As rival Apple is rumored to be eyeing an entrance into the metaverse, Microsoft, an early proponent of mixed and augmented reality applications, is criticized for its blurry vision behind the company’s own HoloLens strategy. While HoloLens notched big early wins, including scoring a U.S. Department of Defense contract, subsequent delays, project cancellations, and high-profile executive departures may have resulted in the death of the HoloLens 3.
At the crux of Microsoft’s struggles with HoloLens is whether the company should forge ahead with its own hardware ambitions, or if it should instead create software to power the metaverse that can run across different brands and models of headsets. The latter software-based vision would be similar to Microsoft’s current strategy with the Windows operating system.
Kipman drew a parallel stating that early rumors ahead of the launch of HoloLens 2 suggested that the company had similarly canceled the headset. As it turned out, that was not accurate.