Microsoft Axes Social VR Platform ‘AltspaceVR’ Amid Wide-reaching Layoffs - Road to VR

Microsoft is laying disconnected 10,000 employees, and with it the institution is axing its societal VR platform AltspaceVR.

We’ve written astir the decease of AltspaceVR once before. In the summertime of 2017, the institution announced it was shuttering the societal VR platform due to deficiency of funds. In a Hail Mary that fewer expected, Microsoft turned astir and snapped up the ailing level lone 2 months aft the planned shut-down date.

It seemed, astatine slightest for then, that AltspaceVR would unrecorded connected to vie successful the rapidly diversifying societal VR landscape, existing alongside VR Chat, Rec Room, and Horizon Worlds.

Microsoft says it’s shutting down AltspaceVR on March 10th, 2023, and shifting its absorption “to enactment immersive experiences powered by Microsoft Mesh,” the institution says successful a statement.

Mesh is the company’s bundle instauration for gathering multi-user XR applications. Announced successful 2021, the instrumentality gives developers a model for connecting users into shared instances which enactment spatial dependable communication, cloud-based plus management, persistent scenes, and a communal avatar system.

“The determination has not been an casual 1 arsenic this is simply a level galore person travel to love, providing a spot for radical to research their identities, explicit themselves, and find community,” the AltspaceVR squad writes. “It has been a privilege to assistance unlock passions among users, from acquisition opportunities for idiosyncratic maturation to the improvement of unsocial and fantastic events, groundbreaking art, and immersive experiences — enabling this assemblage to execute more. With Mesh, we aspire to physique a level that offers the widest accidental to each involved, including creators, partners and customers.”

Microsoft’s astir caller circular of layoffs are said to impact astir 5% of its wide workforce. In a missive to employees, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella notes “changes to our hardware portfolio”; reports from Bloomberg maintain the company’s Xbox games teams are besides affected, including Bethesda Game Studios (‘The Elder Scrolls’ series) and 343 Industries (Halo).