The time has come – a neverending stream of Super Bowl commercials is hitting the Internets, and every major and minor company is trying to get their place under the #superbowl hashtag, which is bound to become trending any moment now. Instead of creating a Superbowl ad, Microsoft created a longer, two-minute video which details their vision on how HoloLens plans to change the way you watch sports.
Since its unveiling, HoloLens showed that Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality (as Magic Leaps calls it) has a lot of potential to become a mainstream technology. Microsoft is working hard on launching the HoloLens Development Kit, expected to ship in March 2016 – just in time for Game Developers’ Conference (March 14-18) and Microsoft’s own Build developer conference (March 30-April 1).
Microsoft HoloLens gaming experience.
Development for the HoloLens platform will not be cheap. The company announced that HoloLens Development Kit will set you back for a cool $3000, 8.5x as much as you needed to pay for Oculus Development kit ($350). Then again, HoloLens is not just a headset – its a whole Head-Mounted-Computer (HMC), packing Intel, NVIDIA and custom Microsoft silicon.
Watch Microsoft’s Superbowl video here:
We wonder can content creators take Microsoft’s vision and make it a reality, given that the video shows tens of thousands of dollars in head-mounted hardware alone, yet alone the home servers the company plans to sell with the service. All in all, this vision is a fascinating one, and will bring on the heat to the competition. For example, it looks like Google is using Magic Leap as a proxy in the battle of rising Augmented Reality concepts.
If this is not enough for you, we invite you take a trip down the memory lane and watch the first public HoloLens demonstration, which got us all wondering is ‘Microsoft 3.0’ the company we should all be watching? While the Redmond giant may have missed the smartphone train, the augmented / mixed reality world we’re marching towards certainly looks to be wearing Microsoft logo on it.
