You may not need a television to play Halo 6 — you may end up playing it as a hologram.
YouTube user Varun Mani has uploaded a video of him streaming the Xbox One exclusive Halo 5: Guardians from his Xbox One to his HoloLens head-mounted display. This enables him to put a floating hologram-like display of the game up on his wall so he can play it in any room in his house. HoloLens is Microsoft’s big move into the augmented reality technology sector. It runs Windows 10, and it has a small, transparent display in the middle of a panel that goes across your vision that places digital displays and interactive windows around your environment. The company has started selling development kits, and Microsoft plans to work toward a consumer version of HoloLens over the next five years.
Check out Mani’s Halo in HoloLens video below:
This is just one example of how the HoloLens technology works, but it is a great demonstration of how classic television games will work with the device. The augmented-reality tech empowers gamers to put a TV where ever they want. And the size of that virtual television set is only limited by size of the HoloLens’s field-of-view.
It’s these kinds of demos that make it easy to understand why Microsoft is pursuing the HoloLens technology. This could eliminate physical screens that hang on walls or that we hold in our hands. Instead, an AR future could create “screens” on demand and only when we need them. These AR displays could even have unique shapes rather than having to stick to the standard 16-by-9 configuration.
In that future, everyone would need to have AR goggles on their heads throughout most of the day to fully participate in the world around them. And Microsoft and Google-backed competitor Magic Leap seem like they are the closest to having the hardware that could fuel that next-generation of computing platforms.