Re: Bluetooth Driver For Windows 10 Cnet
Garcia Miller
Microsoft's HoloLens is back, and retooled. The new version of the company's 3-year-old mixed-reality headset, which is now available to order for $3,500 and is coming later this year, fits easily over my head and glasses. It feels like an industrial tool, a welder's mask. I can see just fine. I go through the eye-tracking setup, and a grid of dots appear. I follow the dots, from one corner to the other, side to side. It works. Now, Microsoft's new Dynamics 365 Guides app is launched. This is my instruction set.
The best way I can describe it is like Google Maps' turn-by-turn directions for real world instructions -- or like a floating Lego manual for reality. I move my eyes over each step-by-step card that floats in the air in front of me. I'm told to put the bike into neutral. Now, a floating arrow arcs through 3D space to show me the gearshift on the bike and where I should move it. I do it. I move my eyes to the next step. Now, I adjust a loose bar on the bottom. A long dotted arrow arcs to a toolkit against the wall, pointing to a ratchet. I almost grab the wrong one, realizing the arrow is pointing me to another tool. My eyes move to the next card. Another arcing line shows me the way to a bin of nuts, to grab the right part to screw in.
Sometimes, the arrows don't line up perfectly. Would I grab the wrong tool, I wonder? Would the program correct me if I made a mistake? I should have tried grabbing the wrong tool. But still, the placement of pointing arrows in space feels weird, like a 3D navigator. My mind, weirdly, leaps to Nintendo and my experience with Labo, a game for the Nintendo Switch that expertly guides players to make elaborate cardboard creations through on-screen instructions. Imagine that, but in 3D, with the instructions spread out everywhere, pointing to real things. The world as a Lego kit.
There's no spider-zapping game here. I'm not playing Minecraft or Halo. Four years after Microsoft introduced the HoloLens headset as a game-playing doorway to magic worlds in addition to being an enterprise device, but now the tone has shifted. The HoloLens 2 is a practical device for companies to help their employees. AR has become a tool for getting things done. And the headset's improved comfort, better field of view, and better eye and hand tracking are immediately apparent. It's also connected to more Microsoft cloud services that will fold into iOS and Android apps, too.
After the wild, Willy Wonka dreams I explored at Magic Leap last year, Microsoft's HoloLens 2 feels like the ego to Magic Leap's id. But both sides might be needed to figure out where this tech needs to go next.
And this HoloLens isn't intended for regular people -- the mass consumer market -- at all. This is for factory workers, in places that can spend thousands on a work tool. In fact, Microsoft may not have eyes on a consumer AR headset for years. For now, the company is just trying to make a better way to mix reality in practical ways... and patiently waiting for the apps, developers and the rest of the connected world to keep evolving with it.
Augmented reality isn't a pipe dream anymore. It's a field being explored by Apple and Google in phones, and plenty of headset-making hopefuls, including Magic Leap, have been trying to crack how to design a comfortable, functional way to carry holograms around all the time.
The first HoloLens felt like an accomplishment because it was self-contained, had no wires and wasn't connected to anything at all. It just worked. Microsoft's new HoloLens 2 isn't really a whole new concept, but it pushes forward in three key things that the last headset needed: eye tracking, a larger field of view and better hand tracking. It's also much more comfortable, and allows people who wear prescription lenses, like me and my CNET colleagues, to use the headset by just slipping it on over our glasses. There's a Qualcomm 850 mobile processor to drive everything, along with Microsoft's own AI engine, replacing the Intel processor of the previous HoloLens.
The new design may look casually similar to someone who's never worn a HoloLens before, but it's notably less bulky and feels like it weighs less, too. It does weigh less, by a fraction -- 566 grams or 1.25 pounds, or versus the original HoloLens' 579 grams, or 1.28 pounds -- but it feels like more because the weight distribution has shifted, so a thicker bit at the back now fits around the rear head strap, while the front-facing visor is smaller. The center of balance is now slightly behind the ears, and is meant to feel like "putting on a baseball cap." I loosened the head strap, popped the headset over my glasses, and everything felt fine. The new balance shift makes everything significantly less painful to wear for more than 5 minutes. It's like putting on a backpack with better designed straps.
It even has a flip-up visor. The visor tilts up to allow anyone to make eye contact or do regular work more easily, like all of Microsoft's partner-made flip-up Windows Mixed Reality-branded VR headsets. I loved that I could stop in the middle of a demo to quickly clean my glasses, or scratch my forehead.
The HoloLens 2 hardware is still self-contained, just like the first one, and doesn't have any extra belt-worn pack, like the Magic Leap One uses, but that also means the headset is bigger than the Magic Leap One's head-worn $2,295 goggles. (It's also more than a thousand dollars more expensive.) But it's also much friendlier to my vision. The Magic Leap One requires me to put contact lenses in, or wait for prescription lenses for the headset: Magic Leap doesn't even support my prescription, currently. The HoloLens 2 just works over my glasses. I know which one I prefer.
Eye tracking hasn't been a big factor in VR and AR -- yet. But it will be. The first HoloLens didn't have eye tracking. The Magic Leap One does, and higher-end enterprise-targeted VR headsets like the HTC Vive Pro Eye and Varjo VR-1 are starting to include it. Eye tracking can recognize where you're looking with internal cameras, so you don't even have to move your head at all. The HoloLens 2 has added eye tracking, too.
The HoloLens 2's eye tracking has a double purpose: It can measure eye movement and use it to interact with virtual objects. Microsoft uses the new eye-tracking cameras for biometric security, too. The HoloLens 2 has iris scanning via Windows Hello, so users can instantly log in to Windows and launch their personal account or remember personal headset preferences.
More impressively, the HoloLens 2's eye tracking works with regular glasses, even thick ones like mine. Most eye-tracking tech I've used before had a few hiccups when I used my glasses. Early demos of the HTC Vive Pro Eye sometimes wouldn't work unless I loosened the VR headset, and similar things happened with a few experiences using Tobii's eye-tracking VR tech. No such problems happened during the few HoloLens 2 demos I had.
The only real use of eye tracking I got to experience was a brief demo showing how my quick eye movements could pick a virtual object without even moving my head. I made little virtual crystals explode by staring at them and commanding them to burst. But there are plenty of practical uses: Enterprise software from companies like Tobii already use eye tracking to create analytics and heat maps of where you're looking, to improve training.
The bigger-picture possibilities of eye tracking get a lot weirder. Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman says the HoloLens 2's eye-tracking cameras could also measure your emotions via tiny eye changes, as well as where your gaze lands.
At Microsoft's Human Factors Lab, where hardware is tested for comfort and accessibility, we step into a room surrounded by prototype headset models, and a table full of different rubbery ears. Microsoft's Senior Director of Design, Carl Ledbetter, shows us how the new headset's fit was carefully measured against a wide range of heads and ears, testing for fatigue and eye comfort. But also, in one corner, a mannequin head studded with a net of sensors sits on a table, looking like a Minority Report prop. It's an EEG-sensing headpiece.
"We use this to measure brainwave activity, and we can measure how much load is being put on somebody's mind," says Ledbetter. "We didn't necessarily use this much on HoloLens, but we see this as an opportunity ... we're using it on some other things."
Holographic magic isn't so magical if your ghostly beings get cut off mid-gaze. The first HoloLens had roughly a 30-degree field of view, which felt like viewing virtual objects through a window the size of a pack of playing cards held a few inches from your face.
The HoloLens 2 expands its field of view to 52 degrees diagonally, which Microsoft says is over double the effective viewing area. It feels like viewing holograms through a window the size of a softcover book. The vertical viewing area is taller, too. It makes a big difference when looking at tabletop holograms and monitor-size virtual displays. It still means some of the 3D effects are cut off, because my peripheral vision isn't covered by anything, and I can see in all directions. It felt considerably better than the original HoloLens.
I originally said in this story that, when comparing HoloLens 2 to Magic Leap One, that it felt "significantly better." After heading home and trying Magic Leap One again, the difference between both isn't far off (Magic Leap's field of view, diagonally, is 50 degrees). HoloLens 2 still felt like it edges Magic Leap by a bit, but I didn't get to try both side by side. And, the demos that Microsoft enabled for me with HoloLens 2 also made that field of view work well with hand tracking.
The effective resolution has increased, to the equivalent of a 2K display per eye versus the original HoloLens' 720p per eye, but the density of the images is still the same, at 47 pixels per degree. PPD is a way of measuring density of pixels in optics, like pixels per inch on a phone or tablet. Kipman calls this effectively "retina" level resolution. I'd still say I can see pixels if I look really closely, versus my everyday eyesight. It's crisper than the typical VR headset, too. (Varjo's new VR headset has an even denser PPD resolution at its center, but not everywhere else.) But the hologram-like effects still look ghostly, much like Magic Leap and the first HoloLens. They're bright and present enough to interact in the indoor spaces I tried. Will it be better outdoors, though? Microsoft says so.
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