Even after two years since its launch in 2016, the Microsoft Hololens is still really impressive. Mainly because not much progress has been made in this area since then. Sure, the Magic Leap One was introduced quite recently and it does have a larger FOV than the Hololens but judging by the reviews online it’s not much of a leap forward… get it? We are going to get our hands on the Magic Leap One soon so we can compare the two but that is a topic for another blog.

We had a Tech Play Friday dedicated to just the Hololens and that was one of our most visited Tech Play Fridays. This for sure indicates that there is a great interest in the Hololens still, mainly because of how cool holograms are, how rare it is to have a Hololens and how expensive they are, coming in at a whopping $3000 US. The interns had a week to develop a mini-game for the Hololens, the end result was a Star Trek inspired command console interface.

While some of the things shown are really impressive, the main disappointment we had was trying to replicate the famous Minecraft demonstration that Microsoft gave back in 2016! Check out this video if you haven’t already.

In this video, the Minecraft world jumps out of a table and you can play around with it. We wanted to replicate this completely, we did our research and found out what is necessary to do this. What you need is two Hololens headsets, a camera, 3D printed mount for one of the Hololens headsets to attach to the camera, a capture card, a copy of Minecraft for Windows 10 and a nice big table. We had all of this and after two hours of trying, we found out that you just can’t run it. It just doesn’t work, it doesn’t let you download the last crucial step. Microsoft’s demo was misleading, making it seem like anybody can do that if you have the right tools but you just can’t, yet. It must have been really custom built to work only on that stage and not just any environment.