Microsoft Is Bringing Holograms To The Masses, And Everyone’s Losing Their Minds

Overnight, Microsoft held an event centred around the next generation of its operating system — Windows 10 — but the biggest takeaway was Windows Holographic: a version of Windows that blends holograms with real world video; and the HoloLens: a wireless, wearable hologram generator, and “the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever seen”.

The technology, which blends holograms and spatial sound with the real world in a way that will definitely be used for sex, is Microsoft’s first attempt to compete with Google and move technology directly onto our eyebs. “Face! The final frontier,” writes The Guardian, in perhaps the best opening sentence you’ll find about the product. But while on paper it sounds like Microsoft’s version of Google Glass or Oculus Rift, it’s actually a whole different thing; learning from Google Glass’ mistakes, the HoloLens is designed to be worn privately, inside, in a much-less-asshole-ish kind of way; and while Oculus Rift shuts the external world out, the HoloLens incorporates it.

It really is poetic that Google shut down Glass the week before Microsoft unveiled HoloLens.

— nilay patel (@reckless) January 21, 2015

The HoloLens was ready for a drive-through by journalists at the event overnight, and most were “mightily impressed“. “We just finished a heavily scripted, carefully managed, and completely amazing demonstration of Microsoft’s HoloLens technology,” writes the Verge, who call it the most intriguing technology they’ve experienced since Oculus Rift. “We played Minecraft on a coffee table. We had somebody chart out how to fix a light switch right on top of the very thing we were fixing. We walked on Mars.”

Wired, who got to play with a prototype back in October, are similarly impressed, and the CEO of Take-Two Interactive — the publisher of Grand Theft Auto — spoke in a November interview about a new demonstration he’d taken part of at Microsoft’s headquarters, which is now believed to have been for HoloLens: “It’s pretty extraordinary.”

While there’s no pricing or shipping date yet, CEO Satya Nadella claimed it would be ready in “the Windows 10 timeframe” (although no one really knows what that means).

Here’a another new video while you wait, which prompted the Verge to ask a very salient question: Why is Microsoft’s HoloLens team so obsessed with motorcycles?

Read more about the HoloLens here.