Microsoft is holding a press event at Mobile World Congress next month, and it looks like we’ll get some details on HoloLens 2. The software giant will hold its event on Sunday February 24th at 5PM CET (11AM ET), and CEO Satya Nadella, Technical Fellow Alex Kipman, and CVP Julia White will all be in attendance. Kipman’s name indicates this will likely be a HoloLens 2 event, given his close involvement with this project.
Microsoft has typically avoided Mobile World Congress in recent years, after killing off Windows Phone. The company used to hold annual press events for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone updates at Mobile World Congress, alongside mobile device announcements. This is an unusual return to Barcelona for Microsoft.
Microsoft has been working on its next-generation HoloLens headset for years. Codenamed Sydney, the headset is expected to include an improved field of view, and be a lot lighter and more comfortable to wear. HoloLens 2 will also include Microsoft’s latest generation of the Kinect sensor and a custom AI chip to improve performance. Microsoft is also rumored to be using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 850 processor inside the HoloLens 2, making it an ARM-powered device.
Microsoft’s press invite doesn’t provide any further clues at what else we’re likely to see at the event. Julia White leads product management of Microsoft’s cloud platform, including Azure, so we’ll likely hear some more about the company’s cloud plans for 2019. The Verge will be covering Microsoft’s press event live from Barcelona, so stay tuned for more coverage on February 24th.
Comments
Probably again it is not for consumers. Just companies
By PdroPM on 01.16.19 11:55am
No point in targeting consumers until the cost comes down and the technology matures enough.
By astroWZRD on 01.16.19 12:07pm
laughs in iphone pricing
By fureien on 02.08.19 1:20am
Consumers don’t need AR on glasses. AR on phones is good enough. It’s just too niche. That may change eventually but it will be 5 years at least. Probably close to 10. If it comes to the consumer market at all.
By Doge Man on 01.16.19 2:08pm
What has a greater chance of consumer mass adoption is the Oculus Quest. A light comfortable all in one headset that people put on for relatively short periods of time to enjoy unique tailored experiences, and casual games.
By Doge Man on 01.16.19 2:25pm
"What has a greater chance of consumer mass adoption is the Oculus Quest. A light comfortable all in one headset that people put on for relatively short periods of time to enjoy unique tailored experiences, and casual games."
What you’re overlooking is that this can apply to an AR headset as well. Specifically Magic Leap, who will be launching a consumer device with ATT next year. People think AR can only be successful if it can be worn all day long and out in public, but that’s just the long term vision. Sort of like people who thought VR would only be successful when it reaches holodeck levels of immersion.
By Malkmus on 01.16.19 9:37pm
You may as well just use a VR headset with pass through video then.
VR is here and also offers great immersion and a vastly greater library of games.
By Doge Man on 01.16.19 9:52pm
That isn’t really the case though, is it? AR provides content in context to your surroundings. That’s completely different to VR with a passthrough video.
By RikF on 01.17.19 12:56am
I know the difference. Why is it so important to know the context of my surrounding when using the headset in my living room, where the VR headsets will primarily be used? And pass though video also shows your surroundings. Hell they could even make AR with VR headsets if they wanted to. Pass through video plus digital elements layered over. Remember these new VR headsets have inside out tracking and map your environment. There is a reason Windows VR headsets are now called Mixed Reality headsets.
As I mentioned before, AR for consumers is niche use cases that work right now in a phone. Mobile AR is a pipedream that I’m not sure will ever hit the mainstream.
By Doge Man on 01.17.19 7:47am
I think the biggest advantage of AR is that it perfectly utilize the most advance optical intrument that is available to human being, the human eye. Any pair human eyes will be light years ahead of the most advance lens in at least the next 5 years. The pass through video solution you proposed will never be as accurate and realistic as the human eyesight. And I imagine that will be fatal for many industry.
By jeffreykuo on 01.18.19 1:11am
Obviously, but what I’m saying is it can be done.
VR will be a hit for consumers because of the escape, the ability to jump into new worlds.
AR will be a hit for work related applications because of the ability to meld digital tasks with physical environments.
AR for consumers remains a big Why? Outside of a few niche scenarios.
By Doge Man on 01.31.19 10:33pm
I love my Oculus Rift but hardly use it because it takes me out of the real world. Same reason I prefer video games where you can sit in the same room and play with people. I’m hoping AR takes off because I’d like to enhance the real world rather than get immersed in a virtual one.
By Mead42 on 01.31.19 9:24pm
I think you are being a bit pessimistic – it’s not going to be 5 to 10 years, closer to 2-3 years. Technology is progressing quickly, and Magic Leap is getting developers to create consumer content. Heck, CES had an AR headset that looks like a pair of sunglasses, just a little thicker than normal.
For me, I find AR on phones is almost completely pointless – if you are looking at your phone screen, then what’s the point of displaying things in the world around you? The only real uses I’ve seen for phone AR is cute pictures and the occasional tool for doing things like measuring distances. The AR games on a phone are almost always games that would be better off in VR, or even just on the phone screen and not in AR at all (they rarely interact with the real world).
By Dreamwriter on 01.16.19 3:44pm
Most of the headsets at CES were basically see-through displays. What’s missing is the sophisticated positional tracking/computer vision found in bulkier headsets like Hololens and ML One. Even if you rely on a belt-worn compute puck, you still need a pretty significant array of sensors co-located with your head for it to be anything more than a video pass-through device. The CES devices looked cool, but all of them would end up bulkier than ML One if they had comparable spatial awareness/computer vision capabilities on board.
By Slackattack on 01.16.19 4:33pm
This.
By Doge Man on 01.16.19 8:04pm
6d.ai is a startup that’s testing 6DoF head-tracking and real-time world mesh generation from RGB cameras. It’s good enough to do rudimentary occlusion. So for a significant portion of the feature set, no, you won’t need those sensors. You’ll just need a fast-enough portable computer.
By bsanr on 01.17.19 1:14am
6DoF head tracking is only one of the requirements though. If you look at ML for example, you also see:
- Dynamic occlusion geometries of environment
- Hand tracking/gesture recognition
- Eye/Gaze tracking
I wish it was as simple as a better monocular SLAM algo + "faster computer" but the truth is that "full" AR experiences are going to continue to look closer to Hololens/ML devices than the HW prototypes at CES for the next little while.
By Slackattack on 01.17.19 7:43pm
Is there any use of AR Glasses?
If you say games or maps, then that’s a very tiny use case scenario.
By Daniel Su on 01.16.19 6:52pm
Exactly. If anything, it would be used even less than the Apple Watch or Airpods. Not ‘The Next Big Thing’, especially for consumers. I doubt most consumers will even flock to folding phones.
By Doge Man on 01.16.19 8:05pm
I think they could sell HoloLens to every school in America… Europe… and the world… if they resurrected Encarta for AR. Imagine to-scale sized dinosaurs in the playground yard or gymnasium.
That said… Nadella is too much of a milk toast… windbag… talk out his pie hole… but do absolutely nothing… to do something truly cool and innovative like that. If it isn’t Azure or Office 365 then it means NOTHING to Nadella. So I wouldn’t expect much at MWC19. Just more empty promises at best.
By BleachedJr on 01.16.19 10:36pm
How would you know if Nadella wouldn’t do it? All you’re doing is making up stories. Nadella is absolutely committed to products beyond Office 365 and Azure. Of course majority of their products these days connect and benefit Office 365 and Azure lock-in.
By Daniel Su on 01.16.19 11:46pm
I know because we’re 4… YEARS… into HoloLens v1. They’re still $3K. And I can’t think of one thing MS has written themselves for it yet.
I know because MS couldn’t code they’re way out of a paper bag anymore. All they do is buy other companies that do coding for them. And since no company is actively offering an AR Encyclopaedia for education Microsoft has no company to buy.
Not expecting any big MWC19 HoloLens release therefore. Only more talk about how great Project Rome and the MS Graph are. Those two things have deep tie ins to Azure and Office 365. And the esoteric Nadella loves to talk about things that make him sound visionary.
By BleachedJr on 01.17.19 9:32am
Microsoft’s pricing for Hololens v1 is deliberate, that prices keep it out of consumer hands and into the hands of developers and businesses.
By Daniel Su on 01.17.19 5:01pm
Imagine if you could make anything that you wanted to interact with, as long as you didn’t need physical feedback from it; and that you didn’t actually need to make it "work" physically, but instead simply make it look like it worked.
It’s not a joke to say that AR is the next step in general-purpose computing. We’ve been adapting UI more and more to the needs of even the most uninitiated user for decades now. The last step is just making it so that you can interact with digital entities as if they were real-world objects.
By bsanr on 01.17.19 1:18am
That’s kind of like saying is there any use for the Internet. I mean you could share documents but that’s a very tiny use case.
By Mead42 on 01.31.19 9:29pm