Apple Vision Pro: I Tried the New Mixed-Reality Headset | Hacker News Reader

Apple Vision Pro: I Tried the New Mixed-Reality Headset

wsj.com

19 pointsgavi11 comments

It's really cool. But that price just makes it completely unaffordable for most people, and this will have to rely heavily on developers developing exclusive apps for it... at this point, it feels like apple is putting a bit too much pressure on devs as every device seems to have so many peculiarities. Everyone develops for the iphone, less devs adapt their apps for ipad, even less devs adapt for the watch and how many will use all these 3D spatial developing tools for a device that realistically most people won't have.

On the other hand, it is really, really cool. But I'm thinking, it's novelty cool. It's also a bit creepy and funny which I'm not sure is a good sign. I think they really could have done without the scuba-effect... it feels ridiculous.

I for one, would have really liked them to put eggs on a "you can basically replace your mac with this" basket rather than a "it's like the ipad but cooler" because for that price tag... idk. I mean, the good news with Apple I guess is that they do tend to stick to their devices so I'm sure as the years will pass they will make this technology more and more affordable. I really hope they don't go "now with m3, now with m4" and instead they just make it cheaper and cheaper until we get to a reasonable threshold. This would be an absolute killer product at 1000-1500 dollars.

Because, why do we need this much processing power for a device that just won't use it like the macbook uses it; because they've decided to cripple it like they cripple the ipad.

You need a LOT of processing power to run those screens at the resolution and frame rate. Like, a RTX 4090 struggles with high graphics games on VR headsets with less than half that resolution.

This feels like a well-balanced and objective report.

An interesting bit:

> To select, I’d pinch my fingers together in the air. To scroll, I pinched and dragged in whatever direction. For the most part, things worked fluidly. In a few instances, I’d try to select a smaller target and miss.

If find hand tracking to be way nicer and convenient for UI manipulation and occasional actions (like switching to a different item in Youtube) but a hassle when doing it constantly for minutes at a time. Basically the Gorrilla arm issue, where on games you're moving your whole body so having the arms up feels natural, but having to use your arms all the time become tedious really fast.

The other bit on missing smaller targets feels like a problem that isn't solved on iOS/android either. Cursor selection on text blocks for example is still a pain. Apple bakes in heuristics to try adjust where a touch lands, but we're still so far from reliability that the Apple Pen and keyboard trackpad still come in handy in many situations.

This headset allows for third-party controllers, but it feels like a repeat of many past mistakes (like for the Apple TV and it's ill fated remote controller used for games...)

I think for each use case how you interact with the headset over a significant period of time will be different. For productivity, you still will use a keyboard. For a video game, you may be standing and moving.

But, no matter what, the AR objects should be touch-able, reactive to your sight, etc. When you want to interact with it using your hands/eyes, it should be seamless, and that is what Apple nailed here.

I find this so interesting because it's pretty close to the discussion on the iPad as well. It is positioned as the best of both world with touch first, and keyboard + trackpad as needed. But we kinda saw how it went from the first pitch to the current situation with the incredible hardware the iPad Pro has.

There will be a gap between "it's fine with touch" and "I need to wipe out a keyboard and trackpad", and if you regularly switch between one and the other mode, one of them will get partly compromised. We're seeing this with the Quest2 as well: hand tracking works well enough until it doesn't, and you start looking for where you left the controller.

If they can solve it on the Vision Pro it would be amazing.

> that is what Apple nailed here.

We've only seen marketing footage at this point.

> We've only seen marketing footage at this point.

Agreed that it is too early to judge. I was basing my opinion mainly off of tweets from people who used it hands on at WWDC, but still that is a biased group.

Apple has never always been about what only Apple can do, but asking like "What could the world be?" So the vision pro is maybe the first exciting VR product to come out in years, in that it's not just a headset, but an entire computing platform as well. We'll see whether they fixed the screen door effect as well as the nausea.

Does anyone else remember when apple released a 640x480 digital camera?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake

It was shortly overshadowed by the Canon D30 and the Nikon 70D. Both camera systems pretty much went on to dominate the digital camera world just a few years later.

But for the time being, I hope the Tilt5 still does well.

> apple released

rebranded, apple rebranded outside products just like their Laser printers were always outside products (Canon engine with Adaptec RIP).

> exciting VR product

So far I haven't really seen any reports to justify excitement.

>"Maybe it was getting the weight off my head. Maybe it was that when I was finally able to see again with my own eyes—looking at my notebook, or my hands or the other people in the room—I realized I was no longer staring at the world through a screen. Even Apple’s crisp 23 million pixels can’t replace standard vision. Maybe that’s the long-term challenge, getting us to forget that difference."

This sounds like a negative take from the author, but it makes me incredibly bullish on this reality-first AR/VR approach (sPatIaL cOMpuTiNg).

Apple nailed the important stuff. As time goes on the hardware will get lighter, screens will get better, etc.

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