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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's HoloLens has an acceptable form factor. They crammed an incredible amount of electronics into a reasonably lightweight self-contained headset. Cordless, even. It's nowhere near as clunky as the HTC Vibe, Oculus Rift, or the 1990s stuff. The field of view is too narrow, but maybe that can be fixed.

There's still no killer app for AR, but that may be a price point problem. If the HoloLens was cheap enough for Pokemon Go, it would sell quite well.

VR may be stuck in the FPS game niche forever.

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I'm not sure most consumers would agree. Fashion-conscious people (read: a large part of consumer society) likely still wouldn't wear it. It is too bulky and obvious still. Even Google Glass was too much.

I increasingly feel like it will take a fashion-forward approach like Apple and Snapchat have done in their respective areas to make these devices hip enough to truly gain mass market acceptance.

The HoloLens doesn't seem like a device you'd be wearing out and about on city streets. Seems more like something you'd be wearing at home in your living room by yourself or with friends, or at work as part of your business process, not something you'd wear on your face going out to a bar to meet a date.

Sure it's bulky and obvious, but it can also be very cool. https://imgur.com/PEZ9LtJ Well you might need to be an astronaut to pull off this look :)

It shouldn't be marketed as a lifestyle device of any kind. It's a tool. It's a toy. There's just no way to pass it off as something a millenial might wear walking down the street to look cool.

Yeah, the HoloLens form factor currently is great. Had a chance to try it a few weeks ago.... When it becomes available to consumers, I'd definitely pick it over Vive or Oculus for gaming applications.

The wires on the current VR setups are a nightmare, as is the requirement for a $2K PC setup.

You can probably get away with a $1k PC build these days, and the HoloLens itself is pretty expensive now as a devkit ($3k IIRC).

The HoloLens is great, but it doesn't really seem to be designed for gaming. Games are cool to demo in AR, but less practical I feel, given the requirement of meshing with the real world. Meanwhile, gaming in VR is taking off decently, and the FOV in the current generation of VR devices is much better than what the HoloLens has, and that's a pretty big deal for gaming.

Also, wireless is almost here for VR headsets: http://www.roadtovr.com/tpcast-wireless-vr-htc-vive-relased-...

The wires are annoying I agree, but not really a "nightmare".

Also, as far as the $1k-2k PC thing goes, I think that a lot of people (especially early adopters) will already have a decent PC so the cost of a nice GPU instead of a more modest one is a lot less than the cost of a whole computer.

That was my experience when messing with the Rift dev unit I got a couple years ago. It was more an excuse to buy a new video card than a need for a whole new computer.

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