It's just so much easier to explain to people what it is if you say Holographic vs Augmented Reality - even though it is technically wrong. Kudos to MSFT for making that leap.
[1] Shameless plug for (http://www.visidraft.com), my AR CAD company.
People will learn new words that define new things and then suddenly it will seem the most natural thing in the world to call it by that name.
Smart Phones were hot tech, but our non-technical families didn't really get the point until suddenly those "smart phones" were "iPhones".
Web searches were a mystical dark art, with all your Alta Vista voodoo, until there was a single box with an algorithm that did a pretty good job finding what you meant... and then many competitors later, someone called one of those boxes "Google" and now that's the verb we use.
Marketing, sales, adoption drive the names things come to be known by. Sure, in reality it's Augmented Reality, but if in 5 years everyone's talking about their sweet new Holographic ski goggles, it's still AR in the mainstream.
A rose by any other name
We re-appropriate words all the time in English, and it's generally a fine thing to do, specialists' consternation notwithstanding.
Also what Google brought that Altavista didn't have was that it actually returned relevant results, not pages of spam where webmaster cranked as many keywords as they could (including "Pamela Anderson", always).
All the companies are branding as "mobile." I don't think they really even sell household corded phones anymore, we don't have to be specific about them.
If I wanted a corded phone, I think I'd have to use that specific modifier to get one.
Anyway, back to the point--say "mobile phone" to Americans and they know it's a cellular phone.
I bet it would take along time for most people asked "how does a vacuum cleaner work?" to use the word vacuum, apart from as a name for the object.
But yeah, I wouldn't say "vacuum" as a method of action unless you really drilled down. (Something about "pump" and "sucking", but I'd have to think for a bit to get to the actual physical "vacuum" aspect of it.)
Also 'clicker' for remote.
But vacuum cleaners and and cell phones contain the name the explanation of what they are and do. "augmented reality" doesn't. Holographic... it does a better job, at least for some people.
"Mobile phone" could have made sense to someone even before the introduction of mobile phones. But I think the word "cell phone" only took on meaning after the introduction of the device itself.
In comparison Radio tends to have a single tower that sends radio waves and does not care about who is listing. The advantage for cellphones is you can reuse the bandwidth from the same small set of frequencies across the country AND maintain a phonecall durring a handoff (where raido keeps forcing you to change stations on a long trip). The issue is the phone's need to rebroadcast their position constantly which eats’ battery life. It's even worse when they fail to connect to a tower as they just keep trying until the battery fails.
Granted, an end user might care, but MMX or SSE mean little to most Intel customers. 'with techron', 'dual turbo', 'LED TV's', 'tessellation', 'electrolytes'
Augmented reality, on the other hand...
However, I doubt this is the case, else they wouldn't just slap this announcement at the end of a boring Windows 10 presentation. I mean, all I could remember about this presentation was: "Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10 with HOLOGRAMS using Windows 10! Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10."
I keep feeling like watching the Longhorn demo at PDC 2003...
So noting they have described defies the laws of physics.
Edit: although, of course they'll need some intelligence on the surroundings to identify surfaces and stuff. But imagine like re-decorating your work room, adding scifi textures or something, and maybe pipes or whatever ;p
Most likely it suffers the same shaky snap laggy tracking like every other AR setup.
I did see a tiny bit of judder in the footage that was supposed to be exactly what the person wearing the glasses would see, but it was hard to tell.
In case any reader here weren't aware how Kinect works, it sends to the developer a 2D image of the depth. Of course as walod says, there's work to do to identify surfaces (as you can see on the image below, background elements are excluded).
http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/hands-on-with-the-xbox-one/micro...
EX: http://www.photographyblogger.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06... Now picture an infocus immage behind the blurry background pen's.
Pretty much everything in this space is incorrect on some level. People casually call the Oculus "VR" when its just a HMD. The VR is going to be the software that works with the HMD. This is like calling a joystick a game.
Personally, I like the hologram branding. Its like the Star Trek holodeck, which invokes a really neat sense of futurism.
What people? Things I've never heard anybody say:
"Can you hand me my Oculus air quotes VR?"
"Dude, I spilled deer urine all over my Oculus virtual reality!"
I can imagine a northern european saying it in english, but those guys kind of sound like lolcats anyway:
"Sven, can I has Oculus virtual reality?"
Personally, I dislike the hologram branding - yet another corruption to spread confusion. I understand the motive, I just don't like it.
So sad...