Vision Pro
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
While I think the statement here is generally accurate, the analogy feels so off the mark here to be downright misleading.
The pre-iPhone cellphone and "mobile internet device" era was totally different than the current VR/AR era. Most importantly, people actually used their devices all the time, they just wanted them to be better. There was a reason they called them "Crackberries" - Blackberry fans were on them 24/7, and they got tons of utility from them. There was none of this "If we build it, I hope they'll come" feeling of the current VR/AR era.
Honestly, it saddens me to think that technology used to be about solving problems for humanity and has morphed into more of this "What substances can we sell to the masses that are sufficiently addictive to make our stock price go up?"
I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.
Ignoring price for a moment (remember that early Apple computers cost $11,000 in today's money), Vision Pro is positioned for general computing, including games, and has a vibrant App Store so there's actually something to do.
All you can do to alleviate it is close your eyes. You can't rest them by gazing out the window, across the room. Things you do naturally without realizing, that give your eyes a break.
In my experience this is as much an issue as headset physical comfort. In fact it's the one aspect that prevents me wearing a headset beyond a couple of hours.
(Plus it is a real pain to drink coffee, have a snack, open the mail; all the little side tasks we tend to do at desks)
Please tell me we'll have a virtual window app for the VP that will simulate looking out a window. Anywhere. And it'll be touted as a way to rest your eyes without removing the VP.
That's quite a claim that I've seen no evidence for in the years I've been using and following this industry.
Actually the light hitting your eyes is much dimmer that you are regularly exposed to all the time so...
With VR I could easily do (when I had the time) a full day (~12 hours), with only a single 15 minute food/washroom break in the middle and no signs of discomfort at all.
Wait until folks catch on that by being aware of your environment, using the washroom doesn’t require leaving AR.
As to having a drink or snack or other activities, the crown control lets you dial in more or less of the real world around you and let you choose the degree of blending.
What do you imagine people doing that isn't done about as well on some other Apple device? I can sort of get the gaming use case; I think it's wildly oversold, but it's legitimately different. But even Apple's launch video doesn't suggest that general computing will be notably improved here.
Also, I'm skeptical that immersion matters all that much. People manage to get quite immersed in their phones, after all.
And I'll again point you to phones. Despite tablets, laptops, and ever-larger TVs, people spend an awful lot of time on those small, rigidly bound rectangles.
The actual potential "killer app" is something like a holodeck: a movie that it puts you inside of so there isn't any screen at all.
The problem is that the only part of their $3500 device that is better for this than an oculus quest is the screen resolution. All of that other stuff makes operating menus and AR aspects better, things that are useful for tasks you can already do on a device 1/4 the price.
> The actual potential "killer app" is something like a holodeck: a movie that it puts you inside of so there isn't any screen at all.
We'll see how this turns out, as Hollywood is doing a lot of VR experimentation. But most modern movies will not translate at all to VR, because they control attention and aesthetic experience very precisely, all based on the constraint of the viewing frame.
I think the experiences compatible with a user looking around as a facehugger display allows will have to be much more like dioramas. They may be very interesting, but they won't be movies.
As a Quest Pro owner, that is exactly what a headset needs. Passthrough on the quest is a blurry, noisy mess that feels like looking through two original iPhone cameras attached to your eyes. The VR part is great currently, and you get that “for free” if your screens/cameras can do an impressive AR mode. I can work in VR mode on the quest, but the AR mode gets way too distracting when you can’t read a phone notification that popped up on the device in your peripherals.
The screens aren’t the only upgrade though, hand tracking on the quest is mediocre currently, doing simple hand gestures requires me to do them repeatedly often as they don’t get recognized. Eye gaze + small gestures on the Vision Pro are the “pinch to zoom” moment of the VR space.
Hand tracking and eye gestures are really nice to have for sure and they make navigating menus feel like actual magic, but again the vast vast majority of what I'm doing when I'm wearing a headset is not navigating menus. This is the point I was making: I don't highly value navigation because if there IS an application in that style I'm probably just going to do it on a phone or PC, menus are not immerse and gain nothing from existing in 3d space.
If I want to move around in a virtual space that's larger than the physical space I'm in I essentially need a controller for smooth movement unless I'm going to be making constant hand gestures.
We'll find out! And as a UI geek and someone who enjoys exploring new tech, I'm totally gonna buy it, though I reservations about its commercial success.
Or do you mean you can install iPhone apps? That's a completely different thing and makes your statement highly misleading
Also, are you implying that the Quest App Store is somehow not "vibrant"?
There are many reasons why I am super excited about the Vision Pro, but the App Store do not number among them
But if you want to displace the iPhone/smartphone it has to be 1000x better, which today's tech simply can't do yet.
If the glasses that I'm wearing right now could become an AR device at Vision Pro's abilities then take-my-money would be in full swing and easily displace the iPhone as the "center of our lives" computing device.
Nevah gonna happin without breakthrough in lithography. Sub nanometer needed prolly. Ur right tho
Smartphones went from "Pointless waste of time" to "Inevitable and incomprehensibly-important technology" overnight when that happened. Jobs had the sense to wait by the river, probably as a result of prior misfires with things like the Newton. Cook, well, not so much.
There are some enthusiastic people who use HMD (like Quest Pro) over 10 hours everyday for virtual display. Though currently the number of people is far less than Blackberry era.
That's probably a big reason Apple has ignored the current VR market segment.
In the UK Blackberry and BBM remained very popular for a long time.
That Blackberry was additively used for email (even in a business setting) implies a lot of use for friends. The crackberry addicts were emailing their friends, who were likely also work colleagues, fellow execs, etc.
That's when the "Please excuse the typos, sent from my mobile device" became popular too.
That thing that gets me is just how weak the scenarios were in their promotional videos.
After building this device, the best that they could offer as benefits were viewing 3D photographs of your children, looking at multiple screens around you, or watching a single large screen for a movie or photo-browsing. (I mean, they showed somebody browsing the web. Why even dedicate time your video to show that?)
It feels like they're either out of ideas or really playing it safe. I'm guessing they do want to make "fetch" happen but don't really know how and are just going to bet on third party devs creating some killer app they haven't thought of. They've certainly got the time and money to work it out over the next few years.
This sounds indeed like Apple doesn't know what it might be good for, while hoping app developers will find some novel use case.
Otherwise it will not be much more than an AR window manger.
this is a new general purpose computing device, so most of the regular things you might do with a laptop would be doable here. Of course the difference here is that you have an immersive view and a nearly unlimited screen to work with and one where you can seamlessly blend the virtual and physical world. I think that is going to be transformative for the existing applications and will open up a space for other activities that we haven’t seen yet.
If it's as good as sold I actually do wonder how chess websites will deal with it. Faster input technology has been a problem before: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/35358/why-is-liche...
Otherwise, I think Apple's focus on "spatiality" is what is key.
But what they did get right was the hardware and operating system itself and the fact that it needs to be boring and “just work”.
As a young 3d artist and software engineer I just desperately want it, and want to develop for it. I want to walk around in my 3d creations and want to let other people experience what I can envision in my head.
While I don’t see it being as big of a leap as the desktop computer, internet or smartphone in terms of _productivity_, I do think enabling creativity is the “killer” app.
Imagine building and playing with an unlimited world like Minecraft or with LEGO bricks, right in your living room :)
Personally I’m building an app that allows me to put my 3D art from Blender into AR on the Meta Quest Pro [0], and it’s so much fun to do. It gives me a childlike joy to walk through my own creations and share them with others.
Anyway, I got a bit carried away, but I feel like HN is quite pessimistic about AR and VR, and want to give some positive counter views.
I'm disappointed that Apple is focused so much on office productivity AR, I'd rather be transported somewhere else in space and time with VR - not marginally more productive at work. But still crossing fingers that this is the start of something.
While paying lip service to "Spacial computing" their product name is "Vision", so the core of it arguably the display part and they'll be pushing it as viewing device more than anything (I like TheVerge's "Apple made a TV" headline). And VR staying a minor platform only used as a display will be totally fine by them, they'll just keep selling computers on the side.
PS: For comparison, this was the pitch for Hololens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqFqtAJMtYE
The visual exp will b better.
But if your prediction is correct, then I think we'll have some better use cases than looking at fake screens. That's my bet.
Better visual exp is worth it alone. It doesn’t need 2 b better than that.
All useful perceived vision will b 2D plane. Stone tablet, paper workstation, crt monitor, lcd, vr. All showing 2d planes
The reason why I would prefer to use a real screen is that I (imagine) the visual experience to be better. At least we agree about the reason.
Going back to the original analogy, while you could argue about the iphone in terms of price maybe, it was undeniable that it was flat out better than a feature phone in every possible way.
Like...
> the analogy feels so off the mark here to be downright misleading.
I mean, come on, you're obviously nitpicking here.
It's not 100% the same, but the parallel between having devices that were basically dumb phones -> internet computers is there, and there was no real indication at the time that a smart phone like blackberry would become a mass market device. None. Zero.
It was a niche device for rich people; most people were, and let's be absolutely honest here, absolutely, perfectly OK with simple feature phones, sending text messages and making calls.
So, the analogy here is pretty clear; once the device existed, it created a market that didn't exist or maybe extended a tiny market that already existed, but come onnnnnnnn, is it really that epic a stretch to imagine that it might happen again? ...can you not imagine this as a gen1 device that improves over time?
It is really so completely different?
I don't think it is.
I'm not convinced it will, but the parallel is not nearly as misleading as you're making it out to be.
Here's what I think is interesting: People want this is fail.
Lots of people. Not because they don't like apple. Not because they don't like VR. They just seem to hate it because its expensive and people are being positive about it and they feel like it's somehow wrong for apple to be:
- Selling something this expensive
- That is a risky bet that might not play out
- That people are willing to talk about favorably on the basis of the Apple brand.
...but, here's the thing right?
1) Who cares? They're rich. Let them fail.
2) Apple has the brand it has because it can deliver, and it has delivered in the past.
What kind of numpy stands here and thinks... "Oh gee, these guys at Apple are stupid. They're never going to sell these. They'll regret this. Look at all their failed products and their unsuccessful business. Haha!"
> I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.
...if some people are excited and enthusiastic about it...
...let them be enthusiastic about it?
In Finland, mobile internet was already a big thing during the dot-com boom. The early attempts failed, because the hardware wasn't ready. Regardless, "mobile portal" remained one of the big buzzwords, and even taxi drivers knew that the mobile was the future. In a few years, new phones got color displays, cameras, 3G connections, and GPS receivers. Ordinary people bought them, because flagship phones were cheaper than they are today. And then mobile internet started finally making sense. I remember using the local public transit journey planner on my phone in 2005 or 2006 to determine the right stop after taking an unfamiliar bus.
I don't know. Holding a phone in your hand is very different than putting something directly onto your face.
> I will happily go on the record as saying that this will be as revolutionary as the iPhone, perhaps even more so.
> But it's going to be a hit. HN is going to be swamped with "How I used Vision Pro to..." posts when it comes out.
> Well fuck me. This thing looks absolutely insane. It’s come in at $3499 and if it performs as good as those videos make out then, if anything, it’s a bargain.
> I think Apple designed an incredible piece of hardware here
No, not really. Like Steve Jobs said, smartphones weren't very "smart". Most people did not have blackberries (those that did have Blackberries, were mostly business users). The rest of us that were technically savvy were playing some crappy java games(the ones allowed by mobile carrier stores), and browsing the web with WAP browsers in our flip phones. Most people were not even doing any of that. And why would they? The experience was terrible.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
Using the same metric, people already use VR headsets, and just "want them to be better". Sure, the marketshare is a fraction of phone marketshare(https://www.statista.com/statistics/677096/vr-headsets-world...). But we can argue that most headsets are tethered to high end PCs, Meta's version is one of the few decent standalone versions.
Apple's device has lots of potential. It's all about the execution now, and subsequent devices.
In my experience, practically nobody. I agree that the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, but it's still a solution looking for a problem, and it's striking to me how even Apple had a difficult time presenting actually compelling use cases in their videos.
To be clear, I think there are some viable uses: gaming obviously, and potentially media consumption, but even there this solution is so much worse than a home theater system (as another commenter mentioned, I can get a group of people together in my house to all watch a movie on a big screen TV that costs much less than the headset that each of my friends would also have to own).
The difference, IMHO, is that those with pre-iPhone smart phones were largely business users who didn't have a choice. Not that there weren't exceptions - I'm sure many had personal smart phones - but I vividly remember (in both Europe and the US) conversations with friends where the idea of paying for a data plan was considered the height of absurdity and would never happen for personal use.
Retconning phone history as if there was nothing between flip phones and first iPhone, or that transition time was short is dishonest.
(Also, Blackberry was big for UK teenaged girls due to free BBM)
The product is not designed for gamers for instance but provides a VR interface for pretty much your everyday iPhone/Mac/Watching movies use.
Personally the thought of people putting that on as soon as they get home/in office or even in the street is somehwat nightmarish but I think they're hoping for something like that...
"where the iPhone was a more-or-less drop-in replacement for the phone you already had, nine years after Meta bought Oculus, VR is still a new device and a new category for almost everyone. Indeed, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984, and most people didn’t know why they needed one."
Soon enough the category will be a replacement for your home theater and/or your mobile entertainment device (i.e. tablet).
As simple as it might look, the most compelling mass-market use case I saw from Apple is... watching a movie on an airplane.
That experience is pretty crappy on current headsets because the resolution is low and the optical aberrations are very noticeable. The dual micro-OLED approach solves those problems. As production ramps up on micro-OLEDs the category will become 10x more affordable, and within 10 years I'd be surprised if 50% of people on commercial flights are not wearing this kind of headset.
To borrow a Steve Jobs phrase, I think of these devices can eventually become "a bicycle for the senses"[1] and open up all kinds of exciting use cases. But to get to mass-adoption you have to nail the basic stuff like watching a movie or TV show. We just haven't had a good device that can do that yet.
It’s also an environment steeped with signalling, something Apple excels at.
"I can afford $4k to watch a movie on this plane and you can't"
When I visit people's houses, I'm often appalled by the audio quality. It's usually nothing compared with good theater sound, which people have experienced frequently. The same often applies to image quality. Does it matter to people? Evidently not. They are entertained just the same, and go to theaters less and less.
And if we look back, people were absolutely entranced by TV in the black-and-white era, and it was the same going forward. The movie theater's advantage was generally more about exclusive, heavily promoted content. Once home video became common, despite its poor quality, second-run in-theater showings mostly died out.
Yes, a family of four could spend $12k on Vision headsets and then find high-tech solution to keep their media in sync. Or they could spend $250 on an adequate 50" TV and then be able to see each other's expressions. That sounds like the real no-brainer to me.
Clearly, Apple shares my dystopic Vision and cannot wait!
Regardless, if that family of four watches separately, $1k on 4 adequate TVs also seems like a perfectly fine solution. If the kids aren't just watching stuff on their phones, which seems pretty common in my experience.
I guess if I had to crystallize a real point out of “family togetherness is out of style”: people definitely care about their viewing experience, just not in the super rational pragmatic way I think you do. Take retina screens, for example - Apple pushed them hard and I anecdotally know people justify their purchases with them, even tho I suspect there were and are more economical options that would give a viewer 99% of the same experience.
The kind of people who could imagine spending $3500 on any gadget are the kind of people who like cool tech backed by cool ads in cool packaging, IMO. And cmon… Sitting in your living room and feeling like you’re in a movie theater on the moon is new and fun and cool, however you slice it.
...and if people buy that device for travel, many of them will use it instead of a home theater
My simple 5.1 system and not so simple qd-oled display is just SO much better for me than the theater.
BUT - my wife doesn’t really care. She’ll happily watch a movie on a laptop although she does say the theater sounds no better than home. I’d guess she’s closer to the norm than me.
Back when we had a baby sleeping in a room with us my wife and I would each put in separate earphones so we could watch something together without disturbing the baby. It was a very crappy experience to not be able to remark on a single thing to each other. That experience plus being harder to see each other too? No thanks.
Currently my two (separated) parents and my two siblings each live in a different city. If all five of us could get together to watch a movie in VR and feel that presence, I think it would be pretty darn fun.
By the way — I'm all for real life, "touch grass" type of experiences too. Both can coexist.
> As simple as it might look, the most compelling mass-market use case I saw from Apple is... watching a movie on an airplane.
I don't think this use case is well addressed by the current hardware on the market, mainly due to resolution and optical aberration issues
That was caused by your baby, not by the devices. 2 people in a small apartment together with their own devices watching what appears to them to be a movie-sized screen would definitely be something many people would like. No big device on the wall. No shaking the people in the apartment next door with your sub-woofer. And you can still comment to each other all you want. (Obviously the price will need to come down for that to be common.)
It was both. The earphones we were wearing meant we couldn’t hear a word the other was saying, irrespective of whether we’d wake up the baby. The Vision Pro has speakers on the side of it too.
I guess I’m not a huge fan of the wall space wasted on my TV but I can’t say it bothers me enough that I want my entire family to strap a headset across our faces every time we want to watch something. Cables coming out the back, a two hour battery life… I’m not doubting the Vision Pro will have uses but I cannot imagine it being a preferable movie-watching experience than a TV.
Sure, let me replace this $2000 4k oled tv with 4 x $3500 headsets so I can watch a movie with my family.
$2000 and $14000 is basically the same, right?
It will probably split in separate categories, the same way we currently have different PC categories ("windows", "gaming" and "macs", whatever people envision in these names).
Your mention of tablet is interesting, as the market is also split between iPad(android), chomebooks and windows tablets, but most people probably only think about the iPad as a "tablet" and the rest as "computers".
I'd like to know if Apple actually designed for that. Because having watched movies on a plane in a headset, I can tell you that when it does anything other than fly straight and level existing headsets get extremely confused. It also is a very low light environment once the lights go off so how well their camera based hand tracking works without light is also a question.
1. The battery seems replaceable. I had an original Google Glass... after 2-3 hours of use you had to take it off your head and let it charge, meaning that you would never get used to always having it on. If people have to choose between having a useless hunk of heavy metal on their head, or not being able to use it while it recharges for a few hours, you have failed. 2. Making it AR-first and having that weird external display. Real life will intrude. Can you answer the door, turn off an appliance, do anything else, without having to pull something off of your head and unstrap some controllers from your hands? With the Apple model of handling things, you can pop out to real life without having to get in or out of using it. If you have to take it off, you're just a little bit less likely to put it back on. 3. Tapping your own fingers to click. This was something I brought up to FB/Meta when I was working there, but they decided not to use it. The only way you can give a tactile/haptic response to virtual items, is if there's also some sort of physical item. Tapping your own finger is the single easiest thing that makes sense. I hope that Apple adds future support for augmented 'props'. Imagine an empty artists palette (typically white plastic), that has virtual colors in swatches, or in a color wheel. You can tap on the physical palette to choose your color, to virtually mix the paints, etc.
The thing the quest is missing is eye tracking, I'd guess because of the cost - but that eye tracking is going to be a really big deal for good UX I think (along with the much better latency).
Meta also has the issue that because they're targeting social (given what the company is) the value isn't really there unless all your friends have headsets too (outside of the gaming niche). This is really hard. Apple by focusing on the utility for an individual side steps this in a way where it's a lot easier to bootstrap imo, especially with the ability for them to rely on their existing platform.
that's a bit of a confusing thing to say because that is exactly how you "click" in Quest when using hand tracking. What's different is the eye tracking and I'm guessing how good the Apple headset is at recognising the tap. But tap is how it does it.
Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to hear these kind of anecdotes!
Because that would be inviting ridicule. It's still way too large and bulky and, let's face it, comical to be used outside. Maybe in an office... Maybe. Clearly it's not intended for outdoor use.
The high-end passthrough is still very important for home use even without tacky "dolphins coming through your walls" usecases. Anyone who has used VR for extended periods of time with headphones and tried to have a drink/look at their phone knows how frustrating that is to take the whole rig off or try to peak down.
The fact VR people were excited you could read your Apple watch without taking off your headset says a lot about the current state of using VR for extended periods w/o quality passthrough.
Also when I boxed I would use this face cover for sweat which also blocked light really well so I basically had to take it off:
https://www.amazon.ca/SAYAFAN-Adjustable-Breathable-Oculus-W...
And it’s AR, so the laptop comparison doesn’t work on that level too. Superimposed directions, reviews, tourist annotations, and goofy shit like FaceTiming your holographic family or playing geolocation games seem like reason enough for a small minority of users to happily take them out onto the streets. Kinda moot for most Americans anyway, who don’t have walkable streets to take them out on.
It just occurred to me that we’ll have to litigate whether this is acceptable to wear while driving… damn screw the rest of my comment, now I’m super curious how that is gonna turn out
I'd personally describe the failure case, culture wise, as closer to "creepy" or "dystopian" or "out of touch/rich". I haven't looked into their materials too much, but hopefully it's super obvious if one of the many cameras on this thing is recording. Deep down I have a strong need to think Google Glass served some purpose, did some good, was not just a shudder in the cosmos to bring false hope to the few... I still want to believe.
"Don't store or leave your headset anywhere where it can be exposed to sunlight. The lenses inside your headset can be permanently damaged from less than a minute of exposure to direct sunlight even if it's indoors."[1]
Some people take them outside at dusk so they can get the benefit of a larger arena outdoors, but they do so against Meta's recommendations.
The Vision Pro may have the same or similar limitation.
[1]: https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/headsets-and-access...
This doesn't sit right with me. The iPhone launched at $600 into a market where most consumers were paying between $0 and $35 for a dumbphone. So while the absolute prices are different, the orders-of-magnitude difference between "what the typical consumer pays for a product in this category" and "what Apple is charging for their radical entry" is about the same.
(No, I'm not trying to say that Vision Pro is the iPhone moment for VR/AR — I agree that it's probably not. I just don't agree with this particular argument.)
So while absolute price does matter, I would say this product will result in the consumer waiting on upgrading their TV, sound system, or computer. With the vision pro, I’d be willing to trade off not having ‘bleeding edge’ tech in semi-stagnant fields such as display panels, audio interfaces, and laptops.
Ignoring that these are the same thing, there is something deeper about the firms’ this reveals that I’m having a tough time enunciating. In essence, Apple is pursuing a time-tested strategy: start at the top of the market and build your way down with scale. Facebook is doin…something else.
Re:strategy, I feel like there are many examples of companies who didn’t start with top-shelf products - I mean, we could start with the iPad and iPhone, which were expensive but I don’t think quite to this degree. But I’m assuming you know more about this - is Tesla the main counterexample?
Apple started with retina and compromised on price; Facebook started with the price and compromised on quality. Moreover, the advances of one are likely to influence the rate of progress of the other. They're on the same track, they're just marching from opposite sides. Barring IP boundaries I don't understand, if one of them gets it the other can too. The phrasing implies they're pursuing separate lines; they're not–they're pursuing the same line from opposite directions.
Both need better apps. Apple seems to be betting on outside developers. They're corning the high end market and beckoning builders with those consumers' disposable dollars. Facebook is going straight for scale. That, however, means burning cash not only to absorb the devices' thin margins but also the in-house development of their software.
It's interesting seeing Apple playing a conventional industrial strategy, and Facebook playing the Vision Fund-esque blitzkrieg line. (HoloLens appears to be more focussed on gamers for the moment.)
I like this analysis, though I think it still misses some fundamentals.
To me, if you go back to root cause analysis on "why has VR/AR not succeeded yet" you have to come to some basic conclusions:
1. The value proposition isn't there. It just isn't valuable enough to have a giant screen or bring a virtual object into your space that you will pay for it and wear a special device. Apple did not solve this. They presented the same things you can do for 10 years, claiming that better quality will make it worth it. But I call BS on that - quality on the Quest 2 is easily good enough that consumers would do it for the use cases Apple presented (photos, movies etc) if the value was there.
2. Form factor. People simply DO NOT LIKE having a giant thing on their face. Apple failed comprehensively at this. The Vision Pro is just as bulky as other headsets - eg: Quest Pro. They also HATE being attached or wired to things and Apple has put a giant wire coming out of your head.
The fact that Apple hasn't addressed the fundamentals leads me to the conclusion this device will at best be a dev kit for whatever eventually makes it to mass market. Perhaps 2 years from now it will indeed be Apple with a glasses like form factor.
I'm a strong believer in the future of this type of device but I really do think Apple has basically just created another VR type device here: it "blows people's minds" and I'm sure a legion of Apple enthusiasts will go buy it (probably me too). But after the novelty wears off, it will sit in the corner because it has the same fundamental problem: it just isn't better at what it does than not using it. At least, novwhere near enough to justify the price and inconvenience involved.
But it's going to change the world.
> It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.
Also, Meta wants to be the gateway to connect businesses with people (the primary requirement for the company) and to connect people with people, slurping every bit of data it can from all its sources in an attempt to become like the Eye of Sauron (unsure if this analogy holds).
As such, Meta has self-imposed limits on what its headset can ever be.
I wonder if this was to counter the possible "glasshole" narrative from popping up again like it did with Google Glass, because the device can record whatever the person is looking at(in immersive 3D VR no less!). Not to mention potential safety issues.
I see it like an iPad, it's for hanging out at home for entertainment and occasionally a bit of serious work when you need to do something simple like answer emails. But most of the time you'll still be using for laptop for real work.
I'm sure some hardcore people will try to work fulltime with it on, people are already trying that with Quest 2s. Which I always found a bit crazy.
I don't know why anyone would voluntarily receive medical devices and procedures for the sake of having cool tech, particularly brain surgery. In a time where a lot of people are reducing their online footprint, you'd have to be crazy to think that anyone would risk their lives to "sign-in" to a kind of social network that you can't ever leave.
No they aren't. The average person is increasing it. Social media platforms are bigger than ever before. I 100% expect that if they released a brain chip that gave you instant access to GPT-10 making you smarter than everyone else, people would buy it. You'd be unhirable if you didn't because everyone else has instant access to all human knowledge.
They are. Not necessarily en-masse, but 10 years ago the terms "digital footprint" and "third-party cookies" were not commonly known terms. They are now.
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1334334/social-media-user...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1045353/mobile-device-da...
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-much-time-does-the-ave...
Just take a look at the iPhone advertising slogan: "Privacy. That's iPhone" It's not, but people like to pretend to actually care about data collection, and that's why they use it in their promos.
Other than that, laws are currently being passed in several states[0] that are attempting to limit this extreme data collection. These laws are limited compared to their European counterparts and are obviously not enough, but clearly people do care.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/us-data-privacy-...
That's a pretty positive spin you put on lobotomizing a person, and stripping them of their human experience. What you're describing genuinely sounds exactly like what is in "Brave New World." If you give people the option of forgetting everything bad whenever they feel like it, like dosing soma, they will literally constantly be doing that, and there's no way that could be a good thing.
I understand the want to eliminate mental illnesses like PTSD and others, but for me personally, this is way overboard.
As for the RFID thing, you're comparing apples to open-brain surgery. A sub-dermal implant, or even more critical devices like pacemakers, are leagues away from a computer in your actual brain.
Regarding Brave New World and dosing soma to forget your troubles… are we not there already? There’s a little dopamine machine in your pocket. If you’re tired of being poor or starving or mentally ill, just pop open TikTok and start consuming.
>Regarding Brave New World and dosing soma to forget your troubles… are we not there already? There’s a little dopamine machine in your pocket. If you’re tired of being poor or starving or mentally ill, just pop open TikTok and start consuming.
Not really. The entire point in the book was not that it was escapism, but that their entire society was built around nobody ever experiencing pain, or really any emotion at all, not just procrastinating and ignoring any and all issues permanently. To quote the RWC: "Christianity without tears, that's what soma is." It's uncanny to think about that because it is so dehumanizing
That's like equating a contact lens with a fully bionic eye.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart...
This will succeed. Immersion is good, and resolution needed for good experience is finally here.
The end.
I got a good laugh readin the Apple Watch announcement thread. Will laugh in a few years at this thread and others 2