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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Several independent review article about Hololens mention the limited view (relatively small view angle), underwhelming and off putting. (You can immediately spot a sponsored article if it doesn't even mention that issue at all.) iPhone 6 and high end Android smartphones already have augment reality apps with SLAM technology that is far more impressive than what MS PR is suggestion Hololens might one day be able to offer - the E3 presentation in 2015 and 2016 were faked as we know in the meantime.

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> iPhone 6 and high end Android smartphones already have augment reality apps with SLAM technology that is far more impressive

This is the most wrong comment I've seen on HN in a long time. The SLAM in Hololens is incredibly impressive and nothing on any smartphone is one hundredth as good, with the possible exception of the still unreleased Project Tango phone.

Could you possibly explain for those of us out of the loop as to why? Otherwise I could simply say:

"This is the most wrong comment I've seen on HN in a long time. The SLAM in smartphones are the same as the one in Hololens. Project Tango should prove even more impressive."

And no one would be any wiser.

SLAM stands for "simultaneous location and mapping", it's about being in an unknown environment which you need to both map and localise yourself in. I'm familiar with it in the context of robotic navigation, but it seems Hololens deals with it too - mapping the environment to place holograms, localising within that environment because you need to be able to interact with them.

Most smartphones simply don't have to do this, they don't have to map their environments without user input. They don't have to localise themselves within a map of the environment that they've built themselves. Project Tango does do AR and environment mapping on a smartphone, so it does deal with the SLAM problem too.

Have you even tried one? The small field of view is disappointing, but only because what is in it is so impressive. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the smartphones, but I'm pretty sure they can't show objects in a room with natural looking distances and depth of field like the Hololens can.

The Hololens dose not have an accommodative display (natural looking depth of field). I believe their display is collimated, so that everything is always in focus.

They have gaze tracking so this should be fixable.

gaze tracking is not eye tracking

These kind of comments are really dismissive. Sure, MS PR did fire up the hype train a bit too much, but in the end they only want to show what it will be capable of in the future, as they are not selling the current version to consumers yet.

Pretty sure it will eventually reach that level of the E3 presentation when hardware gets faster/smaller/cheaper, by now it's just a tech demo and they have a lot more to actually show than Magic Leap for example.

This kind of comment I call FUD.

Please watch many of available videos on YT and you will see that HoloLens is really impressive device (despite fact that is just 1st version).

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PS. Microsoft announced couple days ago that HoloLens is "ready for businness" [1]

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us/commercia...

An article that mentions the field of view: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Microsoft-HoloLens-im...

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev... (scroll down a bit)

Machine translated:

  Opposite VR solutions HoloLens however significantly 
  limited field of view has: Particularly when you view the 
  video on the large virtual canvas was how far away an 
  ugly proscenium effect.  In addition, the glasses showed 
  in black and white content distinct RGB effects - similar 
  to the rainbow effect, causing the color wheel of DLP 
  projectors.

This is why I've decided to wait 3+ years to jump aboard the AR-VR train. The tech is still too raw.

Yeah. That [1] is like pokemon go. Or faked.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-JvTZjbwNs posted elsewhere in the comments.

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