Goodbye Windows Mixed Reality, we hardly knew Microsoft's VR software
liliputing.com
liliputing.com
There were the hololens devices which were expensive and unobtainable to many, then there were the dollar store VR headsets and nothing in between. Meanwhile, Steam and Oculus were running more successful ‘stores’ of VR applications which somebody might want to use.
That’s saying something. Nearly everything Microsoft does is half-hearted.
So cheaper by a good bit, higher resolution, didn't need lighthouses, far easier to set up for a space, simpler cable setup, and lighter. And it quickly got supported by SteamVR with most games having complete support for it.
I don't have the space for a dedicated run around in VR kind of thing, so I mostly use it for racing and flight simulators where it's absolutely perfect at.
Many different kinescopes were made. All of them had slightly different film. Almost no content from kinescopes exist anymore.
So I think "consider[ing] the negative externalities of generating massive amounts of e-waste" is a pretty old problem! (When DuMont, a major TV network, folded, they dumped all of theirs into the New York Bay!)
Personally I was disappointed when I discovered than the Playstation console only works with PS VR. I understand Sony classic business play here but returning to the decades when an expensive computer devices couldn't interoperate with others makes me "cry". Just a rant but I love Thunderbolt and its high-end (e.g. CalDigit) docks.
Returning to the core topic, Microsoft is well known for its business success beyond all these failures.
Where is accurate information about the apps for kids limitations? Because there are apps for kids in the device and some few popular on Internet.
I grabbed Quest 2 in 2021, but my peers and I might be aged out from VR demographics. Maybe I should’ve spent more time to get used to the controls and UX, but it just felt extremely clunky.
BTW, my sideproject using lasers and Oculus in the Miami Art Week 2022: https://youtu.be/46w2XLHd9vs?si=SkfV_7Gt-MT0Y4e6&t=58
The big splash with the Quest 3 is the passthrough features. 7 of the top 20 Meta Quest apps are mixed reality apps within months of the product's launch.
I think we can't call the state of the market decided when true mixed reality is just now getting off the ground.
I think we also can't determine that the market is drying up for Meta when 2023's hardware sales drop happened in a year where basically all the available hardware on the market is growing long in the tooth. Harware sales always drop for old consoles - look at the last two years of Nintendo Switch sales.
IMO Sony doesn't have a clue about what they're doing with VR (or portable consoles for that matter) while Meta, Valve, and Apple seem to understand what their customers want.
Even I could put together a million dollar business if I was allowed to lose $20m doing it.
There are some military training research projects that I came across in a previous life. These VR apps haven't supplanted traditional PC-based training sims, though, although these are often based on commercial game engines rather than custom sims.
Those annual mandatory trainings from HR. Things like "how to not harass coworkers", but now in immersive 3D.
Take a revit model, add some textures and you've got a great demo.
* I used to work at Microsoft and I now work at a Microsoft subsidiary but I have no insight here other than what has been publicly stated.
VR was the darling of the 2010s but it crashed and burned due to both physical limitation and lackluster technology. Microsoft throw their hat in the ring, and are now walking away as they see abysmal usage.
I don’t even know if Apple could save it. Of course there is the age old conundrum of “are people not using it because the implementation sucks, or because the concept sucks”. PDAs being the poster child of this.
- Thing is invented and people think it's cool
- Suddenly everyone wants this cool thing to be everywhere and do everything
- People start to realize the limitations and cool thing gets used in niches where it actually makes sense.
For VR, some people thought it'd replace gaming as a whole. Instead, it just made simulator games a lot better, but the rest is kind of gimmicky (said as someone who does enjoy VR a lot).
Similar thing will happen with LLMs and also the next cool thing.
The consumer buy in for language based interfaces is way less. ChatGPT is literally the fastest growing product of all time. It already generates a ton of value (more than VR ever did)
LLMs are more likely to become technology that everyone uses every single day (like phones.) even after it loses its hype.
VR will never get there.
Maybe mixed reality will, but I just don’t think most people will want screens on their eyes.
Smartphones/tablets is another good example where the industry first were amazed by it, then industry started to shove it down everywhere even when it didn't make sense ("you can perform all your daily work tasks on smartphones/tables now!", "Now you can code on your iPad!") and eventually it went back to its optimized use cases, instead of being used for everything.
Ah, and also, every proponent for these technologies when they are at the max of the hype, have a period of "Ah, but X is different than Y" while if you hang on for some years, you'll see the exact same cycle, even for X.
For example.The most popular web browser, by far, is chrome from android. (according to caniuse) This was not the case before the iPhone. Accessing the internet on the go is a game changing feature.
People use their phones every single day for a variety of tasks.
Phones had their hype phase (the whole there’s an app for that phase), but obviously they’re here to stay.
I think LLMs will be similar.
Unlike VR, which never hit that critical mass.
I was talking about entire categories of products, or industries/sectors/niches, rather than competitors within one industry.
> Phones had their hype phase (the whole there’s an app for that phase), but obviously they’re here to stay.
Yes, but at one point everything was trying to be an app on the smartphone, while now it's been dialed back instead.
And they're here to stay, just like VR is here to stay, just within the niches it has found. Which may or may not expand in the future depending on capabilities/availability of experiences.
I’m saying that smart phones are pervasive in the daily life of at least a billion people.
I think that LLMs will eventually reach those numbers even after the hype phase ends. I think this based on the accessibility, utility, and ease of use of them. I think the growth of LLM products is a kind of indicator for this.
I don’t think VR will ever get to that scale. I don’t think Vr will disappear, but it’ll never see the same scale of usage.
I think this because of the physical and economic barriers to using VR and the fact that people generally don’t like having things strapped in front of their eyes.
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say.
VR found a couple of very specific niches where it brought value. LLMs are already starting to pervade society in both good and bad ways and will likely continue on that trajectory. The obvious uses are many, and non-obvious ones are emerging.
If that's what you're saying (it does not appear you are), then we agree.
With foreseeable technology VR is always going to need something that covers large parts of your head, covering at least your eyes and ears. This is fine in specific cases like gaming, but it seems very unlikely to be something everyone uses all the time.
Everyone I know who tried VR has 30 minutes of excitement and literally never mention it ever again.
Well, except of they like simulation games like flight simulators. Then they surely have already migrated to a VR setup and won't ever go back. Yes, I'm one of those.
Max around 3 hours I think, that's the longest amount of (consecutive) free time I have available.
I remember in the beginning (First version of Oculus I think?) I could play for something like 20 minutes before being tired from it. Not sure if it's because of the HP Reverb G2 I have now, or because I got used to it.
Do you spend much time zoomed in, losing the angular 1:1 mapping of the viewport? I did that a lot with a headtracker (makes you really strive for precision, I had a custom build of freetrack with generous per-pixel hystheresis), but under the headset zooming felt more wrong than expected.
I spend very little time zoomed in. Mostly when trying to pick up a ground target. I agree it feels very wrong in VR.
I would not be able to go back to standard 2D-view-of-3D experience again after getting used to VR. Can't even effectively look around your shoulder, and a bunch of other things.
Not that I don't agree with you, as someone who sold my Valve Index. I consider it to be a technology that takes a wild amount of development money and technology to basically take solved problems and put them in an interesting perspective in front of your face.
Also, I've seen reviews of spatial videos (Apple's marketing term for stereoscopic surround-y video capture) that describe them as eerily real, like you're living inside a memory. I think that may be an interesting use case (plus, unlike Apple's silly tech demo showing a dad capturing a video with a big VR headset strapped to his face while he watched his kids play, you can capture spatial video with a phone).
Comparing the windows CE devices we had in the early 2000s and the Quest 3 for instance, I think the stages are not that dissimilar: they require enough effort and compromises that the general public would not care, but there's actual real world use cases and enough companies willing to invest in the field and bringing incremental and not so incremental evolutions.
To continue to use the PDA analogy, if you went back to the mid-90s and told people "these will be everywhere in 20 years!", people would still shrug their shoulders and go about their daily lives same as ever, because 20 years from now ain't today. And when it comes to VR, we're all shrugging our shoulders.
The same way I think everyone sees smart glasses coming. We just have no idea which company will crack the nut, what will be the twist, and on what timeframe.
But that would need AR rather than VR (excessive isolation from the real world is bad), and way better resolution than headsets currently have.
Agreed, but those cycles are measured in decades, not months. VR had its last hype cycle in the 90's, and AI in the 80's and thus will the wheel of reincarnation continue to spin with VR and AI switching places until the sun dies ;)
- Ads that you cannot look away from
- Ads everywhere you look
- Tracking face muscle as you see ads, to build a model of your reactions and target you more aggressively
- Having more digital interactions that can be spied on
- Having more metadata about those interactions
- Seeing how you react to objects in digital environments and then serving you ads of those objects
As usual, the goals are spying and advertising.
It’s the most interesting thing this year in the game business in the sense that there is nothing special about Xbox or Playstation right now, the Nintendo Switch is ancient, they don’t plan to upgrade the Steam Deck anytime soon, etc.
Outside of that, I am interested in experiences that are more like a theme park, say 3-d models of boulders on Mars inside a natural history museum and it is not hard to make that kind of thing with A-frame.
I remember all the talk about iPad Pro's AR-capable cameras. Do you know a anybody who actually uses an iPad for that?
It had some kind of USB 3.0 pickiness/bugginess/not-workiness. At best I had it half-working in a crazy, glitchy state. I had a perfectly mainstream, working gaming PC with an RTX 3070, the third fastest Nvidia GPU available at the time.
I wonder how many refunds they ate on the thing.
I later owned the Valve Index, which was an overall great experience. However, PC VR isn't something that is enjoyable to play for long stretches and I think those who would argue that VR is a gimmick have some sort of valid argument.
Satya Nadella saw the writing on the wall many months ago and dissolved their VR/AR team and focused all their attention on LLM’s instead. ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in human history. It’s changing the world. Meanwhile, Apple has spent billions of dollars and some of their brightest employees on a product that is DOA.
People praise Tom Cook but there’s a clear difference between Satya Nadella and all the other Silicon Valley CEO’s.
On the other hand, each company differs on it's ability to deliver in a given space. Microsoft failing on VR is just that, Microsoft failed on a category of products. Just like Google and cloud, or support. I'm confident Apple could succeed in the space, and so well that it will make it trendy again.
And your argument doesn’t hold strong when you step outside tech circles. Successfully selling AirPods to 75 year old grandmas looks more impressive to me than 25 year olds using ChatGPT. I understand it sounds extremely stupid, but both of the aforementioned tech giants are making generally smart moves. Will be interesting how eventually Microsoft applies OpenAI products into hardware, because they don’t really have much (compared to Apple and Google).
If you’re going by things that Microsoft walked away from, you’d have a long list of products that have been extremely successful for other companies.
Implementation and longevity matter.
The only thing innovative about the ChatGPT business model seems to be selling compute cycles for below cost.
The difference between Tim Cook and the other Silicon Valley CEOs are that only Tim Cook runs the world's most valuable company.