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Comment by hershel | Hacker News Reader

There's rumors microsoft is working on VR. They also have an amazing 3d game creation platform for beginners called "project spark", very good at building developer communities a and would be happy to sell more PC's. Assuming they can create decent VR glasses, they seems to have the winning combination of hardware + content.

Even better - project spark content would be free, which is a powerful tool to achieve mass appeal.

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I don't know if the deal finalized but Microsoft was working on purchasing Osterhaut Design Group late last year:

http://www.osterhoutgroup.com/

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/20/microsoft-osterhout/

From my experiences ODG was more of an industrial design firm than a hardware firm but judging by the Google Glass-like headset on their home page perhaps they were launching into a wearable project and got Microsoft's attention.

Yeah project spark looks pretty neat.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/games/project-spark

I am sure this article will be followed by some offhand comment from Bill Gates the same as with Whats App. Maybe he will upgrade “bold move” to stealing our lunch.

After they abandoned XNA, I would be hesitant to use something like spark.

I think that these types of products aren't worth being attached to in the long run. 1. they aren't real IDE's 2. they age as the technology rapidly evolves around them what their simplicity accounts for today won't capture the platform of tomorrow and 3. these types of tools are meant to be tastes that get you excited in much more robust systems that are out there. I think that if you used any type of platform like this for more that a year or two without trying to move on from it then you didn't really learn anything.

This was exactly my thought, too. Upon investigating Project Spark, it seems like something more akin to a pumped-up LittleBigPlanet than an actual game development framework. I'm sure folks will have fun playing around with it, but not much more than that.

The interesting thing to do is to look at the progression. Project spark is a huge improvement over little big planet 1 both in graphics and game variety , and maybe programming model/power. Why won't this kind of improvement continue , or maybe there will be some collaborative model between spark and some framework ?

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