Microsoft Just Lost the Augmented Reality Wave (Premium)

Apple's long-anticipated move into Augmented Reality (AR) has delivered a decisive death blow to HoloLens and the Windows Mixed Reality platform. It's over, folks.

And that is too bad on a number of levels. The biggest being that Microsoft was on the forefront of this breakthrough and moved quickly to push a research project out the door in order to reestablish itself as an innovator. But the firm has also bungled its AR product offerings from the beginning, forever squandering its first-mover advantages.

Even Microsoft's most ardent supporters won't be able to argue this point: HoloLens, as originally conceived, is an inexplicably expensive standalone device with limited battery and processing power, a new platform that cannot leverage Microsoft's successes with Windows on the PC. What HoloLens should have been is half the cost, and tethered to the expensive PC that developers already own. Because, after all, you're not walking out into the world with it anyway. You are, in fact, tethered. To a location. Typically a special room.

Creating a platform from this standalone device was smart, of course, even given that first mistake. But Windows Mixed Reality, as this platform is now called, does not bring HoloLens to the PC. It brings virtual reality (VR) to the PC, and the coming headsets that device makers will create will include a single innovation that debuted first on HoloLens: The ability to "sense" the room around the user without requiring additional hardware sensors. That's a step forward for sure. But it's also not going to move the needle on VR adoption on the PC.

But these issues pale in comparison to one simple truth: AR makes the most sense is out in the real world. And other companies, like Google and Apple, already make the popular mobile platforms found in our smartphones ... that we take out into the real world every day. So they are able to leverage this success to drive AR adoption and usage. And do so in a way that will be more desirable to actual users.

Google was first out of the gate with something called Project Tango. But like Microsoft, they bungled the delivery of this technology: Project Tango requires special hardware, and so device makers need to specifically design phones for this purpose. The first such device, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, has not sold well. (Google doesn't even add Tango capabilities to its own phones, which is rather astonishing as well.)

Apple, meanwhile, has been hinting about its AR ambitions for the past year. And while the notion of Apple suddenly dominating a market that was pioneered by others seems a bit far-fetched, it shouldn't. Because, as the company pointed out this week during its WWDC keynote, Apple has a key advantage over Microsoft, Google, and other AR wannabes.

"When you bring the software together with these devices, we actually have hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads that are going to be capable of AR," Apple's affable Craig Federighi said duri...

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