At Apple, Rare Dissent over a New Product: Interactive Goggles | Hacker News Reader

At Apple, Rare Dissent over a New Product: Interactive Goggles

nytimes.com

54 pointstysone22 comments

All I ever wanted something similar to the Skybox VR Player (from Oculus) with iTunes integration and AppleTV, and keep the external access (videos on my local network) with a lighter, sleeker headset.

I hoped that if Apple was not burdened with hardware that was trying to create the best general-purpose VR experience, and focused on this primary (killer) app experience, they'd corner that accessible entertainment and have the base on which to grow. You don't have to know about the metaverse/VR to just want to watch a great movie...

A focus on a large screen in a 3D setting might take away many of the challenges in supporting a more immersive experience that has to deal with much more challenging game rendering issues.

To sum up: I'd like a lightweight, portable, headset to watch movies on the big-screen and not look like a dork on an airplane.

If there is any company that can make a headset work, its Apple. People will get it for the aesthetic, which will be a key factor in normalizing wearable headsets.

Pretty much; smartwatches were seen as niche and "dorky" before the Apple Watch.

> If there is any company that can make a headset work, its Apple.

Logically equivalent to: if Apple can't make it work, no one can.

If there's any company that I do NOT want to have the controlling share of this market, it's Apple. AR will be as transformative as the web, and it needs to be as free. Getting nickle and dimed (and $100ed and $1000ed) by Apple's troll toll to begin to develop for it is completely unacceptable.

This dissent is well justified. AR glasses are a very dubious solution looking for a problem (that also bring up a lot of their own problems). Modern phones do so much and are totally ubiquitous. In the design of consumer electronics, it is hard to find a really compelling answer to the basic question: "why not just do this with a mobile app?". There is no need to commit to the tooling costs without a decisive need to have a piece of hardware built. For AR glasses, all the answers to this question that I have seen strike me as being sub $1000 dollar answers (would do it for ~$300 but not $600). Informally I can say that among people how are paid to use AR headsets (i.e. they are given one for free by their work and are paid 6 figure salaries to make them useful) usage is minimal. Senior executives on these projects are generally oblivious to the challenges and only wear these things at major meetings. Designers work with Figma and photoshop more than blender and frequently don't even check their designs against the optical issues of the displays. Engineers start spinning up byzantine projects for new Operating Systems because why not. The only people who consistently wear and use these machines for more than 2 minutes at a time are the prototypers. And while they are indeed serious users I have a hard time trying to parse whether they are just having fun playing in a world class sandbox or whether they actually think these are useful devices (Prototypers are the only people in tech companies who really seem to be having fun. In general they take a pay cut to work on projects that are just more enjoyable, and they frequently have bizarre hobbies that include buying niche produces like depth cameras, microscopes and GPUs just for fun. Not to dismiss this activity, but I'm not sure if they are really indicative of a broader need).

What annoys me is that there are dozens of industrial applications for this technology, but it often feels as though AR is held hostage by a “need” for mass-market appeal.

Concur. The applications are there. However, the dissent still appears justified. The issue is not with cost nor the lack of known applications. It's purely form factor, resolution, and interactivity. From the article, this product will be like "ski goggles" and it's clear that this is a video see-through (vice optical see-through) implementation.

No. Apple should not release this product until the form factor is an optical see-through pair of glasses, the resolution is >35PPD, and user interaction with virtual content is fairly seemless. Anything less and I don't see the product gaining any real traction, which will be a shame after waiting so long for apple to "get this right."

All the money and talent devoted to these AR glasses should be spent on a Siri 2.0 project using the latest large language models like GPT-4.

Apple put neural network processors on its phone for a few years now but I don't see them taking advantage of it.

Siri feels absolutely brain dead compared to other speech recognition and GPT systems. It should be an absolute embarrassment for Tim Cook and all Apple employees.

> the iPhone, which combined the abilities of a music player and a phone

I dare to say the iPhone was a bit more than that.

Yes, Job was very clear it was iPod, Phone, and Internet in one device.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4

But the first couple really didn't do much more than that. Other features were rudimentary or missing, even compared to other phones of the day.

Yes. The initial iPhone did very little. The internet part is the critical component to justify the device that is missing in describing it as a phone+mp3 player. Internet was becoming a standard feature for phones of that era. The possibility of a music steaming service like Spotify (or YouTube), meant that the core value proposition of the iPod was at risk.

Let’s be clear: the Internet was available in phones of that era, but they were not well integrated into the experience. I recall having a Blackberry that required two minutes to “log in” to the Internet when you wanted to actually use it.

20 years ago I carried around a palm pilot, iPod and cell phone. I was so happy when I could combine all of those devices into an iPhone. I just don’t see a need for VR googles at this point. This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

We already have:

– Crypto to enable black markets for stolen/leaked personal data

– BitTorrent to make huge downloads (ie: of leaked data) feasible

– Facial Recognition to attach a name to a face (ie: using leaked data)

– portable drives capable of storing 1TB+ (ie: of leaked data)

If AR goggles are successful, it could be at least as bad a blow to privacy as the success of social media was. They are the last remaining puzzle piece.

If Apple spearheads this, Apple's reputation eventually could take a hit (obviously to the extent that everyone comes to see AR goggles as a nuisance).

Sorry for my confusion, but what do AR goggles have to do with the rest of the things you listed?

he's saying that you can build large, grey area or outright illegal, databases to do realtime face recognition on any random people you meet, with the ability to pull up tidbits or very private information there and then.

Exactly. Thanks

I think your model is too futuristic, if some of the hackernews don't quite grok what you're talking about, imagine trying to communicate this complicated chain of dependencies in a format of a nyt article.

most likely before such a threat model gets public exposure, you're going to already have legitimate implementations of this technology that will seem positive and benign.

for example, apple already does face recognition on your photos and then ties them contact names. now a gimmicky but totally futuristic use-case that you can demo in a commercial: you send your friend a contact from your address book, and in addition to phone numbers and emails it has a chunk of trained dataset for the contact's face. now you go meet this contact in person, and your ar "recognizes" the contact for you. the commercial will involve a meeting at a fancy Manhattan restaurant "oh hey you're Jeremy!" (you're welcome, nameless apple employee reading this post)

but see totally benign. by the time hackers get to it, it'll be ebil darknet russians breaking nice and pure future tech.

AR goggles require a built-in camera. Presumably the glasses will be portable.

The hardware required for AR glasses to do what they are advertised to do (eg: translate street signs, overlay advertisements while you're trying to eat, etc) is sufficient to identify anyone walking by*.

Not hard to write software to display on the wearer's HUD, for example, random photos and social media posts of whoever enters their field of view.

*providing the other things in my comment are in place.

Google Glass specifically prohibited using the camera for facial recognition —- but let you silently take pictures and video and post them to Google+.

They literally blocked a useful feature (recognizing people you have already met) and promoted a feature nobody wanted (posting pictures of people without consent).

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