Minecraft coming to Microsoft's HoloLens AR headset

During Microsoft's press conference on Monday, the company trotted out a special camera equipped with its HoloLens hardware to show off a new version of Minecraft running in augmented reality. A pair of demonstrators showed the game running with one player wearing a wireless HoloLens headset, issuing commands with voice and moving the holographic game world around with hand gestures. Another player interacted with the same game by playing on a Microsoft Surface tablet.

It's worth pointing out that HoloLens' projections look more impressive through Microsoft's special camera rig than they do through the headset. As I noted when I first tried on HoloLens, the augmented field of view is fairly small, consisting of only a square in the center of your vision. Still, the limited Minecraft experience I had back in January, which Microsoft was calling HoloBuilder at the time, was genuinely striking. It was a great demonstration of augmented reality, allowing me to blow a virtual hole in a real physical wall and see a Minecraft cavern beyond, or to stare through a real physical coffee table onto the floor below.

Here's a video capturing Microsoft's demonstration of HoloLens Minecraft on stage at E3.

Microsoft promises more on HoloLens at Minecon 2015 in London, which begins on July 4.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).