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Microsoft Starts HoloLens Developer-Kit Program
Today at its Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced that it is taking applications for HoloLens developer kits, which will be available early next year.
The company said the kits will cost $3,000 and that they would ship in the first quarter of 2016.
To show off some of the kinds of experiences possible, Microsoft demoed Project X-Ray, a mixed-reality title also shown at this year's E3 convention.
The demo occurred onstage with a player wearing a HoloLens headset and holding a wand (it's unknown if a specific wand is required for the game or if any object will do), and what he was seeing in the demo was captured and shown on the stage screens using a special camera rig.
Microsoft says the game can be played in any room, and that enemies in the game will respond to their environment and with each other. Portals cracked and opened up on the walls of the stage set, and robot bugs crawled out on the wall. The player blasted them with his wearable gauntlet hologram. He also dodged around the stage and apparently could hear enemies' sounds in relation to where they were.
Apart from firing a laser from his gauntlet, he also sucked an enemy to his gauntlet and destroyed it using its vortex mode.
The demo ended with him confronting a large, person-sized foe, but that will have to be a battle for another time.
It should be noted that the player's movements around the stage were fairly slow and deliberate, and the bugs' movements were also slow. It will be interesting to see how frenzied the action could get in the final product.
No release date or timeframe was announced for Project X-Ray, nor HoloLens itself.
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