HoloLens 2: inside Microsoft's new headset

(electronic sounds) - This is the HoloLens 2 and compared to the first version, it is a little lighter and a little smaller, but when you put it on, what you see is much bigger. It will come out much later this year for $3,500, but it will only be sold to businesses, not consumers. Still, the technology inside this thing is really impressive, let's talk about why. By the way, I should say now that if you've ever listened to The Vergecast, you know that I always say, when I talk about this stuff, that my wife works for Oculus, which is part of Facebook, but that doesn't affect how I think about this. technology.

A lot has changed with HoloLens in the two years since the first developer version was released. Although what Microsoft is showing off is still fairly early as a prototype and has a lot of half-finished software, I think it's a big step forward, at least from a technological perspective. All of those changes started with a decision Microsoft had to make: to fix the biggest problem with the original Hololens, the field of view was too small. You would see holograms in front of you, sure, but only directly in front of you and they would disappear if you turned your head a little.

To fix that, Microsoft had to opt for a completely different type of display technology, like the Vaunt and North smart glasses. Hololens 2 uses lasers to create a MEMS display, but instead of projecting an image directly onto the retina, Microsoft's laser goes into these waveguides in front of your eyes. It works by having lasers hit mirrors that scan 54,000 times per second and direct photons into the waveguides. So to make an image bigger, all Microsoft has to do is increase the angle of the mirrors and it can get really bright. The images I saw were 500 nits and each eye had the equivalent of a 2K resolution screen, the result is that you get a wider field of view, the holograms are not cropped as much and they simply feel more natural, they have a higher density Also, they just feel more real.

Microsoft is also beating its chest on this technology, here's the quote: There will be no competition for the next two or three years that can come close to this level of fidelity. Yes, they believe in it. There's another technology here too, it has these little cameras on the bridge of your nose that authenticate you using a retina scan and adjust the image to fit the pupillary distance between your eyes. Of course, it runs Windows, but it does so with a Snapdragon processor to maximize battery life. Now, the difference between AR, VR and MR gets very confusing, depending on who you talk to, but for Microsoft, this is Mixed Reality and for it to be real, the digital world needs to interact with the real world.

To achieve this, there is a new Azure Connected Sensor right here on the front that can scan the room and can do so at a much higher level of fidelity. - In a spatial mapping, Hololens 1 was just a big mix, it was like dropping a blanket over the real world. - Good. - With Hololens 2 we go from spatial mapping to the semantic understanding of space. As you understand, what is a sofa? What is a human sitting on a couch? What is the difference between a window and a wall? - To start, Hololens 2 understands something really important: your hand.

The first Hololens made you do these really awkward little pinching movements to select things, the new one can see how you actually articulate your fingers, so you can naturally grab objects, resize them, and move them. If you see a button, you can simply press it. I just pressed a button, which was really awesome, because there was a little three dot menu and every time there's a three dot menu, I'm a nerd, I press the three dots, I press the hamburger menu, there was an X and I just pressed it as if it were a real button and the hologram disappeared.

It is a much more instinctive way of interacting and you don't need to learn as much to use the new Hololens. That's how some of this new technology works, but that brings us to another question. For whom is this? - For frontline workers. - Well. - In fact, if you think about seven billion people in the world, people like you and me, knowledge workers are by far the minority. Most of the working population is not doing that, not all of them are designing clay model cars, but maybe the people who are fixing their jet engine, maybe they are the people who in some commercial space, maybe the doctors who are operating on you are in an operating room. - It is designed for a different use case.

For workers who do not sit at the computer at all. - People who, in a sense, have been neglected or haven't had access to technology, because PCs and tablets and phones don't really lend themselves to those experiences and in the world that we live in today, where technology is Ubiquitous and ubiquitous in our environment, devices like Hololens allow you to access that and be productive with it. - Yeah, the way most people think about consumer... I mean, it's there in the name, Consumer Technology, but you're not thinking of this as a consumer technology product. - That's right, not yet. - It is a technological product. - That's exactly right. - Is it because you don't think the experiences are ready? - I never positioned it as a consumer product. - Good. - And that is having intellectual honesty in this state, this is the best and highest watermark of what can be achieved in Mixed Reality and I am here to tell you that it is not yet a consumer product. - That's not exactly true.

Microsoft definitely showed a lot of consumer use cases with the first Hololens, although it was technically just a developer kit. It showed games and even a traditional web browser, but the point is that Microsoft is moving away from all that, it's now for people who need to work with their hands and therefore have been stuck using computers in really awkward ways until now. . , if they ever used them. If Hololens are going to be used every day, all day, in situations like factories or in the outside world, they need to be much more comfortable. That's why the innards of the computer are now at the back, so that the center of gravity is exactly in the center of the head, that makes it much more comfortable and, by the way, it now also works better with glasses.

Now when you put it on, you put it on like you would put on a baseball cap and then you just adjust it a little bit to make it tight, but you don't have to put it on as tight to do that. get comfortable in your head, there's a pair of speakers right here, so you can hear the sound and you know what? It's probably awkward for you to watch, so let me do this and now you can watch me while I talk about the rest of the things here. There are a lot of other really clever things, the way it fits your head is much more comfortable, you can put a top strap on it if you need it.

This foam here on the front of your forehead is custom designed to fit multiple body types and it also comes off if you need to clean it off, because it makes you sweat. So Hololens 2 is coming out later this year and will again cost companies who want to buy it around $3,500 each, but it's aimed at workers and I like the idea of ​​bringing computers to people who haven't yet benefited from them. have PCs or phones at work. It may not be something you can buy in a store, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a real chance of changing our understanding of what computers could be like. (slow, heavy bass music) Hi everyone, thank you so much for watching.

Do you think you could use this in your work? Let me know in the comments and if you're sad that you can't go out and buy a Hololens yourself, don't worry. There will be a ton of new devices at Mobile World Congress this year and we have complete coverage of all of them here at The Verge.