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Comment by oatmeal1 | Hacker News Reader

> Apple is so incredibly capable, stocked with talent, and loaded with resources that the company simply went out and engineered the hell out of the hardest problems it could think of in order to find a challenge. That’s good!

I think they knew before halfway through that it was not possible to build a practical product, but Apple thinks it's important to stay relevant and appear innovative, so they went along and built it anyway. Maybe that was the intention from the start.

I'm not sure why they created and marketed so many dystopian features though. The part of the demo where the dad played with his kids while wearing the Vision Pro and then watched the playback alone later was disturbing. Same with people talking using the EyeSight feature instead of taking of the goggles and making real eye contact.

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I was told Jony Ive personally quit over this project. He felt it was fundamentally wrong, and the first product Apple made post Jobs that directly contradicted the vision of the company.

And not in a Porsche shouldn't make an SUV sort of way -- rather on the way out he shared some pretty well articulated moral issues with the product and how Jobs would release buggy products, but rarely fundamentally flawed ones.

This IMO is Tim Cooks first totally original product. The Watch was an Ive product. It will mark whether or not he can find original needs in the market, or simply will fall into what Jobs accused every bad CEO of doing -- SKUs for SKUs sake.

Are you so sure? Have you seen this video where Steve Jobs describes Vision Pro-like capability as inevitable and positive? https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1acubbl/steve_jo...

Yea you saw one video where Steve Jobs said one thing one time. I’ve over the course of a lifelong relationship felt Otherwise.

>The part of the demo where the dad played with his kids while wearing the Vision Pro and then watched the playback alone later was disturbing.

I'm glad I'm not alone who feels the same. To me, that scene is so out of place, so dystopian that it's outright ridiculous that it's presented in a demo like this.

Every parent I've talked to has found that pretty appealing.

We're already looking at pictures and videos of our kids on the phone a lot of the time anyway. Which required us to be holding our phones in hand while playing with our kids.

It only seems weird because it's unfamiliar. But it's not more dystopian than trying to capture special moments with a camcorder.

> We're already looking at pictures and videos of our kids on the phone a lot of the time anyway. Which required us to be holding our phones in hand while playing with our kids.

A phone in the hand is objectively far less intrusive than a full on mask on your eyes that prevents half of your face being seen by your kids.

As said by another commenter above [1], the iPhone 15 Pro can shoot spatial videos that can be viewed on Vision Pro. When the Vision Pro was announced, Apple was its typical self by not revealing anything about another future product (plus, the iPhone is its flagship, and Apple likes to keep the excitement coming from its actual announcement). Shooting spatial videos will be a standard feature on all iPhones in a couple of years. It will stay if the Vision product range continues to do well enough while Apple iterates and figures out the product positioning (Apple is generally good at these things). If it doesn’t work out well enough for Apple’s satisfaction, this will go the way of 3D Touch on some older iPhones. Nevertheless, the technology in it will continue to push its other products — existing and forthcoming, and vice versa.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39195946

Thanks for sharing this perspective. I'm sure I also do a lot of things that can be construed as pretty sad, when looking from the outside, but in reality, I'm having tons of memorable fun.

What I was reminded by by this trailer is this image actually [0]. And then I had the thought immediately how technology doesn't actually "get us ahead" in a way, but rather, sets a new baseline. I have a car, so I can get faster to work, but since everyone has cars, I'm expected to drive to begin with, and work is further away, so commute still takes a lot of time. With VR, I can see that people don't meet, for example, since they can "see each other" in VR anyways, so why bother. I'd not like to say that this is the only valid way to think, but this was about my thought process, when they flashed that scene in the video. It felt lonely, isolated, only a shell of the good times past. And indeed, it's not very different than doing the same with a camcorder. So if the camcorder can provide access to that special memory, I'm sure this new tech also can.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/eranfowler/art/Reality-78861805

Everyone I have heard talk about that initial demo mentioned it was weird and creepy.

But I do not think it was ever the plan that you would create spatial videos primarily from the headset. You can also take them with the latest gen of iPhones, but the VisionPro demo predated the iPhone announcement.

To me it just channeled the 80's/90's dad with his face planted inside a huge camcorder/8mm camera at his kids birthday. Doesn't seem to be anything new under the sun. https://i.redd.it/5o0fv89d69dz.jpg

Yeah it's interesting how the Quest seems like a less-creepy product by just owning the fact that users will be isolated.

> I'm not sure why they created and marketed so many dystopian features though.

Well they're not stupid and know/research their target customer. Apparently this is what people want?

I am confused why they didn't go with something like google glass.

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