if only this was an actual screenshot
It looks like Fortune broke an embargo a little early today and released details on the first Microsoft HoloLens unit that humans can actually buy.
While Fortune’s original story has been pulled, the information was picked up and posted by Redditor Shooob. The gist is this: the first development kit for the HoloLens will not only cost $US3000 ($4,210), but has details on three demo game/experience/things that will come with it.
The first game is Fragments, which “puts gamers in the middle of an augmented reality crime drama that unfolds in their living room. Players are able to investigate clues and solve crimes by interacting with characters that sit on their couch and talk directly to them.”
The second is called RoboRaid, which you’ve seen before when it was called Project Xray:
The third game is a weird choice: Young Conker. It’s described in the Fortune piece as:
Young Conker takes the popular squirrel created by Microsoft-owned developer Rare off platform gaming and and into the real world. Developed by Asobo Studios (which also worked with Microsoft on Fragments), the game changes based on what environment the gamer is playing in.
“This means every person gets a unique gameplay experience, since each gamer’s real world environment is unique,” Tsunoda wrote. “It is amazing how different the play experience feels based on playing the game in your living room versus your kitchen or your bedroom. Even starting the game from a different position in a single room creates an entirely new gameplay dynamic.”
Of all the properties Microsoft owns and could use to inspire developers to create fresh and exciting new content for their science-fiction-as-fuck machine, they picked…Conker? OK. Oh well, good news for Conker fans, I guess!
You can read through the full (copy+pasted) report here.
Comments
12 responses to “Report: HoloLens Dev Unit Includes Conker Game”
Yep $3000 US for a developer kit, these things are not going to be affordable for the general public for about 5 years.
The crazy thing is for that price you could buy a Rift or HTC Vive, plus a kick arse computer to run it on, and still have money left over…
To be fair, very different audiences, very different usage cases. I see Hololens being used a lot professionally for various applications. Rift/Vive/Whatever else I would consider to be exclusively gaming devices.
Plus, the tech in this thing holy crap.
Microsoft please don’t do to Conker what you did to Banjo-Kazooie… please…
What, make a good follow-up game to the series? 😛
When did they do that? Because it certainly wasn’t with Nuts & Bolts.
Yes it was and I shall continue to believe so til forever!
Ha, well then we may have to agree to disagree on that one. 🙂
On reading this one thing is becoming clear, a lot of VR games are only going to succeed in homes with large living areas. People like myself that live in small or studio apartments won’t have very big areas to move around in so the games just won’t really work well.
Well, I look forward to picking this up in a few years when it’s within my price range, and a Vive or whatevers still around then. I notice the latency time (which will obviously be down by then) is still fairly hefty, but for what it is, it’s goddamn amazing.
I’m still boycotting it until they stop calling AR “holograms”. which will never happen.
Actually I think that is where the HoloLens could become a niche.
Remember that Hololens has a fairly restricted Field Of View, and so you are not really needing that big wide area.
Plus a number of the demos are showing you interacting on your coffee table, or on a wall etc.
Furthermore, you have full visual of the room, with the Virtual environment superimposed onto it, so you dont have that risk of falling over things.
So I believe that Hololens will be the #1 for Apartments, Office Space and even Commuting.
One interesting thing I saw from someone who got to try it out was that the low FOV meant that (for his brain, at least) things didn’t really trigger the idea of object permanence, and it was hard to keep track of things that left the Hololens’ screen. It would be interesting to see whether masking the non-screen parts of the lens would make it start to work again.
But yeah, I don’t know that a low FOV could really be a plus for it at all, even in a restricted space like that. If anything, for a smaller space you’d want a wider field of view since everything would be closer than in a more open space, thus taking up a greater arc of your vision.