7 Cool Things You Can See and Do With the Microsoft HoloLens
It’s available only as early development hardware, but we found plenty of neat stuff you can do with the HoloLens—even if you’re not a developer.
The Microsoft HoloLens has arrived in the PCMag Lab: The $3,000 Development Edition of the augmented reality (AR) headset is designed for developers to make software for the platform. We’ve tested development hardware before, and it’s often hard to find useful things to actually do with it. But the Development Edition of the HoloLens comes with plenty of software that non-developers can actually use, and the device is accessible enough that you don’t need to be a developer to work with it. Once you get used to the limited field of vision of the holograms and master the somewhat awkward Bloom and Air Tap gestures required to control it, there is definitely some fun to be had right out of the box.
Here are some of the more interesting things you can do with the Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition.
1. Wallpaper Your Room With Webpages
The HoloLens can run some normal Windows 10 apps, displaying them as glowing windows floating in the air. Microsoft Edge comes installed on the HoloLens Development Edition, so you can open a bunch of different Web browser windows and scatter them around your room. They snap to walls if the HoloLens detects them, and you can manually place and resize them anywhere around you.
2. Create a Holographic Diorama
HoloStudio is a HoloLens app that lets you build, modify, and arrange holograms into entire scenes. It’s more powerful than the included Holograms app, which only lets you set down premade holograms and resize them. HoloStudio has manipulation tools for copying, connecting, and coloring different basic objects together and turning them into a room-sized holographic diorama.
3. Video-Call Your Friends in Skype and Share Your Holographic Vision
Skype is already available on the HoloLens, and it’s fun. Video calls appear as floating windows in front of you, like VidWindows from Reboot. Since the HoloLens doesn’t have any cameras pointing at you, your video feed shows your own view to the person you’re talking to, complete with any holograms you’ve set up around the room.
4. Solve a Fictional Kidnapping
Fragments takes the concept behind the FBI’s augmented reality glasses in the game Heavy Rain and turns it into an AR game of its own. The HoloLens game scans your surroundings to build a crime scene you can investigate, using a number of tools to collect clues. Once you’ve collected enough clues, you can use them to narrow down search areas using a variety of filters, eventually finding the answer you seek.
5. Plan Furniture Layouts
If you have a big, empty room and want to decorate it, the free HoloPlanner app lets you see what it will look like before you start any heavy lifting. The demo lets you place cabinets, chairs, desks, shelves, and tables around any room. You have only a few dozen simple pieces of furniture to choose from, but you can at least see what a cabinet will look like in an empty corner. It’s a fun glance at the future of home décor, and shows how furniture and home improvement companies will be able to use the HoloLens.
6. Explore the Solar System
The Galaxy Explorer app projects the Milky Way galaxy into the middle of your room, letting you spin, zoom, and generally explore it. It’s a simple demo made as part of Microsoft’s Share Your Idea program that invited Twitter users to pitch an app concept for the HoloLens. Currently it offers only a wide view of the Milky Way and a detailed view of the solar system, with a handful of other celestial bodies such as the Crab Nebula as additional pieces of art with educational blurbs connected to them, but it’s still a striking view of space.
7. Build a Shrine to Harambe
The Holograms app lets you place pre-made holograms all around your room. You can virtually decorate with animals, space ephemera, and 3D icons to your heart’s content. Or you can take an empty conference room and turn it into a holographic shrine to Harambe. RIP, Holorambe.
Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
Read more: “The Best VR (Virtual Reality) Headsets of 2016”
