Recently my Grandma passed away, and my sister and I posted about her and the speeches we made for her. Soon after my Grandma’s brother passed away and my mum and our whole extended family have been very sad. So last weekend at the wake, I took the Hololens to brighten the mood. Everyone tried it and I even convinced the Grandma’s to try it on. You can see in the video it was hilarious!!

I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in Australia to get the opportunity to try out Microsoft’s latest gadget, the Hololens. It is a developer edition that my dad received for work. I have used it for a week now playing games, exploring our solar system and watching movies. I believe that the Hololens is awesome fun and will be very popular. This might even be the Apple iPhone moment for Microsoft. As soon as I put it on, I could tell that it was incredibly well developed; it wasn’t slow or blocky, it was smooth and impressive. Let me tell you about my experience:

Putting it on.
As a 12 year old child, putting it on was a bit difficult. BTW it does have a warning that children 15 years and under should not use it, presumably because they think we would break it. 🙂 I initially struggled with being able to see the screen; I was always either squinting up or down, making it difficult to see. Maybe this was because my head is too small.

A Hololens is just over 1/2 a kilogram and working with it is a totally different feeling to working with a computer, and I certainly can’t imagine working with it for hours at a time! I had mine on for about an hour or so at a time before I took a break. When I took it off, well let’s just say I was hallucinating! I kept thinking there were screens around me and my head felt really light, sort of like when you have just got off a hoverboard after riding around on it for hours.

Things to do on the Hololens:
The Hololens has games, applications and the internet, basically everything that the computer has and that I would need. My favourite app of all is the game called RoboRaid – that requires a bit of running around and dodging – and of course to relax watching movies on Netflix is fun! The Hololens also has some awesome applications, like Solar Explorer, where you can see our solar system and everything in it, in great detail! The Hololens also has an incredibly clear image and 64 GB of storage, which does not seem enough when I compare it with my laptop which has 1 TB. I asked Stephen Carter about this and he told me that the size is enough when you consider the size of average Hololens applications are less than 100 MBs.

Overall Experience:
The Microsoft Hololens is an amazing piece of technology, but I am no geek! Any geek would be able to tell you about the special features of the Hololens, which apps you can use to code in it etc, but I can’t!  I did see a Hololen’s presentation by Stephen Carter in the SSW Chapel and it was all about the history of the Hololens and what you can make for it.

I sadly don’t have any money but I can tell you guys if I did, the Microsoft Hololens is definitely worth it. The developer edition is $3,000, which is very pricey, but after a while, I can imagine the price will drop substantially. Even if the price doesn’t drop, you could compare the cost of getting it instead of a computer. If you included the cost of a second monitor, mouse and keyboard, it will often be close to that. On the Hololens can have as many desktops as you would like, no need for a mouse or keyboard (and obviously a second monitor or computer), unless you are doing work in which case you would need a keyboard for typing.

So if you guys get a Hololens, tell me what you think in the comments below.

Ruby