It's Wednesday, and that means that it's once again to start looking for new Windows 10 Insider Previews in the Fast ring. This week's build is 17686, and it contains some new features for Local Experience Packs and Windows Mixed Reality.
As usual, the build is from the Redstone 5 development branch, meaning that it's a preview for the next feature update to Windows 10, which is due out this fall. Those on the Fast ring and those on Skip Ahead are receiving the same builds, since it's still too early for 19H1 previews.
Here's the full changelog:
Improved Local Experience
We have introduced a new Region page that allows overrides to default regional format settings such as Calendar, First day of the week, Dates, Times, and Currency. Please go to Settings App – Time & Language – Region and give it a try.
Local Experience Packs are Microsoft Store apps that deliver Windows display language quality improvements. You can now access them easily via the Settings App. Please go to Settings App – Time & Language – Language. Once here click on Add a Windows display language with Local Experience Packs link to download a Local Experience Pack from the Microsoft Store and start enjoying Windows in your preferred language.
Privacy Improvements
We wanted to let you know that if access to the microphone has been disabled in your privacy settings, we’ll now pop a notification the first time an attempt to use the microphone is blocked so you can review the settings if desired.
Windows Mixed Reality Improvements
This build includes several improvements for Windows Mixed Reality users:
- This build no longer requires a physical monitor to be connected while running Mixed Reality in cases such as backpack PCs. Setting up WMR for the first time in Mixed Reality Portal and unlocking the PC on the sign in screen still, require a monitor to be connected initially. However, you can configure auto login to prevent needing to sign in for subsequent usage here. Using Windows Mixed Reality while standing requires setting up a room boundary.
- Apps running in Windows Mixed Reality can now make use of the Camera Capture UI API to capture images of the mixed reality world using the system capture experience. Try running Mail in the Cliff House and inserting an image from your camera in a new message to share an image of the scenic view.
- We’ve also made some adjustments to the mixed reality video capture experience in this build to make it easier to stop videos from the Start menu.
Perhaps the most interesting new feature is buried at the bottom, which is that you no longer need to be using a monitor for Windows Mixed Reality to work. Aside from making life a little easier, this should allow the GPU to allocate more resources toward the display that you're actually using, which is the headset.
Redstone 5 builds still haven't shown up in the Slow ring, so Microsoft still isn't offering any ISOs. The Insider team did say at Build that it would be servicing Slow ring builds for more steady releases, but we haven't seen it.
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