HoloLens dev kit price and release date announced; Project X-Ray introduces

Microsoft’s HoloLens is a wearable computer that puts a semi-transparent display in front of your eyes, allowing you to to interact with virtual objects in real-world environments. Successful applicants will be able to pick up a kit for a few $3,000 United States dollars, and it will be arriving in the first quarter of 2016.

It looks really futuristic, nearly like virtual reality.

However, at $3,000 it’s clear that Microsoft doesn’t see HoloLens being a cheap piece of hardware for consumers.

As previously implied by CEO Satya Nadella, the first HoloLens will be a developer-oriented unit that Microsoft is calling the “HoloLens Development Edition”. Microsoft’s hardware is a lot more substantial than Google’s was, as HoloLens is a fully standalone device that includes a custom “holographic processing unit”, so a higher price is understandable. It also showcased a holographic version of Minecraft at E3. Players hold a controller device, which the HoloLens projects a gun image onto. Then robots appear in your living room, breaking the walls.

These killer robots are smart, too. I can’t wait to see how powerful this device actually is and what third-party developers are going to do with it. We still don’t know the specs of the HoloLeans. There isn’t any wire, any phone in the headset or any connection to a PC. The developer kit for Samsung’s gear VR was $200, twice as much as the final product.