This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sometimes I feel like Microsoft is just a little too early to the party. Apple is about to release their VR/AR product and even they do it's probably going to be crazy and become popular. Then Microsoft will have missed the wave.
The same can be applied to their Windows phones. Had they suck around a bit they would have had a better market share I think.
Microsoft were hardly early to the game with Windows phones, compare BlackBerry or Symbian. They had some early successes, for instance against Palm. The big failure was to keep deprecating the existing version of Windows phone, in some cases many months before the ongoing version was available, and deprecating the existing hardware along with it. Look at the whole mango/tango Windows phone 7 /Windows phone 8 debacle
To be fair, they were pretty ahead of the competition when it came to the hardware specs of their phones. The Lumia 950 released in 2015 and had a 1440p AMOLED screen, 3GBs of RAM, biometric unlocking with an iris scanner, and a pretty incredible camera for the time. It also had a removable back cover and battery as well as an AUX port. It was also the first phone I'd seen with USB-C and wireless charging.
Just listing these makes me a bit nostalgic for WP...
Hardware was impressive during Nokia’s glory before apps were a deal breaker.
Microsoft screwed developers hard by making rapid changes to metro layout.
Many of them just gave up and abandoned their apps.
Windows Phone's problem was Steve Balmer, and it was insurmountable. They delayed entering the market for too long and without a large enough user base, there was no way forward to get any real traction in attracting large enough numbers of application developers.
Not enough app developers means dismissal app marketplace means inferior overall user experience relative to Android and iOS, no matter how good the overall hardware or OS was on Windows Phones.
For what it's worth, Satya shutting it down it wasn't any better. At least with Balmer, it may still be alive today. It was actually doing pretty well in certain markets in Europe. All of which they threw away very quickly after Satya took over.
I'm not as familiar with Balmer's time but it sure seems MS under Satya was way more trigger happy when it comes to cancelling and deprecating products.
Those last gen windows phones were really good though.
Same with blackberry and their last gen qnx phones. The passport was such a good device.
Passport was an amazing device I still wish I had mine, I really didn't care there weren't many apps, to me the form and function made up for the lack of apps. Hopefully Punkt will bring to market the MC01 Legend and we'll have the option of a Passport 2.0 if you will.
You can argue that Microsoft was early to the game - they had a smartphone/PDA OS out for years, well before Windows Phone. What they were ridiculously late in doing was reacting to Apple's moves that completely transformed the market.
Early or late, they're hardly ever on time anymore. It also feels like they're going the way of Google and starting to abandon projects.
Development tools completely changed ~yearly as well.
I was talking about when the modern touchscreen smartphones entered the market. After BlackBerry and Symbian. Microsoft partnered with Nokia to create some pretty nice smartphones that were well equipped. Their UI was really nice, too. It would have been a great competitor to Android phones and Apple's iPhones had they kept in the game.
The more competition, the better.
To further your point, I would add Mixer. Msoft gave up on it just months before Twitch made a series of controversial moves that would have been the perfect moment to strike with an alternative.
I think that part of the difference there is also that Apple is really good at marketing their products into "the cool thing to have" and a status symbol, a lot of their products don't necessarily gain steam based purely on their functionality but more based on their ability to make it the hottest latest thing to have.
Dude the Mixer situation was so weird to me, they were clearly serious about it, bought out a bunch of big streamers for ridiculous amounts of money and then just... gave up. They needed more ways to engage the community of streamers, like Twitch Rivals does, because people are not going to use your platform if they have no-one they want to watch, but Mixer never attempted to try and get people to watch new streamers.
I did try Mixer when I still watched livestreams often, the video quality was so much better, the player was snappy and was such a breath of fresh air from Twitch. But my god did they butcher the chat/viewer experience. I don't want visual clutter and fireworks flying over my screen all the time, it was the most dogshit thing ever, so back to Twitch I went. I mean Twitch without FFZ is also disgusting now, give me that simple IRC chat back!
It's like the Zune (Zoon?) all over again.
Squirt me some tunes, bro!
Dog poo brown and mushy peas green
Charcoal black and spider blood blue
Ice chunk white and transparent glass
Incase you're wondering what all this is, it's how I describe the color options of the Zune 30. You can tell that they're all the same length in terms of syllables.
Right???
Oooof that's unfortunate, it was the platform for reasonably priced VR systems that weren't made by Facebook (I refuse to acknowledge their rebrand), even if it wasn't the best software...
This is basically another step towards a situation in which your only VR options are either high end Valve offerings or buying into the Facebook ecosystem.
Even then, the high end Valve offerings don't have the content. Meta has been very anticompetitive with all the platform exclusives, and it's hurting VR overall.
I don't think VR can truly take off until it's a standard commodity device like a TV.
All back and forward compatible like HDMI. Pair of hand trackers, head tracker, two eyes, maybe extensions for face detection or other limbs.
That way we can be done with all this nonsense exclusivity.
I mean, the Oculus exclusives are literally fully funded. They are games that otherwise wouldn't even exist. There are no games that were going to be made for other platforms but were steered to oculus only or anything like that. So how anti-competitive can that really be? Should mario games be on other consoles? Is Nintendo anti-competitive for making first party games?
Facebook/meta is terrible, but they are terrible for real reasons, not fake reasons.
Meta has been buying up game developers so they can have a bunch of exclusives. Yes, I'm assuming that the games by the developers would have been made regardless on other platforms. That might be a big assumption given the market share of the quest.
Yes, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, etc anticompetitive practices are bad too. They do it to try to lock out competitors, and in doing so they decrease access to the content.
With Meta this hits already established PCVR gaming users hard as they will essentially no longer get new PCVR games if Meta keeps buying up the VR game developers. It's not like they wouldn't be able to support steamvr through openxr/openvr.
Where's Oculus Rift when you need them? I'm still waiting for the 3 to release...
Will Microsoft force uninstall the windows mixed reality portal app needed to even start steam vr? If so how to fully prevent it from doing so without making it a fully offline device. I play sooo much hotdogs horseshoes and hand grenades (h3vr) with a boat load of mods, and not being able to run it because windows mixed reality portal is removed from the system, will make me sad.
So what happens to, for example, the HP reverb g2?
I'm pretty sure you can make the g2 boot straight to steam vr at the moment so hopefully that will just become the default. Otherwise I'll just have to stop updating my computer which is less ideal.
Decades from now I will have to explain what the "3D Objects" folder is to some kid
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company says Windows Mixed Reality is “deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Windows.” Microsoft first introduced Windows Mixed Reality in 2017 as part of its bid to compete with virtual reality rivals like HTC and Oculus (now owned by Meta).
Windows Mixed Reality served as a portal to games, apps, and other experiences within the VR space.
In addition to the Microsoft HoloLens, other companies, including Acer, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, HP, and Samsung, made mixed reality headsets compatible with Microsoft’s platform.
It doesn’t look like the enterprise-focused HoloLens 2 is going anywhere for now, though, as Microsoft added a free Windows 11 upgrade and several other improvements for the $3,500 headset earlier this year.
HoloLens boss Alex Kipman left last year over allegations of sexual misconduct, and the company later cut 10,000 jobs, many of which affected the workers behind Microsoft’s mixed reality projects, including the now-discontinued AltspaceVR app.
It also started letting Quest users access Office apps and its Xbox Cloud Gaming platform through a partnership with Meta.
The original article contains 248 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 30%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
One of my earliest vr experiences was with the blue Acer mixed reality headsets and it did fine at the time. Cost far less than the mainstream headsets from HTC and Oculus too.
Haven't even seen any new WMR headsets for years and thought it was already dead.
HP Reverb G2, this year, last hurrah for WMR
Oh wow, how out of the loop am I. 😆
Hopefully it’s supported for years to come.
I had the first HP WMR headset and as far as I can tell, the G2 has the same damn controllers. The tracking was awful outside of the rather small cone (compared to the Quest 2 and PSVR2 imo) in front of the headset. Did they really never address that or am I just being pessimistic?
Mixed Reality was a very poor product, so I'm not sad to see it go. I just hope Microsoft doesn't screw owners of headsets that require Windows Mixed Reality for basic functionality.
How was it a poor product? By itself, sure, there wasn't that many VR apps sold on the Microsoft Store, but once plugged into SteamVR, it was another story. WMR offered headsets for every budgets, from the low end to the very high-end and with more flexibility than HTC's Vive and Valve's Index.
but once plugged into SteamVR, it was another story
This was the core of why it was a poor product. It's only job was to pop up, annoy the user, while the user figured out how to minimize it to get to SteamVR.
WMR offered headsets for every budgets
If WMR was simply drivers or optional software it would have been fine all while still offering headsets for all budgets. Instead WMR is a required software which got in the way of actually using the product one bought.
When one plugs in a keyboard, they don't want the manufacturer's software to open on-screen just to use the keyboard, same for mice, same for monitors, same for VR headsets.
Yup. If they leave some minimal process/app that keeps the headsets working with Steam VR, then nothing of value will be lost. It was an underwhelming tech demo and major annoyance.
Was there even ever any use for it, other than using the headsets on Steam?
Nope. It would popup, the user would close it as it did nothing useful, then open SteamVR.
