Tel Aviv, Israel – Bruce Harris, a Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) Technical Evangelist gave a few hints about the HoloLens, the company’s upcoming augmented reality headset, while he was speaking at an event in Tel Aviv. Among the advances, Harris mentioned HoloLens battery life, its connectivity, how it will work with apps and more.
The HoloLens, another eagerly awaited virtual reality product, will start shipping to developers by the end of March, but Microsoft has not announced yet when the device will be available to general consumers or even enterprise clients. While we wait, Harris has shared a few details of how this highly anticipated device will work.
The most important spec has to be the device battery life. Harris said it is very much like a laptop and it will last depending on how you use the headset. It is expected to last up to 5.5 hours, but dropping to about 2.5 hours when they are used for heavy tasks such as 3D rendering.
It sounds pretty reasonable, especially when you keep in mind that the HoloLens will work with wireless connections. Harris even highlight that they have no intention of building a wired device for anybody. But don’t worry, the headset will be able to connect to pretty much any device that supports either WiFi or Bluetooth.
Harris also explained that any universal application that can currently run on Windows 10 will be able to run natively on HoloLens. But you don’t even need a Windows device to connect with the HoloLens. It can be connected to a console, smartphone or computer as long as it supports such types of services.
The HoloLens is called an augmented reality headset mainly because its field-of-view is comparable to a 15-inch monitor held two feet away from your face and it is not bigger because size comes with a limitation: battery life. However, Harris mentioned that as manufacturing improves, the company intends to expand the field of view once it makes sense from a pricing perspective.
Another remarkable feature is that you can link devices together to share the same experience. Two, or even more users can share the content between different devices allowing them to view the same thing at the same time, and what’s better, the headsets doesn’t even have to be in the same room as the connection is formed over the internet.
Until now, Microsoft has not put a price tag on the consumer version of the HoloLens, but for the developer version the cost is $3,000.
Source: Petri