> You can't wear Microsoft Hololens outside of your office, far from your desktop.

This is not true. Hololens is untethered and there's nothing preventing you from using it anywhere. Well, nothing except the fact that it's bulkier and heavier than Glass and obscures your face too much for use in social situations.

The real reason why AR isn't better than Glass for this kind of thing is that AR tracking and recognition of objects is not good enough for real applications yet. On Glass as reported in the article you have to scan a code to identify an object you're holding. In people's imaginations, an AR device would magically recognize the object and overlay useful informational displays on it as you turn it in your hands. In reality Hololens is not even close to being able to do this, so you would be reduced to scanning codes just like on Glass.

This is the second misconception I've read in this thread so far. I was at a conference in finland this year and a huge company called ABB was there with a holo lens demo. They had a hololens you could wear to see how to repair some mechanical unit. The hololens was able to recognise the unit from its previous mapping of the object and project AR on to it. They moved the unit and it still was able to almost instantaneously detect it.

The technology is here. It's ready. And it's already in use.

It's probably best to be skeptical of a demo.

Perhaps but I've used both a Hololens and Google Glass, and the Hololens is light-years ahead. It is easily capable of the 'AR repair' application. Glass on the other hand was very 'meh'. The voice interface was horribly unreliable (think 2010-level speech recognition), and it is really just a convenient small display, not proper AR.

I tried a hololens in real life to measure the distance between bowling balls (English style bowls) and it worked really well superimposing an arrow between the balls with the distance.

For me it was more impressive than glass which when I tried it mainly had me wondering why the photos were so much fuzzier than you could take with you phone.

Hololens can display 3D annotations that have been prearranged on a mostly static, previously mapped environment. It cannot map moving or non-rigid objects in dynamic environments and it cannot identify or track small objects that you are holding in your hands, unless maybe you stick giant fiducial markers on them.

It can't do that on its own, but it's certainly possible to write an app for Hololens that does. I can't confirm writing such an app at this time.

"There's nothing preventing you from using it. Except (...)" - that's quite a lot of "nothing," IMNSHO, to the tune of "if we handwave away all its problems, there are no problems. Tada!"

It has to map the area around you so it has a really hard time being used outdoors and is almost completely unusable when moving in a vehicle.

> You can't wear Microsoft Hololens outside of your office, far from your desktop.

Yes you can assuming wifi is in range. The Hololens is great. There is no cable. The battery life is reasonable. The field of view is awful but usable. We have been using one at the office and I'm very impressed with how accurately and quickly it maps out a space.

I don't think they are so different. In fact anything glass can do hololens will do better.

Google glass is a remote display on ur eyes. Meaning a screen attached to your glasses.

They are entirely different.

Hololens is an entirely new beast.

Comparing them because both can play youtube is every journalist's mistake and uneducated journalists created that mistake.

Hololens can not be used outside in a bright day light.

Hololens can be used any where. WiFI is not needed all time for Hololens. WiFi is needed only for the APPs which needs them as in some APPs in phones. You can connect the Hololens to wifi(hotspot) in any smartphone.

>Mircosoft Hololens is AR as in Augmented Reality while Glass is a UI floating on your face.

Google marketed Glass as AR but it turned out to be just a Floating UI. That is why it failed imo. Hololens is what we were promised for a relatively similar price point.

To be fair, Google's AR example of Glass was it's marketing concept video, but never shown or advertised as a feature of the released product.

My impression was that the Hololens kits ran W10, albeit an embedded version, natively.

The fact that you need to spell out the difference between full AR and glass also seems to show how poorly Microsoft has communicated the potential of AR.