Oasis WMR Driver Launching Soon to Revitalize Microsoft’s PC VR Headsets

Man, Microsoft really threw a curveball last year when they just kinda… ditched support for their WMR headsets with Windows 11. Imagine diving into VR and then bam—support’s gone. But hey, there’s this thing called ‘Oasis’ coming along. This unofficial SteamVR driver, a brainchild of Matthieu Bucchianeri, is supposed to pop out around August 29th. But don’t hold your breath too much—Valve has to give it a thumbs up first, you know?

What’s neat—or kinda ambitious—is that Oasis plans to make those WMR headsets play nice with SteamVR. Seriously, it’s like inviting an awkward cousin to a party and hoping they get along. In its GitHub lair, Bucchianeri mentioned it’s gonna support full 6DoF tracking, and controllers too. But only if you’re an Nvidia fan. AMD? Forget it. Something about SteamVR and GPUs not playing well together. Strange tech stuff.

Bucchianeri tried talking to AMD, but it sounds like trying to get a cat to listen. He dropped some tech jargon over on Reddit, saying either AMD needs to stop ignoring certain flags, or offer a way to override them. Sounds like a real headache just to make something work.

And, back to last October for a sec—Windows 11’s fancy 24H2 rollout basically gave the axe to WMR, leaving Acer, Asus, Dell, and the whole gang out in the cold.

A side note or maybe not: Bucchianeri, the guy behind this, was actually tinkering in Microsoft’s mixed reality space before. Now he’s into Xbox stuff, but Oasis? That’s his personal sandbox. And no, he’s not breaking any NDAs or stealing Microsoft’s secret recipes. Phew!

Anyway—wait, where was I? Shader chips, motherboard pixie dust… no, Oasis! It’s like piecing together VR Legos and hoping this mad scientist project sees the light of day.