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I love that MS tries to push the boundaries with new tech and ideas, but I absolutely loathe them because of their fake marketing of the products they actually do end up creating. Let me take this moment to remind everyone of the Kinect teaser [1]. Now watch the Hololens teaser again [2]. They couldn't deliver the Kinect as advertised 6 years ago, and the fact is they won't be able to deliver the Hololens either as advertised. $3000 is a lot of money to put on a lie.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qlHoxPioM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA

It's fascinating to compare the comment sections under both videos. The first one is full of loathing and mockery for Microsoft and the features they simply did not deliver, the second one boils down to "this is the future, Microsoft is building the future". I wonder how the Hololens comments will look a few years from today.

My favourite:

The games:

- Fake Fighter 2 Turbo - Project Fake Racing - FakeZilla - Fifa Fakeball 2009 - Tony Hawk's Fake Skater 9

"$3000 is a lot of money to put on a lie."

Nonsense, $3000 is peanuts compared to the costs to actually write anything for it. I.e. if you are expecting to be entertained by the device and not augment your creative or professional output by it you are probably not in the core market. I have no idea how it will turn out but it's not a VR helmet as such, it's a wearable HUD with AR capabilities.

Oh I know exactly what it is, and I am a developer with the money who could buy it. But why would I when I know it will be nothing like what they said it is? I think I'll wait and watch the inevitable backlash before I spend my money.

>I think I'll wait and watch the inevitable backlash before I spend my money.

To the opposite of Kinect, a LOT of tech journalist and enthusiast tried hololens. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with only issues about the field of view being raised. I personally tried Hololens, I was blown away by the technology. I own an Oculus Rift DK2 and I tried the unreleased consumer version of oculus rift. They are both great technology, and Oculus clearly offer a more immersive gaming experience, but I personally saw more potential with hololens, and generally speaking I thought the technology was cooler. Anyway, if you are genuinely interested, you should definitely try to get at any of the event where they allow people to try it out.

I can understand the feeling of betrayal, but do you think they did it on purpose? I rather assume they were overly optimistic and reality made it harder to deliver on their promises.

That's naive. They are always looking to maximise profits, and what better way than to sell it as a dream product way ahead of any of it's competitors?

That is overly pessimistic. Given the years of research that went into this product and obviously has continued into the hololens - I highly doubt it was for this little scheme you mention.

Do you honestly think Microsoft is going to make a killer profit from Hololens from selling dev kits? Give me a break. The technology and cost behind this is astronomical, Microsoft is likely selling this close to cost.

People are singling out Microsoft here, but seemingly forget all of the promises Apple and Google are always making, when Google had to can Glass and Apple can't even get Airdrop to work correctly.

I'm not making any judgment call on this product, but selling something as a dream product at a high price and delivering a product that disappoints as a dream product can give the mass market, where the bulk of the money is, to a competitor coming out with a product that is inferior in features to your v1 product, even if your v2 product ships at the same time as your competitor's product with better features at a lower price.

but do you think they did it on purpose

That's why you look at track record to assess behavior. If it happens once, you can forgive it as optimism or somesuch. If it's a pattern, you would then need to assume it's deliberate.

I am not a gamer, but I bought an XBox 360 and Kinect because it had the messenger app and my parents 10000 miles away can see their grandkids who are always running around. And it worked really well. Then one day, they dropped support for messenger. Now, if you want to have the same functionality, you have to get an XBOX One that integrates with Skype. Several people complained in Microsoft forums about taking away a functionality they explicitly paid for. They were greeted with a link to the legal Terms of Service. That is it. I am not going to get something from a company that does this bait and switch.

And who is that? I'm curious.

I'm not here to say that MS doesn't have people doing bullshit marketing powerplays like the one you described. But in the console market, that's pretty much how the business works.

And in the larger PC market, you've got 3 realistic options and they're all frustrating in one way or another.

Ouch, I'd not heard about that particular bit of functionality removal.

They removed a perfectly working functionality. At the time of removal they said it was because they wanted to bring in Skype to XBOX 360. But skype never came to Xbox 360 and it came only in XBox One. This entire feature that is touted in this video [1] is not available in Xbox 360 now. And I bought an XBox 360 because Microsoft's marketing material said it is available.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBsTimrYTIQ

And the [2] video is already a steaming pile of bullshit.

The AR side is equivalent of taking a 6" phablet and holding it at arms length: that dinky rectangle is your augmented viewport.

It doesn't do anywhere near a full AR on everything everywhere you look.

Exactly. But what you described won't make money so we get these videos that don't take place in reality. Majority of non-technical users believe them too hence the hype. I'm interested to see how the reaction changes once hololens comes out.

If anything, I would consider their videos and their dishonesty as fraudulent.

It's also telling, that my previous post in this article was modded down pretty hard. a few of us went to Chicago to demo this, and I was sorely unimpressed. And the AR was only one facet. The bigger problem is their choice of active scanned IR.

They mentioned that their new API will to geocode everything you scan with GPS points, reference points (wifi) and other ways of triangulation. And those points will be linked to Lat/Lon. That sounds exciting and scary both... but with failure to adapt to that huge glowing ball of wideband radiation means the Hololens is a fail outside or near windows.

I guess that leaves the basements to us?

> And those points will be linked to Lat/Lon

Do they "conveniently" upload all this to "the cloud" too?

The "Product Evangelists" refused to answer that, by talking about how Cool the platform was. And it was also limited by the fact that there were only about 7 minutes of questions taken.

My guess is that yes, they would sync to MS local maps of your environments. It would make a great deal of sense, as that's where Google has a huge hole in on their maps service. It would put MS on the "map", literally and figuratively.

You are overly exaggerating the field of view issue. I've tried the hololens twice already (the untethered version they will be shipping). Field of view is definitely smaller that I'd like, but it's MUCH bigger than a 6 inch phablet at arms length. It's closer to the size a 24 inch monitor sitting on your desk at arm length.

Almost all tech journalist that tried it were blown away by the experience. Most of them mentioned the field of view issue, but I haven't read anyone saying that it was such an issue that it made the technology any less impressive.

There is a difference for Hololens, they already presented half of the goodies in the video LIVE.

I suspect that in the environment of a highly-controlled demo, a Kinect could appear to do most of what you see in its "teaser".

Yes I've seen the video, and it scares me to what lengths they will go to to lie, and fool people such as yourself. Video [1] for those who haven't seen it (skip to 2:25).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgakdcEzVwg

When people experience the actual FoV of the Hololens they will be disappointed, because MS has engineered the demo to appear edge-to-edge.

Not going to comment on my interactions with Microsoft, but the Excel team did a really interesting AMA on reddit a little while ago [1].

There's also quite a nice round table video with some of the original authors 30 years on. [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_mic...

[2] http://www.geekwire.com/2015/recalc-or-die-30-years-later-mi...

I am routinely astonished by Apple's R&D capabilities, yet many interactions I have with their actual software leaves me with a dire impression. The lesson is: familiarity breeds contempt.

Which brings me to my favorite quote: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrup

You can expand that quote from [programming languages] to everything and it remains equally true. There's very few things everyone uses that they don't spend at least some time complaining about.

Microsoft Research is a great institution. It's the XEROX PARC of our time, largely failing to commercialise its work. Although this time it tends to be locked up in patents so it's not commercialised by anyone else.

Skype is terrible, I have to use it to connect with family in Europe & Australia and it's getting to the point where I'm contemplating teaching my 70 yr old mother how ti use google hangouts (shudders)

However, Skype for Business (formally known as Lync) is rock solid.

I would postulate that since the rebranding of Lync, the old consumer-Skype is on an end-of-life roadmap.

Hololens + LyncSkype in an enterprise & smb setting makes a lot of sense.

I have the exact opposite opinion. Skype still works quite well (although sometimes it's not great about syncing chats across devices, but it's better than Facebook), while Skype for Business has constant issues and makes me miss Lync.

Urk, I take it you haven't used Lync outside of Windows? The Mac version is horrible mixture of Silverlight+HTML5+Standalone App in which none of the mentioned pieces can't handle the full functionality. On the other hand Skype and Hipchat just works (unless you get hit by the Skype bugs:p).

I feel the exact opposite on both counts. I've never really had a problem with Skype for desktop (though I agree that Hangouts is better), but the week after I updated my work machine to Lync was full of lag, dropped connections, and a suddenly bloated interface.

This is bizarre because your experience is the exact opposite of mine (and the grandparent) - for me, Skype for Business is damn near perfect in every way, Skype desktop I hate with a fiery passion. Microsoft is a strange company.

Skype for business is the biggest dumpster fire of software that I've had to use for work in the last few years. Truly awful- resource hog, screen sharing rarely works, and frequently crashes.

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this. Every little corner of the application seems to have a new UX failure or short coming that blows my mind.

Likewise, I'm amazed at how bad it is. Screen sharing issues, copy paste issues, lock ups (while everything else continues working fine), problems with not saving old messages properly, can't send messages because they are too long (really!?) ....on and on. Microsoft has been screwing up messengers for 20? years now - yes, I know different teams - and still, every new release or client is literally 1 step forward, 1 step back.

Microsoft is a HUGE company. I don't say this dismissively, even those who know the numbers don't always understand how distinctly many orgs work. It is essentially a bunch of independent companies that HAPPEN to be working on top of each other, with some common tech and staffing.

I'll admit I'm hesitant to speak more bluntly, but I'm sure you can inferr what I'm trying to imply from the above; namely, it'll to be seen once holo comes out which org it was in, metaphorically :). If you were looking for a comparison, destiny probably has more predictive ability in terms of dev patterns, since the studios I believe (may be talking out of my ass) had a hand in making both.

I'm also very excited about holo, a bit sad though that they didn't really make dev kits available internally to anyone who wasn't on the direct team; or even with a meaningful enough discount to make it viable to me as a hobby project.

They did make the dev kits available internally, you just had to submit your idea and get selected to receive a dev kit.

In all fairness, I really don't think Skype's UI has gotten any worse. It's always been rubbish to me.

80/20 rule maybe... It's easy to have great ideas and even deliver on most of the idea ... But to actually make it great that final 20 percent is really hard and easy to mess up during the ebb and flow of product development...

>and revolutionary product

I fear that the limited field of vision will severely cripple the experience.

The problem was that it wasn't R&D. Research was separated from Development. This is something Satya publicly stated he wanted to change, and I hope he will.

It's called augmented reality, and HoloLens is just one of them, GoogleLens is another. I played with several research prototypes some years ago. All devices had a too small POV (point of view) and/or bad graphics. HoloLens suffer from a very small POV, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11195008

Xbox and Kinect?

Kinect is really neat. It's hard to make it into a fun gaming device. I'm sure some people enjoy using it, but even for my 4 year old, he prefers a controller.

Kinect and similar depth cams really are neat but I think their potential won't be realized for a little while and selling an early one as a game controller belies that potential.

With VR, I think work on depth cams and software to "stitch" together data streams from multiple devices will become very important. It's one of the only ways you can currently record and transmit (admittedly low-quality in current iterations) actual 3d video that can be viewed from any angle.

When you look at early low quality webcams compared to digital video today, then apply that to something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghgbycqb92c

you can see how it opens up the possibility of real VR movies (not just pano) and even VR telepresence.

Wait for version 2.