Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One successor, currently going by the codename Project Scorpio, has a lot of hype surrounding it where both consumers and the press are concerned. It’s going to be significantly more powerful than the original Xbox One and Xbox One S, will support all Xbox One games, and will also run the exciting future VR titles that have only now been demoed. By all accounts, it’s expected to do rather well when it launches but one thing could hold it back; it’s price.

The director of digital media strategies at Strategy Analytics, Michael Goodman, recently spoke about Project Scorpio’s launch and how Sony’s rival console, the PlayStation 4 Pro, if priced cheaper, could affect it.

“When they release [Project Scorpio], I’m sure there will be some warts you can pick on. Right now they have this specter of a console coming out, where we only know a small piece of what Microsoft has told us, but that piece is darn good. If they told us the system was going to cost $700, then Sony could do something to market against that. There’s a lower cost alternative, but that’s not the case,” Goodman states. “The only thing I can see [Microsoft] doing wrong is the price point. I don’t see them going down the DRM route. They usually don’t make the same mistake twice. They find new ones to make, they’re good at that, but they don’t make the same mistake twice. Whatever potholes they stepped into the first time, I don’t think they’re going to do that again. The only thing they could do is price themselves out of the market. [Microsoft] doesn’t have to announce that for quite some time.”

Do you think Project Scorpio end up being cheaper than the PlayStation 4 Pro? Does price even matter to you? Let us know in the comments below.

The Surface Pro 4 comes with its fair share of mobile benefits such as a lightweight tablet form factor, a detachable keyboard that doubles as a screen cover and full Windows 10 functionality on the go, but the device also comes with a steep price tag for some.

Fortunately, other PC OEMs have taken up the budget friendly mantle, and 2-in-1 fans can now look forward to the Eve V Windows 10 device. PC manufacturer Eve has taken to the crowdsourced method of not only drumming up interest in its Eve V 2-in-1 but funding development.

Unfortunately, crowdsourcing development funds tends to lead to uncertain schedules and the Eve V has suffered a couple of release setbacks.

However, according to a newly released spec sheet, the wait may be worth it for customers wanting more options than just the Microsoft Surface Pro 4.

The Eve V reportedly will release with a 12.3-inch display with a 3:2 aspect ratio packing 2735 x 1824 resolution. Adding to the impressive screen specs is a special anti-reflective coating for what Eve is calling a panel with great color reproduction.

In addition to the great screen, the Eve V will also include a pen that Eve claims is on par with Surface Pen by obeying the N-TRIG protocol of the Surface Pen and work with the Eve 5 as well.

The Pen

As far as security goes, the Eve V will also pack a fingerprint sensor on the home button for better Windows Hello integration.

Lastly, the Eve V looks to come in two variants that include one with LTE antennas.

The Eve V is scheduled to hit Indiegogo later this November with coming weeks revealing, even more, details about this new 2-in-1

Taking a cursory glance at the new Surface Studio and MacBook Pro videos, it’s easy to see a similar design focus in the production for both but behind the scenes lay a bit more nuanced story as to how Apple and Microsoft put together their new product reveals.

Fortunately, Sean Brown, the president of Motorized Precision was more than happy to share its collaborative production process with Microsoft, and it’s pretty creative one at that. Thanks to an in-depth report from TheBeat, Microsoft enthusiast find out that the company used a robot and Xbox controller to bring the Surface Studio to life.

Similar to the big budget Marvel comic movies, Microsoft utilized a mesh of CG renders and practical effects to present a larger than life vision of the Surface Studio. While the names of many motion and visual designers get a tertiary mention at the end of the report, the Motorized Precision KIRA arm stole the show.

KIRA is one of the latest in robotic camera arms. We first covered KIRA after its big splash at NAB 2016. The rig has a maximum height of 9 ft and can extend to 5.63 ft, weighing 570 lb — and the baseplate alone weighs in at a whopping 3400 lb. The KIRA has a maximum camera payload of 40 lbs and can move 3.2 ft in 0.5 seconds.

According to Michael Maher who reached out to Brown about the Surface Studio production video, Microsoft reached out to Motorized Precision to create rig the shots for its launch video. The Surface Studio video was filmed at Cinerent West in Portland, Oregon by a KIRA loaded with a Red Epic Dragon and Canon 15.5-47 mm lens.

To get precise movement and tracking, “the Microsoft Surface team had a series of pre-viz shots created in Cinema4D and Maya — which helped guide and program the KIRA’s motion control movements.”

Adding further merit to the viability of Microsoft’s hardware and software in the creative sphere, Motorized Precision also used its MP Studio app on the Surface Studio in conjunction with an Xbox One Elite controller to manipulate the KIRA.

When we push left on the left joystick the robot moves left and when we push left on the right joystick it pans left etc. We made it so simple and intuitive to control that we were able to focus on the creative and not worry about the technology.

When Maher asked Brown point blank what he thought of the Surface Studio, his answered mirrored what Microsoft hoped would be the case for its new All-in-One device.

I love the Microsoft Surface Studio from a KIRA control standpoint. We developed MP Studio originally as a touch app. On the Surface Studio I was finally able to see that app come to life with Touch Control that made sense! So I was very impressed by the product.  The Dial on set was controlling some amazing color wheels inside some of the apps used in the launch video and it was very impressive to see all the different functionality they were able to get from such a simple device.

Beyond delivering a stunning reveal video, Microsoft managed to test drive its Surface Studio with the exact creative culture it’s designed to entice, and it’s proving to be a viable option.

Microsoft Translator, the company’s automatic translation technology, has become ubiquitous today. The service is available as a dedicated app on iOS, Android, and Windows 10 devices (there is also an Edge extension for Windows 10 PCs), but it also powers translations in other apps and services including Office, Bing, and Skype.

On mobile devices, one of the most impressive features of the Microsoft Translator app is its ability to translate conversations involving two speakers in real-time. However, according to a new report from ZDNet the company is currently working on a new mobile app that will offer live translation of multi-lingual conversations between a group of speakers.

The company demoed a prototype of this app today at the Microsoft Future Decoded event in London. The demo featured three people speaking a different language (French, English, and German) and getting real-time translations of what the others were saying in written text through the app running on a phone. According to the report, the speech recognition wasn’t 100% accurate during the demo but that is too be expected in such environments.

The company said during the event that it is currently working to support translations between nine spoken languages as well as text translations for 60 languages. A preview of the service is expected to be available on mobile devices and web browsers by the end of the year, we’ll let you know as soon as we learn more about it.

Xbox’s Major Nelson just tweeted out some news which many Xbox fans have been waiting for. Blue Dragon has finally been added to the Xbox One Backward Compatibility catalog.

Blue Dragon is coming to Xbox One Backward Compatibility today https://t.co/qPMRNrLoTQ pic.twitter.com/4YG2OxHjji

— Larry Hryb ????????☁ (@majornelson) November 1, 2016

Blue Dragon is currently supported via Backward Compatibility as disc only, but as per a tweet from Aaron Greenberg, the title has long been requested to enter the catalog by Xbox fans. The game itself is is a role-playing title developed by Mistwalker and Artoon and published by Microsoft Game Studios.

Blue Dragon is loosely based on a design by Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, who also supervised development and wrote the plot of the game.

Are you looking forward to playing this game on your Xbox One? Let us know what you think by dropping us your thoughts in the comments section below!

Just a few months after Microsoft celebrated the first anniversary of its latest operating system with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the company has finally stopped selling Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 licenses to PC OEMs as of yesterday, October 31 (via VentureBeat). While some retailers may still have stock of these old machines, Windows 10 has now become the only way to go for PC manufacturers.

As a reminder, Microsoft already stopped selling Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 licenses to consumers back in October 2013 and September 2015, respectively:

For consumers, this doesn’t change much as Windows 10 has been adopted pretty quickly by most PC OEMs since its initial release in July 2015. Actually, PC OEMs had good incentives to do so as old versions of Windows have limited support when running on newer processors and chipsets from Intel, AMD, NVidia and more. For the most part, PC OEMs seem to be happy with the versatility of Windows 10, with Dell sharing earlier this year that Windows 10 2-in-1 devices were the future of computing.

If you’re still running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 on your PC though, you should be aware that mainstream support for the former already ended in on January 13, 2015. Now in Extended Support, Windows 7 is only receiving security updates and will continue to do so until January 14, 2020. For Windows 8.1 users, Mainstream support will end on January 9, 2018.

According to Microsoft, there are already 400 million devices running Windows 10 in 192 countries across the world. As PC sales have been decreasing over the last few years, the company couldn’t have achieved this momentum without its year-long free upgrade offer to Windows 10 for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs. However, the company did acknowledge earlier this year that it wouldn’t meet its ambitious goal to have 1 billion devices running Windows 10 by 2018.

Back in March 2015, Microsoft’s Surface 3 was the second third-generation Surface device to be released by the company after the well-received Surface Pro 3 in summer 2014. At the time, both devices had successfully iterated on the hybrid Windows device concept that Microsoft pioneered back in 2012, with the Surface 3 moving away from the Windows RT operating system that prevented previous versions to run full Win32 apps.

While the Surface 3 remains the most affordable Surface model as of today, the product is clearly on its way out as Microsoft warned earlier in June that it would cease production by the end of December 2016. And now it looks that Microsoft won’t release a successor to the 10-inch 2-in-1 device as the company only announced new Surface Book models and a new Surface Studio all-in-one PC during its Windows 10 event in New York last week.

In the meantime, you may wonder if the Surface 3 is still widely available just a few weeks before Microsoft finally stops manufacturing them. According to a new report from Neowin, it turns out that stocks are already dwindling fast in most markets:

• In the US, all Surface 3 models are currently out of stock on the Microsoft Store, though you can still find some on Amazon (some refurbished) and Best Buy.
• In the UK, the Microsoft Store is also completely out of stock while Amazon is still selling a model with 64GB of storage, 2 gigs of RAM and 4G connectivity for £519.99 (two other models are available through third-party retailers).
• In Australia, the Microsoft Store still has stock of one model with 64GB of storage, 4 gigs of RAM and 4G connectivity for AUS$929 while Amazon doesn’t sell Surface devices in the country.

Considering that many PC manufacturers are now selling affordable 2-in-1 devices, it probably makes sense for Microsoft to focus on its more premium offerings. Indeed, while the company doesn’t disclose it Surface sales, we previously noted that Microsoft has been consistently hinting during its quarterly earning statements that sales of the Surface line have been actually driven by the Surface Pro and the Surface book.

If you’re currently in the market for a good 10-inch Windows tablet, the Surface 3 is still highly recommended, though we definitely recommend you to get the version with 4 gigs of RAM. However, you better hurry up to get one before it finally becomes out of stock.

Minecraft: Education Edition is finally available to everyone. The school use of the popular sandbox has become increasing more popular, now more than ever as the educational version finally releases to the general public. In this version, educators can download lesson plans and tools through a Minecraft Mentors program. The gallery has subjects such as geometry, geography, history, and more to peruse with clearly identifiable tags for age group and topic.

Until now, the preview version of Minecraft: Education Edition had most of the features, but the full version includes the anticipated Classroom Mode. This lets the teacher edit world settings, communicate with students easier, give items, and teleport. Basically, it’s an easy to use admin console that displays a map view, lists the students and users, and provides multiple management settings that educators will find useful.

Over 50,000 students and administrators assisted in creating the M:EE and it’s now culminated with an impressive reach of 11 languages and 50 countries globally.Minecraft: Education Edition is available for purchase for only $5 per user annually. Schools that have an education volume licensing discount can also access the edition.

If you’re an educator, administrator, or student directed to download M:EE then you can get started by visiting their web page.

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Minecraft Education

Developer:
Microsoft Studios

Price:
Free

Yesterday, Google published a new blog post on its Security blog to warn Windows users about a critical vulnerability in Windows that hasn’t been addressed by Microsoft seven days after having reported it to the company. According to the Alphabet subsidiary, the 0-day vulnerability is “particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited.” The company provided the following technical details below:

The Windows vulnerability is a local privilege escalation in the Windows kernel that can be used as a security sandbox escape. It can be triggered via the win32k.sys system call NtSetWindowLongPtr() for the index GWLP_ID on a window handle with GWL_STYLE set to WS_CHILD. Chrome’s sandbox blocks win32k.sys system calls using the Win32k lockdown mitigation on Windows 10, which prevents exploitation of this sandbox escape vulnerability.

In the same blog post, Google also mentioned another 0-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player that has already been addressed by the company through new updates via Adobe’s updater and Chrome auto-update. Since Google published its new policy for actively exploited critical vulnerabilities three years ago, the company’s new security stance is to disclose unpatched vulnerabilities if affected vendors don’t provide a fix seven days after being notified about them by Google security researchers.

It’s actually not the first time that Google publicizes a flaw in Windows, as the company did so in January 2015 for an exploit that allowed attackers to run arbitrary code with elevated privileges (Microsoft patched it a few days later when Patch Tuesday arrived). But nearly two years after this event, it seems that Microsoft is still not a fan of Google’s security practices, according to this statement released to VentureBeat yesterday:

We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today’s disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk. Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. We recommend customers use Windows 10 and the Microsoft Edge browser for the best protection.

As Microsoft didn’t really acknowledge the security flaw in this statement, it’s not clear if the company is already working on a fix though we hope it is. Recommending users to use Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge for best protection also doesn’t really cut it if this flaw is already being exploited. Instead, Google is recommending Windows 10 users use Chrome on Windows 10 which according to Google “prevents exploitation of this sandbox escape vulnerability.”

With Patch Tuesday only a week a way, we’ll see if Microsoft address this security issue as soon as possible or stick to its usual schedule. While Google may legitimately think that 0-day vulnerabilities should be addressed by companies in seven days, pushing companies to rush these sort security fixes could also in some cases do more harm than good. Sound off in the comments if you think Google did the good thing by disclosing details about this new security flaw in Windows.

Microsoft’s Xbox One console has outsold Sony’s PlayStation 4 during the month of October in the U.K.. According to a report on Gamesindustry.biz, the Xbox One outsold the PlayStation 4 in September by only 1,500 units but in October the gap had widened to 25,000. Overall, the Xbox One accounted for 54% of video game console sales in the U.K. in October compared to PlayStation 4’s 42% and Nintendo’s WiiU with just 2%.

Xbox UK marketing director Harvey Eagle was grateful for the success and thanked customers in a statement which said, “Thanks to our fans, Xbox One was the best-selling console in October, the second month in a row in the UK, according to GfK Entertainment. It’s great to see such enthusiasm for the new Xbox One S range of consoles including FIFA 17, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 1 and now – for the first time – Minecraft. All of which are available to purchase now.”

One of the reasons for the continued growth in Xbox One sales is partially due to the release of the newer Xbox One S model which sports a 4K Blu-ray drive, making it one of the cheapest options on the market for shoppers after a 4K media player. “It’s great to see how popular both the Xbox One S and the FIFA 17 Xbox One S consoles are with fans, not just over the last week but since the Xbox One S was released in August,” Eagle said back in September. “4K video streaming and 4K UHD Blu-ray have been extremely well received and we believe there is no better value right now for those looking to upgrade their console.”

Do you think the Xbox One will continue to see success in the following months? Share your predictions with the community in the comments below.

The official Windows 10 Fitbit app has just updated with added support for Microsoft’s Xbox One video game console. The app has been released in the Universal Windows Platform app format for a while now but has been restricted to functionality on Windows 10 devices, such as the Surface Pro, and smartphones running Windows 10 Mobile. This Xbox One app is essentially the same app on Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile and runs on the same code. Due to this, the app’s appearance on the console looks identical to that seen on Windows 10 PCs with the only difference being its inability to sync to Fitbit devices, most likely due to the hardware limitations of the Xbox One hardware.

With the inability to sync to Fitbit devices, the Xbox One Fitbit app’s main purpose is to check data and leaderboards after a device has synced to the cloud via another connected device. Users with the app already installed on other devices should find it in the Ready to Install section of their Xbox One while everyone else can grab it in the Apps section of the Store on the console.

Do you have the Fitbit app installed on your Xbox One? Let us know what you think about it in the comments below.

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Fitbit

Developer:
Fitbit

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As the end of October ticks away, the Office 365 security and compliance team have thoughtfully rounded up all the security related updates that landed for the software suite in the past thirty-one days.

For those in the IT field looking to push out updates to networks but wondering what’s ben included, Microsoft’s month-end summaries come as  a godsend for many.

New updates security and compliance updates for October include:

Applying intelligence to security and compliance in Office 365—To stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape, companies need the ability to analyze and learn from that data to identify, intercept and respond to threats. Office 365 provides unmatched security intelligence to help customers protect, detect and respond to threats. Read about the new security and compliance capabilities of Office 365 that were announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference.

The Office Team has announced today that it’s introducing enhanced control over Office 365 third-party apps to help companies better manage what kind of apps employees are allowed to use. This new feature will be a part of Office 365 Advanced Security Management, providing IT admins the ability to approve or revoke apps’ access to Office 365.

As the company explains in the blog post, many companies using Office 365 today allow employees to install any third-party Office 365 app without any IT intervention, which can be problematic if these users don’t make sure that the apps they use comply with their organization policies.

However, app permissions will now “provide information to IT about which applications in their network have access to Office 365 data, what permissions they have and which users granted these apps access to their Office 365 accounts,” explains the blog post.

Following an examination, IT admins will be able to revoke permissions to non-compliant apps which will prevent them from accessing employees’ data in Office 365. Additionally, the new feature allows IT admins to notify users that the Office 365 third-party apps they have installed will be banned. To get more information on this new feature, we invite you to watch this Ignite 2016 session below:

If your company uses Office 365, let us know in the comments what do you think of this new app permissions system.

Microsoft is always looking to offer gamers new ways of buying their favorite Xbox game titles. Available through select carriers, Microsoft offers mobile Operator Billing (OB) on Xbox to make buying your favorite Xbox game easier than ever.

OB is fast becoming one of the most popular and preferred payment methods worldwide because you don’t need a credit card to pay, all you need is your phone number. By using OB, Xbox gamers use their phone number to pay for games, movies, TV shows, and much more on Xbox Live and have the charges added to their monthly phone bill. Adding your cell phone number to your Microsoft account can add a new convenient way to pay for all things Xbox.

Xbox gamers can access OB via the Xbox App on Windows 10 devices, Android, and iOS smartphones, depending on location. Xbox gamers on the following mobile operators can use OB today in the Xbox Store on Xbox One:

• Beeline Russia
• DNA Finland
• Elisa Finland
• O2 Germany
• O2 UK
• Swisscom Switzerland
• Telenor Hungary
• Telenor Norway
• Telenor Sweden

If you don’t see your OB service provider listed, don’t worry – Microsoft is adding more OB partners soon. If you are already a customer of one of the above-mentioned mobile operators, Microsoft adds a new simple way set up OB:

“Just find a game you’d like to purchase, select “Buy,” choose “Add a new payment method’ on the payment screen, and select “Mobile phone.” Next, pick your mobile operator and enter your phone number to receive a verification code. When you receive the code, simply enter it on your Xbox and you’re done!”

Currently, OB is not yet available in the US, but may be an option sometime in the future. Would you like to be able to purchase Xbox games, movies, and more using your cell phone number? Let us know in the comments.

Microsoft Azure Government is continuing to expand and now has documentation support on the official site. According to an Azure blog post released today, users can now go onto the Azure web page and search through topics of solutions and information that are readily accessible. Furthermore, it gives quite an interesting look into how the Department of Defense could use Azure to regulate safety.

Azure Government is the cloud solution specific to satisfying government regulations. The company boasts that it has unmatched security and that the cloud service has recently obtained higher clearance to the Department of Defense data than any other commercial cloud provider. “Not all clouds are created equal,” the Redmond giant declared two weeks ago in their Azure Government highlight blog.

The new documentation is also a surefire way to stay up to date with all of the preview releases and future features. There are over twenty-three documentations for you to peruse. Take a look over on the Azure webpage and just click the Documentation tabs to select Azure Government from the list.

In a blog post on Microsoft Azure, Kushagra Vaid, GM of Azure Hardware Infrastructure, announced he would be speaking at Zettastructure: The European Digital Infrastructure Summit hosted by Datacenter Dynamics in London.

Tomorrow, Vaid will announce Project Olympus, Microsoft’s next generation hyperscale cloud hardware design in collaboration with the Open Compute Project (OCP). Project Olympus will offer a new model for open source hardware development with the OCP community.

In 2014, Microsoft joined OCP in an effort to reimagine its Azure cloud hardware through the open source community. Initially, Microsoft shared Azure server and datacenter designs and offered Azure’s software-defined networking (SDN) principles. Microsoft learned a number of important things through its collaboration with OCP and the open source community.

One such important thing is that open source hardware development is not being developed at the same pace as open source software. With the current process for open hardware development, the designs that are offered are almost 100% complete and ready for production. This process limits interactive community engagement and adoption and slows down cloud hardware deployment.

In order to address these issues, Microsoft collaborated with OCP to introduce a new hardware development protocol allowing for more community-based open collaboration. Project Olympus offers this new open source collaboration approach that is used for software development and applies it to developing cloud hardware.

Project Olympus introduces cloud hardware designs to the OCP community that are about 50% complete. By sharing designs that are in the early stages of development, Project Olympus allows  the community to contribute by downloading and modifying the hardware design just like open source software. Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer, Open Compute Project Foundation commends Microsoft for Project Olympus, saying:

“Microsoft is opening the door to a new era of open source hardware development. Project Olympus, the re-imagined collaboration model and the way they’re bringing it to market, is unprecedented in the history of OCP and open source datacenter hardware.”

Here’s a look at what Microsoft’s Project Olympus will contribute; a new universal motherboard, high-availability power supply with included batteries, 1U/2U server chassis, high-density storage expansion, a new universal rack power distribution unit (PDU) for global datacenter interoperability, and a standards-compliant rack management card.

Head over to the OCP GitHub branch to check out the Project Olympus’ mechanical and power server chassis interfaces, the universal motherboard, and PDU (protocol data unit) specifications. Microsoft will open source the entire rack system in the next few weeks.

At the Zettastructure: The European Digital Infrastructure Summit in London, Microsoft will share more information on Project Olympus in a detailed keynote presentation, an OCP workshop session, and will have other Project Olympus hardware on display in the Microsoft booth. In addition to the OCP GitHub branch, there are other OCP resources available regarding Project Olympus, including the OCP Server Project Wiki, OCP Events and Meeting Calendar, and the OCP Server Project Mailing list.

Last week, Microsoft announced during its Windows 10 event in New York an upcoming portfolio of third-party VR headsets leveraging the built-in Windows Holographic shell in the Windows 10 Creators Update. Unlike Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed reality headset which is standalone device, this first wave of third-party VR headsets will need to be tethered to a Windows 10 PCs but with a starting price of $299, Microsoft’s partners are expected to give some good competition to rival solutions from Facebook and HTC.

As we reported last week, Microsoft is expected to provide more information on these third-party VR headsets at WinHEC in Shenzhen, China on December 8-9, which the company’s Executive Vice President of Windows and Devices Terry Myerson confirmed today in a new interview with ZDNet reporter Mary Jo Foley:

When we go to WinHEC, we’re really thinking how are we going to democratize this technology, how are we going to work with these partners to build devices that can reach all price points, that can reach everyone on the planet.

In the lengthy interview, Myerson goes on to explain that the purpose of Microsoft’s partnership with PC manufacturers HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and ASUS is not about “filling the ecosystem” with low cost VR solutions. According to him, Microsoft does expect from its partners premium VR products as well:

I don’t see it necessarily as filling in below. By building HoloLens, we were able to push ourselves as hard as we can to see, to go create, really we call it Windows Holographic, to go create that expression. That allows us now to then partner with HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS on how can we create expression of that for your gaming PCs, and that’s the accessories we showed today.

But I think if we hadn’t done HoloLens first, we wouldn’t have been able to do those partnerships as well. And I’m not ruling out the fact that one of those guys builds a $3,000 accessory, because I think we’ll see all kinds of creative expression in what they do. But by building Surface Studio we’re going to be able to have some really well-rounded partnerships and other people will express ideas.

While Myerson didn’t provide more details about the specs of these upcoming VR headsets, he did share that he expects them to “work super-well on most laptops.” However, the exec added that using these third-party headsets, which will have an opaque lens, should be quite different from the augmented reality experience provided by the company’s HoloLens headset (which has a translucent lens). To explain it, Myerson used an external monitor analogy:

One way you can think about these VR accessories is as an external monitor. It’s not technically accurate, but conceptually I think it works quite well. You put on the headset and you’re looking at another monitor. So it’s not a perfect technical analogy, because it lives now in the Holographic shell, so a shell from the desktop. But now I’ll be able to tap at this, so you get the shell and it’s the same shell we have in HoloLens. That comes up and HoloLens has a transparent or translucent lens, while these accessories we talked about today will have often opaque lens.

We use this term mixed reality to represent this spectrum of augmented reality to virtual reality and everything in-between. And in some ways the transparency of the lenses is the difference between augmented and virtual reality, but it’s the same volumetrics compute.

Overall, it seems that Microsoft will have some work to do to explain to consumers the differences between mixed reality and virtual reality. If the third-party VR headset market becomes fragmented between translucent lenses and opaque lenses, it looks that this still young market could become confusing pretty quickly. To add a bit more confusion, Microsoft patented earlier this year a new dimming module that could enable switching from a mixed-reality experience to a fully immersive VR experience, providing a “best of both worlds” solution. While WinHEC is only a few weeks away, we can’t wait to see how Microsoft and its partners will make their VR efforts more consumer-friendly.

A little more than a week ago, we reported that Microsoft had started removing apps and games that did not comply with the Windows Store’s new age rating policy. While it wasn’t yet clear how many non-compliant apps disappeared from the Store following this first wave of cleaning, a new report from Windows Blog Italia reveals that 90,291 apps have been removed from the Italian Windows Store between September 26th and October 19th (via Neowin).

According to the report, the number of Windows Phone apps available on the Italian Windows Store has gone from 329,507 to 239,216 following the purge which represents a 27% decrease. As a reminder, Microsoft still claims on this page that there are 669,000 available on its Windows Store though that number has not seen an update since at least a year (not all these apps are available in all markets).

For now, it’s still unclear how this new age rating policy is affecting the Windows Store globally and we have yet to learn about the removal of popular Windows Phone besides high profile voluntary departures from the likes of eBay or even Skype for Windows Phone 8.1 phones. However, the apps that have now been removed from the Windows Store should remain usable for consumers that have downloaded them prior to the cleaning. Additionally, developers can still resubmit their apps to Microsoft after completing an age rating questionnaire on the Dev Center though we doubt they’ll do it now after missing the September 30th deadline in the first place.

With all of the Surface and Windows 10 news swirling around, it’s too much for just written posts. Tonight we’ll have the first episode of our new podcast “Talk Microsoft.” We’ll be discussing all the biggest news from the recent Microsoft event and even chat some about the Apple event that followed it.

Hosting will be yours truly (Sean Michael), and a new but familiar co-host, popular YouTube celebrity and developer Sean Ong. Both of us will bring our personality and Microsoft related experience to the biggest tech news out of Redmond.

The show will be live on our YouTube channel at 11am PDT. We’ll base our podcast times on Pacific (Redmond) Time so make sure you know what time it’s on in your area. Daylight savings time starts at different times in the UK and US so make sure not to miss us. We’ll then post the podcast on the website in case you can’t tune in live or want to rewatch the show.

Editor’s note:  OnMSFT’s new website launches in one week, get hyped!

On November 2, 2016, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Office CVP Kirk Koenigsbauer will announce the new and big changes in the spirit of collaboration and on “empowering teams to achieve more” with Office 365. Right on the heels of the recent Microsoft Event in New York City, Microsoft will have another live stream event, this time discussing big changes coming to Office 365.

Set your calendars in Windows 10 for this big event, with an anticipated announcement on Microsoft Teams and more coming to Office 365 with the Windows 10 Creators Update.

We will be there to bring you all the news as it happens, so stay tuned.

A couple of days ago, a video was released with the Creators Update announcement that showed off the innovations of putting 3D at people’s fingertips.

The new announcement video follows the story of a young girl learning to cultivate at a young age to leading an urban farming reclamation initiative. But wait, we’ve heard about this before: the acting call for Microsoft’s top secret video we wrote about earlier this month. Well-known enthusiast WalkingCat had revealed on Twitter some of the scenes behind the video called Beihei Announcement Video.

During Microsoft’s New York event yesterday, all was revealed. With the use of Capture 3D app and the exciting Paint 3D that’s already available for Insiders, Microsoft is expecting to bring 3D capability across Office and even into reality.

Furthermore, towards the end of the video we see what is described in the script as a “large magic-windows type of device” that shows holographic augmented reality on the screen.

Walking Cat felt the need to point these out to us in another follow-up tweet.

https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/792015528667688960

The ‘magic-window’ doesn’t seem to be recognizable at this time of anything Microsoft has released so far. Perhaps we’ll be seeing more about it after the Windows 10 Creators Update is released in Spring 2017.