I simrace in VR which is an incredibly immersive experience. I bought an HP Reverb G2 headset in 2021 which uses Windows Mixed Reality - fair enough, I thought, it's a Microsoft product, so it shouldn't become obsolete too soon (foreshadowing warning).
SteamVR works with the headset but performance was a bit subpar, possibly as it uses core Windows components (including the DWM for compositing); after installing the WMR drivers I then fell down the rabbit hole to optimise performance using OpenXR, OXR Toolkit and OpenComposite community fixes to improve frame pacing and foveated rendering...
Eventually I got to a really nice setup where everything just worked well, stable framerates and no reprojection at 90 Hz.
But then...
With Windows 11 24H2 on the horizon, Microsoft announced that they weren't just going to stop updating WMR, they were going to completely remove WMR support from the OS. Oh no. WMR isn't just a driver you install, MS made it fundamentally reliant on core components of the OS, so with those removed, there was no way to just reinstall WMR on 24H2 and have it work.
With sadness, a lot of people sold their headsets or upgraded to other models. Others modified their Windows installs to prevent updates after 23H2 installing (as I did), or even opted to stay on the much older Windows 10 22H2.
Time passed...
Fortunately, after Microsoft announced they were withdrawing WMR support, a crazily talented person called Matthieu Bucchianeri (mbucchia), who worked at Microsoft on the HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality teams (and subsequently contributed huge amounts of effort to maintaining related projects and tools), decided he would carry the torch for WMR devices. In 2025 he announced he was working on a 'blackboxed' driver for WMR devices, using no NDA content or proprietary corporate info (so, legally 100% fine) to support WMR headsets on future OSes. As you can imagine, this caused significant excitement in the community.
And it works, beautifully! I've been using Oasis for about eight months now, finally making the switch while I was still on 23H2. Originally there were some eye calibration issues (offsets factory-programmed in some headsets) which he fixed quite quickly.
I finally upgraded to 26H2 this week and said goodbye to the original WMR driver. Oasis works really well now with the HP HMDs, and as it hooks SteamVR for most of the heavy lifting (instead of hacking around the issue with OpenXR), the user experience is the same as using every other VR HMD.
Building support on the SteamVR API brings significant performance improvements over the native WMR experience for pretty much all WMR hardware. Moreover, you're free to upgrade to any feature release of Windows 11 you want. Great Success!
The Oasis driver is free and relatively easy to install and use - install Oasis from Steam and follow the instructions at https://github.com/mbucchia/Oasis-Driver-for-Windows-Mixed-Reality/wiki, and it should work first time.
Shoutout also to Monado who have been simultaneously working hard on reimplementing cross-platform OpenXR (including WMR support). If you prefer Oasis, it now also supports Linux, courtesy of some additional framework support from Ignition and Supremium, so you are really spoiled for choice if you want to VR game in Linux.
Finally, mbucchia recently posted a few months ago that he's left Microsoft and now works at Valve, which is excellent news. He's a bit of a legend in WMR circles and deserves every success. Time to go donate on his ko-fi page.