Microsoft Hololens
Mixed reality: Your world is the canvas
Microsoft HoloLens is the first self-contained, holographic computer, enabling you to engage with your digital content and interact with holograms in the world around you.
What's a HoloLens, and how does it work?
Microsoft's HoloLens is not actually producing 3D images that everyone can see; this isn't "Star Trek."
Instead of everyone walking into a room made to reproduce 3D images, Microsoft's goggles show images only the wearer can see. Everyone else will just think you're wearing goofy-looking glasses.
Another key thing about HoloLens is what Microsoft is trying to accomplish.
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Microsoft HoloLens specs, features and rumours
The HoloLens is one of the first VR headsets to combine reality with its virtual counterpart, creating what's called an augmented reality - layering computer-generated images on top of the real world.
Design
At its initial unveiling, Microsoft was keen to show off the sleek design and build quality of its headset. Featuring a set of twin lenses and an all-in one-headband, it looked fairly impressive. In fact, it's oddly reminiscent of the aliens' headgear from the original V miniseries.
hardware
HoloLens will be powered by three processors, the CPU, GPU and HPU. The most notable of these is the Holographic Processing Unit, which will handle all the data coming in from sensors on the device, which in turn will make sense of the world around it.
"The advanced sensors in HoloLens capture information about what you’re doing and the environment you’re in," Todd Holmdahl explained on the Lumia Conversations blog.
"This is done through the inertial measurement unit (IMU) which includes an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. It’s this IMU, coupled with head tracking cameras, which enables HoloLens to understand where your head is and how it’s moving."
It is also likely to have a full HD camera mounted on the headset to track movement of the user within their environment, almost certainly derived from the Kinect camera technology previously seen on the Xbox One.
This leaves the CPU and GPU to run the apps and operating system. These processors look set to be based on Intel’s Cherry Trail line of processors. With Intel set to bring wireless charging features to Cherry Trail, the HoloLens could also be charged wirelessly if placed on a suitable surface.
Cherry Trail chips will crunch through large amounts of data, such as what is being looked at, what the user is doing with their arms (reaching for something, touching a surface) as well as what is in the user's surroundings. This is stuff we take for granted as humans, but takes considerable computation power to pull off for the headset.
