Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
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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 husband had recently died of cancer. VR can be a kind of ultimate safe space for people who are hurting. No one can touch you, you put on a disguise, and you can leave at any time.
It had something going on, but was a Grand Canyon away from mass market appeal.
Private persons can leak all this stuff anonymously and nobody is going to track them down. Glasshole also represented a new frontier for hackers.
Answer: some people will do anything to justify corporate cruelty to peope.
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.
Now, where have I heard that before? :D
I suppose if you elect to not remain anonymous there could be an issue, but generally speaking I don’t know that this is a problem.
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.
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.
not a solution per se
I can imagine that the same way you have a shared list of undesirables. Essentially an assholeblock instead of adblock.
I don't understand why reputation isn't a solution offered for spam and bad people. Why not make users on the internet build trust.
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.
More numbers can be found at https://www.metaversed.consulting/blog/metaverse-universe-q1...
Together they basically make up a basic Meta Verse already.
AltSpace and many others were actually pretty comparable technically, for a time anyway. Just never hit critical mass
It’s popular because you can do whatever you want, which is the antithesis of companies like Alphabet/Microsoft/Meta.
>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.
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 players play on desktop. I would be curious about focusing on just the Steam users and seeing what percentage of them used VR.
I can only talk about neos, most players play in VR yes. (Source from the API directly)
For Chillout I don't know how to check this infromation
Maybe. Doesn't mean harassment is impossible.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2005/10/18/a-rape-in-cyberspace...
I dunno, I cannot see anything like that ever surviving mass adoption
Browse to 4chan and turn off your ad blockers if you want to understand.
Of course, this is only true for capital intensive startups. My sincere hope is that this wave of layoffs leads to a thousand bootstrapped, customer focused, non-scaling companies, like 37signals. Or kickstarters like the Framework laptop. I believe we need more companies like that, and far fewer moonshots that mostly fail and leave workers broken.
There's been so much talent locked up in bigtech for so long. The amount of talent in these companies that have had golden handcuffs forever due to the continual rise of their stock grants is staggering.
Now suddenly bigtech stock is down 50%+, and they can't issue enough RSUs to cover the compensation gap. Moreover, there's layoffs coming. All of the sudden these extremely talented people, many of whom have a small fortune in savings due to a decade+ of bigtech stock grants, are unleashed on the wider industry, some with 6-12 months of paid severance. They could easily start up a new business with minimal personal financial risk.
Will be interesting times, for sure.
Example: When Jira was the new kid it was all snazzy and sleek and interesting. Over the last few years a lot of alternatives have appeared. Although Atlassian has made some changes, they can't just bring in what makes those products different unless they write a whole new product, and large companies can't make new products.
Currently I think we're at or just past a high point. The current lineup of Jira alternatives will probably wittle down, the best ones will get bought, made part of some enterprise lineup, that way of working becomes a standard, they'll get big and bloated and unable to innovate. The cycle will get to a low point and then we'll see another explosion of alternatives.
And that's just one niche.
Financially, it's the exact opposite of a problem; it's too profitable. There will always be big market for companies that manage to lock up an audience within its walls.
It's harder to find the business potential because the opportunities are much more closely coupled to optimizing specific processes in specific industries. But if you can find the right niche, the business opportunities are there.
The "current" use of the word implies VC capital. As in "I joined a startup and we raised..."
However in the past it referred to literally "starting a business". Someone sees a gap in the market, builds a product, and looks to fill that gap one customer at a time. Since there is no incoming capital, it has to be revenue positive, well enough for the owners to survive.
This sort of business is (somewhat perjorativly) called a "life style" business. In that it provides salaries to some number of people, and provides a (good?) living.
The reasons for starting such a business are numerous, and while maybe some do with the goal of being mega-rich, in reality the successful ones end up being merely "rich".
But there are a _lot_ of upsides other than money. I'll offer a few from personal experience, but really they offer any goal you like.
A) freedom to work on what you want, when you want, where you want, how you want. Yes, of course you are constrained by actually delivering (or you don't get paid) but the mechanics of delivering are up to you.
B) job security. It takes time to get to this point, but once a business is profitable the owner has a job for life. (he is literally the last person to get laid off) [1]
C) a lack of corporate bullshit. No endless layers of managers. No endless meetings. If you need a new PC you go buy a new PC. (equally true, if you report directly to the owner, decisions get made quickly. If you need a new PC you only have to convince one person.)
D) while on the topic, being employed by a small business has huge benefits as well, but to need to move the income needle for the job security.
I could go on but I think you get the point.
[1] ironically when getting person credit, like a mortgage, ticking "self employed" leads me to a lower credit score, despite the fact that 40-odd people get laid off before I do :)
[2] about 5% of new (bootstrapped) businesses make it to 10 years old. I'm not suggesting this route is easy, but it is desirable.
I bet there are lots of sectors out there that could be totally disrupted or made more efficient if they got attention from high-caliber developers and UX folks.
As free/cheap money goes away it should force entrepreneurs to build real businesses rather than VC fueled money pits.
I want this to be true, but I don't see how.
Good talent is still locked up in BigTech.
Talent that got freed up was working on things BigTech had no way of make money off of, even long term.
On the other hand, SmallTech offers now have a better chance, and seem attractive, to said talent. That must count for something.
This round of layoffs is proof that BigTech safety net is a lie. But not enough to push people with dependents to take on the pain and uncertainty that starting up ensues.
Like we don’t necessarily notice that any business that employs software developers has to be $5+mil/yr or on the way to it which is not true at all for like a restaurant.
Surely your downside is capped at zero?
Why? From the executive's perspective at megacorps like Google, employees are completely replaceable, and even for a megacorp, Google is incredibly scared of discrimination. The safest way to conduct layoffs is to do so completely randomly.
> You kind of expect this kind of thing in startup land.
No. In startup land, you should expect that there is a good chance that your entire company is dissolved. Your equity is completely worthless. You have no 6 month severance. You have nothing to show for the longer hours you worked besides a very sub-market salary.
What?
Unless your work literally drives you to suicide, the cap on the downside is 'You go out and interview until you find another job.'
You aren't risking your own money - you're an employee. You get paid for your work.
If want to work on your idea, but you don't already have connections to tap for immediate VC funding, any work you do on it is earning $0 income while you're still having to pay the bills. Your downside risk is that after X number of months or years, you've lost $Y dollars of your starting savings.
If you take the Microsoft offer, your downside risk is that after X number of months or years, you get laid off, and have to look for a new job, but your $50k is still there, and quite possibly a bunch of new savings as well.
Of course your downside is capped. You're never going to wake up one day and owe Microsoft a billion dollars.
A real example of uncapped downside is when you sell call options on a stock, or short a stock. You actually can wake up one day to your broker telling you you need to find millions of dollars right now because the market moved against you. And it can get worse and worse, the downside is truly uncapped.
Unless you use Azure, of course. Then you don't even need to wake up to owe them that much.
I would love to start the kind of lifestyle (or "non-scaling" as you put it) business, but right now it's a complete non-starter for me because getting a health insurance policy for my entire family would be comically expensive.
It's even been harder for me interviewing with smaller startups because compared to single people, my insurance premiums are bonkers.
The cost of catastrophic situations is still ultimately too high in the US without or with insurance.
Instead of annual out-of-pocket maximums that are mandatory under the ACA and make that unlikely, plans used to have kind of the reverse: lifetime coverage caps that particularly severe conditions could exceed. (This is one of the reasons premiums are higher for superficially similar—e.g., what services are covered and at what cost sharing rule befoee reaching caps—coverage under the ACA.)
I can't see how it can happen post-ACA, unless the condition as a practical matter requires services that are entirely outside the scope of coverage.
The big industrial use case I saw was to receive teleguidance to repair equipment, the ground reality is that most of the time if you don't know how to fix it... You're not allowed to try to fix it.
Did the developer story for HoloLens ever get better or did it just die a slow death?
What? No it doesn't, HoloLens 2 runs "Windows Holographic" which is based on Windows Core OS.
The problem with Project Reunion (nowadays known as WinAppSDK + WinUI 3.0), is that it is clearly managed by people without big background on Microsoft UI stacks (watch a couple of community calls), and it is years away to achived parity to UWP, let alone what Windows Forms and WPF offer in API surface.
We are a small company that sells very complex equipment to labs around the world. The users are smart / PhDs, they just need to be told what to do to fix things when they need an adjustment. This is large physical scientific equipment and the stuff requires 'hands-on'.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/microsoft...
"Microsoft won’t be getting more orders for its combat goggles anytime soon after Congress earlier this month rejected the US Army’s request for $400 million to buy as many as 6,900 of them in the current fiscal year. The rejection of the request, in the $1.75 trillion government funding bill approved in December, reflects concern over field tests of the goggles, which are adapted from Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets. The tests disclosed “mission-affecting physical impairments,” including headaches, eyestrain and nausea."
I have to imagine this will happen with other VR headsets, given theirs was more fleshed out than others.
Seems to me it's far too expensive for gamers, and not all that useful for business - all I can find online are mock ups of hypothetical business uses, like telling mechanics which way to turn a spark plug to tighten it. To me that doesn't seem very useful. What are the chances a job is done so rarely your workers don't know the procedure already; and yet so frequently it makes sense to build a detailed 3D-modelled instruction pack to replace the normal paper instructions?
I generally roll my eyes at Military > Consumer path companies, but in this case? Not so much. Business > Military > Actual Military Usefulness > Mass Market is an interesting trajectory worth watching.
When people have nothing to do they might prefer to leave reality....
There's a story I love to recount on this topic. A dad asked his kid why they preferred reading books to watching movies. The kid said, "because they have better pictures."
(And yes, AI can write stories, so the markets aren't orthogonal.)
What remains to be seen is which disruption happens through the use of AI, which seems much more up for grabs.
Even if you criticise the logic in any individual case, you have to respect the discipline that it must take to drive decisions like this (if it does indeed turn out to be the case - remains to be seen). I have to think though that it is pretty toxic to their partner relationships ... who would deliver a new product based on WMR now?
/sigh
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/microsoft-mixed-real...
All of these alt worlds are the same. Niche video games. I'm not surprised to see them go.
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.
Office is where the money is for Microsoft.
You think I'm exaggerating, but Apple has the best engineering talent in the world, a commitment to deliver revolutionary products, and first bite at the supply-chain, er, tomato. Betting against them is a fool's move, no one else will be able to even TOUCH them.
One could also argue for the M chips, which were absolutely game changing when they came out.
[1] As far as I remember there was only one telecom in US that was working with the iPhone. My memory on this is fuzzy, but I clearly remember telling that to my friend and his answer.
Everyone and their dog knew the iPhone was coming and what it was about.
People are now speculating that Apple will release VR gear. We won't know for sure until release.
and the reception is lackluster. the tech is still not quite mature enough for the average consumer, and the fear of meta's tracking/coercive social networking component in the hardware is all but the most of die hard fans to even participate.
Surely, meta knows this. So what's their end game?
Meanwhile we've got Apple coming along with thier extremely efficient in-house chip architecture thats about to release a lightweight headset with performance that blows away anything Meta has, not to mention an existing ecosystem that it will slot right into.
Outside of Meta everybody knows the 'Metaverse' (i.e in the form as 'Meta' themselves describe it) is a truely awful concept that clearly is not gaining popularity or any kind of desire from the general public.
Based on the leaks we pretty much know that Apples already cracked full body tracking, eye tracking, has a SIGNIFICANTLY lighter design and higher battery life. Hardware wise it'll make everything Metas produced look pretty archaic.
Then it comes to software and app ecosystem. I don't think theres even a debate to be had here. Meta vs Apple would be laughably one sided.
> Based on the leaks we pretty much know that Apples already cracked full body tracking, eye tracking ...
Based on the leaks we know that Apple has struggled to deliver a working product at all having repeatedly delayed then scaled back then canceled whole product areas. On the other hand, based on Meta's openly visible work at their labs (literally iniviting journalists to tour and try it out) we know they have cracked key areas that can potentially revolutionise the field in a few years.
I do think Apple's product is going to be enormously successful and state of the art. But the most likely outcome is what Zuckerberg is shooting for - a repeat of the iOS vs Android playbook but this time with him in control of the open OS but without being at the mercy of OEMs and without the horrific fragementation issues.
“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 productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall”
This type of commerce is all useless nonsense. If his measure of Metaverse success is hitting some mark for how much money he intends to extract from a user it's not a winning strategy.
And, whats with the amping up of avatars? It basically becomes a game like WoW.
And, why would anyone want to be in the metaverse, when a conference call suits well enough for most work?
What does having a virtual and augmented world bring to the table actually?
Their VR demos look awful, last report I heard was employees didn’t even want to use it or touch it, oculus has done basically nothing except burn customer goodwill.
It’s fun enough, sure, but it’s heavy, sweaty, weirdly isolating and far too expensive for what it is. There aren’t enough games or utilities, and none of them are amazingly compelling. The controls are still janky. The idea of multiplayer is basically a no-go, as it requires everyone to have them (see price) and then have a computer powerful enough to drive it (see cost of GPU’s). A good chunk of my friends don’t have amazing GPU’s, let alone VR-compatible GPU’a plus a headset.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/congress_hololens_mic...
- The Magic Leap/Microsoft approach: Use semitransparent displays to create a virtual overlay.
- The Meta approach: Use cheap standalone VR with lots of external cameras, then mix camera/virtual environment.
It seems pretty clear by now that, if anything, only the second works, given the success (in terms of sales numbers) of the Oculus Quest. Moreover, the latter combines AR and VR, it's not a one trick pony.
The upcoming Apple headset is reported to basically copy Meta's approach, except it is expected to get very expensive and high-end. But I would side with Meta here: I don't see a big market in expensive VR/AR.
A headset is like a Gameboy, if anything people care that it's portable and cheap, not that it has the most impressive graphics.
In any case, Microsoft's HoloLens adventure was likely a dead end.
Was produced by a company called Osterhout Design Group. Ralph Osterhout also had the distinction of creating the PVS-7 Night Vision goggles in 3 months - still used to this day.
Ralph was a pioneer in waveguide technology that went into ODG's AR glasses. The display tech from the Hololens? Licensed from ODG. Time is a flat circle I suppose.
The whole metaverse thing has always seemed ridiculous to me.
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.
From technology point of view the few surviving .NET bindings to DirectX done by Microsoft own teams are now dead, thus re-enforcing the work from C++ teams.
Another example that technology many times dies not due to its technology capabilities, rather due to external factors.
Many XBox related studios were also affected by the layoffs.
"its"?
To help make lemons into lemonade, we're hiring for folks into webgl2 for the next gen of our GPU client <> GPU cloud visual analytics engine used by analysts to investigate problems like cyber incidents, fraud, misinfo, global supply chains, etc. We're targeting another 10-100X scaleup through this effort. The first gen led to us writing Apache Arrow's JS tier and helped start Nvidia's popular RAPIDS GPU dataframe project, and we're expecting more hackery needed for this one again.
Should be a lot of fun for the right person, gdoc linked @ https://www.graphistry.com/careers
Nailed it. I do like some of the things he’s doing at Microsoft though
It's clear that it's something he's excited about into putting in all Microsoft software.
Microsoft and the US military are very close
And I definitely wouldn't wear it for hours on end -- that's gonna give me a neck injury