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Microsoft HoloLens

At Benchmark Electronics we’ve had the Epson Moverio BT-200 since June 2015, after much struggle to order the glasses from Epson. And with the product being dead on arrival we were not off to a good start. It turned out to be a sign of things to come, as our experiences with the Moverio BT-200 weren’t great, but the Moverio at least allowed us to convey early augmented reality (AR) concepts to our clients and get them excited about the potential.

To further our experience with augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) we’ve been looking into purchasing either a Google Glass or Microsoft HoloLens as part of Benchmark’s discovery projects. During these discovery projects engineers can propose an interesting concept to pursue, and receive funding and FTE to achieve said concept.

Project Glass is an effort by Google to develop augmented reality glasses. The concept for these glasses was introduced on April 4th 2012 on a Google+ page. The launch also included a YouTube video demonstrating the possible uses of Project Glass. It basically provides a hands-free heads up display (HUD), and interestingly uses bone conduction to conduct sound. Recently Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype, so we’re passing on this one for the time being.

Microsoft HoloLens is an augmented/mixed reality headset developed and manufactured by Microsoft (obviously). HoloLens consists of a head-mounted display, projecting images on its visor using a pair of transparent combiner lenses, and it can generate binaural audio using its 3D speakers. The HoloLens also has some other fancy goodies on board to combine for exciting functionality. Via our US colleagues we managed to get our hands on some early prototypes, and they are awesome. As the prototypes are so fresh, there’s not much peer research development to fall back on. In other words it’s going to be experimental for a while, but we already have clients interested in its potential.

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