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Comment by emoII | Hacker News Reader

"The kids are playing, better record a spacial moment" was one of the most dystopic things I've seen in a long time. Same with the ad at the end, with the father wearing it around his kids. I feel like the interface demands strapping something this futuristic over your head is just... wrong. Perhaps a few years of refining the tech can lead to something that feels more natural

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Agreed for some reason I had a really repulsive reaction to seeing that as well. Feels like this is the next step in people turning more inward. A screen strapped to our face at all times.

If they can get it into a pair of glasses, it might help a lot. Yes, the screen will be there all the time, but people won't be staring down at their phones all the time either.

Oh good, they'll be staring directly at/through me from across the room instead. Can't wait!

Imagine you realise that you haven't taken off your vision for a few months. You lift them up and you're just all alone with sores on your face, in your piss-soaked chair in your isolated flat in your decaying suburb of your polluted city. think I'll just put them back on...

You probably also don't want to take them off if everyone around you is going to wear one, not sure if AR is the right bet though for our dystopia. We don't want to augment the tent we live in the billionaire city, we want to replace the cardboard box we live in with a mansion to ease our embarrassment at not yet being a billionaire.

Future consumer electronics needs to focus on easing the transition of hundreds of millions of people in the western world into poverty.

You mean like how crowds of people at live music events ALL have their stupid smartphones up recording the same damn recording which they should be paying attention to and absorbing the experience and living in the moment?

Forget what people should do, look at what people actually do.

>> Forget what people should do, look at what people actually do.

This seems not Apple’s way. Steve Jobs once said “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

I don’t think Steve would have liked the cable to a battery brick. I’m not sure this new device is a good example of the Apple Way.

I don't know which he like: tethered battery or heavier headset

Steve wanted Jony Ive to have final say, and Jony Ive wanted the product to be fully mobile. I don't think that the wire will be present in version 4+ of the product

I don't think Tim Cook likes the battery brick more than Steve would have, but there are engineering compromises to make here.

maybe if it doubled as an input device

I like this idea, but how or what? The power brick is obviously critical, but I'm guessing they want you to put it in your pocket or on the desk or bed/sofa and largely forget it's there?

The demo of Vision Pro shows a virtual keyboard for a bit. That means it supports gestures (with hands and eyes) and typing on the keyboard.

If only Apple made a device in a similar form factor...

> People don't know what they want until you show it to them

You won’t know what people want or how to build it if you don’t _look at what they actually do_ first. There’s no other way of doing it, even Steve Jobs did it this way.

It sounds like a contradiction, but I don’t think it is. He’s talking about people’s biases about new products. Understanding people’s biases is part of watching what they do, as opposed to just considering what they say. He doesn’t say you’re supposed to come up with what people want out of thin air.

This is better then thousands of people in a crowd holding up their phones.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster phones"

> Forget what people should do, look at what people actually do

I'm going to borrow that one mate.

> look at what people actually do.

Will do. *looks around*

Yeah, not many people wearing ski masks that cost more than many people make in a month while jumping around in sweaty hot concert halls.

Yea... there were quite a few moments that felt rather cringe, dystopian, and weird at the same time. Honestly the entirety of the screen with your eyes for your viewers is a very interesting choice on Apple's part.

I do indeed want one of these and will likely buy it but I would definitely have opted for not having this outward screen functionality. I do not plan on wearing these ski goggles around my wife, kids, coworkers, etc. The fact they are trying to make it interactive for the folks around the person wearing it seems a little comical. That's like putting a screen on the backside of your phone so your kids can see your face while you are scrolling instagram. Wearing the goggles is an individual experience, why try to force everyone in the room into that experience like its going to be an accessory you will wear out and about?

Some day we will get to the point where we want the AR users to blend in a little more but we aren't at that point yet. You have a giant pair of goggles with cords hanging from it strapped to your face. Are people really going to be regularly interacting with Apple Vision users while they are in the matrix?

I guess if you are on a plane and the flight attendant asks you for your drink, they can see your eyes when you demand your coke... but come on, can't you just take it off to interact with people on the rare occasions?

I think it's just every time that you are using this feature, you should probably not be using this feature

Interesting thoughts about EyeSight. I agree that if I were using/wearing this, I would not care about the ability for others to see my eyes and gauge my reaction. This could've been added to a subsequent version of the device.

But it could be that testing showed that removing the device in work and home settings to deal with quick interactions was enough of a deterrence to devise a solution? Also, that being able to show the eyes was a huge differentiator from competing products?

I wonder if they had a few non-negotiables and this was one. They figured it was on the roadmap, so might as well lock it in from the start.

They’ll just slap two cameras spaced an eye distance apart on the back of the next iPhone Pro and bam, you can record your kids with your socially acceptable handheld device. Still won’t need to play with them though.

fwiw, doesn't have to be eye distance apart just a known distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_stereo_vision

interesting!

100% confident this will happen, would bet my life on it

The new iPhone's design is pretty much completely leaked in CAD renders and the camera module looks pretty much the same as the past few years. So RIP to you I guess

Bold

"Don't blow the candles yet! I need to grab my VISION PRO"

This is the new version of parents holding phones up in front of their faces to record moments.

Now generations of kids will grow up staring at their parents' eyes through a VISION PRO instead of seeing the back of a phone in front of their face. Progress?

Which was the new version of parents fiddling with bulky camcorders as they squint through the eyepiece to record moments.

The trick with a phone is recording while holding at chest level and keeping it still pointing at the subject while you still enjoy the moment.

> Now generations of kids will grow up staring at their parents' eyes through a VISION PRO

Not at this price point.

To be fair, that is already the case with "I need to grab my phone", which is equally wrong, imho. But a lot of people don’t see it that way.

Really, what we need is a little 360 spatial drone that records important events like birthdays and what not and then you can relive them on a device like the Vision Pro. That's the best of both worlds and I think that's where things will head eventually. I think Google or Amazon or someone has made a security camera drone that flies around your house so it can't be far off.

Interesting, eliminate the drone part and that actually makes sense. Have a few very high resolution cameras at a distance, and you could NeRF a similar view unobtrusively.

This is where there's a notable disparity in this new product. "I need to grab my phone" behavior isn't any different than what people did with cameras for decades before that. The thing that changed is the technology became much more available, pervasive, and convenient. The use cases were immediately apparent and unlike this device, nobody was scratching their head around how they might actually use it in practice.

On the contrary, it would be wrong for a parent to not pause a special moment to take a picture.

Sure, memories are great, but I have scant memories of my early years. Whatever memories I do have are tied to the rare few pictures my family took. I cherish them because they're a little time travel capsule.

When my child is 35, I'd much rather give him high quality images of his 4th birthday instead of asking him to rely on the memorization capabilities of his still-forming brain.

Agree. My children love watching back videos of various events. The equivalent from my childhood was the occasional photo or very long-winded and boring home videos taken with a giant shoulder-mounted camera saving to VHS tape in a shoulder-slung module - maximum effort for meagre results!

Would it be equally wrong if they said "camera" instead?

It's the equivalent of people going around and taking photos with an iPad.

Can't wait to see these at high school graduations

I hope we’ll see Neal Stephenson’s term Gargoyle come into use as wearable computing becomes more common

Stephenson’s joke with the Gargoyles is that the Protagonist looked down on them throughout the story, but eventually became one.

Every single person on HN, tapped into the to-link-compressed information feeds from every tech website currently live, literally is a gargoyle.

damn you really created a new account just to roast the whole of HN. Not bad.

I think the issue for me was how "real life" and "digital life" are basically on equal footing when looking through this device. So your kids are now competing with whatever youtube video you are watching and it's harder to look away from the digital distraction. The same is true today when you are watching a video on your phone, but it's way easier to get someone to look away from their phone when it's not life-size, constantly in view, and always on

To me the dystopian moment was when they revealed that an AI-generated rendition of one’s face will be presented during video conversations. We were worried already about the photographs taken with phones no longer being real, this brings the issue to a whole new level.

What issue? It's like a memoji (actually worse, because the mouth movements will not follow the real mouth).

I've seen this sentiment repeated ad nauseam since this morning, but I can't fully understand it. The comparison isn't between Vision and full presence. Imagine watching the same video with Dad pointing his phone at everyone instead. The days of experiencing things worth remembering with full presence are already over for most people—this isn't any worse than pointing a big opaque block at the person. Either way, there's a barrier. At least this way we can see their eyes to some extent, right?

While that was an initial reaction for me too, it's also really just a reaction to different tech. Many a "special memory" was captured by dad (or mom) behind an 8mm camera or a camcorder. The entire opening to "The Wonder Years"[1] was designed to capture that "home movie" feel, which would have been conducted by a parent holding something like this[2]. Even into the 90's and 00's it would have been done with a mini-dv camcorder (and later digital), which while smaller was still a bulky device floating around infront of the image recorder's face.

It's only with the advent of proper video recording tech in a cell phone that this technology has gotten so small that it's (mostly) unobtrusive and since everyone has one on them all the time, it's not surprising when someone pulls it out and starts recording.

And many a larger family event usually has one (or more) family members dedicated to capturing on film / camera anyway, so what difference would it make what tech they were using to do it?

If this thing caught on, it would be no different from any of those others, with the two possible exceptions of

A) actually being more present for the recorder, as opposed to looking through a view finder wobbling in their hands, it's just whatever they're looking at through this thing already attached to their head. Additionally for child events, they could still be actively involved with both hands (as opposed to one or none with other camera equipment and trying to work through a view finder.

B) Being less obtrusive to the rest of the people. Sure, people "should" just enjoy the moment, but I'd rather be at a concert with a few thousand people using these to record their moment than a few thousand people holding their cellphones up trying to record it around everyone else's hands.

Another thing to consider are cases where this is used by people who are already professionally recording stuff. Sure, your wedding photographer you probably still want using a real quality camera setup, but would anyone be salty about the photographer's assistant going around and capturing 3d video and pictures of your wedding with this thing? I doubt it.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0bK-vUlw6M [2]:http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Minolta_Autopak-8_D6

Holding a gadget is slightly different than having a HMD mounted on your face. It is different for the operator, and it is different for thoe standing around and participating. Getting used to the HMD might be possible but would be harder and also sad when it does happen.

Also to capture a 3D photo you could also use just a hand held device with stereo cameras. We dont necessarily need a HMD for it unless we are going for that precise framing where a 2D preview doesnt cut it. I wish such a device was perfected for the mass market. It could be as simple as a pair of regular cameras mounted on the back of a smartphone -- separated by the inter-ocular distance.

I agree that it would be different, but I don't agree that it would be sad to get used to. In the long run, head mounted recording means the person doing the recording can be much more involved in the goings on. With both hands free, they can be an active participant instead of off to the side holding a camera and trying to stay out of the way. I don't know if the tech is built in yet, but since it already does eye tracking, an external camera that's recording what the user is looking at, instead of what the camera is pointed at means that the user can be more engaged because they're focused on what's in front of them rather than making sure the camera is in position. The view finder goes away and literally becomes your view period.

I see your point -- but at least in the current iteration the HMD doesnt let the user view the actual outside world directly with their eyes (there is no optical pass through). What the user sees with their eyes and focusses on is whatever the HMD presents on the internal 4K displays, one for each eye.

Similarly from perspective of others around, they dont see the real eyes of the user - just a simulation of that. So any "eye-contact" -- even with the best execution of technology with high fidelity and low latency -- will still be something different from real eye-contact. I am no purist but difficult to accept at this point for in-person interactions. We have already gotten used to it for facetime / video calls.

Something like Google Glass might be easier to assimilate, maybe?

8 years ago, I recorded by graduation ceremony with a 360-degree panorama. I did the same with my first live concert at Wembley. It's something I can view with a Google Cardboard headset.

But to this day, it remains my most powerful photographic memory and I'm glad I took it.

The video of the dad was almost literally shot for shot with Minority Report

https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1665868751479218176

Very weird, but I can definitely see this becoming something you can capture on your phone eventually (and view on your VisionThing). If these take off then I'll bet money that capturing things for AR/VR on your phone will be a priority for Apple

It was the same thing in the 80s with camcorders. There was a stereotype of the crazy neighbor who followed his kids around with his camcorder recording every second of their lives. Then it was smart phones. Now it's this. People want to take photos and videos of stuff and it's more important to them than looking dorky for a few minutes. I don't like it very much, either, but I understand it, and it's pretty much human nature.

we just finished conditioning everyone to cover the bottom half of their face—suggesting now that one keep the top half of their face covered, around the home, around their children, is nothing short of horrifying, both in terms of brazen anti-human dystopia, but more importantly, in terms of childhood development. if this, or something like it, takes off in the "iPhone" way that many here predict, future generations are going to be so completely fucked from the perspective of anything resembling traditional social development—which, of course, the iPhone, by way of the iPad, has already fucked up pretty significantly!

I’ve read a lot of comments but yours is by far the winner. I bet you’re a blast at Thanksgiving dinners and family gatherings.

face-detection is fundamentally important to interpersonal interaction in the baseline human experience (are you aware of the phenomenon of pareidolia?)—fuck with it at your own peril, both for children learning how to read expressions by observing adults, but also, for adults interacting with virtual "AI" simulacra, instead of real human faces! ignoring these basic observations is naïve as hell, regardless of Thanksgiving dinner conversation palatability (always a high watermark for intellectual discourse)!

thankfully, I don't see any reason to believe this will take off "iPhone-style".

> we just finished conditioning everyone to cover the bottom half of their face

Nobody is conditioned to do this, it was just a necessary thing for a period of time. We've already moved on.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again. This looks absolutely great I hope they make a kid size version so everyone can wear one. Anytime a grandpa complains that 'kids these days are fucked' they are demonstrated time and time again that they were wrong. Thousands of years ago people said the same things and they never came true. Have you not learned your lesson yet?

In a few years we will laugh at people not wearing these things just like today you are a weirdo if you do not have a smartphone in your pocket. Kids will be just fine. It's the grandpas screaming at the clouds who will not be fine and excluded even more.

The train is leaving the station. You either board it or remain in the darkness and cold. Forward, forward always forward. Anybody against progress will be trampled under our feet.

can't tell if this is satire or not, but assuming it's not, have you seen young children with their rubber-bumpered iPads these days? parents let them take them out in public just to shut them up, and they're always on the damn things, learning to tap and swipe to consume mindless content from well before their brains have fully formed. this is where personal computers have gone: from being useful devices that can be used (and programmed!) to produce or consume content, to being no-brain-required content pumps that you can use to turn your brain off and fill it full of inane drivel.

but I'm at least half-certain your post is satire, so...

I have. Those kids will grow up just fine. It's all in your head. Those kids will grow up to invent/innovate on levels you can't even imagine today. Like it has always been. Might as well just stop complaining about the "weird new generation" just because that "back in my day" it was better. It wasn't. It's just rose tinted glasses.

how is this possible, when all of the devices the "kids these days" are using are entirely geared toward content consumption, with the only "content" "creation" they permit is that of the most vapid and useless pointing-a-camera-at-my-face variety? The Youth do not know how to use computers to create new good things, they only know how to consume what is already out there. the only creation they aspire to do is that of insipid Content, built atop the foundations of others' platforms, for others to mindlessly consume.

in decades past, one would be forgiven for supposing that, once devices that could ostensibly be considered to be Personal Computers became pocket-sized and nearly universally ubiquitous, complete with access to a global network of information, that we would've reached the culmination of the technological empowerment that the personal computer revolution promised—but instead, we got TikTok, and kids who aspire to be Famous On TikTok. that's what all of this marvelous technology has wrought: brain-numbing slop piped right into your retinas, in exquisitely high definition, practically from birth, judging by the age at which I've seen kids on tablets in public alone!

It is absolutely possible and it's exactly what will happen. Back in my day parents and grandpas were horrified with these things called video games which sucked the lives out of their kids. And how repetitive and mind numbing it all was and how humanity was doomed. Guess what? Didn't happen. It didn't happen back then it won't happen now. Chillax and go watch a few tik tok videos. Not everything there is garbage. You just need to give it time in order to see the value.

It also seems like more and more people are unable to start their own life until later, living with parents longer, starting work later, etc. I assume there's a correlation.

The people I know that are addicted to video games into their twenties and thirties certainly fit the bill. They're going nowhere fast.

Hmm either their brains are melted or the entire world economy is tilted against the working class to a degree not seen in a hundred years, and it's hitting the kids the hardest. I certainly know which one I think is more likely...

You say they play video games because the economy sucks. I say the economy sucks because they're playing video games. Real chicken and egg situation we have here.

lol. lmao, even. The economy doesn't "suck", it's rigged.

- Wage stagnation in Nine Charts: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

- Home prices are rising faster than wages: https://usafacts.org/data-projects/housing-vs-wages

- World's richest people (0.001%) now own 11% of global wealth, marking the biggest leap in recent history: https://fortune.com/2021/12/07/worlds-richest-inequality-ric...

- Richest 1% gained $6,500,000,000,000 in wealth last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/richest-one-percent-gained-t...

- 50 Years of shrinking union membership, in one map (from 33% to 10%): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-y...

You should be a consultant for the Fed. Quite an economic theory you have there. I’m sure you have data to prove it too. Such as less hours worked (as they were busy playing games) and not less earned per hour. Now that I think about it, those Agatha Christie novels probably caused The Great Depression.

Agriculture > Manufacturing -> Service -> Content based economy, turns out youth have the head start, as always.

I don't disagree with you regarding the negative cultural shift caused by social media nor your concerns about stuff like kids wanting to be TikTok famous. Where I do disagree though is your suggestion that kids now are exclusively content consumers at a level higher than in the past and the idea that tech like smart phones and tablets have caused that to happen. If anything it feels like kids have access to way more ways to be creative and create new things than ever thanks to those devices.

When I was about 10 years old I wanted to make a movie (it was going to be a basketball version of The Sandlot) but my parents didn't own a camcorder and couldn't afford to buy me one so I was out of luck and never got to experiment creatively in that way. Last time I saw my brother's family his 9 year old was super excited to show me the musical she and her friends had recorded using her Amazon Fire tablet. My cousin's 12 year old has a bunch of (actually rather impressive) stop motion shorts on Youtube that he created and edited on the family's iPad.

In high school it was super time consuming and slow learning to program reading books and writing simple command line programs I could only run after being super careful installing a Linux distro from a CD in a magazine on my family's one PC cause the C book I bought was unix focused. Now my significant other's 16 year old niece is learning to program on an iPad with Swift Playgrounds, she was literally doing it sitting on the beach last time we went on vacation together. My sister's 11 year old meanwhile loves showing off the frankly ridiculous number of levels he built in Roblox just using an iPad.

Like yeah, theres definitely a lot of kids (and adults) that do not create and only consume content, and I've definitely seen all of the kids I mentioned doing the dead-eyed-stare-at-glowing-screen thing, but I don't think thats new, most kids and people in general have always been like that. And yes most devices are mostly used for consumption, but suggesting those devices limit the ability of kids to be creative just seems incorrect when I see them providing so many creative outlets that I never had access to because they didn't exist previously.

Just on a philosophical level: is it possible for a child to have a better or worse childhood, as measured by adulthood competence (critical thinking skills, EQ, IQ, whatever)? Like, assuming that iPads are awesome - is it necessarily true that all new technology always helps no matter what?

Agreed. As a parent, that just seemed like something that'd never happen the way it was shown. It'd be more like:

- dads enjoying a movie on the headset

- the kids come home and are immediately rambunctious

- headset comes off

The neural implant episode of Black Mirror has a much better UX. You can help the mass and micro surveillance effort without the uncomfortable headset and be present with the kids.

The ads I see on billboards for apple have been getting very dystopian over the years. One was just a humongous iPhone being held in hand, completely blocking the actors face, with the wrist cocked at this very uncomfortably looking angle such that the apple watch face was perfectly squared to the phone. It felt like something out of Black Mirror, like if I moved the phone there would be no face or some sick grin. A far cry from the cute dancing earpod silhouettes.

This ad where she makes the real world disappear always struck me as dystopian. If I'm near a parade, I'd want to absorb that energy, not repel it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVW8-px4Ufw

Are you old enough to remember the big VHS video recorders? The shoulder mounted ones? This is minuscule and unobtrusive comparatively. Nothing dystopian about it.

It was an absolute flop, but I really appreciated how Google's "Clips" tried to solve this problem. Clip it on somewhere or stick it somewhere with a nice perspective, do your day and live in the moment, and afterward maybe it captured some special moments. A product that tried to let you be MORE in the moment. Fantastic idea.

Turned out to not work in practice. Shame, really.

The alternative is me sitting at my desk, with my back to the kids, while I tell them to stop bumping into my chair.

Which one seems more engaged with their kid?

Neither?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/ae/b3/5faeb317ca198e48d6ba...

Minority Report (2002)

https://youtu.be/arTIRgdEb1g?t=80

i think the angle they are going for is that it’s exactly as isolating (airplane, the experience you MOST want to get away from), or un-isolating (being with kids, the experience you LEAST want to get away from), as you want. and it flubbed

I'm sure people said the same things when cameras were invented. "The kids are playing, better grab my camera! -- what a dystopic thing to say!"

This thing is no bulkier or harder to use than the film cameras I grew up with. They covered the photographer's face too.

Home movies are dystopian to you?

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