About Microsoft HoloLens Headset
HoloLens is an Augmented Reality headset developed and manufactured by Microsoft. This head-mounted smartgalsses runs a Windows Holographic operating system.
The current development version of the HoloLens features a 2.3-megapixel widescreen stereoscopic display, a Spatial sound red 3D audio speakers (which doesn't obscure external sounds), accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer,ambient light sensor, a 120°×120° depth camera, a 2MP photographic video camera, Bluetooth 4.1 LE and Wi-Fi connectivity. It has 2GB of RAM, 64GB of flash internal memory, has 2GB of RAM (1GB HPU RAM) and operates via gestural commands which can be detected via the on-board sensors. Also unlike a VR headset that relies on external processing power to run its apps and games, the HoloLens AR headset has a full computer built into the headset itself.
All these HoloLens sensors give the headset an ability to read and understand what the surrounding environment looks like. The headset utilizes a Holographic Processing Unit (HPU), which was custom-made by Microsoft specifically for this particular headset. ;This coprocessor allows the headset to efficiently construct spatial mapping, gesture recognition and voice and speech recognition, with all that done in real-time.
This Augmented Reality headset offers a different visual and interaction experience than Virtual Reality, because it doesn't completely obscure the player's field of view, and the game objects can appear all around you wherever you are. It can understand the real objects in the scene and interact with them, unlike Virtual Reality, where the entire experience is virtual.
HoloLens opens up a new world of creative app possibilities, which can produce interactive apps and games that use the digital content in relation to real world objects. The 3D Holographic content is blended with your physical world using holograms, allowing more natural and some say, more immersive experience than VR. The digital information beautifully overlays and seems to exists in your real world. ;Microsoft's HoloLens wasn't designed to replace the real world like VR but blend with it.
In my opinion, it opens up a way for many new types of social interactivity games and apps that can create completely unique and enjoyable experience that most people haven't experienced before, prior to HoloLens.