REDMOND, Wa. – Microsoft offered

another tantalizing look at its HoloLens headset, as it aims to turn your

living room and workplace into a living, breathing desktop.

The world’s largest software company

saved the best for last during the keynote presentation at its Build 2015

developer conference, closing a three-hour parade of demonstrations and

speeches with a closer look at its foray into the holographic world. The

HoloLens doesn’t produce true holograms in the “Star Trek” sense, CNET.Com

reported. Rather, it beams light onto your eyes to blend 3D virtual images with

the real world, a technology known more widely as augmented reality.

Onstage, Microsoft’s Alex Kipman,

father of the Kinect motion camera and head of the HoloLens project, unveiled

the Windows Holographic Platform, which will let developers create Windows 10 apps that work on the headset. Kipman

claimed that all apps for the still-to-be-released new version of Windows could

be made to work with HoloLens – hitting on a central theme of the day: the

universal reach for developers building Windows 10 apps, which will work across

any device and screen.

But Microsoft is still keeping

details of HoloLens, first unveiled at the company’s Windows 10 event in

January, close to its vest. The cost of the headset is still unknown, and

though Microsoft has previously said it would be available in the “Windows 10”

timeframe, it’s still unclear when exactly consumers or even developers will

get to start using it.

Still, Microsoft wants its HoloLens

to be taken seriously. It brought hundreds of demo units of the headset for the

audience at Build. It used a series of presentations to display potential uses

that stunned the crowd with lifelike holograms that appeared onstage alongside

Kipman, including a real-life robot that was transformed into an

anthropomorphic cartoony companion when looked at through the HoloLens.

Microsoft also showed a few videos

of serious work being done with the headset, in the realm of architecture and

anatomy – including a live demo in partnership with Case Western University’s

Cleveland Clinic, during which a virtual man onstage was transformed into

layers of skin, muscle and bone.

Perhaps most interesting, however,

was a demonstration of how the HoloLens can create a desktoplike environment

out of a living room, with screens stuck to walls and virtual, interactive

displays of the weather and other information floating all around.

With a nod to its potential

entertainment value, a HoloLens user on tage was shown a movie-playing screen

that joined him as he walked along, eventually allowing him to project the

screen on any wall and scale it any size. Kipman also touted the mobile aspects

of HoloLens, noting that the headgear doesn’t require a separate smartphone or

PC to run, and doesn’t require any cables.