Headsets Delayed into 2024
simulavr.com
simulavr.com
I've also seen a16z invest in far less (pitch decks and hand-wave demos). So my read on the feedback is they've made too much progress on one front (enough to show a16z that they're not a compelling seed investment) but not enough progress on the other front (enough to warrant a PMF A round). Doesn't seem like the most fun spot to be in, and I know how hard this part of the stretch is. Good luck!
> I've also seen a16z invest in far less (pitch decks and hand-wave demos). So my read on the feedback is they've made too much progress on one front (enough to show a16z that they're not a compelling seed investment) but not enough progress on the other front (enough to warrant a PMF A round). Doesn't seem like a fun spot to be in.
That's how I feel as well, given feedback from other VCs we've applied at. Amplify told us roughly "too big for a seed, too small for a series A" after five meetings or so.
Besides which, being able to pan your vision around virtual monitors will make the resolution go a lot further.
Also, I'm guessing it's much easier to put together a laptop from off-the-shelf components than to create a VR headset.
I worked like this for more than 12 hours yesterday, too.
I strongly considered their product and found it very tempting. Not a perfect fit for me, so I didn't go for it in the end, but you have to realize the world is not full of a bunch of clones of you.
The size of the premium headset market is a big question mark, but we know Apple's conservative order for 2024 is 300-400k units and they are planning an inconvenient sales process to slow demand.
Linux is around 1% of desktop market share so perhaps 1% of that 400k would want a premium Linux headset: 4k for Simula to serve. Then we'll find out if headsets grow as a market or they fade out like a fad or transition product category.
There's no way 280M laptops are being sold in US every year. Where did you get that data?
Whether their potential customer base is large enough for success is a question I have, too.
My fear is that they'll want to make the system as like commercial offerings as possible, which will actually make it less appealing for nerds like me.
[1] SimulaVR: Headsets Delayed (simulavr.com) 8 points by Philpax 1 day ago
The Vision Pro is based on their iOS (iPad/iPhone) ecosystem for their 2D apps, so you won't be able to use powerhouse office apps. It seems instead more geared towards the passive consumption of information, entertainment, and casual gaming, whereas we're trying to build something that can realistically replace a (Linux) laptop.
I'm not sure what Apple is thinking strategically, but they're structurally incentivized to cannibalize their iPad sales over their macbook sales (since their iPads are their weakest product in their lineup in terms of sales).
Creators can use the Vision Pro as their Mac's display, and/or run Office directly on Vision Pro.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-vision-pro-can-be-used-...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23749947/apple-vision-pro-...
this will be so annoyingly fiddly to set up, nobody is going to use it on a regular basis
why would somebody buy a "pro" device that only lets them VNC into their laptop?
Luckily LG and Meta and Samsung and Google are not playing around and will force Apple's hand with the AVP or overtake Apple entirely.
The SimulaVR can't even run Office natively, right? The hobbyists who purchase it will need to use LibreOffice or run Office until emulation, correct?
In contrast, Vision Pro users will be able to run Microsoft Office natively, with an interface optimized for the device.
Where we don't disagree: For you and other folks who need a literal desktop (nosetop?) PC, SimulaVR is clearly the answer.
In the WWDC demo video, setting it up went like this:
Look at your Mac, and its desktop pops up in a new AR window.
TUNE IN FOR OUR FULL REPORT TONIGHT AT 11
FWIW, it appears that Apple themselves don't see it as that. They are focusing on consumption for the initial release, but there are clear plans to bring "full" macos apps to Vision Pro.
They haven't released everything, but what you need to know is in the category they're placing AVP: computer. They refer to it as a computer, repeatedly. Not a mobile device. And, all of their computers run Xcode. I would be very surprised if we don't hear more about that by next year.
I was suspicious that they are stupid enough to think that this cannibalizing Macbook sales is a valid reason to gimp it like they do the iPad.
However, this tech (AR/VR) is much much bigger than traditional computing and is going to replace the aforementioned and more.
So I sincerely hope that I can do development, pull up a terminal, an so on within the device. That's going to be extremely important I think to use this as a remote working machine (which was my hope for years).
Commercial consumer VR has been available for the better part of a decade now and this doesn't seem even close to happening.
Price is too high, features too few, distinct advantages under compelling, and ergonomics too nomic ... until they aren't.
In other words, its a big change of form and function, not to mention the physics tradeoffs of these products, so it makes sense that the right combo is taking a while to fall into place.
If Apple customers, who have the shiny shells to shell out, fall in love with their devices, that will mean a lot.
You just described the iPhone I.
Price was high, but low enough for what it did that Apple couldn’t make enough.
Low enough that a tiny computer/MP3 player company remade what a phone was and left huge phone manufacturers spinning.
Record sales growth, customer satisfaction & retention year after year after year.
They quickly vacuumed up the majority of profits and revenue for the entire industry long before they had significant marketshare.
That day is why Apple is flirting with $3T.
Samsung was the only competitor I can think of that was nimble enough not to get promptly hammered.
An iconic example of good fit.
over 20 million quest 2s have been sold (ignoring all the other headsets...)
but I'm sure I'll be downvoted into oblivion for daring question apple
1. The passive vs active framing applies primarily to non-Pro iPads. I don't think it can be reasonably argued the $3k Vision Pro is attempting to cannibalize low end iPads. iPad Pros are very different beasts that are designed for a particular type of creative output, and are very capable general purpose computing devices now.
2. There's no particular incentive to cannibalize iPad over Mac, its hard to fathom what dimension that makes sense on. They're happy to cannibalize any product, but their main MO is 'look what cool shit we can do with the latest tech' and Vision Pro is today's version of that. Apple is demonstrably way more interested in building out iOS/iPadOS and we've seen that over the past 10 years, to the point Mac users had to basically revolt to get attention.
3. Of course Vision Pro is based on iPad ecosystem, as its a far more modern set of conventions better suited to mixed modal input than Mac. That isn't a reflection of VP's purpose, but of engineering and design realities - it's far easier to grow iPad/iOS into a top tier spatial computing OS and ecosystem.
While MacOS is wonderful, it's really a product of a particular conception of computing, and shoehorning a 40 year old desktop OS paradigm into entirely new input modalities and ergonomic contexts makes little sense. The puck isn't going anywhere new, the desktop OS modality is baked. Apps will need to adapt to the wondrous new capabilities and constraints of the platform.
Looking at your presentation [1] it's clear the ergonomics are going to be a sticking point, which is a combined hardware & app ecosystem problem: the novelty of windows everywhere bumps up against the human factors / ergonomic fatigue constraints of moving one's head around around more than a few degrees (and whatever you do, don't optimize for looking up!), and app windows with tiny UI elements are going to be similarly fatiguing and unable to adapt to the promise and limitations in accuracy of gaze tracking.
There's a reason WinCE's desktop OS paradigms failed in PDAs whereas iOS succeeded - you need to reinvent the experience when you move modalities. I would argue the exact same thing will happen in AR/VR: sticking with a desktop OS paradigm is a losing proposition.
Just my 2c. Personally I really want to see a variety of offerings and possibilities in the market but I also want them to be based on sound reasoning and approach, which I go into a bit in this essay on category-defining products [2].
I think you've nailed it here. I never thought of it in those terms before, but now that I see it, it's obvious.
It reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of Henry Ford saying that his customers didn't want cars - they wanted faster horses. I think there's something analogous here. If all you are offering is a Linux desktop in VR, you're making faster horses.
When I think about where a novel new VR mode is going to come from, it's either going to be Apple or a research team at a liberal arts college. Technologists can really only solve half the problem.
They are specifically designing a VR-based window manager here. And it's linux and a community of hackers, and open source. I think you'll see community imitations and tweaks and improvements on the apple formula as an option almost immediately.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Mobile_versio...
I see the vision pro 3-5 years from now being part of anyone's workflow that currently uses 3+ screens. And I don't see how this kickstarter competes. So just arguing "yeah but apple din't think of ..." is not encouraging.
Not disputing your claim per se, but Google had a project called Daydream back at least as early as 2017 (though seems earlier) and rolled that into Area 120 projects. They canned it at some point in 2021 I believe.
Whereas SimulaVR seems to have started working on this in 2018 per their YC app (but perhaps earlier?) https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/wiki/YCW19-Application
SimulaVR is creating a full computer built into a VR headset for production work.
Very close to the Vision Pro for 1/5 the price, acts more like a peripheral and works on the 3 major operating systems. It's (supposedly) also going to be side-loadable and maybe even more hackable, OpenXR compatible
It's by the folks who make the https://immersed.com/ app
MRTV interview from earlier today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ic_uqEGI18
I'm back to super pessimistic on this tech... I too want simula to ship but I keep also maxing out my laptop on ram and compute and cooling and battery...
I'm rooting for them but I can't help in a financially signifigant method
>the bandwidth is a killer
It sounds like a problem with your network.
>the compute required to re-encode the video is a killer
Your graphics card should be encoding the video.
The gpu on my laptop was also on fire and the machine was sluggish due to gpu issues, thermal issues, network issues.
It was also a less pleasant and less quality experience than real physical monitors. I also tried it with my index on the beast desktop I have that has those physical monitors turning the monitors off and putting in dummy plugs (same as laptop).
It sucked, my neck hurt, it was laggy, hard to position monitors which I had to do every time I set it up, and the resolution sucked compared to a physical monitor, and don't get me started on fots let alon comparing it to 43" 4k monitor.
I spent a decent amount of time in discord with immersed trying to get it to work. It's just not meant to be currently. And for the same price as a occulus, same weight, smaller footprint (the occulus is huge in a backpack, a tablet monitor is just and extra half inch of laptop), I get a much better experience. Also my neck doesn't hurt, I can see the world, and it's much higher res.
The original links, if you look, are about their new hardware, which is ultra-lightweight, and higher res, 4k per eye
I'm not trying to travel with external monitors, hence why I'm looking for a virtual solution, and this looks quite promising
I don't have anything against immersed. I chatted with them several times and gave feedback every time. They're nice folks. I'm not sure they're gonna ship. And after that experience I'm also pessimistic on vr for desktop for several years at minimum.
And travel monitors are just gonna get better. My m2pro is already light, the externals I can see getting half the weight, 4k and possibly wireless. That'd be more compute in a smaller space and lighter weight than that Dell desktop replacement I plugged around in 2003, and smaller but heavier than the simula. I haven't had a chance to try foveated text on 8k but my math says it's lower density than 4k at arms length on a 17 or 27 monitor so but let's call that a win.
So equivalent experience.
we know software and hardware are not static, so your anecdotal evidence is only admissible if associated with time
I don't know your computer specs ofc. Mine are pretty beefy (11th gen i9, a 4lb p1 gen 4). But it runs smoothly even when I switch to battery saver and turn off my gpu (with 1 4k screen as a result).
The founder has tried them all and commented that similar AR tech is probably still 5 years away (at the price point and form factor the Visor is pushing)
---
Intel event showing Visor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV2CnhuK04Q&t=3687s (a very short cameo(?))
My guess is that there will indeed be a lot of excitement in 2024 (at least in Apple land) and then it's going to drop off again in 2025. That's not necessarily a terrible thing though.
Meta has sold something like 25 million headsets. The market is already bigger than many people realize and maybe it's big enough. It doesn't need to 10x and if it did, there's more than a small chance that kind of growth would end up being bad thing. Maybe a16z not biting means enshittification has been delayed.
Apple's headset is really cool, but is being built over iOS for 2D apps, so isn't realistically going to replace someone's laptop as their primary computing device.[1]
It would have been a much easier pitch to those of us who already understand the caveats of this technology at present state, and we're already believers in the idea. Many VR people are using their current generation HMD's for productivity already despite the downsides.
It seems like it would have been a more obvious route to the type of people who are most likely to be your early adopters, and additionally avoids associating your operation with crypto which still carries a stigma.
I have a lot of respect for Vitalik, but I'd much rather hear the opinion of someone like Thrillseeker for a device like this.
Because the Metaverse mantra is more linked to crypto than the VR space.
Don't confuse builders for influencers.
But we actually do have a discussion ongoing with ThrillSeeker about a headset test/video, and we hope it gets made :]
I think you are likely too early to market, making it a hard sell for a mass market in the short term. If you can survive long enough I think you can do well, however.
There's problems with the software that need to be solved before we ship, but it's not with the UI side of things. That's not to say that the UI is perfect (it really isn't), but it's functional and more importantly: can be changed at any time, unlike hardware.
Four figure drop for an open source darling project? Maybe.. but it is too big of an ask for me to strap a bunch of dev boards and desktop components to my cranium.
More specifically: if we ship 125 units, we lose roughly ~$5K per headset. If we ship 250 units, we lose roughly ~$2K per headset. If we ship 1,250 units, we're operating at a slight profit with a couple of years of runway. If we ship 10,000 units, our margins approach 45% (at least on our pure hardware offering; we'd like to layer in some software offerings as well).
Unfortunately, the most costly part of the project is the very beginning. But we think these sales targets are doable if we're able to get our operation off the ground (with customers able to see shipped units being used to replace laptops in the wild).
1. reduced per-component costs (volume discounts)
2. less administrative/engineering overhead (ie the salaries/one-off costs get divided among more units)
3. more optimized assembly processes
Assembly labor expenses are directly proportional to how many units need to ship per timeframe. If an assembly worker can assemble 10 units a day, you're shipping 200 units/month. So you can ship 1000 units in 5 months or hire 5 people and ship 1000 units in 1 month.