How a consumer AR device made by Microsoft will look like, how much it will cost, and what it will be capable of are all questions that are hard to answer at this point. At best, we can look to the newly unveiled Hololens 2 for some clues.
That device, which Variety got to try at a recent briefing in San Francisco, is in many ways the logical evolution of the original Hololens. Like its predecessor, Hololens 2 is an all-in-one AR headset, capable of overlaying holograms over your view of the real world. It’s significantly more comfortable than the original — three times as comfortable, if we can believe Microsoft’s oddly specific math. And it features more than double the field of view of the original Hololens.
Microsoft’s Hololens 2 also comes with integrated eye-tracking technology, which introduces a range of new interaction models. In one demo shown off by Microsoft, an info card about another Hologram appeared in thin air. When your eyes reached the last line of the text, it scrolled up to reveal additional lines — a pretty magical experience.
But the biggest update may be advanced hand tracking, which makes it possible to touch and interact with Holograms in a whole new way. The original Hololens already featured some hand tracking, including tap and pinch gestures to select and rotate objects.
With its new hardware, Microsoft has significantly expanded the capability of such gestures, and is now tracking 25 joints in each hand. The resulting experience feels a lot more natural, allowing users to press buttons, grab Holograms, and even have AR hummingbirds land on the palm of their hands.
This could be used, for instance, to build multi-player AR games for mobile devices. And ultimately, the same technology will also able to power Microsoft’s own AR experiences, including those running on future versions of the Hololens.
Right now, all of these efforts are just loosely connected. The Hololens, with its $3,500 price tag, is still clearly an enterprise device. Cloud Anchors are a developer tool, primarily geared towards mobile AR. And Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Capture studios are helping to produce content for AR and VR environments.
But taken together, all of these efforts hint at a future in which Microsoft wants to be able to do everything: Build mass-market AR devices with proven interaction models, power them with the necessary infrastructure for planet-scale AR experiences, and have enough content available to make them enticing for consumers. And when Apple and Magic Leap are going to vie for consumers to buy their AR hardware in the next few years, Microsoft may be ready to give them a run for their money.
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