I love seeing old images and films about how people thought the future was going to be. Sometimes they were pretty close, other times they were really off. Either way, it’s always entertaining. If you look at the way the 1950’s and 60’s saw the 21st century we should all be riding around in flying cars, piloted by our personal robots while we eat food that was instantly processed out of thin air.

back in the late 1990’s Virtual Reality goggles and software were white-hot for a quick blip and then faded into the background. Recently Facebook has brought it back to the forefront by spending billions on their product. Google launched Glass which they have also have recently announced they will be stopping development on, and Now Microsoft has jumped into the futures game with HoloLens.

Like all those visions of the future from the past, all three of these tech giants see our future with headsets that augment our reality with 3D visions and gesture controlled virtual reality seamlessly blended into our real world. The video has grabbed more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than a week, and it looks pretty compelling. There is a prediction that this could launch in 2016, but I doubt it will look like this when it does.

I still can’t see people wearing large clunk headsets all day long, and virtual reality replacing your expensive flat screen TV. What I can see is this being used in business for training, education, product approval, collaboration, etc. None the less the Microsoft vision of the future looks pretty slick, and if only half of this happens it would be pretty exciting.