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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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

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

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