Shutting down AltSpace should be a loud warning bell for Meta’s Horizon Worlds. Horizon is basically a badly executed AltSpace.<p>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.<p>It had something going on, but was a Grand Canyon away from mass market appeal.
It'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.<p>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.
That 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
I 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.<p>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.
I 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.<p>Did the developer story for HoloLens ever get better or did it just die a slow death?
It'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.
I really wanted to use HoloLens for remote support. Too bad they never really looked like they would support it for wider use.<p>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'.
Looks 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:<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/microsoft-scales-back-hololens-business-after-setback-on-us-army-goggles" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/microsoft...</a><p>"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 $1.75 trillion government funding bill approved in December, reflects concern over field tests of the goggles, which are adapted from Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets. The tests disclosed “mission-affecting physical impairments,” including headaches, eyestrain and nausea."<p>I have to imagine this will happen with other VR headsets, given theirs was more fleshed out than others.
It's sad to watch all these layoffs but canceling underperforming products/divisions completely makes a lot more sense than decimating the company as a whole.
The reality is that it was always unlikely that Microsoft (or Meta, or Google, or Apple…) would be able to create disruption in AR, VR, etc. on the magnitude of the initial iPhone release. Better to keep their powder dry to acquire the startups that potentially can.
In Oct last year they announced partnership with Meta in VR <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/10/11/microsoft-and-meta-partner-to-deliver-immersive-experiences-for-the-future-of-work-and-play/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/10/11/microsoft-and-me...</a>
This is such a train wreck, because without a VR native windows manager built into windows, PC VR isn’t the productivity tool it could otherwise be.<p>/sigh
Remember Second life?
It was super hyped and faded into obscurity even though it's still around with its dedicated userbase.<p>All of these alt worlds are the same. Niche video games. I'm not surprised to see them go.
Every business will can projects in their portfolio when belt tightening. VR and its multitude of derivative just isn't a core competency of M$. If anybody is to win this space then it'll be Apple IMO.
There are two approaches to AR currently:<p>- The Magic Leap/Microsoft approach: Use semitransparent displays to create a virtual overlay.<p>- The Meta approach: Use cheap standalone VR with lots of external cameras, then mix camera/virtual environment.<p>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.<p>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.<p>A headset is like a Gameboy, if anything people care that it's portable and cheap, not that it has the most impressive graphics.<p>In any case, Microsoft's HoloLens adventure was likely a dead end.
Never bought into VR. AR is interesting, but it has to be seamless, so a part of regular glass frames without any noticeable alterations.<p>The whole metaverse thing has always seemed ridiculous to me.
Stop 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.<p>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.
Hard times for the persons involved.<p>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.<p>Another example that technology many times dies not due to its technology capabilities, rather due to external factors.<p>Many XBox related studios were also affected by the layoffs.
Worth noting is that the development continues over at <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mesh</a>
That's... a lot of specialized folks<p>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.<p>Should be a lot of fun for the right person, gdoc linked @ <a href="https://www.graphistry.com/careers" rel="nofollow">https://www.graphistry.com/careers</a>
> despite CEO Satya Nadella's buzzword-laden speeches on the topic at recent events.<p>Nailed it. I do like some of the things he’s doing at Microsoft though
Wouldn'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?
all 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.