Have You Seen This?: The New & Improved Windows Mixed Reality Portal

For those of us on the fast ring of the Windows Insider Program — Microsoft's continual beta program for the Windows operating system — the constant updates can be a bit of a pain. But there is a trade-off. We get to try the new features long before they come out to the public. So if you like to see the new shinies before everyone else, and don't mind the sometimes two or three major updates in a week, then this is definitely the option for you.

Along with these most recent updates came a few major changes to the Windows Mixed Reality Portal or what is commonly known as Cliffhouse. We have covered this application a fewtimes before, so it seems fitting to post an update with the newest changes. It also seemed a great place to try out our new version of Have You Seen This? Enjoy!

One of the biggest updates is the Holograms application that has been so popular on the HoloLens is actually functioning now. With the addition of a pointer and a motion controller, reference moving, resizing, and activating holograms is a fairly trivial task.

Well, maybe not completely trivial with an Xbox One S controller. I actually struggled a bit to get the pointer in the correct squares and hit the button. Hopefully, the arrival of the actual motion controllers will help simplify that job.

It is obvious that Microsoft still has a bit of work to go. With flickering textures and surfaces all around and holograms spawning with scrambled vertices — well, likely a low poly level-of-detail model being shown when it shouldn't — signs show that Microsoft needs to scramble to get this portal ready for the holiday season when all of their partner's upcoming head-mounted displays begin to hit store shelves.

What do you think about our new and improved version of Have You Seen This? What could we change to make it better? Let us know in the comments.

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Cover image by Jason Odom/Next Reality