Microsoft made an unfortunate decision in taking a really promising technology and giving it a deliberately misleading name that's bound to enrage the early ado

Microsoft made an unfortunate decision in taking a really promising technology and giving it a deliberately misleading name that's bound to enrage the early adopter market. HoloLens isn't in any sense holography -- it's an augmented reality device that integrates light-angle depth cues. Augmented reality is important. Glass failed miserably at it, because despite all the sensors, Glass locked down the ability to use them -- and on top of that, Glass locked down most of the FOV, preventing meaningful spacial integration between real and virtual objects. The Oculus Rift will, largely, not be used for augmented reality -- you'd need to add a camera, and there are definite safety concerns if the camera is damaged or disconnected. Depth cues are also important. VR sickness is not merely related to lag, but also to lack of coordination between depth cues -- something that is hormone-bound (which is why women have a comparatively harder time with head mounted displays -- estrogen levels are linked with the degree to which stereoscopy dominates over color and light angle depth cues). What microsoft has introduced is the first head mounted display that won't make women puke -- which could conceivably double its market over the Rift (since a little over half of all serious video game players are female). However, when you introduce an exciting piece of consumer electronics -- especially something so novel that a brand new API has to be made for it -- you need to be targeting the technical people who will be using the development kits. Those people are exactly the same people who are likely to refuse to develop on HoloLens because some marketroid who didn't know what a hologram was decided it sounded cool. Glass also alienated developers, but arguably in a more extreme way -- by limiting them to static web pages, basically. But, Google has good mindshare among techies compared to Microsoft. It may end up being a wash. After all, Glass essentially failed because it was borderline-useless, and it was borderline-useless because the designers pulled a Steve Jobs and heavily handicapped third party developers; Microsoft, on the other hand, may end up pulling an Atari Jaguar on itself -- having too few developers and too few properties because nobody ended up putting down the effort to learn how to integrate with the thing. The most likely result, however, will be that Microsoft will do what it did with the Surface -- before HoloLens comes to market it will have transformed from a proper AR device to something more like Glass, the same way Surface started out as a computing coffee table with all sorts of interesting features and ended up becoming an uninteresting tablet by the time it was released. Then, some other company will take their idea of using micro-mirror arrays to handle angular depth cues in an AR display, and produce something indistinguishable from the original demo much cheaper.