Bruce Harris from Microsoft recently declared during an event in Tel Aviv that the HoloLens will come with an extended battery life up to 5.5 hours and will be totally wireless.
At a nighttime gathering in Israel, during his presentation to a small audience, Harris explained that the HoloLens can be considered a fully functional Windows 10 PC, only one that is wearable like a set of goggles. According to him, the device will allow any operations a regular laptop is able to perform.
The development edition of the wearable holographic computing device designed by Microsoft is expected to come on the market in the first quarter of 2016. According to CIO Today, it will cost around $3,000. It is not clear yet when the Microsoft is going to launch the consumer edition. Last summer, the company's CEO Satya Nadella declared that the development of the virtual reality gadget will take around five years.
During his presentation, Harris also made it clear for the audience how the Microsoft gadget will differ from other virtual-reality and augmented-reality devices on the market today. Microsoft HoloLens gadget will be in between those two types of devices, according to a report in Ars Technica. The device will not present a totally virtual reality vision but it will be able of more than simply overlay digital information onto a real-world view. According to Harris, Microsoft calls this "mixed reality."
Microsoft HoloLens will have a more limited field of view compared with some current virtual reality gadgets. The device's on-screen images will be equivalent to the field of vision of a 15-inch monitor watched from around two feet away. This has the purpose to eliminate the motion sickness common to many VR devices on the market today, however for gamers it might be a limitation in the way of a fully immersive experience.
According to Microsoft, HoloLens will have the ability to project holographic, virtual images onto users' real-world views, making the device useful for various applications beyond gaming.