‘Oasis’ WMR Driver to Revitalize Microsoft PC VR Headsets This Month

I remember stumbling across this odd tidbit about Microsoft and their WMR platform—Windows Mixed Reality or something. Last year, they just kinda… dropped it like a hot potato with Windows 11. And that’s a bummer for anyone with those headsets. But then, there’s this thing, Oasis. It’s basically like a makeshift bridge. Not gonna lie, the name screams “tropical vacation,” but nope—it’s all about connecting those orphan WMR headsets to SteamVR. It’s set to drop later this month. Or not. Valve’s gotta say yes first, which is always fun.

Matthieu Bucchianeri’s the guy behind this. He said on GitHub it’s supposed to bring all the cool stuff like 6DoF tracking. Mind you, I pretended to know what that meant the first time I read it—something about depth and direction? And motion controllers too, which is neat.

Oh, but here’s the kicker… It only works with Nvidia GPUs. Apparently, SteamVR gets picky with its friends. Matthieu tried chatting up AMD, but they just sorta ghosted him. On Reddit, he was like, either AMD ignores this particular check, or gives us a way to fool the system. Guess how that turned out?

Anyway, a bit of backstory—last October, Microsoft pretty much said “sayonara” to their WMR stuff when they launched Windows 11 24H2. So, yeah, a bunch of headsets from Acer, Asus, all those guys, left hanging.

Bucchianeri, by the way, used to work in Microsoft’s mixed reality team. Now he’s doing firmware things for Xbox. Oasis is like his side gig. Don’t worry, he’s not breaking any NDAs or stealing from Microsoft’s secret recipe or anything. Just, you know, tinkering around and making something cool happen despite the odds.