Heads-on with Microsoft’s Hololens

b-1024x768Microsoft is in the midst of doing a demo tour of their HoloLens device and I went to check it out this past Saturday. As I’ve written before, I’m a big fan of the Hololens and its augmented reality (MS refers to it as “mixed reality”) capabilities, so I was excited to actually get to try one.

The headset itself, in its current state, looks pretty much like what we’ve seen in promo shots:

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Tonight’s augmented & virtual reality tech demo

7hyl4yg9_400x400One of Boston’s many great, local interest groups – Boston Virtual Reality – held a tech demo meetup this evening featuring two hardware developers in the burgeoning fields of augmented & virtual reality – Meta and Leap Motion.

Before I tell you more, a quick sidenote to define these fields: virtual reality (VR) has, of course, been around in various incarnations for years – the latest variation centers around the invention of the Oculus Rift, an immersive headset that has stereoscopic screens for you to see content which pans and moves with your physical head movement.

Slightly different in concept, augmented reality (AR) also uses a headset but, rather than rely on an immersive experience created using screens, AR headsets (like Microsoft’s Hololens, which I wrote about not too long ago) superimpose digital images on top of your view of the real world – images you can interact with using your hands.

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