The Apple Vision Pro's Missing Apps

I tried a free trial of Xtadium on Meta Quest 3.

I got on a sports photography kick lately which has had me going to every kind of college sports event. I became a big fan of sitting in the front row at college basketball games so I was looking for the same experience in VR.

I found that neither the multi-screen nor panoramic modes really worked for me at home over (roughly) 20Mb/sec ADSL. Also the space seems really strange: often stereopano camera have a lot of eyes like

https://us.kandaovr.com/products/obsidian-pro

and synthesize a view which isn't quite right for objects too close to the camera. I gotta go to the office in the evening one of these days to see what the app can do over a good connection before I cancel the trial. Although the AVP has a better display it's going to have the same issues w/ the network and the camera that I'm experiencing.

Apps will follow if the userbase is there. Apple has apparently pre-sold 180k of these so far. I would bet the vast majority of the ones that bought are developers.

The whole tech industry has shifted to focus on profits and optimization. Building apps for a brand new, unproven ecosystem, when you're doing layoffs every 2 months, does not seem like that great of an idea. And if Apple wanted more apps, they could always incentivize developers with $$$.

Not sure if it's that I'm an old timer who's been thinking about MR platforms for decades or not (has it been 17 years since Rainbow's End won the Hugo?), but the idea of wanting screen-based apps in your view isn't super important to me. Have netflix on your physical TV with other things in the overlay. Or pipe it through your phone.

It's a totally new medium. Think Differently.

Apple has already said iPad iOS apps will run on VP, so what's the deal with Netflix? Just because the app isn't "tuned for VP" or whatever, it should still load and run.