back to article Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Microsoft has axed its HoloLens 2 mixed reality headset and there won't be a hardware replacement, The Register can confirm. A company spokesperson told us: "Microsoft is no longer producing Microsoft HoloLens 2, and we have signaled a last time to buy for customers and partners. Support for HoloLens 2, including security …

  1. Paul Herber Silver badge

    I have just.three.words for this.

    Meh.meh.meh.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      HoloLens,

      Hollow Laugh.

      And so ends,

      Its epitaph.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        You are Brian Bilston AICMFP

        1. mistersaxon

          My epitaph for HoloLens: A hollow laugh is how it ends.

          We don't want mixed reality when it's mixed with a Windows PC!

          We wanted apps that just felt zippy, not Bing or Edge or f*cking Clippy!

          We wanted to keep all our data not find out you'd sold it, later.

          We wanted bugs to be fixed fast - End user first, not left till last

          We waited through the update crap, and heaps of unasked for login apps,

          We waited for the network stack or apps to give our cursor back,

          And then we waited even more for Edge to load or the "App store"!

          We never wanted Acrobat! a simple viewer can do that...

          We're tired of reboots. and "screens of death". We'll say this till our dying breath:

          You wasted time on daft ideas and spent a fortune through the years

          So, as HoloLens now fades to black: Let's just bring the Start button back!

  2. tony72

    Credit where credit is due, I am impressed with Meta sticking to the task and continuing to pour the billions into their AR developments, with any eventual resulting profits still way in the future and by no means guaranteed. But from what people are saying about Orion, they seem to be making some impressive progress. I'm not surprised Microsoft is giving up on HoloLens, it seemed a bit half-hearted from the start. Really pushing the technological boundaries takes more commitment than that.

    1. Rich 2 Silver badge

      Anyone any idea how Faecesboo… sorry - Meta’s Matrix visual world is coming along? Have they abandoned the idea yet?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        LOL all the executives that were boasting about their presence in the metaverse seem to have all gone quiet.

        It seems that they finally stepped outside the echo chamber and found that no one else gave a fuck about it and no one wanted to attend a virtual conference where they needed to virtually walk between virtual booths at a simulated slow assed pace, whilst ignoring all the other virtual attendees.

      2. Clausewitz4.0 Bronze badge
        Devil

        "Have they abandoned the idea yet?"

        They will spend the sucker money, sorry, investor money, first. It will fail, then they will abandon it.

    2. tmTM

      Re: Half-hearted

      Isn't that what Microsoft do best?

      From mobiles, to wearables to AR, they put in barely 50% of the effort and give up when it soon fizzles out.

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Half-hearted

        Aaargh, this pattern used to drive me mad at my former employer.

        They'd launch an exciting new platform/industry-initiative/protocol.

        They'd get lots of industry partners onboard - peripheral vendors, OEMs, ISVs - with the usual "we think this is the best thing since sliced bread" canned quotes for the launch.

        And then, a year or two later, when the product in question wasn't - contrary to the marketeers' more fevered hopes - an industry-dominating multibillion-dollar business, well, my employer would cancel it, leaving all those partners with unsold stock and unexpected revenue-stream gaps, and having to explain to their customers why the Next Big Thing was, in fact, the Last Silly Hype.

        And my employer would do this again, and again, and again, burning more credibility and goodwill every time.

        And they wondered why, over time, industry partners became progressively less willing to sign up to stan for their latest initiative ("it's going to be HUGE! Trust us! We TOTALLY won't cancel this one after 18 months!!!") - and why their own reputation as industry leaders just didn't exist any more.

        (I suspect the smarter ones among you can hazard a guess at who the employer in question was, but I'm past caring.)

  3. DerekCurrie
    FAIL

    Hollow, never Holo

    As those of us who understand actual holography will attest: Good riddance to a bad product name.

    1. ITMA Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Hollow, never Holo

      Amen to that!

      It's been bad enough with Tensator's "holographic assistants" (not holograms or holographic):

      https://www.tensator.com/solutions/tensator-holographic-virtual-assistant/

      Not to mention all that "appearing by hologram" crap using the same Pepper's Ghost derivative as used for the infamous "Tupac" thing.

    2. lowwall

      Re: Hollow, never Holo

      I don't see what this has to do with handwriting either.

  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "he'd thought it had been canned years ago. After all, in 2022, HoloLens boss Alex Kipman left Microsoft."

    He must have forgotten to turn out the lights when he left.

    1. chivo243 Silver badge
      Stop

      He must have forgotten to turn out the lights when he left.

      And lock the door! Seems others missed the memo!

  5. spudmasterflex

    ‘We will continue to invest in mixed reality opportunities with first-party software solutions and services”

    What a fucking joke, they have a short memory considering they have dropped support for all windows mixed reality devices in the latest windows update, including my reverb g2 WMR, which is now useless. I know it’s a different product to the holocrap but Microsoft sure has form for doing this far too many times.

    1. Art Slartibartfast

      Another reason for me to stick with Windows 10.

  6. karlkarl Silver badge

    Great, get that landfill shite in the dirt where it belongs next to Microsoft's other locked down crippleware such as Windows RT and Windows Phone.

    Hopefully this will make space in the market for an actual viable technology where obsolescence isn't the sole thing planned for.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Upvote for Windows RT. So much promise....

      1. ITMA Silver badge
        Devil

        I still have a Surface RT - and NO, I did NOT buy it.

        It makes a useful door wedge.... That's about all.

  7. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Wait, Magic Leap still exists???!

    That's the horrifying part of the article.

  8. DrkShadow

    Still missing the big picture

    Just A Monitor:

    Think. Glasses with a 27-inch high-res monitor, right there, on your head, wherever you might want to look. Not see-through (maybe around the monitor image), not "AR", not anything but a monitor. Essentially no processing on the device itself - just an LCD with LED drivers lights, and the pancake lenses that make these things work. No 170 field of view, just a 27-degree field of view, at a 27-inch monitor, as though it's three and a half feet in front of you.

    Just a monitor. That displays an image.

    This would be great: a travel monitor, a replacement for your portable's onboard craptastic TN panel 13-inch display that you can't even prop upright on a plane. For businesses, it's a privacy screen - no need to worry about someone looking over their shoulder at data. For the user, a place to watch a movie, or type a report in a word doc -- and because the Fov is so low, it can actually render text in a useful way. Light-weight. Long battery. Standard HDMI (intel wireless display?) input.

    *Maybe* even, but not guaranteed, a second input, so that the eyes can receive different images. Then game engines can render from two different perspectives, send the outputs to two different monitors, one for each eye, and you have true 3d -- without a $omg-costing computer. !?!? (Still expensive, but seemingly not so bad as current VR stuff.) Again, just a _monitor_, not a 3-d, 360-degree, all-immersive environment. JUST A MONITOR!! (Or _two_, *maybe*.)

    Probably the drawback is: it can't be significantly patent-encumbered. It can't easily be tied to your platform. These companies will never develop such a thing, but this is what I really, really want. To hell with all of these gawking headsets.

    1. Andy Miller

      Re: Still missing the big picture

      This is what I'd pay for. I would add:

      Allows you to sit upright even on a train or plane, or in a hotel room.

      Doesn't need to be limited to 27" equivalent size. Happy for position sensors to allow my whole field of vision to be used.

      Would either have to sit comfortably over my glasses, or work without my glasses (I can see perfectly fine to the end of my nose...)

      The Apple ones kind of do some of this, but the price! and glasses wearers have to pay out for non-refundable prescription inserts before we even get to try using them....

      1. DrkShadow

        Re: Still missing the big picture

        > Doesn't need to be limited to 27" equivalent size. Happy for position sensors to allow my whole field of vision to be used.

        Tbh, I feel that this is what they're focusing on, and it's the whole problem as I see it. Stretching a limited display to cover the whole field of view, where I want high DPI in the form-factor of a monitor -- so that text isn't awful, lines aren't blurry, and etc.

        If they had a 27-inch monitor that I could switch screens on by the flick of a button (not necessarily turning my head to the side, or maybe so), then that might be an interesting feature - one that they or someone else could implement eventually.

    2. Glen 1

      Re: Still missing the big picture

      There are already several devices that do what you describe.

      The early versions are considered old hat because you couldn't "see through" them (think drone pov headsets)

      As for being able to see around the screen:

      Products by XREAL

      Thinkreality by Lenovo

      vIsor from immersed

      Just the first few off the top of my head

      1. Andy Miller

        Re: Still missing the big picture

        Thanks, I'll check them out

      2. DrkShadow

        Re: Still missing the big picture

        Unfortunately these aren't sufficient.

        The Lenovo model is a 1080p display, which -- really -- might be enough for a 21-inch display. It's certainly not something I'd use for a 27-inch display for anyone but Mr. Magoo. Lenovo says this as a 45 pixels-per-degree display.

        Xreal's Ultimate says it's "up-to" a 330-inch screen, at 49 pixels per degree. Their Pro(?) model will give you a 52-degree field of view, at 49 pixels per degree, yielding something like a 64-inch monitor with a resolution of maybe 1530x1200 -- this would be _horrible_. Similarly, it suggests that Lenovo's display is about 48 inches.

        A large part of the fatigue is reading text that looks like it was rendered in Minecraft - it's too big, sloppy, uncomfortable. If they would take that 330-inch display and lens it down to 27 inches (not 30 inches, actually looking at my 27-inch display requires a lot of eye movement, and 30 inches is uncomfortable without moving my whole head, which I can't do in glasses), then they would get the high pixel density required for a quality display.

        They're not doing that. Only Apply has gone with a very high resolution display, but they still stretch it across the entire field of view -- and more.

        The models above don't, and no models of wearable display that I've seen, have a reasonable size image display with a resolution that I can get with a correspondingly sized, good monitor. They all have a resolution something like 640x480 on a 21-inch display (if you wished to crop it), or Apple has slightly better for $5000.

    3. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

      Re: Still missing the big picture

      one for each eye, and you have true 3d

      Not quite, because the focal depth is the same all the time. You can still work out whether things are in front of other things with one eye shut, because the focal distances are different.

      What this would provide would be closer to a "magic eye" image. It would give your visual cortex information about perspective, but nothing about depth, which would probably also trigger migraines in a good number of people, and whilst visual migraines can be funky, and interesting, they're not fun after the initial novelty (of having your brain gradually refuse to process images in one hemisphere) wears off.

  9. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "we have signaled a last time to buy"

    No, you have signaled it's time to not buy.

    Not that I was going to anyway.

    I went, a few weeks ago, to Verdun (France, for those who don't know). There is an underground citadel there, with a rather nice tourist ride that has AR goggles in the mix. It was well done, I can't say the contrary, but let's just say that after 40 minutes, I wasn't unhappy to take the damn things off.

    And it's not like you're going to catch anything at the corner of your eye. If you're not looking right where you're supposed to, you're not seeing what is theoretically there.

    I have no idea what tech those goggles were, but they very much reinforced my conviction that I'm absolutely not interested in acquiring anything like that for me in the forseeable future.

    1. nintendoeats

      Re: "we have signaled a last time to buy"

      "Last time to buy" is for customers who already depend on the product. It's a standard mechanism to provide business continuity.

      Say you design an AR escape room and use HoloLens as your platform. Microsoft will contact you and say "yo, we are discontinuing these headsets, so tells us how many you want by such and such date". Then you figure out how long it will take you to move to something supported, estimate how many headsets you will need before then, and order them.

      At a previous workplace, whenever we discontinued a product that supported $COMMUNICATION_STANDARD we would get substantial orders from existing customers. We were the only company support for $COMMUNICATION_STANDARD, and the people still using it wanted to get as much time out of their existing installations as possible. Ordering a few dozen of our parts at that time for use as spares made sense for them.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Re: "we have signaled a last time to buy"

        Say you design an AR escape room and use HoloLens as your platform.

        Yeah, you'd also have to factor in how long the "escape room" bubble is likely to last, how long before the novelty of it being "AR" wears off for the people who are likely to find that fun, and also find an investor who wants to get rid of money for tax purposes, and wants to have the amusing spectacle of watching a business fail thrown in.

        (I'm suggesting that this doesn't sound like a money-maker)

  10. ForthIsNotDead

    Not to mention... You look an absolute dick (to everybody else) when you're wearing them. Even kids don't use them. I bought the Facebook ones for my kids a couple of years back. They haven't touched them in 18 months. They worked out that you look like an idiot when wearing them, and the people that comingle in the various game rooms are either mean, or nonces. Just like Twitter.

    I've seen them put to good use in business - being able to walk around inside buildings that haven't been built yet, fire simulations, that sort of thing. But it's niche. Not big enough a market to justify the R&D and cost.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: being able to walk around inside buildings that haven't been built yet

      Yes, that could be interesting.

      There's this other, well-established technology called a screen. It can show images and, with a thing called a computer, you can use a tool called a mouse to move your point of view, and a thing called a keyboard to advance.

      It's all very high-tech, I know, but maybe it means that you don't absolutely have to depend on strapping your head to some bulky portable low-definition screen to achieve the same result.

  11. 0laf Silver badge
    Big Brother

    AR Zuned

    Well if you invested in this you got what you deserved, MS has given plent of evidence they are not to be trusted with a hardware platform.

    I actually thought out of all the AR junk around MS actually had something pitched that might, just might, be of use in a professional setting. Architechs, engineers, town planners that sort of thing.

    But I guess the only likely profitable use for AR/VR is going to be pr0n.

    And Magic Leap. WTF. I thought that was outed as a scam years ago.

  12. Locomotion69 Bronze badge
    Coat

    Missed opportunity

    Oh no!

    M$ should have integrated it with CoPilot for maximum AI ... ehhhh....

    I grab my coat...

  13. Tubz Silver badge

    Microsoft should just sell the tech and IP, make a few bucks and let somebody else develop it who has an idea and isn't stifled by the internals at Microsoft

  14. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

    Why pursue "the Metaverse"...

    ...when there's a whole new buzzword with no discernable use cases...

    "AI"

    I look forward to watching how this one plays out on my 3D TV.

    oh, wait, I didn't fall for that one, either

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good riddance!

    All pointless ways to interact instead of through a monitor or phone.

    We recently had a work trial of some VR nonsense, it failed. Who wants to attend a meeting in VR with some Roblox type avatar?

    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Good riddance!

      >Who wants to attend a meeting in VR with some Roblox type avatar?

      ...apart from Mark Zuckerberg?

  16. trevorde Silver badge

    Only one company can make this work...

    Apple! (or Tesla)

  17. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    insecure military hardware?

    So they are committed to selling HoloLens to the military but will end security support in 2027? That does seem like a bit of a problem.

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