So I was in central today and we were near Oxford Circus, so I decided to go to the MS Store and we were able to go round some of the experiences they had set up.
I have to admit, as a big car lover, the main reason I wanted to go was to sit in the McLaren Senna. Unfortunately, at the time I got there, there were already 20+ people in the queue, and I was told it would take an hour to get in, so we had to settle for just taking pics and went to try out the other stuff. You'll have to forgive some of the portrait phone pics.
The store itself is pretty open and the walls covered in screens. There were tonnes of staff present just wandering around and a couple stationed at each "experience". I'm not sure if this is how it'll continue to be or if there were just extra staff for the opening week, cos there really were loads of them.
The store was sectioned off into about 10 or so "experiences" over the 3 floors to showcase the different things Microsoft was working on. Most of the floor was given over to the Surface stuff, Apple style.
The most interesting of all the experiences was the Hololens one. Apparently all the headsets were "charging" when I arrived, so I didn't get to try them on as it would take 30 mins. Instead the guy at the stall showed off their AR app to demonstrate what Hololens was like, using a phone rather than the glasses themselves.
It was kinda like the tabletop Minecraft thing they showed a couple of years ago, just with a past and present rendering of Oxford Circus set atop the table. You could press on certain things and it would pull up an info bubble giving you little facts about them, or pull up a post box or London bus or something that you could rotate around.
It was fun to zoom right in to the streets, but the tracking was a bit finicky and if you pushed the boundaries too much it would lose the image and it would have to be reset again. Still, it was the most interesting thing they had there.
Upstairs they had more Surface space, and then a large segment dedicated to Xbox.
In the corner they had this little section for streaming, and a lounge through the doors in front. We obviously weren't allowed in since they had some celebs streaming from the room, and we just had the TVs on the side to watch them. Apparently Raheem Sterling and Peter Crouch were going to be on later if anyone wants to watch lol
At the top it was mostly just open space, except for the main Xbox thing I was interested in: Xcloud
Supposedly it was a booking only thing, but I asked someone and they said if the station is free they'll let you have a go. To start off, there was a sign saying no close up pictures here, and this was the closest they were willing to let me take pics. I don't know why they bothered, since the phone screen is too small to do any rigorous image quality analysis with, especially off someone's mobile camera. I gotta say I don't think I would be interested in playing graphically intensive console level games on such a small screen anyway.
I was told by the attending staff member that it was the true Xcloud experience running from a data centre just outside London, and I got to try Forza Horizon 4 on the phone.
Now, I've read some reviewers saying they found the input lag to be imperceptible or insignificant, and I have to wonder how much they play games or what type of games they play, because the input lag was
very noticeable and significant imo. If anyone's tried remote play on PS4 it's almost at that level of input lag (though not quite as significant).
I mostly play online games, so this level of lag would be really off putting for me, and even for gameplay focused SP games I think I would find it quite a sub-par experience. I didn't really pay attention to the actual image quality etc because of this.
The staff member said they would have a public event in October where they would reveal more details on the service.
As a reward for trying out these experiences they gave us a MS T-shirt.
Overall the whole thing was a nice experience, and they succeeded in making the store a nice place to hang out for half an hour or so.
