Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

This product, and every similar headset to follow will never appeal to a mass market for daily hours-long usage.

It's uncomfortable, isolating, constraining, expensive, anti-social and its use cases are at best temporarily impressive but quickly grow old.

The entire product category simply sucks. I'm sure the incidental 3D movie experience is great, but most people don't watch movies every single day for hours on end whilst sitting alone on the couch.

It's slow to operate, can't easily be shared with others and having gigantic screens surrounding you is a useless novelty without utility. Watch people with big monitor setups. They watch the middle one whilst the other 2 are stale and only get the occasional peek. This super-multitasking idea is a myth and not how people work.

Consider how when people own both an iPhone and an iPad, they almost always use the iPhone, even for use cases in which the iPad is superior. It's quicker, more flexible, hassle-free, always ready.

Another issue is that the type of content/experience that would truly shine on such a headset, is impossibly hard/expensive to make. So that leaves out 99% of app developers.

You place a lot of emphasis on the social aspect, but we aren't necessarily in the days where we show everyone what's on our phone screens. My phone is pretty much a solo experience unless someone wants to take a picture of me.

> Watch people with big monitor setups. They watch the middle one whilst the other 2 are stale and only get the occasional peek.

That makes it sound unviable, but you underestimate how great a passive monitor can be. Something to have some music or video run on, or to view output while one monitor has developmental tools on it. It saves a lot of friction from switching virtual desktops or alt-tabbing (which can ruin certain viewing applications).

That's honestly a big selling point for me, the ability to pack in a portable double/triple monitor setup for travel. Not $3500 selling point, but it does make me consider trying one of them out before the close of the decade

>Another issue is that the type of content/experience that would truly shine on such a headset, is impossibly hard/expensive to make.

Yeah I imagine so. Beat Saber is crazy fun and something not easily emulated on a controller, but making that truly killer app in this modern environment is hard. But I guess the App Store encouraged that for mobile, maybe they can capture lightning twice.

> big selling point for me, the ability to pack in a portable double/triple monitor setup

I also wish the Vision would do that, but it only allows one virtual display from your Mac, unless you’re satisfied with running iPhone and iPad apps as your “multiple monitors”.

> They watch the middle one whilst the other 2 are stale and only get the occasional peek. This super-multitasking idea is a myth and not how people work.

But.. that's the point. Of course 90% of the time you look right in front of you. Everything else would be tiring.

The advantage of a multi-monitor setup, or spatial computing with Vision Pro, is that for those 10% of times when you need to do something else, that other window is right there. No need to alt-tab through a bunch of apps to find your log file viewer. It's always there, just a glance away, and you can cross-reference multiple windows without them overlapping another.

> you can cross-reference multiple windows without them overlapping another

This is what people always say about this, but you can’t look at two different monitors simultaneously.

Your fingers are already on the keyboard. Once you get the two apps together on alt-tab order, they are one kepress away from each other, and you don’t have to move your eyes or head at all if they are overlapping or just next to each other in the same monitor.

I do this as well as using a tiling window manager than can be completely controlled from the keyboard, and I am much faster at getting information between different windows than colleagues who have multiple monitors. They spend a lot of time trying to remember where they put the other window, looking back and forth between many monitors many times, looking for their mouse pointer, and also, they too still have to alt-tab.

The farther apart two windows are, like on two monitors, the harder it is to copy text from one and paste it in the other, etc etc.

I can imagine a feature where multiple people using AVP in the same room are linked together so that some content is shared. Such as the TV or a Laptop or anything else.

Everything else seems to be more a question of price.

Maybe it will be useful in 20 years.

The comfort, cost, and battery issues seem like must-solves before this is a true mass-market success. But they sound like the kind of thing that can be improved over time. As for the anti-social aspect...you'd have done very well for the past 20 years betting on tech that furthers increasingly solo (in the real-world) behavior...it's a trend that might bottom out, but certainly hasn't yet.

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