Microsoft needs to come up with a UI vocabulary for the HoloLens

I sure like the “new Microsoft” a hell of a lot more than the old one. They’re open sourcing, integrating with other platforms (iOS, Android, GNU/Linux), etc. And the HoloLens is the first viable AR (augmented reality) platform to market, which is huge, because as I have said before: AR > VR.

However, Microsoft apparently still doesn’t understand that when launching a new hardware platform, you need to launch first-party software for that platform along with it. You might not necessarily need a killer app, but at least something to show a working UI and introduce basic UI vocabulary. This is something Apple has done very successfully with the Mac and later the iPhone. Safari and Google Maps on your phone alone were reasons to buy an iPhone and they established gestures like swiping and pinch-to-zoom that users expect to work with in all apps on the platform now. They showed how an iPhone app has to work.

But if you watch the latest Ars Technica HoloLens video, all you see is a tech demo. It’s a very good tech demo with very promising tech (the 3D models blends in very well with the environment), but there is no single app bundled that I’d want to use on a daily bases right now and no guiding principles for developers on how to build such an app. The web browser demo was just cringe-worthy: surely they must have figured out a better way to scroll—as basic of a UI pattern as there is—after all the experience with the Kinect. Speaking of which, Microsoft made the same mistake with the Kinect already: great hardware, but that’s no use if there’s no software to fulfill its potential.