Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens

[dburne]

Disturbing - this does not look good.

Definitely not good for the Meta Verse.

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-has-laid-off-entire-teams-behind-virtual-mixed-reality-and-hololens

Edited January 22, 2023 by dburne

[kissTheSky]

Uh oh! 
 

I hope mbuchia is safe. He was part of Microsoft, wasn’t he?

[IckyATLAS]

I am not surprised at all. I was always astonished to see how much Facebook and the others were sinking in this in terms of billions of dollars. 

There has been a very strong signal from the market and it was the failure of 3D TV sets. Nobody listened. The industry tried to push the 3D TV sets after Avatar 1 film came out and it was a complete failure. I bought one of these 3D TV sets, played a little with the LCD glasses, saw a few 3D films and finally just stopped using them. It did not bring anything more as your brain gets used to it and then there is no more wow effect. But you lost resolution, contrast, image quality and size as the image becomes smaller etc. Not to speak of a large part of the public who feel nauseated like my wife which cannot stand 3D more than 15 minutes, without big headaches.

But nobody listened to this very strong signal.

These Metaverse, Second Life and the likes have never taken any traction and for very good reasons. I also tried them and never came back to them.

But we have to make some distinctions here. Gaming, leisure is one thing, business is another thing.

And in business there maybe professional Hololens type tools or VR 3D type applications that may bring an added value when working with teams immersed in a 3D CAD model of an object or system where many people can interact on it. But these are very niche markets and such systems even costing tens of thousands of dollars, requiring expensive computers, may still make sense when you work on projects worth tens or hundreds of million. Big car manufacturing, aerospace, surgeons, architects may use them but here we speak of the general public.

There has simple been no killer app for the average public even in office use, to justify the expense and the effort.

Meeting people in the metaverse does not bring anything more, I would say even less than actual online meetings with Teams, Zoom or the likes.

You do not need any fancy 3D VR high-tech stuff and you have the real person in front of you and not a ridiculous looking (without legs) more puppet like avatar.

The webcams, camera and microphones have improved a lot and the online meeting technology has become excellent. If you have good quality stuff, sound, image, animated or static backgrounds etc. all that works very well without needing a supercomputer. You can display working documents, images, videos, work together and even  access a common document to work with. And all this is integrated in your office workflow, agenda etc.

I do regular online meetings with people all over the world. I have a high quality webcam, microphone a 32" monitor with good loudspeakers and that's it. I do not need to have anything more. I do not need to wear anything special on my head to be in the meeting. I can sip my tea as I am following presentations and other.

 

Does this mean that metaverse is dead. Probably not on the longer term, but the technology is very far from being ready. There is a need of at least two orders of magnitude improvement in terms of image, but also the simulated visual 3D world quality. Physically being immersed in a virtual 3D world is today simply not doable. The physical interfaces, tactile, motion etc. are still in their infancy and much too cumbersome. Maybe the solution is direct brain connection, but here see you in 30 years minimum.

As long as the Metaverse does not bring more but is just a low quality degraded bad copy of our world then it stands no chance.

 

 

 

 

[1Sascha]

1 hour ago, dburne said:

Meta Verse.

Every time I read that term, I can't help but chuckle to myself.

 

God, what a gigantic waste of time and money that whole BS-project was/is... can you imagine how much good they could've done if they'd given, say, half of the dough they blew on that turd to charity?

 

 

S.

[TheSNAFU]

Apparently their financial concerns aren’t bad enough to reduce executive compensation at Microsoft. The CEO was

paid just under 55 million in 2022 for his “brilliant” leadership. So the people who make the shit they get rich from get canned and the fat cats get fatter. I hope this horrendous economy they probably voted for swallows them whole. 

Edited January 22, 2023 by TheSNAFU

[Bonnot]

1 hour ago, IckyATLAS said:

It did not bring anything more as your brain gets used to it and then there is no more wow effect. But you lost resolution, contrast, image quality and size as the image becomes smaller etc

You can say the same for the Numeric Films : more colors, sounds, explosions, planes, monsters........and in the end you regret an old cardboard Godzilla or a B&W  WWII "Objective : Burma" with less bling and more imagination.

Also, if you watch the last  financial results of an Ubisoft,  the same curse may fall on our Gaming World in a very short time, so let's play what we have and improve what can be , furling the sails is wisdom when stormy winds arrive ......

[kissTheSky]

6 hours ago, kissTheSky said:

Uh oh! 
 

I hope mbuchia is safe. He was part of Microsoft, wasn’t he?

Just fyi. His position was not eliminated.

[SharpeXB]

Facebook was a $1 trillion company before this focus on the Metaverse. Now it’s a $500 billion company…

[BraveSirRobin]

9 hours ago, TheSNAFU said:

Apparently their financial concerns aren’t bad enough to reduce executive compensation at Microsoft. The CEO was

paid just under 55 million in 2022 for his “brilliant” leadership. So the people who make the shit they get rich from get canned and the fat cats get fatter. I hope this horrendous economy they probably voted for swallows them whole. 

I’d love to know who you think the billionaires are voting for?

[TheSNAFU]

Who do you think those woke billionaires are voting for? 

[Voyager]

Cannot say I'm that surprised. Regardless of the viability of their usecases, both were terrible products.

 

WMR has routinely managed to be one of the absolutely most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to deal with. And I know the amount of flack that both SteamVR and the "helping" that Vive's HTC software likes to do. WMR was worse than both, by a lot. 

 

Personally I think Microsoft's application team, outside of their Windows Office team, has gotten far too used to being able to just plug into the OS and do whatever. It makes software very frustrating to debug and tune. 

 

Meta, I can understand why Facebook wanted to do something like it, I'm given to understand VR chat has a pretty solid user base and Facebook has hit the point where they can't really grow without something new, but from what I gather Meta was a fantastically bad implementation. Apparently you were taking the headset on and off constantly and trying to handle tons of one-time-codes through both phone and headset, which went into sleep mode whenever you took it off. 

 

It was interesting as a science project, but they tried to do it at scale before they knew what worked. 

 

Now, I'm certain good augmented reality has a huge future in industry, but it's going to take more than a little experimentation to figure out how to make it work. 

 

And I know VR has a future too. I know 3D movies aren't really great (and mostly end up pulling back the special effects curtain) but there are experiences that you simply cannot get outside of VR. I've been playing through Project Wingman lately. It's an Ace Combat type arcade flying game. Sure, it's not the most realistic game, it's not intended to be, but the feeling of speed and presence you get in VR as you thread your way through a net of rail shots, you cannot get anywhere else.

 

Or flying an open cockpit plane on a dawn recon mission in the rain. I was playing in the middle of summer, but I still felt the need to get a jacket for the flight. 

[1Sascha]

23 hours ago, TheSNAFU said:

So the people who make the shit they get rich from get canned and the fat cats get fatter.

Nothing new under the sun, ey?

 

7 hours ago, Voyager said:

I know 3D movies aren't really great

 

Depends on the movie ... and on the person watching, I suppose?

 

To me, some flicks like Prometheus (crap movie BTW), Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy look amazing, even on my ageing Samsung 3D TV.

 

 

S.

Edited January 23, 2023 by 1Sascha

[Voyager]

On 1/23/2023 at 8:07 AM, 1Sascha said:

Depends on the movie ... and on the person watching, I suppose?

 

To me, some flicks like Prometheus (crap movie BTW), Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy look amazing, even on my ageing Samsung 3D TV.

 

 

S.

 

We saw one of the Avengers movies in 3D at the theaters, and it mostly just made it really obvious when they were doing things like clipping one movie set scene into the back of a CGI transport that was flying away. 

 

I suspect the problem with movie 3D is the eye is extremely good at picking out inconsistencies in depth, and that sort of motion is almost impossible to get right on a set without actually reproducing the true range.

 

Which is probably also why game VR seems to hold up better: in a game engine it is actually easier to just put the characters into a flying transport than it would be to build the scene onto a fix set and try to reproject the whole thing together. 

[AcidBath]

I'm not surprised about the MS layoff of their WMR toolkit group since its primary focus was their HoloLens product which has essentially failed.  I'm sorry for all those that are losing their jobs, but not I'm worried about the long term fate of the WMR VR platform software at this time (G2 owners got to have hope, right?).

 

One of the completely laughable (and outright money grab) concepts of the facebook Meta Verse is buying/selling 'real estate' in it.  First time I read about this stuff harkened me back to the old ruse of 'wanna buy a bridge'?