HoloLens battery life and connectivity details revealed

Used as intended, you won't get very long between charges...

Microsoft has either deliberately or inadvertently revealed a few key details about its upcoming HoloLens augmented reality device, after allowing one of its evangelists to answer some searching questions.

Speaking at the GameIS conference in Tel Aviv, Israel recently, Microsoft technical evangelist Bruce Harris revealed that the headset will manage five-and-a-half hours of use on a single charge. However, this came with the somewhat bizarre caveat that this will be when working on Word documents or using email - something HoloLens is clearly not exactly designed for.

Intensive video rendering that requires large amounts of processing - such as working in Unity or other 3D design environments - will apparently give HoloLens 2.5 hours of life which, all things considered, is still quite respectable for a lot of use cases.

Also detailed in a now-deleted YouTube video discovered by Petri.com is Harris admitting that HoloLens is "totally wireless" - utilising Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for connectivity, but unable to be powered from any of its built-in connection sockets.

This would explain why, in Computing's demonstration of the device at Microsoft's Build conference last year, we were made to remove the device's USB PC transfer cable between sessions of Unity coding and demonstrating the fruits of our labour.

It was also confirmed, however, that HoloLens users can share sessions completely remotely over the internet as well as in local spaces.

Finally, Harris admitted that HoloLens is being manufactured as a first-party Microsoft device - like the Surface Pro 4 or Surface Book - but is not being made in the US, like the company's upcoming Surface Hub interactive whiteboard technology.