Comment by uicompat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uicompat | Hacker News Reader

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This was a great demo, and the spatial computing stuff is cool, but what?

He’s showing off that he has a big screen tv playing a video, overlayed over his big screen tv, playing a video without anyone watching it.

He shows video playing cooking tutorials in his kitchen when he and his partner are both in other rooms working at their desks.

A “note” pinned to his fridge, that he can only see while wearing the headset.

He shows a screen for playing his music pinned to a wall on the other side of the room.

He either has to get up and move to that location to change his music, which is somehow being presented as better than having a tab open on his browser, or he would just use a tab open on his browser and the whole spatial setup is just flashy moot.

I once had a desk setup with two screens where I angled one screen aggressively to the left to attempt to stop allowing the corporate chat program to distract my immediate vision and it hospitalized me with a chronic neck injury.

This setup is ‘cool’ but I feel like we’ve already trudged these waters.

I’m confused by the enthusiasm. Have we all forgot that we’ve been through this “virtual desktop” cycle already?

Are these all people that just ignored the previous stereoscopic headsets as “toys” who are seduced into it this time around by APPL’s marketing that this is for “working adults”?

I'm absolutely certain at this point that this video, the video of the kid on the subway, and the guy in the Tesla are all some sort of inorganic viral marketing campaign on Apple's part because they are also aware of how narrow and niche the market for this device is and are terrified it'll have low uptake.

It isn't open and interoperable with a bunch of other software like the Quest or Reverb, you can't game on it because there's no SteamVR support, and the projected use cases are ridiculous gimmicks. It's also got a much narrower FoV than initially advertised and is limited to Apple's walled garden. For productivity, why would you pay $3500 for this when you could buy two huge 4K monitors and an impressively powerful PC/Mac instead and still have about 500 bucks left over?

It's all so weird. It's like they're trying to make it seem normal to just use this thing out and about when the best applications of VR are interactive simulations and games that are best used indoors in controlled environments. Not a single mixed reality device (Google Glass, HoloLens) by Apple's competitors has ever made this type of use case work, and I have little faith that Apple has somehow overcome all of the obstacles that Google and Microsoft faced.

> I’m confused by the enthusiasm. Have we all forgot that we’ve been through this “virtual desktop” cycle already?

yeah i dont get the hype, almost everything here should be possible with the quest 3 for 1/10th of the price. Plus you can play games, its lighter, more fov, etc.

It depends on your environment and on the person. But personally for me, the concept of actually being able to physically walk around in a spatial computing environment, and manipulate windows to change different things appeals to my ADD side. I like physically walking around and pacing as I work anyway and this gives me the opportunity to do it by simulating essentially multiple visual input interfaces all over my house.

Being anchored to a single desk and computer exacerbates what is already effectively a fairly sedentary occupation.

> we've already trudged these waters

Not long ago, to “walk* on water” was considered incredible, no matter how tiring.

> confused by the enthusiasm

People were confused by 1,000 songs in your pocket when we already have radio, or the Internet on a tiny crappy LCD screen with a dog slow connection when it's much easier to read on a desktop CRT and ISDN or DSL line.

There is always much confusion from either side of "the chasm" about the other: https://www.google.com/search?q=crossing+the+chasm&tbm=isch

Crossing that is quite hard, so the interesting question isn't will it be crossed but when, and how can you be positioned to service the early majority.

* perhaps you meant trawled or dredged

> I’m confused by the enthusiasm. Have we all forgot that we’ve been through this “virtual desktop” cycle already?

A lot of people wouldn't touch a Meta headset with a ten foot pole, especially with all the account shitshow that happened when the Occulus brand got sunsetted. Then Vive headsets required a lot more investment and you had to be already convinced to dive into it. Not mentionning that macs and the all Apple ecosystem didn't have enough GPU power to deal with VR so anyone knee deep in there wouldn't touch VR.

I'm kinda glad that side of the market gets into VR, and even if we see a lot of tired ideas in a "eternal September" style, we might get new insights and nice findings as well along the way.

I'd still be worried about how much Apple will allow for users to tweak that experience. I don't see a third party window manager being ever allowed for instance

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