'This was not a totally immersive experience because objects would get cut off long before you would naturally expect them to drop out of sight. 'The one disappointment for me in trying HoloLens was that the field of view was very limited,' TechCrunch stated. But once you get into the experience of playing a game with it, the size issue seems to fade away.'Ĭrecente didn't have a big problem with the field of view, but almost every other write-up of the technology also brought up the tiny field of view. 'It sounds small, and in some cases, including once you first put it on, it looks small. 'The virtual screen was about the size of a deck of cards if you held it in front of your eyes with your arm half-extended,' our own Brian Crecente wrote. This field of view issue is brought up in nearly every hands-on with the hardware, and we were able to check out the hardware at E3. That video is interesting in general, but take a look at this visualization of the actual field of view in the current HoloLens hardware. This is a hands-on report of what it's actually like to use the technology from our sister publication, The Verge. The illusion seems to be complete you can surround yourself with holograms!

The videos all show a version of reality that seems to wrap around the viewer, covering your field of view with the augmented reality display. Imagine a technology that allowed you to cover a wall with a virtual screen, or create three-dimensional objects out of thin air to manipulate in real time.

You can see and interact with virtual objects as if they were real. HoloLens is a self-contained piece of equipment that paints the world around you with what appear to be holograms. Microsoft deserves a ton of credit for creating this technology and showing onstage that it is, in fact, real.Īll that being said, you may need to rein in the hype-train just a bit. The hardware and software needed to deliver high-quality virtual reality is quickly maturing but according to many people I've spoken with in the development community, augmented reality is a tangled mess of unsolved problems that may prove much harder to fix than virtual reality. Microsoft is proving themselves to be the king of augmented reality. I wasn't able to play it myself, but the demo shown on stage was legitimately amazing.

Minecraft field of view