HoloLens: Hands on

Her majesty the HoloLens!

Hello everyone! This is in my first post on this platform and I wanna thank vrporn for this opportunity! I’ll present myself: I’m… ok, just kidding I know you don’t give a heck about who I am 😀 😀 :D, so let’s dig in the topic of the day: Hololens.

I imagine you already know what Hololens is, but just in case you haven’t heard about it: it’s a marvelous augmented reality device, a pair of glasses that let you see the real world around you, plus some virtual object over it. Surely you have heard about Pokémon Go… well, imagine if you could play that app on your glasses, just shooting Poke-balls with your fingers! That’s HoloLens!

I think that this device has set a new meaning for the world “coolness”.

HoloLens is currently in its first version (created 2 years ago or so), so its actual performances are not the one that are showcased in this fluff video… and just in case you just want to rush to buy one… it’s better that you know that it costs 3000$ and it is sold only in the US! Yikes!

But how is Hololens actually? And can it be used for porn (we are on vrporn after all!)? I’ve had the luck to try it for a day… so I can give you some answers! Keep reading.

Hololens is a comfortable device: it’s very light… and considering the fact that it is standalone (that is, it doesn’t need to be connected to a PC… it already has all the processing unit and the battery inside) this is incredible. It has be adjusted so that it fits your head and your nose (especially your nose), but after you’ve done it… it’s as easy as carrying a pair of glasses! It seems weightless, thanks to the double ring that distributes the weight uniformly on your head.

Hololens seen from the above: the two rings give a lot of comfort on your head. If you look closely, on the right there is a gear to make the device fit exactly your head

Someone has reported me that after having used it for hours, you start feel that strain of having that on your head, but surely Microsoft is already working on this (it’s a two years old hardware… and you know in 2 years how many things change (like dimension and weight of electronic components), don’t you?).

That said, when I wore it, initially I didn’t see anything different from the room around me seen through a strange glass. Then I saw it. A 3D cube with something inside it, just fixed in a position in the room. Because you know, with Hololens, there is no “desktop” anymore: your room is the desktop and you just position the apps in a physical position in the physical world, and there they stay, until the moment you decide to close or move them. And since the system remembers the rooms it has already visited, sometimes happens that you return in a room after a long time and find it cluttered with all the apps that you left open the last time you were there! I imagine that in 30 years the moms will say to their children: “Your room is a mess of holograms! Close them that auntie is coming!” :D.

You may find it strange, but Hololens is just a Windows10 device… exactly like your PC. So it has a Start menu and it has Cortana!

The Start Menu of Hololens… from here you can also say “Hey Cortana, make me a sandwich!”

You command it with your voice (“Hey Cortana, find me some dirty photos!”), with your gaze (looking at virtual objects) or with your hands: when you make the gesture to open your hand with the palm up, you trigger the start menu and with your pinch gesture (thumb and index finger tips touching), you trigger the mouse click. Using gestures may be tiresome (cramps at the index finger? :)), so Microsoft has provided its users a practial “clicker”, a little ring that you put near your finger and press when you want to give a trigger to the system.

Ok, so now you now the basics… but you still want to know more about apps, about what can be done… don’t you?

Well, the first app that you have to open is the Calibration app: it serves to calibrate the optics of the device with your eyes, so that you can see the virtual objects better. It is not super-necessary to calibrate it, but if you want to use it in an optimal way, it is better to perform it. It needs only few minutes, where you put your finger in front of your left and right eye in different positions… quite boring but fast, and it needs only to be done once… so resist and do it :). After that, you can do whatever you want.

One of the easiest app is Holograms, that lets you purt different kind of objects inside your home: is just like decorating the room you’re in, with animated models.

A typical Hololens Menu… as you can see it is a gaze-controlled window, where you can select which Holograms you can put inside your room

I tried the app… and obviously I decided to decorate the room with… a woman ;). So I took the ballerina (I’m pretty classy) and put her on my desk. I started the animation… and… wow! She was there just dancing on my desk! I could move in the room, approaching her, going farther… I could jump… and she stood there, dancing… without moving, without trembling.

Dance my beautiful ballerina, dance on my desk. And after that, please marry me

If you’ve played Pokemon Go, you know that the Pokemons just move badly if you move the phone… with Hololens this does not happen. It is exactly like that virtual object would be pysically in your room, in that position: this is astonishing. As someone who has tried (and failed) to create a AR engine in the past, I know how it is insanely hard to accomplish this kind of result. You have no idea. HoloLens reaches this results thanks to 4 RGB + 1 IR depth camera… this means that it uses 5 cameras to reconstruct the 3D model of your room, and it updates continuously this model. There is a processing unity, the HPU, dedicated only in mapping your room all the time. This lets the CPU and GPU free of this super-heavy task and makes the algorithm stable and efficient. Even if you put objects in the air (like bees), they’re super-stable… and remain stable even if you change light conditions… Hololens tracking is incredible. Maybe the most innovative feature of this device.

Another cool Hololens image… from here you can see the left side pair of RGB cameras…

But… there is a but. Hololens have a great problem, that is the field of view (FOV). You can’t see the Holograms in all the field of view of your eyes, but only in the part that is in front of you. This is a picture that The Verge has made to clarify it:

http://i.imgur.com/9sPki5i.png

This means that you can really see augmented reality in a narrow area in front of your head and this really breaks the magic. And while the horizontal FOV problem can be tolerated, the vertical one is really terrible. Especially on close objects, it really makes you remember that you’re toying with a first version of a product and not with a final one. It makes you remember that you’re just in a room playing with a futuristic device.

That said, I tried some games. Roboraid is a must for everyone that tries Hololens: a simple game that makes robo-monster come out from the walls of your room… and you have to shoot them with epic blue laser rays using your fingers! The more you play, the more the game becomes cooler, with robots wearing shields and beginning shooting at you (and you have to actually move inside your room and dodge bullets with your body!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf9qkURqtbM

Very cool game! I played with it a bit… and it’s super funny even if you miss the enemies, because in that case you see a fake hole in your wall… with wires and pipes…lol. Well played Microsoft.

Let’s kill all that damn robotic spiders with super-badass laser rays from my head!

Another demo I tried was Fragments. It’s a game that scans your room and then transforms it in a crime scene… and you have to collect evidences and solve the enigma. The coolest part of this app is that it adjusts the game on your room, putting objects in the most ideal position for your own environment. This means that you can play it wherever you want, and the game will modify itself to adjust to your actual surroundings. This is revolutionary, trust me. Another cool stuff of this game is that if you come too close to a game element, it starts making you see it with a explosion-in-fragments effect… and this kicks in when the little FOV would make you feel that this object isn’t real… so it is a great enhancement to keep the magic of the game!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Wndguve8U

After that I also tried a custom game made in Unity that showed me how this device has still lots of computational limitations: you have to super-optimize everything if you want your game to run smoothly… so, game devs, you’ve been warned.

What about porn apps? Well, I’ve not tried them: the guy that let me try it has said that he doesn’t watch them… should I believe him? (of course not). Of course the possible adult usages are infinite. While playing with Actiongrams app, I just put this super-beautiful girl in my room

It is not what it seems… I’m not looking at this beautiful hologram bottom… ok, no, just kidding: it is exactly like that 🙂

well, she was there, moving, showing a pre-recordered funny animation (take care: it was a 3D video, not a 3D avatar! So she was like a real person!) and she felt really like if she was there. Of course these are the kind of applications that could be used for adult entertainment.

This girl is a bit puzzled to have me next to her… come on, I’m not that bad after all

Imagine if you could have your favourite pornstars in your house, just next to you. Or imagine AR cam girls, holographically stripping on your table (pornstar Ela Darling has tried to do something similar in VR). And these are just two ideas that have come to my mind. The good side is that no one is seeing what you’re seeing, so… you know, you don’t have to be scared to close the browser window if your mum comes in (even if… she would just catch you touching yourself while looking at an empty sofa… I don’t know if this could be a better scenario for you!). Of course the adult industry should start producing adequate adult AR content… like is already doing for VR (and since you’re on this website, I think you already know it ;)).

One last note about eye strain: after all this usage, my eyes started to feel fatigue. In 1-2 hours, I felt it was better to have a break: maybe even this aspect of the screen projection has to be fixed, because if the future is that we have wear these kind of devices all day, we shouldn’t feel any pain in using them!

This is in short my first experience with Hololens: my final impression was super-great: the device has endless potentials, and surely augmented reality glasses wil be our future in the next 5-10 years. This first version has astonished me with the stability of the tracking, but has disappointed me with the too narrow field of view. My advice is that if you have the possibility to try them, you have to try them!

Hope you’ve liked my first article… if you have any questions or anything else about HoloLens, let me know in the comments section!