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With HoloLens Microsoft want to avoid the mistakes they made with Xbox’s Kinect

This is not a VR headset, this is a Hololens

Microsoft are taking their time with releasing augmented reality headset HoloLens, a cautiousness born from learning from mistakes made with Kinect – Xbox’s ill-fated motion sensing camera.

The games in our list of upcoming PC games aren’t out yet, just like HoloLens.

This admission comes from a recent TED conference in Vancouver, as reported by Recode. There’s a development version of HoloLens available soon for a hefty $3,000, and according to Microsoft it’s very close to a polished bit of consumer kit. But despite this they’re still not ready to release it into the wild just yet.

“When I feel the world is ready, then we will allow normal people to buy it,” HoloLens creator Alex Kipman said. “It could be as soon as we say ‘yes,’ and it could be as long as a ‘very long time.’

“If a consumer bought it today, they would have 12 things to do with it. And they would say ‘Cool, I bought a $3,000 product that I can do 12 things with and now it is collecting dust.’”

So it seems Microsoft are waiting for it to have a few killer apps before releasing it to us normies. This caution comes after the success of Kinect, which sold 10 million units only to fall on its face. Kipman doesn’t want the HoloLens to meet the same fate, he doesn’t want people play with it for five minutes and then toss it aside as a gimmick.

“It was not a pleasant experience,” Kipman said of Kinect. “It was just not ready to go sell 10 million units in 60 days, which is what it did.”

Cheers, Recode.