My cautious optimism amplified considerably after today’s 2015 BUILD keynote.

The HoloLens announcement in January was quite a stunner, but the video was too polished. It was really fun to speculate about, but it just seemed so unrealistic, so far off in the future. Charming, sure. Possible? Come on, that technology can’t really work that well, can it?

Well, it got the conversation going enough for me to think about how potentially world-changing things like this could be. Having tried an early Oculus Rift demo kit, and imagining Valve’s further potential with the Vive, has started to get my wheels turning about possible VR applications.

And Microsoft looks like it has what nobody else does with a true AR system, with things overlaying your honest-to-goodness vision. This is potentially world-changing stuff. Look how willing everyone is to carry around a cellphone in their pocket (oh, and that reminds me of another cool thing announced at today’s keynote). Some tangible objects and the industries surrounding them have had to almost completely adopt digital formats to meet customers where they are. Newspapers, CDs, physical books, and lots of other things aren’t as necessary as they once were. Imagine what a world with AR could be like. (I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s wild.)

Yeah, the headset looks stupid. Yeah, that won’t be the model that goes to market or even close. Yeah, it’s a whole new level of scary in some ways.

But oh my goodness, so this is where Microsoft’s been putting its energy. Yes, make money from Azure. Yes, make money by investing in big data collection for user analysis and ads. Yes, earn some Windows cred by showing a little vulnerable side and willingness to cooperate (or find opportunities) with other huge platforms.

I know Microsoft probably won’t be the only one with this tech for very long. I fully expect a Google competitor, a Facebook competitor. Possibly Valve. But Microsoft is smart to be building good relationships with developers today. So when they announced new tools for translating both iOS and Android apps easily onto Windows — that’s a huge deal.

No, their modern app aesthetic may not be super appealing or unique, but they are getting some things right. The responsive design of the modern apps is a huge deal, especially in newfound light of resizing things to whatever size you want and plastering them all over your walls. The BUILD demonstration actually breaks things down a bit by using an insane camera rig to give us a real (approximate) glimpse, warts and all, of what HoloLens is capable of right now. It’s impressive. And the software is written for Windows 10? Like this is just one more responsive state? There are APIs for interpreting the physical world and stuff? That’s incredible. It’s a compelling thing.

Aren’t these file pickers just the devil? (For the record, I already had this screenshot, filed as “Yo MS, I hate this Explorer Dialog.PNG.”

It makes me forgive them a little bit for not updating the File Explorer yet, or introducing a screenshot feature that comes close to any half-decent Linux distro. Clearly they’ve been busy.

***

All of these technology prospects make me think about what kind of changes people like my gram saw over the course of her life, growing up in the 1930s : walking to school in my small, rural town… Attending BINGO at the local school and winning the prize of a real live pig (“Boy, when butchering day came, that was sure sad”)… Seeing almost no one who owned a car, to basically everyone having cars… And phones. And television. And internet.

I actually recorded her retelling of the pig story once. It was one of her favorite stories to tell.

I know this is not a great tribute — some day, hopefully, I can do her better justice in that way. But thinking about the past also makes me think about the future. What a life our elders saw, full of crazy technological change. What a crazy one we have before us as well.

For Mary Doherty.