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Apple's software and hardware arcs are coalescing into them going all in on AR/VR. Things like LIDAR, Photogrammetry, spatial mapping, USDZ / PBR and friends all come across as pretty marginal novelties on smartphones, but they are all a part of that strategy, and will make much more sense with a headset. They're coming out of the gate with a robust ecosystem.

Blender is obviously a huge component of the software stack.

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I want to share an amazing experience I recently had. I was looking through TV consoles on Crate & Barrel and found one I liked. I was unsure if it'd be too tall for my room (it's an extra 9 inches of height over my current TV stand, which is actually just a coffee table repurposed.) The listing page had a QR code I could scan with my iPhone. I was taken to a page that asked me for camera permissions and I said yes. In a few seconds, it placed a 3D model of the TV console in my room and I was able to get a good idea of how it looked. All so quick and easy - no extra apps to download - and actually useful. Putting Pikachu in my space is fun, but this is actually worth the extra lidar tech in the iPhone Pro.

I feel a weird sense of loss for Google Glass. I feel like the controversies that set it back also set back the entire AR space.

I wonder what life would be like if I could wear a HUD that showed me an AR overlay. It might bubble up an alert to remind me to drink a glass of water to stay on track for the day. A to-do list might slide in from the side if I tap a button near my temple. A friend calls and their animated avatar hangs out in the corner of my sight while I continue doing what I was doing... It feels like these things are very close, but society is struggling to integrate the amassing tech innovations we're encountering.

A camera in glasses is always going to be too intrusive I think. Norms may change, but even if there's a clear light indicating that a photo or video is being taken, it's offputting to feel the possibility of a recording happening at any moment. Perhaps the middle-ground is to have glasses with just a HUD, but no camera. You can still get useful info, but without the imposition on other people.

The water alert will also mention that you would be better hydrated if you bought ElectroX, the electrolyte drink for serious thinkers. The to-do list will include an item to check out the latest release of Banging Cans, your favorite band. By allowing you to see your friend and his surroundings, you are implicitly allowing through images of the products that are visible, and therefore they will be added to your cloud targeted ad profile.

Not to mention what you won't see. When you drive by protesters about a topic that makes you uncomfortable, your SuperFlow2030 app will blur out the words and images on their signs so they don't disturb you.

The latest safety feature will use facial recognition to highlight anyone you don't know or is not typically in an area, so you can keep an eye on them. Coincidentally, a high percentage of those highlighted people will have a different skin color from you, which deep down in the weights of its classification model is still being used as a handy heuristic even though the developers tried to specifically exclude it.

I, too, wonder what life would be like. Sadly, I don't have to wonder too much, because it appears that it would be like it is now, only more so.

I definitely had a naive little image in my mind of how things would be, but I see where you're coming from. I think one of the things that would push monetization techniques like the ones you mentioned would be if the hardware doesn't have enough compute power to process video, audio, etc. Having to be tethered to a cloud would make it more feasible to do those sorts of intrusive things, ie how Alexa picks up audio but Amazon servers process it.

Although speculative cyberpunk is usually dystopic and oppressive, it fascinates me how much of those predictions have come through or are in the process of occurring. I think the major breaking point will be climate refugees moving toward cities, which could lead to megacities, which have notoriously been imagined as highly populated by an impoverished class of people.

Thanks for the little dose of reality. I hope we can nudge our future by starting these sorts of conversations.

if companies and govt hadn't broken our trust so often wrt privacy, snooping, data-hunger, their might not have been so many controversies... I think the struggle is good if it stops or slows down these things.

If everybody used VR headsets all the time, you wouldn't even need a TV console in your room. In fact, you wouldn't need much besides a comfy chair.

This whole AR thing is just a transition technology, that will go away with time.

> VR headsets all the time

I love VR headsets, but that's not going to happen - for so many reasons - I want to get up and get a coffee, I often read while half watching TV, or sit and chat with the family while watching TV and so on, fold the laundry with the TV on and so on. You can't do anything else when wearing a VR headset.

>If everybody used VR headsets all the time

You just described Ready Player One, which in some sense is a dystopian nightmare.

With the comfy chair reference, I saw Wall-E. Cartoonish dystopia is still dystopia.

Assuming your life is spent in a virtual world consuming media, that is. For people who want to live in the physical world with maybe a few augmentations here and there, AR could be around forever.

Yeah, this is more and more popular. Apple has this built in on their product pages, and recently I saw it on Sonos’ website too. You can even preview some cars using AR.

A photo with a new McLaren next to your garage adds a lot of credibility to all of the “honey, I bought a new car” pranks ;)

I like the sounds of that. I like the prospect of Apple competing with Facebook on AR/VR. It's an area I was quite interested in some years ago, but firstly wasn't well supported on the Mac, and secondly it got bought up by Facebook to a large extent.

I've been wishing for a modern Playstation so I could try the limited bit of Gran Turismo that's VR and uses their headset. I know the Nurburgring fairly well by now but would love to play there 'for real'. Quite an environment to be whizzing through: that and the tricky rally circuits would be real interesting to get more immersion in.

I would bet my life savings that Apple are developing some form of VR - maybe headsets, maybe something more interesting like a lightfield display. They're clearly very interested in this space.

I’d say that’s a safe bet considering there are 90 job openings when you search “VR” on their careers page. Exciting to see what the future holds.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=VR&sort=relevance...

Well, yes. The current gen AR tech in the IPhone is direct enabler of AR once they get the glasses out (which have been rumored for years).

Not to mention the platform wide rollout of spatial audio.

And the text and object detection in real world scenes that is the most underrated feature in iOS 15

Edit: this tweet I just found shows exactly what I meant: https://twitter.com/juanbuis/status/1448686889158983681?s=21

Interesting. I was working on an app that would let users scan logos and return company data; carbon footprint other industrial impact metrics, individual investors, board, C-suite… into a shared repo of oligarchs who have chosen celebrity and visibility by “leading” us with our own data.

I was going to send images to Google to pull objects and text from, but if I could just send text to search for, that would be great.

I wonder when apple will start taking the 'serious games' segment seriously. Like being able to play nintendo switch quality games on your iPad, AAA games on a laptop or some sort of apple TV++++ device and such.

It also helps blender is a competitor to Epic's Unreal

I guess you confuse Blender 3D editor with Godot game engine.

Blender had built-in game engine, but it's been frozen and removed few years ago.

Also Epic is sponsoring Blender Fund too.

And Epic granted money to Godot:

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...

While it's great that Godot is getting better funding, that's about the worst insult I can think of. Epic is so confident that Godot will never be a serious competitor that they're giving them charity money. We'll see; there was a time when Autodesk viewed Blender as an also-ran too.

Not necessarily. While Epic has an interest in selling unreal they would also benefit from people selling godot games on their store.

I was thinking about Godot!

Epic doesn't seem to think so, since they majorly funded it just two years ago.

https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...

The only area I could see this in is in high-end movie production, like they did with The Mandelorian for the digital green screen stuff, but the distinction between real-time and non-real-time rendering seems pretty strong.

Blender does have a real-time engine called Eevee which is pretty powerful, although I don't think the use cases overlap enough to bother Epic.

Wait, how so? Isn't Blender a pretty direct competitor to 3D modeling and rendering tools like Maya and 3dsmax?

AFAIK you can't directly author 3D models in Unreal, if anything Unreal has a dependency on tools like Blender.

There is some competitive overlap, but that seems mostly within the realm of real-time vs. offline render for producing video content?

You can do 3D modeling directly in Unreal, but it's very limited compared to something like Blender.

That's almost like saying Internet Explorer is a competitor to Microsoft Word because they both share text documents with pictures.

Yeah, Blender and Unreal kinda-sorta do the same thing (3d rendering). But their applications are completely different... and you'd be more likely to see people use both tools together on one project rather than a competition between the tools.

Sort-of? They both compete in rendering, specifically for ArchVis. But otherwise they complement each other more than they compete. Likely why Epic is also a member of the Blender Development Fund.

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