 People have been preparing me for the Microsoft HoloLens for about three months now. It's supposed to be amazing. It's holograms. They're real, right in front of you. And now I've finally gotten to see it. And it's really great, except when it is really terrible. They still won't let us take pictures or video using the HoloLens, but it actually does look like something that's semi-finished. It's completely self-contained. You can put it on and adjust it, and it feels about as finished as something like Project Morpheus. When you manage to look through it and you're looking through it at the right angle, it looks amazing. You aren't seeing pixels, you're seeing photons. It seems like there's actually the world's best projector, and it's showing you something on the floor. And it's amazingly aware of what's actually around there. If you have an origami ball, then you can watch it bounce off the table, and it'll roll around on the floor, and it will hit a couch and bounce off that. And it's just really incredible what it can pick up. It's still not really clear how people are going to interact with it. As soon as you want to start getting close to it or start actually moving it, you're stuck doing the air tap again or talking to it. And it can recognize these gestures well, it can recognize voice commands well, but that's not really how we want to be interacting with something. And you're not even able to get that close to it because the camera, your head camera, will start to click through it. Which brings me to my biggest problem, which is that you can never actually believe that this is there. The field of view, which is where you can actually see objects, it looks kind of like a box in front of you. And if you have a small object there, then it looks amazing. It looks like it is absolutely there. But the moment you try to actually look around something that's a table or a big notepad, then it starts disappearing and clipping off. And it's like you have all these invisible walls around you. And so it means that you can never really feel like something is actually in this space. It just feels like you've got a screen and it's the best screen in the world. And the problem is that all of the demo videos of HoloLens are these incredible vistas of people looking around at Mars or seeing Minecraft expand out around them. And that's all basically a lie. All of these things, they can be around you, but you have to look straight at them to know that they're there. You just have to kind of take it on faith. And if you can't see this, if you can't believe in this, then what are you using this for? Right now the HoloLens isn't augmenting reality, it's augmenting a little fraction of reality. Which is still amazing in a lot of ways, but Microsoft has promised us science fiction. And this isn't science fiction yet.