According to a series of tweets by Dirk Songür, the Studio Head of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Studios in Berlin, the studio will close at the end of the month, despite the fact that the team’s main project, the HoloLens 2, has not launched yet. It is unknown how this will affect its development or launch, but a Microsoft spokesperson had this to say when Th3rdEyeXR reached out to them for a comment:
“Microsoft made the decision to realign resources in the [Europe, Middle East, and Africa] region, resulting in the closure of the Mixed Reality Studio in Berlin at the end of this month. We remain fully committed to Mixed Reality as a company, and through our Microsoft Services studios in the UK and US will continue to innovate in this space to deliver great experiences to our customers around the globe – including incubating and evolving new services and delivery capabilities for our enterprise customers.”
– Microsoft spokesperson
We asked for clarification on whether or not this “realigning” means the former employees would be moved to other departments within Microsoft, but this spokesperson told us that they had no further details to share. We know that this decision was not due to creative differences among the team: Songür recommends his former teammates – producers, user experience (UX) designer, artists, and engineers – to anyone looking for mixed reality (MR) talent, “Microsoft internal or external.”
Songür said in his tweets that this was a “rational business and strategic decisions,” and that there “is little [they] could have done more.” He also said that this month is to allow the eleven-person team time to finish the projects they were working on and shut down the facility.
The studio’s focus was primarily the creation of the HoloLens and HoloLens 2, both of which we have reported on several times, including when Microsoft’s Army HoloLens was Being Tested, and when the HoloLens 2 was announced. The team also worked with German car manufactures to use MR in their manufacturing and design process.
