6 ms·

Apply for the Microsoft Hololens Development Edition

122 points by pmelendez 11y ago

T3RMINATED 11y ago
The Visual Field is way less than what they marketed at E3... Avoid HoloLens 1.0
Permit 11y ago
Good God, $3,000 USD is a little outside my price range. Hopefully the consumer edition will be able to knock the price down a little bit. I really wanted to get my hands on one of these, but it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  They have said it was a full Windows 10 computer, so I'm not entirely shocked by the $3000 price, but I do think that the consumer version will likely have to be cheaper to sell it to the average consumer.
  - tennysonmach 11y ago
    They can define what "full Windows 10 computer" means. If Microsoft ported it, that $9 ARM based computer that showed up on kickstarter last year could be a "full Windows 10 computer". They're trying to weed out early adopters to avoid dooming a product with known shortfalls that can be solved with product iteration and time (low FOV, tracking lag, etc). Like what Google Glass is doing, except they seem to be making it less "glamorous" and possibly tethering it to a PC of some sort.
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      Honestly, I think they've defined pretty well what "full Windows 10 computer" means in this case: You are strapping a full Xbox One with Kinect onto your head. Last I checked, you can't run a Kinect very well on a $9 ARM chip. Based on graphics we've seen in demos I doubt the system hardware is anything less than we see in an Xbox One, but it's definitely not less than what we see on a Surface Pro, form factor for form factor. It's possible that they are trying to weed out early adopters with a high cost, but with entire new hardware that's not been mass produced to date (the holographic display, the proprietary holographic processing unit) it certainly seems like this is probably more a reflection of actual production costs today. It's certainly long been a tradition of console game systems that the early development machines are an order of magnitude (as much as even 100x, historically) more expensive than the final retail hardware. (Which also historically has been a profit center for some console generations when they were charging the same development box costs long after the retail cost margin drops.) It's very much a case that I think the only real comparison is to the Xbox One and we don't have a lot of data on that as Xbox One never sold dev kits to the public, that's certainly something new with the Developer Edition of the HoloLens. Also, for what it's worth I've not heard any reports of "tracking lag" (in fact just the opposite from articles I've followed to date, that the HoloLens seems to have "tracking magic") and I'm willing to believe that the adjustments of the device's FOV are as much for safety reasons as anything else (we humans use our peripheral vision for a lot of things when navigating the real world). Certainly the same journalists complaining about the FOV have also stated that they've experienced different FOV in different demos.
  - ppog 11y ago
    They've said that the first version isn't targeted as a consumer device. They initially see it as a professional piece of kit for use by, for example, product designers. (At least that's how it was presented at the New Zealand MS conference.) Of course, then they show it off using Minecraft demos, recipe books, and a parent helping their kid in another city fix their sink. So sure, marketing it to consumers is the long game. But I'd guess that's some way off.
- pmelendez 11y ago
  I guess this could analogous to Xbox/ Xbox Dev Kit from a price perspective back in the day. We will see...
- gchadwick 11y ago
  I guess they haven't ramped up manufacturing for full production yet? Small batch runs will cost more. It may also be artifically high to stop so many people buying one for the fun of it. As they will (almost certainly) have limited supply they want everyone buying one to be serious about building an interesting application with it.
- gcb0 11y ago
  that's the price for "i have a CAD software company" clients.
deelowe 11y ago
Have the fixed the issues with the EXTREMELY NARROW field of view?
- boost_ 11y ago
  no they haven't, its still narrow as hell. nice one hackernews, downvoting the most important question in this thread... i guess this is full of MS fanboys that don't mind being scammed out of 3k dollars..
  - pmelendez 11y ago
    It is an annoying trend and I have seen it in similar discussions about Google and/or Apple. It almost feels like tribes within HN. As for the topic, they didn't specified the field of view, How could you tell they didn't fix it?
  - raesene4 11y ago
    I'm not sure the narrow field of vision is that important for a dev. kit. The goal is to let people work out how best to produce apps for this kind of interface. If they can't sort it for consumer release, that's a much bigger issue of course. My guess (and it's just that) would be that they'll be trying to improve field of vision for the consumer release, as from the reviews I read it was the one major negative people cited.
    - boost_ 11y ago
      well i would be more inclined to agree if they didn't announce their product with full view (at least 120º) capability. i mean, we all saw the videos from the announcement, and the "live" demos. and that was just pure lies no matter how you want to paint them. also even if they didn't lie, don't we need the dev kit to have the same full capabilities as the final product? would you acquire an early dev kit for some new console, only to find out that it has less ram, gpu and/or cpu than the final product? how can we actually test it fully?
      - 11y ago
kriro 11y ago
"""holographic computing""" Pretty sure they don't use any holographic technology and it's "just standard AR". US only...meh. There also doesn't seem to be any university licensing program. Could be done quite a bit better.
- cma 11y ago
  They use a holographic waveguide, but it isnt like looking at real volumetric hologram, the actual image formed is still flat at fixed focus. But you do get stereo and parallax from head movement, the only thing lacking is variable focus/eye accommodation.
- pmelendez 11y ago
  > US only...meh And Canada :)
- vlunkr 11y ago
  I think they are calling it holographic because more people will understand that than augmented reality.
- necubi 11y ago
  It's as much holographic as the Oculus (or other head-tracked HMDs), and the missing depth cue (accommodation) doesn't seem very important in practice. See here [0] for a good discussion on what is and is not holographic, in the context of the HoloLens, from an academic VR researcher. [0] http://doc-ok.org/?p=1172 http://doc-ok.org/?p=1172
danielvf 11y ago
TLDR: $3,000 dollars. This is basically using the free market to sort out who really needs the kits. Whereas the Rift dev kits could, and still can be, Ebayed for hundreds more than their purchase price.
beatpanda 11y ago
>To build a vibrant community, we are looking for a wide spectrum of developers to create diverse experiences. Oh, great! >You are a developer in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada where the Development Edition will first be available. >Please note that the Development Edition hardware and experiences are in English only. Oh.
silverlight 11y ago
I'm just getting an Error while trying to get to the Survey form.
ylem 11y ago
Does anyone have any thoughts about the pros and cons of this over the Oculus rift for scientific visualization? It seems that it might be easier to deal with user interaction for the Hololens, but without playing with one, it would be hard for me to say.
- danielvf 11y ago
  The hololens's first big advantage here is that you don't have to loose sight of the other people around you while using it. A couple of people can sit around and see both each other and the visualization they are working on. Secondly, you can see the environment around you. For science purposes this may not matter, but for industrial visualization, this makes all the difference in the world.
  - ylem 11y ago
    Thanks for that--I hadn't even considered the possibility of multiple viewers!
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      Yep, multiple viewers, including remote viewers, seems to be a big deal for Microsoft. Certainly that has been a big explicit focus of the JPL, Architecture, and Skype demos they've been showing. (It's also an implicit part of all their on-stage demos as well; supposedly the fancy camera rig is acting just like any other HoloLens and sharing the same scenes directly as the actual devices will in real time.)
bambang150 11y ago
Wow, there is a development one. Looks forward to download it for my project development. Love it!

122 points by pmelendez 11y ago

The Visual Field is way less than what they marketed at E3... Avoid HoloLens 1.0

Good God, $3,000 USD is a little outside my price range. Hopefully the consumer edition will be able to knock the price down a little bit. I really wanted to get my hands on one of these, but it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer.

WorldMaker 11y ago
They have said it was a full Windows 10 computer, so I'm not entirely shocked by the $3000 price, but I do think that the consumer version will likely have to be cheaper to sell it to the average consumer.
- tennysonmach 11y ago
  They can define what "full Windows 10 computer" means. If Microsoft ported it, that $9 ARM based computer that showed up on kickstarter last year could be a "full Windows 10 computer". They're trying to weed out early adopters to avoid dooming a product with known shortfalls that can be solved with product iteration and time (low FOV, tracking lag, etc). Like what Google Glass is doing, except they seem to be making it less "glamorous" and possibly tethering it to a PC of some sort.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    Honestly, I think they've defined pretty well what "full Windows 10 computer" means in this case: You are strapping a full Xbox One with Kinect onto your head. Last I checked, you can't run a Kinect very well on a $9 ARM chip. Based on graphics we've seen in demos I doubt the system hardware is anything less than we see in an Xbox One, but it's definitely not less than what we see on a Surface Pro, form factor for form factor. It's possible that they are trying to weed out early adopters with a high cost, but with entire new hardware that's not been mass produced to date (the holographic display, the proprietary holographic processing unit) it certainly seems like this is probably more a reflection of actual production costs today. It's certainly long been a tradition of console game systems that the early development machines are an order of magnitude (as much as even 100x, historically) more expensive than the final retail hardware. (Which also historically has been a profit center for some console generations when they were charging the same development box costs long after the retail cost margin drops.) It's very much a case that I think the only real comparison is to the Xbox One and we don't have a lot of data on that as Xbox One never sold dev kits to the public, that's certainly something new with the Developer Edition of the HoloLens. Also, for what it's worth I've not heard any reports of "tracking lag" (in fact just the opposite from articles I've followed to date, that the HoloLens seems to have "tracking magic") and I'm willing to believe that the adjustments of the device's FOV are as much for safety reasons as anything else (we humans use our peripheral vision for a lot of things when navigating the real world). Certainly the same journalists complaining about the FOV have also stated that they've experienced different FOV in different demos.
- ppog 11y ago
  They've said that the first version isn't targeted as a consumer device. They initially see it as a professional piece of kit for use by, for example, product designers. (At least that's how it was presented at the New Zealand MS conference.) Of course, then they show it off using Minecraft demos, recipe books, and a parent helping their kid in another city fix their sink. So sure, marketing it to consumers is the long game. But I'd guess that's some way off.
pmelendez 11y ago
I guess this could analogous to Xbox/ Xbox Dev Kit from a price perspective back in the day. We will see...
gchadwick 11y ago
I guess they haven't ramped up manufacturing for full production yet? Small batch runs will cost more. It may also be artifically high to stop so many people buying one for the fun of it. As they will (almost certainly) have limited supply they want everyone buying one to be serious about building an interesting application with it.
gcb0 11y ago
that's the price for "i have a CAD software company" clients.

deelowe 11y ago

Have the fixed the issues with the EXTREMELY NARROW field of view?

boost_ 11y ago
no they haven't, its still narrow as hell. nice one hackernews, downvoting the most important question in this thread... i guess this is full of MS fanboys that don't mind being scammed out of 3k dollars..
- pmelendez 11y ago
  It is an annoying trend and I have seen it in similar discussions about Google and/or Apple. It almost feels like tribes within HN. As for the topic, they didn't specified the field of view, How could you tell they didn't fix it?
- raesene4 11y ago
  I'm not sure the narrow field of vision is that important for a dev. kit. The goal is to let people work out how best to produce apps for this kind of interface. If they can't sort it for consumer release, that's a much bigger issue of course. My guess (and it's just that) would be that they'll be trying to improve field of vision for the consumer release, as from the reviews I read it was the one major negative people cited.
  - boost_ 11y ago
    well i would be more inclined to agree if they didn't announce their product with full view (at least 120º) capability. i mean, we all saw the videos from the announcement, and the "live" demos. and that was just pure lies no matter how you want to paint them. also even if they didn't lie, don't we need the dev kit to have the same full capabilities as the final product? would you acquire an early dev kit for some new console, only to find out that it has less ram, gpu and/or cpu than the final product? how can we actually test it fully?
    - 11y ago

kriro 11y ago

"""holographic computing""" Pretty sure they don't use any holographic technology and it's "just standard AR". US only...meh. There also doesn't seem to be any university licensing program. Could be done quite a bit better.

cma 11y ago
They use a holographic waveguide, but it isnt like looking at real volumetric hologram, the actual image formed is still flat at fixed focus. But you do get stereo and parallax from head movement, the only thing lacking is variable focus/eye accommodation.
pmelendez 11y ago
> US only...meh And Canada :)
vlunkr 11y ago
I think they are calling it holographic because more people will understand that than augmented reality.
necubi 11y ago
It's as much holographic as the Oculus (or other head-tracked HMDs), and the missing depth cue (accommodation) doesn't seem very important in practice. See here [0] for a good discussion on what is and is not holographic, in the context of the HoloLens, from an academic VR researcher. [0] http://doc-ok.org/?p=1172 http://doc-ok.org/?p=1172

danielvf 11y ago

TLDR: $3,000 dollars. This is basically using the free market to sort out who really needs the kits. Whereas the Rift dev kits could, and still can be, Ebayed for hundreds more than their purchase price.

beatpanda 11y ago

>To build a vibrant community, we are looking for a wide spectrum of developers to create diverse experiences. Oh, great! >You are a developer in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada where the Development Edition will first be available. >Please note that the Development Edition hardware and experiences are in English only. Oh.

silverlight 11y ago

I'm just getting an Error while trying to get to the Survey form.

ylem 11y ago

Does anyone have any thoughts about the pros and cons of this over the Oculus rift for scientific visualization? It seems that it might be easier to deal with user interaction for the Hololens, but without playing with one, it would be hard for me to say.

danielvf 11y ago
The hololens's first big advantage here is that you don't have to loose sight of the other people around you while using it. A couple of people can sit around and see both each other and the visualization they are working on. Secondly, you can see the environment around you. For science purposes this may not matter, but for industrial visualization, this makes all the difference in the world.
- ylem 11y ago
  Thanks for that--I hadn't even considered the possibility of multiple viewers!
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    Yep, multiple viewers, including remote viewers, seems to be a big deal for Microsoft. Certainly that has been a big explicit focus of the JPL, Architecture, and Skype demos they've been showing. (It's also an implicit part of all their on-stage demos as well; supposedly the fancy camera rig is acting just like any other HoloLens and sharing the same scenes directly as the actual devices will in real time.)

bambang150 11y ago

Wow, there is a development one. Looks forward to download it for my project development. Love it!