Notes on Vision Pro
notes.andymatuschak.org
notes.andymatuschak.org
And these 3D spacial moment recordings, imagine children growing up in a house where when something nice happens, the parent rushes to put on goggles and stare at them through them, their little virtual eyes displayed on the outside, it’s frankly creepy to me.
The 3D photo thing is super weird, they could release a stand alone camera in future, BUT, I think this is a v1 product, imagine where it'll be in 5 years time, or an SE model which isn't wrap around. I already wear glasses so having AR glasses is no big leap.
This is exactly what I tell myself. This is equivalent to their five hundred dollar original iPhone with no App Store or even copy and paste functionality. I expect the SE to cost a third of this if not a fifth.
Edit: five hundred dollar iPhone typo
Then they'll keep adding features to justify the price ...
Then after a few years, the price will start creeping higher and higher.
And then, when the implanted-AI version comes out, it'll be $15,000 for Pro Pro AI Max version ...
"Literally Think Different!"
/only semi-joking ... this was basically the iPhone playbook and why wouldn't it be applied to the Vision?
Regarding phones, I see your point there too, but at least with phones people can still look up make eye contact, easily set the phone down when needing to interact with someone; unlike these, there is a definite wearing-them and not-wearing barrier that many will probably not cross on a whim, so we'll just get used to interacting with virtually projected eyeballs on the outside of them. Very strange to me.
Having to take AirPods out of your ears is more obtrusive I think.
I don't own airpods but I don't mind if someone comes to talk to me with airpods on. I think it would be stranger having someone come up to me and talk to me with the goggles on.
Well that is just plain rude. I meant if someone with airpods on comes to talk to me, I am reasonably sure they have transparency on or something like that.
VR/AR has wow factor, but you quickly get used to it, and then your concerns are mostly pragmatic: the headset is huge, the battery life short and so on.
Although AR at least has pass through, which is a big benefit, as it doesn't completely hide your real surroundings.
The father wearing the headset and recording his children play around him really hit that note. From the children's perspective, instead of their father's face they see a pair of black goggles and rather than their father's eyes they see a digital facsimile.
"Hold still son so I can record this moment, I've only got 10 minutes out of the 2h of battery left on this headset" lol
The mental illnesses kids will have growing up with tech addicted parents are gonna be epic. Therapists are gonna be printing money.
having the ability to share parts of our lives remotely and also remember them is profound. i often look back at photos of the past few years, and remark at memories i've forgotten, places i've been, and i share those things with others as well.
sure no one wants 10 people in a room interacting thru their apple vision pro, but i really don't think it's fundamentally different. and if i could have a 3d video of my deceased family that looks more real than a photo, i'd love that.
look at the parts of the tech that connect us more; there will always be negative things, loners, tech addicts, etc.
and as for the mental illness quip, i honestly don't have an answer because it's so outlandish we can't even begin to quantify it
Yeah that was a mistake. It should have been a worker recording how to assemble something to make a training vid. The family recording thing probably turned off a lot of people.
Apple unironically going for the dystopia angle is a weird flex.
In my life it got to a point with some friends where I introduced the idea of everyone taking their phones out and putting them face down on a stack on the table, if you really need to check your phone for something important one has to voice out "I need to check my phone", taking a break from hanging out to check it. It annoys me to no end when in the middle of a conversation someone takes their phone out just to check a message, or Instagram, or any kind of trivial notification, and end up lost in it for a few minutes, it's been really great to make them more aware of the behaviour as it completely tunes me off from a conversation seeing someone you're trying to communicate with staring intensely into their screens.
At least in VR I know that they aren't present, easier to adjust, with phones it just annoys me absolutely.
I also teach my kids not to do that.
But if someone didn’t remove their VR headset when getting into a conversation with me IRL… I can’t see that ever becoming commonly accepted. It’s completely different from phones because you wouldn’t even know if and when they are glancing at messages or other content (or even filming you), so there’s just way more social norms for the tech to contend with. With a headset, there is a 100% clear distinction between when you’re using it vs when you’re not, and a distinct act putting it on and taking it off, whereas with phones you can flick a glance at it.
Direct-to-brain AR will be another matter though. Then we will be forced to accept that anyone we are talking to may be secretly engaged with other stuff at the same time.
We can call it "iPhone"
As a parent myself, the idea that someone would stop what they are doing to put on goggles to take a photo seems crazy. You would miss the moment. The only reason I use my phone for most photos over a DSLR or Mirrorless is because the phone is right in your pocket and instantly available at all times. I'm pretty sure the newer iPhones already have lidar sensors don't they?
Watching recordings of people doing interesting things could be the killer feature.
Porn is obvious, but even just experiencing the recording of someone walking through some beautiful place will be a treat.
I would prefer a lens that could adapt an existing camera to 3d photography / video. Some already exist, like:
- Canon RF 5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye: https://www.dpreview.com/news/7991481617/canon-shows-first-f...
- Loreo 3D Lens 9005: https://www.oddcameras.com/loreo_3d_lens_9005.htm
Do we want more of that ?
If you want to use your phone less, use your phone less. Complaining about how other people use their phones “too much” is just kids-these-days.
Within my circles, the "regulation" of not having everyone on their phones constantly in social settings has been slowly but surely taking root for years. And that's a good thing. I hope (and believe) the same will be true of these headsets.
There is a reason we live in organised societies, with rules and limitations, and it's not so that you can do "whatever you want whenever you want"
At some point we have to decide where we want to steer the ship
The sports clips and experiences are also not captured by people with headsets standing on the sideline; I'm not sure why a lot of commenters see this as the bleak new future?
Yeah and that's really bad.
I have a friend who used to do this, even back when phones first started coming out. He couldn't resist just being on his phone, trying to talk to him was a nightmare.
The HoloLens had some great examples of highlighting where to hit a mechanism to make it work. I have no idea if it was any good in reality.
That doesn't work for Apple, at least not for advertising.
I think it would have been neat to have shown a sports person/dancer/musician looking through the eyes of their instructor to correct their posture, etc. Or at least show them reviewing the recording together.
And made me question my work choice as an iOS user and developer, this time from an ethical perspective.
Isn't this what used to happen with camcorders and now with smartphones?
Hell, how many people watch live music events and the like in-person through a smartphone camera (assuming recording is okay)?
I understand where you're coming from, but it pays to take a step back and look at things from a wider and more fundamental perspective.
A UI that relies entirely on eye tracking and arm motion tracking, without a single button for 'accept' or 'back' or 'fire' in the case of games seems incredibly limiting. They didn't demonstrate text entry, did they?
I expected to see Apple's headset being demonstrated as a product for professionals, perhaps for architects, product designers, and engineers to visualise their designs for clients. Maybe it could have also found a niche in education.
But no, they seem to have iPad-like use cases in mind, and for that, the price is way too high.
Likewise for work you could use a normal keyboard. I think they did mention that in the presentation.
The AR aspect here is really clever -- you can use normal keyboards and controllers because you can just look at them when you need to.
The biggest hint for this is the name: "Vision 'Pro'". Why call something "Pro" that doesn't build on another product to enhance it with other features? The pro moniker for Apple has always been a sign of increased functionality for power users.
Mark my words; we will see a mass-market consumer focused version of this product within 5 years if gen 1 is a success.
Of course, miraculous advances can occur, but you can’t just expect them to happen.
With the Vision Pro, Apple is going to let us become the prettiest gargoyle at the ball.
My Meta account name is “regretbuy” (IIRC), but I love the menu scene in Superhot because it looks so similar to your description.
Im not following. Why would that be the dystopia?
so the show portrays AR - at least in that setting - as almost degenerate.
of course, Lain has an unfair advantage in not really needing any kind of interface to live in the Wired.
Of course it would need some tech to fill in the blind zones obscured from cameras, but likely with generative AI and data from before and after the occlusion occurred such technology seems plausible.
Imagine how that scene with the dad filming the kids playing would look if the kids had the Vision goggles on, too.
I haven't yet read/seen much about Apple's take on it so maybe they closed a gap I am not aware of.
> And these 3D spacial moment recordings, imagine children growing up in a house where when something nice happens, the parent rushes to put on goggles and stare at them through them, their little virtual eyes displayed on the outside, it’s frankly creepy to me.
Well, I have always found that creepy, even with old analog camera from back then (but I always found adults staring at children when something nice happens a bit creepy (or cringe ?) so that's me).
The fact that I can mute out the rest of the room while working is a plus not a minus.
I'm skeptical this will be there on a technical level to justify the price but the concept of working in VR is objectively an improvement, especially once you factor in the portability of the system.
For entertainment - it's probably going to be the same as computer games - everyone had one for work and it was expensive and awkward - but work drove adoption and people started playing games on it.
I think this is the main failure of VR so far, it's trying to force people into this alien experience just for entertainment. I have plenty of ways to play games/watch video, I probably wouldn't use it if I had it for free let alone paying large sum of money.
If I'm using VR day to day for work - then I might occasionally game on it - this is the road to widespread adoption.
Apple needs to build an app store for this and fast.
I mean I get what you mean, but I also think that some things get normalized in subsequent generations. Our 15 year old and his gf have their phones out at all times, frequently switching to interacting, glancing at random videos, messaging, games, etc. Unthinkable 20 years ago, but for them it's tuesday.
That said, VR headsets have been a thing for a while now, at all price ranges; Google Cardboard and clones would make any smartphone into a rudimentary 3d headset, but as far as I know nobody normalized that into their daily life to e.g. watch videos. Head-mounted DVD players were a thing as well for a while I think, but again, never became normalized. Google Glass was the first 'big' AR system, and it was hated for being so obvious and its wearers being so blatant in glancing one way and having a camera aimed at you (which might have been recording) at all times; it might be interesting to see what today's iterations, Snapchat's Spectacles [1], Facebook / Ray Ban's Stories [2], Bose Frames or Amazon Echo Frames will do, I think they'll be much more accepted because they're not as obvious.
[0] I had to edit that one a few times, had to think about when mobile phones became daily use items
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/snapchat-spectacles-2-0,review-...
True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being unveiled with promotional videos of people all being hunched over them at dinner.
Smartphones were promoted by enabling us to do things on the go: making and receiving phone calls, getting directions, finding restaurants in the area. This is why this feels different: the experience that is promoted is one that feels already slightly dystopian.
Until the time they're arrested for using a smartphone while biking, or for relying on the computer not to malfunction just to avoid riding blind.
It's not proper AR, It's VR with passthrough which means it's purely active. If it fails it goes black.
I guess we don’t really know what the R1 does. It is hypothetically possible that there’s a failsafe road-eyeball path just goes through that chip, maybe that could be made as reliable as various other critical computers…
I guarantee you Mercedes or Lamborghini would _love_ to have a fully enclosed interior with screens instead of windows, but it's a critical safety feature and anything that makes it less likely to work is just not happening.
Getting rid of the windows and making the headset totally necessary seems like riskier proposition though. For the Apple thing on a normal car, the backup option of taking off the headset is always there (assuming sufficient warning can be given before a failure, which is a big assumption, but should be doable).
Drive-by-wire systems exist, so it isn’t as if replacing some normally mechanical steps with electronics is impossible. The electronics just need to be made sufficiently reliable.
Yes I know the difference between in theory and practice .
Not a great solution to using these in such situations, because bugs as you say, but it might be a feature that allows people to feel so daring. Oof.
1. An iPod - that was already isolating people
2. A phone
3. An internet communicator
I don’t think my opinion of smartphones would be any different if early promotions had shown the downsides, or bigger upsides, or bizarre and unrealistic scenarios. Am I wrong to be anchored on how they’re actually used, which literally nobody foresaw?
I agree that demo was dumb and dystopian. But it's silly to latch on to one imagined usage, ignore the others, and have no interest in what the reality will be.
My suspicion is that this is related to the longtermist movement.
True, but is it so different to be hunched over a phone than hunched over a book. You can still just look up and be present. With a headset, well… there isn’t such a parallel.
Maybe the Sony Walkman is a better comparison because finally you could go out in the world buffered from it.
AV is slightly different b/c it's trying to let people still be present. Is it enough and will it work still remains to be seen.
Yes, and this is a bad thing.
Yes, because by definition this is a shared experience. Phones are isolating because no one knows what you're looking at and it's rather hard to share the small screen even if you want to.
there is a lot of isolating tech (most social media) but it's also quite cultural-- yes it's global, but america f.e. is largely idealistic and materialistic and it shows.
i don't think the mode of interaction is the issue
Respectfully, how does this make any sense? Didn't mobile phones end up becoming the most intrusive technology on Earth? (I'm not sure what you specifically mean by "intrusive", but I'm assuming that you mean "the extent to which the object interrupts your life/tasks/etc.").
Phones sell because they are:
1. Convenient
2. In most civilizations on Earth, it became a necessary item in order to live (authentication, payments, maps, etc.).
I'll skip the lesser points, such as the fact that they took over the camera for >99% of people for 99% of the time.
I mean intrusive in blocking yoru attention and isolating you from the environment and blocking sensory input. While it grabs your attention it doesnt isolate . Phones are attention-grabbing but nowhere near as intrusive as goggles
In the 80s people started using walkmans to hear their own music instead of listening in their living room with their family speakers.
I think that the social criticism starts much much earlier. Nothing special about Apple.
Another take, adding AI to the equation, is that probably the humanity ego is huge and all these stuff is harming it and we are not as important and intelligent as we thought. We are amazing creatures for sure and will fight for our humanity in the way other animals do for their survival.
By trying to show interactions with other people, it’s just highlights a weird isolation - what it’s not pointing it out is that the advantage for people like me who work in a private home office where I’m already isolated - this just helps me work there better. I don’t have to cram my small table with monitors any more, and when I do watch a movie or show there I can do it on a giant screen.
Even the cameras could have been highlighted much better, either by photographing a complex machine, or an art collaboration across countries.
Honestly most of the presentation had this exact vibe for me. That the Vision Pro is directly positioned as a device for deep immersion, like movies, gaming, and engrossing work. The two exceptions I remember were those moments where a person plopped their Vision Pro on to take a 3D moment of their children and the one where a person answered a FaceTime call with the Vision Pro while packing their suitcase. I don't see those moments happening in reality with this sort of device.
Except the Vision Pro maps your home, visually and acoustically. I suppose it's acceptable if one already has a Roomba and an Alexa.
Can see it becoming a faux pas to answer a video call as the creepy avatar.
I know Zuck got clowned on for the horizon avatars but at least they were just lame and low quality, not outright creepy/gross.
Imagine if ancient man, living in the woods, saw people of today living in cities. "It feels very uncomfortable seeing all of these people isolating themselves inside buildings".
In fact the very opposite is the case. Now, we go into nature to isolate ourselves.
In the future, going into virtual reality will be where you go to interact with others, and you'll take the goggles off to isolate yourself.
There are enormous advantages to living (as much as possible of) your life in VR:
- your home can be arbitrarily large at zero cost and without taking any land away from anyone else
- you can change the decor whenever you want at zero cost
- you can paint walls as ornately as you like, at zero cost, immediately, without even any prep work required
- you spend zero time on travelling
- you can instantly hang out with friends in foreign countries for free without even needing a visa
As long as the technology is good enough (and please remember that qualifier, because people normally respond with an implicit assumption that the technology is not good enough) - as long as the technology is good enough VR is strictly better than current reality.
Because it's not good enough and there's no real plausible means by which it will be good enough.
I mean this was a core argument in the Matrix, and many agreed that it wasn't worth doing even when the virtual reality was absolutely flawless and a land of limitless bounty.
And there's no tech in progress that has a path to that kind of immersive experience. Even if that kind of thing is possible which I have doubts about my great-grand-children will be long dead by the time it shows up.
You're not going to hang out with friends in foreign countries for free you're going to be isolated in your house with a piece of plastic on your face.
I don't know that Vision Pro is necessarily taking us on that sort of path; I'll probably hold my judgment until they've proliferated enough that I actually know someone who has one. But your point that the virtual world is becoming where we go to interact with other people while physical spaces are used for individual isolation is a good one, and my contribution here is to tie it to a book that is over 65 years old to show that it's not even a particularly new idea.
Reminds me of the sex scene in Demolition Man.
1. People do not really go into nature to "isolate" themselves. As you said, you can do that in your own house. There's a plethora of reason nature is good for.
2. Everything else you're listing as "advantages" are less equivalents of what can be done in real life already.
3. Hanging out with friends virtually is no where near the same emotionally or physically. This has been scientifically proven. You NEED to be talking to people in person and interacting with them. Otherwise, you will be emotionally stunted.
I'm very normal and sociable and well adjusted. But our relationship with our surroundings and each other is changed due to technology. And will continue to evolve.
It will evolve into a mess of mental illness and likely the end of our race in my opinion if that's the way we go. We can already see this happening. Less people are reproducing, more people are mentally ill than ever, a lot of people see the human race as a blight on the planet etc. We will not evolve, we'll just die out or be something so far removed from what we are it won't be recognizable. It's obvious that digital communication doesn't meet our emotional and physical needs.
Also, did you ever think about the reason why you're "isolating" in nature? It's likely to get away from the modern technical world that's stripping you of something. Sort of ironic in regard to your stance on wholeheartedly accepting every facet of VR into our daily lives.
This sounds deeply shitty.
If, instead of needing to live in close proximity to work opportunities, often in an expensive and crowded city with a long commute, people could live wherever they want and commute virtually, that would be a huge positive in my book. That is already possible for some professions, such as software development. But good VR/AR will open the door to other professions that still require in person collaboration today and will improve those that are already remote capable. Then, at the end of the day, you take off your headset and live your life wherever/however you choose.
Also, it's pretty clear that cities are too large for our social apparatus. The ancient man living in a tribe has a deeper personal connection with his fellow villagers than anything we develop in a city, much less in the worldwide city we call the internet.
Given all that, I think it's reasonable to take a backwards-looking approach to this. Evolution happens on the time scale of millennia, and our biology has had only had a few hundred years to adjust to the modern city. Rushing headlong along the same path into full, always-connected VR is hazardous.
Citation needed? Humans have been living in cities for thousands of years.
Modern cities are enormous by comparison and our urbanization rate is completely flipped. 80% of people in the US live in a city, and we have 50 metro areas with a higher population than Rome had during the empire. Our largest metro area is New York/Newark/Jersey City at 20 million people, 20x that of imperial Rome.
And remember that Rome itself was an anomaly in its day, and the Roman Empire in general was an anomaly in European history.
Forest man is on to something. Can I live in his family’s hovel and keep my antibiotics? Thanks.
Do I want it? Of course not.
You are approaching the territory of describing enslavement in your description.
> - your home can be arbitrarily large at zero cost and without taking any land away from anyone else
Except it isn't.
> - you can change the decor whenever you want at zero cost
Except you can't.
> - you can paint walls as ornately as you like, at zero cost, immediately, without even any prep work required
Except you can't.
> - you spend zero time on travelling
Except you don't.
> - you can instantly hang out with friends in foreign countries for free without even needing a visa
Except you don't.
This is an incredibly dystopian view.
Let's not kid ourselves that VR will not be monetized to the breaking point just like any other platform. Enshitification is inevitable.
In other words, corporations will do what they already do, sell lies, create demand for those lies and in exchange demand more of the irreplaceable things like time, land and resources.
In the future people will be in their pods, only connected within virtual reality and everything will feel as if it was real.
This allows for much more optimal space and resources management.
This is not a future where individual consumers have control. This is a future where corporations give consumers enough of an illusion of control that they don't notice how much they've actually given up.
AI, obviously, they are far better and meticulous planners then humans. AI will evolve to maximise shareholder value at all costs.
I find it hard to not throw a plethora of insults at you for the vision you endorsed. The Matrix was not an instruction manual, it was a warning.
Why do you want that to be the future?
FWIW, it looks (to me) like "the world's most comfortable jail for your face".
That you cannot even peer out of this jail, but instead have an ersatz rendered version of you depicted on the outside, is even worse.
Our trajectory of pursuing a frictionless world, at any cost, is going to be our doom.
You might not even be able to tell any difference when you are in a pod. In fact you could be in the pod right this very moment and you could be the main player where all scenarios are created and catered specifically for you to throw various challenges at you which might feel stressful, but you'll be able to surmount them. These scenarios give meaning to your life.
Moreover you are also steering this towards the simulation hypothesis which is a dead end for a debate.
I will no longer entertain this charade.
People are already out of their natural habitats, and they will be even more. Is there going to be some sort of magical future moment where people achieve what they wanted to achieve and will they be happy?
How could it happen if environment is going to completely change? What once gave rewards to humans, in the future can not, since there wouldn't be similar events that have built humans throughout the evolution.
People are already addicted to smartphones, people are depressed and have issues with their mental states, despite World being more comfortable and safe to navigate than ever before, people are overall not necessarily more happy.
E.g. if you are able to produce a method or substance to produce heroin like effects in people without tolerance build up, should people be allowed to consume that?
Some of these objections sound like saying we're not really listening to music on our phones, I guess because there's not really a band playing, or because of the lossy sound encoding or something.
In fact, we _are_ listening to music, in a way that people seem to enjoy and which has been democratized far beyond previous possibilities for listening to music.
Secondly, all of the examples above were examples of trying to avoid reality. A pathological form of escapism. Why push so hard for such a shitty future where escapism is the only option? Black Mirror is a warning not a manual. Are you really that unimaginative that you can not imagine a better future than the shittiest of dystopias? Also, good enough technology is not an argument. More optimistic scifi like Star Trek has the holodeck with a realism level of ~100%. Yet people don't just spend all of their time in it because reality is amazing in it's own way. Why bring about a future where reality is so undesirable?
Also, as I said, there is absolutely no way VR spaces will not get enshitified the same way all current platforms are. In all VR spaces you will absolutely be the product while also being milked for every single micro-transaction you can pay.
1) What makes reality important? 2) What is the definition of reality?
> In all VR spaces you will absolutely be the product while also being milked for every single micro-transaction you can pay.
How does that differ from reality? Are you not paying for the walls that are presumably around you right now?
Besides, I was the one who asked first the much more pragmatic question of why some people consider such a dystopian future to be desirable.
If you think reality is important, then it's upon you to define reality and why you think it's important.
Change the wallpaper in your virtual apartment, huh? You'll absolutely be paying for that. Some people will save money by just coping with the walls being non-stop ads for anti-depressants and pills for erectile dysfunction. Perhaps they'll take their headset off and do everything through command lines. Pity if the headset eventually evolves into implants that pump images and sounds directly into your brain.
As for writing it yourself, care to talk about the price of the developer account, the approval process, the risk of getting banned, the ever changing API surface, the time you use for all of this, etc. etc.? You are NOT the owner of anything in the "metaverse". You are just allowed the privilege of playing in the platform owners sandbox as long as you pay. When the platform owner will decide it is profitable to exploit users ability to set wallpapers there is nothing you as a user or as a developer on top of the platform will be able to do to counter that.
Here, read this (1) and watch this (2) and tell me you feel confident the same will not happen to any "metaverse".
(1) https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
With regards to enshittification: all the examples listed were software companies or service companies. I don’t see any hardware companies on there, and I’d go so far as to say hardware companies that sell with high margins do not undergo enshittification. From the article: “… they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers …” Apple doesn’t have business customers. Their core business strategy is not to sell ads, or data, but rather hardware.
Apple is in no way excluded from enshitification.
Apple refusing to support more than one external monitor on non-Pro or non-Max M* laptops is an example in hardware by virtue of being intentional market segmentation.
On the software side, ads are slowly encroaching previously ad-free spaces on Apple software too. Apple is also a services company providing everything from an ads platform to apps marketplaces to media to payment services to banking services and leveraging their position in anticompetitive ways. It's platforms are subject to the same pressures of enshitification.
The part you quoted is just one of the steps. The strategy for a platform is to act as an indispensable middleman and abuse everyone both upstream and downstream.
A city is literally millions of people all wanting to live in the same place to be close to other people. I couldn't wait to move from the countryside to a city in order to be near more people like myself.
Communications technology is great, it helps me connect with even more people with common interests, as right now, and with my family while we are apart. It is in no way shape or form a substitute for being physically with people. There's something primally satisfying and emotionally anchoring about actually being together. That's why online discussions can so easily escalate into verbal knife fights and abuse. It's emotionally disconnected and I suspect the same will be true of VR.
The technology is siphoning attention from the home. Humans are highly visual creatures. The impact of this product will probably be greater.
I really like my Quest 2. But these devices are for when you are alone. I work alone and would love to use something that expands my workspace and provides a comfortable environment to concentrate in. Quest 2 can't really get there. And occasionally I find people to talk to in VR which is enjoyable. But when the family is home it makes 0 sense. I cannot imagine us all sitting in an empty room with goggles on, watching the same thing.
First there's technology. This is clearly better than anything else in the market. Enough has been said on this.
Then there's usability and market. There's no real trojan horse feature that will get this product mainstream right now. Apple's hope is that the dev community will either build one or users will point them in the right direction with usage stats and telemetry. Maybe they will, or they won't nobody knows.
Finally there's the future. I see people comparing this to previous apple products and their past experiences with them etc. There appears to be two factions here, one that says "This is the future I want and I love it", and the other saying "This is the future I don't want and hate it". Both groups however are saying one common thing ... "this is the future". And that's pretty much Apple's bet.
And I'd say that 80% of its failure can be attributed to bad software. It's buggy, I constantly have to re-calibrate my work/play area, the hand tracking is janky, and even though it supports (incredible) eye tracking, almost nothing takes actual advantage of the hardware.
It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash. Do they seriously expect VR enthusiasts to build an entire operating system for them? Much like the reports we're getting about the Vision Pro, the eye tracking in the Quest Pro feels like magic, but nothing uses it—basically it's irrelevant to navigating the operating system and barely any games use foveated rendering. It's infuriating.
If I was Zuck, I'd fire all my product managers. I say good for Apple. I'll probably be selling my Quest Pro and buying the Vision Pro.
Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. But how big of a deal is the M2+R1?
Anyway the metaverse was already being retracted, else this Vision Pro could have hammered Meta.
Clearly Occulus has to evolve to match VisionPro. Controller has to be optional. It has to have better AR. Meta has to be the more "open" alternative to Apple's ecosystem barriers.
This was Microsoft's warcry for years: who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware. Well guess what, software matters and it matters more than hardware. If you have both, you have literally a generationally-defining product (e.g. the iPhone), but even if you just have the software, you'll still eat your competitor's lunch. Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware.
Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.
Oh, I don't know about that. Admittedly there were some awful choices made between 2015 and the emergence of M1 architecture, but Apple's reputation for making well engineered hardware goes at least as far back as to when they started milling Macs out of aluminum. I'm thinking back specifically to the PowerMac G5 in 2006. It was designed well, felt solid, and when you opened it up, it continued to look well made. I recently popped open my 2015 Macbook Pro because I'm finally having hard drive issues, and for as much as I have railed against Apple fanboyism over the decades, it looked so nice inside I wanted to take a picture. (Why?! Who cares!? What would I even do with that picture?)
I got tons of mileage out of various Dell desktops and self-built machines over the last couple of decades. It was better bang for the buck, I didn't have to fuss over proprietary connectors and a locked down operating system. When the company I worked for made a big shift away from (it's okay to chuckle) Coldfusion and MS SQL Server to Ruby on Rails and MongoDB in 2013, though they offered to let me continue running on Windows, I asked for a Macbook because that's what everyone else was using. Might as well learn. Didn't much like OSX but the hardware was better than any Windows laptop I'd used. Later I bumped up to a 2015 MBP, which I only just retired this year.
While I was Windows at home and MacOS at work, last month I snagged a Macbook Pro w/ 64gb of RAM from B&H for $2400 - the first Apple computer I've ever paid for myself - and it's replaced my Dell desktop and that 2015 Macbook that my old job let me keep.
I effectively skipped the bad Macbooks, so my perspective is tinted by that. But even during the bad years, even my friends who continued to operate in the MS domain were buying Macbooks and dual booting them into Windows.
I had access to a Surface tablet through work early on. It was really nice! Just like a Zune. The Surface Pros looked pretty great too, but anecdotally, I never saw them outside the context of visiting a business that was a strictly MS shop.
I still like Windows as an OS better. But Apple's new architecture (which importantly doesn't have me carrying dongles around, or even needing them at home) was compelling enough for me to take the plunge.
There's lots of little details which are well made, but bad decisions: the screen hinges tend to be a little too floppy, the trackpad is oversized, removing the physical buttons makes it hard to use, moving the power button from a separate area to the "eject" button location on the keyboard (and making it look like a regular key), everything they've done with keyboards (flat, overlay spaced keys with no surface indentation and less and less travel). The ridiculously sharp edges of the body chassis which cut into your when you rest your hands there (seen at least one video of someone just filing a bevel into the machine to fix it).
They look great, but that's all they've ever seemed to me: in usability details they've always felt terrible (even MagSafe, which seems like it should be great, feels great, and yet has seemed pretty lacklustre when I've had to use it with a work machine).
The two things I agree on for the 2016-2022 laptops are the sharp edges and terrible keyboards. Maybe take a look at the new laptops next time you get a chance, the edges on my MBAir and 16MBPro from 2022 are waaaay more comfortable than my previous two MacBooks and the keyboard feels much nicer too.
Back to point one though, to me the trackpads are well sized, the hinges are smooth and just right and the power button being where it is is a none issue, I even quite liked the touchbar.
What on earth are you talking about? Microsoft is a software company first. They rode the Windows advantage for more than a decade and didn't have anything to do with the hardware, because they aren't a hardware company. Windows ran (and was preinstalled) on everything, from the lowest tier of trash to the highest end machines, and Microsoft didn't care about the quality of the hardware, because they owned the platform that everyone used for computers. Office is another software product that still doesn't have any real competitors and is one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows.
On the flip side, when exactly did Apple have better software than Microsoft? Their office suite is barely usable for anything outside of the most basic use cases. Apple beat Microsoft in mobile, and Microsoft kept its head in the sand and assumed the Windows advantage would live forever and didn't wake up until Ballmer was gone, after Apple had started eating their lunch in the laptop space, but the assumption was that Windows was so good people wouldn't switch, not that Apple had bad hardware and good software, if only you could run it somewhere else.
Microsoft is named for being SOFTware for MICROcomputers, they don't have a blind spot around software. This is some Soviet revisionism or something.
> Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.
I don't know, Meta is probably the largest employer of PHP developers in the world, I bet they can find people willing to do some other masochistic shit too.
The Vision Pro is really a first-product distraction for the Apple fans. This only further validates the market for XR devices and Meta's Quest's lineup will be the cheaper alternative for those who don't have iPhones or Macs (Since Android phones still outnumber iPhones) [0].
I'm only interested in the next iteration when it gets smaller and cheaper and when Apple announces a direct competitor to the cheaper Quest. Probably 'Apple Vision'. Then it will get its 'iPhone' moment, but it is not going to be the Vision Pro.
> Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.
Meta is fine. They will just copy Apple and make it cheaper and at worse case, become the Android of XR headsets and glasses.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
It’s not like it was better built or had a better screen than cheaper alternatives or anything.
Gaming can't be good, because there's no controllers. Even if the hand and eye tracking is absolutely S-tier, you're never getting something like button input from swinging your empty hands around, twitching your fingers. Just the occlusion from the back of your hand would be enough enough for that to be impossible.
Fitness might be more doable, but even then I think you're going to be very limited with hand tracking only. I think there's a reason why Apple skipped over those segments almost entirely.
EDIT: I meant "VR" controllers, as in things that are tracked in 3d space. Of course you can use a game pad or MKB, but that kinda misses the point of being in VR in the first place.
There are a LOT of WWDC sessions on visionOS; hopefully it’s shown off in one of them. EDIT: Trackpad usage shown here https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076?time=914
VR controllers aren't simple the way a game pad is. They need a full tracking solution, which means sensors with base stations, cameras with some form of vision based tracking, or the headset needs to be able to track them based on some reference points (infrared lights or something). And that tracking needs to be fast, precise, and correctly positioned relative to the headset.
Using the Index controllers with the Lighthouse base stations is kinda plausible from a technical standpoint, but that would mean Apple would need to allow the headset to work with SteamVR, and that seems very unlikely at this point.
Re: 1, it’ll be interesting to see how well the camera system works in practice. All of the reviews are quite positive about precise movements so it might be that they’re throwing hardware at this problem but I’d also be surprised if they were not very carefully tracking performance – if the accuracy isn’t there, it’d take an unusually un-Apple like product manager to risk a billion dollar investment rather than enable that class of device.
PSX games with a PS5 controller on a theatre screen? My inner 8 years old is going to loose his mind.
But that doesn’t solve the issue for the mainstream.
Using only gestures means no haptic feedback and it gets de-synced as soon as the camera can't see what you're doing.
Take Apples gestures for example (e.g. tap your thumb and index finger together to click). As soon as your hand is rotated in such a way that your own fingers are hidden from the camera, you actions stop being applied. This will also happen should one hand cross the other, or resting your arms down while standing, or reaching up for something, or even resting on a couch with your knee up.
The only VR headset I've tried that can do hand tracking (Oculus Quest) sucks at it and games there didn't pick up on it as an input at all, as far as I know.
However, just because VR controllers won't exist for the Apple Vision at release it doesn't mean they never will. Perhaps Apple will release some later, or it'll be a third party release. Heck, someone might unironically release a Nintendo Power Glove style controller that works incredibly well with Apple Vision.
Because none exist.
Assuming it could run Virtual Desktop, there’s your Half Life Alyx in ultra high res.
if it was under 1k usd I would probably pick one up for work. maybe give it a few more years.
Why? When I go to an imax cinema I am impressed with the immersion, I don't feel the need to jump around and act out the scenes in front of me.
I certainly don't think so? My guess going in was that fitness would be one of the main plugs — especially because high-end fitness devices already cost a fair amount, and that would have made their tail end, "How much would a computer plus a screen plus umm... it's $3,5000!" go a lot more smoothly.
I do think that's likely high on the road map, particularly given such a large investment in Fitness+, but also can see them being very wary about encouraging any high-energy movements with a $3,500 device. I think it's the pricing and dev-kit-ish nature of the v1 more than too obvious.
But Vision Pro does seem to imply a future Vision Sport.
The platform launch was very locked down. For incremental hardware upgrades, they put hardware in the hands of devs by either shipping out early or bringing devs to their offices to work on prototypes in a secure environment.
Jesus set up the room boundaries, it's really not that hard.
Basically, a Game Boy or Switch for VR.
Is this the same team who came up with a phone that bends in the pocket?
- 1 Their customers have historically chosen metal and aluminum for their products, and Apple is in the business of building what their consumers prefer.
- 2 Glass and Aluminum conduct heat better than plastic. The 2hr battery suggests thermals are a great consideration where the materials chosen were not just for aesthetics. Perhaps plastic could've worked, but see point #1.
I had just showed him WA state and no ill effects, but I didn't have issues on a pre-release vive prototype or release occulus OG while doing barrel rolls and back flips or movement vluprs.
So I crank up the details to super high and enjoy the awesome rendering detail and save myself from motion sickness.
Elite Dangerous is the only VR app that gives me any motion sickness at all and is also my favorite app in VR so far.
Incidentally Google Earth has comfort options exactly due to that reason, such as the option to narrow the field of view when moving around. I wonder if that option was enabled?
Interestingly I tried out F1 2022 in PCVR mode with it and was surprised to find that didn't make me feel ill. A lot of it comes down to the refresh rate and quality of tracking as its the lag that causes a lot of the nausea.
What is even more impressive is when a VR version of a big, popular game is the best version of that game.
Affordability is somewhat relative. If something is truly compelling, people will spend a lot of money to get it.
"Exclusive" in games consoles is a loaded word that means "exclusive to this platform and not available anywhere else".
If the intended meaning is what you suggest, then I'd recommend removing the word "exclusive" and just saying "there is no affordable VR console with lots of big games".
VRChat, Superhot, Simpleplanes, Flight Sim, Ultrawings, Phantasmagoria, Htiman, Nearly all VR compatible racing games, Rec Room, Euro Truck Simulator, Most VR compatible horror games like Phantasmagoria, etc etc etc.
Did you even try to look it up?
I do not need to "look it up", I own and play Superhot on the Oculus for example.
What in your knee-jerk reply would you say contributes to the conversation about whether "VR exclusives" are needed for a given platform to succeed?
I'm going to help you by providing the context for this conversation (not written by me, but in the initial comment I was replying to), which is:
> "The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games."
There you go. What do you think "big exclusive games" means in this context? Do you think it means "exclusive" as in "Nintendo exclusive" or does it mean "exclusive" as in "it's designed for VR first, regardless of headset brand"? Or something else maybe?
something that people will look at and think “I need VR so I can play that”. The closest so far is half-life alyx, but that’s really not cutting it.
I was really impressed by the Oculus "First Contact" (or whatever the one with the robot is called). I wonder by there are so few games that feel like it.
Beat Saber is pretty cool, but what killed it in my family is that you cannot see what the other person is seeing, so it's a bummer when you're not donning the headset. Unlike with a regular videogame, where you can watch the screen even if you're not playing.
The problem with Valve is that their platform is PCs, and a gaming PC + VR headset is too expensive for most people, who often don't already own a proper PC. The problem with Sony is similar: The PSVR 2 is not a standalone console, but just an add-on to a PS5, and PS5+PSVR2 is too expensive for people who are just interested in VR. It's like trying to sell a Game Boy which requires you to already own an SNES for it to function. It would be a flop.
The Meta Quest 2 is in a better position, it's standalone and rather affordable. But Meta can't support it with big games like Sony or Valve could. Meta doesn't have the expertise and probably also not the will to develop expensive AAA games in order too push Quest sales. They are more interested in the metaverse than in becoming a games company.
Nintendo could perhaps make a successful VR console, but it would require massive investments in AAA titles, which would be very risky for them, given their size. And Sony isn't interested in a standalone system.
Microsoft would be more likely. They have huge cash reserves and can afford to lose large amounts of money until they become profitable, as they've shown with the first XBox. But I they haven't shown any ambitions so far to invest billions into an "XBox VR" console and corresponding AAA games.
In some cases they use it well, like Beat Saber. But how much is that worth to people?
I get why they didn't want to go the controller route, but they'll surely be very aware that it greatly limits what can be done with games.
Remember, the iPad doesn’t come with a controller, but you can use a Pencil with it if you want.
Same thing will likely happen with the Vision products.
Moreover, making elaborate games like civilization wouldn't be economically feasible even if they could be appropriately controlled by default. The price for the headset is so high that not many people will buy it. Then elaborate games can't sell enough copies in order to be profitable. For example, it seems unlikely that even a success like Half Life Alyx made its development cost back. The hardware install base is too small.
I think Apple is playing the long game here. Moore's law and manufacturing improvements will cause the price to go down over time.
Remember, the first Macintosh cost $3,000 in 1984. Today most Macs cost less than 2/3 of that price before adjusting for inflation.
My point was that it would be like walking around Madurodam while playing a game.
And standing would be optional. Apple showed most people sitting down, so I’m presuming you could do that.
But you should be able to do VR while sitting down and "walk" using gestures or a controller.
[0] - https://www.kat-vr.com/
Why? No, seriously, why? People say this as if it is a given, but how would VR improve a game serious that is built around strategy as it's main selling point. How does VR improve Civ as a game? In fact, there are very few genres and types of games that the immersion VR brings is worth the limitations: Weird controls, isolation, headaches, wearing a mask, expense, physical exertion etc.
I'm so tired of people who don't seem to know anything about either video gaming or VR gaming parroting this empty hype of how VR magically makes all games better.
VR is a peripheral, not an advancement in rendering technology.
It's a city. I live in a real city. SimCity is this flat set of graphics on a screen. I'd much rather be able to view my city that I created and see what it looks like on a human level.
I get your point, and many things would not be good.
But for me at least, SimCity would be. So would Call of Duty (and I know that because I've played 1st person shooters in VR before on multiple occasions).
But that's just me.
Meta was proudly boasting about how the Quest 3 will have "Over 500 titles" - thats not something to boast about, it's just highlighting how incredibly poor the platform has been from a developer adoption standpoint.
But there are clearly still problems to solve. And some of them do involve hardware capability. Basically for the mass market they’re just not there yet.
The apple headset certainly appears to have significantly more power and capabilities in many ways. It will be interesting to see what pops up.
Though obviously a future version with a lower price will be necessary for it to truly go main stream.
Either way, if I was gaming, playing a new single player 2D (Last of Us, etc) game on a MASSIVE screen on the Vision Pro seems so exciting. Beat Saber and throwing my hands around? Not so much.
A flop indeed. /s From [0]
"Standalone VR headset Quest 2 from Meta (formerly Oculus under Facebook) has outsold Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S consoles, according to the latest information from the International Data Corporation (IDC)."
> Apple is right to ignore it.
Incorrect.
Apple didn't ignore it because they cannot ignore it. Apple is targeting both gaming and for work just like how the Meta Quest Pro has done so.
[0] https://www.thevirtualreport.biz/data-and-research/65297/que...
The resolution on the Q2 is also just way too low for certain games, I think a MtG-type game would be super cool on the Q2 (and the games I tried in this vein had /massive/ potential that was thrown away completely due to blurry text). In the ends the Q2 has way too many downsides and not enough upsides to keep me using it. I will be getting a Vision Pro at launch though, the resolution alone almost would sell it for me but the emphasis on AR and productivity are the clincher.
But isn't it still the most succesful application of VR?
I don't see another application of VR / AR that will prevent the device eventually gathering dust once novelty has faded. Certainly nothing in the presentation from Apple.
But they also showed full support for pairing standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers and playing with those the way you can on any other Apple platform (except the watch, of course).
Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?
Five times the price, yeah. Today. This really feels like a product aimed at developers right now not the mass market yet.
Which fits. The iPhone took a few years to really take off. The Apple Watch took a few years to really takeoff.
When Apple TV was being developed they were handing them out to devs for free like they had millions they were trying to get rid of. I was a lowly single app creator and they happily sent me one.
For the Intel to M1 migration they did something similar but required them to be returned this time, and limited which devs they sent them out to.
The first Intel Mac and the first ARM Mac were DTKs: Developer Transition Kits.
You’d buy them from Apple at a reduced price, could use them to get your software running, and then had to give them back when the real hardware was released.
There was nothing similar for the watch, iPad, or iPhone though.
Not todays market, which has evolved.
In my opinion, with the possible exception of South Korea, that is purely a matter of apple's global pricing vs local purchasing power and a huge number of those android users would have an iPhone if they could afford it.
I don't think that's true. Samsung flagship phones cost the same as iphones (at least in the UK) and they sell very well here.
Interestingly, the Quest 2 seemed less buggy when I had one.
>Eye input is not shared with Apple, third-party apps, or websites. Only your final selections are transmitted when you tap your fingers together.
Along with this small video: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e2...
Which is great and important for me to see, but I'm unsure how that jives with features such as foveated rendering.
One notable takeaway is that eye tracking of saccades is loosely correlated with cognitive load. In fact, “cognitive load” was a product that would be licensed to developers to use in their apps so that difficulty levels could be dynamically adjusted to keep users in a sweet spot for learning.
Especially when combined with a PPG sensor which can in theory detect if a man gets aroused (HP never investigated developing a model for that, but some comments from friends who were DoD-aligned contractors expressed alternating concern or interest in it, because they knew from their own career and independent research what applications might be possible with those technologies)
…it could be used to infer things which someone might prefer to keep private (I.e. which categories of things they have an emotional response to).
Apple definitely is aware of this and is heading off potential issues by not only not providing that data to third party app developers but also even to Apple itself. Apple does have a strong pre-existing framework for dealing with sensitive health data, so they could have decided to capture similar data and treat it the same way they deal with ECG data. HP did not have a HIPAA compatible framework so they threw away 99% of the PPG data and distilled it down to just “heart rate” which was the only data source available to app developers from the PPG sensor.
(Downside is that one loses the capability for hovering, but strikes me as the correct trade off.)
Now imagine the game has advertisements, or loot boxes, or something else that the game company wants to know if you've looked at. How does Apple prevent them from learning that, if they're able to know what they need to know for the game to function as a regular FPS?
The question will be how easy it is to reconstruct that information from the last exact position + movement info...
I wish someone on the SDK team there could observe me as I tried to search for this information and failed because it would be super-informative on how to (and how not to) succeed on creating a wider community of apps...by making SDKs easily available.
<All opinions are completely my own personal opinions>
Zuck was probably part of the problem... a room full of POs pushing for stupid shit while building on a rocky foundation.
If Vision Pro will succeed Meta could be seen as the cheap-ass alternative. 3500USD vs 500USD is like Ferrari vs. Kia. Not everyone can afford the former.
If Vision Pro doesn't succeed, the market will likely move on from VR completely, leaving Apple and Meta in the same place. Money spent, product introduced, tried, didn't work. Move on.
Not because Meta had a better product, but Apple putting its might into this product category means that "Meta" is vindicated in investing here -- that there exists / will exist a viable market for this technology in coming years.
All the damage done by the poor quality 3D renders of AR/VR worlds from Metaverse -- that made a layperson laugh at the concept of AR/VR -- is probably partly offset by the positive press and marketing budgets that Apple will bring to the table.
Let's be real. You can have all the money in the world, but that doesn't guarantee you access to talent. It doesn't guarantee that you made insightful technical decisions that hamstring you later in the product cycle. It doesn't free you from short-sighted managers or employees who just care about making it to the next vesting cycle.
When you're a billion-dollar(haha, not so significant these days) company, you have a tremendous pressure to show results. You have tremendous pressure to show innovation and be first to market. It has no bearing on the quality of the products you release in the short-to-medium term.
A lot of people probably don’t remember what Android looked like in 2007. Using the Android pre-release SDK next to an iPhone, you’d come to a similar conclusion as yours: how does Google release a mobile OS so behind the curve? Should they fire all their product managers?
Same story with Windows in 1986. It was difficult to see how the graceless file manager from Microsoft could compete with Apple’s holistic GUI.
Give it four years. I think Meta intends to be the Windows and Android of this third wave of UIs. Validation of the market by Apple is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.
metas strategy is to release a cheaper consumer product and improve it iteratively. Hate to break it to you but day1 apple vision pro will have software bugs too.
But it does put an enormous amount of pressure
on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so
far, the role of precise 2D control has been
shifted to the eyes.
I'm extremely curious to know how Vision Pro deals with this. One certainly hopes there's some kind of "single eye" mode; certainly seems possible with relatively small effort and the % of the population who'd benefit seems fairly significant.
Eye tracking most certainly sounds like the way to go, relative to hand-waving.
The Minority Report movie probably set the industry back by a decade or two. Waving your hands around to control stuff seems logical but is quickly exhausting.
EDIT: found it — he didn't talk about it, but it was reported that he had to frequently rest his arms: https://medium.com/@LeapMotion/taking-motion-control-ergonom...
Artistically it was a great choice, and they certainly weren't intending to inspire a bunch of wrong-thinking UI choices in the real world.
However, waving your hands in the air for 8-10 hours a day feels a bit unnatural relative to "actual" physical work. I don't have a real scientific basis for this statement.
But there are some physics at play IMO. In boxing it's generally accepted that a missed punch consumes about twice as much energy as one that connects -- your body must do the work to accelerate your arm, and then it must do a roughly equal amount of work to decelerate it. I think there are some parallels to waving one's hands in the air for 40-50 hours per week relative to "actual" physical labor.
More to the point: MR-style interfaces (at least as typically implemented/depicted) don't really offer tangible advantages to using a good touch pad. They trade tiny finger movements on a trackpad for huge sweeping arm movements that accomplish the same things.
I think if MR-style interfaces had somehow been invented before mice and trackpads, we'd be celebrating mice and trackpads as absolute miracles of efficiency.
On the note of tiring out, I have been strength training for 12ish years now and I still get tired quickly when holding my arms above my head to work on my car. I think because they are a smaller muscle group, they can be saturated easily. I don't have the same issue with repetitive motions, it's just holding the arm in a similar position that does it.
Maybe if AR gestures take into account full motions rather than holding the arm in a similar position for too long, it might not tire so easily.
I have VR already and I will say it's an exhausting experience in general, I can flat screen game for hours, but in VR I want out in less than an hour. I think it's the full focus it forces on you, and the split world spatial reasoning going on.
The aches and pains were there, but just in different spots. Yes my core was stronger, but holy hell were my feet exhausted.
But now that I am also in the future I still use USB drive to move files at the office because. Guess they were on something after all :].
The fallacies
The network is reliable;
Latency is zero;
Bandwidth is infinite;
The network is secure;
Topology doesn't change;
There is one administrator;
Transport cost is zero;
The network is homogeneous.Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tape.
I really hope I won't be locked out of using vision pro just because its input modality isn't compatible with my body...
(I say "I think" because I have not actually used their accessibility features)
With all of the new paradigms in VisionOS it seems perhaps unavoidable that accessibility features might take some time to catch up. Engineers and designers have to wrap their minds around the new stuff.
I have a loved one having issues due to a brain cancer. Optical seizures were the first warning sign and went unnoticed for some time. It would be amazing if VisionOS could potentially detect some conditions or help folks with epilepsy just as the watch has for some cardiac events.
Sound recognition for example, or Assistive Touch on the watch. Not needing those I have no idea wether or not they’re actually useful, but it sure is impressive and seems well-thought.
It will also be interesting how the outward display will display the "bad" eye input including missing eyes, lazy eyes, nystagmus, etc...
"And for people who prefer a different way to navigate content, Pointer Control lets them select their index finger, wrist, or head as an alternative pointer."
This reads to me like they've got you covered (at least in principle).
I suppose Apple could change my mind but I've never been a fan of eyes as input. Touch typing or any equivalent where you can look at one thing and do another seems impossible now.
That's not "defending Apple", that's just... gosh, I can't think of any word besides common sense.
From all of the presentations and press accounts, it seems clear that eye tracking is something of a direct replacement for the mouse/trackpad cursor -- in fact it seems you can use a trackpad or presumably a mouse as well. Looking at an app or "window" seems equivalent to mousing over it, not equivalent to clicking to activate that window.
I think the implication is that the window you are looking at is focussed automatically. Which wouldn't work for say, typing up a document to a text editor while reading from a reference doc. That's just the beginning, I use a mouse-to-focus window manager and that happens all the time with all sorts of things.
What’s your motivation for saying that? Personally I am suspect of people say there isn’t common sense.
Here is the definition at the top: Common sense (or simply sense) is sound, practical judgment concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge in a manner that is shared by (i.e., "common to") nearly all people.
One can certainly say there is common sense. For instance no one likes pain, people like pleasure. People care about entertainment, not boredom. People tend to learn on the whole as they grow up. I also think on the whole have a perception of what is wrong and right, even if there is variance between cultures. The golden rule of reciprocity seems to be near universal (like: don’t kill, don’t steal and so on)
Lots of things we share as a species.
And then you obviate the concept by rendering your own gross ignorance: people don’t like pain? Today you learn about masochism. People need entertainment? Monasticism, asceticism, Buddhism, nihilism, et al. People learn as they age? Quite unfortunately many studies show many people lose a great deal after their teens. And your invocation of the idea that cultures share morality such as a prohibition on murder (this has nothing to do with “reciprocity” by the by) is truly divorced from basic observable reality.
100% of a farming town/community are going to hold "don't grab an unknown fence, as it might be electric" to be common sense. Yet there's going to be a sizable portion of the planet to whom that WON'T be obvious, and they'll try it.
100% of New Yorkers might know not to park your car overnight in a particular area, yet people new to the city will happily do so not knowing they may be putting themselves or their property in danger.
If you have to put bounds on "common sense", or contextualise it at all, then it isn't common, it's just knowledge shared by a group of people of unknown size.
You say it in your final sentence - "near universal". If it's not universal then what's the point? Where is the magical cutoff point of the population where "common knowledge" is no longer common? 95%? 50%? If so, why?
Such speculation is ludicrous because it's going to change drastically from area to area and change even more so depending one what you're talking about. And if such a definition is so fluid, when you're positing that it is in fact universal, then it's pretty clearly false.
"Common sense" and "common knowledge" are just shortcuts we use so we don't have to explain the entire contents of history in one go to explain one other concept. This is very useful. But relying on it existing _ALL_ the time is the work of a dangerous lunatic that has clearly not encountered a broad enough segment of humanity.
I think my personal stance is more on the idea that there is a lot we share as a species (from words, to symbols and human basics) and that could be grouped as common sense. But perhaps my grasp of english fails me here.
Looking at the etymology it also seemed to stem from “community” , what is common among a community. I would wager things were very common for his peers when Thomas Payne wrote his book “Common Sense” , a world to him that was largely very the same in style and substance.
Perhaps that concept simply can longer apply in a pluralistic global world or in a modern sense like you point out with your examples.
Probably best for me not to be an early-adopter in this case :)
Edit to add: Can confirm that Apple stuff is amazing with accessibility, so I’m not surprised there are alternative input methods. My main thinking towards the future is around how nystagmus and foveated rendering will interact. That’s a giant and fascinating research topic I imagine.
https://www.childrenshospital.org/conditions/strabismus-and-...
The bad idea had waves even before that: Remember the gorilla arm.
That's maybe because the screen is small and low. Raising an arm at or above the head is a different matter. If you're cycling with a heart rate monitor you discover that you add some beats when you raise your hands (say, go from 150 to 155) and gain some if you lower your chest close to the handlebar. This doesn't take into account increased or reduced drag because I measured it at home on trainers.
What's interesting is that unlike steady state to a hard sprint, the heart rate rise is almost immediate. There's some delay - 20 to 45 seconds - if I change it up and do a sprint interval before my heart rate reflects that effort.
There was an operations center I worked at that had a large touch screen (think cnn wall), that always sat in the corner of the area collecting dust, but whenever some higher up would visit it would get pulled out and used just to provide a wow factor. It was always the unlucky one that ended up having to use it during this time. The fatigue was horrible.
Andy’s thoughts were infinitely deeper than anything else I’ve read about the device+interface so far. In particular, I liked his observations that so far it’s mostly a 2D plane, with exceptions like the Breathe app and a few demos, which might just be good for demos.
Seeing the heart in 3D reminded a lot of what we saw 10 years ago around what book publishers were trying to do with the iPad. Cool demos but limited real world use.
Here was one particularly thoughtful section:
“unlike the physical version, a virtual infospace could contend with much more material than could actually fit in my field of view, because the computational medium affords dynamic filtering, searching, and navigation interactions (see Softspace for one attempt). And you could swap between persistent room-scale infospaces for different projects. I suspect that visionOS’s windowing system is not at all up to this task.“
On the face of it, it sounds like a company would want coherency, but in practice it means leaving a lot of money on the table for every single of your products. Any consistent design decisions means anyone who's not pleased by it has no option in your lineup to go to. That's of course a gamble Apple is willing to take.
For instance, Apple consistently uses glass and metal in their product design, the only exception I can think of being airpods and their mouse. I personally prefered the plastic for weight and comfort, so that set me out of the market for their headphones and I went to Sony for instance.
Same for laptops with touchscreens, if you care any bit about them Apple is a no go to you. Same for so many things.
PS: on inconsitencies and incoherencies, Windows is the king of the kitchen sink approach, and it's consistently stayed ahead of Apple in numbers. Another instance on how being opiniated isn't only a positive aspect from a business perspective.
Yes there also will be quirks I'll be unhappy with, which I _could_ (given enough time and experimentations) find a better solution for. But fundamentally I'll be getting a solid product, that works well enough. It is _that_ promise, which fundamentally allows Apple to do an online store and do a mostly directly-to-customer retail operation.
If you increase diversity, you make this "buy any product and you'll be fine" thing so much more complicated, loosing more sales than the niches even contain. I'd guess almost all people just want it to work :TM:, at least that's me, and that's me deciding the phone of my mum
On the other hand, that doesn't seem to be what most consumers long for. Apple had two runaway successes with the iPod and then the iPhone, but to note, the iPhone is not the best selling phone brand nor dominates the international market. Same way Apple is not the #1 computer maker.
So yes, focus and consistency brings tremendous value, but there are many other ways to get that level of value, and many customers will have different priorities.
(I also don't think any brands need to be #1, being profitable should be enough, but I am more and more interested by how Windows has stayed at the top for so many years. In particular Apple progressively feels closer to Sony when it was at its peak: superbe products, strong ecosystem binging, coupled with also a heavy dose of strategy tax on how to benefit from what the other companies are doing)
From everything I've heard, Apple's org structure is a lot more focused and UX-driven from the top down than basically any other large tech company. That means you get a lot less compromising and in-fighting.
The other side is how Apple makes money compared to other companies. Meta makes money mostly by selling you (the user) to advertisers (the real customers). Same with Google (70%ish ad revenue). Microsoft is a hot mess of competing B2B fiefdoms (the vast majority of their revenue comes from businesses, not consumers). Amazon only makes a few products directly for consumers, and mostly makes money from being a marketplace + AWS. That leaves Apple fairly uniquely positioned as a premium consumer hardware company that also sells consumer software services to enhance the experience and... drive more hardware sales.
Apple builds an insanely strong core from which any and all other teams can (maybe must) build on top of and use to power their team's platform.
You have a core messages team for example - off of which Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch teams integrate. Do that for each core service or product (photos, safari, notes, music, etc).
The Amazon structure is such that everything flows from the person above you, work is not shared between teams.
One is compositional (Apple). The other is inheritance (Amazon).
- Something whimsical to inspire developers. Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile, or a task manager that shows processes as plants around me. Close apps by scrunching their screen like paper. A globe with my geotagged pictures.
- A game, any game. Beat Saber was the killer app for me to get my Vive, and Valve already spent tens of millions of dollars to create a triple-A VR game. Neither seem compatible with the Vision Pro input methods. Apple could at least play their strengths, like an AR hide-and-seek, or a horror game with eye tracking.
- Content creation or professional work. The last thing we need is another passive device to watch 3D TikTok. Show someone customizing their "home screen" environment to look like a fantasy potion shop; or a mechanic looking at a 20x magnified broken part; or an SRE watching their kubernetes cluster as a floating 3D graph; or a VFX artist in the scene scrubbing forward and backward to adjust an effect.
It feels like inventing the first smartphone, camera apps and all, but it doesn't make calls and the only input is tapping on icons.
TikTok on your face likely has better market potential than the dreadful Horizon Worlds.
We finally have the technology to bring https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html to life
> Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile
But the point of whimsical demos is inspiration, like a concept car, not complete realism.
[1] https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA
Half of their marketing was about how it's a essentially a macbook that you strap to your face...
By far the most disappointing part of the keynote was when they finally do show someone playing a game, and it's a basketball game played with a regular controller on a flat, virtual TV. The TV is even smaller than an average real-world TV.
It's typical of Apple to so completely ignore gaming, but it's disappointing that they're continuing that trend even with VR.
A lot of value could be had playing flat screen games this way. Imagine sitting on a plane with a controller in your lap, but it feels like you are sitting in a private loungeroom or some zen environment playing a game on a large TV.
The fact that what they came up with was "game in a rectangle, but this time floating in the air" makes me think that either there are major limitations to what the AR platform is capable of or that they're intentionally trying to tell people "gaming isn't a priority here".
apple's anti-gamer slant has always stunk to me of some exec being salty about what went down with nvidia and hating the idea of ppl playing games. their slapfight with epic games is another example of them not giving 2 shits about the gaming market and alienating a highly growing userbase.hell they didn't mention live streaming at all and that seems like a usecase this thing is tailor built to be good at considering how many cameras and screens it has!
meanwhile they want people to buy into apple arcade...
I respect Apple for not doing this. These are demos that are kind of fun for 20 minutes but you would never want to actually use a device like this: https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ?t=59
- leverage existing content means they won't have an empty room problem or a big "now what?!" moment for users after the novelty wears off. Without Steam, most existing VR platforms would be completely pointless. So far VR is for games and most of those are published on Steam. That's because most VR hardware vendors suck at software and end up outsourcing that to game studios. Meta included. Despite their ambitions, their goggles are mainly devices for running games not developed by Meta.
- a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience running, again, off existing content. Genius move because people already spend lots of money on home theaters. Some people buy 10K$ plasma screens even. This market is very real. Also, involving Disney with their huge back catalog of completely unmonetized 3D movies ... so obvious.
- Extend the highly successful IOS ecosystem to the new experience. They have tens of millions of apps already. And they'll work fine in AR. Why not do that?
The strategy is about content. It's the right strategy. The first generation hardware is of course amazing too and it will bootstrap a new generation of application developers that will be using Apple SDKs and tools to target all this with new content. But to bootstrap the ecosystem they need an audience.
Here too the strategy is genius: SDKs are based on things developers already use. They just co-announced a push into gaming for Mac along with some convenient porting kits for developers. That was just a footnote buried deep into the mac related announcements. But of course this means more content coming to AR as well. All that lovely content currently available via Steam.
Top to bottom the strategy is about compelling content. I think it's going to work.
This is not the final answer to AR but the opening salvo in a decades long push to completely own this space. Step 0 is to get millions of these things in the market with enough content to get people hooked and keep them consuming content. The rest will come later. It's appropriately radical, pragmatic, and conservative at the same time.
The specification of the device seems to be complete overkill for the kind of strategy you are describing, which frankly does not need extreme hardware power, and makes it cost prohibitive to many of the people who would otherwise buy the content.
All I can think of is that there are lower specced and lower priced devices coming, but I am sort of at a loss as to why they didn’t start with those - as if this fails, they aren’t going to get off the ground.
The high-end system spec is to ensure there’s no tethering requirement, thus the computer-class SoC in there.
Will help keep people from turning into Stephenson’s gargoyles. :)
By the way, this is a similar price point to the magic leap and holo lens devices. This just seems to be what it takes for a state of the art AR/MR experience.
And it's not like there is a shortage of very wealthy people buying things like Teslas, ipad pros, fully specced out iphones, that carry thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For those people 3500$ is just the right level of premium and exclusivity. Like it or not, Apple is very good at separating people like that from their cash. There are millions of them and most of them are already loyal customers. There is no need for a lower price point and there absolutely is no need to compromise on quality.
The goal isn't to make you happy but to make you crave something you can't afford yet. So, when the time comes you'll be spending a bit more than is comfortable for you. That's what Apple does. They leave the low margin scraps to others.
There's one unavoidable obstacle to people wanting to put on the headset: you're going to look really weird and isolated to other people in your environment. The tech to solve this problem doesn't exist, and maybe it's too high a barrier and this product category just isn't going to work. But Apple is betting that if they chip away at all the other reasons to not put on the headset, it'll cross the threshold where it wearing it becomes a regular routine for most people who buy one.
If they can bootstrap that into an ecosystem so that there's things you'll want to do with the device that you couldn't do with your other devices, at that point they can start selling a cheaper device that doesn't try to solve the onerousness problem through sheer luxury.
a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience running, again, off existing content. Genius move
Cool. Tell NReal and BigScreen that, they and others have already done it on Quest and other platforms. Nothing new here.
Without Steam, most existing VR platforms would be completely pointless. So far VR is for games and most of those are published on Steam.
Tell that to the many Quest users who have delighted in the wireless experience and superb exercise apps and other new vistas opened up to them in their existing platform, including remote working via services like Immersed. The latter can absolutely be boosted with the new specs the Vision Pro is bringing.
Look, this is a bold move by Apple, and I applaud it; I think it could give a welcome boost to the industry but please can we stop with the nonsense about them creating something that wasn't already there, or at least elaborate what it brings and improves with reference to the prior art.
That information - which I don't doubt is there, this is an exciting product - will be genuinely useful.
Similarly, sure, maybe NReal and BigScreen have done something similar and were earlier in doing so. But they simply don't have the same audience Apple does. I get the frustration -- we shouldn't credit Apple as the sole inventor of all good things. But they are usually really good in stitching a lot of good things together and releasing them in a single product that usually turns out fairly successful.
One of my biggest impressions watching Apple's trailer was that this paints a big target on televisions and home theater hardware in general.
If the experience is executed well, it would be much cheaper (yes, really) and easier and simpler to just get Apple's VR goggle instead of a TV and peripherals that will infuriate you.
Clearly we live in interesting times.
That combined with Meta boasting "over 500 titles" like it's a good thing really do put into perspective just how devoid of content the quest really is.
I actually see this as a bit less surprising. After all, if you change the hardware in a big way, and you change the software in a big way, users will have a harder time adjusting to the new platform. Instead, they're making a big leap on the hardware side, keeping legacy apps and concepts, and then will presumably iterate to more 'native' experiences that were previously impossible/unimaginable/unintuitive.
We are all highly trained to read text, it seems basic but it is in practice quite abstract.
Text is still best read on a flat surface.
The great innovation I can see with this new Apple device is eye tracking, they have not invented it, but they might have perfected it enough to be useable.
Eyes could be better than a mouse.
That lacks other features of course and must be tethered to a PlayStation 5.
But eye tracking + foveated rendering seems like it’s going to become table stakes in the next few years.
It would be funny if controllers evolved to be more like the single-joystick models that we had decades ago, with the joystick on the left and rows of buttons on the right. History doesn't repeat itself, but perhaps it'll rhyme?
In top down bullet hell shooters the player had to aim and shoot in one direction as it walks in another (potentially opposite), so one stick is still needed
edit: ah, right the vision pro does have lidar. I look forward to seeing this pinning if it's implemented. I'm still skeptical it would work well - I've used ARKit and it's not really that accurate when you're moving around.
And some might argue you just switch apps to find that "screen".
Personally I would put something interesting on the ceiling and look up at it.
[1] https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg?t=180
[2] Same video, 5min 12s: https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg?t=312
* Fingers together gesture clicking.
* Voice activated menu navigation. It was glitchy/I never used it though. In 2023 these sorts of systems are much better though.
* No controllers. It was all gesture based. Opening the start menu required your hand upturned, fingers together then outstretch. Kind of like an "open" gesture.
* "Pointing" based on head looking vector, which was annoying.
* Spatial anchors and being able to remember past spaces and how you used them. There was a whole set of SDK APIs for the spatial stuff built into Win 10
The Vision Pro iterates on some of these. Eye tracking for pointing and more cameras for tracking hand pose for clicking, to reduce the annoyance/strain. IMO all mandatory for long term usage (I frequently got motion sick with the HoloLens and the 3 months of debugging/developing on it were a challenge).
Maybe if Microsoft had switched to more commonplace display technology and continued to iterate on their product instead of let it languish, they could have had a solid competitor to this, if not maybe be first to the market.
Pebbles and other smart watches filled the criteria, but never delivered a cohesive package. I do admit that the first 3 or so generations of Apple Watches are pretty rubbish, but 4th onward with the possibility of all-day battery life, the watch became a clear winner compared to all others by manufacturers. Garmins and other fitness-first watches hold the crown when it comes to the more slimmed down and focused feature set, but for the generic smartwatch the Apple Watch is untouchable.
Six years later Nokia pulled the plug on the whole thing because it got absolutely steam rolled by Apple who had none of those things but started building them around the same time Nokia decided to focus o flip phones instead (sorry, this level of corporate insanity still makes me angry). They were worried about the Motorola Razr more than they were about the iphone. They actually killed multiple touch screen platforms because of that before scrambling to re-build one around the sinking ship that was Symbian. And then they badly botched that. Reason: Nokia management was arrogant, out of touch, clueless, incompetent, complacent and utterly in denial about there even being a problem. Six years later the whole lot got fired and sold off to ... Microsoft. Who of course promptly killed it because Apple had won already and between them and Google, MS saw no path to success. So, they walked away from the whole thing.
That's the company we're talking about here. So, sure, MS has stuff that they've been sitting on for ages. But what they've lacked for years is any clue as to what to do with all that stuff. Like with the iphone, Apple has been known to prepare something for years. And people just assumed it would be fine and disappointing.
IMHO things are not that hopeless for MS and they could pull a few things together. XBox, holo lens, and some other bits and pieces could make for a half decent experience. Apparently they are talking to magic leap about licensing some of their tech as well. But that's not going to happen overnight and a rush job is not going to be good enough here.
I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningful way as my primary computing device.
On the other hand, the closed ecosystem is definitely cause for concern. Fingers crossed that WebXR support comes out from behind a feature flag to allow for progressive (spatial) web apps.
Hmm. Marketing horse-puckey.
A 2018 Dell XPS that has a Wacom digitiser and OneNote gives me lower latency and better inking experience than an iPad and pencil 2. I used them side by side for long-form writing for a while and the iPad was left in the dust.
Part of (my) definition of a platform is that when you buy it you are fully paying for the cost and contribution the platform provider made when you buy it. If there's a residual financial (or other) obligation after that then you don't have a platform, you have a partnership. I know there's other definitions of platform but that's the one that's important to me.
I guess you can always buy an android based headset that allows sideloading but presumably it won't have the same level of investment.
As far as this goes ...
> it won't have the same level of investment.
Meta is constantly mocked for how much they have invested. You can argue about how much it paid off, but they certainly invested.
I think the point is that Meta’s investment is weak compared to Apple’s full court press. It really is laughable.
Ouch. I'm sorry to hear that, I feel sorry for folks like you that are sensitive to nausea. There's so much potential in this tech but I can see a whole new class of disadvantaged people coming who aren't able to fully utilise it.
If that same dev would have made the same profits on other competing platforms, Apple is just fragmenting the market and it's take should be limited to basically management fees.
I hope this new platform brings newer applications and innovations, but also expect competition to adjust, making it a situation where Apple is just one of the many platforms.
iOS sure brings some value to the table. How much actually ? who knows...
For comparison Youtube is also a platform regularily criticized by its participating creators, but you're not seeing high profile lawsuits or the EU slapping them fines at every turn.
What you’ve said doesn’t change this at all.
That number is the total revenue for the whole store (there's a lot to say about it, since Google is also not the only Store for android, in particular in China and Korea), and it matters very few for any individual developper.
It's not because the total amount of in-App purchase for all games is twice as much on iOS that my new ssh shell app will make twice as much on iOS than on another Store, for instance.
Of course individual products have their own idiosyncrasies, but is it in fact the case that on average, an app on iOS will make more than the same app on Android.
But we all know the difference between implementing something brand new versus retrofitting something into an existing system. So my guess is iOS had more secure defaults for a system like vision.
So they're effectively recreating a lot of the elements of the macOS w/r/t window positioning, resizing, and depth, but building all on top of the iPadOS paradigm. If you consider the input methods are probably closer to a touch interface than a MKB interface then it kinda makes sense.
Personally I have zero interest whatsoever in living inside Apple's "only what we allow you to do" world, and the fact that they seem to be expanding it to what seems like a very powerful, desktop replacement computing device is kinda gross to me. But from an interface standpoint I think it's really interesting and actually makes some sense.
They’re the same foundation, iOS is a fork of OS X and was originally announced as such. I’d be shocked if there isn’t a well maintained internal build of iOS which keeps parity with macOS windowing etc.
The difference in restrictions between the platforms is entirely arbitrary. If this device appeals to Mac users or would-be Mac users, I’d be shocked if it doesn’t at least eventually allow a Mac-like environment.
"Limited" makes it, well, limited, but it has performance advantages: fewer unexpected page faults mean audio/video processes won't unexpectedly drop a frame as often, and there's fewer disk writes which is good for the lifespan of the hardware it runs on.
Btw iOS actually has a very limited swap policy called "freezer" that only applies to suspended background apps, and only when it's in the performance budget.
No matter how fancy the visuals, it’s hard to have a pseudo-hands free voice interface that doesn’t uh, work?
I switch between iPhone and Pixel and Apple/Google products and each has a lot going for it. But leaving Assistant for Siri is downright jarring.
Why Google made the shitshow that is Bard when they could have just iterated on Assistant I’ll never know. Such a solid product.
It would be really nice if there was a dictionary you could add technical words to.
I strongly doubt you're right. Apple is full of geeks; just because they tend to be tight-lipped doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to all the same stuff we are.
Whereas I’d wager more than half of Google employees use iPhone, and a lot of Google staff work exclusively on iOS and Mac apps. Apple software runs in their hardware, period. It makes them too insular and unable to see their shortcomings.
Hell it was bad as a voice assistant now it's gonna get lapped by other companies releasing personalized AI assistants.
No it’s not. Try doing literally anything without an active internet connection and she’ll say “I’m having trouble connecting”
Though I do remember reading you can connect it to your mac, so who knows. You’ll just need 2 $2000+ devices instead of one.
I'd prefer an OS that spans multiple devices. Something how computers behave in “The Expanse” where someone can flick stuff from their mobile device to another system for a better workspace. If I'm typing this on my workstation, but want to switch environment and bring something light like a tablet or just my phone, I could send the tab and it would retain its state. The closest to something like this is a server-client architecture like Logitech Media Server. A paradigm like this would be more useful than immersion.
This is also why I like Vim. Buffer is a separate concept from File, adding an extra flexibility – in terms of layout – to how I edit to complete my current task. I want a similar flexibility with applications, at least lightweight – state wise – ones.
CloudKit and Handoff are close, but very brittle. Apps like Bear, Reeder, Anybox, Things 3, make switching devices seamless. Another good example is handoff between the HomePod and the iPhone.
I think Apple's whole point is that they provide the APIs so that apps can do this themselves. Which, yeah, is a bit disappointing; I'd love to have a 100% fidelity, flick-to-another-device type of Continuity built into the OS, but the APIs are at least a starting point.
Imagine developing with the ultimate 10x setup: several files, documentation, and debuggers open at once, with a zen nature background. Or making music, or painting, or even writing a research paper.
Imagine playing a video game but the environment wraps around you. Imagine watching movies in a virtual theater with a simulated 100-inch TV (one of Apple's demos). Even reading and browsing the web can be improved with an ambient environment and extra space for more stuff.
Is it worth $3500? For end-users probably not, but if it genuinely makes professionals and hobbyists substantially more productive, it will be worth $3500 or even way more. How much money would you spend to write, code, create faster?
Of course, this assumes the VR actually performs, and whether a bigger screen and immersion actually makes people work faster. As of now it seems VR is still a gimmick which impresses people at first, but doesn't provide much outside of niche experiences; which, if this holds for the Vision Pro, makes it very much not worth the price.
The problem for me is that I like monitors better. I like the feeling of real space around me. I cannot conceive of wearing googles on my head all day. I just don’t want to.
And I definitely don’t want to be separated from other humans by googles. It just not attractive to me.
I used to believe this was the ideal setup, hell I even implemented it with monitors, but since I've integrated LLMs into my development process I find all I need are two side by side windows and now with CopilotX those are both in VSCode. I occasionally venture out for documentation but even that will make its way into the editor at some point. Using Edge and the Bing sidebar I can even save myself the trouble of reading through all of the documentation on a page by just asking Bing to retrieve the info I want from the page I'm on.
Doing all that in VR would be cool but I don't think it's going to increase my productivity nearly as much as LLMs have.
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on VR and I love gaming and socializing in VR
This irrelevant for those of us not doing cookie-cutter-been-done-1000000-times-before stuff. In such cases all the LLMs in the world are useless, but many pages of docs open at once are useful. Go tell your LLM to write a ARMv6M assembly MIPS-II emulator. I'll wait. Go on.
No one has come up with anything better yet. That’s one of the big problems with VR that I’ve seen. Do you have games on one hand, and a virtual environment showing mostly 2D stuff on the other.
I think that’s one of the reasons Apple is releasing this when they are. I sort of suspect they’ve gone about as far as they can. They don’t have a killer app, but that’s ok.
They’re putting it out there for developers, and we’ll see. Someone will come up with something compelling.
VisiCalc, Lotus 123, WordPerfect, Photoshop, PageMaker, Angry Birds, the web… none of them came from the platform vendor. So what will someone come up with that will make everyone rush to order the Vision 2 when it’s announced for $1500?
EDIT: Found the API docs. There's some really interesting classes in there! I remember handling coordinates to be confusing/a pain though haha. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.perception...
And for me, that sounds super exciting. Imagine going into a room and you have apps on the wall. You go into your home office, you have apps ready to go (picture a big status dashboard covering a wall, your music app to the left of your desk, stuff like that).
If it actually does work that way, that really is a whole new world.
Can’t believe after the failed attempts to kill files on iPhone and iPad they’ve learned nothing and still think we can pretend a professional work tool can exist without a proper file system.
Not saying it should have desktop icons strewn across your living room, just that the “files siloed in apps transferring via share buttons” iPad model is objectively productivity hell and puts mental load menu fumbling where MacOS is instinctive drag and drop.
If it's anything like iOS/iPadOS it just doesn't work for getting work done or keeping projects organized, buildable upon and sane.
I don't understand this. It's things they made them sign? I saw another article saying they make them sign a promise to not show they are wearing the headset, allegedly because they might look like huge dorks and cause brand risk.
As long as it doesn't get sweaty or nauseating after 30 minutes, I would still be content with it as a glorified monitor, not needing new UI paradigms or gesture controls.
Distraction-free huge monitor computing anywhere in the world is a huge advantage over laptops imo.
Why would anyone want text fully aligned to the left of the browser window?! At least it's distinctive, I don't think I've ever seen that on any other website in the last 15 years.
Now I just have to wait for a Linux compatible version.
Because there's no way I'm gonna use any Apple software as if it was twenty five years ago, before iTunes insanities and whatever happened since. NFW.
That'll probably be about 15-20 years. Apple will have to prove that their interfaces work, and the rest of the industry will have to follow, and hardware will have to be hacked, and new paradigms built, and eventually -- maybe -- it'll be possible to do a non-janky version of this on linux. But the UX is paramount here, and linux is notoriously bad at that.
This is why I think this device will be different than its predecessors. There are practical reasons to buy it … assuming you can use it without getting sick or strained.
Gary has a great TED talk (Mar 2010) on this radical but intuitive spatial sorting interface. Foveation and hand movements are perfect user links.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT_x9s67yWA
Combined with a Vision Pro—OMG.
That said, the same thing was true about video phones, to the point that everyone assumed humans do not need to see each other on a phone call. Then we had a pandemic and things changed.
Figuring out how you're going to get mobile data access in a foreign country without being charged through the nose does feel somewhat stressful...
Also, a private monitor where nobody can look over your shoulder, which is a game changer for doing any kind of sensitive work or personal business in a public or shared space.
I thought at this stage, it would be fairly foolproof to use that at the very least to simulate something like a click, no?
So I take it that you can basically leave your laptop home and take your Vision visor with you and work from a virtual environment?
I want to measure my pupil distance while browsing social media. The reasoning is my reading in "Thinking Fast and Slow" that pupils dilate when we see something we find interesting / something we like / when we are thinking and vice-versa. I want to put it to the test and it seems like finally the consumer tech is close to making it possible.
Does quest support pupil tracking? I did some cursory research but couldn't find any reference for it. Industry pupil tracking headsets are way too expensive; My last hope is that someone will jailbreak vision pro...
I wonder what happens in games though. Will this not essentially be aimbot, looking at the target and then shoot?
The basic observation: It takes very little effort and exposure to remember places (spatial information) in contrast to taking in linear heavy processed information from writing and numbers (e.g. "facts").
Combine these two and you have a powerful way navigating through the information space itself.
If you look at it, we are confined to rectangular boxes, fancy interactive books enhanced by moving pictures, audio and some very limited tactile feedback but nevertheless bound by the superstructure of a static tiny detail in our overall spatial awareness.
Of course we are now so used to the endless iterations of rectangular boxes that we are extraordinarily proficient at extracting a lot of richness/information from that: in scrolling, clicking, typing, imagining ... I'm reminded by the scene of "The Matrix" where Cipher let Neo glimpse the Matrix code on his screens: "You get used to it, I don't even see the code. All I see is blond, brunette, redhead."[1]
IIRC once a 50s western movie was shown to a rural "test" public from the Eurasian steppe some of who saw a moving picture for the very first time. The reactions were mostly enthusiastic during slow "panorama shots" but the audience reacted very agitated in "close-ups" or "medium shots" where e.g. in the heat of the action the horse's legs were "cut off".
We take it as given that we learn the language of movies and find them at times 'realistic' and 'immersive' when in fact contrasted to 'reality' itself qbit by qbit they are basically - with some rounding error - as highly processed as books and thereby rely heavily on our imagination filling the gaps.
While we are on the subject of of naïve visions, another area which isn't appreciated enough imho is the immense dexterity of our hands as with "vision processing" the devices themselves are glued on our dexterity of "exact" and "repetitive" moves, there is too little wiggle room for organic experimenting, refining and expression like one would naturally do for a musical instrument.
This is immediately where I went as well. Been hoping for something like this since the first few iterations of VR tech. I can imagine that will become one of the 'killer apps' of this platform. Unfortunately, he also said it might take some iterations on their windowing system.
Maybe this is a better time than ever to start a new opticians.
It seems like the last few years have generally had a technological backlash with worries about both invasive spying and surveillance capitalism on the one hand and mental health issues (especially in teens) sprouting on the other.
So it seems strange to react to all that by offering a product that glues a computer straight on your eyeballs. Now of course Meta has already been going down that road, but let's just say that company doesn't have much to loose in the reputation department.
To be fair, Apple seems to have made a few interesting design choices. They seem to have gone out of their way to create an illusion of two way transparency to their headset making casual human communication at least theoretically possible (although how much conversation you can have with someone actually wearing these due to distraction is an open question - if it's like trying to talk to someone on their phone that it will be at best half their attention).
That said, you can have something identical to this with Obsidian with a few plug-ins and their hosting service.
I've been researching eye tracking for my own project for the past year. I have a Tobii eye tracker which is probably the best eye tracking device for consumers currently (or the only one really). It's much more accurate than trying to repurpose a webcam.
The problem with eye tracking in general is what's called the "midas touch" problem. Everything you look at is potentially a target. If you were to simply connect your mouse pointer to your gaze, for example, any sort of hover effect on a web page would be activated simply by glancing at it. [1]
Additionally, our eyes are constantly making small movements call saccades [2]. If you track eye movement perfectly, the target will wobble all over the screen like mad. The ways to alleviate this are by expanding the target visually so that the small movements are contained within a "bubble" or by delaying the targeting slightly so the movements can be smoothed out. But this naturally causes inaccuracy and latency. [3] Even then, you can easily get a headache from the effort of trying to fixate your eyes on a small target (trust me). Though Apple is making an effort to predict eye movements to give the user the impression of lower latency and improve accuracy, it's an imperfect solution. Simply put, gazing as an interface will always suffer from latency and unnatural physical effort. Until computers can read our minds, that isn't going to change.
Apple decided to incorporate desktop and mobile apps into the device, so it seems this was really their only choice, as they need the equivalent of a pointer or finger to activate on-screen elements. They could do this with hand tracking, but then there's the issue of accuracy as well as clicking, tapping, dragging or swiping - plus the effort of holding your arms up for extended periods.
I think it's odd that they decided that voice should not be part of the UI. My preference would be hand tracking a virtual mouse/trackpad (smaller and more familiar movements) plus a simple, "tap" or "swipe" spoken aloud, with the current system for "quiet" operation. But Apple is Apple, and they insist on one way to do things. They have a video of using Safari and it doesn't look particularly efficient/practical to me [4].
But who knows - I haven't tried it yet, maybe Apple's engineers nailed it. I have my doubts.
1. https://uxdesign.cc/the-midas-touch-effect-the-most-unknown-...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
3. https://help.tobii.com/hc/en-us/articles/210245345-How-to-se...
I think unless Apple has really added some sort of magic, it will be an issue for most people to use Vision Pro for anything but passive activities, or with a physical trackpad.
Compare with a smartphone, I can move to tap the 'back' button in Safari without moving my eyes to the back button. Looking "at" the phone generally is enough to see where my finger is, and say clicking on links I can look at the link and move my hand to it and move my eyes away while my hand is moving.
Having to coordinate looking and clicking - while I haven't tried it - I can imagine that feels more load-bearing, more effortful, more constraining, more annoying.
I'm doubtful we really know how good it is yet. Without a few hours/days of hard use its just not going to be obvious the degree to which they've overcome all these long standing obstacles via "magic".
It's hard to think voice is anywhere near ready for this application, I still find it highly frustrating after decades of tries.
I’m curious about how they deal with apparently not doing this, in terms of how do you know what button is going to be clicked if you click? The product page under privacy says that websites and apps don’t get eye tracking data, only knowing when you click, so I guess that means a website won’t display its active/hover effects on a button you’re looking at. Because if it could then it could just link that to analytics in JavaScript and defeat that privacy protection. So if you don’t have that, how do I actually know what’s going to happen when I click?
With Apple solution (or any VR with eye tracking):
1. You have very accurate head 6d location (gyroscope, compass, accelerometer + lidar for translation) at 100+ fps minimum and very computationally cheaply without much latency
2. Cameras pointing at each eye from distance of few centimeters. In this situation Eye region of interest occupy full image resolution. Probably even VGA resolution (or less) is enough to have very accurate precision in this case
3. Because headset covers your face you don't have any problem with different lightning condition, cluttered background, whats more they use IR floodlight to have consistent lighting of pupils
4. Possibly they even use similar Truedepth IR dot pattern to get 3d depthmap of your pupils similar like truedepth sensor works with difference that here they can put thos camera more far away and have it more accurate disparity map
5. Who knows maybe they even use lidar instead of truedepth for even lower latency
6. Because sensors are so close they can have very accurate reconstruction of your eyes and distance between them - most people don't have completely symmetric eye/face
Tobii is a sensor that is just like 0.5m far away from your face. Has to track your head, estimate orientation and distance, and detected eye ROI will be a tiny crop of their image sensor even if they camera has 4K resolution (which I doubt they use such resolution). At that distance if you want to get accuracy of 1 cm of what you are looking at screen you need to detect pupil movement of ~1 degree angle. If you want even better accuracy without gitter like 1mm then you need to detect movement of pupils of 0.1 degree angle.
? =! Vision Pro
And I'd like to know how realistic this thing is for "not apple users". It's a VR headset, can I use it with Windows to play MS Flight Simulator or Star Citizen? Can I use it on Linux to get wall-to-wall emavs? More real world testing is required.
This will be another part of the Apple system along with Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc. You will never be able to use this as just a monitor equivalent for any other OS.
This is an M2 computer strapped to your head: it can bloody well do VR, let's see what folks do with this device that Apple never asked them to, but they do anyway because Apple doesn't get to tell them how to use their overpriced hardware (especially if the moment you buy it, the buyback is $50 if you're lucky)
MKBHD on the Vision Pro: better image passthrough, better responsiveness, better hand tracking, better eye tracking, better image quality than any other headset he's ever used.
You: "overpriced hardware".
No, better hardware.
There are reports now from dozens of people who've had similar 30 minute sessions using some of the features. That's enough to get an idea of some facets, guess at what's not polished, what's not ready at all. But they're all easy to ignore if you want to wait until next year.
But valid to be annoyed at it, Apple do tend to be quite polarising for people.