Microsoft Launches $3,500 HoloLens 2 Headset

As expected, Microsoft launched its HoloLens 2 ahead of Mobile World Congress. As expected, the new headset is a significant improvement over the original, with new features and capabilities. The one thing we didn’t expect? A petition launched by Microsoft employees criticizing the company for war profiteering and calling on it to drop a recent $479M contract it won with the Department of Defense to outfit US military personnel with HoloLens technology in combat scenarios.

We’ll tackle the technology first.

HoloLens 2 is designed to improve HoloLens 1’s limited field of view and uncomfortable design. Microsoft claims to have doubled the FOV without reducing image quality. The original HoloLens only supported a 35-degree FOV, so doubling this to 70 degrees would be a significant achievement. Like the original HoloLens, HL2 packs 47 pixels per degree, which implies the native resolution of the new device is considerably higher. Even high-end consumer hardware like the Vive Pro has a PPD of ~16, just to put the difference in context.

The new system includes both eye and hand tracking and HL2 can build an entire map of your hands and fingers in far more resolution than what was possible with the first-generation device. Gesture control, as a result, has been significantly improved.

The internal hardware is powered by a Snapdragon 850 with Bluetooth 5 support, along with Microsoft’s second-generation custom HPU (Holographic Processing Unit). I had theorized earlier this month that Microsoft might drop its own HPU for the Snapdragon 850’s built-in DSP, but the company appears to have opted not to take this step. Exactly how HoloLens 2 uses its new DSP or whether it takes advantage of the Snapdragon 850 DSP isn’t yet known.

Microsoft is focusing HoloLens 2 entirely on the enterprise sector, with a $3,500 price tag for the commercial version. No development model has been announced, though bundles with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist will start at $125 per month. Microsoft is also working to produce specific HoloLens 2 models for particular tasks, including a HoloLens 2 from Trimble integrated into a hard hat.

Microsoft has done a great deal of work on its display system (The Verge has details on how the waveguide design has improved) and how worker-focused the product is. According to Microsoft, workers, not consumers, are the principal focus for the product. According to Alex Kipman, who heads up the HoloLens project, HoloLens is for “people that have been, in a sense, neglected or haven’t had access to technology [in their hands-on jobs] because PCs, tablets, phones don’t really lend themselves to those experiences.” Speculation that Microsoft would open the device to the consumer market at this point was unfounded — according to Kipman, despite advances, the hardware still isn’t up to what consumers would expect.

Accusations of War Profiteering

A few months ago, Microsoft announced that it had won a major US military contract to deliver HoloLens to soldiers in active combat and to develop the technology as a force multiplier. At the time, we noted that this could put the company in hot water with its own employees.

Over the weekend, Microsoft employees sent a letter to their own executives declaring that the company was engaged in war profiteering and that its own responses to these issues had been insufficient. The letter states:

While the company has previously licensed tech to the US Military, it has never crossed the line into weapons development. With this contract, it does. The application of HoloLens within the IVAS (Integrated Visual Augmentation System) is designed to help people kill…

Brad Smith’s suggestion that employees concerned about working on unethical projects “would be allowed to move to other work within the company” ignores the problem that workers are not properly informed about the use of their work. There are many engineers who contributed to HoloLens before this contract even existed, believing it would be used to help architects and engineers build buildings and cars, to help teach people how to perform surgery or play the piano, to push the boundaries of gaming, and to connect with the Mars Rover (RIP). These engineers have now lost their ability to make decisions about what they work on, instead finding themselves implicated as war profiteers.

The implication of Microsoft’s $480M deal announcement is that HoloLens will be used in actual combat. It’s understandable that some of the company’s engineers would be fundamentally unhappy at this development. Microsoft isn’t the only company facing employee revolt over some of its own decisions; Google employees have been fighting over the company’s secret efforts to develop a censorious, spying search engine for the Chinese market and to end that company’s use of forced arbitration in dispute cases. Google has since said it would end that practice for all employees. Microsoft has made no formal comment on the HoloLens 2 protests, but the campaign announced their letter had more than 150 signatures from MS employees as of Sunday morning.

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