Enlarge / Surprise! Microsoft has its own VR controller. (credit: Microsoft)
Thursday’s Microsoft Build keynote included a repeated call from Technical Fellow Alex Kipman about the importance of mixed reality (meaning, virtual reality headsets and their “augmented” reality siblings like Hololens). This platform will drive “the future of computing,” he said, and he repeated Microsoft’s call to ushering the MR era on a wide scale: by offering people a reasonably priced, low-fuss path to trying it out.
The company’s latest call echoes what it has already said about this platform, known as Windows Holographic: a bunch of headsets made by third-party vendors, starting at $ 299. Today’s announcement confirmed the first Windows Holographic bundle with a unique controller. This $ 399 bundle will launch “this fall” and will include a headset made by Acer and a pair of “VR motion controllers” made by Microsoft.
Just from the reveal, we can already determine a few things: that the controllers could be really damned cool, but that they could also be rendered irrelevant before their “fall” launch by at least one other intriguing piece of hardware.
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