From what I gather it looks like Microsoft has been secretly been working on VR technology for sometime. They don't want to have what happened to them about the web to hit them again in the OS space. They want to corner the market and space with VR techology and they are showing headset vendors what they been working on for sometime and the headset vendors have really just fallen in line. Nintendo also apparently may have a connection in this space with their new console and VR ready technology. Microsoft has new playback technology that pre-renders the models many frames ahead to save CPU load and clean playback of video at much higher frame rates.They sunk 2.5 billion into minecraft to make use of this technology. I'm hoping it pans out.