Microsoft announce windows 10 vr

M$ have been oddly quiet on the vr front until now focusing on their hololens tech which is more AR than VR and some murmorings of a partnership with oculus to bring rift to the xbox

now they've announced their own vr initiative and like much of their hardware it's more a platform that other people are building stuff for

it interesting uses inside out tracking (where the headset itself tracks the environment rather than using cameras or lasers like the rift and vive and psvr) presumably derived from their hololens prototype which used this sort of system already. It's something oculus had been toying with at their last conference with their santa cruz prototype but it seems microsoft is much further along with that technology.

They announced a whole range of headsets with the price starting at 299 dollars but other than the tracking system and the fact they'll be made by third parties they've not really announced anything else about the headsets so it's too early to say what sort of effect this will have

Can't help but see this as a stab in the back for oculus but it's not that surprising the partnership such as it was seemed pretty unlikely given the facebook corporate pay masters

So interesting news but lacking details so too early to know how it will affect the market.

I'd like to think they will make these units compatible with the open vr and OSVR type platforms so we can move more to a standardised platform less you have a rift you can play x but not y and vive can play z but not q and so on it would be better to have the hardware as interchangeable as possible so any game can run on any of the headsets and motion control scheme.

If they can manage a 299 dollar headset with good tracking and comparable quality it would do a lot to move vr out of the niche