Crucially, creating all this won't be nearly as difficult as you might expect. Building apps for HoloLens is like building any Modern Windows app. The Windows 10 universal app SDK supports HoloLens, and there are plenty of high-level methods and objects that simplify working with some of Windows Holographic's more complex features.
For example, one object handles converting the direction a user's head is facing into a vector, which can be passed to a method that tests to see if the gaze vector intersects any virtual objects.
If you were working directly with the HoloLens sensors, you'd have to write code to detect head position, and then convert that into a view direction, before handling object occlusion in 3D. That's a lot of complex 3D maths – but with the HoloLens tooling in Windows 10, it turns out to be only a couple of lines of C# code to find out when the user is looking at something in your virtual world.
Adding a keyword for voice control is just one line of code, and you can attach voice and gesture controls to individual objects or to the whole holographic world, so making a powerful interface doesn't have to be complicated.
Things can be simplified even further using tools such as Unity, which supports the HoloLens as a camera viewpoint.
You can construct a 3D environment in Unity, attach a few C# scripts, and then export the whole project as a Modern Windows app, ready to compile and deploy from Visual Studio. There's no need for specialised tooling, or for non-standard languages and toolkits, making it very easy to pick up HoloLens and have an app running in a day or so.
Mastering it is another story, though. Building coherent and comprehensive 3D environments requires more design skills than a traditional desktop app, so you'll need to be prepared to work closely with 3D artists.
Next: what apps to expect
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