Making Apps for HoloLens : Benefits and Limitations

HoloLens – an augmented reality headset by Microsoft promising a strong connection with Windows 10, app developers and hologram apps. It is still unclear that how HoloLens will change the way you do activities. Or is it really going to make any change or not? The device is yet not ready to answer your questions but developers can have some hopes with the frequently releasing HoloLens-updates by the company.

HoloLens allow you to interact with holographic objects and set them in your real world wherever you want. The device will create a fake image assembled with real world making you realize the beauty of Augmented Reality. If this device is that much able to make you believe fake things, then app developers have to make themselves able to create worthy apps for such device.

Let’s check out the stuff available for developers and limitations attached with it.

Benefits

• HoloLens Software Development Kit

The kit is surprisingly cultivated with speakers, sensors, processors with a dedicated Holographic Processing Unit helping you to handle everything that Microsoft expects. From mapping to recognizing and registering through users’ hand gestures, the kit is able enough to take care of everything.

• Voice Commands

Adding voice command to any HoloLens app is as easy as having a sip of tea. A call to AddKeyword Method from KeywordRecognizer class and passing trigger to the string of plain English text is enough to use Voice command system in your app – a straightforward method eliminating the complexity of voice command system.

• Sensitive Microphones

HoloLens possesses highly sensitive Microphones. Even if you murmur in a low voice, the system will reliably respond to your words. According to Alex Kipman (Technical Fellow at Microsoft), HoloLens has many microphones that are too close to the user’s face which empowered device to easily hear high to low voice sounds.

Limitations

• Objects Appearance Issues

While wearing HoloLens, the objects which users’ can see from central field of eyes’ view will cut off at peripheral vision. It means “close” holographic objects will clipped in from the place where they have originally created.

• Gesture Issues

It takes a little more effort to let the device recognize your hand gesture. You have to hold your hand close to your body and a little above to your waist, and then HoloLens will detect your mid-air tapping gesture and respond to it.

• Set Up

Not all your heads are of same size, that’s why HoloLens offer you system that lets you adjust the device as per your head size. At one side, this is a benefit of device and on another side, it demands for a light weight adjustment to fit on your head rather than sliding to your nose.

These limitations are actually issues of HoloLens which are there because the device is still under development. It takes more time to get ready for all challenges or to overcome from all types of issues. Other than this, the device is good at everything to wear on and have your own virtual world at your own terms.

Nokia dares to look beyond windows, tweaks Android!

So Nokia is also coming up with their own budget android phone. It does not raise eyebrows to hear this announcement when the company is desperately looking for some voluminous sales. However what an android app development company would find strange is the fact that the device will not have any direct application to the play store. However Nokia will give the app for Nokia app store (OVI store) to download apps for your device. Is this an effort from Nokia to create get a huge low end market and then sell apps to them. How should the decision of excluding play store be looked at?

Nokia has a very strong brand perception that directly connect to dependability, trust and other major variables of brand loyalty. Especially in countries like India, Nokia is still one of the major players in the market selling most of the budget phones. People believe in the brand name and might give its android phone a chance. Forget about the play store thing, if we just look at the specs, it is fairly a great phone that comes with kit kat out of the box set to run on a 1.2ghz dual core. The market that it is targeting is mostly occupied by 4 inch+ phones made by players like micromax. And this is where the brand name Nokia might be able to topple the 5 incher micromax devices.

Micromax has already been known for its notorious customer service while with Nokia, it is vice versa. Nokia has one of the best customer service network in India and people are already aware about it.

If Nokia fares better as compared to micromax on the experience part, (for which micromax has bad reputation with some of its models) then it would open up doors for the company to sell feature rich phones for this market creating a substantial Nokia android cluster who will be downloading apps from the Nokia store and Nokia and come up with a substantial app store supported by reviews and some cash as well, derived from the paid apps. In the longer run the company might go for a larger spectrum of devices and target other segments too. This might looked a little farfetched but launching a budget android phone with its own app store indicates nothing but creating a foothold upon the chaotic android platform while also assuring a revenue generating app store in the future.

The acquisition of Nokia devices is good for Windows phone app development experts

With Microsoft going to acquire Nokia Devices and patents, there are a lot of raised eyebrows at the moment. But the deepened association of Microsoft with Nokia is no kindergarten story. Mobile app development companies are now expecting a tighter integration of the Windows mobile OS into the devices and hence better performance from Microsoft-Nokia devices. All these years windows has not been able to acquire much of the market share and this has caused the company to search for position it enjoys in the PC market.

Why the acquisition of devices and patents is justified

The acquisition of the Nokia devices and patents by Microsoft makes perfect sense. To make a personalized and competitive ecosystem compared to Apple, Microsoft needs to have full control for over the hardware of the devices and only then can it match or even surpass the experience of iOS devices. Windows phone app development companies and various experts have praised the Windows OS and it really does a good job on numerous aspects.

On the other hand the dominance of android in the open source space is too hard to compete. Android may be making lesser money than Apple from app store revenues but the market share stats of Android is overwhelming and cannot be overtaken. Hence android is not the competition. If Microsoft is targeting Apple’s market share then it’s not at all a bad bet but MS would need to work on a number of areas.

Can Microsoft bounce back to attain a sizable market share?

Microsoft can but it needs to come out with innovations that could compliment its biggest asset of legacy software on mobile. Windows phone app development believe that something which may be a new or inventive way of typing and using other creative tools on the mobile could create substantial market for the mobile devices powered by windows. MS would need to work towards these or might even have to peruse companies to make apps for windows platform.

The acquisition might not look lucrative at the moment but speculations remain. Hopefully Microsoft would be able to take this into something much larger and emerge as a significant player in the market.