Weekly Metaverse #139: HoloLens news and AR recipes
HoloLens news
While Meta and Apple are constantly in the headlines when it comes to VR and AR, Microsoft’s been chugging along, improving the technology behind their HoloLens headset and getting it adopted for an increasingly broad set of use cases.
There are a couple of new ones that have hit the news lately - first, Microsoft announced that the Singapore Polytechnic School of Chemical & Life Sciences will be adopting the HoloLens as an education tool. The broad strokes are that it’s going to give students a more immersive view of what they’re learning - from virtual laboratory facilities to 3D representations of scientific concepts.
As you probably know by now, I’m extremely bullish on VR as a classroom training tool, particularly when it comes to subjects like science and medicine that have hands-on components that can be more easily practiced in a virtual environment. I definitely expect more announcements like this one over the course of 2023.
The second place HoloLens has hit the news is at CES, where Abbott is using it to reduce the stress of giving blood. Nothing too wild about this use case - it’s an AR experience that’ll put the patient into a virtual garden to relax them. A little gimmicky maybe, but that’s partially the point. Per Abbott, besides lowering stress of blood donors, this is also intended to help lure young folks in to donate. Makes sense to me - you donate, and in exchange you get to try a neat piece of technology. I’d give it a whirl (and they’d love to have me, since I’ve got that sweet, sweet O negative coursing through my veins).
In worse news for Microsoft, one of their very promising HoloLens use cases has hit a rather significant roadblock - Congress has blocked a $400 million order of 6900 headsets to the US Army. There were issues with both reliability and health issues like eyestrain and nausea. Add to that the price tag (do the math and you’ll find that came to just under $58,000 a headset, though it’s worth noting these are heavily modified from the standard HoloLens), and it’s easy to understand why Congress decided the US would be fine with the 5000 headsets they already have. Fiscal discipline in military spending - you don’t see that every day!
Using VR kinda sucks sometimes
I read a tweet this week about how the big problem with VR is the time to fun - how long it takes to go from putting on the headset to actually doing something enjoyable. Regrettably, I can’t find the tweet right now, but it being a long weekend here in the US, I thought I’d take the opportunity to test that out. I bought Iron Man VR for my Quest 2 a little while back during a sale but never played it, so I got the ol’ headset out to give it a whirl.
It was… terrible. First the headset wasn’t charged, so I plugged it in for a couple of hours while I read Twitter. Then one of the controllers was out of battery, so I had to replace that. Then I had to install the game, but the download speed was incredibly slow (not the fault of my internet connection, which is great). It started to download, then it just quit and wouldn’t let me restart it. I haven’t played Iron Man VR today.
I really hope Apple gets this right, and I believe that they will. They’ve never been the first into a category, but they’ve always entered a relatively early phase with a product that offered a vastly superior user experience to what was there prior. If they can come in with a headset that gets you up and running with an experience that feels like magic in a few seconds, their inevitably premium price point might not be an issue.
In the meantime, maybe I’ll try Iron Man again tomorrow.
Some neato stuff from the Twittersphere
Here’s some neat tweets!
Wherever information is better viewed in three dimensions, VR and AR will make work more efficient and less error-prone. Blueprints printed on huge sheets of paper should be a thing of the past in not too long.
I hope we can all get used to looking a little ridiculous for the sake of using AR for fun stuff.
If you’re selling something that’s best viewed in 3D, AR is going to be table stakes for all e-commerce businesses.
And last but not least, AR cooking instructions. Instead of putting the information on a screen, soon we’ll be putting it on the world around us, wherever it’s going to be most useful.