29 ms·
Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens
- 32gbsd 4y agoSad to see that hype not come to reality.
- freeone3000 4y agoThis is an actual physical product you can buy today: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy
- kabes 4y agoYes. But the hype hasn't come a reality
- fragmede 4y agoThere are limited opportunities to use the aware, this is true. This is most especially due to cost - $3,500 for the base model Hololense. But it works and is actually really cool. It's like the original Microsoft surface product - the table sized tablet thingy, not the laptop form factor - it was too expensive and never saw wide deployment, but it was very cool if you actually got a chance to use it. It's priced out of consumer use, which makes it invisible to most. I have no idea how many people have learned to be airplane de-icers thru Hololense-based training programs, if it's all a marketing gimmick, or if there's a new generation of them trained in VR. It certainly sounds cool, but if they were really making money, it doesn't make sense for Microsoft too have cancelled the project.
- 8note 4y agoI wear glasses and I wouldn't wear that. And I definitely wouldn't wear it for hours on end -- that's gonna give me a neck injury
- voxic11 4y agoIt has 1/3 the mass of common motorcycle helmets. Its not heavy, just large.
- wmf 4y agoIt's sad to watch all these layoffs but canceling underperforming products/divisions completely makes a lot more sense than decimating the company as a whole.
- sublinear 4y agoDoes it really, or is it short term thinking?
- michaelt 4y agoIs HoloLens on a trajectory towards success, in your opinion? 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?
- verdverm 4y agoThe opportunity is in the first consumer grade smart glasses. If MS could get their hardware there first, they had a chance to disrupt the Google/Apple (bi)monopoly on mobile devices. The Hololens2 experience is quite good, what one would want in a pair of smart glasses.
- cududa 4y agoCongress just gave the military something like $75m-$150m to award to Microsoft to improve the hololens for battlefield readiness. It started as a high end niche business product. Demo'd well for the military. Business device shoehorned into military didn't work. But, if they can get it "military good" those enhancements will trickle down to business and eventually consumer use cases. I generally roll my eyes at Military > Consumer path companies, but in this case? Not so much. Business > Military > Actual Military Usefulness > Mass Market is an interesting trajectory worth watching.
- sys_64738 4y agoEvery business will can projects in their portfolio when belt tightening. VR and its multitude of derivative just isn't a core competency of M$. If anybody is to win this space then it'll be Apple IMO.
- xigency 4y agoIt’s not like cutting other products will make the core offerings better. I’m sure they could double the Windows 11 team size and the start menu search would still take 10+ seconds to find the app I’m searching for. At least mixed reality was interesting.
- jbigelow76 4y agoDear Lord, do not tempt them to increase the size of the Windows team, they might find more places to shove all the stupid ads in that OS.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoThat's because Windows is far from being their core offering. Office is where the money is for Microsoft.
- bitwize 4y agoAzure is where the money is now.
- noAnswer 4y agoIt would be a dream if they would sell Windows to a non publicly traded company "to concentrate on their core competence".
- xmasspirit 4y agoThey wouldn't do that. Windows Server is an integral part of Azure, running on every machine that hosts VMs.
- cududa 4y agoThat 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
- orik 4y agoWhich anchors team?
- cududa 4y agoMRTK - the Azure one is still alive
- MontagFTB 4y agoI’ve heard something similar from a contact who works in those departments. The VR space was hit hard, but the AR groups are still around.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoYes 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.
- tuan 4y agoIn Oct last year they announced partnership with Meta in VR https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/10/11/microsoft-and-meta-partner-to-deliver-immersive-experiences-for-the-future-of-work-and-play/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/10/11/microsoft-and-me...
- zmmmmm 4y agoyes it will be interesting to see if this signals a broader change in approach similar to their pivot to Android instead of their own in-house mobile OS. 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?
- ripley12 4y agoI was considering getting into HoloLens development a few years ago. It seemed like they were still pushing developers toward UWP even when UWP was obviously nearly dead, and that killed any interest I had. Did the developer story for HoloLens ever get better or did it just die a slow death?
- N1ckFG 4y agoHoloLens 2 switched to <strike>Android</strike> ARM and UWP apps running on heavily modified Android, but imo the insistence on hand tracking as the primary interface still walled it off from the other Android XR developer communities.
- wucaworld 4y agoHoloLens 2 did not switch to Android. I have one and it is uwp and unity/unreal.
- ripley12 4y ago> running on heavily modified Android What? No it doesn't, HoloLens 2 runs "Windows Holographic" which is based on Windows Core OS.
- N1ckFG 4y agoYeah y'all are right, I can't find anything to support the notion the HoloLens 2 uses an Android fork for its OS. (Possibly the person who told me this had it confused with Magic Leap...?)
- pjmlp 4y agoIt focused on using Unity, and MRTK is based on Win32 and Khronos XR standard. 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.
- phi11ip 4y agoI wonder who is supporting the 10s of millions of dollars worth of military hololenses that were sold
- ch4s3 4y agoDoes the military actually use them?
- metalspot 4y agono. it was only a test program, and the test was a complete failure. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/microsoft-mixed-reality-headsets-nauseate-soldiers-in-us-army-testing/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/microsoft-mixed-real...
- ch4s3 4y agoYeah I’m the world of precision artillery and dirt cheap drones a glowing helmet seems unreasonably dumb.
- LarryMullins 4y agoI thought they shitcanned HoloLens years ago, I had written that project off as already obviously dead.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoI was really surprised earlier today to see a product review video of a 3D printer that makes use of the HoloLens for the user interface. After making a huge splash when announced, it really does seem to have withered away, at least from the public eye.
- dougmwne 4y agoShutting 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 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.
- pharke 4y agoNah, 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 they'll win a bigger share of the market with a far superior engine. It waits to be seen.
- h0l0cube 4y agoIt'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.
- andirk 4y agoThere was Google Glass but it got laughed out of town for being made for dorks. Seemed like perfectly good tech.
- relyks 4y agoI don’t think Google Glass provides any augmented reality functionality? It’s just a mobile head-up display. You need a lot more processing power (and clunkier hardware) to be able to do augmented reality
- charles_f 4y agoI mean, these were cute and demos were a bit "wow" but the practicality seemed reduced, especially when most of the use cases they demonstrated would be covered by a phone call. 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.
- boppo1 4y agoThe coolest use-case I saw was controlling a humanoid robot to repair a pipeline in a hostile environment. Now we just have to wait till humanoid robot tech catches up.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- somerandomqaguy 4y agoEh, I always viewed it more as having a guided reference manual on hand more then letting someone untrained perform a repair. A mechanic might know exactly how a car engine works, but they probably don't know the exact part numbers, torque specs, and disassembly / reassembly order to gain access to an specific area on repair for that specific model and year of car.
- charles_f 4y agoI don't know. The few technicians I know are already hardcore on having paper manuals, an iPad is already way too much into the BS. They'd never put that on.
- sofixa 4y agoThere's another practical niche - museums. The Museum of the Liberation of Paris - General Leclerc - Jean Moulin (same museum, they couldn't decide on the name apparently) uses HoloLenses in the underground bunker that served as a command post during the uprising in Paris that led to it's liberation. It allows for a much more immersive experience than just signs and mannequins (they have both of those too). I can also see that working very well in e.g. natural history museums, with AR making fossils come to life.
- javajosh 4y agoIt's funny I keep thinking about how the same people might work on the same thing but with different terms. As a W2 employee you make great money, but your upside is capped. Your downside is never capped, of course. As a founder you make okay money, you have better upside. But the same corp that fired you will invest that money with the VC that funded you. So, either way, the capital flows through the corp to you, and the profits flow from you to the corp. There are a few that "make it" and become a corp themselves, but that's the rare exception that follows a power-law distribution. 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.
- mjr00 4y agoI agree. I think the next 5-10 years will see a massive wave of new companies come out of this. 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.
- p1mrx 4y agoOn the other hand, it seems most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked over the last couple decades. What is left for a random small business with software talent to do?
- patientplatypus 4y ago[dead]
- rel2thr 4y agoStill blows my mind that the military was going to spend 20 billion on hololens
- verdverm 4y agoBattlefield AR will happen, the biggest thing holding all of the AR use cases up is hardware miniaturization. Smart glasses will be a thing in time
- roughly 4y agoWhat’ll be interesting to watch there is the learning curve on what should go on an AR display in the middle of a firefight - various branches of the US military seem to follow a similar curve where they get very excited about technology and massively invest, only to find that 70lbs of networked infantry gear or a naval destroyer full of screens or a jet with no guns doesn’t actually enhance lethality the way the guys at General Dynamics said it would. Usually V2 is a bit more sane/practical, so I’ll be interested to see where they land on the HUDs.
- cududa 4y agoFun fact. The military started using AR at the start of the Iraq invasion. Product was essentially Google Glass with facial recognition against a static/ local dataset (stored on device), but in 2004 - for identifying wanted suspects at checkpoints. 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.
- amitport 4y agoit already uses much more expensive augmented reality helmets.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoWouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is readying itself to sell/splitoff its consumer products and focus on Enterprise and Cloud. That could also be part of the reason why they're trying to make the consumer version of Windows generate revenue streams. The only thing that might point the other direction is the acquisition of Activision. Why buy it if you're going to spinoff that division?
- beambot 4y agoIf they're selling or splitting off consumer, why are they trying to buy Activision Blizzard?
- cududa 4y agoI'm genuinely curious here - how old are you? People bring up this theory time and time again - since judge Thomas Penfield Jackson decreed the same thing in 2000, which was overturned. Having been a former Microsoft employee working on enterprise to consumer stuff, this would be such an obscenely horrible move. There truly is a virtuous cycle between consumer and enterprise products influencing eachother. Modern Azure VM's are based off the VM segmenting of Xbox One that seperated the "app/ OS" stacks from "on the metal gaming VM". Hell, even Dave Cutler came back to work on the Xbox One VM partitioning which then folded into Azure.
- tootie 4y agoI think VR/AR were massively over hyped and the actual size of the market just isn't very big.
- Kukumber 4y agoBuying Activision is only to counter Tencent (or Netease, i forgot wich one), wich was interested in acquiring them Microsoft and the US military are very close
- schaefer 4y agoThis is such a train wreck, because without a VR native windows manager built into windows, PC VR isn’t the productivity tool it could otherwise be. /sigh
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- indigodaddy 4y agoHoly shit that website just crippled my phone.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoHow does that effect the crazy fat DND contract MS has for HoloLens?
- tootie 4y agoCongress chopped 90% of the Hololens budget for this fiscal year due in large part to poor results of the field testing. $400M turned into $40M. It's not dead but MS can't sustain the size of the program. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/congress_hololens_microsoft/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/12/congress_hololens_mic...
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoYikes! That is a huge adjustment.
- paxys 4y agoIt's a pretty big leap to look at the shutdown of AltspaceVR (which already has a successor) and MRTK and conclude that "HoloLens, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality are all but dead at Microsoft." There are a TON of other active teams/projects working in the area. This is likely the side effect of a consolidation/reorg in the division.
- swman 4y agoCool maybe they can reallocate these people to working on things that actually matter.
- yazzku 4y ago> This past week, Microsoft revealed its joining Amazon, Google, and others in laying off thousands of employees. "its"?
- eclipxe 4y agoit is
- jwsteigerwalt 4y agoThe reality is that it was always unlikely that Microsoft (or Meta, or Google, or Apple…) would be able to create disruption in AR, VR, etc. on the magnitude of the initial iPhone release. Better to keep their powder dry to acquire the startups that potentially can.
- skohan 4y agoIt seems obvious to me AI will be the next major disruption. Radically decreasing the need for human labor has an obvious productive advantage while there is no evidence people would prefer to leave reality.
- SoftTalker 4y ago> Radically decreasing the need for human labor has an obvious productive advantage while there is no evidence people would prefer to leave reality. When people have nothing to do they might prefer to leave reality....
- massysett 4y agoTell someone in the 18th century that 200 years later 2 percent of the labor force will work in agriculture, and they would swear that we must have nothing to do.
- troymc 4y agoHeadsets might be a niche market, but "leaving reality" is a huge market if you count video games, movies, TV, novels, short stories, plays, musicals, ... 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.)
- skohan 4y agoYeah fair enough, but I still think "wearing something on your face will be one of the main modes of media consumption" is far from a safe bet.
- victor106 4y ago> despite CEO Satya Nadella's buzzword-laden speeches on the topic at recent events. Nailed it. I do like some of the things he’s doing at Microsoft though
- xiphias2 4y agoSo far all interviews with him were buzzwords, except the last one about OpenAI and especially ChatGPT. It's clear that it's something he's excited about into putting in all Microsoft software.
- ChicagoDave 4y agoNever bought into VR. AR is interesting, but it has to be seamless, so a part of regular glass frames without any noticeable alterations. The whole metaverse thing has always seemed ridiculous to me.
- partiallypro 4y agoLooks like it's mostly related to Microsoft's inability to sell to the Pentagon, which seemed like a big use case and a way to make up for their costs: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/microsoft-scales-back-hololens-business-after-setback-on-us-army-goggles 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.
- freitzkriesler 4y agoRemember 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.
- Animats 4y agoSecond 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.
- avsteele 4y agoI really wanted to use HoloLens for remote support. Too bad they never really looked like they would support it for wider use. 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'.
- metal_am 4y agoThis is where the most promising applications have shown up (but not necessarily the money). It’s fantastic for things like assembling wiring harnesses for aviation where it can serve as a sort of interactive manual.
- mdorazio 4y agoWhy would you need a HoloLens for that instead of something much cheaper and easier to wear like a Vuzix M400?
- antoniojtorres 4y agoMagic leap had some pretty interesting demos for remote support at CES this year. You should check those out if you haven’t.
- hello1234567 4y agoall is good. companies will be able to hire some good people with the compensation that was unthinkable few months ago. compensation convergence to the mean is the inevitable in the long run.
- lmeyerov 4y agoThat's... a lot of specialized folks 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 https://www.graphistry.com/careers
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- apatheticonion 4y agoAs someone who loves VR it's disheartening to know there have been large portions of the WMR team laid off.
- kerpotgh 4y ago[dead]
- dt3ft 4y agoWorth noting is that the development continues over at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh
- throwawayfckq 4y agoFuck you Microsoft
- devwastaken 4y agoStop 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.
- amitport 4y agoIt is very much also in Military space. It just that Microsoft may not be an appropriate fit for that space.
- pjmlp 4y agoHard times for the persons involved. 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.
- hulitu 4y agoWindows is already Mixed and Virtual reality so those teams were ... redundant. /s
- euroderf 4y agoSo Apple will (surprise!!) come out with a winner - and basically own the market for minimum three years, if not for much longer.
- cubefox 4y agoThere are two approaches to AR currently: - 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.