Apple delays its mixed reality headset by two months, to debut at WWDC this June
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
I guess my point is: Yes, this stuff is better than Microsoft's Hololens. However, it is also a product targeting the same niche market, and the Hololens hasn't really been successful. Turns out most organizations don't want to buy expensive headsets to then develop most of the key software themselves when any other alternative exists.
A lot of people have faith that anything Apple will release will just be successful by the virtue of the Apple-y-ness of it. But realistically how big do you think the market for a $2-3K headset is? Are you going to buy one? I'm certainly not.
The Quest 2 ($400) is maybe near the current best case scenario in terms of cost-to-user experience ratio. Anything better has huge diminishing returns, and we'll likely be waiting a few years minimum until technology has advanced enough to be affordable. We know, today, what it will look like since everyone's R&D lab has produced a few demos of it, but we also know, today, what it would cost to put into your hands.
Apple is rational. They won't sell this with marketing, they'll try to grow a developer community, just like with Mac, iPhone, iPad. My thing is, no matter what it is, it's a solution without a problem. I honestly can't believe they'll actually release it, and if they do, I won't believe it will be successful until it is. Just because Apple is Apple doesn't mean they can do the impossible. Usually Apple will take what is there and make it better. But with this, there's really nothing there to speak of, just a very small amount of splintered vociferous supporters of VR, and even less with AR. Watch, they'll downvote my comment soon enough. Apple needs to sell this to a lot of people that wouldn't think they needed or wanted it. But this isn't an iPod, so I just don't get how it can possibly be made essential or even sexy. Trying to make VR/AR a successful seller is like trying to fight a land war in Russia in winter.
I mean, people said that about the iPod. Slashdot, famously: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
"Younger people don't wear watches any longer."
That said, genuinely useful AR in a headset seems challenging as a consumer device.
For those with prosopagnosia, the names of people floating above their head, replete with notes on your first/last interaction with them, how you know them, the company they work for, their net worth/their company's market cap, current pupil size vs normal, breath rate, etc. Be however invasive you want/don't want to.
Subtitles underneath the person who said it, for the hard of hearing.
Live translation (output as in-ear audio or subtitled) for foreign languages.
And the not so great:
An X-ray glasses app using deep fake technology to show everyone around you as naked.
Replacement of visually undesirable elements with a happy planters (so you don't step on them). Trash and poop and homeless people are no longer things you have to see. (Debuted at the end of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror) )
Assuming this will is all powered by, basically an iPhone 15, these things are within our grasp. For better or worse. The real concern is battery life. An iWatch has such pathetic battery life that I can't believe Apple stands by it as a product. But it gives a floor on how long Apple AR glasses will last on battery power before Apple is willing to release it as a product.
I agree that AR could be very useful (if socially disturbing) in principle. I'm just not sure when it can get there.
This seems to depend heavily on the series and your specific usage.
I've had my Series 7 for about a year now, and I charge it for ~20m every morning when I sit down at my desk. It's usually at ~55% battery at that point. I can stretch it to two days between charges but I don't like to.
I got my daughter an SE at the same time (it was "free"), and it barely gets a day of charge. If she enables the "always-on screen" setting it only lasts like 12h. It can be a daily watch or a sleep tracker, but not both.
From what I'm hearing the Ultra lasts longer than the Series 7 or 8.
Gorilla Tag has hit 760,000 daily players and $26 million in free-to-play buy-a-hat revenue in December [1], and that's with the many, many issues that come with playing a physically active game while wearing a current-gen VR headset. Anything Apple comes out with now will be too expensive for that market, but there's definitely a market there, and I think it's more limited by the physical weight and display quality of the headsets than by anything else.
[1]: https://mpost.io/vr-game-gorilla-tag-reached-26-million-in-s...
If it had been out three years ago, we’d have 10M blissful zoom schoolers by now.
I don't know what this Apple headset is, but a theoretical headset can solve the problem of phones. In 15 years cellphones will be replaced by a wearable closer to a Ran-Ban Story than a Oculus Rift. The market can support a cellphone replacement wearable at a cost equal to and possibly more expensive than flagship cellphones ($1400+).
The Problem of Cellphones:
1. Has to be carried around. Glasses are much more natural, with a longer history in our culture.
2. Draws the gaze/attention away. Maybe we've gotten use to this, but its actually a huge problem.
3. High friction of notifications. Was that buzz in my pocket important? I have to spend ten seconds finding out.
It's not "just a matter of time".
Clearly you weren't around when cellphones came out. They were seen as borderline miraculous devices, even if they were huge. The first phone weighted 4 and a half pounds! Even at that size, people didn't believe it was possible. Remember, that pre-dates personal computers. No laptops existed.
It was a big deal and required newer technology and even advances in mathematics (for the cellphone signal processing).
We can make them tiny now. So tiny, in fact, that you can have tiny spy devices which are nonetheless able to talk to cell towers.
Sure, we can only make battery so small until they can't store much in terms of useful energy. But that also depends on how much power the devices require. An Apple Watch was an impossibility until not too long ago. Not just because of battery size, but also because of power draw (specially from screens). Have you seen how small an Apple Watch battery is? And that powers quite a bit of compute (an Apple Watch equals to about 2 Cray supercomputers from 1985, around 3 GigaFLOPS).
It is a matter of time.
Dude. I'm 42
> And that powers quite a bit of compute
On a tiny screen, mostly idle, with most complex things driven by phone.
You want a continuous compute with a large projected screen on your face.
Edit: The pro new controllers are nice, but I have no clue how they will enhance work when your hands will likely be in front of you compared to either gaming or fitness. They should have kept the focus on the headset itself and saved the controllers for the Quest 3 release.
Whether Meta and the other manufacturers will admit it or not, they need Apple to make VR & AR acceptable to the masses and workplaces. Despite the name change, meta still cannot escape its past yet. The Quest 2 is a revolutionary consumer device that is largely ignored because of meta’s poor public image
The bigger issue is that it targets gamers, and only gamers. The few fitness things on there are gaming related and the social stuff doesn’t appeal to people outside existing users.
The problem in my mind, and clearly in Metas given the Quest Pro, is that they need broader appeal.
You still have a point. I know people who are indifferent to meta, yet they still are hesitant to even try it. I feel that they’re intimidated by the headset form factor.
Probably not. And I say that while having the first commercial Oculus Rift, a HTC Vive and a Quest 2.
However, that's not important. When Apple does something, people pay attention. If Apple invests in and releases a product, you know other companies will follow. Companies will be scared and won't want to miss the boat. Samsung will release a design that will be cheaper and look mostly the same. Other manufacturers will try to come up with their own spin on things. All of a sudden, you have a battleground.
Think about this: Meta is hemorrhaging cash. They would be widly profitable but are in the red because of VR investments. Apple has plenty of cash (although stock has taken a beating with the rest of the market) and is also dedicating tons of R&D. What are they seeing that we are not seeing?
This is the exact sort of thinking that got the Soviet shuttle (the Buran). "The Americans wouldn't be crazy enough to build a spaceship as big as the shuttle for no reason, would they? They must have a pretty good reason we are not seeing, so let's build our own and figure out later." It does not have to be true. Maybe Meta and Apple are way off the mark and high on fumes from Milpitas. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
If the worst problem we can think of about this tech is how much it costs, that won't be a problem for much longer. It never is. It may take some time, but it will happen. We forget how much precision is required to make a CPU, an old fashioned hard drive, or a modern display. They all cost millions of dollars not that long ago and had to drop by _several orders of magnitude_. A VR headset costing 3k has to drop to maybe a third of its price to reach cellphone prices. If you drop by one order of magnitude you get to Quest's levels (before the price hike).
We need killer apps and comfortable headsets that are accepted by society. That's it. They look dorky today, but so did bluetooth phones until Apple released theirs. Now, they are fashionable.
Just replacing the custom android OS on that thing with a fully fledged iOS like interface would go a very long way IMO.
From Mark Gurman: "The headset’s FaceTime software will realistically render a user’s face and full body in virtual reality. Those avatars will allow two people — each with an Apple headset — to communicate and feel like they’re in the same room."
Even in the consumer world - my game-playing son already has a headset with a microphone attached while he's on his PS4. The VR headsets with the PS4 (or xbox, or whatever...) have been clunky in the past and had limited games, but it doesn't negate that there are already consumers being conditioned to use headsets here that could be extended in some way.
Finally - look at all the people wandering around with AirPods in their ears... is it really that hard to imagine some extension to this in glasses form or some other lightweight, non-intrusive form where the iPhone has the smarts and the headset is just another augmentation like the Watch?
While I agree with the broader point (Apple probably wouldn't do AR for a niche enterprise use case), it does have some level of enterprise sales. I'm pretty sure a company that provides thousands of MacBooks to its employees has an Apple account rep.
Because Apple has never makes things with business-to-business intent. Sure, there's iOS MDM, and what little passes for networking in macOS in general (and briefly, the Xserve), but that's the full extent to which they're made for business use.
It's all only ever been higher-end consumer-level stuff, and the fact that some businesses happen to use their gear is more a happy accident than anything Apple themselves explicitly planned for- they didn't have a good rackmounting solution for years after you'd find businesses hacking together server room mounts for the circular computers.
So no, I don't think they'll be explicitly courting businesses- sure, they could almost certainly make a good run at it (especially with the technological edge they enjoy now, but will likely lose to Nuvia-Qualcomm in the coming years), but that's just not how they've worked for their entire existence as a company.
But they do target sophisticated professions willing to spend a premium when it makes sense to that profession. And that's what I was trying to convey - there have to be domains out there where it makes sense to have this kind of device OR it has to fit in a similar niche as the Watch.
But I don't think truckers and medical enterprise are really the target market. Those people might find a use for this product, but Apple focus their high-end products and advertising on trend leaders, media professionals, creative prosumers/aspirants.
Mostly, because at the moment, it isn't clear to me what, where, when the market for these headsets might be. And Apple, for all their innovation, tends to jump in when the demand has become somewhat clear. These headsets, at least as the world currently sees them, don't seem to have a clear use case that is at a mass market and price tag that makes sense.
>But I don't think truckers and medical enterprise are really the target market
I agree - it was my attempt to reach for some crowd that might actually have a motivation to buy a device.
Bonus points if they can also market it as eye safety, i.e. the material is such it can protect your eyes like safety glasses. Even more bonus points if you can select your frames (think watch bands) and I can replace my prescription glasses and sunglasses. These are the things that might make this economically viable and attract consumer interest.
I'm still skeptical.
Designed to work with an iPhone but also sometimes use with a computer, as a supplemental interface layer that surrounds or superimposes.
Their recent pro products love pushing DaVinci Resolve, so as something that has loads of modes and palettes, I could see them tying in with that, and Resolve having new features for creating mixed reality or immersive video.
They have tie-ins with media - concerts, shows, movies - and watching these in a collaborative or immersive fashion.
But I will say that, as someone who travels quite a bit, I would love to just have some nice, high resolution glasses, that would emulate my monitor setup back home with minimal drawbacks. That alone would make me quite happy.
The Apple headset would be probably overkill for this, I know. Regardless, it surprises me that there are very few vendors aiming at delivering such a straightforward feature.
The closest product so far is from NReal, founded by a former Magic Leap engineer.
Using my own unremarkable setup as an example, 2560x1440 is about as low as you’d want to go for a single 27” screen, for a comfortable level of sharpness and amount of content on-screen. If that’s taking up say 40% of your FOV, that’s 6400x3600 per eye (for the simplified example of a 16:9 display overlaid across your entire FOV). That feels a ways off still, especially for a portable device.
I know some of Meta’s offerings (current? Future? I’ve been bad at keeping up with this stuff due to general apathy) are offering a virtual desktop, I wonder how readable/useable it is. Maybe I’m wrong about this stuff.
Probably not yet high resolution enough for it to make sense, but higher than most alternatives, and the comfort and portability should be good.
A "straightforward" feature that requires packing cpu, gpu, ram, battery and screen into form factor of glasses.
I’m looking forward to these having enough pixels to work as a carry on monitor.
Of course it's not. The "lightweight ones" have a cord connecting them to the actual device. The others are bulky and work for a few hours at most. You can't cheat physics.
Boy do I have the product for you!
Exists, in the real world, shipping from Amazon, many reviews on YouTube.
https://github.com/microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity
Though it would be nice if everyone could get on an open standard, like https://www.khronos.org/openxr/
The big question I have about the future of AR/VR/XR is how do we have shared experiences across devices without putting significant compatibility code on the developers?
I think that gaming platforms, because they have long had to deal with the confluence of multi-user, low-latency, permissioned systems, are better poised to be the basis for shared experiences in XR
Isn't this already the case? As far as I'm aware all major headsets support OpenXR, it's the games that are lagging behind. Hopefully this is going to include Apple, of course.
Maybe our tools like Unity can manage this, to reduce the pain...?
I really not seeing the writing for a mixed reality headset on the wall at all.
This also explains why Meta is still committed to plow billions into XR to secure their own viable hardware platform.
AR glasses are going to mean the Internet's not just available everywhere, but is available on the real world, all the time, which is a pretty big distinction, about as big as the smartphone revolution.
A bunch of stuff that's kinda sucked will suddenly be great. AR tools. AR games. QR codes. Questions we used to have to ask our phones will simply be answered, automatically ("what's this song I'm hearing?", "who's that person?"). Voice assistants will become far more useful (get used to hearing a lot more people in public talking to their assistant—it'll be weird or seem dickish and annoying at first, but then, so did texting in public or talking on the phone in public, until, in a very short span, they didn't anymore)
Of course, we'll see if Apple's the one who finally cracks it. Someone's going to, I'm pretty sure, and I think all the major tech companies agree—they've all been pouring money into AR R&D for years and years, even though it's been clear the whole time that, on a phone or table or gaming device (Nintendo DS) it's got terrible UX, and there's no fixing that without new hardware. They must all believe wearables are going to be A Thing before too long.
Texting in public was never an issue. Not sure what you mean here.
Questions like what song is running are mundane.
The advantages of qr code are still very limited. Restaurant menu? Sure. What else? Perhaps wifi code? Okay.
But what else really? Driving perhaps I can see that. Instead of adding are in the car I might want to wear an AR car version but what then?
I don't believe people will be willing to elwear any type of glasses if they don't have to every day. If you then don't have it every day it will not become a sane default.
Sure, that's down a lot as calling in general has dropped off. It was a Whole Thing early on. Especially people on earbud+mic combos or headsets.
>Texting in public was never an issue. Not sure what you mean here.
This and the call thing were a big deal in pop culture, even if the circles you ran in between about 2005-2013 weren't bothered by them (many were bothered).
> Questions like what song is running are mundane.
99% of what normal people use the Internet for is mundane. And that may be understating it.
As for the rest—I guess if you can't see it you can't see it. The use cases are endless (like, think bigger with the QR codes—not just linking to menus, but cueing AR to replace entire surfaces with something else; now apply that "think bigger" to everything else you dismissed) And maybe I'm wrong! But I'm pretty sure it's going to be a big deal.