Hololens detects the action and creates the appropriate event. Some of the time. (I actually had a fair bit of trouble getting that to work.)
That’s very sexy but it quickly leads to the ‘Gorilla arms’ problem that we’ve seen again and again — from the Nintendo Power Glove to the Minority Report interface, this idea that hands-waving-around-in-the-air-indefinitely is a good idea is defeated very quickly by the actual biophysics of the human being who isn’t meant to hold out their arms unsupported for any length of time.
Better by far to go for the Cortana integration, and simply focus on an object and say, ‘Select.’ That seemed to work, too — some of the time.
The most magical part of Hololens is that it is simultaneously untethered and fully aware of the space that you’re in. It maps out the space, and stores that — presumably up in Azure somewhere — so that it remembers the layout of objects in the space. And can do that for any number of spaces. Your office, your home, your gym, your supermarket — all of them are stored separately and managed individually.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Hololens is also a beautiful example of industrial design. There’s an enormous amount of computing power crammed into it, together with enough battery to keep it all running, and while it’s not light, it’s certainly more comfortable than any of the current generation HMDs. I could imagine people spending hours in Hololens without suffering any ill effects. That’s the result of a deep design process.
Much of what I’m noting as shortcomings are to be expected in the very first version of a device so new we barely know how to use it. The original iPhone came with 6 Apple-provided apps — and no way to install any more. We forget those early days because what we have now is so comprehensively powerful. Hololens seems on a similar trajectory — unless it finds itself eclipsed and overwhelmed by Magic Leap, whatever that turns out to be.
If I were Satya Nadella — or advising him — I would tell him to bet the company on Hololens. It’s by far the most exciting technology I’ve seen from any tech company since the iPhone, and while far from perfect is so incredibly potent even in this very first incarnation that you could see many different businesses being built on top of its platform.
