Interesting that it actually calls out game developers right at the start despite everything else announced about the headset indicating that they couldn’t care less about gaming on VisionOS…
Very interesting times for Apple.
And I don’t think they’re losing sleep over Unreal. Plenty of games are done in Unity, and developers who want to ship on multiple platforms are leaning towards Unity in part of because of Epic’s alienation of Apple and other platform owners.
Definitely interesting times, but I don’t think either of those considerations will have an impact on Vision’s success (which is far from assured)
Which is why they are backed into a corner, they have to paint this picture while avoiding the largest 3d engine, ignore stiff competition with other (largely gaming which is important to note since your point about general purpose vs specific is kind of nullified when other VR headsets can handle non-gaming well too) headsets, and get developers on board to start making apps for the new platform before any sweeping changes to the app marketplace take hold.
It would have been nice to see Apple shift their weight behind O3DE instead, as Unity really has been struggling to capture an audience. Would have demonstrated a real commitment to creating 3D content. Those who ship on multiple platforms are really struggling to stick with Unity as it's made their lives harder the past ~5 years, when the same is easily achievable on Unreal or even Godot now.
https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/osx-ironcore-a-or-what-we-k...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/07/unity-and-ironsources-4-4b...
I agree but look at the iPhone - gaming on that is a massive market and Apple do well off it.
You can buy a different phone for a fraction of the price, but Apple are a market leader.
You'll really need to design from the ground up with its very specific input capabilities in mind. Porting titles over that were made for Quest, PSVR, or PC will be difficult.
With its eye tracking and much stronger hand tracking hardware I expect Apple's will work nearly perfectly, just a matter of how people support it in games.
Teleport movement is a big question for me, convention for that on controllers is to push the thumbstick forward, aim the targeting arc, and release. Will everyone be making up their own teleport movement gesture, and eventually the market will settle on an expected way to handle it?
Will games where you pretend to be holding something (mini golf for instance) feel weird with just hand tracking, and nothing to actually hold?
But they came with a controller that seemed to be designed with the goal of ensuring that it was as useless as possible for gaming (also as useless as possible for entering passwords!)
But Apple used to be pretty great for gaming. I remember playing tons of games like pong or snake clones, dark castle, shufflepuck cafe or airborne on our Mac SE when I was a child.
Like the Dinosaur coming out of your wall and then also talking about Unity.
We have to remember that when they talked about this it was around a year (or more if it isn't delayed) away from shipping and they talked about it at a developer conference. It was clear that they were focused on the technology it has and the mostly Apple developed experience of it.
I still don't fully understand where the idea that this could not be used for gaming came from, except maybe the lack of (VR) controllers but I can't imagine not being addressed by the Mifi program later down the line.
In the keynote they showed exactly one scene with a game: someone picks up a console controller and starts playing a basketball game... on a flat, virtual TV. That communicated pretty clearly to me that they didn't have any interest in VR gaming for this device.
EDIT: Not the keynote, but this video [0] at 3:22 pitches gaming in exactly the same way: you get a big screen!
Like I said, we are talking about a product that is at least a year away when they first showed it off and they did tease other 3D setups.
To me all that ever said was, hey you can pair a controller to this if you want. A natural extension of being able to watch a movie or whatever.
I feel like saying no games based on that presentation was very premature. Really saying almost anything about what this can and can't do except for exactly what we were shown is premature given the large chunk of time between announcement and release and needing to see what developers can actually do with it once all of the pieces are ready.
The way I read the keynote is that they intentionally left out any spectacular gaming content because they very much do not want people to treat the Vision Pro as a gaming device like the Oculus. It's intended to for a very different set of use cases, and they tried very hard to communicate that with the emphasis on passthrough and productivity.
So while that doesn't suggest that there will be no games, it does suggest to me that the hardware and software will lend themselves much more to the casual games that are already prevalent on Apple's devices, rather than appealing to the PC or console gaming audience.
MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game…
I can imagine lots of game genres that could work fine but they’ll only be economically viable if the market for VisionOS games itself is big enough to support such a business model or if Apple jump-starts things by investing heavily in individual titles. Their messaging to date hasn’t really suggested that they’re interested in playing that game though.
We’ll see, though.
A device like this already has so many conflicting constraints to deal with that I’m not really surprised that they didn’t prioritise the things that would benefit gaming.
Hand controllers may well come a few years down the line (if the product line survives that long), but it’s very much in line with their behaviour historically to initially avoid requiring additional input devices: anyone remember how long it took Apple to release a stylus for the iPad?
Also seems like their efforts to protect privacy by restricting direct gaze input access may make certain kinds of gaze-related input actions tricky to implement, but the Unity video shared earlier suggested that they may be giving developers more access to that stuff (at least via Unity-based apps) than they’d previously implied.
Hand gestures are cool and all but i have yet to use a gesture system that isn't more than a little 'lossy'...
Yeah, you're already talking about the most expensive headset, nevermind that added cost for controllers. With this price tag you're going to be talking about a tiny installed base.
If it's easy enough to port stuff... and the controller ecosystem develops... well, sure, I guess this thing could find its niche. From an ROI perspective though it can't possibly be the primary target for game developers, which means it gets ports... and with ports to niche platforms there's always the risk of low quality / jank, which would only hurt the brand.
> Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally.
> Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.” It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.
It's more likely that it simply doesn't have the processing or cooling capacity for an impressive game experience.
> This seems unlikely given how much effort they put into the physical demo experience at the unveiling event
Can you name five games Apple has released in the past 10 years?
How does such a list of games relate to my comment?
This has the advantage of dramatically increasing the comfort, since motion sickness is largely caused by artificial locomotion with the controller, but it also drastically limits what kinds of games you can do in VR.
I would expect them to expand on this area eventually, but I can understand why they wouldn't for the announcement, as for the time being they want the focus on VisionPro as a friendly computer/monitor/TV/cinema replacement.
However I’m not sure that putting 3T magnets near people isn’t an option.
But the even bigger issue is that even if you overcome that, you still have the fundamental problem that a correct vestibular response is extremely important to keep users from falling over. If you artificially give people the impression that they are accelerating or decelerating, they'll automatically compensate and lean into it and just fall over. This happens already often enough just from the visual stimulus alone, if you mess with the vestibular system those accidents would get a lot worse.
That said, maybe there is some middle ground that could work where you don't create a real virtual vestibular input, but just a little jolt to notify the brain that something is going in, even if that something isn't matching the visuals. Many people report having less issue with motion sickness when they walk in place or bob their head. PlaystationVR2 has a small rumble motor build into the headsets with is supposed to help a little bit here as well.
If they had made a part of the presentation (outside the 3 second mention of Apple Arcade) about playing games I could see a lot of people spending even more time comparing it to an Oculus or PSVR2 and complaining it was insanely priced.
Instead they did a pretty decent job of getting people discussing non-game use cases.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/apple-vs-epic-70percent-of-a...
Mainstream use cases like office workers (I don't think Apple depicted this) are less likely in my opinion. Typical office workers (not developers/engineers like on here) are given a bare bones budget PC to do their job, like total spend of $500. Even if form factors for VR/AR get to "comfortable for 8 hours" levels I still don't see the ROI on the hardware for commercial purposes like office workers - most VR/AR headsets require some other compute device as well.
The market here isn't typical office workers, it's execs and high-value workers like software devs. They won't even have the production at a scale large enough that it could be available to typical office workers en masse for years at a minimum.
Not having controllers will be pretty limiting for gaming - some types of games will be fine, others definitely won’t be.
For everything else games could use hand tracking with a similar control scheme to Kinect and Wii attempted.
However, most VR games that require a controller for VR interactivity with "real world objects" tend to fare less well as they create a cognitive dissonance between the actions the player is taking and their perceived results. Anecdotally, for the few VR demos I've tried I agree.
Yeah, it will be limiting for the preexisting games built for preexisting VR systems. It will also be perfect for the types of games people envision and build for this generation of device. Not recognizing that seems more like a lack of imagination on your part than a failure of design on Apple’s.
Still, sometimes you need buttons. While mobile gaming is obviously huge there are certain types of games that just don't work all that well on it. In the gaming space Apple will be directly competing against other VR headsets designed for gaming. Mobile games don't really directly compete with consoles or PCs.
Windows has a very strong grip on gaming and you have to convince consumers and developers that it's worth it.
The Steam Deck kinda got around that with Proton but it also means that if that becomes the norm for anything other than Windows, it is only fixing one of those problems while developers still continue to target and optimize for the main platform (Windows)
Part of the problem is dethroning Windows. The other part of the problem is not being so greedy that you make Microsoft look reasonable by comparison.
Apple had nothing to do with Vulkan.
A few developer tools that the suits probably have never heard of don't change that.