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Comment by schmichael | Hacker News Reader

I’ve only toyed with friends’ VR devices a bit. The productivity applications of the AVP are obviously not aimed at a single full screen terminal user like me. I stare out my office window often as I consider code. Clearly I’m not the target market for the AVP’s ability to run Keynote or whatever.

However truly native VR applications do excite me a lot, and I think that’s what the author is getting at too. When you take advantage of VR’s immersive capabilities in unique ways it gets a lot more exciting than just a virtual floating monitor.

The resolution comment and bugs do make me realize just how early this tech still is. VR seems as hard as the moon landing and we’re on like Apollo 10… maybe?

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> I stare out my office window often as I consider code

One of the attractive features of AR/VR for me is to be able to see sth different than the gray sky out of the window in a big part of the year where I live

I could see how the preset nice and calm scenes become even more dull than the gray sky.

At least here there is real weather, kids annoyingly playing the flute, dogs barking or doves procreating. That’s gotta be more exciting than seeing the same Moon rocks and Northern lights.

You’re focusing too much on the defaults. There’s nothing stopping a third party from capturing or building a bunch more scenes and selling them as an app. Probably as a subscription. I’d be surprised if there’s not someone right now trying to make or repurpose a procedurally generated forest.

And in principle, it would be possible to have a weather and environment broadcasted through cameras in any place in the world. And there are already VR games that get it quite right.

Yeah I’m curious about this possibility! What makes me skeptical is the temptation for distraction is so high in VR. I actually want the scene I stare at to be a bit boring because I’m not actually staring at it: I’m letting my eyes rest and effectively stop using brain resources while I think… does VR ever really let you “look away”? Maybe! I’m curious but it’s definitely not as simple of a problem as giving me a nice beach to look out on… I’d want to jump in and go snorkeling!

Outside my office window is one of the major roads through the city. Nearly every day I see a very old blue van drive West, carrying what looks like industrial kitchen modules built into a trailer. Several hours later, I see it driving East with no such modules.

This van consumes me. Who is driving it? Where is it going every day? What are those things its carrying and why does it never carry them back? I daydream of setting up an overly complex surveillance operation to track the van and follow its mysterious load.

Then my subconscious figures out what was wrong with my code and I get back to work

> The productivity applications of the AVP are obviously not aimed at a single full screen terminal user like me.

From initial playing around with mine, I would say the strength of the device (which the OS doesn't completely lean into yet, but I would bet improvements are in the works for visionOS 2) is the "spatial" part, and I suspect that's the whole reason for its emphasis in the marketing.

That is to say, imagine your terminal as a floating window, but you've also got other windows arranged around your home and office, not just clustered at a desk. Reminders floating near your fridge or break room, weather forecasts near the coatrack, calendar with upcoming events on a wall, Kindle or Books.app floating next to your couch...

Obviously it's a really, really expensive device (and a somewhat uncomfortable one) just to do that kind of thing with, but if you cross your eyes and stare into the future I think you can see the path towards much more refined devices that fill the role of letting you have "virtual stuff" in the same way that you might hang a clock on your wall today.

I am not going to walk around all day in a headset. Everything you describe is AR, not VR. A HUD in my glasses would be fantastic but a completely different product than an immersive VR headset.

> in a headset

That's why I mentioned "much more refined devices".

To me it seems obvious that Apple made a headset only because that's the minimum amount of hardware needed, right now, for the functionality they want. What they really want is "Apple Glasses", but they're willing to set money on fire for however long it takes to get there, building out the full-featured software ecosystem along the way so that by the time the mass market likes the idea they've already completely conquered the niche.

I am still waiting for Dennou Coil to become reality...

Having a tiling window manager and usually a single terminal window open, that spatial part doesn't seem beneficial to me.

I can see why it is cool though!

In the Wall Street Journal review, Joanna Stern managed to put two timers on top of two different pots while she was cooking with the headset on. Was pretty cool.

I would assume that the next iteration for the Mac and AVP integration would be to break out the windows from the Mac and place them anywhere, unconstrained by the concept of a screen.

The timer thing was the most impressive and useful thing I’ve seen so far. Which in a way is kind of sad, but it does hint at where things can go in the future.

The big leap that still need to be made is the jump from VR to AR, and much smaller. I think AR will make the idea of people wearing this stuff all the time much more socially acceptable. I can’t see an average person putting on the current AVP to cook dinner.

I'm really struggling here: aside from baking and pressure cooking, why would you ever need a timer for cooking? Is that a cultural thing? Don't you guys see and taste when things are done? (And for pressure cooking, just get an InstantPot, it's cheaper and you don't have to wear it in front of your eyes.)

Why would you need a timer for pressure cooking? Don't you just stand there staring at it counting the whistles?

Not the OP, but right now I set a timer on my $200 phone so I can shitpos^W engage in the comments here. I don't need to watch the pot, I don't want to watch the pot. And my pressure cooker has a built-in timer so aside of the initial check what it did got the required pressure I don't need to bother with it at all.

As said, I'm fully in favor of timers for pressure cooking. I love my InstantPot. It solves an actual problem. No more turned-to-sludge potatoes!

And I think we can agree that if you don't want to watch the pot, having the timer spatially over it makes little sense, and that little phone in your pocket is probably better suited to remind you...

BTW, guys, a large part of cooking is actually pipelining: for instance, while the pasta is cooking, you can cook other stuff in parallel!

Gives a rough idea/reminder. I'll often wander off and do something else for the 10 minutes it takes to cook pasta or whatever so a timer is preferable to ruining my food. I don't know why I'd need it spatially over the specific dish, my cheapo smart speaker will do multiple just fine.

I regularly set timers for things like pasta, steel-cut oats, baking cookies, backing lasagna, roasting chicken, chilling pastry in the fridge. Many of those things take significant time and do not need constant attention. I can wander off and do other things and be reminded when to come back and check on them. (If something takes an hour, I’ll usually set a 30-45min timer to check on progress.) Sometimes that other activity is just sitting in the kitchen table and browsing the web or watching a video. I could do that on the AVP, too.

Obviously you wouldn’t pay for an AVP just to set cooking timers, but if you are wearing an AVP, it is handy to be able to do this.

I don’t do a lot of cooking, but when my dad is cooking for a holiday meal he will almost always have his iPad out to time stuff. He has an app that shows the burners on a stove and he can set times for each one so he can keep track of what’s going on.

The stuff might not need exact timing, like with baking, but if he is prepping something else on the counter, or gets caught up in a conversation, the timers keep things from going off the rails. He has a tendency to lose track of some of that stuff without the reminders. He also keeps track of how long things take, so he can better plan in the future, as he tries to get all the stuff to finish up around the same time. When it starts getting close to dinner time there are a lot of timers going off and things seem a bit chaotic, so I think it would be easy for things to fall through the cracks.

I don’t think he cooks often, especially not for a group, so it’s not a skill he’s developed where he can just go by feel. The recipe will say something like, “simmer for 10 minutes,” so that’s what he does.

Still, is it $3400 better than “Siri, set a timer for 5 minutes; Siri, set a timer for two minutes”?

Ah, but which one is for which pot?

"Alexa, set a spaghetti timer for 10 min", "Alexa, set a sauce timer for 15 min".

10 minutes later:

"Your spaghetti timer is done."

5 minutes later:

"Your sauce timer is done."

At least this works fine with Alexa, just name the timer.

Interestingly (and somewhat surprisingly) you can do this on an Apple Watch.

However, you cannot do this on an iPhone (what?!).

Perhaps you haven’t updated your version of iOS in the last 4-5 months, or haven’t tried it recently?

This is high on the list of surprising warts on iOS that has been fixed.

Ah, my apologies then. I have updated but out of habit, I haven't tried it on my phone since that feature hasn't worked for years.

> That is to say, imagine your terminal as a floating window, but you've also got other windows arranged around your home and office, not just clustered at a desk. Reminders floating near your fridge or break room, weather forecasts near the coatrack, calendar with upcoming events on a wall, Kindle or Books.app floating next to your couch...

I'm imagining it and I'm not impressed. Post-its on fridges work fine, and why would I ever walk to my calendar or weather information when I have everything right here in my pocket? That sounds like a downgrade. Regarding replacing the Kindle: while I love my Kobo, most people still prefer physical books over ebooks, so I don't see it.

I know I know, people said the same about the iPod, the iPhone etc., but I was not one of them (yep, I'm old). (EDIT: I was highly dismissive of the AppleWatch and EarPods, but I think their success are more because of fashion. I kind of doubt that the AVP will succeed because it'll be fashionable to sport one on your head, but as just said, I was wrong before...)

This is already possible in 1.0

https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1ai37t7/working_...

I have a lot more faith in spatial computing if it can be more like Minority Report, where we have pervasive screens and projections in the environment, rather than AR.

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