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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

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

I would hazard a guess that the $3,000 price tag for this dev kit would easily pass $10,000 with a significantly larger FOV. I don't have a detailed understanding of the optical magic Microsoft is using for the display, but given how small it was in the previously demonstrated prototype, where cost was no issue, an economical way to scale it up is probably still a few years off.

No, it's not fixable with the hardware they are using.

There's a lot of certainty here about the capabilities of a just-announced device that was only seen under strict NDAs before today. Can you give more information?

"HoloLens' final version will keep limited field of view, says Microsoft" http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/18/8809811/hololens-field-of-v...

The limitations of their approach are clear and well understood.

You don't need to be "read in" to know that they are using a version of the waveguide-based display [1] though it helps to be an AR developer ;). The hard limit on these is the shape and resolution of the SBG display system which maxes out around 40 degrees.

ODG uses a similar system and has the same FOV.

You need a wholesale new way of doing displays to get to a wider FOV.

[1]http://www.displaydaily.com/articles/446-sponsored-articles/...

edit: Please don't reference Magic Leap as having a solution to this - I'm super tired of discussing them.

I don't believe the device demo experiences themselves were under NDA, however recording devices had been restricted. Oliver Kreylos did a great writeup a while back on measuring the FOV: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1274

That sucks. I wonder how the market is going to react to that. It was fairly heavily criticized at E3.

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..

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?

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.

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?

oh sure, in an ideal world the dev kit would have all the capabilities of the live consumer device.

But when you're developing a new category of device, that's not always possible.

For a very related example, look at the Oculus Rift approach to VR. they've been iterating on developer kits slowly improving the hardware while letting people feel out how to use that class of device.

Ultimately it'll be down to individual dev. houses whether it makes sense for them to invest at this stage, or wait till it's closer to consumer launch

> 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?

I guess for MS is important to have a good portfolio of apps before the product is launched to the public. This class of unpolished dev kits are not unheard in MS world, Do you remember when the dev kits for the XBox were Apple Power Macs?

they were, but the hardware was the same was it not?

Not really, just the processor was the same, but it was the best they could do in a short time.

> only to find out that it has less ram, gpu and/or cpu than the final product?

That doesn't sound like a problem. Now if it turns out it is less powerful than the final product, that would be a serious issue.

The reason the narrow FOV is important is because right now, the FOV is so small that you can't see a person's hands and face simultaneously at a comfortable conversation distance. There's a huge number of applications where you won't know the suitability, or even be able to visualize/test if it'll work well w/o knowing a target FOV for a consumer revision.

"nice one hackernews, downvoting the most important question in this thread... " We're less than an hour in and the OP question is the top comment... I'm not sure what's so wrong to you about the HN community here?

when i replied more than 30min ago there was already 11 replies and the one i replied to was on the bottom in grey color..

and now they down vote me.. lol whatever guys go crazy!

'narrow as hell' is your assessment based on what?

Is there some industry standard minimum field of view for AR glasses that this fails to meet? Have the people who tested HoloLens out who complained about the field of view being narrower than they would like said that it made the technology useless, or just that it limited it? Seems like you think it's a showstopper, I'd be interested to know why.

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