Round 2 with HoloLens: A bright future ahead, a narrow field of view today

Sounds like the earlier tech demos were running on more powerful hardware and could handle a lot more modeling and display. Now that they're moving toward getting it to work in something you might actually buy and use, it will have more to do with optimization for lower-powered and lighter components.

Still, I can't help but be excited by this stuff. I said the same thing when I got my Oculus dev unit: this is a lot like early portable and mobile computing. There were tradeoffs necessary to get the first portable computers to fit in a briefcase but now we've got ultrabooks. And I remember seeing early smart phone prototypes that did a lot more on a breadboard than when they were big, clunky Treos and PocketPCs at Radio Shack.

But things that can only be done in prototype or with less "wow!" in early consumer products have a way of progressing pretty quickly once engineering and software development races to catch up to demand and proof of concept.