When we tried out a Microsoft's augmented reality HoloLens prototype at E3 this year, our impressions (like those of many others) focused on the device's limited field-of-view. The experience was a bit like seeing a realistic, phantom world through a small magic window in the center of your view. The rest of your vision is taken up by boring old reality.

Until now, most readers had to imagine those limitations in their mind's eye. That's hard to do while watching Microsoft's fanciful demos, which obscure this limitation by showing augmented reality holograms that completely fill a camera's field-of-view. A new promotional video from Microsoft, though, gives some brief glimpses at how this limited field-of-view looks from a first-person perspective.

The video (above), which highlights Microsoft's anatomy education partnership with Case Western Reserve University, primarily shows the kind of camera-filling holograms we've seen during previous HoloLens demos. But there are a few small sections that transition to a first-person view, showing how the hologram effect simply disappears outside a small central window. You can see these bits at the 0:48, 0:58, 1:23, 1:38, and 1:42 timestamps in the above video. If you don't want to jump around, Polygon has made some animated GIFs of the relevant sections.

These short glimpses give a good idea of how the augmented reality experience with HoloLens is definitely usable, but much more limited than most other demo videos would have you believe. For applications like research and industry use, this might not be a huge deal—you can simply move your head or step forward to get a better view of things. For gaming purposes, though, it could be a big problem. In one E3 shooting demo, enemy robots had to hover directly dead-center in my view before firing so I wasn't completely blindsided.

Even this video only gives a partial impression of just how limited the effect is. That's because the aspect ratio of the video window itself cuts off a large part of the peripheral vision you have when using HoloLens in real life. The unseen area above, below, and to the side of what the video shows is just unchanged reality when using HoloLens, making the tiny "magic window" effect seem even more pronounced.

What's more, this is a problem that seems unlikely to be fixed by the time HoloLens becomes a real consumer product. Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda said during a Giant Bomb interview at E3 that while the field-of-view on display in the HoloLens prototypes isn't final, he "wouldn't say it's going to be hugely noticeably different either" in the first consumer version.

That's a shame, because the spectacular effect of seeing a virtual world overlaid smoothly on top of the real world is really hampered when that virtual world abruptly cuts off at the edge of a small window. Hopefully, this is just a temporary limitation that will be fixed as the technology continues to iterate down the line.