This seems like the sort of play that people will eventually spend most of their time using. While playing the game in this mode you use a regular Xbox One controller to play the game. In these views, you can lean up against the wall to look inside the picture, all the way over, as if looking through a window that happens to open up upon the world of Minecraft. While playing this way, you can simply use your wall as a regular television, or you can have it turn your view into a typical television-created 3D perspective, or a true holographic 3D experiences. Viewed from across the room while seated, it looks like a massive play space. It can create a virtual television on your wall, which comes in three sizes: small, medium and large. In the case of Minecraft, the HoloLens has two ways to interacting with the brick world. Sometimes that other world can completely obfuscate reality, but more often than not, it augments it. Instead, the HoloLens creates a sort of floating window, through which you see this other world. Microsoft's HoloLens isn't like a virtual reality headset, a device designed to overtake your world, to create a virtual playspace out of the darkness inside a set of goggles. The HoloLens creates a sort of floating window They'd see you grabbing and moving your arm up and down and probably see you leaning back and forth, as if peering into an invisible window. They'd probably see you pinching the air in front of your face, or tapping the air like you'd tap someone on the shoulder. Viewed by a friend watching you play, they would see you sitting on a couch staring at the wall, or laying on your bed staring at your ceiling, or most likely, standing over your floor or table looking down. It is a private experience in a public space, unless you're playing with friends, who can join in without the need for another headset. The Minecraft HoloLens experience is one of those moments that helps crystalize a baffling concept like holographic augmented reality into something that you simply "get" and most likely marvel at.Īs Microsoft warned during its press conference earlier this week, Minecraft HoloLens isn't really what you saw up on its stage during the press conference.
That was a really just a prototype designed to give people an idea of the gaming potential of the new headgear. The HoloLens version of the massively popular exploration and building game shown during Microsoft's press conference is a work-in-progress game that will eventually ship for Microsoft's augmented reality headset.Īnd it's a very different sort of Minecraft than the one Microsoft showed off in January back when the HoloLens was first unveiled to press. Minecraft HoloLens isn't a tech demonstration or experiment, not anymore.