Game designer and former Microsoft insider Peter Molyneux has warned the company not to overpromise on what its holographic headset can deliver.

"I did see the early versions of HoloLens and played around with a few things on it," Molyneux told GamesIndustry.biz. "It was very, very early days in the technology. It is, I have to say a magical experience, seeing these objects in the real world. The problem I think is to make it feel like it is in the real world and not projected into your eye. I think it's, for me, more exciting than even VR but it shares a similar problem as VR does and that is: what is the application going to be?"

"For me, some of the stage demos they had were magical as they were building drones on stage and you start to think back to your Kinect days and how exhausting that would be to move your arm around and tap with your fingers. And this is the problem with VR - the applications that we think are going to be great on it quite often are exhausting or very challenging. My hope is that their concept video doesn't over promise what the technology can deliver. Because the actual experience of seeing a 3D object projected into the world is a magical one.

Molyneux worked closely with Microsoft on its last "game changer" technology, Kinect.

"It did remind me of [Kinect]," said Molyneux. "You kind of want to scream 'don't over promise these things.' The thing about the concept videos is they feel so seamless and it just looks like everything's working and actually, as we found with Kinect, it works all fine if you've got the perfect environment and the perfect distance away and you're the right shape human being. But it's very challenging if any of those things don't come together perfectly.

"The technology that they are showing with HoloGlass is amazing. If you just took a couple parts of that demo and said you could look at a TV screen on any surface, I'd be pretty impressed, but they took it so far into the future. You had Minecraft spinning off into the entire geometry of the room. How they get that geometry they didn't quite say."

Molyneux pointed out that great software is what sells great hardware, and that's something Kinect lacked.

"The bizarre thing is a huge amount of effort and time and money goes into researching the tech, like the Kinect tech and scanning the bodies, and there's always this one line that hardware manufacturers - whether it be Microsoft or anyone else - say and that's 'we can't wait to see what happens when it gets into the hands of developers.' Now if Apple had said that when they introduced the iPhone, I don't think we'd ever end up with the iPhone! What really should happen is that they put a similar amount of money into researching just awesome real world applications that you'll really use and that work robustly and smoothly and delightfully."

Molyneux said that developers now face a paradox of choice when it comes to developing for new technology. He suggested Microsoft buy developers' attentions. "What they should do is they should say come to us with a proposal and we'll make sure you're super profitable before you even finish. That's what they should do to try and attract the attention of developers, because the problem for development talent is there's so much stuff going on. There's all the VR stuff, there's all the Sony stuff, there's all the cloud stuff, there's all the touch stuff, there's this relentless march of new hardware from mobile manufacturers, and it takes probably three years to make something that's super quality with a new piece of technology like augmented reality. And in that time God knows what's going to happen in mobile, God knows what's going to happen with VR, so there is a problem."

Microsoft revealed HoloLens alongside Windows 10 last week.