So, you head off to work. You walk in the door, sit yourself down in your cubicle and stare at an LED panel for the rest of your day. I worked IT at a middle school last summer, so I know the feeling of staring at a screen for what seems like an eternity while doing server maintenance or whatever. Well, just the past week or so, a company called Microsoft, you may have heard of them, made an announcement, a big announcement. No, not Windows 10, which looks alright, but I'm talking about the HoloLens, what looks like a plastic headband with lenses, speakers, and 3D cameras that seemingly makes holograms appear before your eyes.
After seeing the announcement in my YouTube sub box, I was surprised to see that they announced something different. I watched the announcement with their live demo and all that, but I remained skeptical. This piece of ambitious tech seemed like the Kinect all over again. I continued on with my week until I saw this CNET article by Nick Statt entitled "The HoloLens is no Joke." The title was click bait enough for me to bring it up on my Flipboard, and once I had finished reading, I became a believer. After the announcement, Microsoft had a press demo ready, and Statt mentions how his experience with the glasses was unreal. He used it to receive help fixing a light switch, to walk around a portion of mars, and to blow holes in walls with Minecraft style TNT, amazing. I scoured the internet, but this was pretty much the only article about the press demo i could find. With a measly 4.3k shares on Facebook, it seems that many people still think this thing is a subpar 3d camera that you can struggle to order pizza with.
The night after I first read Statt's article, I was thinking about how this one Microsoft gamble could completely shake the tech market as well as our entire way of living. HoloLens is already wire-free, a trait that is still years off for even the Oculus Rift, making the HoloLens actually practical. After that trait, it brings virtually endless implementations to the table. The HoloLens can put anything you can see on a computer into real life. Imagine it: TV Screens, new car models, that new desk I couldn't figure out how to place in my room, and even a bird's eye view of action figure sized Super Bowl players running around on your floor (Go Pats!). If the HoloLens reaches a Retina Display like resolution, then there would be absolutely no reason to have any screen in your house. At work, you would simply turn on your desktop and have it do the heavy-lifting while streaming the results to your HoloLens with which you could have a 3-monitor setup projected on your desk for you to use like any tangible setup. At family movie nights, your family wouldn't need a 65 inch quantum dot TV. You guys would instead need a HoloLens each and could skip the fuss of picking a movie on Netflix. You watch Fast and Furious 10 while your parents are watching 50 Shades of Grey, and your baby cousin is watching Power Rangers.
All in all, the only restriction to this hardware is its battery life, but with the up and coming long range wireless chargers we have seen at CES 2015, even that problem will be solved soon. Microsoft could still mess up in some way and make me look really dumb for believing in them, but after reading this post and Statt's article, I hope that you too can become a believer and can imagine the crazy life-changing possibilities of this technology.