I got to try Hololens at work. I think MS is missing out on a big opportunity to put their display tech to use in VR headsets. Put a black visor over the front of the Hololens to block out your view of the room and you now have a VR headset that beats our current options in some significant ways.
Downsides:
- Some rainbow shimmer when moving your eyes around quickly (like a DLP projector). This was only really noticeable on the white dot they use as a pointer. I didn't notice it while looking at a rendered object, for example.
- smaller FOV, but not as tiny as I had heard. I'd say it's currently equivalent to a 50" display viewed at 8 feet
Upsides:
- light weight and comfortable
- no screen door effect. Things looked solid.
- no sweet spot. Everything was in focus wherever I looked within that FOV.
- no chromatic aberration
- high resolution
- refresh rate was fine
- great brightness
I think whatever kind of projection tech they're using is fundamentally a better approach than using lenses in front of a flat LED array. Even with the smaller FOV, I'd take it over what we're using in Vive and Rift. They just need to add the wireless display tech to have it driven by a PC.
There's also input to consider too. The hand tracking was good, but it wouldn't beat Lighthouse for gaming purposes. I guess I'd pretty much take the Hololens display, put it in a Vive and call it a day.