But HoloLens only feels natural when you're not handling anything much bigger than a basketball. It produces a magic square the size of a large TV screen, and the moment something slips outside, it disappears. It's possible to imagine that a small object has just dipped out of sight, but for a larger one, you either have to step quite a ways back or content yourself with just seeing pieces of it in the center of your vision. It shatters the illusion, and it looks very little like the amazing whole-world illusions of Microsoft's videos. Even a heads-up display becomes less useful once your peripheral and near-peripheral vision is off-limits. And a couple of Microsoft's ideas clearly just seem meant for virtual, not augmented, reality. You could drop into a hidden world in the origami demo or look around a full-sized landscape in the architecture program, but it's hard to piece together what's going on through that little window, especially when you could be looking at the whole thing at once with an Oculus Rift.
People often imagine virtual and augmented reality fusing, but with HoloLens around, the two start seeming very distinct indeed. Its images are astonishingly good, on a level that VR's magnified screens will probably never match. It's smaller than any virtual reality device on the market, partly because it usually doesn't need to power an entire photo-realistic environment. Microsoft has put much more work into building things that people can use, not just things they can see. But it's hard to imagine how Microsoft (or anyone) could get the HoloLens projection system to support a field of view big enough that it can stop being distracting, let alone become immersive on a VR-like scale. As cool as HoloLens can be, it's firmly a product of today, not the future — at least not yet.