Designer Jonathan Da Costa has developers a new mixed reality concept for HoloLens. He says he created an “inspirational” in collaboration with Microsoft and Qwant. The latter partner provides a private search engine. In the concept video (below), you can see how a HoloLens user will be able to online shop while interacting with a magazine. For example, while browsing through a fashion magazine while using HoloLens, a user can open holographic cards that link to a website. This all occurs in a mixed reality environment. Once the linked website is open, users can see information on the topic, buy products, or view media. HoloLens can read the media on the page and link it to the online space for further viewing.
While this has positive implications for traditional media, it also works for online material. For example, viewing an online shop with HoloLens would bring out item holograms in the real-world environment.
Developing for HoloLens
Once again, we are seeing the potential of HoloLens and mixed reality to change the way we live and consume media. Of course, this kind of feature is some way off, considering Microsoft has still not launched a consumer version of HoloLens. That is not expected to happen until 2019. Anyone can buy the developer edition of the hardware, but it costs $3000 and is not a complete market-ready device. Microsoft has said it wants to build a content ecosystem before launch. That makes sense, and abilities like this show why HoloLens has so much potential.
