Although it seems that all Microsoft’s efforts are focused on augmented reality with HoloLens, the R&D section is preparing Irides, a very low latency wireless HMD.
For Microsoft, the main challenge of virtual reality will be to offer quality, speed of response and mobility, all at the same time, and the Irides Project meets those three conditions. Irides uses Kahawai streaming technology, which offloads some of the work from the integrated GPU making it processed in the cloud, to return it in the form of streaming with a higher quality. Thanks to foveated rendering, Iride employs more quality at the exact point the user is looking at.
Microsoft has done some tests with Doom 3, and those who have tried it have noticed a big difference compared to other existing virtual reality solutions (we understand that they refer to Oculus) in terms of overall experience quality and latency. In any case, the future of Irides is unclear, since this is a research project and it is possible that Microsoft will integrate Irides technology into HoloLens instead of creating a virtual reality viewer. Time will tell.
