Neat,  though I'm not sure how the quality of the holograms has anything to do with the significant drawbacks that had to be made to the hardware to allow it to be wireless.

Wow, I did't think that was possible. How are they compressing the 6.4 Gbps video stream?
1.5 hour batterly life though :/ and another $220, the cable isn't that big of an issue.

I'm curious what the real life experience is with latency. Putting my amplifier in between the headset and ps4 was immediately noticeable with the controllers getting a slight yet visible delay. They claim 2ms to compress, transmit and decompress the video stream, sounds like magic.

Awesome, you have hololens.

I'm wondering can it make the holograms really solid like in VR, or is there always some translucency going on? I guess it depends on the room lighting?
Is it possible to effectively darken areas (like darkening sunglasses) or is it only additive, overpowering background light?
Can it simply act as VR if you put a blindfold over it? :)

Style will eventually be normal glasses, long way off. Then vr contacts!
Or perhaps retinal projectors.

The point is that the hardware is fine... Why would you assume it is not? The hardware is fine enough to create a very good experience all together that is actually certainly as good pure VR, just diffefrent. Microsoft focused on that too (to get back to your initial point)

It depends on 2 things actually :) I really played a lot and tried different things with it.

- Room lightning definitely but it is really not that much a problem (of course if you are outside in a very sunny day it may but it will still work)
- The most impacting thing is the actual hologram. Holograms are basically ray of lights with the hololens being projected into the 2 small screens; so if the holograms is too dark (using darker textures) then less light are projected and if you are really projecting something black, Hololens is basically not projecting anything at all :)

I would say that for very bright holograms, it can actually appears almost solid and I can definitly hide the "real" objects behind it (I 'm trying it at the same time than typing this :) Actually, I can see the object behind if I really focus but the hologram is really almost appearing solid). But if I go darker (close to blak) then it will virtualy be transparent.

Overall this is really not an issue tho because you just design your application in consequence and so far I did not really have any problem with that.

I have no idea how they manage to get latency down. Battery life certainly isn't great, and it is expensive, but it's full wireless VR. Mostly I'm just impressed at how quickly it happened.

Now, the actual proccessing is still done on a normal PC. But I think VR still requires a dedicated space since other wise how do you keep youself from running into real world objects?

Of course something like Hololens with a wider range would be ideal since you can potentially do both AR and VR. But the price is an issue, and the Hololens in its current state is far from ideal. So maybe he should have a more finished product before claiming AR superiorority :).

I guess my issue mostly lies with Microsofts insistence to bring up Hololense when they talk about VR.

Hololense is an AR device. Which is very cool, and I imagine AR will have a huge place in a lot of aspects of our lives in the future, but it's so much less demanding than VR. A high quality VR headset is closer to a fully contained VR headset than the Hololense is.

Nah, Sword Art Online type headsets is the final destination.

Sure as long as it doesn't cost one kidney to enjoy.