While most of the industry seems fascinated by virtual reality, with Valve jumping into it on the high end and Nintendo on the low end, Microsoft is seemingly going down an alternate route with augmented reality, or AR. While we haven’t seen a lot of what they are planning for commercial release (especially compared to others in the VR realm), we do know they plan to use the cultural phenomena, Minecraft, to catapult AR forward- and now it seems we have a solid date for when we can expect to see something related to that.
At their annual Build conference, the room in attendance got a bit of a tease. At the very end of the video below, we got a skit that featured someone using a phone with Minecraft playing, and the various characters popping out into the real world with a message telling everyone to tune in on May 17th to Minecraft.net. Whether this will be an official reveal about Microsoft’s Minecraft AR project is anyone’s guess, but we’ve known for a while that Microsoft is cooking up something with AR and Minecraft, so it’s possible we’ll finally get a peek.
Either way, stay tuned, and we’ll keep you updated on any new info that comes our way.