Microsoft will have Windows Holographic developer kits at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, according to a video on the company's Channel 9 site that was spotted by MSPoweruser. GDC will run February 27 to March 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Windows 10 Creators Update, currently anticipated to be released in April, will include a wealth of new 3D, virtual, and augmented reality capabilities. This will be used with a range of relatively cheap headsets such as the one Lenovo showed at CES.

So far, however, Microsoft hasn't revealed a great deal about Windows Holographic's APIs, capabilities, or compatibility, though information has been trickling out. Insider preview builds of the Creators Update showed that the PC hardware requirements will be lower than those of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, with the GPU demands in particular being significantly reduced (with even integrated graphics acceptable).

The WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen offered greater detail about both the PC requirements and the headset capabilities. Windows Holographic will support headsets from 1080×1200 per eye to 1440×1440, at refresh rates from 60 to 120Hz, with integrated headphones and microphones optional. It will also support a choice between traditional gamepads or special 3D game controllers.

Microsoft already has an initial holographic API, used by the HoloLens. The Creators Update is extending this API to handle a wider range of hardware and scenarios, though the API doesn't yet appear to be final. The company is planning a streaming developer day on February 8, at which it says it will talk about the developer story for these headsets. Only when the full developer experience and hardware are available will developers be able to take advantage of Windows' new features. HoloLens has been positioned as a commercial, business-oriented device, but clearly that's not the focus at GDC, indicating that the aims of Windows Holographic are wider than those of HoloLens.

The VR API space is something of a mess right now. Facebook's Oculus has its own SDK, the Oculus SDK. Valve has its own API, SteamVR, used with the HTC Vive headset. Parts of this API are open source, named OpenVR, and drivers have been built enabling SteamVR games to be used with the Rift, albeit forfeiting certain capabilities native to the Oculus SDK. The Khronos group, the industry consortium that stewards development of the OpenGL specification, is working on a VR specification of its own. A number of companies including Intel have banded together to create OSVR, an open source VR platform.

Microsoft's Windows Holographic platform will be yet another option. The question of what kind of interoperability, if any, will be offered remains unknown at this point, and it's presently not clear that Windows Holographic apps will be able to run on existing headsets, nor that existing VR apps will be able to run on Windows Holographic headsets. If Windows Holographic's cheaper hardware and lower system requirements give it a substantial share of the VR market, then some consolidation and greater interoperability may be forced. But if this doesn't happen, the market may well continue to be deeply fragmented.