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Comment by Jeff_Brown | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase The Economist, "This device is amazing, and now Apple needs developers to figure out what it's for."

https://www.economist.com/business/2023/06/06/apples-vision-...

In 1981, I received a computer as a birthday gift at the young age of 13. Likely the first micro-computer in my small California town. When I took it to my Junior High science fair people were like stunned by a kid with a computer. When you turned on the computer, all you got was a flashing cursor wait for you to program in BASIC. The next year, a successful local business person asked me, if I thought in the future most people would have computers. I said yes. They replied they didn’t think that would ever happen. And they didn’t see, the need for it in their business, even after seeing VisiCalc. In less than 5 years, they had computers in thier business for Lotus123. And not long after, they had computers in their home. I have seen this pattern repeat many times. I have also seen many branches of computer tech die (amiga, os/2, palm….) But from my point of view “figure out what it’s for” is the ultimate computer hackers playground. And perhaps Vision Pro will be the first headset “worth criticizing” regardless of its success.

This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere - sometimes simply due to being out maneuvered business wise.

Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, that they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market.

Maybe Apple Vision is the future but it could also just end up as another path not taken on the trash heap of history. Time will tell.

> a little bit of survivor ship bias at play

I am not sure why you are focusing on "survivor bias". My comment was about being a programmer and the fun of seeing a new technology that is an undefined territory to explore.

But I did directly mention that many of these do not workout as as I referenced: amiga, os/2, palm, and VisiCalc and Lotus 123

However, so that you may have some idea of my personal "survivor bias", here is a super simplified multi-dimension history of my over 43 years of computing smashed into a linear list with massive things forgotten:

  TRS-80 Model III, LDOS, BASIC, VisiCalc, 
  modem-to-modem
  TRS-80 Model 100
  CompuServe
  MS-DOS compatible, MultiPlan, TurboPascal, dBase
  Windows 3.0
  DesqView  
  Delphi Online 
  OS/2, REXX
  Macintosh System 7 --> 1993 to OS X
  Dial-up ISP
  Solaris, Perl
  BBEdit
  Windows 95
  Palm Pilot 
  Linux for Servers --> 1998 to Today
  Linux Desktop
  ColdFusion
  Apache 
  Python --> 1999 to Today
  Always on Internet (ISDN, DSL, Cable) --> 2004 to Today
  Nokia cellphones
  PHP
  Zope/Plone
  Mac OS X --> BETA to Today
  Windows XP
  Nginx
  iPhone --> 2009 to Today
  SublimeText
  Windows 10 --> 2018 to Today
  VS Code --> 2018 to Today
  NodeJS --> 2018 to Today
  SvelteKit --> 2021 to Today
  KDE Neon --> 2022 to Today (the year of Desktop Linux arrived for me)

The longest thread is from 1993 to Today is what is now known as macOS, but for about the first 15 years of my usage Apple was considered at risk of failure. MS Windows was always a part of my world, but seldom my primary focus, it has only been since 2018 that I use it on an extended daily basis. Some of the above are clearly dead. Some I still use lightly (Nginx, BBEdit) but are no longer the focal point of my work.

As far as Apple's Vision Pro, I have no clue if it will be successful. For myself personally, it is the first headset I am even interested in playing with.

seems like the longest thread is Windows by the same reasoning?

But not as a daily driver.

I have had one or more Macs since 1993, I went years without a Windows system. (Servers have been consistently Linux with some Unix and Macs early on).

I probably spent less than a day total with Windows for Work Groups, NT, 98,ME,Vista,7,8,11, etc

Much of my Windows 3 usage was under OS/2 Warp

The above list really about my personal major themes. I already can see major omissions, but Windows is not one.

>This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere

Survivor bias is real, but the interesting failures (in comparison to VR) are things like 3D TV.

3D TV has a very weak effect, the 3D effect is basically dismissed after a while, after you get immersed in the actual content. A bit like watching a (good) silent movie, at first it's jarring, but after an hour you don't notice it anymore.

On the other hand, because VR is so immersive, the effects on the brain are quantifiable, it is fundamentally different than all other forms of media. You can permanently change your brain with VR in ways that are literally impossible with letterbox media. It can change your brain, in a way that no technology has ever been able to before ('Strategic modification of Bayesian priors' if you're into the science).

That kind of thing is why VR is a guaranteed success, it's not just about the fact that movies and entertainment and games will get to a new level, but the psychological possibilities for actually modifying the self with VR are going to ensure we all have headsets in a decade.

VR is immersive to a degree that it tricks your brain completely. It can activate powerful biological mechanisms that cannot be done in other digital/scaleable ways. For example, there's a company in Spain called Virtual Bodyworks, founded by the VR researcher Mel Slater, which can affect your implicit bias with body swaps performed in VR. This is genuine selective neural net-surgery, done in a way that cannot be replicated outside of VR.

The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

That kind of software is going to be the reason VR will take off, it's capable of changing the mind in ways we can't imagine at the moment.

Not to mention that spatial computing is the 'final form' of human machine interaction, plenty of research on that.

> The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking. There is no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

Five minutes to quit smoking? There is one app that claims to be clinicly proven and even they only claim 33% of users actually quit after completing the program.

'only 33%' is not so bad, that's basically a market-leading rate. 10 weeks of CBT is the established benchmark for 'proven' tobacco cessation, and has a 2 year 33% success rate (IIRC).

Most of the tobacco cessation products top out at 33% for some reason, but combining them gives higher success rates.

What app are you referring to btw? Very interested in this area at the moment.

You may be right about what you're describing, but this sounds incomparably more like bullshit than any chance of being right.

I've played with VR, and it's really not that immersive - no more than any other good media.

In particular, VR is definitely not as immersive as actual reality, so anything that could be done in VR to convince someone of non-fantastical things can also be done (at a higher expense, for sure) with actors and props. So, your claim about 5 minutes to quit smoking has no reasonable chance of being true from where I'm sitting.

>n particular, VR is definitely not as immersive as actual reality, so anything that could be done in VR to convince someone of non-fantastical things can also be done (at a higher expense, for sure) with actors and props. So, your claim about 5 minutes to quit smoking has no reasonable chance of being true from where I'm sitting.

Well yeah, it can be done in real life, it's just much more brutal.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000579...

https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/0005-7967(63)90042-1

A fourteen-year-old boy was said by his parents to have started smoking at the age of seven, and to be spending every penny of his pocket money on cigarettes. He had at one time regularly smoked 40 cigarettes per day, but was now averaging about half that number because his pocket money had been reduced. He said he wanted to give up smoking because he had a smoker’s cough, was breathless on exertion, and because it was costing so much money. Physical examination and chest X-ray were normal.

Treatment was given in the outpatient department. On the first occasion he was given an injection of apomorphine l/20 g, and after seven minutes he was told to start smoking. At eleven minutes he became nauseated and vomited copiously. Four days later he came for the second treatment, and said that he still had the craving for cigarettes, but had not in fact smoked since the previous session because he felt nauseated when he tried to light one. He was given an injection of apomorphine l/20g, and after seven minutes he lit a cigarette reluctantly, and immediately said he felt ill. He was encouraged to continue smoking, and he collapsed. He was given oxygen and an injection of Coramine. When he recovered he was very hungry and asked for food, which he ate voraciously. Four days later he was given apomorphine l/40 g. and vomited as soon as he attempted to light a cigarette seven minutes later.

When he next attended he said he no longer had any craving for cigarettes, and he made two interesting comments: “When f see an advert on T.V. for cigarettes, it seems like a dead advert. ” “Just smoke from my father’s cigarette makes me feel ill”

Two months later he left school and started working. He said he had “got a bit down” at work and wanted to “keep in with the others”, so he had accepted a proffered cigarette. He immediately felt faint and hot, and was unable to smoke. It is now a year since his treatment, and his parents confirm that he no longer smokes.

The only reason this experiment seems to have worked is because it was brutal. So not sure what the relevance is. I imagine you could induce serious vertigo through VR in someone, and associate it with smoking in the same way, but that's still brutal and a form of aversion therapy, which brings serious ethical concerns from my point of view (particularly if applied to a child).

I don’t know, I think you are a bit overhyping the effects, but anyway — this is very creepy. Even if the effect stops at being able to manipulate people on a short-term (e.g. in-“game” transactions, etc) basis more effectively than the already criminal (morally) existing manipulations.

Also, I tried looking into the Strategic modification.. paper? but didn’t find it.

I think I'm being pretty mild on the effects :) But maybe that's the enthusiasm of working in the field.

And yes, it's creepy for sure. There is a theory that every generation witnesses a key technological development and is 'lost' to that development, and the generation that grows up with that technology is immune to it. I imagine VR is going to be a technology like that, there will be people 'lost to it' in the same way that people were lost to TV or to smartphones today ( ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Olt-ZtV_CE ). Ethically VR is going to be a minefield.

Here's the paper that coined the phrase:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0035...

And here's I think one of the better papers giving that explanation in terms of VR.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30553934/

Although I come more from a mechanistic/biological background, but there the research has not come so far, AFAIK.

Although Catherine Dulac and Christian Broberger are on the cutting edge in that area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtiZb-kuexU

That lecture is a fantastic place to start, and the statement at 6:55 is key to seeing why VR is going to be a game changer.

*edit*

Maybe also this lecture too, the shear scale of the visual system in the brain is another key aspect to how VR can be so powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2jfPZLhTIY

Thanks for the reply, will be checking out your links!

The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app, takes 5 minutes for some people to go from decades of unbroken addiction/40 smokes a day/first smoke within 5 minutes of waking, to not even being able to think about smoking.

Emphasis mine.

This is a meaningless statement.

I argue the only valid statistic is x% remain non-smokers at y years, something comparable to other methods.

And even if your company’s method does turn out to be statistically significant, that doesn’t necessitate everyone owning the device, only the clinic needs to.

I mean, super early days and they're talking their book, but this is definitely a massive use case for VR.

I thought about this a while back, you could definitely do aversion therapy treatments potentially more effectively with a VR setup.

> that doesn’t necessitate everyone owning the device, only the clinic needs to.

If this approach works, then it will be super widely adopted as it costs insane amounts of money to drive behaviour changes right now, and lots of health services would be interested.

>I argue the only valid statistic is x% remain non-smokers at y years, something comparable to other methods.

Absolutely agree, but our problem is time, we did our first patient around 8 months ago, so we're just limited by that timeline.

So far so good though, followup shows classic Aversion reactions, the people that were affected still have a very strong reaction to the taste and smell.

> On the other hand, because VR is so immersive... tricks your brain completely

I find there is a similar acclimitisation effect to 3DTVs. Do a repetitive task in VR and it doesn't take long for VR to not matter. If you use VR everyday the wow disappears and desktop gaming can be a refreshing change. Only after a decent refractory period might you put on a headset and get some sense of magic again.

> takes 5 minutes ... no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

Oh, you are snakeoil salesman. I regret responding.

I think the key is that this is not a VR device but an AR one. The illusion is harder to maintain in AR but if you manage it is way more tricky. The difference between VR and AR is undervalued in the discussion. imho, the ability to do a credible AR (due to superior computational power and the abundance of sensors) _could_ be the key for Vision success

Except it's not really--in the sense of an out-in-the-world-walking-around HUD. And certainly the keynote emphasized in-home entertainment and (I think?) gaming. It's got elements of AR to it but it seems much more like VR+. (And Apple was almost certainly smart to just coin their own term.)

While I'm not sure that

> we [will] all have headsets in a decade

you do mention a couple things I hadn't considered or heard of before.

> The company I work at has a smoking-cessation VR app

This sounds very intriguing! Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.)

More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments.

>While I'm not sure that

>> we [will] all have headsets in a decade

I'll take that bet. I'm a kind of tech-cynic, have a Nokia 8110, ten year old thinkpad and listen to minidiscs. But in January I'll fly to the states and buy a Vision pro day 1. The last time I was this excited about a technological innovation was with OS X. My brother was a CS guy and he recommended I buy an iBook when I started university because he thought OX was going to be a game changer. And in the beginning it was weird to have the only Apple in a lecture hall with 300 Dells. But 10.1, 10.2, 10.3... It felt like being on the cutting edge.

That's what the Vision Pro looks like to me. The Powerbook 12" all over again, future-tech.

>Could you possibly provide some references and/or the name of your company? (I don't smoke but I'd love to understand better how this works.)

It's really simple as hell, there's an effect called the 'Garcia' effect, whereby if you feel sick ≈6 hours after eating or drinking a novel taste, you get a lifelong aversion to that taste of smell. It's highly conserved, found in every animal studied with the sole exception of vampire bats (they only have one dietary option).

And this was used in tobacco cessation in the 60's. There's a lovely case study where a 14 year old boy is given apomorphine three times while smoking, he vomits so copiously he passes out at one point, but literally can't smoke afterwards.

It fell out of favour because injecting people with opiates to induce uncontrollable bouts of vomiting wasn't a popular way to treat smoking.

We just do with a simple VR spinning room, you take as long a break from smoking as you can comfortably manage, light up and then do our 'aversion' session for 5 minutes, or as long as you can manage.

From that, we see around 20% of people that are unaffected (the efficacy is dependent on a factor that varies ≈10000:1 across a normal population).

For most people, you get some effect, and for around a third you get an instant reaction where even 2-3 5 minute sessions mean they just can't smoke. They can cave to cravings and light up... and then just have to throw the cigarette away in disgust.

https://sickofsmoking.app/

Nicorette meets Clockwork Orange in a way.

>More generally, how do you stay on top of what's happening in VR tech & applications? I'm asking because I've clearly been missing out on some significant developments.

Very difficult, so much happening in various silos. Jaan Aru and Mel Slater are probably the two researchers I try to follow as much as possible, but this is a prescience at the moment, so even finding common terminology is a challenge.

This is fascinating, thanks for elaborating! Do you think a similar therapy would work in the case of alcohol addiction? I.e. drink a glass of some high-proof spirit, put on the VR glasses with the app, profit(?)

yes basically, in fact when we talk to people about this, around 50% of people have had some experience of this in their life (with me it was Kiwi fruit after a long car ride, I associated them with the nausea and couldn't eat kiwis for around 20 years).

Of that 50%, around a half or so have a history of this with some kind of alcohol. I have one friend who will almost puke if he smells whiskey, because of one terrible night in Norrköping with a bottle of Paddy's.

So, I can see just how this would work super well and make people quit smoking. The power of headsets to induce extreme nausea is surely ever-present.

Will it also cause aversion to headsets and to VR? :)

>Will it also cause aversion to headsets and to VR? :)

Unlikely, the Garcia effect is tightly coupled to taste/smell. Could inadvertently give a lifetime aversion to any food/drink though, especially if it's a new taste.

A very elaborate way of saying that people are gonna fry their dopamine receptors on VR porn.

> A bit like watching a (good) silent movie.

A bit off topic but in this context I found “Dogville” to be interesting.

Absolutely! What a movie.

Also makes me think of 'The testament of Dr. Mabuse', totally incredible film.

> Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, that they had competitors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market.

Bill Gates famously engineered his own luck by opposing a free market.

>they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market.

hmm, this seems to be a rather biased description of the history.

There were any number of better operating systems at the time than DOS, especially in the 1.0 timeframe. CP/M was arguably at least on par. Any number of 16-bit minicomputer operating systems. Probably a bit early for Unix realistically.

Compared to Unix and especially modern operating systems DOS is more comparable to firmware than OS, it was something ultra minimal which basically got out of the way of developers. And being so minimal it allowed IBM PCs to sell for prices below $10,000 (1980s! dollars). This was they key to the success of Microsoft and the IBM PC. You might have created a ‘better’ OS at the time, but no one cared about your fancy slow OS which used all the memory cost a fortune in hardware.

perhaps my tendency to expression is overly ironical and indirect at the cost of clarity and obviousness, but I meant it seemed biased that Gates described the reason why MS won out over superior tech was due to 'luck'

Clearly Microsoft did lots of things right (and wrong) over the years. And one of them was creating DOS in the first place. But IBM could have presumably gone in a different direction for the IBM PC fairly easily. And had they done so, it's reasonable to speculate you might never have heard of Microsoft.

It is biased as it is coming from the winners. But it does say something that Gates was willing to admit that it was because of some glorious amazing product that they were successful.

A big part of it was also Gates ruthless business practices.

> When you turned on the computer, all you got was a flashing cursor wait for you to program in BASIC.

> from my point of view “figure out what it’s for” is the ultimate computer hackers playground

I don't have much to add to this fantastic comment.

My father in law was in the construction business during this time at a company building bridge spans. A supplier gave them 5 Apple IIs as a bonus for buying so much product. The owner exclaimed, throw them out computers are a fad!

To calculate the bridge spans requirements it took 3 guys a 3-5 days to do the calculations, drafting the spans, and double checking everything. My father in law opened the book on basic and saw the math it could do.

He wrote a very basic program to take the inputs and do the math. It took the computer less than an hour to return the results.

Who knows that the future brings but I’ll be optimistic.

You could argue the computer was an extension of those human done reports. The iPhone moving the business reports from desk to be mobile as you go. VR on the other hand is entirely new paradigm. However VR will find its way into a lot of “pro” industries. VR interior design, VR architecture, VR manufacturing line design. There’s tons of usecases.

I think the transitions from punch cards to CLIs, to GUI/mouse interfaces, then to touch interfaces, are more apt metaphors when considering the impact of VR.

Touch found it's place as the interface for small-form devices. I'm pretty sure VR is the interface for gaming (with other niche applications). It will be wildly popular, probably a headset in every house within 20 years, I just suspect it will be doing what we already expect - gaming, visualizing chemical reactions, architecture, etc... things we already do in 2d, made just a bit more convenient in 3d with spatial controllers.

My first internship was at a biology research startup back in ‘96.

My supervisor, the head of R&D, had an SGI w/ 3d goggles and a glove and would spend hours in front of it manipulating virtual molecules. He would talk about his days as a PhD student at Stanford in the early 70s working with punch cards and the progress of computing up until that time just over 20 years later… and thought that maybe in 10 years, when his rig that cost about $100k would be cheap enough for the average consumer, it would be the next step in personal computing.

what about the idea that the headset is just a crutch. It seems the UIs shown eye and hand tracking are only tied to the goggles as demonstration to get the tools in developers hands.

3.5k device that's locked down into some iOS like Apple walled garden doesn't sound like backers playground to me.

My first computer (bought my parents) in 1986 was an enhanced 128K Apple //e with Duo disk drives and green screen monitor and a dot matrix printer. It was about $3K in all in 1986 dollars.

My second computer I got for a graduation gift was a Mac LCII with 10MB RAM with a 512x384 12 inch monitor a LaserWriter LS printer, an Apple //e daughter card, a 5-1/4 inch drive for the card and a copy of SoftPC. It was $4000 - in 1992.

People use to spend a lot more on computers back in the day.

Both of my computers were hackers playgrounds for me.

Your computers were tools for building... anything, and the manufacturers (especially Apple back then) actually educated, promoted and rewarded amazing things. This is a consumer device tightly coupled to the most restrictive ecosystem we've ever seen. Doesn't seem like a hackers' playground.

You know, open-mindedness and being curious about new things is part of the hacker ethos. If you are dismissing something without even experiencing it, based on nothing other than preconceived notions about it, maybe you aren’t really a hacker in the true sense of the word? Just a thought.

I guess I’m also not a Scotsman…

Do you also want to run an IDE on the Apple Watch?

I paid $10 a month to distribute my little freeware on AOL in college so normal people could access it. I also submitted it to info-Mac archive via ftp.

I would have gladly paid $99 a year for the bragging rights of putting my app on the iOS App Store so anyone could get it.

I paid for a 65C02 compiler back in mid 80s using my allowance and paid for a Mac C compiler in the early 90s.

My parents were solidly middle class - a factory worker and a teacher.

The point isn't paying to publish apps, the point is that you can't hack into it if this is anything like iOS.

If this runs a version of iOS, we can't access the code that is running in it, we can't open a terminal, we can't use our programing language of choice. We can't use the actual device for building anything hacker related by itself.

We can make apps for it using an actual PC made for building, but only if it runs MacOS, ans using their proprietary language. The actual device is far from a hackers dream or plaything if its as locked up as the iPhone. But very cool device though, hopefully it brings VR into Mainstram outside of gaming

You can definitely hack iOS all you want to, use private APIs, do all sorts of things that are against the App Store rules, run it on your own device and publish the code to GitHub to let other hackers compile it and run it from source.

iPhone enthusiasts Stephen Hackett (his real name), hack into pre-release versions of iOS all of the time to see how it’s running from their computer.

Even that 1986 6th grade hacker that I was would never want to program on the phone. I fail to see the fascination with running a fully fledged IDE on a phone.

When I was programming on the very open Windows CE devices pre-iPhone, I avoided running on the phone as long as possible and used the emulator.

You can use any programming language you want that compiles down to ARM.

Do tell me how I can run my own home screen, directly access the filesystem, write my own device driver or tweak the kernel without voiding my warranty and risking bricking my phone using a jailbreak exploit, assuming one is available for my device.

This "you can build and directly deploy an app to a limited number of devices if you're on the developer program and have a mac, therefore you can 'hack iOS all you want'" meme is borderline dishonest.

Also, the fact that you "fail to see the fascination" is of little significance to those who do want to develop on-device. You don't get to make "you can hack iOS all you want" work by restricting what people are allowed to want.

> voiding my warranty and risking bricking

nut up. hacking has never been perfectly safe and has never had a promise of easy. if you want it enough, you can make it happen.

Piss off, I'll do my tinkering on a platform that isn't continually trying to prevent me from doing it, thank you very much. I'll use my expensive pocket bauble as the limited device it is designed to be. Just don't try and gaslight me into thinking it's in any sense a general purpose computer.

You do you. The rest of us do our tinkering however we choose based upon our own situation, as well. Some people only own the "expensive pocket bauble" (you know, economics are a thing) and they're still out there hacking on it rather than whining about the walled garden. We all know that there are other ecosystems that are more modification-friendly. We don't need to hear your over-qualified internet rant. hence the "nut up" comment. "void my warranty" sheesh. What point are you trying to make?

There are plenty of kids out there tinkering and hacking in the truest sense on iOS and macOS using one of their relative's dev accounts.

> voiding my warranty and risking bricking my phone using a jailbreak exploit

Messing around with the kernel generally does run the risk of voiding warranties and bricking devices.

So?

So why are you mentioning it like it’s a unique drawback? It’s inherent to the activity!

For one thing, it isn't. I can do linux kernel dev on my desktop and laptop without voiding my warranty or risking bricking anything.

And most of the things I'd want to do with an iOS device that I'm prevented from doing wouldn't involve any kernel-level work anyway.

But more importantly that's the most pathetic justification I've ever heard. By that logic, since playing the piano is difficult we might as well sell pianos with all the keys glued together.

The truth of it is that Apple products are not designed for tinkering and they actively resist attempts to do it. To spend my time plumbing their internals to add value to a product that treats me an my kind as a sort of infection would be a pure waste. I'll do my hacking on Linux and use my iPhone for arguing with people on hackernews, it's fine.

The argument is not that you'd run your IDE on the AR device (although there's people who will want to do that).

The point is that you can hack the device to run your software, or distribute your software so that it's easy for others to use it as well, but not both.

>I was would never want to program on the phone. I fail to see the fascination with running a fully fledged IDE on a phone.

Problem is, Apple isn't advertising this as a phone or "mobile device". They're advertising it as a spatial computer. And IDEs are probably my second-most-used computer applications after web browsers, so I want to be able to use them with the near-endless monitor space offered by this spatial computer.

Great comment and replies. Thank you.

> most restrictive ecosystem we’ve ever seen

I get what you are trying to say, but this just isn’t true.

Not everything people build/produce is a program running on the terminal

The cost of deploying to App Store is negligible compared to the rest of the HW needed

It's true that it's a walled garden. But with everything the device has access to, cameras pointed at your pupils, cameras pointed at your surroundings, precise tracking of where you look (which the OS prevents apps from accessing), I'm not sure I want apps to have full permission to the hardware. The more "intimate" devices become, the less you can trust random apps. They still let you run whatever you want on your own device as a dev, which seems like a good compromise. But I'd never trust other people's apps with access to all that.

> 3.5k device that's locked down into some iOS like Apple walled garden doesn't sound like backers playground to me.

Some playgrounds have no fences, but also no interesting objects to play with.

Other playgrounds have boundaries far out, and comes with a huge combinatorial explosion of possibility.

This. I'd rather play with Lego than throw rocks at a tree.

The walled garden is much much vaster than anything we had in the 80s.

And $3.5K is less than a computer would have cost in 1981, adjusted for inflation.

Disagree. HoloLens and oculus went with internal SDKs too complicated for most devs, and had official docs recommending Unity and unreal for development. This seemed stupid as those environments were not purpose built for this class of device (mixed reality). I think Apple has shown some serious wisdom here and am excited to explore their frameworks.

In 5 years, it will be half that price and there will be half a dozen competitors priced under $1000.

Original iPhone was 599, an expensive phone at the time. Today 599 isn’t considered that expensive for a smartphone.

The price doesn’t have to come down as 3.5k is the modern day equivalent to the price of a laptop 10-20 years ago.

Price still has to go down to be mass adopted. Apple sell just ~25 million mac per year and probably most of them are just cheaper macbook air with price below $1.5. Even though their current macbooks are great and people see the value of having a laptop, it's a mature market but Apple still has only like 10% market share.

People wallet and their salary is not out of rubber - there is limit how much they can stretch their budget.

The tech will be back-engineered once the first VisionPro is out. It took Android smartphones a few years too before they were competent with Apple. Today, the best Androids are almost as good, if not better.

There will be multiple VisionPro competitors within half a decade and they’ll all compete on price and focus on mass adoption - just as it happens with phones and laptops.

I feel much the same way about having been given my own computer with internet when I was about the same age in the late 90s.

Following developments in VR/AR for a while, I've felt like we've been in a "business computers before spreadsheets", "home computers before the internet", "mp3 players before the iPod", "PDAs before the iPhone" sort of period, wondering if we'd see a sea change platform emerge. I generally have a low tolerance for hype, but I'm excited about the potential here. Can't wait to experiment with developing software for it!

Perhaps it is not the next iPhone but the next Mac. It is a better at home or at work general computing device. I am a cynic and I see it as the next iPad.

Or it may be the next TV.

You sitting on your couch as virtual events and shows happen around you.

I feel the computer revolution was seen by many. The Vision Pro won't be nearly as explosive, if at all. It's essentially an interface for personal electronic space, and that space is being explored by hackers every where with all kinds of devices. So 'figure out what its for' is being explored by many, and doesn't have to be exclusive to Apple devices.

Like 5 years ago I worked at a digital agency that received a bunch of devices from different manufacturers. AR, VR, spatial audio, directional audio, holographic displays and were given a sort of blank check to make some cool experiences. We never really got past the novelty factor. Obviously there may be some cleverer folk in the world than we had at the time, but I came away thinking these would never really get mainstream acceptance for anything besides gaming. I also came away realizing that mouse and keyboard are really just amazingly efficient and 2d screens are perfectly fine.

>I have seen this pattern repeat many times.

I saw Personal Computer, PDA / SmartPhone and Tablet and I never doubted their success as a product category.

But Vision Pro, or AR / MR is the first one I am joining that camp. I am sure It will do well in many areas, I just dont see it carry the same weight as PC, or Smartphone.

Computers were invented to speed up calculations, and yet the primary thing we use them for today is to read the news and send each other messages and memes…

I think it’s totally reasonable, to expect developers to find the real use

It's the users that will find the real use.

So — pornography, then.

In one or more of William Gibson’s early books, maybe neuromancer, there was a think called simstim where you could vicariously live a celebrity’s life as they live streamed their daily existence while wearing a headset.

Combine that and pornography and I think you’ve nailed it. Pun possibly intended.

Hey, I've seen this one!

https://vimeo.com/144850907

Any talk of Vision Pro should include a link to this 1983 movie (Brainstorm) that features Christopher Walken

https://youtu.be/NNiZP2G-nEM

A killer app might be:

"Better Than Life: Las Vegas"

Games, gambling, shows, and porn all in one "so immersive you won't want to leave" experience.

"Disney ain't got nuthin' on this!"

VRChat with payment integration, then. No reason to choose Apple.

So we're supposed to get excited about our future Brave New World?

That depends on your view of VR entertainment and Las Vegas-style (adult) attractions.

The Vision Pro was showcased with Disney as a content partner. While Disney has historically featured "family friendly" entertainment, there is definitely a market for adult entertainment that the Vision Pro could excel in.

Is it "an exciting Las Vegas adventure in the privacy of your home" or "a lonely person in a dark room trying to escape the sadness of reality"?

You're the Hiro Protagonist of your own story -- Y Not Both?

FWIW, my take is that this is yet another "slippery" media [0] and will mutate to whatever form brings its creators the most succe$$

[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/

Apple won't allow porn-focused applications in their stores.

Apple won't allow alternate stores on Apple-branded mobile devices, or sideloading.

This is a fundamental disrespect of their customers who have purchased the device. Apple regards their brand image more than allowing their customers to display what they want on the device they own.

There is a browser on that thing. There will be generic 3d viewers that can access content over the internet. I think you can display what you want one way or the other. That they don't want porn to be the centerpiece I can understand. That's very problematic or outright illegal in most parts of the world.

I consider this to be hugely beneficial to Apple users. It’s beneficial to Apple too - if everyone was mentally and physically sick from pornoghraphy even more than today, who is going to work, earn money and buy Apple products?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424434

“Why is it every time a new thing is invented, humans immediately try to use for it porn?”

- Janet, the Good Place

Is that why they call them users?

Not necessarily. Developers and product designers assume that users are going to use their product in a particular way. In my - limited - experience in those roles users tend to find entirely different ways to use your product that you never ever would have thought of, and if you had thought of them would have had significant impact on the product itself. The resulting impedance mismatch tends to be overcome with ruthless applications of duct tape, post-it notes, bending and twisting of parts and - unfortunately - the overruling of safety devices and lock-outs.

Computers had a 100% open platform from day 1. Tell me, will Apple allow a pornography app for the Vision Pro?

> Computers had a 100% open platform from day 1.

The first computers were operated by the British and US defence establishments. Could you explain in which way you feel ENIAC was "100% open platform"?

People who owned and had access to ENIAC could load and run any software they wanted on it. They did not have to fight with an app store support agent for months over arbitrary rules only to get their software rejected. That's what open means.

So you think "convincing the army that your software should be run" is open?

The word is meaningless as you use it.

They certainly had to fight the librarian to install something on ENIAC.

It has a web browser. You can access anything you want via that, same as the phone.

Neither a web browser, nor the iPhone are remotely comparable to a general purpose computer in terms of free use

I've never understood this criticism of iOS. It is a fully fledged general purpose operating system with bare metal access and ability to run anything that can be compiled. Sure you can't distribute apps that do whatever you want on the app store. But there is absolutely nothing about iOS that makes it any less of a general purpose computing platform than Windows or Linux.

On iOS you don't have root. This prevents you doing many things with it, which is why jailbreaking exists. The fact that you can write an app and deploy it directly to a restricted number of devices for testing (if you're on the Apple Developer Program and own a Mac) doesn't change that.

Try altering the iOS home screen behaviour, directly accessing the filesystem, writing your own device driver or tweaking the kernel. You certainly don't have "bare metal access" except by voiding your warranty and risking bricking your device by jailbreaking it, if there even is a jailbreak exploit that currently works on your device.

Many of us learned development by using a computer to program apps that then ran on that same computer.

As far as I’m aware you can’t do that with iOS devices (potentially including the AR ones).

>As far as I’m aware you can’t do that with iOS devices (potentially including the AR ones).

Sure you can. You can fire up Xcode right now and build a self signed app to your phone with whatever the heck you want in it. Distributing that on the App Store is another story, but there's nothing stopping you from executing whatever arbitrary code you'd like on your own phone.

This misses the "same computer" stipulation, no?

Says who? Is Apple going to make the entire Vision SDK web compatible?

Safari was shown in the demos.

The question isn't whether you can view the existing web content on the Vision Pro, the question is whether all of the Vision Pro SDK, sensors, and 3D functionality is exposed to the browser to enable VR-enabled webapps for the genres which Apple would disallow on their app store.

https://immersiveweb.dev

You don't need an app to watch porn. Just connect it to a stream, either online, or offline through a storage device. An app would be useful only if we're talking about VR, but so far this hasn't worked for porn.

Hopefully it's as open as macOS, or at least much, much closer to it than iOS. Otherwise the options for exploration are limited by Apple.

New opportunities for abuse do exist with Vision Pro. If you allowed free reign access to the sensors people could record the inside of your house/work, capture your face, fingerprints, retinal pattern etc.

And again with Objective-C it's impossible to prevent private API usage unless you have some sort of App Store model which can inspect the binaries and prevent abuse.

So it's ultimately going to be the same as iOS.

> And again with Objective-C it's impossible to prevent private API usage unless you have some sort of App Store model which can inspect the binaries and prevent abuse.

A alternative is to sandbox applications to prevent them from calling anything else than the official API, and to use a less restrictive sandbox for applications signed by a key owned by the vendor.

> If you allowed free reign access to the sensors people could record the inside of your house/work, capture your face, fingerprints, retinal pattern etc.

Yes, yes they could. That's not and shouldn't be Apple's problem. That's your workplace's problem to regulate how the device is used on-site, the government's problem to regulate how it can be used in public, your household's problem on how it can be used in private, etc.

The device will be inevitably jail-broken anyways, so a walled-garden isn't going to stop bad actors.

Not to mention, most of the things you mentioned can already be accomplished with less expensive and much more subtle devices, like a standard digital camera. And those device definitely don't try to prevent abuse. (Imagine if your camera refused to take a picture because it thought you didn't have permission!)

> Yes, yes they could. That's not and shouldn't be Apple's problem. That's your workplace's problem to regulate how the device is used on-site

Considering the vast majority of exploits on Windows are not the fault of Windows and are the fault of 3rd party applications. The fault is always put on Microsoft.

If Apple gives you free rein, and shit hits the fan. People won’t blame the company for allowing a piece of software to go rogue. People will blame Apple.

At least where I live in Australia there are laws about how biometrics are managed.

Apple can't just capture them and then allow any rogue app to access it. The device would be considered a threat to national security and banned.

And no there are no other mass consumer devices which specifically store a 3D representation of your face and a high resolution scan of your retinal pattern.

Personally, I much prefer the walled garden approach to what you're describing.

Imagine if your Xerox machine refused to copy a bank note...

Private API is not a security boundary. The platform sandbox is.

It is more locked down than both.

Video games require A LOT of calculations.

Unreal Engine developer here, super thrilled to see Apple spitefully choosing to only support Unity with no mention of UE. I imagine due to the bad blood between Epic and Apple over AppStore lawsuits.

Apple _really_ holds grudges.

After the Nvidia blamed them for their failing GPUs, they literally never shipped anything Nvidia ever again. There’s probably an alternate universe where metal does not exist because Apple and Nvidia became friends and just optimized cuda for macOS

Holding grudges is what Apple does.

I remember Jerry Pournelle on Twit.TV saying he reviewed the original Mac and said it was a bold vision but ultimately a toy. A great idea but with not enough RAM to make it really useful. Steve jobs saw the review and took action. Jerry said the 512KB Mac was excellent but that point it was too late.

He was black listed for life from having any early access to hardware for review and was never allowed to an Apple conference ever again. This was in place until Jerry's death 33 years later.

Remember in the 90s when he wrote a book about science fiction fans saving the world from the evil of "people who believe in climate change"?

That's fascinating. I wonder how formalized and widespread this logic is -- did economists tell leadership, or did they just happen to organically hire spiteful leaders?

Anything except tit for tat loses in game theory, so it's just spiteful

This is such a weird example because of how not true it is

The most classic game theory example ever, the Prisoner's Dilemma, is solved by cooperation when played iteratively instead of one-shot

In general, lots of systems can reach an equilibrium of cooperation

That is tit for tat - cooperate first and then only defect if your opponent defects, otherwise keep cooperating.

Sure? Why would you do anything to help someone who’s trying to tear down your business?

Don’t expect long term love for UE from Amazon or Sony or Microsoft, either. They all know that Epic’s end game is to get regulators to force platforms to allow Epic as a competing app store. Let others take the risk, swoop in and undercut once there are profits to be had.

Nobody is going to want to fund that. It will take a decade or more, but UE is doomed unless Epic divests it or gives up on the predatory app store / regulatory business model.

Wow, you seem to have a lot of love for walled gardens...

Take the risk? What risk? By now both surviving mobile platforms (iOS and Android) are well established, and especially the iOS app store is raking in obscene profits for Apple out of the work of others. I would have been ok with a 30% "app store tax" a few years ago, but nowadays it just feels like milking the cash cow...

No need to get personal.

I’m just saying that Epic is using a legal strategy to attack markets with vertically integrated hardware and software distribution (phones, consoles). The owners of these platforms are not thrilled, and we should expect UE to be a casualty.

I’m surprised that’s emotionally charged for you.

When Unreal had those super expensive licenses in the order of +$200k most indie devs moved to Unity, so the average Unity dev doesn't have lots of resources to spend on a pricey headset and the expectation of very high quality titles. Either too few devs will ship anything or quality will be low.

VR developer here.

Politics aside, nobody should ever choose Unreal Engine for standalone VR anyways. It's clear that Epic doesn't prioritize VR, so it's more easily explained as an efficient use of resources.

In concrete terms, Unreal Engine's VR support is awful; you can't get a good looking game running at high framerates on mobile hardware with it. Its forward renderer is severely lacking on mobile VR, and deferred is untenable.

I don't want Unity to be as dominant as it is, but it's the only sane choice for VR. Epic is very clearly not interested in being a leader in this area.

I bet that if you wanted to jump into Unity, it would be relatively easy for you and, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, fun.

I'm still wondering if they choose Unity only as initial partner and will allow other to integrate their 3rd parties engines by themself. Otherwise they would alienated not only Unreal Engine game makers but also:

- godot - bevy - flutter - qt

since all those above render their own ui widgets - you need to integrate somehow this eye tracking to be able to select it.

Having a disliked corporate daddy definitely has its knock on effects

I’ll care when Tim stops being a lying douche. He’s a terrible person and I’m happy Apple won’t support him.

Honestly, I'm excited to start building AR-enhanced cooking experiences for Umami[1].

I worry though: is the passthrough reliable enough to use a sharp kitchen knife safely while wearing it?

[1] https://www.umami.recipes

Isn't there also the issue of the device overheating ? accidental water projection ? oil projections ? Camera fogging ? The battery dying while doing something and you're suddenly blind ?

I think the Apple demo of people mostly sitting on a couch is not a lack of imagination, but a pragmatic approach of how this device should be used.

You may be right. My hope is the AVP is at least step toward something that could make potentially dangerous physical activities, like cooking, safer (e.g., by showing you the temperature of a surface before you touch it with your hands, as suggested elsewhere in this thread).

It really makes it a pity the Hololens didn't go anywhere. I wonder how much time we'll have to wait for a device that actually aims for that space, and not a portable display like the AVP seems to be.

I feel like even if it is good enough it’s only a matter of time until it lags and you lose a finger. Lulling us into a false sense of security is the real danger.

I don’t know about you, but it’ll be obvious to me in much less than 1ms when the passthrough is lagging. You know your hand moves, so when you don’t see it move it’s incredibly jarring.

You might be special. (I'm not being snarky.) I'm a digital musician. 5 ms lag is just barely perceptible to most of us.

My intuition regarding proprioception is similar to yours, though -- give me laggy input of my own hands and I'm still pretty likely to get things right.

Sound travels around 1.7 meters in 5ms. Acoustic musicians can play fine while being apart more of that distance, although there is a tendency to slow down, unless consciously keeping the tempo up (everyone individually feel that they are rushing a little bit, but that's how they just keep the pace).

There is a huge difference between consistent latency and jitter, but even then I doubt that 1ms latency + 1ms jitter would be very noticeable.

Well, yeah, it was a figure of speech, the refresh rate is 8ms or so, so you wouldn’t notice it before that in any case :)

Damn, a bunch of worry warts in your other responses. I feel like I could safely manage a knife if I closed my eyes, or if I was cooking at night and my power went out! Like, I wouldn't immediately chop off a finger... I could manage to set it down. Sheesh.

I'm planning to be a Day 1 user of AVP to see what I can build with it, and I look forward to your cooking app!

Even if it’s almost fine, do you really want to encourage someone to hold a knife with your app and a big black box in front of their eyes, ready for any litigation?

I’m definitely getting a vision pro the moment I can, but I am most definitely not going to wear one when I’m handling anything other than a keyboard on my couch.

I’ve never seen an AR/VR usecase that interested me, but if this thing turns out to be a decent replacement for external monitors I’d probably buy one. I travel a lot for work and the laptop on the shitty hotel desk setup is a major drag.

I'm with you, it seems neat technology wise but the use cases I have seen just seem almost forced. I mean it is neat but I am not really wowed by the potential. In the realm of teaching, particularly with representation of physical things - this thing will be awesome. But beyond that, I don't know.

The idea of a portable large viewing screen is brilliant but that it not the real main selling point of this. A decent VR head set could do something similar.

In 10 years time, comments like this will either look like a prophet that could see the folly of the future... or be like all those people that dumped on the iPod and iPhone.

I’m not trying to dump on it, I’m just saying that as I see the product today, that’s the only thing I imagine myself wanting to use it for. That said, when the iPhone first came out I was only really interested in it to upgrade my mobile email experience, so we’ll see I guess…

this seems like it’ll be much higher resolution than even decent VR headsets. Also, I think the AR mode being very good is important. Not seeing the real world for too long would make me feel claustrophobic

> A decent VR head set could do something similar.

Are there any VR sets & OSs that can project multiple app windows into the space around you?

I somehow doubt that this would work for real work. The desktop/paper metaphor of the monitor is an important part of its usability. Not sure whether "spatial computing" can invent something equally workable for the stuff people usually do on a computer (besides 3D gaming).

It is conceivable that completely different categories of workflows will become available. In the end everything we do on a computer has been invented at some point or another. I guess there are plenty of eager early-adopters and fanboys that will be more than happy to report on their magical productivity boosts.

In any case, assuming that the above caveat is not an issue, if the main real use case is as external monitor replacement I would think that suitably optimized hardware would deliver much better value for money. No need to wear a computer on your head when you need to carry one on your laptop (even mobile) anyway.

I’m also rather skeptical about whether it would do very well for that usecase. But Apple seem to be saying it will work well for that, so I’ll wait and see. Once I’ve had a chance to try one and see how it works/feels I’ll make up my mind about it.

I’m also not really concerned about value for money. As far as business expenses go it wouldn’t exactly be a major spend. I’m personally more concerned about how good the experience is, and value for weight and size. For about half the days in the year I have to live with ~35 lbs of possessions that have to be able to fit in a suitcase. So for me if it could deliver sufficiently improved work experience it would be worth it.

I can totally imagine walking into a WeWork in 2025 and seeing everyone in the hot desk area wearing one of these instead of their tiny laptops.

That makes weworking and hotdesking in an office even more useless than it already is. Sitting there with your headset on, disconnected from most of the world.

Some people just need a quiet place to work where there’s coffee and clean bathrooms and no toddlers running around tugging at your leg asking Dada to go up in the air.

My reason for going to WeWork are to simply chat up with other people during breaks I’m not working. It’s pretty much my only regular social outlet.

My usecase is a probably not so common, but as a frequent hotel-room-worker the main value I (only occasionally) get from the wework-like services is a comfortable desk/chair (with a monitor) and a more stable internet connection than you sometimes find in hotels.

I assume the end goal is something like Cyberpunk 2077, where you have a HUD always, so if you go get a cup of coffee whilst working, you can, and still fidget with things as you do, or what have you, maybe you're about to go to lunch and miss a message that could prevent one of the worst outages of your company, or whatever, I'm just trying to see the net good that people will figure out over time if its done correctly, but there's likely to be something people will come to enjoy about it. I would also assume you would want as many RDP type of applications on this platform as you possibly can have, and if Apple is not pushing companies that make RDP apps to be on their platform or other useful app makers onto their platform, then they're really dropping the ball early.

I feel the same with the Meta devices but I think what the journalist misses is the strategy.

Meta completely failed in the strategy, their store is empty of AAA offerings. This is not bad luck it is a blatant incompetent strategy from Meta. It is in the business book.

I assume Apple has a strategy, it could fail? Obviously, but they are doing what is right.

When the iPhone 1 launched there were many hiccups but in a short period of time.

I agree that initially this product will not sell many units. A sci-fi thinking also tells me that this could improve many industries with completely new interactions with the world. I see this more a B2B product than B2C.

Apple's strategy has always been to go 100% in and don't look back. Eventually people assume if Apple is investing so much into this new thing, they must have a plan. So a few adventurous devs and users get onboard. Apple marketing team uses that as the bait to bring more people onboard.

Yes, but you can say the same about Meta: their bet on Oculus is big yet nobody is onboard. Without being an Apple fan their thinking and execution is different.

Mostly infighting with the teams around how to build for oculus, it is a huge pain in the ass.

Too many business/econ types have difficulty envisioning what new tech may be good for. Be it early computers, or the internet, or now this, they seem to be bottom-line people with little imagination or vision.

I feel the opposite way. The crowd will invent things an individual cannot anticipate. To believe otherwise is a failure of imagination.

I’m most intrigued by the handtracking I’m hoping that ends up beig distinct…. eventually.

I look forward to a virtual, nothing-in-my-hands-but-I'm-still-playing-it drumset. The lack of tactile feedback will make it worse than real drums, but it'll still be fun to be able to play them anywhere.

Air drumming feels much nicer with drumsticks. You actually get tactile feedback this way if you use a relaxed grip and let the butt of the stick hit your palm.

I make Aerodrums and that operates at 125Hz for the mocap. As far as I understand, Apple Vision Pro tracks hands at 83Hz. They would need to improve that (and provide developers what they need to do a good job determining the position of the drumstick tip), for an air drumming app to be possible without accessories that plays to a musical instrument standard.

I've replied elsehwere in the thread plugging our live Kickstarter for Aerodrums 2, check it out, it only has 7 days to go.

Maybe Aerodrums should hire some programmers to write an app that just projects a drum set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CavlglPYVvQ

edit:

They already seem to have a beta VR application: https://aerodrums.com/3d-updates

Yann here, Aerodrums co-founder / developer.

Thank you for the plug. We're doing a Kickstarter right now for Aerodrums 2.

It will have support for VR passthrough. We'll add support for Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 as soon as they make it possible (if anyone has connections to speed that up, I am interested).

The project page is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aerodrums/aerodrums-2-a...

Do you think aeromarimba would be feasible with VR?

I feel like the VisionPro is a demonstration of what it takes technically. All the frameworks are fleshed out. The work is done and in x-number of years it will take off or the various pieces will be absorbed into other products.

Replying to myself but...

Imagine just the eye and hand tracking with no screens. That could be a much smaller device and one can trade the screens for an interactive environment.

Hand tracking is available on at least five other headsets available now.

I Haven’t seen hand tracking like the vision pro.

What you you mean by "like the Vision Pro"? The following headsets have hand tracking: Ques 2 & Pro PICO 4 HTC VIVE XR Elite Varjo XR-3

guess they’re going to have to send me one so I can get crackin

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