HoloLens 2 Review

A HoloLens 2 arrived today. We love new technology days in this home. It is a slightly used headset, and we are working on how to reset the device for use in our office/household/lives without destroying someone else's life, or at least their Windows profile.

First impression: Being a halo HMD, this is surprisingly comfortable. It is well balanced, and I did not need to crank the knob super tight for the device to stay put on my face, which is a first, literally. Honestly, it’s the most comfortable I’ve been in a headset since the Oculus Go and the best fitting of any of the previous windows compatible headsets.

My daughter got the first crack at using the headset, and she used the draw application. My turn in the HoloLens came when she needed technical support to share her creation. The screen is super bright. The colors were vivid in a well lit room with both overhead light and natural light streaming in. Unlike the first HoloLens, the field of view is large enough.

Cortana’s voice recognition was very good and had no difficulty executing my request. My close friend has a non western name which up to this point no voice recognition software has been able to identify in my contacts. Today that milestone has been met, and it was a delight to vocally compose and send a message.

A downside is the lack of applications available, and almost all that are available look and feel like they are produced by Microsoft or their partners. This headset is business focused, no doubt, however it could be an option in the consumer space if the cost were to come down.

Very quickly we identified a problem with the basic operating system, there is no easy way to have individual profiles on this device. Microsoft is hardly to blame: a problem with headsets in general right now is the basic assumption that one person is the owner/user of a device. Every headset going forward needs a management system to allow for multiple users, as what I want to do in headset is not the same as my partner or my child.

All in all, lots to love from a user experience perspective with this headset