Yesterday, Microsoft hosted a small event in San Francisco to unveiled its vision for Windows Mixed Reality. That event was open to only a small group of press and bloggers, but the Microsoft has posted a video recording of it, so now anyone can see what went down.

I covered the actual announcements elsewhere. But here are some observations from the event.

Closed captioning. For some reason, Microsoft has burned closed captioning into its recording instead of using the soft captioning support built into YouTube. Is Alex Kipman that hard to understand?

Communities. Perhaps understanding that the key to niche market like MR requires an engaged community, Kipman talks about Microsoft’s efforts along those lines right up front.

Era of Mixed Reality. Kipman says that MR is both a new era for computing and a revolution. I don’t see it that way, per se, and certainly not in the short term. But big advances often start off with baby steps. And Windows Mixed Reality is certainly a baby step, more VR than augmented reality (AR) like HoloLens.

Differentiation. With Apple poised to steal this market away from Microsoft, Kipman claims that the software giant is the only firm to “embrace the entire continuum for mixed reality,” meaning both AR and VR, on PCs, phones, and headsets both opaque and see-through. I’m curious what the phones bit there means.

Tagged with mixed reality, Windows Mixed Reality