WMR getting deprecated.. ?

[RealDCSpilot]

You are still stuck only looking in your own small niche. I still remember the flood of new VR users seeking help in 2017 when WMR headsets were released and i remember the second flood in 2019 when the Reverb was released. You also still don't get what i meant with WMR being the third leg. Simply ask ED why they never added WMR API support after implementing LibOVR and quickly after that OpenVR back in the days.

[Baldrick33]

1 hour ago, RealDCSpilot said:

You are still stuck only looking in your own small niche. I still remember the flood of new VR users seeking help in 2017 when WMR headsets were released and i remember the second flood in 2019 when the Reverb was released.

I was responding to your quote about OpenComposite and OpenXR toolkit being "the only reason why WMR itself survived this long" and without it "no WMR user would had a good experience with VR games". Now that is real niche stuff as much as I like what was created. It may be relevant for a small group of enthusiasts here but hardly VR gamers at large, for whom SteamVR and WMR for SteamVR is all they have needed and has probably worked well enough in their eyes.

It is easy to see how WMR has no strategic future as an environment but in its current form the user experience is far from the disaster you are portraying.

 

[Buzzer1977]

20 hours ago, RealDCSpilot said:

You mix up the device with an API and a runtime that no one needed. WMR was an API and a runtime. If the Reverb never had OpenXR support you wouldn't even know that it exists. WMR was one of those fails of Microsoft, completely misunderstanding a new and slowly growing market. Check how much of the other WMR headsets failed so badly in 2017.

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around and you're mixing up things. OpenXR a API that relies on a OpenXR runtime, and in the case of WMR devices the OpenXR runtime is WMR.

[RealDCSpilot]

@Buzzer1977 Goodness... The topic is WMR getting depricated and i'm trying to tell you why the concept failed. And i'm looking at the whole history with Microsoft trying to bind VR HMD manufacturers to their system. I'm into VR since 2012 and owned VR headsets since 2014.
WMR - the naming alone is already misleading, the runtime has the name WMR and the native API is also named WMR!!! But no one really developed or integrated the WMR API into their games. Before VR it was only used for Hololens projects and after 2016 only a handful of small developers tried it and put their VR games on the only store with WMR API VR support - the Microsoft app store. OpenXR was added a bit later to be supported by the WMR runtime, now look how long it took for OpenXR to mature and at the dates how many OpenXR games are out there and when were they released? The whole WMR thing was a dead horse from the beginning and the WMR for SteamVR wrapper was the afterthought solution trying to keep the bad idea alive. On many occasions the WMR for SteamVR plugin simply broke, they were always running behind SteamVR's progress.

@Baldrick33
Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus HMD basically failed instantly. I would call that a desaster. Samsung and HP tried once more with a more sophisticated HMDs, but Samsung also gave up in the end. The tragedy of the HP Reverb is that HP still kept staying with WMR. They were on the right track with the most parts of their hardware, but should have made themselves independent from Microsoft in all those years. I also still remember how many people just bought the Reverb in 2019 without having the hardware to drive those highres panels. Even the best consumer GPUs in 2019 weren't really able to deliver the resolutions the Reverb demanded. Because nobody listened to HP, they never intended to sell the headset to normal consumers. The Reverb of 2019 with those early highres panels was intended for engineers and professional designers in CAD workflow integrations, on highend GPUs to be able to see fine lines in 3D data and text. That's one reason why the Reverb was not planned to be produced in large numbers in the first place. But then the simmers discovered it for their niche market. It's good for seated VR, mostly without the need of those crappy controllers. But the performance with demanding sims was abysmal, so programmers from the community stepped in with creating free tools to get access to tuning options. But this only extended the life support for the dead horse.

It's a good thing that some bad ideas die out naturally. And when WMR has vanished, alternatives will be available.

Edited December 30, 2023 by RealDCSpilot

[Buzzer1977]

3 hours ago, RealDCSpilot said:

OpenXR was added a bit later to be supported by the WMR runtime, now look how long it took for OpenXR to mature and at the dates how many OpenXR games are out there and when were they released?

@RealDCSpilot Is it so hard to understand that there already is OpenXR support in DCS? And that OpenXR needs a OpenXR runtime? And that nobody cares how the OpenXR runtime is called. Can be WMR, Pimax.dll, what ever ..... People just want to use their VR headset. They don't care if you like how the driver is called, or who made it, as long as it works, which WMR (yet) does.

[Joch1955]

For us G2 owners, I think the only question we have about WMR is how long can we keep using our headsets?

I may be oversimplifying this, but as I understand it, the role of WMR is to act as the "operating software" of the HMD. It keeps track of your head position and passes that info to DCS so the game shows you the correct display.  So there is no real need to further "update" WMR and in theory, it should keep running as is with no problem for many years unless something changes in Windows.

Rumor has it that Windows 12 will come out late 2024, so that is probably the "newer version" MS is referring to, so as long as you delay updates to windows10, 11 or whatever until you have confirmation it won't break WMR, you should be good to go.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Joch1955

[Nightdare]

I certainly hope to get a few more years out of my G2

[Fisherman82]

How nice it would be if Microsoft would just put the final version of WMR available for download on their website like they have .Net frameworks ans stuff for people still using "legacy" WMR headsets the day its removed from Windows and the Windows store. Could not be a big thing for them.

[RealDCSpilot]

On 12/30/2023 at 1:22 PM, Buzzer1977 said:

People just want to use their VR headset.

Then it's time to go out on the streets and cry "Make WMR Great Again" ...