Windows Mixed Reality

» see microsoft.com/mixed-reality as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed WMR completely. by '17 i was looking at uav workloads and computer vision pipelines, not strapping a headset to my face to look at a virtual desktop. for some reason microsoft kept positioning WMR as an enterprise productivity story right alongside the hololens pitch, and i think most of the people who actually owned a samsung odyssey ended up using it on steam to play half-life: alyx. that part of the story was real. the rest was a deck.

microsoft shipped windows mixed reality on october 17 '17 with the fall creators update. the trick was that consumer windows itself was now a VR runtime. you plugged in a partner HMD over hdmi and usb, the OS detected it, and a portal opened. no lighthouses, no base stations, inside-out tracking baked into the headset. acer, dell, HP, lenovo were the launch partners. samsung and asus arrived later. on paper this was the cheaper, easier-to-set-up alternative to the oculus rift and the htc vive. on shelves it sold okay for one holiday season.

i was not paying attention. anyway, by '19 the writing was on the wall. valve shipped the index and locked the PCVR enthusiast spend to itself. meta dropped the quest the same year and captured the consumer market by itself. PC VR sales flatlined. microsoft kept the WMR runtime alive through '23 because killing it would have meant admitting hololens was going the same way. on december 21 '23 microsoft confirmed the deprecation. windows 11 24H2, which shipped in late '24, dropped the runtime from the OS install. existing headsets stopped working unless you rolled back windows.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

the WMR story was a multi-OEM hardware story. microsoft did not ship the headset. the partner brand did. the runtime was the bet. for a while there were six different headsets running the same software, which is the kind of platform shape that worked for windows on PCs and did not work anywhere else microsoft tried it. the samsung odyssey was the standout, with built-in AMOLED panels and integrated headphones. the HP reverb G2 came later in '20 and was actually a respectable enterprise training headset for a moment.

~ the decline ~

two things killed WMR. the first was meta. the quest line did not need a PC, did not need cables, did not need an HMI you could break by updating windows. it was the right product for the consumer who wanted to try VR once. the second was steam. WMR users were not playing microsoft VR games on the WMR portal. they were playing valve and bethesda VR games through steamvr, with WMR acting as a translation layer that sometimes broke after a windows update. microsoft was paying to maintain a platform whose users were spending their time on someone else's store.

~ what really happened ~

december 21 '23 the deprecation notice landed. microsoft said the runtime would be unsupported, the portal app would be removed from new windows installs, the mixed reality portal page would go offline. the dec '24 24H2 update made it official. headset owners woke up on a fresh install and found the headset showed up as a generic hdmi monitor, with no way to enable inside-out tracking or the steam bridge. third-party drivers came out within a month for the samsung odyssey and the HP reverb, kept by hobbyists. microsoft has not made a consumer VR play since.

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