http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ex-mass-effect-director-joins-microsoft-for-holole/1100-6427417/

As weird as this is, it makes sense in a way. Hololens was originally conceived as an Xbox project before new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came into power and wanted it retooled as a productivity product. It seems they're going back to its roots. Maybe now when I'm talking to someone when I'm wearing Hololens, I'll get some dialogue options of what to say.

Weird! HoloLens seems way less suited to traditional games than a full VR headset, but maybe that's a good thing?

Wasnt he the guy that proclaimed that the new MMO Bioware were working on was gonna redefine games as we know them etc.. the one that got canned?

Umm...sure I guess?

Will it have an ending tho?

Yeah, Hololens will come in three variations: Red, blue, and green.

@danzig: the product will be available in three different colors oh god will these jokes ever end

Got my preorder.

That's not what I was expecting him to do but it's definitely an interesting move. If Microsoft can come up with neat game mechanics with this thing alongside the obvious non-gaming productivity stuff that people are actually going to buy this for, that would be pretty cool.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2!

Wow! I can't wait to experience the taupe ending in VR!

Sorry. I couldn't resist.

Seriously though. Hooray? I guess? Maybe? I have to admit, I'm sorta down on the whole VR-craze that's been passing through the industry lately. As someone who still remembers standing in line with his dad for like 3 hours to play a round of Dactyl Nightmare, and then being really excited when his best friend got a Virtual Boy, it's hard to escape the feeling that VR is a bit like the flu - some new strain of it comes around every 10-15 years or so and everyone freaks out, and then it turns out to be not such a big deal. Don't get me wrong, I think it'd be super cool if things like Oculus worked out, but its really hard not to be a cynical bastard about it at this point.

Virtual Reality: Video Games' Peripheral of the Future. Since 1991.

Ill avoid being snarky and say good for him. Seems like a more exciting and possibly lucrative venture than more vidjya games.

That is strange to hear.

Ten ways to save THOUSANDS on your insurance the government doesn't want you to know about!

She saw WHAT at the beach?

Casey Hudson chose to do WHAT?

Casey Hudson left Bioware quite some time ago. He also has a degree in engineering. He's also been with Bioware forever - with the EA purchase and the loss of the doctors, I'd imagine the company is not the same company he started working for when he graduated college.

If anything, it sounds like a more exciting project than Mass Effect FPS, energy based, multiplayer, freemium iOS game.

Well dang that's a bit weird. I wish em the best though!

Aw, I thought he was going to work on a free-to-play mobile game.

Hololens is the new Kinect, neat conceptually, but technically troubled and inevitably forgotten.

Today, we’re proud to announce that Casey Hudson has joined Microsoft in the role of Creative Director at Microsoft Studios, where he’s working on Microsoft HoloLens, Xbox, and other awesome projects.

So its not exclusively HoloLens, he will do Xbox things too.

technically troubled? I haven't ready any news about this, what exactly is going wrong with it?

The tech for hololens is apparently pretty solid. Only qualm I'm seen is that right now the view angle for the "holograms" is pretty narrow.

Still don't really see it as a gaming thing though. Makes more sense as a productivity/entertainment device.

AR is much harder to get right than VR and huge ass companies are struggling to get VR right. When you have to layer stuff on top of the real environment everything can go wrong really easily. You have much more variables that can just screw your AR experience. Making a game with that? Really don't know if they can do much better than those nintendo AR cards.

I shouldn't say that, I haven't heard anything particular bad about it, but keep in mind that for all the promises that are made with these things, they never come close to delivering. The dream is always beyond the tech we have at hand, remember when they showed the kinect scanning in household objects into your games? Or when microsoft thought that voice control would be the greatest thing to happen on the Xbone? The technical hurdles were too great to achieve those things either at all, or in a user friendly manner. We get stuck with overpriced novelty tech that doesn't do what you want, when you want. I just wonder why we should have faith that microsoft can pull off holographic displays after something like the kinect. I hope it does well for caseys' sake!

lul wut u guise didn't see this coming?!

Back in January MS unvielded Hololens and journalists got hands on time with it and said it was amazing and they couldn't believe this was actually real. Fast forward 3-4 months and MS are giving another demo at their annual BUILD conference, this time journalists are a lot less impressed, specifically that FoV is absolutely tiny. What a lot of articles are excluding from this is that the Hololens they used in January was huge and it even had things hanging down (Norm has spoken about this on Tested) and the newer version is much smaller, smaller than any VR headset. So I'm guessing that in MS's attempt to make the unit smaller, they've lost out on computing hardware and thus isn't able to give as much FoV as the previous headset. Reading some of the previews about it, I'd thought the product was out and available for me to buy. Just seems strange to me that this quite clearly prototype product is being harped out about one thing that could be fixed by release while the Apple Watch is getting a pass on being an ok product but more on the potential it has.

crazy how much money and resources all these big corporations are putting into something as unproven as VR, especially given how risk averse they usually seem to be

are you practicing writing headlines for Buzz feed?

Pretty sure he did not leave Bioware for this, I thought he left Bioware a while ago.

A) Don't write post titles like that, please

B) So wait, was Casey Hudson responsible for ME3's story or not? I thought he was the guy who wrote the first one and everyone thought had been martyred into an advisory role so that EA could rampage across the countryside of MEs 2 and 3 (or maybe just 3)?

@captainthunderpants: I edited your thread title per the Community Rules.

1. Vague thread titles: The reader should be able to tell what your topic is about without clicking on it. Topics with intentionally vague or misleading titles are subject to editing or deletion.

Last time I checked, we weren't on BuzzFeed. Let's try to keep it that way.