In late 2024 Microsoft removed support for WMR (Windows Mixed Reality), and they didn’t just cease development. As of Windows 11 version 24H2, headsets like the HP Reverb and others by Acer, Samsung, Lenovo, and Dell stopped working at all. But the good news is developer [Matthieu Bucchianeri] created the Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality which allows WMR headsets (and their controllers) to work again.
Oasis is available as a free download from Steam and involves a few specific setup steps in order to get working, but once the headset and controllers are unlocked and room setup is complete, the hardware will be usable again. Note that while SteamVR is handy, one’s headset and controllers are not actually tied to SteamVR. Any VR application that uses OpenVR or OpenXR should work.
It’s an extremely well-documented project, and anyone willing to read and follow a short list of directions should be off to the races in no time.
Now that there’s a way for folks to dust off their WMR hardware and get back in the game, it’s a good time to mention that if you have ever suffered from VR sickness, we’ve covered ways to help deal with and adapt to it.
I dislike that all HMDs basically live in these walled gardens software-wise, and thus they are easily orphaned and become useless if a company decides to abandon the walled garden interface, which of course they love to do. At least until some heroic individual comes along with an open-source solution, such as the one mentioned above.
If you have an HDMI monitor from some brand or another, you just plug it into the HDMI and it works. It’s a monitor. It doesn’t have a software portal like Meta or all the others which you have to start up so that the computer can talk to the headset display and display stuff on it. The drivers are generic.
For controllers and position feedback, stuff like USB HID doesn’t care about what kind of device you plug into the other side (obviously with some edge cases and exceptions), it just works. It talks to the OS. You (usually) don’t have to have a special Logitech™ walled garden software experience package requiring an account login to Zuckerface.com™ necessary to plug in and use your mouse.
Relics of a lost business model and design philosophy. I think that whoever does away with this and makes a more “universal” HMD will go a long way towards making them more commonplace instead of this niche consumer gimmick which people play with for a couple weeks and then toss in the closet.
This is exactly what stopped me from buying when I wanted to watch Ready Player One. Proprietary nonsense and Zuckerbollox made me put my wallet away.
Not really my research into ’em (looking to upgrade when funds allow from a Vive) says most designed as PC headsets will just work with OpenXR or SteamVR runtimes, some even come with open frameworks for everything else it might have. There might be some walled garden on many of them still around these more peripheral of the functions, but they do work at least.
There are some terrible options on that score, that unfortunately tend to be the cheapest to the performance they provide. But if you really want HMD there do seem to be many really great options that are not pure crap in the software wise, you just have to open your wallet probably a fair bit deeper than Zuckerface.com’s offerings.
We need laws that compel companies to release their code into the open source world when they abandon a product.
This.
Huh, MS just pulling drivers off of existing PC’s?
do they think they own those computers?
They own Windows. You just have a license to use it.
That’s the fun part.. They do!
Eventually we need to do something about the hundreds of terms of service agreements everyone agrees to each year which take a year and a half to read and require a PhD in theoretical frontier law to understand
This was the last straw for me. I switched to Linux when my Acer mixed reality headset stopped working after the windows update.
How well does it work in Linux?
Can’t speak to the Acer in particular, but VR in Linux should be for most HAD readers pretty easy to get working if you get a HMD that isn’t one of the crap ones – as long as it just supports OpenXR/SteamVR you’ll quite possibly have an entirely Linux related tinkering free experience on par or better than Windows gave last time I used VR that way…
The only downside I’ve found to it is my expectations have grown beyond the HMD I owns ability to render details – its only a Vive, and this many years of having it so the wow factor of stereo vision and moving your head freely has gone working flawlessly just isn’t enough. I was playing with OpenXRDesktop I believe it called, that lets you use the HMD as a desktop space and it seemed superb from a practicality POV – way more screen real estate in easy reference than even the best monitor arrangements can handle, but that rather falls flat if your email has to poster font sized to actually render legibly.
Works great with my G2