
Apply for the Microsoft Hololens Development Edition - pmelendez
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us/development-edition
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deelowe
Have the fixed the issues with the EXTREMELY NARROW field of view?

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boost_
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..

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raesene4
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.

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boost_
well i would be more inclined to agree if they didn't announce their product
with full view (at least 120º) capability.

i mean, we all saw the videos from the announcement, and the "live" demos. and
that was just pure lies no matter how you want to paint them.

also even if they didn't lie, don't we need the dev kit to have the same full
capabilities as the final product? would you acquire an early dev kit for some
new console, only to find out that it has less ram, gpu and/or cpu than the
final product? how can we actually test it fully?

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pmelendez
> would you acquire an early dev kit for some new console, only to find out
> that it has less ram, gpu and/or cpu than the final product? how can we
> actually test it fully?

I guess for MS is important to have a good portfolio of apps before the
product is launched to the public. This class of unpolished dev kits are not
unheard in MS world, Do you remember when the dev kits for the XBox were Apple
Power Macs?

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boost_
they were, but the hardware was the same was it not?

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pmelendez
Not really, just the processor was the same, but it was the best they could do
in a short time.

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Permit
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.

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WorldMaker
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.

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tennysonmach
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.

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WorldMaker
Honestly, I think they've defined pretty well what "full Windows 10 computer"
means in this case: You are strapping a full Xbox One with Kinect onto your
head. Last I checked, you can't run a Kinect very well on a $9 ARM chip. Based
on graphics we've seen in demos I doubt the system hardware is anything less
than we see in an Xbox One, but it's definitely not less than what we see on a
Surface Pro, form factor for form factor.

It's possible that they are trying to weed out early adopters with a high
cost, but with entire new hardware that's not been mass produced to date (the
holographic display, the proprietary holographic processing unit) it certainly
seems like this is probably more a reflection of actual production costs
today. It's certainly long been a tradition of console game systems that the
early development machines are an order of magnitude (as much as even 100x,
historically) more expensive than the final retail hardware. (Which also
historically has been a profit center for some console generations when they
were charging the same development box costs long after the retail cost margin
drops.) It's very much a case that I think the only real comparison is to the
Xbox One and we don't have a lot of data on that as Xbox One never sold dev
kits to the public, that's certainly something new with the Developer Edition
of the HoloLens.

Also, for what it's worth I've not heard any reports of "tracking lag" (in
fact just the opposite from articles I've followed to date, that the HoloLens
seems to have "tracking magic") and I'm willing to believe that the
adjustments of the device's FOV are as much for safety reasons as anything
else (we humans use our peripheral vision for a lot of things when navigating
the real world). Certainly the same journalists complaining about the FOV have
also stated that they've experienced different FOV in different demos.

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danielvf
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.

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ylem
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.

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danielvf
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.

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

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WorldMaker
Yep, multiple viewers, including remote viewers, seems to be a big deal for
Microsoft. Certainly that has been a big explicit focus of the JPL,
Architecture, and Skype demos they've been showing. (It's also an implicit
part of all their on-stage demos as well; supposedly the fancy camera rig is
acting just like any other HoloLens and sharing the same scenes directly as
the actual devices will in real time.)

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beatpanda
>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.

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kriro
"""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.

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cma
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.

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

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bambang150
Wow, there is a development one. Looks forward to download it for my project
development. Love it!

