darcyjs14

I love my job and anticipated this question. I also anticipate that Alex Kipman, whose office is directly behind my desk will have some strong words if I reveal product futures. So let me try to thread this camel through the eye of a needle:

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1. Weight is something that Alex, the Hardware team and the ID team are thinking about all the time. The main issue of weight is comfort for the user. The tradeoffs are that we also want longer battery life (bigger batteries = more weight) and we want more powerful graphics (more CPU = more heat + more batteries. Heat either needs venting or a heat sink and heat sink = weight). Between HL1 and HL2 we made material improvements to comfort by changing the fit system and weight distribution, even as the weight stayed largely the same. As we plan for future products, weight is always at the top of the list of design trade-offs
2. More powerful? In general all computing devices, especially devices like ours that render beautiful graphics (if I say so myself), get more powerful across generations. CPU/GPU/AI processor/Memory BOMs all improve in the flagship SKUs. Look at the Surface product line (or, for that matter Apple's iPhone and Macbook product lines) and you'll see that the standard bearer always tries to push a performance envelope (while hewing to other considerations and constraints like weight, cost, heat, comfort, reliability, etc.)
3. Longer battery life? Yeah, the Achilles heal of all cordless products. I love my new iPhone 12 Pro Max but still not getting a full day on a single charge. Batteries are hard, as great graphics mean a powerful GPU. Outdoor use means you might need very bright displays to overcome sunlight, etc. We try to figure out the scenarios that the majority of HoloLens buyers use the HoloLens for and then tune the performance to meet or exceed those scenarios. There are scenarios that are more than once deviation from the norm. We have inspection engineers who use the device for 8 hours at a stretch and the batteries don't last that long. You can use external batteries to extend a working session. I would expect we'll look at options like the kinds of piggy-back batteries that exist today for the iPhone, so that you could "snap on" an extended battery pack if you need it, and you as the user would be willing to carry the extra weight around that those batteries entail
4. Will the FOV and resolution be greater, refresh rate higher? I think you can continue to expect big generational steps in display technology
5. Please understand that I can't answer that last one if I want my badge to work tomorrow.

Cloud rendering is great in theory and in practice. So long as you have a good network connection and low latency, you're golden. The thing to remember is that your software developer needs to implement this. It isn't something that you as a user can pick. Jordan needs to implement Azure Remote Rendering in one of his future products. If you use any of Trimble's HoloLens software products, you need to let him know that you want Azure Remote Rendering so that he moves this up his backlog ;-)

Both the current generation of the HoloLens (the HL2) and the Trimble version with the hardhat (the XR10) have been designed for commercial customers. The cost of the HoloLens went from $5k in HL to $3.5k in HL2 but a consumer device would have to be sub $1k. That's not our market currently but to make a product that lots of people can afford and will buy, you need to priced much closer to a phone than a high-end laptop.

Thanks for the question! When HoloLens was in development, in 2011-2013, much effort was spent on making spatial audio magical and all of our studio teams had at least one audio engineer attached to them. I made small contributions to a number of the launch experiences (World Explorer, HoloSkype, HoloTour, Fragments, Young Conker) and making audio a central part of the story-telling was part of our charter from management. As it became clear that HoloLens would be a commercial device first, the emphasis on spatial audio waned somewhat but in VR today, and in MR in the future, spatial audio is a really important part of how we experience 3D, because it mimics how we experience sound in the real world. Our teams have written some comprehensive docs to get you started. Check these out and feel free to ask additional questions. Audio in mixed reality - Mixed Reality | Microsoft Docs

Hi. We don't use OpenPose. We have our own silicon, the Holographic Processing Unit (HPU), now in its second generation, and we use custom, in-house ML algos