Vision Pro will change photography | Hacker News Reader

Vision Pro will change photography

om.co

59 pointsSLHamlet93 comments

Sure. Let's look back at history. Things that changed photography were the Kodak Brownie, 35 mm photography, the digital revolution and camera phones. So basically affordable image taking devices. If the device used to view the content is priced like the Vision Pro is, looks like scuba equipment and weights more than a pound, I quite doubt it would have much of an impact.

Exactly. This will be fun for the 5 kids from rich families for 10 minutes and that's it. Far from a "revolution".

The product you've seen today is just the first generation. Not even the Model-T of its day.

You have to think forward a bit to see what the product can become.

And in that context, by making immersive 3D video a realistic possibility for customers, I can see this as a true paradigm shift in the same way that Smartphones were -- as kicked off by the first iPhone.

For those 3 people using it.

I'm one of those HTC Vive owners that cannot tolerate prolonged usage (>5 minutes). If your product line enters market, where one of recommendations is "try little at first, increase a minute each day" for even using it, it won't have a broad appeal

There’s a huge difference between virtual Reality like the vive and augmented reality like the vision pro

Yeah, but the hot brick in front of my eyes looks similar.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enthusiastic about that tech, but let's not get the overhype kill it. If they integrate some variant of a well performing 3d reconstruction (such as guassian splatting), it has a potential to impress.

Still, In "professional photography" it won't make any dent.

Vision pro is a VR device pretending to be augmented reality.

People are willing to work for things that are worth it. Most people take time to learn new skills. The important piece is that it needs to be worth the effort.

I switched to a split keyboard with a different layout because I was suffering from an RSI. It was worth me to take the time to relearn something I had done for decades to be able to continue typing. Most people don’t need to and get no benefit, so they don’t.

Apple just needs to make a product that provides enough value that people are willing to deal with the initial hump of discomfort.

"are worth it"

ok now please prove these gimmicks are worth the $3500 price tag

Unfortunately there is a market for being an opinionated early adopter online. "This will change everything" type commentary is sadly an effective clickbait tactic.

Well, I can’t, because it’s not released yet and I don’t have one. Which is why I said

> Apple just needs to make a product that provides enough value that people are willing to deal with the initial hump of discomfort.

And not that they have already made one.

But what would such feature be? I'm thinking the personal equivalent of a fully immersive screen could do it. But if it's fundamentally limited, like more of an Apple TV device, then maybe not.

People drop that on computers and monitors that don’t even have gimmicks.

Not many people have that issue though.

I can wear my quest many hours per day and I didn't have to build it up. I did have to use teleport movement at first but that didn't feel like an impediment.

Care to elaborate on what are you using it for? Mine is collecting dust, but the recent cyberpunk vr mod looked fun enough for me to undust it.

Is there any value in the productivity "sector", or it's still mostly entertainment?

The productivity is coming along now finally. Microsoft now has MS Teams support in their VR solution "Microsoft Mesh". They are also working on productivity support in VR so you can use Office apps inside mesh. A bit similar to what Apple is doing with their vision pro, where you can use your mac virtually. Until now there were some third party products like Spatial and Arthur that did the same. But they were costly and it was hard to justify it. Now if you are a MS shop you get all this basically for free (with Teams Premium that is) which makes it much easier to roll out.

Personally I see a big benefit for the more networky event that are simply not well done over MS Teams videocalls because that is too centralised. For people that can't or won't travel due to monetary, environmental or familial concerns I think it is a great option. It's not as great as meeting face to face but it's way better than online meetings. This is why I promote it within the company I work (and I volunteered to take on the task)

The cyberpunk mod is not great actually. In fact most third party mods aren't. It's very quirky especially because it doesn't render both viewpoints for every frame, it uses "alternate eye rendering", so each frame it alternately renders the left or right eye. The other frame is interpolated. This gives some ghosting effects. There's also many control issues as the game is not made for VR controllers. The city is beautiful but not nearly as beautiful as on a screen, everything looks really crumbly in VR. And yes I have the latest mod (the studio breaks the VR mod with every update so you have to). I have a 4090 so performance is not the issue.

There's some third party mods that are great, like the Half-Life 2 games. They have full motion controller support. Also some made for VR games like HL:Alyx are amazing of course.

"not many people"

My own experience is that half of the people I know can't do more than 20 minutes in one session. The longest I could do is 1 hour and that's it. Unless you have real numbers to back up that claim, it is meaningless.

It's from my experience promoting VR solutions inside our company. There's a handful of people that have serious issues but 95% are totally fine.

Do you have numbers to back up your claim? Seems like you're just citing a tiny amount of anecdotal data. You're also talking about an inferior (heavier, worse screens) device and assuming that the same experience will be true on the Vision Pro.

You see, I am taking about the people I know, while the previous guy seems to be taking about it in the general sense.

LOL about that "inferior" point. I don't know how much hype you bought into but the comfort thing isn't going to be significantly different on Vision Pro. It is only weighs a bit less and the screen is not going to do magic. I wouldn't make any assumptions until the unit is widely available and reviews come out.

Well I have used VR with hundreds of people at events. There are some people that have an adverse reaction pretty much instantly.

The rest might have some discomfort (though our experience is tailored to that with teleportation instead of smooth movement etc) and they are fine. If they use it regularly it will go away.

I've only seen 2 people that really were not ok with it. It happens yes but it's not a huge amount of people.

Also, don't forget, the phenomenon is only when the movement in VR doesn't correspond with the physical space, usually because the virtual world is much bigger. But for many things like productivity scenarios, moving around long distances is not really a major need.

Interestingly, you'll get similar instructions with any Norelco electric shaver. They're not wrong, and they don't seem to interfere with market adoption.

It certainly hasn't affected the wider elective medicine market. Bad acne? Try this and see if it makes things worse or better? Cant study? Try this and see if it makes things better or worse.

The point being that if the value is there the people will come.

I think the true revolutionary change will be when we get easy to capture radiance fields or Gaussian splats. Being able to explore the “photo” with 6DOF will be a significant upgrade from normal 2d work. Stereoscopic 3d is interesting, but feels a little off putting when moving your head doesn’t move your location in the scene.

Lytro could have changed photography, but they went with an optics system that was about 6" too small in diameter. It needed to be something big and clunky, but capable of doing amazing things with the captured light fields. There wasn't enough change of perspective across the lens to be useful at the form factor they chose.

You might be interested in it's bigger sibling, the 40k 11ft cinema camera

https://www.lightfieldlab.com/blogposts/the-promise-of-light...

I can't find a specific link to one I've seen but there's some great videos about this truly insane bit of tech.

I've made images with a virtual light field bigger than that.. focus is incredibly short, which is awesome.

These 2 images were derived from the same set of photos taken about 2 blocks away from the subjects in Chicago

  https://flic.kr/p/2n1uYqj
  https://flic.kr/p/2n1AhXa

In this case the virtual aperture was about 20 feet. For most subjects 1 foot is more appropriate.

It's a time intensive process, but cost nothing otherwise.

Based on my quick reading of TFA, an iPhone 15 Pro uses two sensors very close together for 3D, and the wide angle lens lowers the res to 1080p.

I wonder if as a kludge, we will see a 3rd party app and dual iPhone holder which then creates a single 3D video/image, allowing more human-like pupillary distance at 8k from the two main sensors.

I totally agree with your assessment, Nerf and Gaussian are much more interesting and I'm sure they will be huge in the future. But I don't think it will ever be easy to capture a clean scene randomly, at least not with anything that moves like people in the scene.

The issue is that in order for the Nerf/3DGS to be clean, that is to not have too many zones where the data is not sufficient to train the model for that particular spot, you need to have pictures from every angles to train the scene.

For a totally static scene, it will work: walk around the scene until you have all the angles, and you are done. The capture won't even need to be perfect because diffusion models will be able to fill in the gap for what you missed.

However, if you are talking about recording a memory, presumably with several moving people and objects, it's going to be a challenge as you can't freeze time (or I can't at least).

For planned production, it won't be an issue, the trick will be to setup enough cameras around the scene to shoot from all the angles, but I don't think we can expect to ever have a single magical device that you can walk around with and record Nerfs on the fly.

Instead of photographing from every angle you could capture with an array of cameras placed on the outside of a ~1m spheroid, similar to how Google captured their lightfield demos. Generating guassian splats with that data would allow for high quality, perspective correct imagery from any virtual camera placed within that sphere, sort of like a 360 degree photo (and eventually video) that looks totally convincing.

Move your head outside the sphere and the effect would break, but I feel 1x1m would be enough to allow for enough freedom of movement to be comfortable. Capture could perhaps be somewhat portable with some clever engineering, think those expanding sphere ball toys.

I'm interested in what Apple have cooking, but stereo + depthmap doesn't seem like enough information to accurately construct a perspective correct scene outside of a fairly narrow frustum. Maybe they use generative AI to fill the gaps? But what has come out about the format doesn't seem to indicate that, it's still fundamentally a stereo pair just with additional depth data from the depth sensor.

I still see gaussian splats as the technique that will finally deliver on practical true spatial photography.

> there is a whole new appreciation of being there

And yet, the always unsuccessful attempt of the photograph: "To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself" (Barthes, Camera Lucida).

Barthes (and Sontag) were not photographers. Almost any photographer, or collector of photographs, would disagree with that goal.

It's a shame Google killed Cardboard Camera. You could capture awesome stereo 3D panoramas using only your regular phone camera, back in 2015! It captured a little audio clip too, which is a nice touch. Viewing stereo content in VR that you took yourself is definitely qualitatively different from looking at a gallery of your photos on a screen.

Cardboard Camera can still be sideloaded from APKMirror. I don't know how to view the captures in VR these days, but I'm sure there's still some method.

Quest can do that stuff in it's browser.

But I was never impressed with "VR" video and photography, it comes with most of the problems of Stereo 3D like fixed IPD and fixed perspective but adds more like stereo breaking whenever the viewer tilts their head.

Yeah I never saw much point in stereo content created by others due to the limitations you mention, and I wouldn't spend money on dedicated stereo capture devices. But Cardboard Camera costs $0, and it's a cool feeling to stand inside one of your own captures of a place you haven't been in a long time, or a place that doesn't exist anymore.

Someday soon we'll be capturing and viewing gaussian splat scenes and videos and that will be the point where 3D captured content really becomes compelling for VR (outside the adult niche).

I've never been too impressed by it either. On the other hand, a friend of mine got one of these live transmitting 360 degree camera devices that streams to your phone and lets you move your phone around to pan on the live feed... took it to Vegas with us and handed it up to dancers on stage in a club who handed it around while they were dancing above a crowd, and the results were ridiculously good. He's looking forward to spending his later years reliving highlights of his life in VR via these videos. Would be nice if they were stereo, I guess, but the 360 aspect is much more important.

I've never heard of those, what model was he using?

It's called an Insta360. Lots of fun. Using it... you stop thinking of it as a directional camera, and start thinking of it as a point in space. While it's streaming to your phone, you stand there and hold your phone in front of you and whichever way you turn the phone's inertial direction tracking syncs your screen to that part of the panorama. If that makes sense. As if you were just taking a photo of what's around you, except you're looking at what's around the 360 camera. And then while it's live, or later when you play it back, you can use your phone's tracking and zooming to shoot "normal" flat 2D videos inside of whatever it captured, sort of like you're there and you can shoot the scene all over again. The editing capability to me was kind of the killer feature... you don't need to worry about framing subjects. Six of us put it in the middle of the table during dinner, and later on cut a video that pans or jumps to whoever was talking.

It's also really low-key, because people don't know what it is, and it doesn't look like you're pointing a camera at them. Even though it's capturing everything around it. We were able to go all over a casino with it and no one on staff noticed.

This functionality is still there, it was integrated into the standard Google Camera on Pixel devices, as "Panorama". Also the pixel photo gallery has a view mode usable with cardboard style contraptions.

It doesn't make a stereo image pair though, does it? Wow, I do see that it has an option to capture audio, I had no idea that was there. Default off though.

It does. As I said, the gallery offers a cardboard style stereo view. The 2nd image is hidden in the jpeg file, just like the mp4 audio, and can be extracted using exiftool.

You sure? I just checked a panorama I took last month and the file does not contain the second image as far as I can tell using exiftool. I see the Cardboard viewing feature in the Photos app, however that doesn't mean the image is necessarily stereo. It looks to me like it's just displaying the same image for both eyes, rendered on the inside of a sphere at some default viewing distance.

It would surprise me if Google left the stereo feature enabled when it would double file sizes for something 99% of people would never use. But it would be nice if an option to enable it was exposed.

Shameless plug (my apologies it's my second this week ) - but we recently released our $80 headset. It's a plastic headset, with two bluetooth controllers, that you put your phone into 'Google Cardboard style'. We've released a Spatial TV app that lets you view spatial videos straight away. https://www.zappar.com/zapbox/

He keeps saying that the Vision Pro is 8k, but its actually 4kx4k per eye.

For more context 8k is

    4k 4k
    4k 4k

Yeah and because both displays project a lot of the same content it's effectively not much more than 4K.

Still a jump higher than other headsets though.

Maybe? I'd love to see the use case of this thing but all I can think of is CAD software visualization for professionals who can afford a tool. To change photography it needs a large number of people wanting to take or view photos with it.

> wanting to take

I suspect their angle here will be to bake it in as a default, maybe with the iPhone 16, where at some point all iPhone photos will capture a 3D version by default and flatten them if exported to other formats (while keeping the 3D format if exported to something that can support them, like Facebook posts). That will make a large ecosystem of 3D photos pop into existence almost immediately.

There's a lot of fluff here, but the comments I've seen on the subject from people who actually know what the heck they're talking about (for example, preexisting MR/VR enthusiasts) suggest that the "special" format here is just basic stereoscopic photography of the kind that already exists in about a million YouTube videos that anybody with a Quest 3 can already record and view, rather than anything new like actually encoding real depth info along with the image capture.

Mistaking the sophistication of the technology for it's relevance to people's lives is a classic HN error. Sure, dropbox is just a bash script that rsyncs files or whatever, but the presentation and interface surrounding that bash script can still be absolutely revolutionary in terms of how regular people interact with it.

I don't have the experience to agree or disagree with the article's claims about the feelings evoked by Vision Pro's presentation of spatial video being a leap forward from what we are used to - but I feel pretty confident in saying that whether or not that is true doesn't depend on how novel the underlying image data is.

It's not the sophistocation vs. relevance part that bothers me... it's that the people writing these puff pieces clearly have no idea what already exists in the field of 3D media or any of the uses that people have already made of it.

Or to put it another way, imagine articles about the original iPod written by people who obviously didn't even know that other MP3 players existed.

And yet the other ones never had the same impact because the execution wasn’t as good. The Diamond Rio has no brand value today and no current iteration.

If you haven’t experienced what the phone can now capture and what playback on the Vision Pro is actually like, then I’d suggest reserving judgement.

I don't think this kind of issue applies to media in the same way that it applies to apps and devices.

You can take existing niche technology and make it mega successful by improving UX, price, discoverability, and applying marketing.

But I don't think you can fundamentally change how impactul media is in the same way. If a stereoscopic fixed perspective picture or movie is just not that impressive (beyond the technical marvels) when demoed in some back room on some wonky device, I don't think it can be made impressive by some marketing genius.

And I general, 3D movies of exceptionally high quality already exist in cinemas, and... They're just not that much more impressive than 2D movies. We have quite an amazing capacity to create a 3D scene in our minds from a 2D image.

Being able to easily and quickly capture photo and video+audio from your phone and share that to anyone in your friend group is magical, and has built the social media empires. But adding a third dimension to them, one that can only be viewed on special, unpleasant to wear hardware, is very unlikely to be a leap forward.

My prediction is that we are already at the peak of what people want in terms of capturing and sharing their experiences for a long time (the next level will be to add smells, but that likely requires direct brain/computer interfaces which are a looooong way off).

Of course, IF VR/AR glasses get extremely popular for other reasons (I don't expect them to, but I am far less confident here) and IF capturing this type of image is as easy as photo and 3D, these pictures will end up dominating, since there is no reason to take lower fidelity photos than the best you can get. But I don't think this type of photo can be the reason the device becomes popular.

> My prediction is that we are already at the peak of what people want in terms of capturing and sharing their experiences for a long time (the next level will be to add smells, but that likely requires direct brain/computer interfaces which are a looooong way off).

We are very far from the peak, as long as we still have to be concerned with device, network, format, latency.

Imagine one day you can just put on a pair of glasses, not thicker than your standard reading glasses, and say "Capture what I'm seeing with all details, in the most realistic way, and share it with my wife". Nothing further. Then we'd be close to the peak. And may still not be there.

Glasses are a worse form factor than today's phones. People don't want to wear things on their faces (that's why many choose contact lenses instead even today). Not to mention, (worn) glasses fundamentally can't take selfies, probably the single biggest revolution in photography that phones brought. They also can't take photos from most angles you'd like to chose, not unless you take them off (so you don't see what photo you're taking) or contort your whole body to bring your eyes in the right angle. Glasses are a really really bad form factor for taking photos or video.

Having to speak to take a picture is also worse than a button.

People love to take specific staged pictures from specific angles even though video exists today. Capturing "everything" is not as good as capturing a specific thing from a specific angle. And I'm not talking about high art - I'm talking about what you'll see everywhere on social media, in family chats, etc. There are moments that you'd like to capture in their entirety, so it is true that at the peak you may want that as well, but the vast majority of photography and video is not about that.

I'd also add that network and format are infrastructure problems, completely unrelated to the way photos are taken. Network availability may one day be so ubiquititous that you won't notice, formats are mostly already a solved problem (outside Apple inventing new ones occasionally). Latency though is a fundamental physical problem that will always be there. Already today audio/video call latency is mostly limited by the speed of light, not by network constraints.

Using a phone as a camera actually kind of sucks and the problems you bring up could largely be solved with something like a GoPro on a stick.

Sure, but that's an extra device (and a stick) to carry around. The killer feature of phones is that a single device handles both your compute and your camera needs. Even if glasses + voice control handled your compute needs, you'd still need a second device to act as a camera.

There are reasons why compact cameras died immediately as smartphones came along.

Not really an extra device to carry given that the AR glasses are wearables. The camera device itself probably wouldn't need to be much bigger than the camera block in a typical phone either, iPod Nano sized. In terms of net baggage or inconvenience, it would be less.

As far as I’m aware these do encode depth information and are not just stereoscopic movies. You will get parallax by moving your head.

For sure it'll be interesting to see how photographers use these new tools. I can't help but see this as the same "this will change everything" hype we saw with 3d movies a while back.

There are definitely techniligies that afford new experssive avenues, and there are definitely ones that end up as interesting experiments and not much more. I have no idea how to tell them apart.

Yeah if I had a cent for every 'revolutionary' thing some random guy on internet writes about (who is definitely not impartial due to extremely limited and guarded early access to it, I mean come on, we're adults here who understand cash flows, incentives and modern advertising).

These kind of articles should be ignored for actual facts till after release when people with no skin in the game actually review it. Or shell out 3500 dollars and be a beta tester.

No, it wont! Cheap and massively-accessible inventions changed industries!

On Quest 3 it’s interesting that it has good passthrough, but no way to record 3D passthrough videos and share them.

Meta could basically do an early version of Strange Days right now, but they have chosen not to.

It would be a terrible experience for most users. It would not be like a 360 video where you can direct your gaze in the direction you want. It would be a stereoscopic 110 degrees videos where the viewpoint keeps changing to follow the original head movement of the person that recorded it.

It would surely be a nauseating experience.

No it will not...

at least not in a grand way...

It will be used by a few for very niche.

I bet AI generated video in a few years will be more important then this...

Pretty sure this thread will be the slashdot equivalent of iPod launch.

I have yet to play a single game on it or do any kind of work on it

I have already stated on multiple occasions that Vision Pro is going to be a device that redefines our relationship with visual media and content

I despise people like this. They want to look like a visionary but when they turn out to be completely full of shit they face no reputational consequences.

Om is one of the Valley's most respected journalists, and specifically pertinent to this post, is also a great photographer:

https://www.photosbyom.com/Collections/Recent-Works/

Being a photographer makes him an expert on the cultural impact of $3500 VR headsets he's barely touched?

It’s not a comprehensive review but an exciting feature he’s experienced that, based on his experience as a photographer, he thinks will be a huge deal.

Even if I don't necessarily agree with this piece, I really like his photography. Michael Kenna and to a lesser extent New Topographics influences. It shows he put a lot of work he put into it. Lovely. Thanks for sharing.

"is" might not be the case so much any more. He left journalism over a decade ago and has been in VC since. He's also one of a certain subset of writers who find it exceptionally difficult to write anything even mildly negative about Apple.

He also wrote gushingly that the Vision Pro will revolutionize movies and we'll consume Hollywood content by sitting on the couch together, all watching our own Vision Pros. Hmm.

If this is as good as it gets, nobody will buy it.

Vision Pro will do nothing of the sort. It just has features that serve to lock you in their platform.

I don’t think anyone minds the walled garden anymore. Infact people appreciate the mindless safety and security.

How so?

Same problem with iCloud Photo Library- fantastic app/platform, but incredibly difficult to leave. Things like facial recognition (it's very good), search (by person, year, or subject!) and live video are not easily duplicated in a cohesive package anywhere else. They lock you in with a few subtle features and make you feel like you need to keep it - and they target you where it's personal. Your photos.

Did iCloud Photo Library change photography? I would say not.

Most people take personal pictures with their phone. When you take pictures of your child with spatial video and get that little extra detail, then upsell a product like Vision Pro - you're most likely going to want to get one. You're also not likely to leave the walled garden if you have thousands of photos bundled up in there.

Have you tried to export your photo library from iCloud Photo Library and take it elsewhere? A veritable nightmare. I have tried multiple times and failed. I have over 200GB of photos + videos (almost entirely personal photos with things around me and my family and friends).

- Albums are given to you only in a csv format, not folders or anything useful of the sort.

- Images are dumped all in one folder, not separated by something useful- like YYYY-MM-DD.

- Live videos are dumped as .MP4 and indistinguishable from your normal videos.

- The useful metadata from each photo is not saved 1:1. Comments, any adjustments and edits, etc. Edits just get dumped as another photo. Apple saves a set of metadata on top of the ones that are included with the image EXIF data and there are no EXIF data included with videos. Those stay in iCloud.

I get it: you can't expect Apple to make it easy- but if their product is so good, then they wouldn't make it this hard.

All of those features are present in both Plex and Google photos fwiw

With Plex, you need to be your own sysadmin. With Google Photos, well, I wouldn't touch Google.

There is photography as documentation and photography as art.

Photography as art will never be truly changed by new technologies. Shooting film and developing it yourself is by far the most romantic way to practice the art of photography. It is timeless.

Photography as art is absolutely changed by new technologies.

Firstly, you mention film but film itself is technology that greatly advanced throughout its life and enabled incredibly different forms of art.

Secondly, technology like digital sensors have allowed for millions of people to make expressions of art that would not have been possible otherwise.

Shooting film and developing it is romantic to some. But there’s nothing absolute about it.

> Secondly, technology like digital sensors have allowed for millions of people to make expressions of art that would not have been possible otherwise

"Butt, this is art. " Mike Judge

Do you think it is perhaps somewhat elitist to suggest that photography that does not involve developing on film is somehow less artistic?

They say “most romantic” not “most artistic”, in fairness

I guess this is subjective.

Some people love interactive art installation. I just meh with it.

You may mean to say that older forms of photography in art will never be obsoleted by new technologies - I mostly agree with this.

But photography as art has absolutely changed with the times in that there are artists who produce new art with every type of camera available.

> Photography as art will never be truly changed by new technologies. Shooting film and developing it yourself is by far the most romantic way to practice the art of photography. It is timeless.

This is a very weird assertion given how photography changed just in the film era moving from slow monochrome to faster to slow color and fast B/W, etc. People played with motion blur, lens flare and other distortion effects, color cast and film grain, various darkroom effects, etc.

The only constant I remember were people saying that something new wasn’t capable of art, only to be disproven by artists who learned what it was good for. I’m still skeptical that the Vision Pro will be compelling at the price but I’m absolutely certain someone will make something mindblowing with the technology.

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