New York City – Imagine moving around digital objects just by using your gaze, designing video games by speech commands and by pointing your index finger. There is a place in Microsoft’s Fifth Avenue flagship store where software developers can come to experience the new HoloLens for themselves. After adding their names to a virtual waiting list, they can test out the augmented reality technology as it has never been sensed before. The shipping of a developer’s edition is scheduled for the first four months of 2016 and after a while, HoloLens will be available for customers.
Microsoft is presenting the HoloLens Developer Experience Showcase during two months in Manhattan.
Developers will be taken through three rooms located in the fifth floor of the store and will be introduced to three different scenarios in which HoloLens might be used. In the first one, HoloLens users will have the chance to design a 3-D ocean scene plus an X-wing fighter from Star Wars. They will be able to move around the holograms as they appear across the room and will even get to paint them and change their sizes.
In the second experience, HoloLens wearers will have the opportunity to play an exciting videogame by shooting robot drone things before they shoot them. Finally, they will get to develop a presentation for potential customers. This last scenario includes a 3-D map, a 3-D watch and a breathtaking view of the Solar System. As people are immerse within the holograms they can look at them from many different angles and perspectives because they see them all as three-dimensional objects.
The HoloLens technology differs from virtual reality because it doesn’t trap people in a parallel world-like environment. Instead, while wearing them they will be able to see the real world and can even look at others in the eye, with the difference that there are virtual objects added in the scene as they’re being controlled by the user’s gaze, voice and finger.
The company has remarked that the HoloLens doesn’t feel like glasses, as they weigh just less than a pound and are very comfortable to wear, even when such a tremendous technology is all packed into the legs of the wireless gadgets. People can adjust the fit of the headband and use them without problems if they’re also wearing another kind of glasses or a ponytail.
But not everything is that easy by the moment of wearing the HoloLens. The edition available for the showcase requires someone else to adjust them according to the distance from the wearer’s pupils. This step is important so that they can properly project what wearers are seeing. However, Microsoft said that the final version that will reach customers will not require that process, since the glasses will automatically adjust to the pupils.
Source: CNN