[Analemma_]

Some bullet points I wrote when I tried it:

- The display technology is very nice. I was very impressed by how good the object permanence was: when you put an object somewhere, there is no lag or jitter when you move your head and it stays anchored to the spot. The holograms are reasonably bright and opaque.

- Also, when you pin an object somewhere, it stays there even when you walk around the room. It even stays if you pin it in like the middle of the room where there are no obvious reference points or anchors to use.

- The field of view is neither great nor terrible. It's usable but more would of course be better.

- The major downside is the interaction: "air-clicking" is not great and the gestures to trigger various actions aren't very reliable. It really needs hand controllers like the Vive has.

- The unit itself is comfortable, much more so than the Vive. There was an annoying lens-flare-like glare below the field of view. Not sure if that was my unit not set up correctly or a problem common to all of them.

Overall I'm quite impressed, although I probably wouldn't buy one even if I had $3,000 to burn. V2 will probably be the one to get, if they expand the FOV.

[drewrv]

This is pretty much exactly my review. A couple things I'd add is that being completely wireless is pretty amazing. Having no trackers to set up or tower to connect it to is also pretty amazing. Turn it on and it just works in any room you throw it into.

Also the sound is well done. Similar to vision, it doesn't cover up or plug your ears so you can maintain awareness of your environment. I didn't have high hopes for the sound quality but I was pleasantly surprised.

The gesture thing needs a ton of work though. There are only a handful of gestures, none of them interact directly with the virtual objects. You need to turn your neck to look at something, then make a click gesture to select that item. There is no ability to grab something, mold clay, punch bad guys, etc. Just look around and click, occasionally drag though if you try to drag something out of the field of view of the sensor it gets dropped.

[longerthoughts]

> The major downside is the interaction: "air-clicking" is not great and the gestures to trigger various actions aren't very reliable. It really needs hand controllers like the Vive has.

I agree on the gesture reliability being a current limitation, but wouldn't a move towards hand controllers sort of be a step backwards? Interested to hear what other people think but seems like moving away from hand controllers is an inevitability, will just take some time and further investment in gesture control.

[WorldMaker]

Why not both? Gestures are great for broad things, controllers are great for fiddly things. Use whatever combination of gestures and controllers feels comfortable to what you are working on.

[longerthoughts]

That's definitely true for now, but shouldn't the goal be improving gesture control to the point where the difference is trivial? Might make for a less versatile product today but a better product down the road.

[WorldMaker]

I think Microsoft's research is somewhat proving/showing that we will always be multi-modal in input schemes, for the very least for accessibility reasons. A person might not be physically capable of making an accurate enough gesture, whether that is due to disability as one example or tiredness/exhaustion as another. On the flipside, a person may struggle with a controller but have no difficulty making extremely accurate gestures...

Speech, gestures, touch, controllers, keyboards, mice, trackpads, trackballs, everything else in the giant spectrum of input devices, all have different pros/cons and different accessibility. A failure often in sci-fi virtual reality is that everyone magically switches to a single mode of input, when even computing today suggests that every mode of input may be welcome (or even necessary) to users. VR/AR doesn't shift those accessibility needs as some imagine.

The interesting thing is that AR/MR suggest new input modes as well. There's a reverse skeumorphism that becomes more apparent in AR, along the lines of: in real life to accomplish a task I might turn some knob and that knob has seen decades of being the right tool for that task, why can't the AR respond to that knob as well. As AR/MR become more common and you start to see more "reality" in computing bleeding in from the other side, digital objects responding to physical ones, I think you'll start to see an expansion of what it even means to provide input to a machine. You might think of that as gesture controls, at least at first glance and some that may simply be advanced enough gesture recognition, but I think there's going to be a lot of bleed-over into the IoT space for custom controllers and sensors and touch surfaces. Some of those are going to look like existing physical objects, but extending their footprints deeper into "digital spaces" (many already are to one extent or another: your car's steering wheel, as one among many examples, may already have a digital footprint of some sort). I wouldn't be surprised if some of that leads to entirely novel seeming input devices in specific subdomains of human behavior.

[TheHoloHerald]

Would like to note that the HoloLens comes with a clicker that makes a lot of those precise moments easier to maneuver, such as clicking and dragging, and scrolling using motion controls!