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Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

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191–200 of 252 posts

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#191
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just need to download the 90 gig client, then I'll join your Teams 2 call.

Just part of the standard OS install. Nobody notices bloat any more.

> Just part of the standard OS install.

Now, where have I heard that before? :D

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#192

Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace. AltSpace was super niche, but some artists and marginalized people seemed to find a home there. It was like an odd cross between a digital Burning Man and a BIPOC LGTBQ+ neurodivergent support group. I had a memorable conversation during the height of the pandemic with an older gay man whose…

VRChat is winning VR. Despite there being a few alternatives (Neos, Chillout, etc.), nothing reaches the scale of VRChat's community, platform, and developer ecosystem. Whoever buys VRChat wins VR.

>VRChat is winning VR.

>nothing reaches the scale of VRChat's community, platform, and developer ecosystem.

Neos and Chillout require VR. Most VRChat players play the game without VR.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#193

Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace. AltSpace was super niche, but some artists and marginalized people seemed to find a home there. It was like an odd cross between a digital Burning Man and a BIPOC LGTBQ+ neurodivergent support group. I had a memorable conversation during the height of the pandemic with an older gay man whose…

VRChat is winning VR. Despite there being a few alternatives (Neos, Chillout, etc.), nothing reaches the scale of VRChat's community, platform, and developer ecosystem. Whoever buys VRChat wins VR.

Eventually every app becomes chat.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#194
post #32
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Meta right? Otherwise it just sounds like you haven’t been following the field.

This is how Zuckerberg sees the metaverse: “We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more produ…

Keep in mind this is from a phone call with investors. Investors do care about how much money you think an investment will make.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#195
post #39

Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace. AltSpace was super niche, but some artists and marginalized people seemed to find a home there. It was like an odd cross between a digital Burning Man and a BIPOC LGTBQ+ neurodivergent support group. I had a memorable conversation during the height of the pandemic with an older gay man whose…

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.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#196

Remember Second life? It was super hyped and faded into obscurity even though it's still around with its dedicated userbase. All of these alt worlds are the same. Niche video games. I'm not surprised to see them go.

Second Life is doing OK. User count about 60%-70% of peak. More concurrent users than anybody else in the virtual world space except Roblox. Profitable. The owner says "it's a cash machine". The business model is straightforward - free to play, charge to rent out virtual land, take a small commission on item sales.

It's about the only thing in this space that turns a profit. Roblox has a huge user count, but loses huge amounts of money. Since they did an IPO, everyone gets to look at their terrible numbers.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#197
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually strongly disagree -- the amount of business potential for software that isn't trying to becoming a billion-dollar unicorn is massive, and has been extremely underserved during the past decade as most of the money (and talent) chased after the billion dollar moonshot bets, either in B2C businesses or very generic B2B software (think Atlassian). It's harder to find the business potential because the opportun…

Isn't the opportunity to make "fuck you money" the motivation for the risk of working as a startup? Without that people are probably better off working at a corp.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#198
post #8

That is an extremely misleading headline. AltSpace and the geospatial anchor teams have been axed. Lots of folks were reduced across MR and HoloLens, but the teams weren’t completely fired

Yes and even before this announcement, the story was about a shift from AltSpace towards the new Mesh for Teams product as in better world/room building will be part of Mesh. Mesh is being used internally and the project as far as I can tell is still the main program in their shift to XR software and backends and leaving hardware to partners.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#199
post #180
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a solution that scales extremely poorly in a global environment with potentially billions of people you might want to mute. More so in an environment which supports anonymity, so that they can just keep creating new accounts.

In that case one could rely on an allow list rather than a block list.

Now you’re so keen on being right that you’ve lost sight of the value that was originally proposed in the first place.

Re: Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one can touch you but they can hurt you in the same way people hurt others online all the time. Verbal abuse, name calling, derogatory remarks, unwanted solicitation, etc...

> and you can leave at any time

You can also avoid talking to people and attending social events as much possible but that's terrible as humans are social.
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