Apple Vision Pro: The MVP for AR
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iPad apps will run unmodified as basically virtual floating iPads which is nice, but not anything too special. What's much more interesting is that existing iPadOS apps can be transformed into first-class visionOS apps by just checking the "visionOS" checkbox in Xcode, which gets the app the full 2.5D treatment with all of the various controls taking on the expected visionOS appearance and behavior.
This means that the Vision Pro is probably going to have by far the best selection of day-1 apps that any AR/MR headset has ever had. Most of these apps won't be anything revolutionary of course since they're adapted versions of existing apps, but it makes the platform much more practically usable.
Only spatial computing apps matter.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool and I'm intrigued, but 2.5D controls are about as groundbreaking as skeuomorphism.
One of the clear goals of the product is to serve as an alternative to monitors. In that sense, any productivity tool (like the newly launched Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio for iPad) would immediately be extremely useful in visionOS, even if it’s not fully spatially aware.
It may not be the flagship spatial computing experience, but that doesn’t mean it should be thrown out as a “cheap trick” either. It likely is the more common experience for day to day interaction with the device, which is Apple’s goal.
Hear yourself man, you’re saying be able to look at iPad apps on a big monitor is the killer app for Apple Vision Pro.
MacBooks with Apple Silicon processors can run a shitton of iPad apps natively. App developers can choose not to have their apps listed in the store if they want, but many do.
Or you can just… plug an iPad into a monitor with USB-C.
When the Apple ecosystem works, it's extremely powerful.
AFAIK it’s only Mac->iPad. If you’re running an app that also exists on your Mac (or equivalent like a browser) then you’d be able to take over the context on your Mac but it isn’t technically “[throwing] iPad Apps up on any monitor”.
They’re most definitely on an anti-Apple/Vision Pro crusade given their replies, but they asked for a specific thing and I gave them the exact thing they asked for.
> basically virtual floating iPads which is nice, but not anything too special
Instead, it was saying that being able to interact with those apps in a spatial way will be valuable:
> What's much more interesting is that existing iPadOS apps can… [get] the full 2.5D treatment with all of the various controls taking on the expected visionOS appearance and behavior
That’s not what the person said, but also it might actually be the “killer app” for the vision pro.
Having a large, high-fidelity monitor anywhere you go would be extremely useful. Maybe useful enough to get people to keep coming back to the Vision Pro after the novelty wears off.
Multi monitor setups are overrated anyway. I work entirely off a laptop screen and only a portion of that screen is where my focus is most of the time. Having multiple monitors at my desk is mostly for decoration and looking like you’re a big deal. Switching a virtual desktop isn’t hard.
Some creative types could legitimately use multiple monitors to lay out a lot of content, but I also don’t think those creatives will necessarily prefer an Apple Vision Pro over their existing tools, unless they’re doing something truly spatial like sculpting out a life size car or something. But that’s definitely not the norm. Most people are just going to browse web sites and stare at spreadsheets.
I staunchly disagree with this. I work from home and as such have no reason to optimize my desk for showing off or acting like a big shot, and find that having at least one extra monitor is a huge productivity boost because for most tasks, it practically eliminates the need to juggle applications or windows — everything that's relevant for the task at hand can remain visible the whole time without a cramped tiled windows setup. Virtual desktops are great but to me, work best in concert for switching tasks rather than being used as a tool to corral windows on a single screen.
When I need to work away from my desk, it's somewhat frustrating even with a 16" laptop.
I get that you don't care about having a big monitor, but it shouldn't be surprising that other people want big monitors. Personally, I hate working on my laptop screen, if I can use the Apple Vision Pro as a remote monitor while traveling, that's certainly worth some amount of money to me.
No, it's a way to mitigate the "chicken and egg" problem for the platform. Having existing apps to make the device immediately useful is important, even if they're not all exploiting the capabilities of the platform immediately.
Nobody knew what the point of a microcomputer was back in the Apple II days (at the time I thought it was crazy that anyone would buy a computer rather than design and build their own). The best anyone could imagine with was keeping recipes and playing games. Yet the killer app was Visicalc, with analysts and accountants buying their own (expensive!) apple IIs and visicalc and getting around MIS (what's called IT these days).
The second consideration is "onramp". Clicking a button and being able to experiment with an app you've already written yourself is way better than being given sample code. Likewise the crufty skeuomorphic cues (from the desktop metaphor of PARC and then the Mac to the "leather" of the ios notepad and shiny "wheels" of its date picker) are important onramps that get people using something so that they can develop the correct metaphors. It wasn't Apple who came up with "pull to refresh", it was the developers (Brichter's app Tweetie, then quickly adopted by others).
So while you're right in the long game, I think your dismissal is premature.
That’s the question: what is the killer app for VR? Seems like it could be gaming but I didn’t see a lot of gaming examples during the keynote.
When I say onramp: Visicalc made the Apple II but I do think gaming got it into the home.
People sound like they are over-rating how good interacting with 2d apps with goggles can be. It is "really neat", a really wow experience the first few times but it quickly gets old and things like "scratching your nose" or "drinking coffee" become far more valuable features than anything the goggles can provide.
I think we are in for a frustrating few years where the faithful go absolutely bananas over this because of the Apple brand until people quietly admit that they don't actually like having their peripheral vision filled with fake scenary or app windows or whatever. It's much nicer to see your real cat snoozing on your desk instead.
Yes, but these apps aren't native to the interaction patterns of AR/VR. They're adapted touch apps, which makes them as awkward as touch apps adapted to a desktop OS are.
Native visionOS apps have full affordances for eye and hand-based navigation and should be a good deal more pleasant to use in AR than emulated touch apps will be.
I quite enjoyed browsing the web in various VR headsets, it's a fun novelty experience, but it's not sticky as a tool because it's not adding anything to the experience yet adds the irritation of goggles.
Namely it’s not AR…
1. The ease of use of installing Android apps. This is the constant flaw of all the “well XYZ also does this” arguments from tech folks that ignore the flow of the process
https://www.androidcentral.com/how-sideload-apps-oculus-ques...
That’s not exactly something most people will be doing
2. As the person you’re replying to said, the iPad app can adopt visionOS features within the same codebase. The android apps cannot, because there’s no progressive API.
2. I just don't rate them. The magic of 3d headsets that differentiates them from 2D for me has been "presence". To stand in front of a massive temple in Skyrim or something and feel like you are there, it's special and can't be replicated in 2D to the same extent. As soon as you get into a focussed state e.g. a game loop churning out iron daggers to level a skill, presence doesn't matter. Your area of attention is quite small and having a headset on is just a pain in ass. 2d apps are in the latter category for me.
My basic rule of thumb is that if you don't already render the content in 3d on a 2d screen, "spatial" doesn't have much to offer besides gimmickery.
You’re also oddly fixated on games, which is clearly not what the product is focused on delivering.
That’s just incongruent and reductive to the argument at hand.
But to your last point, that’s exactly what the progressive APIs let you do. You can integrate 3D elements on top of your windowed iPad. You’re thinking in “either 3D or 2D”, whereas this is allowing developers to progressively adopt the entire gamut within the singular app which can target iOS and visionOS.
The quest just can’t do that.
Well, the reason I bought a number of headsets was for developing productivity applications. I just found that it was a bit of a deadend and that the only meaningful value was in existing 3d experiences (games, modelling, visualisation). I couldn't find the value in spatialising 2d productivity experiences. Hence the heuristic, if there was any value, we would already be wasd-ing our way around a 3d view in our 2d tools. There have always been a stream of 3d experiments like debuggers or knowledgement management tools but they just don't offer value compared to 2d text-oriented experiences.
Some of the talk about Spatial, feels like a pendullum swing back to Hacker's "Gibson" or Jurrasic Park's "Unix, I know this" 3d interfaces that were assumptions of what would be useful in 3D, and we have made real versions of these, but they just suck. Classic case of imagination / reality mismatch that often comes with tech.
> allowing developers to progressively adopt the entire gamut
That is just the "how", not the "why".
It would be "wow" for sure, but also - spatial memory is one of the easiest to hijack and repurpose for something useful. Of course, being able to visualize the codebase like this would require a Smalltalk-level system (I'm seeing a chance here for Smalltalk & Moose/Roassal/Mondrian/GToolkit/etc.).
The problem: once you get to that model, you need to read it. And until now reading lots of text in VR wasn't the best experience, not without things costing $10k+. So, the idea is shelved and waits for a good opportunity in the future... Maybe.
I'm still not sure if it's enough to be successful, but if an AR/VR device is to finally take off, an iteration of the VP is probably it.
You really believe that an app made for touch on a fixed 2D screen will miraculously be pleasant to use in VR/AR just by checking a box?
You have to say "Ok I'm going to play Candy Crush now" and get your headset, put it on, and then do that, with largely your full attention unable to multitask because it's big.
I doubt people will want to use any of these apps beyond the gimmick novelty.
If you can fill your physical space with floating virtual iPads, what will it be like to touch and manipulate them? You don't get to actually press against a screen when you press or scroll. If you wanted to "hold" a screen while manipulating it with the other screen, what will that be like?
I'm just speculating. I find touch and weight etc to be important, personally.
I'm also concerned about the weight of the headset, again, because I find touch and weight to be important.
And about how it works for people with glasses who can't wear contact lenses (perhaps you could have prescription lenses built into the headsets one day?)
Consider Android tablets, folding phones, or basically any Android device with a large format display. Basically all modern Android apps work on those devices, with practically no effort required of the devs. But most Android apps were built exclusively for smartphones, with small vertical displays. Only apps which have been developed to account for large displays actually provide a good user experience on those devices. Sure, there's still value in having a big library of apps that technically work on the new platform. But if the AVP experience for an app is worse than the platform it was built for, most people will probably try it out and quickly switch back to the platform they used before.
The AVP really needs a killer app to convince people to invest in it. If it can capture that investment, there will be an incentive for devs to start building their apps for it and it can grow from there. I'm concerned that I haven't seen anything that looks like a "killer app" for the AVP yet.
While there are apps that do this on IOS (Snapchat , Instagram) I believe the introduction of Stage Manager on iPad has prepared IOS app makers for dynamic windowing better than Android Tablets and folding phones have.
And, as the article notes, I think it is an early-adopter device that isn't worth the price tag, and probably doesn't deliver on even 1/10 of what it needs to for mass adoption - but I don't think that Apple intended it to.
The hardware for ambient light AR also sucks, it’s why HoloLens, magic leap and such are not compelling. It’ll be a while before that’s a viable option (and why Apple is committed to pass through currently).
I think Microsoft didn't have the confidence that it could be a mass market/consumer device at its price.
(It is interesting that with the Disney section of the keynote, Apple seemed much more directly was flirting with consumer/mass adoption.)
The VisionPro is a far less comfortable, far less portable, more power-hungry version of an iPad, with a few gimmicky 2.5D/3D stuff built in, for $3500. Is it really going to take anyone away from a laptop? Perhaps, but not that many people.
They could pivot into gaming, that's not a bad bet, especially if they manage to shove an M5 Max or whatever into the headset eventually.
The current “executive toy” vision is, I believe, just a stop-gap measure until they get the hardware cheaper and games ported.
I don’t believe anyone wants to work in 2D with a thing strapped to their face for hours on end. Sure you get a bigger screen but it’s also super uncomfortable, especially this metal and glass conception. It’s only worth it if you are doing something in 3D, like playing a game.
I don't believe there's an internal buffer battery either (IIRC it was mentioned on the ATP podcast, who were told by an Apple rep) so you can't hotswap the external pack, as the article suggests you could, without completely rebooting the headset.
I fully expect the more pared-down cheaper mainstream consumer versions to be plastic though, much like the cheaper AirPods.
I think they mentioned that the battery can be charged by usb-c, so you could potentially attach a power bank or to the wall to extend the battery life, also I hope that Apple allows 3rd party batteries so you could buy one with more capacity (but knowing Apple they might add some extra chips inside the battery render that harder).
The front glass is more scratch resistant than plastic but in exchange it's going to be instantly obliterated if you drop it the wrong way, so pick your poison.
On the other, I have no interest in VR/AR until it hits a "better Google glass" level. Something that looks and feels like a normal pair of glasses, but has things like AR navigation, text message popups, or hands-free ability to change music by "looking" at a button. Unfortunately that tech seems to be ~10+ years out.
I can imagine going to the coffee shop to work on some code, and instead of using a laptop, whip this thing out, while sitting on a comfy couch sipping a latte... And if I want to play an immersive game for a bit, I can do that too.
Also I can tell you haven’t used VR because eating while using it is nearly impossible.
I really hope this will be my solution, a true VR computer like the Simula One (which I feel like this is competing against).
If this range of devices doesn’t do it for VR/AR (once the price comes down), nothing will.
I think some people do like that type of attention, but whether or not it reaches a critical mass where it doesn't make you stick out is what I'm waiting for.
Seems clear to me that's not a minimum requirement for viability. The ease of integrating the device into the situations where is might be useful is certainly important, but there's a sliding scale. I'm not sure where it becomes viable, but I don't think it's all the way at the end of the scale.
Actually, I think this entire analysis is backwards. The question isn't how far from perfect the Vision Pro, or any other VR/AR/MR device is, but whether it does enough things well enough to be worth the trouble.
(For me, it looks like the VP does not, mainly due to the price tag. That's even assuming some new major drawbacks that become apparent once it's released.)
I know there's supposed to be some kind of custom magnetic Zeiss lenses you can pop in, but I don't fully understand how they're supposed to work — do they replace your glasses, or are they to adapt your glasses vision to an AR space.
There were a few tidbits in the iOS and watchOS portions of the recent keynote focusing on vision issues, so it's nice to see Apple taking it seriously. But I don't understand the solution.
Totally immersive is VR. For mobility, nothing beats a phone. This is threading a needle of immersive and mobile and I'm not sure what the value prop for that could possibly be.
Over time Apple will put out cheaper less featureful products, and Meta will make their hand and eye tracking better etc. Meta will include better integration with Windows/Mac for work, Apple will get beat saber, etc. In the very early days of iOS v Android, the two OSs were very distinct and choosing one or the other was a significant choice. By about version 5, the OSs were at feature parity, all phone makers had different phones at different price points, etc. The excitement was gone and we had mature capable phones all around. The VR headsets will play out the same way.
Some people really did wear them everywhere. It was weird. And quickly stigmatized as I recall.
I don't think this is a necessary condition for AR. Just take the computer off and put it down. Or better, don't wear it to begin with.
The tech was definitely a cool proof-of-concept and the route I wish VR/AR would have taken. AR has so many more impactful use cases - think a navigation HUD or hands-free control of music while driving/biking or doing other things with your hands.
The Glasshole style remarks probably won't go away with the Vision Pro either. Not to mention the potential of being robbed of the headset in public.
The big Apple hits have been the perfected version of products that already had massive markets
Like the iPod launching into the music/mp3 player space or the iPhone into the phone/personal device space
The Vision seems to be going counter to this, launching one of the earlier products into a undeveloped market
> The big Apple hits have been the perfected version of products that already had massive markets
Uh...
Did you own the first iPhone? It had no apps and no horizontal typing. It didn't even have 3g. Few if any mobile sites. Small screen. Bad battery life.
Did you own the first iPod? 5gb. Firewire connection (which were hard to come by). The scroll wheel was an ACTUAL wheel. You needed a mac to use. Again, bad battery life.
I won't even go into the early mac desktops and laptops.
Those were MVP's on the market. Where we are now with those products didn't dictate where were were then. The did the bare minimum to be considered products.
Those might have been MVPs in terms of what Apple can do
But the markets were already there
Millions/billions of people who already owned a personal music player or a cellphone
Compare the size and maturity of those markets to the current VR/AR market
There is an argument to be made for iPhone vs. media players. The Irivers and the like were comparable functionally. The iPhone just had a killer app… the iTunes Store.
They were arguably minimal for what Apple intended to do. They obviously wanted to carve out new categories and create products that would not be fungible with the competition in the minds of consumers, which from their perspective would raise the bar on what the minimum is.
But, in terms of the market, the iPod was not a minimum viable music player, and the iPhone was not a minimum viable phone.
Notes on iPod, 5GB was a very large capacity at the time, and the iPod was smaller than competitors with similar capacity. The wheel was very extra as a concept, however implemented. It had 10 hours of playtime on a single charge. It was built well from steel and polycarbonate. This was a premium product.
Also the physical wheel was amazingly good UX, and very responsive.
I think all the other players WANT VR to take off, but haven't yet made a truly compelling offering that attracts anything but nerds. Apple has been forced to step in early to encourage the market to develop. Just like the others this first version will be early adopters, nerds and developers only but Apple will make it MORE compelling (unlike Meta who made their "pro" model less compelling) for the mass markets with future iterations because that is just what Apple does.
Macbook Pro vs. Macbook kind of thing.
There is probably quite a bit of room to cut out things, first and foremost the EyeSight ( even though it's cool ) to get to a more reasonable product.
The original MVP for AR was Microsofts HoloLens and especially HoloLens 2. The later one has many of the AVP features already in place (hand and eye tracking, spatial awareness etc.) and has proven on a professional level to be a useful tool.
Apple going into VR seems like the first time they've taken an actual risk in a long time. I'll buy it day 1 if it allows me to create a solid virtual workspace with multiple monitors synced to my laptop.
But for consumer market they are going to have to find a way to drop the price over time and get people over the negative image of wearing goggles on your head
and there's the simple fact that you won't be able to wear these publicly in most major cities without getting robbed, which limits their use
At the time mp3 players were a niche with crappy hardware and low capacity. The iPod was a lot more expensive and a lot better - it caused general adoption.
Similar for the iPhone - smartphones were a business niche and had crappy hardware, the first iPhone was triple the price and expanded smartphones to everyone on earth.
HoloLens, magic leap are niche products (the latter also being crappy hardware), meta’s hardware is better but still mediocre and constrained by their lack of computing platform. Apple’s hardware is a lot more expensive and if successful will expand the market to everyone in a few hardware revisions.
This isn't about image, it's about the discomfort of wearing heavy goggles pressed against your face. Doing that for anything more than an hour or so is horrible, and it's pretty bad even after ten minutes.
People dislike wearing glasses if they can afford to, I don't believe you'll ever get them to wear these heavy goggles for anything except some deeply immersive gaming experiences.
Like we're trying to succeed at entering in The Matrix.
Apple’s success is due to their appeal
For example, the iPhone was a success because it was a status symbol
And having the latest one still is
In contrast, having a Vision Pro is not
It’s more like a fanboy article