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Microsoft HoloLens hands on: Walking on Mars
Microsoft has started shipping HoloLens, its futuristic headset that augments the wearer’s vision with holograms.
The headset, which was first revealed in January 2015, hasn't yet had a mass public outing, and even now is only just being shipped to developers. But along with the shipping date, Microsoft also announced that the public will be able to explore the surface of Mars by wearing the headset, as well as revealing some uses already in development.
At Microsoft's annual Build developers conference I had a lesson at the HoloLens Academy, which involved playing with holograms, launching projectiles at unsuspecting journalists, and walking on Mars.
What is HoloLens?
Microsoft’s HoloLens is not to be confused with virtual reality headsets such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR. Rather than immersing you in a new world through 360 degree video, HoloLens overlays holograms into your real environment.
As with VR, the full range of uses for augmented reality is enormous. At Build, Microsoft demonstrated the HoloLens being used to explore a 3D model of the human anatomy, a fictional “energy hub”, a CAT digger, and Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of Mars.
How HoloLens works
The headset consists of two circular plastic and rubber bands that sit on your forehead and stretch around the top of your head. The outer ring includes a pair of double-lensed glasses.
To put HoloLens on, you tighten one band around the crown of your head and then adjust the glasses until you can see a full rectangle in your line of sight. Unfortunately long hair, a fringe and glasses don’t make for the easiest headset wearing experience. In both demonstrations I had to readjust the headset multiple times and change headsets twice. But maybe I’m just difficult.
Once you’ve got HoloLens sitting comfortably, you have to calibrate it by moving a finger across the air and opening and closing different eyes.
After the setup, HoloLens takes you to a home screen with icons for staple Windows apps, including Skype and Edge browser, floating in the air in front of you. Wearers control HoloLens using an “air tap” motion, which involves making a fist out of your hand, holding one finger up and tapping it downwards. Due to the calibration it can accurately see where your hand is so that you can interact with the hologram, making it almost tangible.
HoloLens accurately places holograms in your space through an internal scanning system that continually maps the wearer’s environment. When you air tap on the floor and objects around you, a mesh appears that shows how HoloLens is visualising the area.
Looking through the glasses you see your real-world environment with the hologram rendered in real space. The view is fairly narrow, and for me there was a bit of glare from the sides, but that’s to be expected when you’re wearing three sets of glasses at once. The visual restrictions aren’t too distracting - once you have the surface of Mars mapped out in front of you there are bigger things to focus on.
Exploring Mars
A collaboration between Nasa and Microsoft, Destination: Mars puts the HoloLens wearer on the surface of the red planet with a hologram of Buzz Aldrin as the guide.
The Mars experience will be available for the public to try at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida this summer, and was one of the most popular attractions at Microsoft’s annual developer conference Build in San Francisco this week.
It took place in a blacked out pop-up room, which we entered having fitted our headsets. The demonstration started with a floating Mars we could walk around, looking at from above and below as Buzz Aldrin showed us precisely where we were going to land.
We then descended onto a 4km-wide area of Mars that stretched from a lake basin up to the peak of Mount Sharp. It’s one of the areas that the Curiosity Rover has explored, scanned and photographed in the four years that it has been on the planet.
The views of Mars through HoloLens were incredible. Holographic Aldrin, who looked much like a full-colour version of holographic Princess Leia in Star Wars, walked us across the planet, focusing on details as small as a 16mm drill hole created by the Rover to the top of the 5.5km-high Mount Sharp peak.
The demo also included a close-up look at the Rover as it travelled around Mars. We could walk up to it and around it, seeing it from all sides in context on the planet.
As cool as it is, the Mars project isn’t actually an augmented reality experience, but is the kind of immersive experience you’d expect from a virtual reality headset. The more typical uses of the headset are the kind I was shown in the Holographic Academy.
Launch projectiles at unsuspecting bystanders
In the HoloLens Academy we were given the chance to interact with holograms floating in the room in the Moscone conference centre. This included moving a fictional “energy hub” around the room, placing it on a table and then firing projectiles at it.
As the headset continuously maps the contours of the surrounding environment, it is able to accurately bounce projectiles from the surfaces. Using the air tap we were able to fire at the walls and floor and see the projectiles bounce away and explode, which would be very cool in the context of gaming.
The coolest part of the demonstration was when a team of five of us wearing headsets fired simultaneously at the energy hub until it exploded and opened a cavern in the floor. The cavern was so convincing it fully prevented you from wanting to step over it.
These two examples are obviously not the practical uses Microsoft envisions for HoloLens in the long term. Current applications include using remote calling and a group hologram of the human anatomy to teach medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Microsoft is hoping the developers who have HoloLens on the way to them will come up with more experimental uses for the headsets.
Although the Mars and energy hub experiences may not be commercially viable uses for HoloLens, it's definitely worth trying out the futuristic device while it's still in its early developmental stages.
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