Microsoft is reducing the pool of mixed reality that manufactures its five-year-old helmet, the HoloLens 2in the latest sign that technology is not living up to its promises.
The wireless device, which is sold from USD 3,500arrived on the market in 2019five full years before Apple Vision Prowhich has a similar price. Mark Zuckerbergfounder of Facebookhe was so convinced that devices like this would be the future of the social media giant that he renamed his company as Goal at the end of 2021 and has invested since then USD 45 billion in your division Reality Labs.
However, not even his helmet Meta Quest 3not even the most focused on companies HoloLens 2 of Microsoft, have advanced significantly. The highly publicized Apple Vision Pro is already facing lower than expected demand in USAaccording to recent analyst estimates.
“Today we announce a restructuring of the organization of Mixed Reality of Microsoft,” a spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge.
When the HoloLens 2 debuted, Microsoft predicted “there is no competition in the next two or three years that can reach this level of fidelity.”
Although the company decided to continue selling the HoloLens 2left its development path unclear, saying only that it would continue to invest in Windows365 “to reach a broader ecosystem of hardware Mixed Reality”.
At the end of 2022he Wall Street Journal reported on deep-seated problems for the hull of mixed reality of Microsoft, which combines the physical and digital world. Only about 300,000 units had been sold in total in the seven years since the first generation was launched, according to estimates by the market research company International Data Corporationand more of 100 employees They left the team.
“We had the opportunity to dominate this market,” Tim Osborneformer team manager HoloLens at the time, he told the newspaper. But Microsoft He didn’t put enough people or money behind the effort, he added.
Fortune contacted the company for a comment on the exact number of jobs affected and the reason behind the cost cuts, but officials have not yet responded.
Global helmet shipments augmented reality and virtual reality industry-wide fell by almost a quarter last year, according to figures from IDC in March.
“2023 started the same way 2022 ended: with a series of significant drops year after year,” said Ramon Llamasresearch director of the Augmented and Virtual Reality of IDC. (Thanks to the arrival of Apple Vision Pro, IDC predicts a recovery 44% this year to 9.7 million units).
The helmets of mixed reality have suffered from the perception that they are too heavy and aesthetically unattractive to justify their premium prices in a world that already has a wide variety of useful applications for smartphones that help us in our daily tasks. Furthermore, the helmets virtual reality Older ones, which do not offer camera transfer vision, have gained a reputation for causing dizziness.
The restructuring of Microsoft arrives just when US Armyits largest customer, enters final testing this year of its integrated visual augmentation system (VAT) of mixed realitybased on the HoloLens 2.
In September, Brigadier General Christopher Schneider said to Army Times that Phase II of the device’s development had been approved after initial problems related to cumbersome wiring, image distortion and humidity control were rectified.
“We remain fully committed to the Department of Defense IVAS program,” he added Microsoft in his statement.
The software company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen has not had the most successful record in terms of devices. Products like the player MP3 Zune and the Lumia smartphone failed, while even the most successful video game console Xbox It is lagging behind its two main competitors.
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