Microsoft's Hololens is up for pre-order, here's hoping you can expense it Microsoft has opened up its Hololens augmented reality hardware for pre-order with a shipping date of March 30. The Redmond giant said it would begin sending invitations to developers who pre-applied for the preview edition of the hardware. Those who get invites from Microsoft will now be able to fork over the $3,000 price tag …
"The Redmond giant...invitations to developers ...$3,000 price tag...focussed on...supporting developers, who will help pave the way to consumer availability."
So, let me get this straight. New MS kit. NO SOFTWARE YET. We need devs to start working on producing software to make our hardware useful and profitable. Give us three grand and you can start working for us. If you're lucky we'll sell what you write and might pay you a bit of a royalty per unit software sold with our highly profitable hardware. If it sells.
>our highly profitable hardware. If it sells.
How can you even judge the profit on something that hasn't been sold yet? You have to share your R&D and tooling costs amongst your customers. After that, you add up your bill of materials and assembly costs per unit. Add the two together and add a margin. This will be roughly what you sell it for.
For the moment, we don't know how many customers there will be. So we can't calculate a profit.
Indeed the price is set to specifically exclude 'punters' at this stage. You don't price it at a consumer level when they're the last people you want handling the goods when there's no software beyond a few demos, and you keep upgrading the firmware every few weeks. It's not a consumer product at this stage.
I guess a good parallel is the Kinect - it sold by the shitload when it was priced and packaged for consumers and had a ton of great software being sold so they could use it, but started off with expensive developer previews so it could get to the point where it was a consumer product.
I guess a good parallel is the Kinect - it sold by the shitload when it was priced and packaged for consumers and had a ton of great software being sold so they could use it
Must be hiding somewhere, as not seen very much that actually uses the Kinect v2... Also the 100+ GBP price tag isn't particularly consumer friendly...
>I guess a good parallel is the Kinect - it sold by the shitload when it was priced and packaged for consumers and had a ton of great software being sold so they could use it, but started off with expensive developer previews so it could get to the point where it was a consumer product.
Even the original Kinect was sold at a loss - with an idea to recoup the money by selling games (a bit like printers and ink cartrisges... again, profit is hard to calculate).
Within 48 hours of its release, a MIT student had got a PC to talk to the Kinect, opening the door for people to use the subsidised hardware for their own applications. A little while later, MS released a PC-only version of the Kinect which was more expensive, along with drivers and APIs.
"For the moment, we don't know how many customers there will be. So we can't calculate a profit."
Maybe I'm just old enough the remember "the good old days" when small companies invented new toys and gave them away to devs to help create a market. They even sold them to the public with little in the way of software because it was new and clever. I miss the days when computers were more fun and less mass market/consumer oriented and didn't cost $billions to create a new game title.
It'd be so useful for medical staff where just looking at patient would bring up their scans and properly overlay the images so any internal damage appears on the skin, or in a way that the patient looks translucent. Maybe add some kind of facial recognition and a brief synopsis of the patient's records so that doctors can ensure they are giving treatment to the right person.
I'd also like to see something that tracks surgical objects during surgery so that any foreign object is highlighted in the surgeon's view so they don't forget about their materials. A ridiculous number of people have experienced severe surgical complications because someone left a sponge in their abdominal cavity. There've also been cases of scalpels, forceps, retractors, and sorts of other tools left inside patients. I've personally had the end of a suction hose left in after my appendectomy, luckily it was close enough to the surface that it caused an obvious bulge under my skin.
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