3 ms·

Microsoft Is Discontinuing HoloLens 2, with No Replacement

35 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

bbor 2y ago
Wow, that’s tragic. The us military is clearly screwed as well — no idea how they’ll try to convince the people running that contract that they’ll move groundbreaking tech forward just for the military but don’t see a need to put other resources into it. I guess maybe the difference is that the current tech is good enough for military usage, where budgets are high and a HUD could be a literal lifesaver? Throwback to this quip from 2015, that made me so damn hopeful and excited at the time: “HoloLens is 5 years away from consumer’s hands” https://stevivor.com/news/microsoft-suggests-that-hololens-is-five-years-away/ https://stevivor.com/news/microsoft-suggests-that-hololens-i... Rest in peace my chunky friend, may you be revered/giggled-at in museums of computing for centuries to come. Clearly, you were born before your time. Props to Meta for bullying a trillion-dollar corporation out of an entire market segment just by touting a prototype! I think that proves just how amazing of a prototype Orion is, $10,000 price tag or no. I would give Apple some credit too, but AFAICT Apple Vision has been a HoloLens-style disappointment so far.
- paxys 2y ago
  Let's be real there was never any real military application for these headsets. The contract was secured via standard corporate lobbying/grift, much like the rest of the Pentagon's procurement process.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    The military has been pursuing AR technology for a long time, and will continue to do so in the future. There's plenty of application for AR, provided it can be made to work well for practical command or battlefield applications: R&D is ultimately expensive, and a contract from the military would've been for the supply and testing of it in this application. (i.e. to properly test such a thing, you've still got to pay someone to build the sort of software and interfaces you think you might need before you can even put a soldier in the field to trial it).
  - devanshjus 2y ago
    Have you seen the F35 Helmet ?
    - mplewis 2y ago
      Yeah, and it isn’t this.
pedalpete 2y ago
Once again, like touch interfaces, tablets, mobile phones, Microsoft was early in the development, but just couldn't capture the market. Was it due to under-investment? Are they not asking the right questions? Not properly solving a need? Or just trying to stuff windows into all these places without recognizing it doesn't fit?
- cbanek 2y ago
  As someone who worked for MSFT a long time ago, I feel like Microsoft picks the right technologies and pumps huge sums of money into it but their understanding of use cases and UX is really poor (compare to say, Apple, who REALLY understands UX). The more PMs there are the muddier the waters are on actually using things. You end up with something like Office, that has so many options and whizbangs that people struggle to use the basic stuff. And just look at them talking about taking away the Control Panel, which I think was only aborted by how bad the reception was.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  This sums it up quite well, https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon-apple-facebook-microsoft/ https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon... As more recent example, see the Windows desktop mess, or how they started to push Blazor Hybrid inside of MAUI, alongside the whole MAUI rewrite, mudding the waters of MAUI's purpose. How many way there are now to do Web apps in ASP.NET, classical MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor Server, Blazor Client, Blazor Fullstack,...
schappim 2y ago
Microsoft discontinuing HoloLens 2 without a clear successor feels eerily familiar—like the Windows Phone all over again. Innovative tech with promise, but ultimately left hanging without a long-term vision.
- chrisandchris 2y ago
  It feels like you described a couple of Microsofts products. Windwos control panel, any .Net UI framework, Windows in general, sometimes Azure, ...
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Innovative technology is nothing without good execution. I’ve used HoloLens a couple times and the FoV was tiny, the overlay not bright enough and the videos of the announcement completely misrepresented it as something revolutionary (showing object occlusion), which it wasn’t.
pjmlp 2y ago
Yet another device that WinUI / UWP folks don't have to worry about.
binary_slinger 2y ago
My company tried to integrate the HoloLens with our in-house CAD package. And it was extremely clunky. low FoV, bad colors. The Quest 3 is cheaper and the dev tooling is better.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  For many uses, the Quest (and Apple Vision) have a horrible failure mode: if they crash, they render the user effectively blind (or very confused) until the headset is removed. PTC demonstrated the Apple Vision in a factory-like setting. I would NEVER approve such a thing.

35 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

bbor 2y ago

Wow, that’s tragic. The us military is clearly screwed as well — no idea how they’ll try to convince the people running that contract that they’ll move groundbreaking tech forward just for the military but don’t see a need to put other resources into it. I guess maybe the difference is that the current tech is good enough for military usage, where budgets are high and a HUD could be a literal lifesaver? Throwback to this quip from 2015, that made me so damn hopeful and excited at the time: “HoloLens is 5 years away from consumer’s hands” https://stevivor.com/news/microsoft-suggests-that-hololens-is-five-years-away/ https://stevivor.com/news/microsoft-suggests-that-hololens-i... Rest in peace my chunky friend, may you be revered/giggled-at in museums of computing for centuries to come. Clearly, you were born before your time. Props to Meta for bullying a trillion-dollar corporation out of an entire market segment just by touting a prototype! I think that proves just how amazing of a prototype Orion is, $10,000 price tag or no. I would give Apple some credit too, but AFAICT Apple Vision has been a HoloLens-style disappointment so far.

paxys 2y ago
Let's be real there was never any real military application for these headsets. The contract was secured via standard corporate lobbying/grift, much like the rest of the Pentagon's procurement process.
- XorNot 2y ago
  The military has been pursuing AR technology for a long time, and will continue to do so in the future. There's plenty of application for AR, provided it can be made to work well for practical command or battlefield applications: R&D is ultimately expensive, and a contract from the military would've been for the supply and testing of it in this application. (i.e. to properly test such a thing, you've still got to pay someone to build the sort of software and interfaces you think you might need before you can even put a soldier in the field to trial it).
- devanshjus 2y ago
  Have you seen the F35 Helmet ?
  - mplewis 2y ago
    Yeah, and it isn’t this.

pedalpete 2y ago

Once again, like touch interfaces, tablets, mobile phones, Microsoft was early in the development, but just couldn't capture the market. Was it due to under-investment? Are they not asking the right questions? Not properly solving a need? Or just trying to stuff windows into all these places without recognizing it doesn't fit?

cbanek 2y ago
As someone who worked for MSFT a long time ago, I feel like Microsoft picks the right technologies and pumps huge sums of money into it but their understanding of use cases and UX is really poor (compare to say, Apple, who REALLY understands UX). The more PMs there are the muddier the waters are on actually using things. You end up with something like Office, that has so many options and whizbangs that people struggle to use the basic stuff. And just look at them talking about taking away the Control Panel, which I think was only aborted by how bad the reception was.
pjmlp 2y ago
This sums it up quite well, https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon-apple-facebook-microsoft/ https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon... As more recent example, see the Windows desktop mess, or how they started to push Blazor Hybrid inside of MAUI, alongside the whole MAUI rewrite, mudding the waters of MAUI's purpose. How many way there are now to do Web apps in ASP.NET, classical MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor Server, Blazor Client, Blazor Fullstack,...

schappim 2y ago

Microsoft discontinuing HoloLens 2 without a clear successor feels eerily familiar—like the Windows Phone all over again. Innovative tech with promise, but ultimately left hanging without a long-term vision.

chrisandchris 2y ago
It feels like you described a couple of Microsofts products. Windwos control panel, any .Net UI framework, Windows in general, sometimes Azure, ...
rbanffy 2y ago
Innovative technology is nothing without good execution. I’ve used HoloLens a couple times and the FoV was tiny, the overlay not bright enough and the videos of the announcement completely misrepresented it as something revolutionary (showing object occlusion), which it wasn’t.

pjmlp 2y ago

Yet another device that WinUI / UWP folks don't have to worry about.

binary_slinger 2y ago

My company tried to integrate the HoloLens with our in-house CAD package. And it was extremely clunky. low FoV, bad colors. The Quest 3 is cheaper and the dev tooling is better.

rbanffy 2y ago
For many uses, the Quest (and Apple Vision) have a horrible failure mode: if they crash, they render the user effectively blind (or very confused) until the headset is removed. PTC demonstrated the Apple Vision in a factory-like setting. I would NEVER approve such a thing.