Phil Spencer went to Syndey last month where he discussed some Virtual Reality plans for the upcoming Project Scorpio console – to be available Fall 2017. Spencer began by saying “I love the technology behind VR. I have an HTC Vive, I have an Oculus Rift. I’ve used the PlayStation VR device a lot in demos and stuff.” Even though he has tried many VR technologies he feels like it isn’t quite there for Xbox – “I don’t think the creators in the game space have yet found – well, they haven’t obviously perfected the craft of building VR games,” he said. “It’s so early, I think we’re a couple of years before we’ll really see that hit mainstream.”
“I’ve seen great video uses of VR, like taking you to places you can never time travel, just the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or they simulate the surface of Mars, some really cool experiences users can see.”
This doesn’t mean VR is not coming to Xbox, in fact Spencer says “I think VR will find its spot in gaming; I would make that bet,” he continues by saying “We designed Scorpio as a VR-capable console. Whether that happens this year, next year or the year after… like I said, I still think the creative community has to get its arms around what are these new tools, and this new feeling — this new immersion. “What experiences do you put in people’s hands to have a long term engagement? Most of these things I’m playing now feel like demos and experiments, which I actually think it’s absolutely the right thing to have happened. That’s not a criticism at all, but should be happening. But I think it will take time.”
Stevivor further asked Phil about HoloLens filling VR gap – “In the long run, we need untethered solutions. You need to have the compute capability not be wired to my display that’s on my head. That means I either have some kind of high-bandwidth wireless HDMI or I have compute here. With the HoloLens we’ve chosen to put compute in the HMD itself, so it’s right there. The other thing I think most people who look along in this technology is a mixed reality world where I have a head mounted display that’s able to go from a fully enclosed, opaque world that is VR to a fully transparent world where I’m seeing augmentation in my world makes sense. I should have one device that spans both.
“With HoloLens we picked where we think the tech’s going to be in ten years, because we see a lot of people doing great work in the VR space today. We’re working with most of them on Windows to make sure those devices run well on Windows, so let them go do the stuff they’re going to do in VR. We’ll go do stuff on the content side with Minecraft and other things in VR and then we will, as a platform company, focus our first party efforts on something more in a mixed reality world with the belief that that’s where this all plays out eventually any way”
Source: Stevivor
