Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

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> AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.

I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers.

On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more).

I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones.

That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.”

Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.

AR and VR is a wasteland where money gets burned on ideas that have not advanced much since 1990s and the first Virtuality devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) in terms of being more useful than an Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a laptop for pretty much anything. A computer does not get better when you wear it.

Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head.

AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.

Nobody needs any new ideas for urban planning. Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried, so what's needed is ideas for how to make the planners go away.

I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.

Do you think urban planning made Amsterdam worse in the last 40 years? That it made Paris worse? Or Barcelona? All these cities have been greatly improved because they planned it (after some terrible decisions too, especially all the decisions related to making more cars enter the cities). All great cities have had several planning phases, over centuries

The good parts of Amsterdam and Paris come from undoing previous bad ideas, and Paris is still too expensive because of height limits, so I don't think it's an impressive showing yet.

Good Asian cities' planning efforts are mostly making illegal to let NIMBYs have input on anything.

The height limits are a good thing. Keeps the city human scale. That’s why it’s expensive. Well, at least that’s part of it.

You're not supposed to look up at the sky while you walk, so I think it's fine.

Why aren’t you supposed to look up at the sky?

You'll run into people.

That's a good way to make new friends

> Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried

Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.

No, it's even worse in other Anglo countries, and China, Brazil, etc. (not sure of the details of the last one, just remember something about planned cities not working)

The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.

Tokyo would like a word

And what the alternative would be? Grafton?[1]

Copenaghen or Amsterdam aren't perfect from the Urban planning PoV but after having spent a few months in an LA suburb vs a few years in those cities... Yeah, Thanks but no thanks, I think I'd rather have the imperfectly urban planned towns for the next few years. Matter of taste, I guess.

[1]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

LA suburbs are not an example of no planning!

At this point I feel we're arguing a no true scotsman fallacy.

Care to point a good example of "unplanned" urban environment with an excellent quality of life for _all_ of its occupants? Outside of, dunno, some exceptionally small villages in the Swiss alps or northern parts of Scandinavia (which are basically unchanged since the middle ages), I can't think of any.

Tokyo is the usual example. (Of course, it has a planned road network too.)

American suburbs are just about the most planned things in the world though. Try building an apartment there - you can't do it. They would never exist if it wasn't for artificial zoning laws. Gotta read Strong Towns.

I think none of those "innovative future of transportation" ideas will come to life in any meaningful scale. Transportation for the most part is a solved problem. Car dependency is the main issue and no "super innovative personal transportation device" solves this.

Meta likes to call quest 3 "mixed reality" since AR is generally defined as adding images to the existing light going into your eyes.

I just feel like the technical challenges of AR are much larger than people give it credit for - even just dealing with "how to project an image" before even trying to miniaturize it is really hard!

I can see the reasoning yeah, for now it seem to be treated similarly though. Maybe a v2 could help like it did with the iPhone, after all the first model also had a lot of trouble to find its place.

It always does. First gen Apple stuff is often really pushing the limits. Then v2 is way better. Phone, watch, iPad.

Plus they don’t appear to know what its real use case is yet.

But they don’t want to be a $3500 thing to play ports of Quest VR games from 4 years ago.

I do agree with them on that, that's for sure. The VR market is minuscule and even the "market leaders" get chump change compared to smartphones and laptops, the market penetration is very low and worse than that, is looking like a flat curve now.

I don't know what will work to commodities VR but the current platforms just ain't going to cut it.

In my mind the big problems are a killer app and nausea.

Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.

And enough people have nausea issues that it can’t be ignored. Higher frame rates will help. But a lot of software either ignores the issue or does half measures. The instant something screws up and gives you a huge lurch in your stomach the fun stops.

“Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.

> “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.

I hate hearing this.

I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick.

Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable.

My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.

> Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.

Sure they have, it’s the only medium capable of offering anything close to the presence of real life social interactions.

The worst social experiences in VR are worlds ahead of anything you can experience in any other medium short of meeting someone in the physical world, which would be my preference but for many people, is not always possible.

“meet your friends in reality instead problem solved, it’s better anyway”.

My friends live all over the world now, but thanks to VR, we’ve still been able to catch up and hang out in the same space and converse, watch movies, play games and even dance and exercise together plus many more activities in a manner that is simply incapable of ever being delivered through a monitor and keyboard.

I’m a gamer (though I hate to use that word) but it’s not where I see the value to this long term and it’s never really been where I see it, though it’s a value add to me of course.

Do they really push the limits tho? At that price ofc it has the specs it does; it better bloody well do.

Otherwise idt they've really done much beyond what Vive/Oculus have done for a while.

Been looking at https://www.bigscreenvr.com/ recently, a great contender and something I'd like to see more of.

Apple does have the benefit of the rest of their ecosystem and walled garden though, they can easily integrate with their own pre-existing apps/service/technology whereas competitors have to pick and choose 3rd parties and spend time building it themselves - meaning that they usually don't.

> iPhone vs early Windows CE phones.

These, at least, had legit keyboards.

Yet were nigh unusable.

How memory fades. People used smartphones for years, in large numbers, prior to the iPhone. Nokia, Blackberry were the market leaders. Also Palm and MS and probably others I've forgotten. Sony...

I wasn't talking about anything except Windows CE phones (I had a Palm-based Treo phone at one point, but it was not really a very good phone or palm pilot.) WinCE phones were barely usable for their primary task, and were almost completely unusable for anything else because of the limitations inherent in WinCE and Microsoft's insistence on trying to replicate the Windows UI on something that was fundamentally unsuited for it.

Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything.

I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007).

The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.

They were quite useful! Just not for rewarding impulse buying.

WinCE phones? No, they mostly weren't. When they weren't crashing, they were only really accessible with a stylus and often not well built. Microsoft didn't get mobile UI and stability correct until Windows Mobile, and by then it was too late for Microsoft to be a major factor.

I assumed by "CE phone" GP meant WM5 - how many non-WM && WWAN equipped devices were there? WM5 way okay for its days, and with the buttons and controls that don't change they were quite useful.

It should come as no surprise that there were many, which is one of the reasons where Windows Mobile failed. All the other manufacturers had been burned badly by Microsoft's inability to deliver anything reliable on mobile (and eventually saw themselves directly in competition because of the Nokia purchase) and Android starting being a cheaper, more focused option.

Fundamentally, Windows CE was flawed beyond repair, and it should have been obvious from the very first iPaq and sibling devices. I used my Palm devices every day. I rarely turned on my iPaq (available third party software was also a problem; there was lots for Palm and comparatively nothing for WinCE).

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