In December 2023 Microsoft announced that Windows Mixed Reality has been deprecated and will be removed from Windows 11 24H2. This did not come as a surprise, as the platform hasn't seen any investment in years. But it does mean my HP WMR headset will officially become a paperweight later this year.

This is fine by me, because my headset has pretty much been a paperweight since I damaged its cord. I tried fixing it and was seemingly successful, but there was a chance my fix is flawed. An errant pin could potentially ruin an expensive video card so I never really put the headset back into use. It is old anyway, lacking features of newer headsets. Heck, it was old and out of date when I got it! At that time, WMR was already... not a resounding success... and my local Best Buy decided to clear out their slow-moving inventory with heavy discounts.

What could I do with it now? There was never any compelling WMR exclusive experience for me, so I don't have anything to revisit before it's gone. And since I've upgrade to a Valve Index headset, that gives me a superior experience for everything in SteamVR. I guess I could use the deprecated WMR headset for experiments that I don't want to risk on my expensive Valve Index, but I don't have any project ideas along that direction. There's no particular reason to hang on to it "just in case" an idea comes up because (1) it'll stop working by the end of the year, and (2) if I want VR experiments with an affordable headset, I have to option to go pick up a Meta Quest 2. Which is not only affordable, but would let me explore untethered VR as well as opening the door to Quest exclusive experiences.

During my long inkjet teardown/Dell XPS debugging saga, I would frequently think about what I could do with this obsolete WMR headset. After a few months of not coming up with anything interesting, I will proceed with the ultimate fallback option: it is teardown time!