Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 surprisingly still a thing, will get Windows 11 treatment

Though Microsoft's mixed reality teams took a hit this year in terms of cost cuts and layoffs, the IT giant is pushing forward with its HoloLens 2 headset, with plans to upgrade it to Windows 11. The free update will come in the first half of this year, we're told, with Redmond putting an emphasis on the mixed-reality device's …

[David 132]

Windows 11 in goggles, eh?

Talk about in-your-face adverts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn you

when your right your right.

Facebook has done a brilliant job of convincing consumers that VR and AR are nothing but the onramp to a dystopian hellscape. Developers have been happy to lap up the cash, but Zuckerburgs bet that the industry would hand him control of the future of the internet if he pumped out enough cheap headsets hasn't hit paydirt. And he has pissed in the manufacturer's pool by making it impossible to sell hardware at actual cost. So his willingness to to flush mountains of cash down the loo has ensured a repeat of the 90's VR crash. Some of the same faces as well, still hyping up buzzword compliant vaporware with a business model of fleecing VCs who haven't forgotten them.

I had hope we would see the other side of the finish line this time. All the parts are there, with decent 1080 per eye hardware a possibility in the premium tier of the field.

I'd rather see the whole market burn and wait another 25 years before I see it taken over by Facebook-by-another name. There is enough hell on earth to go around at the moment. That said I may try to grab a last gen Hololens to add to the pile of Microsoft hardware that was to interesting and useful to exist, like the Kinect. People showed that you could do amazing things with both, and Microsoft never really managed to execute on either opportunity fully. A few cool videos but not much success in scaling the market. Weirdly I think both projects got slapped with some brain drain with the self-driving car bubble, losing both ToF camera/lidar talent and environment modeling talent from a fairly limited pool.

[jmch]

"I had hope we would see the other side of the finish line this time. All the parts are there, with decent 1080 per eye hardware..."

What I would like the VR/AR future to be like is to have the local processing power in the headset or locally-connected PC / processing device that can work as a standalone or peer-to-peer directly with other headsets in the conversation / group. But (similairly to voice-to-speech or voice commands), this model was hijacked by the "send the data to be centrally processed" crowd, for whom the provision of the service was only ever an excuse to get their hands on the data to be processed and the lovely lovely ad revenue they could get by driving targeting adverts.

Which brings us to... " pissed in the manufacturer's pool by making it impossible to sell hardware at actual cost."

There's probably a market for this stuff even with more expensive headsets if users keep control of their data and aren't fed bullshit ads all the time. But not if giant monopolistic industrial conglomerates are "selling" headsets at a gigantic loss to be able to get their hands on the data. Mega-corporations whose monopolies in one area can subsidise massive loss-making in another to drive competition out of business and create even more monopolies are anathema to free-market / competitive capitalist principles.