This is a semi-regular update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.
Current book word count: 182,682
Writing
As you might have peeked, the early drafts of my book on the history of the metaverse and virtual worlds had a chapter on Microsoft HoloLens. And why not – it’s easily one of the most influential Mixed Reality platforms of all time.
But when I gave the book to my technical editor, James, he noted that the chapter was gone. He very politely added a comment, which essentially amounted to: “Dude, wtf?!”
My reply was a cheap excuse. For a while I worked at Microsoft around the Mixed Reality platform and was, for a brief moment, tented – meaning that I had access to internal material about it. And it doesn’t really matter how short you are in this inner circle, once you are in, you have access to pretty much everything. My argument was simple: if anything I said could be interpreted as insider knowledge, I’d open myself to a breach of NDA lawsuit. With Microsoft. That’s not on my bucket list.
But that isn’t really that good of an excuse. All I’d need to do is only summarize public information and provide sources for every statement – which is something I’m doing for the book anyway. So, what gives?
I guess the truth is that I’m not really over it. See, I really liked working with the thing and on the thing. I ran head on into full cognitive dissonance that this was the platform of the future, while it obviously didn’t reach the distribution to warrant that assessment. Yet, even in hindsight there was so much right about our ideas, assumptions, approaches, concepts and implementations. While it wasn’t the platform of a Mixed Reality future, HoloLens can be considered a foundation for one.
So, I finally started the chapter on HoloLens. Because it is an important part of history. And for me, an opportunity to finally recognize it as something of the past that belongs into a history book.
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