Microsoft HoloLens 2 Preview – Big step towards the future

Microsoft presents the HoloLens 2 as a product for the business market and that makes perfect sense, but there are signs that the manufacturer has a broader vision. The Unreal engine will receive support for the mixed reality platform in May, and Epic Games says everything it does for the next few years will support HoloLens. It is striking that Epic foreman Tim Sweeney appears on stage at Microsoft, because a few years ago he openly denounced the Microsoft Store and variants of Windows as the only publishing platform for apps and games. That’s not going to happen on HoloLens: anyone can set up their own download store and it’s obvious that Epic has its own mixed reality game store in mind.

The focus on the business market is therefore perhaps a temporary thing. That makes sense: it is strategic for Microsoft to be present in markets that may become very large in time. The company has missed the step to smartphones, but it does not want to miss a possible step to holographic computers. The HoloLens is clearly a computer of the future right on your nose.

Put on the glasses

Anyone who puts on a HoloLens 2 for the first time will notice how easy it is. Microsoft employees compare it to putting on a cap, although the headset may be a bit too heavy for that. Nevertheless, the set up went well in one go and he was right on the head. On the back of the HoloLens 2 is a button to adjust it tighter or loosen it. It’s an easy method and works fine.

What you immediately notice is that it sits comfortably on the head. This is due to the cushions in the headset that should make it more comfortable to wear. That does not mean that you can easily wear it for hours. After fifteen to twenty minutes of the demo, the straps of the headset on my head were already sweating. That was not due to the pleasant temperature at the Microsoft stand. It’s something I also experience with VR glasses and it’s no different here.

iris scanner

If you use it more often, the HoloLens 2 can authenticate the user via the built-in iris scanner. Microsoft already gained experience with iris scanners for Windows Hello in the Lumia 950 smartphones, among others, and that experience comes in handy here. On first use, the headset calibrates the iris scanner by letting you look at a rotating colored cube that occasionally shoots through space, occasionally spinning in place for a few moments. This calibration takes a maximum of one to one and a half minutes.

In addition to an iris scanner, the HoloLens 2 also has a camera to scan the environment and project holograms on the right surfaces. He can also see and follow your hands.

Service

There are some new controls in the interface. For example, it is possible to manipulate holograms directly with the hands to make them larger or smaller or to rotate them. A ‘pinch slider’ is also possible due to the hand recognition. By pinching your fingers together, you can swipe a slider in the interface left or right.

One of the most useful improvements to the controls is the buttons. These are holographic representations of real buttons and you have to press them at the point in space where the HoloLens projects them. Obviously you don’t get any tactile feedback – the hands are free because there are no controllers. Nevertheless, it works quite nicely. You don’t get the idea that you’re really pressing a button, but that’s how it looks and that’s a nice way of operating.

The HoloLens 2 also has voice control. The interface displays what you can say and when you say it, it has to perform an action. That turned out not to work properly during the demo. Now you could argue that English isn’t my primary language, but the command ‘next’ isn’t exactly the hardest to recognize from English with a Dutch accent.

Laser projection

The holograms are built up via lasers that project onto the waveguides, which are the transparent elements for your eyes. That should be the equivalent of 2k screens with a resolution of 47 pixels per degree. That is somewhat close to the maximum 60 pixels per degree that the human eye can distinguish. The first thing you notice is that your world is slightly darker with the glasses on; that is necessary for the technology used and it makes seeing the holograms a bit easier. It’s not like you’re wearing sunglasses, but it’s somewhere between glasses and sunglasses.

The holograms themselves are fairly sharp. If you look closely, there are of course pixels visible, but the projection of the sick woman on the bed that I saw was convincing because of its shape and interaction with the bed. The holograms are a bit transparent, but certainly not completely transparent. It’s a bit like seeing Casper the friendly ghost virtually.

The field of view is better than the first HoloLens, but during the demonstration I quickly ran into the limits. After all, I was looking at a patient, but when I put her head on top of the frame, the boundary of the laser projection sawed her off at the knees. And that while I was standing at a distance of two to three meters.

Afterwards I tried to calculate the angle of view based on my observations. Vertically that seems to be no more than between 35 and 40 degrees, horizontally I came out between 70 and 90 degrees. That is a lot more than the 30×17 degrees of the first HoloLens. Technically a tour de force, but it was nevertheless easy to run into the limits. In addition, the glasses cover a larger area than the screen, while you would actually like the border of the glasses to be the border of the hologram. That would feel more natural.