Apply for the Microsoft Hololens Development Edition

http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us/development-edition

by pmelendez • 11 years ago

122 42 11 years ago

Permit• 11 years ago

Good God, $3,000 USD is a little outside my price range. Hopefully the consumer edition will be able to knock the price down a little bit.

I really wanted to get my hands on one of these, but it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer.

WorldMaker3• 11 years ago

They have said it was a full Windows 10 computer, so I'm not entirely shocked by the $3000 price, but I do think that the consumer version will likely have to be cheaper to sell it to the average consumer.

tennysonmach• 11 years ago

They can define what "full Windows 10 computer" means. If Microsoft ported it, that $9 ARM based computer that showed up on kickstarter last year could be a "full Windows 10 computer".

They're trying to weed out early adopters to avoid dooming a product with known shortfalls that can be solved with product iteration and time (low FOV, tracking lag, etc).

Like what Google Glass is doing, except they seem to be making it less "glamorous" and possibly tethering it to a PC of some sort.

ppog• 11 years ago

They've said that the first version isn't targeted as a consumer device. They initially see it as a professional piece of kit for use by, for example, product designers. (At least that's how it was presented at the New Zealand MS conference.)

Of course, then they show it off using Minecraft demos, recipe books, and a parent helping their kid in another city fix their sink. So sure, marketing it to consumers is the long game. But I'd guess that's some way off.

pmelendez5• 11 years ago

I guess this could analogous to Xbox/ Xbox Dev Kit from a price perspective back in the day. We will see...

gchadwick• 11 years ago

I guess they haven't ramped up manufacturing for full production yet? Small batch runs will cost more.

It may also be artifically high to stop so many people buying one for the fun of it. As they will (almost certainly) have limited supply they want everyone buying one to be serious about building an interesting application with it.

gcb0• 11 years ago

that's the price for "i have a CAD software company" clients.

deelowe2• 11 years ago

Have the fixed the issues with the EXTREMELY NARROW field of view?

boost_4• 11 years ago

no they haven't, its still narrow as hell.

nice one hackernews, downvoting the most important question in this thread...

i guess this is full of MS fanboys that don't mind being scammed out of 3k dollars..

pmelendez5• 11 years ago

It is an annoying trend and I have seen it in similar discussions about Google and/or Apple. It almost feels like tribes within HN.

As for the topic, they didn't specified the field of view, How could you tell they didn't fix it?

raesene42• 11 years ago

I'm not sure the narrow field of vision is that important for a dev. kit. The goal is to let people work out how best to produce apps for this kind of interface.

If they can't sort it for consumer release, that's a much bigger issue of course. My guess (and it's just that) would be that they'll be trying to improve field of vision for the consumer release, as from the reviews I read it was the one major negative people cited.

benoits• 11 years ago

"nice one hackernews, downvoting the most important question in this thread... " We're less than an hour in and the OP question is the top comment... I'm not sure what's so wrong to you about the HN community here?

jameshart2• 11 years ago

'narrow as hell' is your assessment based on what?

Is there some industry standard minimum field of view for AR glasses that this fails to meet? Have the people who tested HoloLens out who complained about the field of view being narrower than they would like said that it made the technology useless, or just that it limited it? Seems like you think it's a showstopper, I'd be interested to know why.

AndrewKemendo2• 11 years ago

No, it's not fixable with the hardware they are using.

jameshart2• 11 years ago

There's a lot of certainty here about the capabilities of a just-announced device that was only seen under strict NDAs before today. Can you give more information?

deelowe2• 11 years ago

That sucks. I wonder how the market is going to react to that. It was fairly heavily criticized at E3.

mortenjorck• 11 years ago

I would hazard a guess that the $3,000 price tag for this dev kit would easily pass $10,000 with a significantly larger FOV. I don't have a detailed understanding of the optical magic Microsoft is using for the display, but given how small it was in the previously demonstrated prototype, where cost was no issue, an economical way to scale it up is probably still a few years off.

kriro• 11 years ago

"""holographic computing"""

Pretty sure they don't use any holographic technology and it's "just standard AR". US only...meh. There also doesn't seem to be any university licensing program. Could be done quite a bit better.

pmelendez5• 11 years ago

US only...meh

And Canada :)

cma• 11 years ago

They use a holographic waveguide, but it isnt like looking at real volumetric hologram, the actual image formed is still flat at fixed focus. But you do get stereo and parallax from head movement, the only thing lacking is variable focus/eye accommodation.

vlunkr• 11 years ago

I think they are calling it holographic because more people will understand that than augmented reality.

necubi• 11 years ago

It's as much holographic as the Oculus (or other head-tracked HMDs), and the missing depth cue (accommodation) doesn't seem very important in practice. See here [0] for a good discussion on what is and is not holographic, in the context of the HoloLens, from an academic VR researcher.

[0] http://doc-ok.org/?p=1172

danielvf2• 11 years ago

TLDR: $3,000 dollars.

This is basically using the free market to sort out who really needs the kits.

Whereas the Rift dev kits could, and still can be, Ebayed for hundreds more than their purchase price.

beatpanda• 11 years ago

To build a vibrant community, we are looking for a wide spectrum of developers to create diverse experiences.

Oh, great!

You are a developer in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada where the Development Edition will first be available.
Please note that the Development Edition hardware and experiences are in English only.

Oh.

silverlight• 11 years ago

I'm just getting an Error while trying to get to the Survey form.

ylem2• 11 years ago

Does anyone have any thoughts about the pros and cons of this over the Oculus rift for scientific visualization? It seems that it might be easier to deal with user interaction for the Hololens, but without playing with one, it would be hard for me to say.

danielvf2• 11 years ago

The hololens's first big advantage here is that you don't have to loose sight of the other people around you while using it. A couple of people can sit around and see both each other and the visualization they are working on.

Secondly, you can see the environment around you. For science purposes this may not matter, but for industrial visualization, this makes all the difference in the world.

ylem2• 11 years ago

Thanks for that--I hadn't even considered the possibility of multiple viewers!

bambang150• 11 years ago

Wow, there is a development one. Looks forward to download it for my project development. Love it!

Apply for the Microsoft Hololens Development Edition

Related Stories