Apple Vision Pro – Why It May Be Lousy for Watching Movies on a Plane
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* Sure, you don't get the full resolution. The apps typically put you in a virtual movie theatre and "waste" pixels on your environs. But people watch 720p content all the time! Would I want this to be my only media experience? No. Is it better than your tiny phone or cheap tablet on your tray table? Yes.
* The 6dof tracking is totally off because the cameras can't see the fact that you're moving and you just end up shifting wildly. You can turn it off and go back to accelerometer-based head tracking and it works fine (modulo landing and takeoff, and in those regimes you just need to reset the viewport every so often). I would recommend you turn off 6dof before you get on the plane though; it's wild trying to do it on the plane.
I'll do you one better. My nephew was going to a summer camp that didn't allow the kids to bring phones or tablets. He was allowed to bring an MP3 player, tho. So I downscaled a copy of Into the Spiderverse to 432x240 (his iPod Nano's native resolution). I left the bitrate quite high (1600kps) and it looks absolutely great. Even stretched out on a full sized ipad, it's completely watchable.
I have a bit of astigmatism, but I still don't wear glasses as a routine thing, and when I watch good DVDs on my 60" TV from about 8 feet away, it's fairly rare for me to be that upset by the video quality. Even after I suck some out downsampling into mp4, it's still rare for me to actively notice. DVD encoders are fairly good now.
At this point I don't care at all if something advertises a "4K" stream because I know that it's still likely to be not all that good. Tell me the bitrate of your stream, that's what I want to know. (Assuming the use of a modern codec and quality encoder.) I can get a "4K" stream with hundreds of kilobits per second. The encoder will be crying because of the shoddy job you're making it do and the decoder will look at you like you're on crack, but by golly, 4K's worth of pixels will indeed be shoveled onto the screen.
Take an average 4k Stream from YouTube/Netflix/etc and look at the transfer size for the full duration. It's gonna be something around 1-3gb per hour from my observations.
A good 4k Video is usually around 5-10x that size and with good reason, because the resolution demands a lot of bits to make it shine, no matter how well you've encoded it
What does "high quality pixel" mean?
However, if you look at a swathe of pixels, say a 16x16 chunk, you can reasonably talk about with what fidelity that set of pixels represents the original signal, whatever that original signal was. You get into the whole perceptual coding thing which tells us that determining the human-perceived accuracy of a chunk of pixels is more than just adding up the differences, but you can take that as a suitable first approximation for thought.
High-quality pixels have minimal deviation from the source material. Low-quality pixels have significant deviation.
Tom Scott has a good video where turns up and down the quality live so you can see it in a single video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI The video's resolution never changes, and you could say the video's bit rate never changes (it probably does because adaptive coding saves YouTube a fortune, but conceptually you could say it doesn't), but the quality of the pixels sure does.
You may have been inadvertently subverting his summer camp experience.
If I'm watching on a 7" screen on a seatback, I still have peripheral vision. I want to maintain that. I want to see on the area that isn't the screen, I just want something bigger than 7", and the ability to do things besides just watch movies/TV (like, my own content or games....).
Basically, this is clickbait.
- Thanks to the headset's optics, you're staring at a point in space ~5ft in front of you instead of a couple feet tops which cuts down eye strain
- It's private, so you don't feel like people are watching over your shoulder
- On international or redeye flights, you're not keeping everybody up with the light spewing from your tablet/phone
On almost every international overnight flight I've been on people watch movies and TV on seat back monitors at all times. For people who need absolute darkness the airline usually provides an eye mask.
I hadn't thought of that. As a fairly tall person, working on a laptop or tablet on a plane has become a literal pain in the neck. I don't know if it's that the seats are closer, the tray tables are lower, or maybe I'm just getting old. This seems like a much more pleasant experience.
Sometimes I've found resting the laptop in my lap/knees along the screen hinge (so it makes a 45 degree angle with my thigh) to be the most usable. This requires you to pull your shoulders/elbows back however so you usually can't do it if you have someone you don't know sitting next to you.
I have strongly debated bringing my Quest 2 onto a plane and using a wireless keyboard to program with, I think the ergonomics would work out much better when flying coach.
Not sure if I'd be desperate enough to try it on a plane (the stereoscopy would probably make me sick), but as a viewing experience it's phenomenal. The OLED panel on the original Quest is a godsend for movie watching, and when streaming over DNLA I can get 3-4 hours of battery life.
It truly is a glorious viewing experience, and if you make the screen large enough you effectively get full 1080p detail.
I had the same reaction, and the article only says that the effective resolution, accounting for their "pixels per degree", is something less than 1080p. Which sort of implies it is better than 720p...somewhere between the two. Plus whatever benefit blocking out the things around you in the plane has.
I'd much rather hear some reviews of the experience from run of the mill people that don't have much experience with VR.
I suppose the article does, though, at least set a reasonable expectations bar.
I see this come up a lot in hardware discussions (Megapixels come to mind) and manufacturers love to jump on this effect.
My guess is that they combine a number of signals to do the tracking, and when those signals start to disagree too much they've prioritized some signals over others. That could include things like how your eyes are tracking and other physiological signals, not just the accelerometer and various cameras.
1) People don't tend to watch 720p content on large FOV displays.
For example, 720p on my phone is fine, because it takes up less FOV than a theater.
2) Content can be upscaled, picels cannot.
Downsampling compressed 4k video to 720p probably looks quite good as long as they don’t then compress the output.
It just seems to me like many people might struggle with VR on a plane given that planes and VR can each on their own cause people to vomit, and not only would you be using both at the same time, but they would actually impact each other because the plane has turbulence which would impact accelerometers but not cameras.
I have no idea how this would all work out in the end. Perhaps it wouldn't be as bad as one might think.
Yeah the important thing is to turn off the cameras. It'd be a vomit inducer otherwise.
I still prefer a TV when I'm chilling at home, but the NReals work great on planes.
* They supposedly work well with Dex (Samsung/Android VR space)
* They also have a desktop app called "Nebula" that can generate up to 3 virtual monitors. Resolution low for each monitor, but it's handy for having a bunch of different material in your view.
* They can also do 3D side-by-side mode.
I also have them working (without audio) with my Playstation.
The AVP is estimated to be around 35-42PPD.
Why? I don't get this. As long as the plane is moving at a constant speed it should be no different from sitting in a stationary room right? Unless there's like turbulence or something I guess?
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/the_talk_show_live_from_w...
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...all these cameras to do that and um and the other thing is interesting and you may or may not have seen it in the in the keynote because we can also do this on a plane which uh when you for those who are you know in this kind of space like that's not an easy thing to do because planes kind of like turn and fly and move around and you know the IMU on the system how does it know what to do in that case because it doesn't have a fixed inertial space so there's some magic going on there but you can get that same level of stability when you use it on a plane which means that you know when you're at 40 000 feet and you know the baby's crying next to you and you really kind of want to be somewhere else you can be uh
MS had to do it first to solve boat use for the IVAS military program and partnered with Volkswagen [1]. Meta just announced a program last month [2] and is partnering with BMW.
So like most of the Vision Pro, Apple is using technology choices with the same trade-offs as everyone else in the market and Karl, TFA author, is an opinionated expert in those trades so go read his teardown of the Quest Pro if anyone is offended at his redteam style calling him an Apple basher.
But I think he might be missing the tightly coupled OS layer with an attention to detail not typical in the industry to date. In the same YouTube video quoted above they mention (50:57) developing a whole new glyph rendering engine just to get better text. That and a hundred other fine-tunings is what I hope to see.
[1] https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-and-volkswagen-collaborati...
[2] https://about.fb.com/news/2023/05/meta-bmw-ar-vr-experiences...
The system's Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) faces a challenge in these scenarios due to the absence of a fixed inertial space. However, we've developed some innovative solutions to ensure a similar level of stability, even when used on an airplane.
This means that, even at 40,000 feet, amidst distractions such as a crying baby nearby, our system can transport you to a more pleasant environment.
(courtesy of you-know-what)
I see that quote as saying the visionPro verifies what the camera sees and what the IMU is describing to arrive at a realistic interpretation.
Forgive me if that wasn't a question.
...
Its definitely possible that the Vision Pro will be a dud, but it seems odd to assume that Apple hasn't verified basic things about the product like "is watching a movie a good experience".
So we can argue hypothetical rebuttals to these hypotheticals, but we can also note that this pattern has repeated over and over. Apple has failed before, but “it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” and “what improvement can they bring to the commodity mp3 player” and “what’s wrong with command lines” and “who wants a small iPhone on their wrist” and “wires make earbuds socially acceptable” are valid things to remind this year’s doomsayers of.
It doesn’t make sense in hindsight, like the “iPhone will fail because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” doesn’t make sense. But that’s the pattern here. Vision may fail, but if so, it will not be just because it’s different than current paradigms.
It’s easy to criticize. My complaint about the criticism of the Apple Vision is that it largely boils down to: It’s different and doesn’t solve existing problems and I can’t imagine people using it.
Great products sometimes don’t solve existing problems. They sometimes create a need. I’m very excited about the possibility of the Apple Vision. If it’s as good as Apple touts, and this remains to be seen, then I think it will usher in a new era.
Oh god, you're giving me flashbacks to the "courage" keynote...
It’s interesting that now very few phones have a headphone jack. The vast majority of the headphones sold are wireless.
So, I agree. It's very courageous, not for Apple but for the user who so absent-mindedly gives up on platforms they control.
Who can blame them, though? Most people's idea of "open computing" these days boils down to their web browser and Xbox. Maybe people are ready to jump from frying pan to fire.
So far, the author, and nearly everyone else, has yet to wear this new device, let alone on an airplane. All the analysis on previous headsets is great but moot, since the reality of Apple's version isn't tested yet. And, based on how wrong all those iPhone analyses were, it's a fair benefit of the doubt to think maybe Apple will do right by this headset as well.
why? It’s not like companies which previously released successful products don’t fail all the time. Also the iPhone even back then had some clear use cases (web/media/maps and later camera) it’s just that all other people mostly sucked at these things. Nobody has quite figured out what can you do with a VR headset besides gaming.
But even taking your point about no one has figured it out yet, why go to a place of "it's gonna suck" before actually trying the thing? The specifics aren't known yet by anyone not under NDA, so why speculate something will be bad, as the author did?
I didn’t say that. IMHO it’s as silly as those saying that it can’t fail and it will revolutionize the world because it’s Apple.
> The specifics aren't known
apps and real world use cases will probably matter much more than the specs. I highly doubt gen 1 will be that successful or that Apple expects it to be though. It seems much more like a developer preview than the end product.
> Because their hit ratio is still positive?
Corporations are made up from people and many of those who developed their most successful products initially are no longer there
True, but it's not as if this is a completely new company with new employees. Much of the leadership remains, many of the rank and file as well, and probably many internal processes/guidelines. I'm comfortable claiming that Apple's past successes are relevant when considering whether the AVP will be successful as well.
Which isn't to say it will be successful. The price alone will ensure it remains niche. But apart from cost I fully expect it to be a better headset in many ways than others that came before it.
The iPad is the more interesting one to me because tablets had been a Next Big Thing for a long time, to the point that the common wisdom was that they weren't going to happen. Phones become slabs-of-glass because of the constraint of fitting into a pocket. Tablets couldn't compete with laptops in the absence of that constraint. The iPhone was the birth of a new industry; the iPad breathed life into an already dead industry.
(Granted, that industry seems to be trending back towards dead, or if you prefer, "a stable niche that isn't going anywhere due to the ease of just making a Phone, but Bigger, but isn't going to take over the world", but if anything that makes Apple's accomplishment even more impressive.)
This seems a much closer comparison to VR. Even before the current push represented by the Oculus and similar gen products, VR headsets had been a Next Big Thing for decades now. I'd still characterize the field as basically dead, at least at an Apple scale. If it hasn't outright plateaued, its first derivative is certainly only marginally positive. If the Apple Vision product succeeds it'll be another breathing life into a dead industry play.
I'm not saying the iPhone was obvious. I'm saying it wasn't coming after years of failure in the product space. They did a good job and leaped very quickly to a good solution. Absent Apple, the rest of the market would have gotten there, though. They weren't swimming upstream, they just got where the stream was going faster than anyone else by quite a lot.
iPad was swimming upstream. So is a VR headset.
One day reading the latest computer magazines was Steve Jobs talking about a computer so easy to use a 2 year old could use it. I could not begin to comprehend what he was talking about. He was talking about the Lisa. I don't know how long it took me to find out what in the world was going on.
It maybe like 2 mouses in that it has eye tracking and hand tracking. Which might make 2x as good as a mouse.
VR glasses have not yet gained mainstream acceptance among the general population in the way that phones had achieved before the iPhone. Practically nobody is saying that the Vision is a bad product, all of the skepticism is whether it’s a good product category.
The same could be said about the iPad and Apple Watch, no? Tablets and smart watches weren't popular before their introduction. With that said, I don't think the skepticism is unwarranted. Just because Apple has been successful in introducing new product categories in the past doesn't inherently mean that they will be this time.
As for the watch, watches are a very popular accessory generally, and there have been plenty of entrants before the apple watch, all the way from the casio calculator, to fitbits and pebbles to android wear.
If you were already into watches, and were already in the apple ecosystem, which I have to imagine was a large set of people, the apple watch was basically an insta-buy, not only because of its integration but also it’s customizability.
I don’t see those same variables present for VR as were for the watch, but I do see similarities between AVP and iPad in how it’s billed as a pro device, and I imagine it will suffer a similar fate of falling short of expectations.
Certainly how it worked at my company.
Or you can consider an even longer past; has any company in history ever been able to consistently "hit-it-out-of-the-park" with products? Or is there an element of luck here that distributes these things.
In other words, does one game-changing innovation make it more likely or less likely to produce a second?
Apple has had financial success with many products, yes. Is that what we're talking about? No.
Do you really think MacBooks and AirPods are revolutionary products like the iPhone?
I guess if we declare everything Apple’s ever done to be just pretty versions of ENIAC, they really haven’t had any successful products at all?
What other product categories have Apple "re-invented" or invented. The mobile phone. The tablet. What else?
They didn’t invent any of those, and they didn’t invent the innovations that made their products successful. But the user experience of all of them was so much better than existing products that they went from nothing to dominating the category in just a few years.
Maybe the iPad, but large phones became popular and the whole tablet hype sort of disappeared.
The Apple Watch? The only people I know who own one are people so deep in the Apple ecosystem they need it all. Seemingly good product (everything Apples makes is), but not a game changer.
The fact that Apple fans want every Apple device does't make the devices amazing. My opinion, of course.
Smartphones are great examples of how user behavior can change. No keyboard turned out to be fine, and people wound up plenty happy to watch videos on tiny screens.
I think two things could have made the article more useful:
1. A better structured article. This was a mix of random details and jargon with speculation about the new device that didn’t feel well tied together.
2. I would expect the view of a sceptical expert to be more cautious and considered; to say what things might be difficulties, why they were difficulties for things in the past, how Apple seems to be planning to deal with them, where that approach might fail or succeed, and then some estimate of whether it seems easy for them to solve the problem. That is, it should be more clear what the assumptions are that are being relied on for the estimation.
To take a stereotypical iPhone criticism for example, it would be bad to merely say that the lack of keyboard or badness of touchscreens makes it impossible and better to say that good touchscreens and some kind of solution to keyboard problems would be needed, and you don’t think improved sensor resolution would work and the problem seemed hard because X or Y. Like, I’m not saying that the author needs to be right but I think they could do a better job of having convincing reasons that they have tried to thought of the ways they might be wrong.
[1] There was some discussion of a device the author worked on in the ‘90s(!) but I didn’t see discussion of more recent work. Capabilities of much of the tech going into this Apple thing will be quite different.
If Apple Vision was the form factor of a pair of sunglasses (more like what xreal is doing) then I wouldn't be so critical.
I have no idea when/if the technology will get there but a HUD in a fairly ordinary-looking pair of glasses you could wear on the street seems potentially interesting. I'll keep an open mind about the Vision Pro but the use cases I've seen don't seem super-compelling to me--at least at this point.
TL;DR: I agree; don't use Glass as a reason to write off AR glasses altogether.
Seriously, the headline here is why something "may" be lousy for watching movies.
Being 500 grams with most of that in the front (for that stupid glass and "face" thing), it's not going to be a good time. Without a back to front strap, it's not going to be comfortable, and the "solution" for the weight of just clinching it tighter against your face is the WORST solution (believe me I've tried) and only results in more discomfort.
I don't know how lightweight you have to get before something is comfortable to wear on your face for extended periods, but it is probably closer to 250 grams than 500
At this point though, all of this is speculation. I expect v1 to suck, v2 to be a little bit better, and v3 to be the one that gets it right. I'm guessing that's about 5 years out.
The launch unit probably should be a heavy mess and if it isn't, maybe they weren't ambitious enough.
For example, the one I link to below is a two piece setup where goggles clamp to your face and then a wide shield hangs from the goggles:
https://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/equipment/welding-gear...
There are all kinds of attachments you can get that can bring the mass into that 500g neighborhood. The ones from the previous generation were easily 500g.
All of Apple’s product launches get criticism leveled at them, and if they are successful, people forgot about the criticism. If the product is unsuccessful (Mac cube), people forget about the product.
Predictive text being utilized to change the virtual size of touch targets on the keyboard, yet keeping the design static to improve accuracy, was something even those with years working with and on touch only smartphone interfaces did not figure out in its entirety until after the phone was in their hands.
The iPhone is a good parallel because just like with it, this is trying to further an existing class of devices and history has shown that, for as many things as I can criticize about them, Apple is very good at adding these unnoticeable optimizations and hidden tricks that make experiences work much more flawlessly.
Adding to that, though, I will admit that the first iPhone was severely flawed in other ways, like lack of MMS and 3G. These however were not issues with the UX (compared to Windows Mobile which supported these but had UX issues out of every orifice), but rather conscious feature restrictions, on which Apple ended up back paddling.
In fact, that is my main concern with the AVP, Apple intentionally restricting it in ways that will make the hardware less appealing and impactful. The AVP, in my eyes, should in the long term replace both Macs and iOS devices (at least iPads), but to do that, should enable the creation of software on device. I hope that, just like with 3G and MMS, Apple will see the light between V1 and V2 regarding local macOS app support (or at least Xcode).
If that happens, I will buy one at their asking price. As it stands, I will wait for reviews and only buy one if it means a distinct improvement to my workflow, even though I'll need to take my MacBook with me. Apple should, just like with Xcode on the iPad, stop being afraid of letting new classes of compute device replace the old. To bring this back to the original iPhone, imagine if Jobs had announced that it is not an iPod on top of being a browsing device and phone, because they feared cannibalizing iPod sales. Would have been shortsighted, to say the least.
Lastly, I will freely admit that past performance should not be used to predict future successes. It is possible that Apples methods may have changed since then, and they have not put as much consideration into solving the UX issues plaguing current pass-through AR devices, in which case justifying the price will be (even more of) a challenge. I doubt it though and, even if, more recent history (Apple Watch) has taught them a thing or two about pivoting a seeming failure into an impressive success.
> Third, users will detest the touch screen interface due to its lack of tactile feedback. Using a thumb keyboard, as on the very popular Treo phone, allows the user to feel the keys and know subconsciously that he’s about to press this one and not the one next to it. A touch screen doesn’t allow that, so the user will have to be looking at the keyboard at all times while using it.
http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut-...
https://512pixels.net/2009/01/early-macintosh-reviews-show-d...
> Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.
John C. Dvorak
I've been idly imagining how my work experience would be different if I had eye tracking and hand gesture recognition these last few days, and I keep noticing times when I wish I had it.
His mistake wasn't in assessing the issues, just that he could not see that there's software solutions to fix those.
The complaints were valid, but they weren't nearly enough to make the device bad.
Now, how many people can spend $3500 on a headset where the main use cases are "watch a movie", when those same people probably also have a really nice TV? Everyone keeps talking about how it's "very interesting" but how many of you have actually tried to watch a movie in a VR headset? It's not comfortable, not just from screen specs, since those don't really matter. The weight and face gasket suck to have on. You can't engineer that away.
The other extreme is expecting history to repeat by demonstrating that people have consistently over estimated the probability of success in the VR space.
I don't know which is right, but my gut says that VR is not something that will go mainstream in its current form (HMD). It's too 'bluetooth earpiece', and doesn't match the prestige image that is particularly strong in people that favor Apple products. Notice that I am not criticizing anything technical with AVR, which I think is a peripheral issue.
While I agree that blindly expecting history to repeat is problematic, it’s worth considering that this seems to be Apple’s strong suit, and while there are plenty of questions about how the market will react to this product, the early demos seem to confirm that Apple has indeed accomplished something that the other headsets have not. I think this is why some people are so bullish about this tech - and not for no reason.
> It's too 'bluetooth earpiece', and doesn't match the prestige image that is particularly strong in people that favor Apple products
Apple took something that was decidedly uncool (Bluetooth earpieces) and turned it into a status symbol (AirPods) despite these earpieces looking pretty goofy when they first landed.
And again, I think the optimism comes from their demonstrated ability to achieve this kind of shift in perception/public consciousness.
The reality distortion field in the form of top tier marketing from Apple has the best hope of making progress in this area compared to those that have come before.
Could this all still be an enormous flop? Maybe. It could also be a Newton, and a decade later we’ll get the product Apple really wanted to ship: the iPhone (compact glasses).
The trend I see is software companies like Facebook, Valve, and Microsoft over-estimating their odds of success at making hardware devices.
We think the iPhone is great today almost entirely because of Apple’s iteration since launch. The initial model had promise but also major shortcomings that were obvious at the time.
So “remember the iPhone” is probably not as strong a reassurance as it might seem on the surface. In general, Apple “version 1” products are often flawed.
But Apple generally does not launch a product unless it intends to iterate on it for a long time (one of their not-so-secret keys to success).
which country?
Phones that didn't have any of that usually were from the older generation like the 3310. That lack of messaging options combined with the very high price at launch made it a non-starter.
All of that got fixed on the 3G.
Even now the iPhone isn't as popular in mainland Europe as it is in the UK, Ireland, and the US.
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/iphone-to-debut-in-fran...
Usually Apple’s 2nd version of anything is the best.
V1 is always missing something important that they couldn’t quite get ready in time.
That is my only hesitation with the Vision Pro! It’s a lot to shell out if next years will have some new and amazing thing
That's the same for every company I think, you always miss stuff when designing the V1
https://qz.com/work/1167463/apple-is-forcing-ceo-tim-cook-to...
Has the author seen anyone ever wear a head mounted display anywhere outside of their living room?
A more honest way to make the point would be to say there are 10 million Quest 2's, and have you ever seen someone use in to watch a movie on a plane in the last 2 years? I will admit that, in the few plane rides I've taken in the last few years, I have not.
There's zero surprise that in 1990 nobody saw anyone watching a movie in VR on a plane because it was not remotely possible.
The main point may have some validity, supporting it with over the top misleading arguments just because they sound like slam dunks is dishonest.
Wait til the thing comes out, use it, tear it down - whatever - but provide real facts to back up your assertions.
The reason VR enthusiasts want wide FOVs is not because they want to watch movies stretched to 120°. Nobody does that. They want wide FOVs because even at relatively high FOV, like the 106 of Quest Pro, the edges of the display are still easily visible and the image does not fill eye's FOV fully. Yes, the resolution of what we can see towards the edges of our vision are much lower than what we can see in the center, but it's about getting rid of the visible boundry that messes with immersion.
Which makes PPD analysis based on counting pixels suspect. Good optics can cheat by moving pixels from the peripheral field of view to the central field of view.
Simulavr claims to go from 24.48 PPD (pixels / field of view) to 35.5 PPD (actual pixels per degree near the centre) by doing this.
They also have a great blogpost on it: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
Especially for Apple enthusiasts who have been spoiled by >200dpi laptops and >450dpi phones, I think the practical resolution you get out of a "4K per eye" headset is going to underwhelm.
Could you elaborate on this a bit?
I know that most people use a 24"-30" monitor, but there are plenty of people who want max screen real estate and either use a large TV, or multiple monitors which add up to a large TV in size.
I don't see a lot of difference between what you're describing and using a 48" TV as a monitor. The reviews of people who have tried this suggest that it many not be the best for gaming, but for productivity and watching video, it's pretty great.
Just basic apps like notes and calendar would be much better in a “spatial” OS
The virtual screen has to be scaled to fit the space it's supposed to occupy on your headset's display. Thanks to perspective, the virtual screen will never scale linearly with your headset's display no matter where you position it relative to your head. And every time you move your head, that scaling will shift slightly.
I'd guess a 1080p virtual screen at comfortable viewing distance in the AVP will be a muddled mess.
The primary appeal of the VR desktop is that you'd effectively have infinite screens which can dynamically adapt to the content. But I suspect the sacrifice to visual clarity will be enough to scare away most people from using it that way.
Maybe it would work with 8K+ displays? If you can crank the DPI high enough, I could see the VR desktop taking off. I just think 4K probably isn't enough to make it worthwhile for most people - at least not for extended, professional use.
If I can put one of these things in my carry-on, use it during the flight, and still have a 4K-like experience with the monitor in the hotel bedroom for the 3-5 days I'm at the conference, I'm in.
It sounds like I'm in, I got to be honest...
The other obnoxious thing here is that he thinks he’s being novel? Like Apple hasn’t considered any of these points over this headset’s near decade-long gestation period?
Ultimately though I’ll at least give him credit for putting himself out here so publicly. Plenty of people are harboring private doubts, but he’s setting himself up here for potential posterity, up there with all the people who said the original iPhone would be a failure.
Date: 2018-06 to present
Organization: RAVN
Title: Cheif Science Officer
Summary: RAVN is working on augmented reality headsets for military and first responder applications
... Not the GP, but it looks like they work for someone who makes a competing product. A competing product not backed by Apple's absurd R&D budget.
If you take nothing else away from this:
- Try to keep detail and gaze in the 10° to 30° range (from view center) to limit fatigue
- People prefer moving their head to moving their eyes, for any lengthy amount of time
And also this awesome chart, which I always use when moving and TV positioning: https://i0.wp.com/kguttag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/HDT...
[0] If he and his grad students still teach it, the GT "Rapid Prototyping" course is awesome. Or as the joke went, "Learn just enough EE for IED assembly" (just kidding, FBI! And also, steel wool + 9v battery + timer/receiver)
But on the other hand, if you gave me one on the plane, I'm definitely putting it on throughout a 14h flight. Anything to let me escape the reality of flying long haul Economy.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the hardware could be locked to the user’s eyes, just as iPhones can be locked to the user’s fingerprint or face.
To get a jump on Apple Vision development I picked up a Hololens 1 and it also has 2 hour battery life on Ebay although right now I don’t know if I can stand to wear it for that long. The weird thing is that even after using it for 20 minutes I could not see computer screens the same way, I was already starting to want to drag windows off the monitor and have them hanging in space, do a ‘flower’ gesture to open the Windows menu, etc…
The Hololens 1 has the problem that it does not work outside in the day at all, it is just not bright enough to compete since it works by adding to (not subtracting from) light from the outside world. Inside the house though it can put "holograms" in all but the brightest places. No way I am installing Microsoft Streets & Trips on it and using it to navigate on foot or in the passenger seat of a car.
The Apple Vision will do better outside. For years I've been dreaming of making an Iron Man Halloween costume with a passthrough VR setup, even though I anticipate I'd need to have a handler to stay safe. I guess if I don't do it this year I won't get to do it before it becomes passe.
Not to mention, this is an M2 device, it'll sip power.
The fact that we keep beating the same paths either means we’re crazy or there’s actually gold at the end of this rainbow somewhere.
The product found a niche as remote googles for FPV (first person video) drone pilots, but was not successful otherwise. It had a very narrow field of view and the aperture was small, so getting aligned to even see anything was challenging.
I still remain skeptical that movies on a plane will really work out, but I have more recently tried out some VR experiences which blew my mind and made me much more positive about the whole field. [0] [1] I'm also cautiously excited by the orders of magnitude improvements that Apple as made in resolution, field of view, and latency for passthrough.
The nausea problems are caused because your body getting different signals then your eyes. Similar like reading a book in a car. But with apple vision, everything is anchored to the outside world. So reading a book in a car with apple vision while looking straight ahead may be way less vomit inducing as reading normally. My guess is, the same goes for in flight.
I'm sceptical as well. But apple has a pretty good track record in sweeping into a field that consisted of 20 years of half-assery and overengineer a few key aspects they deem most important.
Jobs died in 2011, the iPhone 6 came out in 2014.
720p is fine for watching movies, even if it's not home theater perfect. But it's absolutely fine and way better than the alternative of watching on a terrible IFE seatback (which probably gets the aspect ratio wrong)
The kguttag.com blog posts were the first time I've seen someone raise interesting questions about the feasibility of the product and try to poke holes in them. Yes, he's using product shots and statements from Apple to speculate what the product's limitations are, but this guy appears to have knowledge about this space himself, so he's familiar with the difficulties of building AR and VR headsets.
Small changes in the aircrafts speed in various axes tend to cause tracking issues.
I guess this could be fixed with a higher reliance on camera traking, but i think it is still a unsolved problem.
In reality, it always sucks for those things. Crap in seat displays, crook neck on a tablet/book, no comfortable typing position, etc.
I mean it it works, but I wouldn't say its ideal - particularly in cattle class.
So weather this is the solution or not, I don't know, but think theres definitely _something_ in a compact, portable 'Head Up - Hands Down' device form factor.
Apple likes to iterate with their hardware, so I have no doubt they can get to where they need to be pretty easily if people buy and enjoy the current iteration.
Also, we need movies which are made for VR.
Maybe I've actually reached that halcyon stage of life where I've run out of fucks to give about the trivial shit.
Movies in VR are enjoyable when the effort is put into the theatre experience surrounding the movie and the social experience of watching a movie with other people sitting next to you.
I expect that one day I’ll go to a concert and everybody will be wearing them. Hopefully with a synchronized ultra-low latency broadcast option direct from the house mix (hint hint to any Apple employees) to deal with the garbage sound at some areas in arenas.
Adoption of new hardware seems to always be very slow, then all at once.
Have you tried this? Can the AirPod Pro 2s block high frequency sound well? I actually vaguely worked in the vicinity of where the active noise cancelling tech was developed. Blocking higher frequencies was always a big problem. Unfortunately I left that area a while ago now and haven't really kept up with the developments.
I got a pair of the first gen pros for free, and I couldn't imagine wearing them at a concert. They'd sometimes end up amplifying random noises when I was walking on the street, I'd be scared of them going haywire in a concert.
I always wear musician earplugs at concerts, but now I'm kind of interested in trying the new pros. I would be worried of them getting knocked out though.
I would assume they use them with transparency mode to lower the environment sound so they don't go deaf.
I mean, I have a pair of musician earplugs for that reason.
conspicuous consumption dialed up to 11. unless you're in business class.
iPad is just a big phone, iPhone doesn't have a keyboard, Airpods look silly, removing headphone socket is a mistake (i agree but didnt stop them selling), etc.
Personally, if I had the money, I would buy a Vision Pro day one. Sadly, it's about $3000 out of my price range :( Would I wear it in public? Probably not, but then I have no idea what sort of applications people will create for it, so who knows!
If someone creates something like Pokemon Go using the Vision Pro, I could see it suddenly being everywhere. Although I worry that theft will be easy and they're so expensive that not enough people will have them anyway.
Isn't iDevice theft really low because of the Find My lockdown on devices? I.e. if a device has Find My installed if a device is stolen it can effectively be bricked because it's tied to someone else's Apple ID? I thought this entire thing made theft of Apple devices a mostly non-issue.
I think most phones now can be remotely disabled, right? This article from April says over 90,000 phones were stolen in London UK alone last year: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/mobile-phone-thefts-ro...
I'm sure a bunch of them were iPhones, so it still happens. I guess even if you just sell them for parts there's a lot of value in an iPhone and presumably that will be true for the Vision Pro too.
This is why trade in services (including Apple's) require you to turn off Find My. I think you even have to turn it off to send your device in for repair.
it's a luxury that many can't afford.
"i'm forced to sit among the riff raff of economy so i'm wearing an expensive headset to avoid them"
long-haul economy flights aren't luxury, but neither are they poverty.
If I have to long-haul economy, then I usually create virtual personal space by splashing out $10 on some kindle books, and when my eyes finally glaze over, a sleep mask as a cheaper VR headset and "leave me alone" signal.
Nowadays, wearing Airpods signals that you have money and wealth.
Give it a few years and no one would care if you have a Vision Pro on in public. And then the cool kids will wear one and suddenly, everyone in high school is asking their parents to buy them one.
Apple's brand is incredible, really.
It’s sometimes a matter of how many people use the technology like you said. The more there is, the less it’s noticed …
iPhones aren’t anymore either. You seen poor people with them all the time.
I could see a kid wanting AirPods because his cool friend has them. I don't think I'd see the same thing with Skullcandy, or Bose for that matter.
By my Junior year everyone was wearing AirPods and there was a greater stigma against people with wired earbuds (“oh, you can’t afford AirPods?“).
That was only 2 years. I think this AVP is more of a dev tool than a consumer product, but I think by v2 or v3 Apple will pull it off.
It'll look weird initially and people will only wear at home. Then by v2, some people will wear it at work and coffee shops. By v3, people might be walking on the street with them on.
Apple's brand makes it "cool". Basically, using Apple products is a way to flaunt that you have money and influence. So I don't see why the Vision Pro wouldn't end up being the same.
I'd never fly business, not if I was paying for it myself. I don't think I know anyone who flies business routinely for personal stuff; it really tends to be very, very expensive for what you get.
If that trip is for anything less than 3 months, the price difference can be well worth it.
If you can afford one of those devices for around 3500$, isn't this almost a given?
I think that my personal PC and everything in my homelab is worth under a half of that.
It’s like the person who loses their senses of perception through tragedy and must imagine everything —except the imagining is being done for them.
So... exactly like the huge number of people who wear sleep masks or blackout sunglasses on planes already?
I’m imagining the day when my earbuds fall out at max volume and the flight attendant hears faint but loud moaning
and I casually confirm that I’m interested in hot tea
and they smile, I smile, the person seated next to me laughs in shock, and we go about our business