Silicon Valley is convinced that the next era of computing will be worn on people’s faces, with Apple, Facebook and Snap racing to develop “augmented reality” glasses that are as small and light as an ordinary pair of sunglasses, but able to project digital images on to the real world.
Those efforts remain locked inside R&D labs, and could still be years away from release. But Microsoft is proving an unlikely pioneer with its “mixed reality” HoloLens headset, the latest version of which it unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday.
Instead of aiming for mass-market consumers, Microsoft is doubling down on corporate and commercial customers with the latest version of the headset. “A lot of technology is a displacer of jobs,” said Alex Kipman, who has led HoloLens’s development since the project began almost a decade ago. “Devices like HoloLens are enablers of jobs. They give people superpowers at work that they didn’t have before.”