Microsoft joins the VR contenders with HoloLens

As Many of the worlds biggest tech giants join the VR market (excluding Apple) Microsoft made an announcement today that implies that they too would be joining the train.

In this vision of a future shared experience enabled by Windows Holographic, one user is wearing HoloLens within a room scanner/communicator (left), another joins via a VR headset (middle) and the third initiates the session from a HoloLens at a remote location (right).

At the Computex trade show in Taipei, Terry Myerson (Executive Vice President, Windows and Devices group) was joined by Nick Parker and Alex Kipman (HoloLens Architect) to announce that Microsoft would be widening the scope of their mixed reality headset by incorporating VR.

 

At the announcement, Terry Myerson stated :

"The market for virtual reality devices is expected to be 80 million devices per year by 2020. However, many of today’s devices and experiences do not work with each other, provide different user interfaces, interaction models, input methods, peripherals, and content. And most virtual reality experiences can’t mix real people, objects, and environments into the virtual world, making creation and collaboration difficult. This is because they lack the human, environmental and object understanding that is already built into Windows 10."

On the unveiling of HoloLens, Microsoft had also released Windows Holographic, which is a platform to allow Windows 10 developers design apps for the device.

 

Early source code for Microsofts MS-DOS and Word to be made public at the Computer History Museum

Today, Microsoft announced that they would be dusting off the code for MS-DOS and Word and making it available to the public for the first time by putting it at the Computer History Museum.

The release of the code is part of an ongoing project by the museum to collect and preserve some of the worlds most used software of the early days, and making them available to developers.

Microsofts MS-DOS actually started when the company (microsoft) was approached by IBM to work on a project codenamed "Chess". Microsoft first provided a BASIC language interpreter to IBM, but was asked to make an operating system. Microsoft then created, and licensed PC-DOS to IBM and retained MS-DOS for other PC manufactures. Later in 1989, Word was released for Windows and and was generating half the worldwide word processing market's revenue within 4years.

Even as the developers are gaining important teaching tools, the museum is also winning big on this development, because it's quite difficult for institutions to get original source code. Paola Antonelli, MOMA's senior curator of architecture and design said in her TED talk last year that while she worked so hard to bring video games like Pac-man and the likes to the museum, the endgame was always to preserve the source code. 

Technology companies are usually very skeptical about releasing source code to the public (kind of like declassifying NSA files), and it could take years of discussions and work before they eventually do, if they do at all.

By: Ezekiel.T.Ogidan