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A new promotional video designed to highlight Hololens’ educational credentials has given a more accurate glimpse of how using the headset works in practise.
Microsoft’s Minecraft Hololens demo was arguably the standout moment of E3 (you can see it in action here) but much of the device’s post-event coverage has highlighted how the user experience differs quite considerably from that seen in much of the video material.
As can be seen in the video below, the main issue is the fact that the area of a user’s vision (the field of view) that Hololens actually populates with augmented reality images is actually quite limited. Effectively, the graphics themselves are confined to a restricted TV-shaped area in the middle of a user’s vision. Imagery will not appear in the areas surrounding this.
Furthermore, Microsoft executive Kudo Tsunoda has previously said that the field of view is unlikely to be expanded in launch units.
"I think you’re never going to get to full peripheral field of view, but certainly the hardware we have the field of view isn’t exactly final,” he told GiantBomb. But I wouldn’t say it’s going to be hugely noticeably different either."
Here’s the video:
