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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a rant, but I bought a Quest Pro last year, and I feel it was a total waste of money. It's actually embarrassing how much of an unpolished piece of garbage it feels like. Sure, it's fun as a PCVR headset, but as a productivity tool or as a multimedia consuming device, or as a social tool, it completely misses the mark.

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.

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I found it notable Apple has this to say about eye tracking under the "Learn more about privacy and security" section:

>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.

You can get a surprising amount of information about cognitive processes from eye tracking. I worked on the industrial version of HP Reverb G2 which included a PPG sensor and Tobii eye tracking. Was really an amazing product which suffered from having to use third party platforms like Windows Mixed Reality and OpenXR which didn’t have first class support for what was possible.

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.

I imagine there will be some developers that try to have analytics fire when certain events happen, correlated with eye-hovering. Hopefully Apple will catch these tricks before they can go live. The potential value of knowing where someone's eyes are (whether they saw an advertisement, for example) could be very high, so I envision a cat-and-mouse game.

Apple addressed that in the keynote. There’ll be an invisible canvas over the window content, and the app never learns where you look (nor Apple, ie it is not further stored or processed). Only when you click (ie tap your thumb and index together) does the app get an event.

(Downside is that one loses the capability for hovering, but strikes me as the correct trade off.)

Sure, that works for certain contexts. But what about a game, where your vision is used to aim a weapon? The app has to know where you are looking in order to know where to shoot. If it's an online game, then the information cannot be isolated on the device since you're shooting at other players.

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?

Shooting is typically an action you take, not just a matter of the direction you're pointing in - so this fits the model well: the game gets information about motion to swing the camera, and gets the exact position when you press a button, but doesn't get to know exactly what you're looking at if you're not pressing the button.

The question will be how easy it is to reconstruct that information from the last exact position + movement info...

This doesn't hold true for FPS games. You absolutely need to tell the game where you are aiming so it can draw crosshairs, even for on-rails shooters favored by VR.

most probably you are right. But I could imagine crosshairs are not needed anymore with highly accurate eye tracking, you would just intuitively know where you are aiming anyways.

You don’t necessarily want the cursor to be as fast as the human eye

Yep, you presumably need to animate a hand/gun/etc. moving on-screen. So maybe it would lag eye movements by a bit.

I expect fps will still require a controller/kbm rather than relying on the eye tracking/gesture input. For one thing, I don’t know how else you would move and perform actions at the same time.

There aren't usually any on-screen crosshairs in VR games. You just use the crosshairs that are on the weapon, which is tracked through controllers. I expect there to be trackable controllers available for Vision too. It's also possible to use hand tracking, but that's not optimal.

I’m absolutely happy if the answer to that will be that gaming is not the core focus of the device. Let AR be more than FPS in 3D for once.

Same goes for driving games, and really any game where you're navigating a cursor around a map.

It’s a long game. In both desktop and mobile, a viable and commercially successful alternative emerged even though Apple had the edge in sophistication and innovation.

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.

The Quest Pro has actual VR games and proper VR controllers though. I doubt that such games are possible or probable with eye pointing and finger clicking alone. Apple also didn't include any VR games into their presentation.

VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. Apple is right to ignore it.

People generally agree that VR games are miles ahead of ordinary games in terms of immersion. The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games. The Meta Quest comes close to a decent price point, but there aren't many publishers making elaborate games for it. A chicken/egg situation with regards to adoption and game investment.

Basically, a Game Boy or Switch for VR.

They are immersive, 100%. But also nauseating and forehead heating.

A reviewer on YouTube said the Apple Vision is a bit heavy because they used a metal frame for some reason. (No comment about foreheads)

You can safely treat “reviewer on YouTube” as “stranger at a bar” in terms of accuracy. They get paid to get clicks, not to deliver accurate or expert advice, and that heavily favors “why don’t they just…?” comments glossing over challenging engineering decisions.

I think it was MKBHD who seems to know his stuff

Yeah. Also, the "why don't they just" (use plastic/carbon) came from me, not him. Apple is long known for using metal in places where it unnecessarily increases weight, because it makes a product feel more premium.

He did mention that competitors use plastic precisely because it is lightweight.

How many industrial design projects has he done, though? He doesn’t have any particular expertise in the area so while it’s fair to ask why they picked the trade-offs they did, it’s pretty far-fetched to think one of the best industrial design teams in the world forgot about a primary success factor, especially given how much other effort they made to hit weight targets. Absent someone who’s actually worked in the field saying it’s unnecessary, I’d give the benefit of the doubt and assume that they used aluminum instead of plastic for a good reason.

> one of the best industrial design teams in the world forgot about a primary success factor,

Is this the same team who came up with a phone that bends in the pocket?

And a wireless mouse that can't be used with the charge cable plugged in...

There are other headsets without metal frame, so we pretty much know this is not necessary. And we also know with certainty that metal absolutely isn't necessary for laptop cases, but Apple still uses metal. The explanation is easy: aesthetics, feel, "haptics".

There are no comparable plastic laptops with similar performance, portability/thiness, battery life, and quietness — metal is rigid, and an excellent heat conductor that contributes to those goals.

There were many such laptops when they were still on Intel.

Yes, and Apple also sold plastic laptops when they were still on Intel. Apple has repeatedly attempted to sell products with a cheaper chassis (iPhone 5C, Plastic Unibody Macbook) yet their customers preferred metal enclosures.

Yes, because they feel more premium, that's their "advantage". A headset which hurts your neck more in the long run could offset this premium feeling.

We don't really know why Apple chose Glass + Aluminum for their headset, but we do know for a fact that:

- 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.

Have you tried a Quest? I found the SW on that fixed all neaseau I experienced on earlier headsets and I think the Quest 2 was even better but I don’t recall at this point.

It's very varied by person. My friend used a index on my 4090 dedicated (All other monitors to the 2080ti). Running at full frames on google earth. He puked his guts out 20 minutes later and took about 40 total minutes to recover. I was watching the stats the whole time. He just suddenly went urp right in the middle of mt rainier.

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.

Wait, were you the one controlling where he was going? Like zooming him around the planet? Cause that’s a sure fire way to make anyone nauseous.

no I showed him how to navigate while watching me on the other monitor...then let him fly around and talked him through the controls.

I have a 3090 with HP Reverb G2 and very high tolerance for motion sickness. I’ve noticed in Elite Dangerous that lower framerates cause less motion sickness. The stuttering between frames makes my eyes/brain not treat the visual motion as “real”.

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.

I think everyone can agree that artificial locomotion can be motion sickness-inducing. Which you can quite easily do a lot in Google Earths. The faster the worse.

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?

No, it varies hugely person to person. Plenty of us can do completely disconnected motion in VR and not get any nausea. I could do barrel rolls and "Sliding" movement in VR no problem from day one. For the people who are marginal, software and framerate improvements can help, but those "comfort" settings work by killing immersion. There's also a small portion of people that will never be able to play VR without nausea.

Ok. But Index is made by Valve and you're using SteamVR. I've always had motion sickness issues with Valve. For whatever reason, Quest's rendering stack has always not made me motion sick. Even with Oculus Link which has what people consider "crazy" latencies, it's not which means that it's ASW and other last rendering corrections that are hiding better all the things that would cause motion sickness.

I had plenty of nausea with the Quest 2.

Same experience here. For stationary position games I found it fine, but anything with any kind of walking handled by the controllers it felt awful.

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.

I think that has more to do with mental framing. Your brain is used to being "in a car" and having weird motion. You also usually have the inside of the car being stationary in your field of vision, meaning your brain can look at that and feel fine that you aren't moving.

There's no plauible way to allow you to move around the virtual space without moving in the real world and not give many people motion sickness, since by definition that is exactly what triggers it. The better the illusion of immersion, the worse sickness you'll get when your eyes tell you you're moving but your body and inner ear say you're not.

thta's not going to get better with working in one. it'll still be forehead heating, nauseating, distracting.

> there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games

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.

I don't think that price can always be outweighed by other factors. Successful game consoles are always pretty cheap. Only productivity devices can ask for a high price.

"Exclusive games" have little to do with adoption. They are a vendor lock in thing. Games need to be good and immersive, not exclusive.

A game needs to be purpose-build for VR, that makes it almost an exclusive.

Maybe, but focusing on the "exclusive" part -- the one part that is consumer hostile -- seems weird. If there was a standard for VR games, or if a game existed in both Oculus and Vision, it'd be a good thing. Exclusivity is not a good thing.

they mean “exclusive to VR” not exclusive to a particular headset

What does the word "exclusive" mean in this context? What would be a non-exclusive VR game that can be played on a VR headset? What are some examples?

"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".

>What would be a non-exclusive VR game that can be played on a VR headset?

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?

> "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?

exclusive as in “experience that can only be had in VR”

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.

Isn't that the same as saying "VR videogames"? Assuming we mean good quality, and not a minimum effort port.

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.

An affordable VR console with a lot of big games would be sufficient for VR mass market success, but likely some of those big titles would be automatically exclusive for that console, namely for first party titles. Those would first be made just to get the console off the ground. Sony made "Horizon Call of the Mountain" probably just to sell more headsets, not because they expected to make money with it. The install base is likely too low for that. A third party publisher wouldn't have an incentive to make such a big game. Valve probably also didn't earn anything with Half Life Alyx, they wanted to make their Steam market bigger.

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.

How much do gamers actually value immersion though? Seems to me the satisfaction of solving puzzles or executing strategy and the sort are the real drivers of satisfaction with games. Immersion is nice, but unless the interaction mode provides something novel to enable better ways to play it’s really just a novelty.

In some cases they use it well, like Beat Saber. But how much is that worth to people?

VR gaming has definitely cultivated a community in the genre of sim-racing and Half Life Alyx modding

The problem is that the Quest 2 is what everyone bought and it's arguably not a compelling enough experience to encourage people to put it on instead of playing traditional PC/console games. Most people serious about PC gaming eventually upgrade to an Index because it's still the best option at a great price if you have the room for a full-room setup - and these people definitely play at least a few times a month.

I agree that so far that is where we've been, but imagine a Sim City or Civilization game on the Vision Pro. THAT would be a ton of fun. I'm sure Sid Meier could make something interesting on it. Frankly, I would love it if Apple would throw money at him to make one of his games on it.

One problem to solve is that probably we don't want people to stand for hours and having to walk through the city or the world. They might not have the space at home to do it. They could sit on an office chair and rotate themselves 360°. If they spend 3k on the visor they can spend $100 on a chair. However you don't even have to do that kind of exercise on a screen.

Yes this is where lack of controllers is going to be an issue. I guess you could use a PS/Xbox controller but then you may as well be playing on a pc.

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.

They never said you can’t use a controller.

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.

The point is that most games would probably need a special VR controller (not a normal one!), unless they can be played point&click style. But Apple won't include them, so the respective games won't be made in the first place. There aren't even smartphone games which require external controllers, despite the install base of smartphones being orders of magnitude higher than what the sales numbers for the Vision Pro headset will be.

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.

An Xbox controller would probably work fine. I already have multiple connected to things like PC's, Macs, and even an AppleTV in my house.

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.

So let's wait again 40 years. 2024 to 2064. But Moore's law will not last that long. The prices per transistor aren't exponentially decreasing anymore.

A screen would be nowhere near as immersive.

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.

You can walk up to the walls of the room you are playing in (or bed, or chairs or flower pots or a ball you left on the floor, ouch) but I guess that if this sticks somebody will build a 360° walking pad specifically for games. Meanwhile they can artificially limit how far a player can walk in a straight line. Mazes, small vehicles, etc

The already have one [0]. Pretty neat once you get used to it.

But you should be able to do VR while sitting down and "walk" using gestures or a controller.

[0] - https://www.kat-vr.com/

>imagine a Sim City or Civilization game on the Vision Pro. THAT would be a ton of fun.

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.

The same way a huge TV makes a college football game more fun.

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.

Games are successful and making millions on the platform. If some people churn out of the experience is that equivalent to it being a flop?

I'd attribute part of that to there being so few games available that you've got a captive audience and limited content.

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.

I’ve played VR games. They can be a lot of fun and very immersive.

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.

It’s a billion dollar business.

VR games? Sure gaming, but I didn't know VR games specifically made so much money.

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.

But Beat Saber would be more exciting, despite seemings.

Have you tried a VR "Big screen" experience? It's a massive gimmick. It's not special. The quality of what you are looking at is lower than using a nice monitor, and sitting in some empty environment that hosts this big screen is dumb.

It's impossible for me to try anything because it doesnt exist right now. There is no VR experience that has high resolution. If the resolution was better, it would be great. Don't care about the "environment" Just project it into my living room like a home theatre.

Yes, VR Games. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-quest-store-revenue-1-billio...

Very cool! I had no idea

VR gaming is a niche. Racing and flight simulators are very good; other software is typically mediocre. But VR games do not work with AR glasses.

Even with my racing sim rig, I find myself using my curved monitor more than the Quest 2. It's just such a pain to re-calibrate and update the software and tweak my graphics settings every time I want to hop in that I usually just don't bother.

> VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust.

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...

Maybe the new Xboxes are a flop, also (at around 20 million sold by 2023)? The Xbox 360 has sold 85 million. PS5 has sold 35+ million.

The Kinect sold even more devices, but as a paradigm was still a massive failure. Nobody used them beyond some original demos.

I have to agree overall. I enjoyed my Meta Quest 2 but it's sat unused for a while now. There were a few games that really were awesome (Beat Saber, Walkabout Mini Golf, and Breakroom) but the last 2 really only shine with other friends and coordinating a time we can all play isn't the easiest. This doesn't even touch on the motion sickness aspect. The Q2 further hampered by the piss-poor UI/UX on the Q2, it really is astounding how bad it is. Once you are in a game it gets better but joining a party or joining an in-progress game is a roll of the dice. When it works it's almost magical but the failure rate is way too high.

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.

Half Lie Alyx is a great game.

> VR gaming is a flop

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.

I’m sure people can come up with games or interfaces that would work just fine.

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).

You need special controllers for VR games, ordinary ones won't do. The standard controllers are just for conventional games.

I got one last year also, but was disappointed by software selection. My children loved the hardware but wanted more software. At their behest, I tried to write my own software for it, but went in circles trying to figure out what SDK to use.

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.

This is on brand for meta. Look at fb. It didn't come with instructions, but that didn't stop Cambridge Analytica from happening. Look at React. It didn't have instructions and yet it blew up. I bet Meta expected people to pick up the slack, that the best of what was there while they killed time polishing it.

Zuck was probably part of the problem... a room full of POs pushing for stupid shit while building on a rocky foundation.

> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash

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.

John Carmack led them to a very strong technical base. Based on his testimony they squandered it.

It’s kind of funny that meta stock didn’t drop on the vision pro announcement. What does that say about the market’s assessment of meta’s vr/ar prospects?

The market is hedging it's bets.

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.

Apple has the stubbornness and funds to drive this for a decade, and they will. Apple Vision Air AR glasses are coming even if they don't sell a single Pro unit for five years.

maybe the odds of meta dropping the whole vr thing have increased? then they can stop lighting piles of money on fire because zuck read snow crash as a teenager? OTOH, maybe apple will show meta how a headset can actually be done and they can mimic their way to product market fit?

I much prefer Meta dumping billions into VR rather than targeting ads and worsening teens' depression.

I actually expected the opposite TBH.

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.

tracks with what carmack said when he left. what a shame!

I'm with you. Had the same exact problems, and I returned mine.

Interestingly, the Quest 2 seemed less buggy when I had one.

i dont understand this mentality, obviously the intent is to improve the experience over time, creating a VR platform itself is an ambitious task. Are there no happy customers of the Quest?

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.

> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash.

Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?

If you have a product that's 5x as good, but 2x as expensive, literally everyone will buy it. The iPhone is the perfect case study.

If you’re comparing the Quest 2 to the Vision Pro, it seems more like 2x as good for 5x the price.

Based on the hands-on impressions I’ve read it sounds significantly more than twice as good.

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.

Has Apple ever released a Developer Edition product before?

They've had developer units but not a publicly released one as far as I know.

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.

Yes, sort of.

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.

Yeah the Intel Macs. I think you had to return them?

11 times the price

...if you are in the US. Outside US iPhones are nowhere nearly as popular. In many markets Android phones have about 90% of the market share

I believe they were referring to the original iPhone compared to the other “smartphones“ of the day.

Not todays market, which has evolved.

> Outside US iPhones are nowhere nearly as popular. In many markets Android phones have about 90% of the market share

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.

> 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.

Fitness and gaming wasn't demoed much yesterday, but are going to be insane on the Vision Pro - so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it?

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.

> Also Meta could catch up if it was just software.

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.

>Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware.

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.

I haven't liked the usability of the entire Macbook line though, and It's very upsetting that so many laptop makers have decided to just copy it.

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 looks-over-function school of design thought Apple is famous for

Two thoughts here. The first is that this comments is totally valid and mostly the inverse of everything I think, really shows that we all value different things so thank god for a free market.

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.

> This was Microsoft's warcry for years: who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware.

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.

> 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.

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 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...

> Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware.

It’s not like it was better built or had a better screen than cheaper alternatives or anything.

> I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it?

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.

They talked about and briefly showed using game controllers and keyboards/pointing devices with it.

I saw a traditional gaming controller and a keyboard. Was there some kind of tracked-in-3d-space pointing device that I missed?

At 1:31:50 in the Keynote video they mention “Bluetooth accessories like Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard” and show those on a table and a person typing on the keyboard. I don’t believe the cursor of the trackpad is shown (but I’m on my phone and my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be!). I bet it’ll work like on iPadOS.

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

Why do you say there are no controllers? I was reading about bluetooth keyboards and interacting with a laptop, so why wouldn't a bluetooth controller be feasible (say, before launch)?

I mean it's not impossible, but Apple would have to design and manufacture one. If they're planning on it it's weird that they wouldn't mention it.

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.

If camera based hand tracking works already, it seems like a Bluetooth controller wouldn't be that hard to add in after the fact. Didn't PSVR just use a single camera and a glowing orb?

They are feasible and I dare say already working given its essentially a modded iOS, which already has support for game controllers.

Gaming is pretty good with a keyboard and mouse. No controller necessary.

VR gaming is different from regular gaming. You largely want to feel like you're interacting with the environment (in most games).

I agree that keyboard and mouse is superior, but as a grown-up with a family, it's rather infeasible. The Steam Deck has been great; I actually play a game for 30 minutes maybe twice a week. I'm hesitant to even try keyboard and mouse on some games because it will spoil the experience with a controller. When I have the rare luxury of a free evening alone at my desktop, I'm more likely to play VR.

I thought they showed a PS5 Controller being used?

1) Console controls are not a suitable alternative to proper VR controllers 2) What makes you think the PS5 controller was connected to the headset, and not the headset being used as a TV showing the output of a PS5?

Re: 2, they showed it being used to play Apple Arcade games and since they already have support for that it’s unlikely that they have deep philosophical objections.

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.

Oh, I’ll have to see if and how Provenance can run on it.

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 controllers isn't about accuracy, it's about occlusion and haptics.

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.

But the latter is ideal. I just want PS5 shown in Vision Pro rather than a sub par VR game.

I hate VR controllers. I'd prefer to play VR games without them. I'd prefer they do hand and eye tracking to determine what I'm doing, like look at a zombie and and go pew pew pew with my finger guns.

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.

My family went to a Sandbox VR store and played a zombie game. In it they gave you “guns” that the cameras could track. I put guns in quotes because when you remove the headset you see that you were basically holding a stick with reflectors on it, but in VR it sure felt gunish.

That’s a unique take. Especially for guns in VR which feel incredibly natural with a controller that is basically a pistol grip with a trigger. For people really into Pavlov they even sell kits to mount the controllers together into a rifle configuration with attachments for a shoulder strap and buttstock. I’ve never heard of a successful shooter game that uses finger guns.

> I’ve never heard of a successful shooter game that uses finger guns

Because none exist.

Why do you hate VR controllers?

It supports Bluetooth input. I wonder if the visual tracking system that tracks the hands is so good that it could accurately track controllers. Then third party motion controllers could be relatively cheap and plentiful.

Assuming it could run Virtual Desktop, there’s your Half Life Alyx in ultra high res.

having a virtual screen that is way bigger than the space you are in is a huge selling point for me. I'm more interested in this than VR stuff honestly.

if it was under 1k usd I would probably pick one up for work. maybe give it a few more years.

>Of course you can use a game pad or MKB, but that kinda misses the point of being in VR in the first place.

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 for one will be sticking to controllers and forgoing eye tracking. Hand input is irritating and limited, I hate using pinch gestures to click on things and the article makes a solid point that the lack of haptic feedback just makes it feel like you're flailing around (which you are). Eye tracking is nice to have in social interactions but I don't see the point otherwise.

> so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it?

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.

Could be that they're leaving it (and gaming/etc) for developers. They largely showed core stuff only at this point.

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.

Sweating profusely in an electronics device... I've ruined ski goggles just sweating in them and they're meant for that. Also just stumbling with these on or slipping and there you go cracked $3500 screen.

Worse, if you run into a wall at high speed the screen probably ends up in your eyes.

Honestly, how often do you bang your head hard into a wall/floor? Sure, I'm a tall guy, roughly 200cm, and I sometimes bang my head in a overhead doorstock. But that is typically some old cottage or similar, where I would probably not bring a XR headset anyway.

I was taking while being tired from exercise. While skiing biking etc often. While doing vr, I've broken a monitor and gone through a wall and broken several controllers. While just waking around I forgot my shed had a low door and clipped my head last week first time in years. That's why I wear a effing helmet. You're blind on your stationary bike and pop off wrong. Done. Foot stays clipped in, faceplant.

>While doing vr, I've broken a monitor and gone through a wall and broken several controllers.

Jesus set up the room boundaries, it's really not that hard.

They don't always work

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