Alex Kipman promises ‘infinite’ field of view for HoloLens 3

While HoloLens 2 doubles the field of view of HoloLens 1, it has not been the revolution we have been hoping for.

It turns out while HoloLens 2 has the hardware to enable a much wider field of view, bizarrely Microsoft has not quite implemented the technology.

Speaking to the Australian Financial Review, Alex Kipman revealed that while HoloLens has eye tracking and the ability to “steer” photos to the part of the screen a user is looking at, the device in facts lacks the ability to do “foveated rendering” and Kipman confirmed it will not be coming to this generation of devices.

“We’re incrementing forwards, to get towards what ultimately will be like a pair of reading glasses with an infinite field of view,” he noted, but confirmed they would have to wait for HoloLens 3.  Kipman had previously suggested this could be as much as 4 years away.

Kipman’s goal is eventually to have a headset that is as comfortable to wear as glasses with as wide a field of view as the same, saying having already doubled the field of view and tripled the comfort in the second generation, it would only take a few more iterations to achieve this goal.

Do our readers find it somewhat disappointing that HoloLens 2 does not, in fact, use Foveated Rendering, despite having the component hardware? Let us know below.