Phil Spencer isn't ready to say for sure whether or not VR will be coming to their new console Project Scorpio. The Microsoft boss talked with Stevivor and said he wants the technology to be more than just "demos and experiments". Spencer talked about how there are certainly some cool things to do on VR currently, and that he owned an Oculus and HTC Vive, but that he was wary after the failed Kinect...
Kinect turned into the Dance Central box...It was a great franchise...It didn’t map to controller in any way. In fact, in some of our early Kinect games — and I’m not trying to draw any analogy between the two things [Kinect and VR] other than just from a creative process – we’d actually call some Kinect games ‘mimic games’ because of what they would do."
“If I put my hand out here, that’s the A button, this is the X button. Really, they were just turning your body into a kind of pass-through to the controls. Those didn’t work. Those weren’t good Kinect games. Things like Dance Central where it just said, ‘see something, do something and the game reacts’, those were what turned into the right Kinect games. They didn’t have a map to what happened in the kind of traditional controller-based games and I think VR will be the same.”
Spencer adds that he doesn't appreciate the "tethered" nature of VR headsets, and states that a mainstream audience will not purchase a device that keeps them tied to a box...
“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."
It's hard to really classify Hololens as VR from what I've seen, however, as every tech with it primarily looks AR. Spencer has been known to say one thing and then do the other so take his words as you will. It is interesting to see where his head is at though when it comes to the future of VR and Xbox.
