Still blows my mind that the military was going to spend 20 billion on hololens
it already uses much more expensive augmented reality helmets.
Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
231–240 of 252 posts
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#232Stop trying to put VR in business space. Its for entertainment, focus on that. Valve put out the best VR headset you can buy, and that was years ago, with a team of people without the grand influence of Microsoft. These mega tech corps are so big they can just hemmorage money, sit on intellectual property, and do nothing. In a competitive market by all means MS should be bankrupt.
It is very much also in Military space. It just that Microsoft may not be an appropriate fit for that space.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were we talking specifically about corporate work? There's more to meetings or meetups than just your job. That said, I think VR/AR may eventually be a way to enhance online work meetings. It doesn't seem like it's there yet overall, but eventually I could definitely see it working.
Can you elaborate on how VR would enhance meetings? I really don’t see the point myself. I don’t want to meet some avatar in a virtual room and I don’t know anybody who would.
He elaborated and you didn't understand
There are tons of accounts of how you feel a sense of 'presence' in VR. The head tracking fools your lizard brain into thinking you're actually there in the virtual world.
If you're reading this site I'm guessing you have access to $400. Just go buy a Quest 2 and try it out for 10 minutes, and you'll see what I mean.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#234So Apple will (surprise!!) come out with a winner - and basically own the market for minimum three years, if not for much longer.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is built different as a tech company. They will keep everything a secret more closely guarded than the nuclear codes, then come out of nowhere with a mind-blowing product that leaves everything else in the dust, just like they did with the iPhone. A Quest 2 with an Apple Silicon CPU would, alone, be a game changer. There's probably some advanced head and eye tracking and SLAM AI in there too that makes Meta's s…
> ...then come out of nowhere...like they did with the iPhone Everyone and their dog knew the iPhone was coming and what it was about.
You don't remember the phone-bolted-on-to-an-ipod renders. There were lots of surprises, and even then the impact of half the innovations weren't widely recognized at the time.
https://theultralinx.com/2014/07/6-crazy-iphone-mockups-real...
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your downside is never capped, of course. Surely your downside is capped at zero?
Perhaps they believe working for big tech will lead to the eternal damnation of your soul.
I invite them to say what they mean, so we can stop speculating. Until then, it is impossible to say.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Azure is where the money is now.
It would be a dream if they would sell Windows to a non publicly traded company "to concentrate on their core competence".
They wouldn't do that. Windows Server is an integral part of Azure, running on every machine that hosts VMs.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://metrics.vrchat.community Look at the last graph which compares the total vrchat player count to the steam player count. All non Steam users are Quest users. There are more Steam users than Quest users even that the Quest is a much bigger VR platform than PCVR. The Steam player count is so high because it is counting desktop users who do not use VR. This data does not support my argumunt that most vrchat playe…
If you buy the game on Steam but play using a Quest don't you count as a Steam user? It would launch using SteamVR.
Only if you launch the Steam version of the game.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE th…
It's more that the industry is bearish on long bets in a tight financial climate. The tech for VR/AR is too clunky to seamlessly integrate into peoples' daily lives like mobile phones and smart phones did. There will need to be an iPhone-like leap in affordable and portable vision tech before VR/AR becomes a feasible marketplace.
On the price point, the original iPhone retailed for $499USD which in inflation adjusted dollars today would be $714USD. The Quest 2 is significantly cheaper than that as a standalone device. The Quest Pro is much more expensive but is targeted at businesses, watch Zuck's intro of it if you doubt that. The biggest barrier is that for really good performance on any headset you need to tether to a gaming PC. That's a lot more cost and complication for non-technical people. That said, the hardware is there and capable of delivering outstanding visuals and inside out tracking. The compute and networking are lagging behind, we really need a small, user friendly and powerful device that anyone can go buy, plug in and then connect their VR headset to with 0 frustration. That would free up headsets to only worry about the displays and tracking.
I don't think the future of VR is portable. I have an aversion to lumping AR in with it since they are fundamentally different. If it makes it easier, VR is desktop, AR is mobile. Similar but not at all the same. The way I envision the future of VR is that it does for your physical experiences what computers and the internet did for your paperwork and documents. Thinking about VR as a cellphone is the wrong mental model, it's not a peripheral that exists in your physical environment. It is a replacement for your physical environment or more congenially, it is another physical environment to which you can travel in addition to the places you currently go to.
Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, Microsoft and Meta are obviously partnering up. This is likely just a symptom of that with Meta getting buy in from Microsoft to use Meta's VR platform. I agree that Horizon is the worse of the two but that doesn't mean they'll fail. Worse is better sometimes. The lynchpin will be if Meta is really married to Unity, Unreal Engine is eating Unity's lunch with adoption and features. If Meta makes the jump to UE th…
I am afraid you are not paying much attention to the xr dev community which is overwhelmingly Unity vs UE. Both have their shortcomings but the new UE features like Nanite don't work out of the box double rendered and thats just one reason.