Yesterday at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft unveiled HoloLens 2, the company's next iteration of its enterprise-focused standalone AR headset. Microsoft is coming strong out of the gate with its fleet of partners as well as a number of in-house developed apps that they say will make it easier for companies to connect, collaborate, and do things like learn on-the-job skills and troubleshoot work-related tasks. That's all well and good, but is the HoloLens 2 hardware truly a '2.0' step forward? That's the question that ran through my mind for my half-hour session strapped into the AR headset. The short answer: yes. Stepping into the closed off demo space at Microsoft's MWC booth, I was greeted by a pretty familiar mock-up of a few tables and some art on the wall to make it feel like a tastefully decorated home office. Lighting in the room was pretty muted, but was bright enough to feel like a natural indoor setting. [caption id="attachment_86151" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image by Road to VR[/caption] I actually got the chance to run through two HoloLens demos back-to-back; one in the home office, and another in a much brighter space with more direct lighting dedicated to showcasing a patently enterprise-focused demo built by Bentley, a company that deals in construction and infrastructure solutions. The bulk of my impressions come from my first demo where I got to run through a number of the basic interactions introduced at the HoloLens 2 reveal here at MWC. Fit & Comfort Putting the headset on like a baseball cap, I tightened it snug to my skull with the ratcheting knob in the back. Overtightening it slightly, I moved the knob in the opposite direction, eliciting a different click. Although I'm not sure precisely how Microsoft arrived at the claim that it's "three times more comfortable" than the original HoloLens (they say comfort has been "measured statistically over population"), it presents a remarkably good fit, sporting a low density replaceable foam cushion that comfortably rests the front weight on the top of the forehead. The strap, which is a firm but flexible material, wraps around to fit snugly under what Wikipedia scholars refer to as the occipital bone. Giving it a few good shakes, I was confident that it was firmly stuck to my head even without the need of the optional top strap. In the 30-odd minutes wearing HoloLens 2 over the course of two demos, it seemed to be a comfortable fit that could probably be worn for the advertised two to three hour active-use battery life without issue. [irp posts="86122" name="HoloLens 2 Specs Reveal 2–3 Hour 'Active' Battery Life, Optional Top Strap, & More"] Once the device was on and comfy, I was prompted with a quick eye-tracking calibration scene that displayed a number of pinkish-purple gems that popped in and out of the scene when I looked at them, then I was set and ready to start HoloLensing. Hand-tracking & Interactions To my left sitting on the table was a little 3D model of a cartoony miniature city with a weather information display. Like at the on-stage reveal, moving my hand closer to the virtual object showed a white wire frame that offered a few convenient hand holds to grab so I could reposition, turn, and resize the virtual object. HoloLens 2 tracks your hands and individual fingers, so I tried to throw it for a loop with a few different hand holds like an a index finger & thumb grip and a full-handed claw, but the headset was unphased by the attempt; however I found more exaggerated grasping poses (more clearly discernible to the tracking) to be the easiest way to manipulate the room's various objects. Brightness Suffice it to say that HoloLens 2's optics work best when a room isn't flooded with light; the better lit space predictably washed out some of the image's detail and solidity, but it's clear that the headset has bright enough optics to be acceptably usable in a variety of indoor environments. Of course, I never got the chance to step outside in the Barcelona sun to see how it worked in the worst possible condition—the true test of any AR display system. Both demos had the headset at max brightness, which can be changed via a rocker switch on the left side. A similar rocker on the right side let me change the audio volume. [caption id="attachment_86148" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Image by Road to VR[/caption] A Fitting Hummingbird With my object interaction handling skills in check, I then got a chance to meet the little hummingbird prominently featured in yesterday's unveiling. Materializing out of the wall, the intricate little bird twittered about until I was told to put out my open hand, beckoning it to fly over and hover just above my palm. While the demo was created with the primary purpose of showing off the robustness of HoloLens 2's hand tracking, I couldn't help but feel that the little bird brought more to the table. As it flew to my open palm, I found myself paying closer attention to the way my hand felt as it hovered over it, subconsciously expecting to feel the wind coming off its tiny wings. For a split second my attention drew to a slight breeze in the room. [caption id="attachment_86154" align="alignnone" width="1480"] Microsoft's Julia Schwarz demoing on-stage, Image courtesy Microsoft[/caption] It wasn't a staged '4D' effect either. I later noticed that the whole convention floor had a soft breeze from the building's HVAC system tasked with slowly fighting against thousands of human-shaped heaters milling about the show floor. For the briefest of moments that little hummingbird lit up whatever part of my brain is tasked with categorizing objects as a potentially physical thing. Haptics aren't something HoloLens 2 can do; there isn't a controller, or included haptic glove, so immersion is driven entirely by the headset's visuals and positional audio. Talking to Microsoft senior researcher Julia Schwarz, I learned the designers behind the hummingbird portion of the demo loaded it with everything they had in the immersion department, making it arguably a more potent demonstration than the vibration of a haptic motor could produce (or ruin) on its own. It was a perfect storm of positional audio from a moving object, visually captivating movements from an articulated asset, and the prior expectation that a hummingbird wouldn't actually land on my hand like it would with a Disney princess (revealing it for the digital object that it was). Needless to say, the bird was small enough—and commanded enough attention—to stay entirely in my field of view (FOV) the whole time, which helped drive home the idea that it was really there above my hand. More on FOV in a bit. Both the hummingbird and general object interaction demos show that HoloLens 2 has made definite strides in delivering a more natural input system that's looking to shed the coarse 'bloom' and 'pinch' gestures developed for the original HoloLens. What I saw today still relies on some bits that need tutorializing to fully grasp, but being able to physically click a button, or manipulate a switch like you think you should is moving the interaction-design to where it needs to be—the ultimate 'anyone can do it' phase in the future when the hardware will eventually step out of the way. Eye-tracking & Voice Input With my bird buddy eventually dematerialized, I then went onto a short demo created specifically to show that the headset can marry eye-tracking and voice recognition into a singular task. I was told to look at a group of rotating gems that popped after I looked directly at one and said the word "pop!" My brief time with the eye-tracking in HoloLens 2 left me with a good impression; though I didn't have a way to measure it, I've tried nearly every in-headset eye-tracking implementation spanning the 2015-era Fove headset up to Tobii's new integration with HTC Vive Pro Eye). [caption id="attachment_86109" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Microsoft[/caption] The last portion of the demo had one of the most plainly practical uses I've seen for eye-tracking thus far: reactive text scrolling. A window appeared containing some basic informational text, and as I naturally got to the bottom of the window it slowly started to scroll to reveal more. The faster I read, the faster it would scroll. Looking to the top of the window, I automatically scrolled back up. It was simple, but extremely effective. Continued on Page 2: Field of View » Field of View Now here's where I'm supposed to invent a fuzzy, imperfect metric to help sell the size of the FOV, except I shouldn't. Before the big consumer VR push in 2016, head-mounted display manufacturers used to use these sorts of gimmicks to communicate FOV ("it's like looking at a 200-inch screen 15 feet away!") and I just don't think that does it any amount of justice. So while I can't say one way or the other whether it truly achieves the promised 52 degree diagonal field of view, or two times the FOV area than the previous HoloLens, the headset's FOV is approaching what I'd call 'really quite usable and not terribly annoying' (let's call it RQUNTA for short). The display's most noticeable cut-off point between the physical environment and the augmented reality view is at the display's bottom edge; the left and right portions of the display blur somewhat as they near the periphery of the plastic outer shield. That's not to say it takes up your entire horizontal FOV—far from it. The physical design of the headset sets a few expectations that glasses wearers will probably recognize, namely the acquired ability to only view the external world from within the confines of the frame. HoloLens 2's field of view fills more of that already limited area in all respects over its predecessor. (Side note: glasses technically fit underneath the headset. Please clap.) [caption id="attachment_86150" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Image by Road to VR[/caption] While the bottom edge of the display was plainly visible, the top horizontal edge was much easier to ignore. The block of depth-sensing cameras and computer hardware housed in the portion of the headset above your brow creates a static visual barrier which is easier to mentally ignore, compared to the bottom of the FOV which goes right from display to air. Because HoloLens 2 doesn't block out your real peripheral vision you can still peek out the sides and bottoms of the display, which makes more apparent that there's a sudden edge to the augmented imagery. On the flipside, Magic Leap seems to take purposeful advantage of this fact by limiting your full human field of view all the way around with a 'goggles' style form-factor which means a larger relative portion of your (physically truncated) field of view is taken up with the AR display. That's a long way of saying: the less optically intrusive frame of HoloLens 2 might make the field of view seem a bit smaller than that of Magic Leap, but actually the two are almost identical in size. For enterprise and industrial use-cases (which is the stated focus of HoloLens 2) the more open design is a benefit exactly because it doesn't truncate your natural field of view as much. Remote Collaboration & Enterprise Focus With my first demo over, it was time to head on to my second Bentley-branded experience. Here I mostly revisited concepts I learned before like manipulating various building models and fiddling with switches, although the key take-home here was that multiple headset users could collaboratively view and interact with these models while in the same physical space. This, alongside the concept that users wouldn't necessarily need to even be in the same country (but could virtually interact together in the same way), was HoloLen 2's unique selling proposition that many of the other partner companies are tapping into. [irp posts="86135" name="Watch HoloLens 2 'Spatial' Remote Collaboration Demo from MWC 2019"] Microsoft is focusing on enterprise and industry right now for good reason. At a hefty $3,500 price tag (or 28 easy monthly payments of $125), HoloLens 2 is undoubtedly outside the range of anyone but businesses looking to cut costs on the sort of highly specialized and collaborative work that would normally mean flights, hotels, and time spent using 2D viewing formats for inherently 3D work. - - — - - It's more than an issue of price though. At the present moment, AR headsets—Hololens 2 included—have plenty of barriers to cross before John Q. Public will put one on and go about their daily errands. Even at an FOV approaching an acceptable size, the augmented reality headsets of today are best used in rooms that have been pre-mapped and are ready to serve up the sort localized content that will keep you indoors and close to a wall charger (and WiFi) where the headset feels most at home. While we've yet to approach the true promise of all-day, on-the-go AR in this product cycle, well-funded companies like Microsoft are investing into these early steps because there's a fairly clear case for a immediate return on investment in the enterprise space, while beginning down a path of proliferating the Windows platform onto AR products and platforms that eventually wind up in the hands of consumers too.