Microsoft HoloLens (1st Gen)

» see microsoft.com/hololens as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i saw a hololens in person was at an engineering trade event around 2019. someone wore it for ten minutes. the field of view through the visor was smaller than the marketing renders had suggested, and the headset slid on the head every time the wearer moved fast. i did the same thing every other engineer at that booth did, which was take it off, hand it back, walk to the next table.

microsoft shipped the development edition on the thirtieth of march 2016 at three thousand dollars a unit. a commercial edition came in at five thousand the following year. the pitch was the first untethered standalone ar visor that ran a full windows 10 build inside the goggles. no cable to a pc, no tether to a phone, no external markers in the room. the spatial tracking came out of the kinect lineage and worked well enough to plant a hologram in a corner that stayed put when you walked.

hololens 2 was announced at mwc barcelona in february 2019 with preorders at thirty-five hundred dollars. the original then entered the long quiet phase that hardware gets when its successor ships. microsoft's official end-of-servicing for the 1st gen landed on the tenth of december 2024.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

the consumer ar story microsoft tried to tell at the 2015 reveal involved minecraft worlds on coffee tables and skype calls with a floating avatar at your kitchen counter. none of that was the actual market. the buyers were defense contractors, surgical-training labs, factory training departments, and a small population of enterprise architecture firms with the budget for the commercial edition.

the us army ivas contract was the loudest enterprise win and also the loudest enterprise headache, with field tests producing nausea and headaches in soldiers and contract redesigns running for years. by the time hololens 2 was shipping at scale, the consumer ar narrative had been dropped in favor of the much narrower industrial pitch.

~ what it did ~

the headset projected a small bright field of color in the middle of your forward vision. you could see your hands and use them as pointers. you could anchor an object to a real-world surface and walk away. the spatial mesh of the room was built up live by the cameras and inertial sensors. for a 2016 device that fit on one head with onboard compute it was an impressive engineering result, regardless of whether anyone wanted to buy one.

~ the end ~

microsoft never really replaced the consumer story. apple shipped the vision pro in 2024 at thirty-five hundred dollars and ran into the same wall: no consumer use case at that price. meanwhile microsoft narrowed the hololens roadmap to defense contracts and let the ivas program drag through redesigns. the 1st gen end-of-servicing in december 2024 was barely covered as news because the audience that owned one had already moved to the 2 or to the next platform.

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