Steve Kovach December 17, 2015 at 08:45AM
For months, I had been dying to try Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality headset.
The live on-stage demos I saw on stage at Microsoft events looked amazing. My colleagues loved their experience with the HoloLens. And the videos from Microsoft made it look like something out of a sci-fi movie.
I finally got my turn this week.
Overall, I was impressed by the demo, but I was distracted by one extreme limitation with the HoloLens. It has a limited field of view.
In the promotional photos and videos for the HoloLens, it seems like you're surrounded by virtual images.
Like this:
But when I finally put the HoloLens on, it felt like the opposite was true. I could only see what was directly in front of me in a very narrow field of view. It was almost like staring down a tunnel with a small opening at the end.
The coolest thing about the HoloLens is that it's totally untethered, giving you free range of motion around your environment. But the narrow field of view doesn't let you have a sense of the virtual objects around you. You're forced to turn your head around to bring items into view. And at times, it even cuts off objects directly in front of you.
For example, in one demo, I was looking at a 3D model of a designer watch that was hovering over the table in front of me. But as I got closer to it, chunks of it started to disappear because the entire thing couldn't fit within the tiny screen hovering in front of my eyes.
Microsoft kept the field of view narrow because it wants users to be able to wear the HoloLens without worrying about bumping into real-world objects as they walk around. But the tradeoff there is a false sense of what virtual objects are actually around you. I hope this aspect is improved in future iterations of the HoloLens, which otherwise is a truly exciting product.
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