[HN Gopher] Mixed Reality gone in Windows 11 Insider Preview Bui...
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Mixed Reality gone in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052
Author : croes
Score : 101 points
Date : 2024-02-10 07:44 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.windows.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.windows.com)
| taneq wrote:
| Wow, is there any indication of an alternative? Or are they just
| going to brick everyone's WMR headsets (except HoloLens of
| course, because that's _their_ one)?
|
| Edit: As far as I can tell they're just yanking support from
| Windows and tough bikkies. I asked Bing about it and it basically
| said to buy a different headset or hope a third party releases
| alternative software that can run the headsets. Oh and also no
| you can't prevent Windows from auto-updating and disabling it.
|
| Extremely disappointing behaviour on MS' part. I can understand
| them sunsetting development, but actively rendering fully
| functional devices unusable is criminal.
| caslon wrote:
| They announced this a long time ago.
|
| WMR headsets work on Linux pretty well nowadays.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Google search results says in Nov. 2026/2027:
|
| > Is WMR discontinued? "As of November 1, 2026 for consumers
| and November 1, 2027 for commercial customers, Windows Mixed
| Reality will no longer be available for download via the
| Mixed Reality Portal app, Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR,
| and Steam VR beta, and we will discontinue support." Dec 27,
| 2023
| taneq wrote:
| > WMR headsets work on Linux pretty well nowadays.
|
| Works pretty well as in 'apt-get install wmr-for-linux' or as
| in 'spend three weeks setting up a build environment for some
| hairy proof-of-concept code which isn't compatible with
| SteamVR games'? WMR is one of the last things really tying me
| to Windows, if it's practical to use on Linux I could see
| myself switching back.
| caslon wrote:
| Works pretty well as in, "Install Monado using your
| distribution's package manager, set it as your default
| OpenXR runtime, hit three buttons to get Valve to
| begrudgingly respect system defaults instead of the closed-
| source 'Open'VR runtime."
|
| Optically-tracked WMR controllers work, depending on how
| new of a build your distribution has and the type, but WMR
| controllers are generally considered to be pretty bad to
| begin with. You can use a different style of controller
| with a WMR headset if desired.
|
| That said, building Monado isn't hard if your distribution
| doesn't currently have a version that supports WMR
| controllers. The repo lists all of the dependencies you
| need, and what they're called for popular distros. It also
| tells you the exact things you need to run to get it to
| build; you can just copy and paste the build instructions
| after installing its dependencies. You can probably get it
| done within ten minutes.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Optically tracked WMR controllers do not work yet in
| Monado. Some people have code to do the optical part of
| the tracking, but there is a bit of reverse engineering
| left to synchronize the IMUs and control the LED
| brightness to enable sensor fusion.
|
| Hand tracking however does work.
| tensor wrote:
| Announcing this long ago doesn't make it any less shitty that
| a fully working still relevant and expensive VR device is now
| a paperweight. Keeping a minimal framework alive so that the
| devices can be used with e.g. steam would have been the right
| thing to do.
|
| Also, no one using WMR devices on Windows wants to bother
| with Linux. Most of us were using the device with things not
| available on Linux, and even if they were we don't want to
| run Linux on a desktop. It's not a solution.
| ladyanita22 wrote:
| Then don't.
| caslon wrote:
| > Also, no one using WMR devices on Windows wants to bother
| with Linux. Most of us were using the device with things
| not available on Linux, and even if they were we don't want
| to run Linux on a desktop.
|
| Cheaper headsets for Linux users, then! It's a solution in
| one way.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Most users of WMR headsets had a Reverb G2 because it was
| by far the cheapest headset with its featureset, and were
| willing to bother with the issues that WMR brings and
| tinker around.
| jaffacakes wrote:
| I wouldn't call it pretty well, not quite yet. The Monado
| driver has come a long way, but doing anything useful with it
| still has too much legwork involved for the majority of WMR
| users, not including the switch to Linux. Although since the
| announcement, work on WMR-specific stuff seems to have sped
| up, so hopefully the situation improves.
|
| I also recall seeing a working demo of hand tracking for WMR
| (maybe just the G2?), so that's neat.
|
| https://monado.freedesktop.org/ Monado OpenXR platform
| https://stardustxr.org/ Stardust XR display server
| Levitating wrote:
| Microsoft is making Linux more attractive by the day. I
| wonder if they'll ever get to regret that.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| After what MS did with Windows Phone and the first Lumia
| headsets*, I think you need to be crazy to release hardware
| that depends on a not-yet-established MS product. They're very
| good at keeping their successful products backwards compatible
| and at least somewhat supported for years, but they can dump
| unproven products like led disregarding any kind of marketing
| push.
|
| * Nokia's first Lumia smartphones released with an older
| version of Windows Phone, while MS was publically working on
| the Windows 8 push for a common OS across all form factors.
| They promised everyone in huge marketing campaigns that the
| Lumias would be upgradeable to the new Windows Phone 8, which
| all the marketing was pushing for. Fast forward _two months_
| from the release, they announce that no, they would not upgrade
| and you 'll have to buy a whole new phone if you made the
| mistake of buying a first generation Lumia.
| MikusR wrote:
| So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts growing. It
| happened with Mobile phones, browsers, tablets, AI.
| caslon wrote:
| They've been in the process of pulling out since before the
| Vision Pro was announced; HP was the canary in the coal mine,
| firing or moving around everyone they had working on WMR
| devices a year or two ago. When HP pulls out of a Microsoft
| initiative, it's over.
| vdaea wrote:
| As it starts growing? Is there any indication that mixed
| reality in Windows 11 has ever grown?
| andybak wrote:
| They meant "Mixed Reality" in general. The Apple Vision Pro
| has just launched. You can debate whether it will be
| succesful or not (please - do that in another discussion
| thread as it a topic I grow weary of) but the timing is
| worthy of note.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| So the entire opinion of "Microsoft leaving as a field
| starts growing" rests on the Vision Pro coming out and
| therefore VR growing, but we should not question the fact
| that Vision Pro is unquestionable proof VR is growing in
| this thread...
|
| No. VR is not growing. Apple was supposed to put out Vision
| Pro in 2021 when everyone was aboard the VR hypetrain, and
| AI was not in the public's mindset. Vision Pro is not the
| VR industry growing, it's an echo from yet another dead VR
| hypecycle.
| andybak wrote:
| > but we should not question the fact that Vision Pro is
| unquestionable proof VR is growing in this thread...
|
| I was simply asking that we don't recycle the same
| metadiscussion yet again.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Well the metadiscussion upends the whole discussion.
|
| Microsoft should've wrapped up their HoloLens research
| and offered a nice low-volume product for researches,
| engineers, and designers. We need such products, and it's
| a shame they abandoned it.
|
| But they keep trying to find the "next big thing". And VR
| is absolutely not the "next big thing". So if they only
| see value in that, they were right to cut losses and move
| on to focus their resources on other things like AI.
| andybak wrote:
| I rather agree than chasing mass-market VR (with "mass"
| defined as "the new smartphone") is a huge part of the
| problem.
|
| However I do think VR potentially has a large niche to
| fill amoung consumers, hobbyists and various semi-
| professional roles. Something bigger than you're
| suggesting but smaller than say - consoles or
| smartphones.
|
| Whether this is a niche big enough for Microsoft, I
| genuinely don't know. I think it probably is - but it
| would require aggregating several quite diverse market
| segments.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I could be wrong , I think the notes say "This
| deprecation does not impact HoloLens.".
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that laying off the HoloLens team last
| year impacts the future of HoloLens.
| imiric wrote:
| They were outcompeted in mobile and tablets. They had the most
| popular web browser for a good decade in the late 90s and early
| 00s, until they were outcompeted there too.
|
| But how are they abandoning AI? They're a major part of the
| leading AI company.
| MikusR wrote:
| They finished killing Cortana some time before starting from
| scratch with Copilot
| thimp wrote:
| They're not abandoning AI yet. They are however compromising
| it pretty heavily with overblown claims about how it's going
| to make people's lives better. They also have little to no
| profitability model around it and the development is
| operating at a heavy loss with the hope that they can break
| even with silicon advancements and user count down the line.
|
| The thing is 99% of the people I know either played with
| their proposition and found it irritating or don't give a
| shit. They literally just want to be left alone and for
| people not to keep changing things. The machine is a means to
| an end and that end is well defined for them already. Only
| the tech and investment industries are gushing all over this
| and the latter are only riding the hype.
|
| Typical MS this. Give it 5 years and read this comment
| again...
| keyringlight wrote:
| It's hard not to see it from the perspective of "for the
| person with a hammer, everything is a nail", Azure and
| already having the capability to build data centers is
| their hammer and the nail is a compute-heavy task. There's
| an element of speculation if whether it will be a lasting
| wave of the future people will pay for, but they have the
| levers to pull in case it is. It wouldn't be the first time
| they or any other company has made a bet so they don't get
| left out, time will tell if AI becomes a part of the
| furniture commodity or doesn't prove broadly valuable and
| fades away after a change of direction.
|
| The interesting thing for me is the push for AI hardware as
| a baseline in consumer chips, right now I'd assume training
| and inference is done on their servers, but as it moves
| from a development/exploration phase to regular operations
| and scales up they want to offload inference to save costs,
| and probably provide a better experience running a model
| locally.
| thimp wrote:
| Well they failed miserably at that first thing. Azure's
| only leverage is really AD, InTune, O365 etc for
| corporates and then shovel everything else in there
| around the edges. Even in the MS house I work in, other
| than AD, all the product stuff is in AWS.
|
| And the Azure hardware situation is so crap they had to
| buy in capacity from Oracle!
|
| Source: https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-
| cloud-infras...
| imiric wrote:
| > They are however compromising it pretty heavily with
| overblown claims about how it's going to make people's
| lives better. They also have little to no profitability
| model around it and the development is operating at a heavy
| loss with the hope that they can break even with silicon
| advancements and user count down the line.
|
| You've just described every AI company. AI is not even
| their core business, but MS is certainly in the best
| position out of any of the Big Tech companies to deliver a
| successful consumer product. Whether someone else will step
| in and steal their lunch, or they just fumble the product,
| only time will tell, but none of this is an indication that
| they're "abandoning AI" as GP mentioned. Quite the contrary
| --they're heavily invested in it.
|
| The rest of your post is pure speculation, but I'll set a
| reminder for 5 years from now in case your crystal ball is
| legit.
| thimp wrote:
| Not every AI company. There are two approaches to solving
| problems. One is finding problems you didn't have to
| solve with the latest hammer. The other is having
| existing problems and solving them with the latest
| hammer. The subtle difference tends to bisect product
| outcomes accurately and thus can drive investment
| decisions. My crystal ball is mostly fairly well proven
| heuristics and financial modelling (used to be the day
| job). I could be wrong but the chance of a favourable
| outcome is less than one I'd put money on.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... overblown claims about how it's going to make
| people's lives better.
|
| That sounds exactly like how they did Cortana too -> "It'll
| be GREAT!!!". Fast forward a few years and they're ripping
| it out of everything as it's actually not useful.
| de6u99er wrote:
| > So another thing Microsoft abandons just as it starts
| growing.
|
| I don't see VR/AR growing. Quite the opposite.
|
| E.g.: https://mixed-news.com/en/steamvr-february-2023/
| tasoeur wrote:
| Some contrast to this comment: this is steamVR data which is
| not only specific to steam (which as pointed out in the
| article, is not representative of the entire market) but also
| mostly biased towards gaming. Now I will concede that VR has
| mostly been "successful" with that demographic (gaming), in
| fact, oculus (now quest) is mostly making money solely on
| that sort of content... some people at Meta while I was there
| would even argue that this product should limit its ambition
| to be the "Nintendo switch of VR". Apple on the contrary has
| been setting expectations much more clearly that gaming is
| not in the forefront (but not excluded). Whether it will be
| successful is another story, but we should still welcome new
| challengers in an industry / product category. What happened
| to the excitement in tech everyone :-)
| LegitShady wrote:
| oculus always wanted the walled garden approach, but
| steamvr had so much more content that users were unhappy
| that their vr display device wouldn't play steamvr games
| even though it technically was possible (in fact people
| hacked it in before it was officially enabled).
|
| Now that oculus has made the device cheaper so more non pc
| gamers are playing I'm sure they're selling more software
| themselves. Valve also hasn't launched a headset in a while
| and wasn't targeting low budget headsets at all.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I'm not sure 6 million MAU is really "successful" when game
| consoles are approaching 400 million MAU and they're still
| mostly nerd boxes. Let's reserve "successful" for products
| that break 10 million MAU or perhaps 100 million MAU. A few
| hundred thousand devices, as Apple will sell this year, or
| a few million devices, as Meta has deployed successfully
| over the last decade, that's just not mainstream and not
| even close to any other Apple release in terms of sales or
| fashion factor (AVP is actually anti-fashion, a real
| departure for Apple.)
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| occulus headsets are outselling xboxes.
|
| https://www.pcgamesn.com/oculus/quest-2-meta-sales-xbox-
| seri...
|
| PSVR2 is outselling both.
| Macha wrote:
| I wonder if that's still true now that Xbox has more
| software and the supply crunch is resolved.
| bombcar wrote:
| Apparently Xbox is just doing horribly bad this console
| generation. No real major reason I can see for it,
| however, the Xbox does Xbox things.
| MikusR wrote:
| Quest is outselling PSVR2 https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-
| psvr-2-unit-sales-holiday-202...
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| thnx, there is "aces of thunder" dropping for PSVR2 in a
| quarter or two which should get that moving again, either
| way great to see the trend only accelerating.
| jsheard wrote:
| However, the Xbox is profitable and Metas VR division is
| still spending $6 billion for every $1 billion they make.
|
| It's relatively easy to move a lot of devices if you don't
| care about making any money on them.
| cubefox wrote:
| The author speculates that PCVR users are switching to the
| PSVR2. It seems much more likely that they are switching to
| the standalone Quest headsets, which have far higher sales
| numbers and exclusive AAA games like Asgard's Wrath 2. The
| graphics aren't as good as on PC or PS5, but not everything
| is about polygons.
| ok_dad wrote:
| PSVR2 is an excellent headset, I'm not buying PCVR until
| those headsets are on the level of PSVR2. OLED or micro LED
| is a must, and foveated rendering is good for performance
| on pixel dense displays. Plus, inside out tracking instead
| of extra boxes to mount. The main problem is you can't use
| it except on PS5.
| cubefox wrote:
| It's probably subsidized by Sony, otherwise it is hard to
| explain how they ship it at $550.
|
| Quest 3 (500 USD), from Meta, is definitely subsidized,
| given that their hardware bill alone is almost as high as
| the end price of the product [1] without any inclusion of
| development cost, and considering that the latest losses
| of Meta's Reality Labs exceed 4 billion USD [2].
|
| So I don't think there will be anything soon in that
| price range that can compete with the headsets above. The
| Quest 3 seems the best deal currently, given that it has
| a lot of games and doesn't require a PS5 or even gaming
| PC.
|
| [1] https://mixed-news.com/en/meta-quest-3-bill-of-
| materials-ana...
|
| [2] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/01/metas-reality-
| labs-loses...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| These statistics are complicated. They're looking at the
| evolution in percentage relative to a Steam's total numbers.
|
| For instance if Steam had a sudden influx of new comers
| because of some standard popular franchise's game, the total
| VR usage could slowly grow yet still be declining in
| percentage relative to Steam as a whole.
|
| Then users not relying on Steam (someone playing recrooms
| through Oculus Link for instance) also won't be counted. I
| have no idea how many people that would be, but VR is not
| that mainstream, so people doing that kind of stuff feels par
| for the course
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| Your link is from 2023.. Current numbers:
|
| Steam users with VR Headsets: 2.24% (vs 2.07% last feb)
|
| See https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey (VR section)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Vs 1.84% the prior month. This is an example of noise of a
| flat trend over the last year, not something just starting
| to grow.
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| OP was arguing that it was decreasing. Steam is a bad
| source of info for a lot of reasons. Meta is the largest
| platform and they don't release numbers. My personal
| feeling (Apple Vision Pro hype not withstanding) as a VR
| developer is that the industry is in the slow growth
| phase and will continue to grow as real usecases are
| found and hardware continues to improve year over year.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Sure, the source isn't perfect but May 2021 still being
| higher than this peak is no more an argument it's
| actually growing in absence of other actual data nearly
| 10 years into the current cycle. Particularly since this
| is for the much more popular overall VR market, not just
| AR. That could always change in the future, but there is
| nothing beyond hopes and feelings suggesting it's already
| changing at the moment (not that those can't ever turn
| out to be right).
| terribleperson wrote:
| I'm surprised there'd be that much noise in the Steam
| Hardware Survey.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Typically anything in ${latest-steam-survey} is more
| unreliable than ${not-latest-steam-survey}. People often
| get hyped up on a big month change in e.g. Linux that
| ends up being a detection issue or the like.
| sotix wrote:
| For what it's worth, my VR usage is greatly down because I
| used it for iRacing but grew frustrated with windows and
| switched to Linux where I can't use it anymore for the time
| being. Blame anticheat.
| ok_dad wrote:
| The only thing I want PCVR for is simracing; I don't
| particularly enjoy other games. I have a PSVR2 from when I
| planned to just use a console but now I use an IR head
| tracker in iRacing, which is like a poor man's VR.
|
| Too bad they won't get anti cheat working in Linux, I
| really hate Windows too.
| thimp wrote:
| Yeah that. They enter every single market, deliver a half-assed
| broken product with dubious gains and expect to pick up
| business and when it doesn't they shelve it, even if the market
| is heading in that direction. At the same time they compromise
| their core business with the fads they pick up because
| attention is diverted. Can you imagine what it's going to be
| like getting all the unused AI crap out of windows and office
| when the inevitable incoming AI winter hits.
|
| Dear MS, can you please just concentrate on your core business.
| We know it's dreary but we just want Windows, Office and AD
| that doesn't suck balls.
| pavlov wrote:
| Why did Microsoft give up on AR/VR just when Apple and Meta have
| shipped the fruits of their massive R&D investments and are
| spending to create the market?
|
| Sure, Windows Mixed Reality wasn't great. Maybe in the current
| marketplace it was the Windows 2.0 to Apple's Mac. But the old
| Microsoft would have persisted when underestimated and come back
| with a sneakily good 3.0 product.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Because Microsoft doesn't get a 30% cut of products sold for
| it's platforms. Also Windows on ARM hasn't caught on and x86
| has only recently been closing the performance per watt gap
| with ARM.
|
| Meta's headset is Android based so it has 18+ years of low
| power, ARM performance and power tweaking. And Apple is using
| their in-house M series chips.
|
| Microsoft's bread and butter is B2B; Azure, Office, etc. The
| Xbox and consumer divisions are just too small to take on high
| cost, novel devices. They've historically not been great at
| branding or marketing direct to consumer either. (Zune, those
| Microsoft store commercials, etc.).
| pavlov wrote:
| Fundamentally those are excuses based on Microsoft's current
| market position.
|
| When they invested in Windows 1.0, their existing users were
| not asking for it and didn't have a use for it. MS-DOS wasn't
| a good foundation for a GUI, the IBM PC hardware was
| misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics), and obviously Apple was
| miles ahead.
|
| The product didn't fit any of Microsoft's existing strengths
| and felt like a toy rather than a credible business tool. By
| the same logic that's applied to AR/VR today, Microsoft
| absolutely should have exited the GUI market in 1988. (They
| were even a leading Mac software vendor! Why bother making
| their own worse GUI?)
| bonzini wrote:
| > IBM PC hardware was misaligned (e.g. terrible graphics)
|
| In 1985 it was terrible for games due to no sprites, but
| business applications run on the Hercules graphics card
| (monochrome but 720x348) or EGA, which had decent
| resolution and was way better than the competition for
| business applications. It had worse color resolution than
| say the Amiga, but by 1988 the VGA had fixed that as well.
| rini17 wrote:
| How was it better for business? Text mode?There were
| plenty of terminals available at that time with better
| monochrome and color text modes and fonts, even line
| graphics support. It was about various attractive
| business software available for PC, not about EGA being
| superior somehow.
| ohthehugemanate wrote:
| It's ok to make short sighted investment decisions based on
| current market position, especially when one of your
| biggest bets from the last decade is striking gold in a big
| way, and you need all hands on deck to reap maximum
| strategic value during the temporary opportunity window.
|
| In that phase, it makes absolute sense to reduce or cut
| anything that is not CURRENTLY performing well, in favor of
| the area that is taking off and needs all the push you can
| give it. When the gen AI market stabilizes, ideally with
| Microsoft in a dominant position, it will again be
| appropriate to diversify bets. That includes pushes for
| markets where MS can grab 2nd or even 3rd place.
| jdsully wrote:
| The old Microsoft wasn't so myopic which resulted in not
| one but two of the biggest software dynasties with
| windows and office and in more recent times Azure.
|
| You can't get a winner if you leave the game early.
| johnny_canuck wrote:
| I recall in the late 2000s Microsoft had some of the best
| mice and keyboards on the market, but you'd never know they
| existed unless you happened upon them.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Gamers definitely did know. For a good part of the decade,
| the basic IntelliMouse Optical (2001 revision) was one of
| the very few devices that didn't have pointer assistance
| gimmicks that stand in your way, like angle snapping. It
| was sought after well into 2010s, despite it being limited
| to the measly 125Hz polling rate, having high SRAV and
| slippery sides.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Good point but Google gets a 30% cut for things on Android
| and they killed their VR/AR as well.
|
| I do think the stupid ads and rent seeking turned out to be
| so incredibly lucrative that it's essentially all that
| companies can think about.
| AmVess wrote:
| Meta isn't creating a market, rather instead a hole in which
| they've dumped 30+ billion dollars into with nothing to show
| for it.
|
| Apple's VR is nothing new and will also fail.
| DANmode wrote:
| Accusing Meta of not being able to set trends is fair.
|
| But Apple?!
|
| Bit off more than you could chew, there, I think.
| cubefox wrote:
| Meta has sold far more VR headsets than all other the other
| brands combined. Unlike Apple's headset, they also have a
| clear use case, a "killer feature": VR games. Something you
| can't have without VR. Apple seems to just offer somewhat
| improved(?) experiences for watching TV and working with
| multiple monitors.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I 100% agree. No matter how impressive AVP is, it's
| still _clearly_ worse than just a normal laptop /TV. You
| can do all the same things but just more painfully and at
| lower quality.
|
| Quest games make much more sense because it's a
| completely different thing to non-VR games. You can't
| just say "well I'll play beatsabre on my laptop".
|
| That said, they seem to be losing money hand over fist
| anyway.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Honestly you could though. Beat saber has basically
| nothing in it that couldn't have been done with a Kinect
| (sp?) or a wii.
| jayd16 wrote:
| They spent a lot but they have about 20 million units sold
| which is pretty close to the latest Xbox generation. Content
| wise they have a lot of defacto exclusives. I wouldn't call
| that nothing.
| PKop wrote:
| I would call it less than nothing given it's not
| profitable[0][1] until there's evidence of pay off in
| future earnings from content and the operating losses are
| overcome.
|
| [0] https://xrdailynews.com/quest-3-bom-production-costs-
| reveale...
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/vr-market-shrinking-as-
| meta-...
| ahiknsr wrote:
| maybe due to
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/7/23159049/microsoft-hololen...
| MikusR wrote:
| From the linked post:
|
| "This deprecation does not impact HoloLens."
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Does hololens really not depend on WMR at all?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Microsoft's strategy was a mess. They were pushing a lot of
| vaporware so they could imagine a world where Azure rendered XR
| frames and streamed it to headsets. Definitely a lot of
| thinking about how to charge for something and working
| backwards not meeting the actually cool but fledgling tech
| being built.
|
| Teams integration was pushed and is a mess with or without XR.
| They finally launched something that should be able to connect
| web cam and XR users in a teams session but why... AFAICT it's
| in a special teams app. Apple's face time windows that are not
| a full overlay are a better fit for a productive experience. I
| haven't checked out the new Teams yet, though. Maybe its just
| not in the marketing material.
|
| They had the first inkling of the exciting spatially anchored
| app stuff that the Vision Pro is pushing but it just was not
| fleshed out or really pursued beyond proof of concept.
|
| MR for Windows was just not a good value add in general. It
| didn't supplant SteamVR or Oculus and Microsoft didn't (and
| doesn't) have a way to capitalize on their commoditization so
| what even is the point?
|
| Right now, making XR apps is their only coherent strategy.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Apple thinks it has a new and different approach which will be
| popular, Meta is hoping their current approach will lead to
| widespread popularity if they keep going at it, and Microsoft
| had an approach they tried but it didn't really work out and
| they don't want to throw their hat in the ring again quite yet.
|
| Which of these decisions end up working out or not requires
| waiting 10+ years and looking back. Companies were hyped about
| 3D TVs, some held out longer than others, it turned out to be a
| bad idea. Companies were hyped about e-readers in the 90s but
| it didn't pan out at first only to be successful with future
| innovations and iterations and it turned out to be a good idea.
| threeseed wrote:
| This makes sense for Microsoft.
|
| They have a great relationship with Apple and Meta and have
| already brought their full suite of applications and services to
| their respective XR platforms. With Google/Samsung aiming for
| third place there just isn't room for another OS.
| fh973 wrote:
| They developed MSFS 2020, which is the killer app for VR
| headsets, and announced a successor already. At least there
| seems to be some strategic misalignment.
| LegitShady wrote:
| They're display devices, they don't need their own operating
| system.
|
| Microsoft's problem was actually that they did what you're
| talking about - Mixed Reality had all of these nonsense things
| microsoft built into it that didn't improve the experience and
| just put barriers in front of using the device to play games or
| whatever.
|
| When you plugged in the headset it would automatically pop up
| mixed reality whether you wanted it to start or not. I couldn't
| keep mine plugged in and not running reliably. It would restart
| mixed reality at random times.
|
| When you logged in instead of a well designed menu system, they
| made it stupidly spatial and you had this virtual house where
| functions were in different rooms you had to navigate to
| instead of just letting me start the application I wanted. It
| had a whole new set of widgets and interactions. A lot of
| designers got paid to create little toys that didn't improve
| the experience at all and just complicated things.
|
| And microsoft's own device wasn't aimed at consumers and cost
| more than the vision pro, so you were buying HP or some other
| 3rd party's implementation microsoft's of mixed reality on
| windows.
|
| It was fine to play games but not an improvement over steamvr.
| iAkashPaul wrote:
| Who knows we might just get Microsoft Mesh through Apple Vision
| Pro after all instead of HoloLens updates
| caslon wrote:
| For what it's worth, on the off-chance that anyone at MS who
| worked on this views the thread, I thought it was cool. I liked
| what you did. I'm sure that seeing people review the Vision Pro
| is frustrating, seeing how many things you already did being
| declared revolutionary. I'm sure it's like that for Oculus
| developers, too.
|
| In retrospect, people like John Gruber and Tim Urban will mock
| the industry prior to the Vision Pro for not Getting It Right, or
| for fundamentally-flawed interaction models, ignoring where
| things _were_ right. Eye-tracked selection was already a thing in
| the Sony headset. Tracking windows fixed throughout your
| environment has been a thing in the Oculus inside-out devices
| since release, good enough to keep track even on different
| floors. Varjo does reprojected AR _better_ than Apple, for a
| cheaper price point (though still a steep one).
|
| Microsoft, for their part, captured a sort of mundane magic:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97mqPUn-4x0
| andybak wrote:
| I still dispute that eye tracked selection will prove to be the
| correct solution. I think it might be _part_ of the correct
| solution but eye, hand and controller based interactions all
| have distinct advantages and disadvantages and I 'm very
| sceptical of anyone claiming that only one of them should be
| the only option across a wide range of applications.
|
| Personally speaking I have used all three and if someone put a
| gun to my head and insisted that I had to pick just one, it
| would be 6DOF controllers. (and that's me also trying to take
| into account future improvements in implementations for each)
| caslon wrote:
| I love controllers, personally. I think the actual solution
| is a lot closer to making controllers into hands than the
| other way around. For now, though? People are going to
| incessantly bask in the Sony-Apple approach.
| modeless wrote:
| I agree. I do think eye tracking selection is part of the
| solution, but combined with at least one physical button on a
| physical controller. The worst part of my Vision Pro demo was
| the finger gesture tracking; it's simultaneously impressively
| good and not nearly good _enough_. The reliability and
| tactile feedback of buttons can 't be beat.
|
| But there are a lot of ways to do minimal controllers that
| don't look like gamepads. They could be tiny to fit on your
| keychain, or built into a ring the size of a normal wedding
| band. You really only need one solitary button when combined
| with eye tracking. Since you're already carrying your phone
| everywhere, perhaps phones could add a physical button on the
| back for this use case. (The existing buttons wouldn't be
| good for this because they are intentionally hard to press.)
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I want a little track nub like thinkpads have that's glued to
| my thumb so I can click as if doing a bomb detonation
| movement or do basic 2D movement inputs
| deanCommie wrote:
| This happens with every Apple product, and people need to get
| over it.
|
| iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
|
| iPhone: "it doesn't appeal to business customers because it
| doesn't have a keyboard"
|
| iPod did not invent MP3 players, iPhone did not invent multi-
| touch or smartphones.
|
| Yet both became the defacto standards for every future mp3
| player and smart phone.
|
| The same is going to happen with the Vision Pro - for better or
| for worse. Everyone trying to do only AR or only VR will give
| up, and try to do what apple is doing.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Is there some law of nature that Apple always has the right
| ideas? I very much doubt it.
|
| They've had plenty of misses, not just hits. They got the
| mouse wrong (three buttons are now universal, one was never
| even close to good enough). The touch bar was a failure. The
| Apple Watch has not redefined how smartwatch UIs work. MacOS
| has plenty of UI ideas which have not been adopted by any
| other OS, most notably the top bar and the left-hand side
| window controls.
| deanCommie wrote:
| True enough. And very accurate about the mouse.
|
| But at least the touch bar was honestly pretty great. It
| happened to arrive with a generation of MBPs that killed
| all their ports and ruined the keyboard, which is what
| people more hated.
|
| The Apple Watch seems to be the only smart watch I see
| around - though granted smart watches are not as ubiquitous
| as smart phones.
|
| MacOS is tricky because it just feels like if it wasn't for
| Office at The Office, it would have just fully won...
| oohffyvfg wrote:
| they only succeeded when the market expanded such that you
| don't have to be technically right, but just have the
| larger marketing budget.
|
| ipod was advertised around the world like absolutely
| nothing before it. there was no international launch of
| consumer device before it.
|
| iphone destroyed the media because att did not have the
| best network but saw they could sell more data than they
| could sell minutes. so it also had the most marketing of
| any telecom device in history.
|
| all that in a time consumer eletronics left the
| enterprise+niche market.
|
| hardly either are the case with the headset. it will flop.
| and if not, it's because they undertood fomo influencer
| marketing better than everyone else.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Unrelated but get off my lawn.
|
| > We are trying out a new experience for Copilot in Windows that
| helps showcase the ways that Copilot can accelerate and enhance
| your work. This experience will show when you copy text - since
| Copilot supports helpful actions that you can take with text
| content. In this scenario, the Copilot icon will change
| appearance and animate to indicate that Copilot can help (there
| are several different treatments so you may notice a different
| visual effect)
|
| Full disclosure: I like AI. I also like my clipboard being
| mine...
| weikju wrote:
| Microsoft owns your computer so your clipboard isn't yours
|
| I'm reminded of the 90s era Slashdot that had a Bill Gates of
| Borg icon for every Microsoft related article. Seems to be
| where they are headed
| MrPatan wrote:
| Can't spell "copilot" without "clip"
| thelastparadise wrote:
| Actually... CLIP is an image-to-text computer vision model.
| It has nothing to do with copilot.
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| I think GP was going for a clippy reference.
| teekert wrote:
| We have a potential Linux convert right here guys!
| rogual wrote:
| I can't wait to experience this new experience in my clipboard
| experience.
|
| Every time I get upset about the decline of MacOS, Microsoft
| manages to cheer me right up again.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Surely this will never go wrong with a password manager copying
| stuff to a clipboard.
|
| Also they probably never tested that with pornographic search
| queries / clipboard contents, which will be very common in the
| real world. And even if they did test, they probably just did
| so with vanilla terms that are easily identified as
| pornographic by AI. Cue Copilot regurgitating porn queries
| because it mistakenly believes they are relevant to some
| current work task.
|
| Personally I'm ready with popcorn for Microsoft unleashing
| chaos.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Surely this will never go wrong with a password manager
| copying stuff to a clipboard.
|
| Window's clipboard API allows password managers to mark if
| the clipboard content is allowed in history or is cloud
| syncable.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Somehow I doubt it would work correctly for my setup. My
| middle monitor has a KVM switch to switch from my Linux
| work/main setup (laptop in a docking station) to my gaming
| Windows tower computer (+a bunch of audio hardware to merge
| output and split mic input). I'm using barrier[1] to share
| mouse and keyboard between my Linux and Windows PC. My
| password manager runs on Linux because the Windows setup is
| bare-bones for obvious reasons, with barrier syncing the
| clipboard over the network. If I had to guess, that stuff
| is going to synced to the cloud and ran through AI by
| default, because Microsoft won't have the foresight to make
| cloud-sync opt-in as opposed to opt-out by the software.
|
| Obviously I will make damn sure that Microsoft thing isn't
| running on my setup, but if they considered barrier/synergy
| users, I'll be surprised.
|
| [1] https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Your clipboard is all yours in Linux.
|
| I get that no every use is supported on Linux but at this point
| most everyday uses are. I don't understand how people don't at
| least seriously consider using Multiboot and Windows only were
| it is absolutely necessary.
|
| Modern Windows is little more than an appliance with all it's
| modern day adware. It's closer to one of those Amazon buttons
| designed solely to get you to buy more stuff than a real
| computer where the user is in control.
|
| Must be some kind of mass learned helplessness or something.
| brudgers wrote:
| Multi-booting means stopping what I am doing and rebooting.
|
| Unless I use two computers of course.
|
| But since I can only use one computer at a time (for many
| practical definitions of "use"), I will probably use the
| computer that has all my tools on it.
|
| And of course, Excel, etc. Which is why I went back to
| Windows after almost a decade of Linux as a daily driver. I
| am sure there are hills worth dying on, but Linux turned out
| not to be one of them for me.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| Suspended virtual machine that you resume as needed might
| be a slightly better experience.
|
| Is there an app like Parallels on Mac that supports
| seamless mode - it merges the Windows apps with my other
| windows?
| kevinmershon wrote:
| virtual box can do a seamless windows mode. It in't as
| slick as parallels but it is passable.
| brudgers wrote:
| Well there's WSL to run Linux in Windows. It's just a
| feature to turn on.
|
| And before I started driving Linux daily, I ran Linux in
| VM's for a couple of years to sandbox web browsers. This
| was before common browsers supported multiple identies.
|
| But your question highlights why I went back to Windows.
| I finding solving many classes of ordinary problems
| easier than reading Archwiki.
| bpye wrote:
| I've found the Office web apps to be pretty good for my
| occasional use and they obviously work fine on Linux.
| brudgers wrote:
| I used "Excel" metaphorically.
|
| Office Online doesn't solve Photoshop, AutoCad, Ableton,
| utilities for configuring miscellaneous hardware, etc.
| etc.
|
| Like I said, I drove Linux daily for close to a decade. I
| found and used work-arounds. Going to Windows removed a
| lot of "arounds" and lets me spend more mental cycles on
| the work.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| From the Deprecated Features page which is linked mentioning the
| Windows Mixed Reality item (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/whats-new/deprecat...):
|
| > Windows Mixed Reality is deprecated and will be removed in
| Windows 11, version 24H2. This deprecation includes the Mixed
| Reality Portal app, Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR, and Steam
| VR Beta. Existing Windows Mixed Reality devices will continue to
| work with Steam through November 2026, if users remain on their
| current released version of Windows 11, version 23H2. After
| November 2026, Windows Mixed Reality will no longer receive
| security updates, nonsecurity updates, bug fixes, technical
| support, or online technical content updates.
|
| > This deprecation doesn't affect HoloLens. We remain committed
| to HoloLens and our enterprise customers
|
| --
|
| Some more HN discussion about it when it was announced back in
| December:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762095
| edandersen wrote:
| These headsets had a nice standard HDMI and USB A 3.0 port. Could
| have plugged straight into Xbox for "Xbox VR".
| pornel wrote:
| WMR itself was annoying and pointless, but it's required by HP
| Reverb G2, which is still technically a very good headset.
| Levitating wrote:
| I owned a Lenovo headset myself. Imported from the UK for about
| 200 euros. By far the best price-value at the time.
|
| The only major issue I had was of course WMR itself. Why
| couldn't they just make it behave normally.
| criddell wrote:
| I never used WMR, but I never understood why it had to be part
| of the operating system. Why load that onto millions of
| computers when so few people use it?
|
| IIRC, it was one of the things that Microsoft made difficult to
| remove. You could uninstall it through some PowerShell
| incantation, but chances are it would be back in a couple of
| Tuesdays.
| steelframe wrote:
| I own two HP Reverb G2s and am not at all happy about this. I
| shouldn't be forced to choose between being able to use my
| hardware and getting security updates. This behavior on the
| part of Microsoft should be illegal.
| NBJack wrote:
| That's a real shame, but it's clear they stopped investing in it
| years ago. This is just an acknowledgement of that fact.
|
| I have a WMR collecting dust as we speak. I loved the concept for
| a usable VR workspace! And it had a LOT going for it. But too
| many issues, bugs, and QoL issues were never addressed in the
| workspace:
|
| * Allowing a user to exclusively use a physical keyboard (the
| floating keyboard would automatically pop up if you clicked
| inside a text box or app)
|
| * Only about 4 windows/apps floating in your view could actively
| refresh (a damn shame as having a bunch of floating SSH sessions
| felt quite cyberpunk, and it put tabs for browsers to shame)
|
| * Only one desktop view at a time, even if you had multiple
| monitors
|
| * Bad performance on most mobile devices
|
| * No support for non-WMR headsets (i.e. I could never use one of
| my Quests with it)
|
| * They made a tease of a Halo demo that never panned out (OK, I
| admit this was sour grapes, but it was just a tease at the end,
| just when it got interesting)
|
| So much potential. But they basically created version 1 and
| either never listened to the audience, or never invested in it
| again.
| bitwize wrote:
| As with other things, the technology didn't really exist until
| Apple invented it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| On the brighter side, the Monado project is not too far away from
| a fully featured experience for WMR devices on Linux, and maybe
| eventually on Windows, too. Currently, the headsets even work
| with positional tracking and hand tracking.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Goodbye Windows Mixed Reality, we hardly knew Microsoft 's VR
| software_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38762095 - Dec
| 2023 (74 comments)
|
| also:
|
| _Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed
| Reality, and HoloLens_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34472549 - Jan 2023 (236
| comments)
| calamari4065 wrote:
| I won't miss it. WMR was by far and away the worst experience
| available on the market.
|
| Putting aside the numerous bugs in the VR environment, the
| software itself was typical Microsoft garbage. It absolutely
| infests your system and clobbers any and all other VR runtimes
| you have. Difficult to remove, and once you do uninstall, your
| other runtimes like OpenXR or SteamVR are still left broken and
| you have to reinstall those too.
|
| I had to develop an app for WMR at the same time we were working
| on OpenXR/SteamVR apps. I simply could not do my job until I
| ripped out WMR. We relegated it and the headset that _only_ works
| with WMR to an isolated machine used exclusively for testing WMR.
|
| The industry is much better off without Microsoft trying to elbow
| their way in to disrupt standardization around OpenXR.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Out of curiosity, did you try just isolating it into a separate
| virtual machine?
|
| (I have no idea to what extent special pass-through support was
| needed for WMR.)
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