Well they're using an SOC which was developed for the phone market or derived from phone SOCs.
The displays and other sensors may be something that's more bespoke or at least low volumes so still fairly costly.
I think it would almost take HMDs which are no bigger or heavier than sunglasses, because people don't want to go around wearing something that looks weird.
And it would have to be $500 or so and deliver all-day battery life.
Then the applications they're going to have to come up with to appeal to a large market.
Even then I think developers may struggle to come up with popular AR or VR applications other than entertainment/gaming.
I imagine that if/when Microsoft releases this to the consumer market it'll most likely be marketed towards
- Do it yourself, home improvement types. All of those types of people that like to do things themselves or tinker with things.
- Rebuilding cars (Fairly common around here, people like to pick up old classic cars and attempt to rebuild/restore them).
- Renovating their house.
- Building stuff (I have a few friends that have a workshop in their garage where they just make stuff like Furniture).
- Gardening, cooking, knitting, model railroad, etc. Basically hands on hobbyist type things.
- Maybe travellers. Albeit you'd look goofy walking around with a HMD on.
Much like those guided Museum or garden tours, but you bring your own. Perhaps with guided tours of cities. You could do this with a smartphone, but probably a lot more immersive and certainly less dangerous than walking around looking at a smartphone screen.
- Sporting events. Bring your own sports caster with replays to a live sporting event. Without having to potentially miss the action on the field/court because you're looking at your smartphone.
- Games.
Who knows what other interesting stuff there could be. Yes, right now it's hard to say since it's not out there in enough numbers and with enough capability to truly find out what can be done.
HoloLens 1 was never going to be that product as the control scheme was too limited and too primitive. FOV was too narrow to be truly immersive. The design while comfortable at first wasn't comfortable for extended periods of time. Etc.
HoloLens 2 gets us a bit closer by doubling the FOV. Enabling far more intuitive and useful controls. Redesigning the HMD for more comfort, etc. But as the MS spokesman said, it's still not ready for the consumer market. It still needs to get better in all those areas as well as reducing size and weight.
It's entirely possible it may never get to the point where it's a mass consumer device, but, IMO, it still holds way more promise for achieving that than VR.
Then again, for MS, it isn't VR or AR. They are both the same thing for MS.
Regards,
SB
These are good possibilities though I think a lot of these hobbies are declining in popularity. For instance, teens aren't into cars like they used to be and instructional things for renovating homes, cooking, etc. can be delivered through Youtube.
No it won't be immersive as an HMD but all this content is FREE now. Maybe if it's easy and quick to develop AR content as it is to shoot these Youtube videos, you'll see a lot of Youtube content ported to AR, assuming it doesn't require expensive gear or an SDK or licensing to develop this content.
I can see museums offering this. They offer audio guides that you can rent so it would be useful but it's fairly limited to big and rich museums, who would get corporate sponsorships to invest in the HMDs and developing the content.
Sporting events could be interesting. Steve Ballmer, former MS CEO, may be interested in developing for Hololens. Right now he's trying to develop VR for NBA as well as a system for displaying real-time data and analytics as you watch the games. If they try to monetize these, I don't think too many sports fans will sign on. People can look at data afterwards.
He's also talked about offering people at home the ability to get the POV of half-court court side seats to big NBA games, which would cost thousands of dollars each. But maybe for us plebs, we pay $10 a game to get that POV and use HMDs for the immersion.
Yeah maybe something like that could be popular.
