Enhanced by advancements across the board, including in the visual display system, making holograms even more vibrant and realistic
Microsoft has announced HoloLens 2, designed to deliver a comfortable and immersive mixed reality experience.
Mixed reality on HoloLens 2 combines an untethered device with apps and solutions that help people across a business to learn, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. It is the culmination of breakthroughs in hardware design, artificial intelligence (AI), and mixed reality development from Microsoft.
Immersion with HoloLens 2 is enhanced by advancements across the board, including in the visual display system, making holograms even more vibrant and realistic. Microsoft has more than doubled the field of view in HoloLens 2, while maintaining the holographic density of 47 pixels per degree of sight.
HoloLens 2 contains a new display system that enables these advances in performance to operate at low power.
Also, taking advantage of Microsoft’s new time-of-flight depth sensor, combined with built-in AI and semantic understanding, HoloLens 2 enables direct manipulation of holograms with the same instinctual interactions the user would anticipate with physical objects in the real world.
In addition to the improvements in the display engine and direct manipulation of holograms, HoloLens 2 contains eye-tracking sensors that make interacting with holograms even more natural. Users can log in with Windows Hello enterprise-grade authentication through iris recognition, making it easy for multiple people to quickly and securely share the device.
Comfort is enhanced by a more balanced centre of gravity, the use of light carbon-fibre material and a new mechanism for donning the device without readjusting.
Commented Julia White, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure, in a blog: “This is a tremendously exciting time for Microsoft, our partners, our customers, the computing industry and indeed the world. The virtually limitless computing power and capability of the cloud combined with increasingly intelligent and perceptive edge devices embedded throughout the physical world create experiences we could only imagine a few short years ago.
“When intelligent cloud and intelligent edge experiences are infused with mixed reality, we have a framework for achieving amazing things and empowering even more people….. We are entering a new era of computing, one in which the digital world goes beyond two-dimensional screens and enters the three-dimensional world. This new collaborative computing era will empower us all to achieve more, break boundaries and work together with greater ease and immediacy in 3D.”
Time-to-value is accelerated by Microsoft mixed reality applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Layout and the new Dynamics 365 Guides applications.
HoloLens 2 will be available this year at a price of $3,500.
