Coding in Vision Pro
willem.com
willem.com
More often than not, it's collecting dust on the shelf within a few months. Sort of like an expensive blender you were so excited to get, you imagined making super fruit smoothies every morning. Let's see how AVP fares in this regard.
It would be a great shame if a secure, well designed, easy to use computer loaded with a custom-built, well supported unix-like distro gets trashed because the company that makes it is always trying to "innovate." I don't know if there's much left to innovate in the computer world, there is only so much you can do with ones and zeros. It would be better if they just focused on what works, reliable and secure consumer electronics, instead of trying to be what they were under Steve Jobs.
Jobs is dead, he will never come back, and Apple will never be Apple under Jobs again. They should just try to be like the IBM of their space...just there, doing what they do best. An institution, a monolith, but not a "disruptor," as if there are any of those left.
Not that I’ve found. Maybe on individual features, but not as a whole product.
I bought my first pair of AirPods very close to their initial release and everyone looked at me like I was an idiot for wearing such an ugly and expensive device that couldn’t really do anything better than a $20 pair of earbuds. Do you remember everyone making fun of them at the announcement? It wasn’t until around 2 years later that AirPods were widely worn and accepted.
I’m not sure Vision Pro will go through the same adoption curve, but I am not confident that it won’t happen by late v2 or v3.
What do we think of people who sit around with a VR headset on all day? We think, usually, that they are anti-social, that they are afraid of going outside, that they want to trap themselves in a world that generates and serves their fantasies. How does a company which makes so much of their money off of people associating their products with high social status break into a market that appears to be solely for those who stand on the other end of the continuum?
The rational is contradictory: technology (according to the Silicon Valley playbook) profits by transforming the world into a place of further alienated and isolated individuals whose entire lives are shaped by and for tech companies which only exist to exploit them; and yet, such a world, in its total form, could never appear, since people could not work and live in that world unless they participated in it collectively, at some level. Phenomenologically, we can't view this move as anything more than an extreme error of judgement, a move from a post-jobs apple that doesn't seem to understand the magic of great design, the element of the sublime that technology can create--but it would always have to be this way, since the philosophy would never overcome the profit-motive.
Its why I said that computers can only go so far. We're at the end of the rope of the transformational power of technology, and everybody knows it. The world will not change on the whim of the market, the market will just constrict and eventually kill us all.
On top of things like much longer lasting battery, much better support for advanced HD bluetooth codecs (I can plug them into anything like some cheap TVs anywhere). But to me overall sound quality is still #1 reason to invest into premium quality.
Of course then somebody from A team comes with 'but they integrates greatly with my iphone' argument, which is probably true but not that relevant to above. My Senns integrate effortlessly with my Samsung phone/tv/laptops too, thats kind of baseline in 2024.
I have high quality headphones and IEMs, the headphones I use if I’m _really_ listening to music, maybe a couple of times a week. The IEMs have been in drawer for months without use. The wireless headphones I use every day all day. It’s convenience.
Being tethered to a phone or computer with a wire that pulls, catches, and makes rubbing noise through your ears is truly an awful relic of the past.
Man, the amount of history rewriting that happens in tech world is actually insane.
Louis Rossman literally made his career out of showcasing how shit apple laptops have been through the years. The evidence is all there. I dunno if people are just willfully ignorant or are actually just lying.
I can't speak for the Apple Vision Pro, I'd love to try one, to be honest. But I can agree with your comment.
Such has been my experience with the two headsets I own - the Meta Quest 2, which I think is really great and serves many purposes, and the PSVR 2 headset, which is phenomenal for gaming, but pretty much useless for anything else.
Both headsets have had a short-lived "wow" factor to them, without a doubt, but sadly, the novelty tends to wear off within weeks. I haven't used my Quest 2 since early 2023 (I think) and the PSVR 2's last use was for a game called Pavlov, which is simply mind-blowing, despite which, I think the hassle of headsets is problematic. For real gaming I go back to couch gaming with the Xbox or PS5, and for computer things I use computers.
Funny thing is, I keep meaning to do more with the PSVR 2 but now it's actually so dusty that it puts me off, it needs a full cleaning at this stage :).
Edit: Meta Quest -> Meta Quest 2
There's zero on the Quest 2/3 because it's a mobile device and it's not up to it and at least in my experience the link is not up to it either.
I'm not saying there are not some good experiences there. Several rhythm games are fun, a couple of games designed for low-power mobile devices. But the fully immersive high quality graphics games are so few an far between. If there were more I'd keep playing.
What I love most about this comment is how it caused me to reflect on what I use daily and get some amount of joy from.
When it comes to Apple products in particular I use an Apple Studio display at home, I use it for 10hours per day, every day, and honestly I have no complaints, it's probably one of the best bits of technology I use daily.
However, it's completely unsexy and has (at least on paper) extremely stiff competition. Not only that it was maligned by the tech media upon release.
Yet, it just subtlely benefits my life because the speakers are excellent, the webcam is servicable (the novelty of the fact it tracks you never truly wears off) and the size/pixel density is great.
It's weird that I'm waxing poetic like this about such a boring device, but that's kinda my point, your comment made me reflect about all the little tech around me that I use every day that just sort of shifted into the background. Quietly doing its job excellently.
Until/unless Apple does fractional scaling in a way that doesn’t really need pixel doubling to work, I will insist on a 5K display for a 27” monitor and the ASD really is the best game in town.
But at the same time, I see the LG is down to $999 (I suspect it’ll be discontinued soon if it isn’t already) and it’s debatable that the studio display is $600 better. It’s definitely $300 better though.
That said, it is increasingly more difficult to buy the LG. So it’s become less of a choice.
It's mind blowing, I don't wanna reach for the low-hanging quips here but it really is like an Apple iCult type of vibe
Women love apple products, but if you look at who is splurging on multiple high end apple computers with multiple monitors it's gotta be 95% male.
The 27" 5K Studio Display is in a weird category, where they actually have zero competitors. On paper, there's the LG Ultrafine, but I have yet to see one available for purchase in EU (I've seen "in stock", but not actually available), not to even mention seeing one in person. So basically you don't really have a choice.
- Apple's software (particularly macOS) is extremely high quality. Best game in town.
- Their hardware is also high quality, but it is often overpriced.
- You must use their hardware to get the best experience using their software.
- Therefore, people might end up buying, say, the Apple XR display or AirPods Max even though they are overpriced compared to other monitors/headphones, because it gives you a better experience using macOS.
I am a pretty huge Apple fan but I think this is pretty unfortunate, not gonna lie -- it kills me a little that macOS doesn't look sharp on my 4K monitor. But it isn't an iCult, it's just that the cheaper thing doesn't work as well with macOS.
Luckily this "wasn't my first monitor", so I quickly returned it and went back to Dell that's always been OK enough so I don't ever have to pay attention to which monitor or display setting I'm using.
My husband uses an iMac (27” 5k display running @2x) and I struggle to do anything at that resolution.
There are only two 5K displays on the market that can render macOS at Retina resolution on a 27" panel: this one and the LG Ultrafine, which isn't that much cheaper. My last monitor was a 27" LG QD-OLED 144Hz 4K display. I LOVED that display, but text wasn't sharp because of the Retina resolution problem.
I also have a semi-professional webcam setup and external speakers, so those being built-in does nothing for me.
I just want macOS to support variable scaling like Windows has for, what, 15 years at least?
Anything in-between is rendering at a larger resolution and scaling it back down for the display, resulting in a non-pixel-perfect image.
Your shop Mac is rendering the UI at 5120 × 2880, then squishing that down for the Acer display. Which, apart from being more graphically demanding, ends up blurry and aliased.
What Windows does is actually just changing the pixel dimensions of the UI elements (in steps of 10% I think?), which Apple has never done.
I’ve tried to adopt MacBooks twice over the last three years and both times this has been the dealbreaker for me. I was flabbergasted that MacOS didn’t have better support for it.
No way to really fix it, it's just another Mac shortcoming. Using resolution to scale the UI is not a compromise, it's a mediocre workaround.
To be clear, I criticize the hell out of the company on things that I think are truly bad. Their app store policies are a disaster. I get that gamers want framerates over resolution. I'm not a gamer and want the other thing.
For my money, Windows is a terrible operating system but it embarrasses Mac and Linux thoroughly in this regard.
[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-complete-list-of-27...
There’s also the Samsung S9 now.
Incredible for coding.
Although, I have a strict policy of not sharing my AirPods, or let it connect to anything other than my iPhone to make sure I don’t get into the mess of “figure out which device it auto connects to” etc.
- my personal iPhone
- my work iPhone
- my personal MacBook
- my work MacBook
And not once have I ever had to worry about it being connected to the wrong device, it seems to just keep track of all the devices around and everything "just works"
In mind these are AirPod pro 2s
The hard part is being able to know when that inflection point comes. But I think there's a very good chance that 10 years from now, it's already behind us.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCS71K6P?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...
We've grown so accustomed to viewing technology as a steady progression of improvements that it seems natural that the thing that Apple is pushing today will be universal in 10 years, but there's no guarantee of that, and there are reasons to be skeptical that we'll look back at this as the next big leap.
For myself, I'm keeping my eye out for technology that is less intrusive into the rest of my life, not more immersive.
Maybe when they can shoot photons directly into my cornea without an intrusive set of goggles that take me out of the real world.
I've not used a laptop (or computer) at a desk for decades, I prefer lying down, which works really well.
I do wish there was something between a laptop and a phone though. Interfaces need to improve or innovate, but I don't think VR headsets are the answer. I haven't even touched on the nausea.
With AVP, Apple is taking a bet that the accessory nature of previous attempts is why this product category failed and so they're trying to embed the compute and make it wireless.
Unfortunately for utopian visions of VR goggles, we're running up against the limit on how small computers can be, so the idea of a standalone headset as light as Bigscreen VR is essentially science fiction at this point. Not to say it won't happen, but if that's what it'll take for this product category to take off then your optimism is misplaced.
Perhaps something along the lines of zapping the back of the eyeballs with lasers is the answer.
Even after 36 years of wearing glasses (current ones weight barely 20 gram), they still bother me, and I fiddle with them constantly.
For instance we've seen the arrival of movies and tv, books became moving visual content, games expanded from boards to immersive experiences etc. But the lower dimension media never disappeared nor significantly got irrelevant. We're effectively reading more words per day than any of the previous generation, podcasts are booming, web comics etc. are thriving.
TV and movies were just an addition to the media landscape, I see AR and VR in the same light.
I bought an AVP on day one to be used -exclusively- as a monitor extender for coding.
It's untenable.
The only way I could avoid significant neck/back pain from the weight was to sit in a reclining chair. That wouldn't be a bad coding setup, but my eye strain was pretty significant, too.
I ended up returning mine.
This is a necessary 1.0 to build out the app ecosystem, etc. but it's absolutely not ready for full-time use.
Lying on a bed would also do the trick.
It hurts (and wake me up) in just a few minutes if I happen to fall sleep with my regular glasses on.
It's not even scratched. I have no idea what it's made out of but it's super impressive. I try not to think about because of whatever the biosafety standards were back then... but the lack of visible damage gives me hope not much of it has been ingested at least.
But I have a plastic VR headset and I'm pretty sure an impact bad enough to damage the plastic care is also bad enough to damage the electronics, which are going to be way more costly to repair.
I'd take a plastic headset personally assuming it was lighter. Anything to save weight in this product category.
A lot of Apples decision seems to make more sense when considering how incredibly powerful (and thus hot) it is. The external battery pack (which is a 3 cell 13V pack btw) is definitely a consequence of that, they supposedly have some of the power electronics in there which helps move a bit of the heat generating stuff away from the face.
Imagine if you wanted to make a powerful headset without a fan. How would you even do that in plastic? You’d definitely want to transport the heat out to the perimeter or front, and plastic would just not be the most suitable for that.
So maybe that’s the path they’re looking towards? They might eventually be able to get rid of the fan with better chip technology, without compromising on compute, but then they need some metal to shed the heat from.
Perhaps the development they’re doing with titanium on iPhone is also a step in that direction. Letting them use metal without as much of a weight penalty.
Not even that, apparently many customers are already returning them[1]. Most of the hype, as usual, is tech reviewers who want to stay relevant.
Early adopters will naturally chase any and every opportunity to make use of them, but in the coming months as novelty wears off, more issues arise, you get the (The ecosystem is just not ready yet)™ and most will be listed on the secondhand market.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/14/24072792/apple-vision-pro...
Still, it would be pretty darned cool to be able to take something even half as good on the road in a package that will easily fit in a backpack!
I am entirely done with Apple and will not be buying any more of their products, but I look forward to the competition that AVP will foster.
That's part of the problem framing the AVP as a system for 2D floating screens. 2D screens are good at what they do. 360 degree 3D with Six Degrees of Freedom is a completely different surface area and we are still at the Horseless Carriage stage of development of that affordance space. There are a few experiments in what's possible [1] but, for the most part, if all you throw at these devices is a floating screen then the novelty wears off and we have the conversations we are having in this thread instead of thinking about what more is possible.
[1] VR Immersive IDE: https://primitive.io/
For the some niche things, fantastic, it's unique. Feeling inside a 3d scene, two handed manipulations of 3d objects... it's the hang-glider jumping off a mountain which no horse can do. If you currently render something in 3d on a monitor, VR might help and some new things like training for physical tasks might be cool too.
The hang-glider just isn't useful for commuters getting from A to B which in this case, is office work. It's text, it's numbers, it's organisation, it's communication. Throwing things around in 3d is just a gimmick that will likely slow you down. Moving your head or waving your hands around are not better ergonomically than a good monitor, keyboard and seating. Using a keystroke to flip the app/tabs in your field of view is more comfortable than turning to look at your wall.
> VR Immersive IDE
This is like every 3d scifi UX you could see in compsci department since the 90s. I get it, everyone wants to create that cool looking scene from Prometheus but sadly no-one wants 4 lines of code exploded into a huge visual call-graph with dozens of nodes, interconnections everywhere and translucent text. VR won't change that. No-one really wants to drive around a city to find their files in a Gibson either.
For VR, you don't want to look at text that's far away, you don't want to look at text at weird angles... so what is a 3d environment adding? The ideal is to bring perfectly sized legible text at a comfortable focal distance into your gaze, that's what an automobile will need to do.
i’m very much so a bit easily distractable and i do tend to wander and move locations while i work at home. i actually has thought the vision pro was tethered completely and 100% dependent on another apple device but i guess not entirely? that would be appealing for me to have very light work space that moves with me for similarly light work (chats, emails, etc)
looks a bit too goofy for me for public use but i’m just shy) but the article did help me see a vision for using the vision pro. better than apples ads
What is your reason? I am genuinely curious. I used to think that using open devices (Linux, GrapheneOS) gives me the convenience of being able to do everything I want. But over time I came to realize that Apple optimizes their devices for one happy path they envision, and if you don’t stray off that happy path (e.g. on iPhone you cannot sideload, can’t have background jobs), the convenience can be even greater than the possibilities an open design offers (native terminal, root access in Android). It is a local maxima. Thus I own an iPhone. On the computer side I own a PC, but that’s because Linux isn’t yet fully supported on Macs. What is your reasoning?
So far hearing vastly mixed reviews about its “balance” on the users head - when I wear night vision goggles or similar devices I have to use a counter mass at the back of the helmet to make it comfortable. It seems the AVP doesn’t have such a balancing weight?
You can easily code on Quest 3 if you really wanted to do AR/VR, and could do it on Quest Pro as well a year ago. While its true that Vision does offer better resolution, lets not pretend that people who are trying the Vision Pro have significant experience with AR/VR headsets, chasing the ability to work anywhere. Its brand fanboyishness at its core: "Apple made therefore its good and usefull".
We programmers are quite the outsiders, and sometimes its hard for us to understand how others see computers.
It's better to be patient before jumping to conclusions, this goes for first impressions or what we think it's gonna happen.
After a while (and not a long one) you develop a serious usability bias since you can intuit what a program is doing and how best to interact with it.
The longer you work in software, the harder it is to accurately imagine how a non programmer uses a computer.
That’s why the classic “only users could cause this error” jokes exist.
My partner works as a medical research assistant. They had filled data into a huge spreadsheet in a software I think was called IBM SSES or something along those lines. Basically an excel spreadsheet, with hundreds of columns and tens of thousands of rows.
One of the analyses they wanted to run wasn't working correctly so she was tasked with filling in 0s in place of empty cells. She was expecting to spend 2-3 weeks doing this. She mentioned it to me, I've never seen this software before in my life but it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to do three weeks of manual work instantly. Just googled it and followed some instructions.
Being able to understand software is a useful skill. We should find ways to bring the average person up to speed, help them understand what computers can do so they too can see a task like that and be like "there's no way the software doesn't have an easier way to do that" instead of wasting time doing pointless busywork.
This is one way that you can design your software - follow existing conventions so that people's existing knowledge is useful for understanding your software.
The alternative can be summarized as "not doing that" and personally I don't see that solving any problems. It just means people have to learn it from scratch instead. And it's not like anyone actually reads manuals and such.
Famously, there was a shoe designer who was hired on the BOTW team. The fresh perspective keeps Nintendo games from falling into idiosyncrasies, which is part of the reason children and adults can just walk up and play most Nintendo games and have immediate without needing prior gaming experience.
I think it’s valuable to have non technical designers and QAs for that reason.
Sure the fresh perspective fades after a while, but it’s still valuable AND gives us in tech a reason to hire those not in tech.
The vast majority of normal people's compute tasks for work could be done on an iPad with a keyboard. The vast majority of their compute tasks for play just require a smartphone. 3D modeling is already a huge exception to the norm in that it needs serious compute power and in that people already often use specialized equipment for it, and to top it off it's a task that is actually hampered by using a 2D projection on a flat screen.
Most tasks are more like coding than they are like 3D modeling.
That said, I tried one on at the Apple Store the other day and the immersive stuff was really cool and I’d like to see more of it. But I think it makes sense to wait for the amount of content to increase and the price to come down.
I don't regret the purchase; I did not expect it to change my life, and I've actually had my skepticism about spatial computing turned around. I hope there is a future where we can do the same things in a less physically cumbersome way.
Everything is more exciting when it’s novel. That’s part of the fun of consumer electronics, games, movies, etc.
My VR headsets don't see much usage outside of simracing which I'd consider a hobby more than just gaming. So my point is that, "working" might present that same routine which demos/gaming/facehugger yt with low return on novelty.
I'd love for this thing to reach it's full potential as this 'work from a mountaintop, but really your garage' device, but I feel like until the resolution gets to the same as existing monitors (no small task, I know) it's just...not as good for the vast majority of use cases.
Because of lag, or why?
Many people work on remote desktop all day long, and I spend my fair share of time in SSH sessions as well. It's not like it improves the experience compared to working locally, but for me it works fine so long as you're within a few hundred kilometers without much jitter. On the VR, the screen should move as you move your head because that position isn't what's being passed through, so that can't be the difference either. I don't understand (without having a device myself) how/whether this is worse than normal video streaming over LAN?
And I'd assume that yes, it would be torture to try to view a monitor through the AVP just due to the resolution loss. It would be like poorly downscaling the 4k/5k resolution of your 27" monitor to like 1366x768 but much worse since the pixels are not even staying lined up on a level grid but resampled at slightly diagonal angles as your head moves even a couple of degrees. I am pretty sure setting up 2 more big $1000 monitors left and right would be better than "center monitor + AVP with virtual apps left and right" (and it would save about $2000 lol).
For coding you don't need a 2k$ monitor setup, you can get by comfortably on 3-400$.
It's an interesting argument but they are going to need to try a lot harder for it to be a compelling desktop replacement.
I wonder if it could largely be replaced by native AVP apps or a better way for them to send out data from the Mac to the headset once there is broader software support?
It’s felt more like I was playing a simulator game of myself coding, and it was not enjoyable at all.
I often wonder how people who actually work at fast paced places as engineers are claiming to be more productive with this strapped on.
If I just ingested and read email and slack messages all day, or talked in zoom all day, sure (maybe), but I don’t.
1. Having more screen real estate in my small home office. I often dive into spaghetti code, and seeing more of it helps me maintain context.
2. Working in my RV. I can’t take my extra screens with me (it’s a multi-use family RV, so I’m not mounting anything. Plus, there isn’t room.), and I’m so, so excited about having more screen real estate in there. We lived/worked in it for 3 months last summer, and it was really nice coming home to more screens at the end of the trip.
Very curious to see how tolerable the UX is in an environment that's almost always experiencing some degree of motion independent of the user.
It’s amazing to me what people will do to avoid being present in the moment. You’re on a sailboat, enjoy it, smell the ocean, feel the water on your face, breathe deeply and take it all in. If you’re just going to strap goggles on your face to blind you to the beauty around you, then why did you even get a sailboat to begin with?
Besides the ocean and elements, there's also a certain beauty in using the latest technology to operate a SAAS company from almost anywhere on the planet.
When I’m on PTO, my laptop doesn’t go with me. I absolutely use all my PTO every year.
I expect our radius to get smaller as our child gets older and goes to school, but we are very passionate about being outdoors as much as possible.
For example - I helped build a mutually accessible structure in a national forest, and my favorite work days are out there. We installed solar last summer, so it’s workable year round now.
Zoom calls were cool, but nobody could take the Persona seriously.
After a few days the eye strain seemed to get worse and worse, until yesterday it give me such a bad headache I decided that was enough.
This is going to be another of their socially awkward gimmicks like Memojis they will double down until they inevitably fail.
I really feel like Apple actually just doesn’t feel it and every time they’re pushing their weird geeky ideas onto their users they loose a bit of coolness factor. And if kids decide Apple got too cringe, while someone else manages to use that to spin their momentum (think e.g. Nokia respawning riding the 90s sentiment wave), they may actually start to seriously struggle.
From my broad circle in the US and Europe, I know one person who sends one maybe once a quarter.
What do you mean? Obviously normies all browse the web in emacs and write their own plugins in elisp.
Or maybe you lack perspective, because maybe some people use it in your circle, but otherwise it’s very unpopular?
Observational fallacies work both ways.
Lots of people use Facebook but virtually nobody considers Facebook to be fashionable.
Meta doesn't care if Facebook is fashionable, but the more Apple looks like Meta, the bigger the opening for being disrupted on that front gets.
I don't necessarily agree. Some have talked about how the weirdness starts to fade after getting into a conversation and focusing on the discussion or collaboration at hand. It seems that once the brain has adjusted a bit, it can start to fill in for the badness somewhat.
The feature clearly has a long way to go before it's good, but I think it's premature to dismiss it. Future iterations will only improve, so if some people are finding some success with it now, that will only grow.
But it’s been over 5 years since Apple started pushing Memojis, they still continued as recently as last year and they have little adoption still, as far as I am aware.
Those who watched WWDC remember how cringey those Memoji bits were, I specifically refer to that aspect of their being increasingly out of touch.
But I think these are different enough capabilities that the success or failure of one is not necessarily predictive of the other.
Just google news Memojis and see what you get. Hardly any content, and if you navigate 2-3 pages further, you quickly reach 2022 and 2021 articles.
If that doesn't scream "low adoption" then I don't know what does.
Google Trends seems more likely to be instructive, and as a topic, it has shown fairly steady (if low) interest over time after peaking on release with some periodic spikes most likely correlated with major updates.
But as a feature, I wouldn't expect even Google trends to be very instructive (for understanding adoption), since people who know how to use them aren't likely to be out there searching. More use = more familiarity = less searching. Who knows; maybe they're barely used, but there isn't good data to back up that claim, and there are a number of other ways to interpret the data that does exist.
With all of that said, I'll maintain that I don't see any real connection between them and Personas, or any predictive value in comparing them.
For the record, my point here was: More use = more familiarity = better writing subject for portals and journalism
Even if they made a small misstep or had an awkward moment in a launch announcement, it was seen as endearing and forgivable.
But there seem to be an increase in moments where Apple comes across as behind the curve, or not as aware of where the public is at relative to them, compared to then.
Lolwhut?? Microsoft wishes it had a fraction of the echo chamber Apple fans create. It's what Apple is known for.
>Even if they made a small misstep or had an awkward moment in a launch announcement, it was seen as endearing and forgivable.
Uhhhh... "You're holding it wrong" was an absolute unmitigated PR disaster for Apple. It was one of the worst kinks ever in the "reality distortion field". People were rightly pissed. It was smug and stupid, not endearing.
I cringe every time I hear someone say this to malign stupid users. Yes, I hear it at work.
Some people legit only read the headlines about that story, not the articles.
You either have some rendered 3D model or you take the headset off when making a call.
Physics dictates that those are your only two choices.
This thing is like $5k all-in and even then you have to get on a waiting list. I wouldn’t really say that they’re pushing this on people.
Apple hasn't been cool for a long, long time. Everyone has an iPhone so it's no longer special. It's just a waste of money when you can get basically the same android phone for half the price
It's not perfect. It's not even good. But it's better than nothing.
Curious if you've ever gotten your vision tested?
I don't need glasses in everyday life, but I did go to an optometrist and got a pair anyways after I got annoyed one night that a friend could read a faraway sign and I couldn't quite. They make things a little bit sharper but not that it ever makes a difference for anything I actually need.
But then I discovered that if I wear them, zero eye strain in VR. Without them my eyes hurt after 20 minutes. With them, I can use VR for hours, zero problem.
No idea why. And I can't seem to find much information on it, but I asked my optometrist and they said it's a whole thing -- people who wear glasses sometimes not to see better, but to reduce eye strain and headaches.
Personally I found AVP to be most draining if I'm moving my head around a lot and experiencing this motion blur. If I'm just looking at the screen in front of me, I get fatigued less
I wonder if there's something similar here going on. Since we rely so heavily on vision for everything(Especially balance). Any difference to our normal perception will cause "exhaustion" of sorts. But maybe wearing it continuously for days can cause our body to adapt to it?(Which, obviously is impossible for AVPs)
(pure conjecture, I last used lenses fifteen twenty years ago)
https://appleinsider.com/inside/apple-vision-pro/tips/why-ap...
The software should probably force text to be aligned on whole real pixels, even if that detracts a little from the realism.
And the best would probably be to keep virtual screens completely fixed until you move by a certain, largish degree (as an option).
Then again, maybe this has nothing to do with the straining.
I think that'd be difficult given that pixels are effectively "non-rectangular" given the warping from the lenses.
Remember that you're working with two screens, not one, and they have to have coordinated projections that will also depend on the user's IPD.
Text in streamed displays from a Mac may suffer from pixel misalignment.
Also your eyes can't really focus the same, anything within about 12 ft causes you to struggle to focus leading to eye strain. This is an unfortunate reality of the lenses
It's a bunch of factors. Heavy, lots of pressure on a few specific points, the dangling cable to a slippery battery which I had to leave plugged in all day, the grainy passthrough... But most of all it's just too heavy. And connection would sometimes get janky between Mac and Vision Pro.
I've got high hopes for generation 2 and 3 but it needs time to cook.
My NReal Air are nice glasses, but the fact that I can’t look away from the huge ass screen is annoying af. Eye movements can only get you so far, and the intuitive head movement does not work. Argh!
Some people seem to be suggesting the higher quality of the Vision Pro overcomes this, but I'm starting to really wonder. Would even more resolution actually solve it? Or maybe there's really no way around the discomfort for some of us.
I took it off yesterday before some friends came over for dinner and I was kind of shocked that it had gotten dark outside because my mind felt like it was still day time since the sun was out in mount hood. I had actually been sitting on my office in darkness for a least an hour.
Background: I got my AVP on Monday 5th (having gotten up before dawn to place my order when it first became available). I am a programmer with a multi-screen setup to maximize my usable workspace, which consists of editor, terminal, and browser windows. My hope is for the AVP to replace a set of fixed screens, and have in effect infinite screen space.
The AVP has worse Angular Resolution than a monitor, at average 34 Pixels-Per-Degree (PPD) vs a monitor's 64 PPD (more details in iFixit's writeup [1]).
This is an inevitable consequence of placing a screen so close to your eyes. The AVP's exceptional screen technology mitigates this (and for me completely eliminates the "screen door" effect that plagued earlier VR sets), but it can't beat Physics.
So for one thing, you cannot have the legible text density of, say, 2 27" monitors an arm's length away. In other words, the equivalent amount of text will take more space in your vision on the AVP.
This is understandable. But where the AVP really has a problem, but I really hope they improve, is window management.
Someone quipped that, from an app/window management perspective, the AVP is like sticking an iPad on your face, and I agree.
As someone who's used to moving and resizing windows around with Tiling window managers on Linux and SizeUp or Moom on macOS, the window management of the AVP is really awkward. Say you put your editor large front-and-center, but now want to switch to a terminal, or resize the editor to put a reference on the side? The hand control may feel magical, but you're going to be doing a lot of it to move and resize your windows.
But these are software UX problems, and I'm gambling on Apple fixing them over time.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/90409/vision-pro-teardown-part-2...
It feels so perfect for this use but it’s a shame it doesn’t exist
I would expect any window management system to be the same when auto tiling
Health applications: pretty cool for education, maybe other things, eventually.
What I think would be compelling, for me, is the ability to use it on travel. To be on a plane and not have to worry about breaking a laptop screen when the person in front of me tips their seat back, not have to worry about someone shoulder surfing me. In yet another boring hotel room? Let's escape!
Now, the problem is that, in many meetings, a laptop is barely acceptable as it is (in some cases, not at all acceptable). So, I still have to bring a laptop. So, my backback is now ... heavier? I'm already carrying multiple devices required by various security policies.
Is this juice worth the squeeze? I can't bring myself to spend my own money on this. And I helped develop an AR device. I'd be happy to use it if the company bought it. But you're in for almost $5k after applecare, accessories, etc.
If action items are simplistic enough that you don't need to consider calendars for the future, don't need the ability to show the status of existing concerning items, and any reliable information is conveyed via paper, you've got multiple problems.
Mostly you have a culture problem, to put it simply.
This is unless I'm running the meeting and my laptop is plugged into the big screen.
I was making the assumption that presentations were excluded (and confusing the issue). A meeting is dynamic between individuals. Relying solely on what you can recall is less efficient than using a device to assist, plain and simple.
If there is any value, at all, in a face to face meeting, then a device can only enhance it. If there is no value, then that consideration has no place in the discussion about how to have the most productive face to face.
Anecdotally I've always found that when I see a doodle made during a meeting or lecture I get a much more vivid recollection of the actual content.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090226210039.h....
At 49ppd it's on par with AVP if the goal is just to mirror a laptop display.
I didn’t even think about how nice they’d be to use outside on sunny days, compared with a laptop (or, coupled with one).
I'm not necessarily criticizing that - more thinking that we're likely approaching a fidelity threshold where you no longer care it's a screen (I still don't think we're quite there yet and suspect this is just one gen before the device that will survive the few months in VR great filter).
Running late, took a webex call from the back of my minivan on my MacBook Pro. Except I had enough screen real estate with the virtual monitor to do work during the boring parts. The best part was going full immersion and hearing the rain falling on a high mountain lake in between people speaking.
I also usually wake up overnight and want to work, but can’t because my office is located in the master bedroom. Now I can sit on my couch and not have to hunch over.
Finally, I took my dog to the dog park and worked with no screen glare and big virtual display
Also, watching movies on the moon is pretty cool.
Vision Pro is approaching a quality that I feel is acceptable, somewhere between "flawless reality" and a decent screen. The virtual environments are crisper than the camera passthrough mixed environments.
There is definitely room for improvement on screen quality, but in general I am impressed.
I can definitely see pixels on the device if I’m wearing contacts unlike what most of the early reviewers claimed.
But it’s not so bad as to be unusable and you don’t really notice them in most contexts - the main place I notice pixels is using it as a screen for macOS. VisionOS apps are rendered very large by default so the resolution deficiencies aren’t as apparent.
Overall it is very impressive but there’s also much room for improvement in resolution.
Personally I can't see any pixelation. It's even better than reality. That being said passthrough cameras' resolution do suck but it's not what it's important and probably the easiest problem to solve.
Does it obviate the need for the 149$ Zeiss add-ons ?
Do you blink enough in the environment ?
The main advantage is that it's less crowded in there, I suppose.
Why would I actually want that? You've been able to do this for decades by hooking a TV up to your laptop and while that certainly has space challenges that limit the number of people that'll try it, it's not like tech bloggers were flocking to hook up 65" TVs to their macs and lovingly wax poetic about the productivity gains, either.
You can choose 4k resolution and get extra real estate
I just went to an Apple Store to demo the Vision Pro and walked out feeling like I had a religious experience. I was overcame with emotion over that immersion demo, those baby rhinos completely blew my mind. I'm booking another appointment soon to get another taste. I really hope the price becomes manageable for consumers like me; I love the tech and want the future but can't afford it.
Despite its imperfections, wow is it fantastic. I'm writing now from a Mac virtual display (which, yes, is a bit blurry). But how could I return this thing? It's the most impressive product Apple's ever made and it's genuinely useful. It's not an expensive novelty by any means. What an achievement.
But, I think you should consider a pair of AR glasses from xreal or rokid. They cost a fraction of the price, have less latency, and you don't need to worry about battery life.
They're also much much more portable. I think using AVP primarily as an external display is a huge huge waste.
The Vision Pro wants to be a VR headset that throws away the existing VR ecosystem. No VR controllers, no beat saber, no Oculus Link, no PC VR.
At the same time, it wants to be a productivity machine that can’t compile its own code and has the same software limitations as iPadOS.
Mobile airplane computer? It fits in a backpack worse than a regular laptop and gets 1/10 the battery life. You could buy an economy plus subscription from United Airlines for 7 years for the same price and just use your laptop on the plane.
I agree that Apple has paths forward to fix all of this, but I disagree that they will go down those paths. I see Apple products like the iPad stagnating because Apple refuses to take them beyond a constrained vision. Apple will never let you install applications outside of their walled garden and they’ll never let you compile code on the Vision Pro.
That’s fine for an entertainment device like a $500 Quest 3 but a $3,500 “spatial computer?”
[0] https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/04/apple-vision-pro-writing-...
Personally, with my ZEISS inserts for my prescription, the text is incredibly sharp. I often will forget it's a virtual display in front of me, and not my actual monitor. This seems to vary for people, but since I didn't have my ZEISS prescription on day one, and I got to experience the before and after – I REALLY wonder how many people have worse eyesight than they realize, or are thinking that using the thing without their glasses is not making a difference. It absolutely makes a huge difference.
In terms of comfort, it took a little while since I didn't go to the Apple Store, but it finally 'clicked' and I have a feel for how to wear it comfortably. Also, it's less forgiving of bad posture. So, you need to allow yourself time to experiment with how to wear it because it's worth it. It feels comfortable to me now – I spent hours in it yesterday.
My 6k monitor kicked the butt of the spatial computing screen. My Macbook was easier to use. I could use my phone laying on the side.
There were ultimately a lot better, less blurry display options.
The same as the `Pro Display XDR` but with more ports, and half the cost.
I have the XDR and got it as I live in an apartment which gets a ton of natural sunlight and the XDR goes to 1000 nits sustained brightness (1600 peak for hdr). The specs of the Dell panel indicate max brightness of 450 nits, so not at all comparable.
I wager the guess that this is due to the "low" resolution that HMDs have. The last HMD I used was a HTC Vive Pro and there I could still see individual pixels. I have "high resolution eyes" (150-160% vision), but still I would assume that the resolution is still too low to render sharp text at a distance.
There's some math there. The ppi equivalent is rather low despite the rather high resolution and ridiculous density of the displays themselves, after blowing it up to 100 degrees of FOV it ends up being much lower "density" than anything else you're used to looking at
Yeah I do that by putting my monitor near a window, and using my special ability to move my ocular organs to decide what I get to see. It saves me 3k dollars and having to wear some awkward device on my head.
For the vision pro price you can afford one for home and another for the office.
Watching videos was fine because I felt I could just let my eyes relax, but trying to focus on text was anything but fun.
I have contacts and am not convinced that the fit/focus I had was correct, but it was not a good first impression from a "productivity device" perspective.
Apple is going to have a problem with how finicky VR headsets are.
"Headphones are a miraculous thing. You put on a pair of headphones and you get the same experience you get with a great pair of speakers, right? There’s no such thing as headphones for video. There’s not something I can carry with me, that I can put on and it gives me the same experience I get when I’m watching my 50-inch plasma display at home. Until someone invents that, you’re gonna have these opposing constraints."
Walt Mossberg then mentions goggles, and Jobs says "but they're lousy!" (And Walt adds, "you never get a date if you wear them.")
For me it wasn’t quite enough. The fresnel lenses make “God rays” at the edges and the text was readable, but not pleasant to read.
I’m planning sometime to try the Quest 3. The Vision Pro seems like it might be the best option because it’s purpose built for that. Also I’m a Mac user and imagine the experience to be whole.
I work with someone who has said "if the Quest 2 was a 0 on the usability scale, the Quest 3 is an easy 8 - it's that much better." I've not tried it myself, but I don't think my coworker is exaggerating.
(edited) I still could not program for 2 hours comfortably on Quest 3. I can do that on the AVP
The comment above about "god rays" is correct in my experience, as well as the lenses being blurry towards the edges due to how they're made.
However, I realized that I need prescription lenses for VR, because while I have -0.75 in one eye, that's still enough to throw the overall experience off a lot (and the glasses that I have are too wide for the headset).
Aside from that, what helped me immensely is the Immersed app: https://immersed.com/ where the actual environment is rendered on the Quest, whereas the actual monitors are streamed over from the PC which helps immensely with how legible things are. SteamVR and the Oculus Link apps are both trash in comparison, there's aliasing, shimmering, or everything ends up being way too blurry. I tried using the Horizon Workrooms app, but it wouldn't work because I have 4 monitors and it only supports up to 3. There's also the Virtual Desktop app which might be good, but I didn't feel like paying for it at the moment.
So yeah, Quest 2 starts out at a disadvantage compared to other options (aside from cost, I guess), but there are factors that can absolutely ruin it, such as using the wrong method of displaying things. Also Quest 2 is just a little bit on the heavy side, or at least feels that way after prolonged usage, with the default face interface, even with a custom head strap.
Virtual Desktop has a ton of features, but only permits one virtual display.
For me, the unlimited virtual displays with unconstrained resolution offered by the free SteamVR overlay Desktop+ is the best way to work. Seems plenty sharp to me, and not limited to 1080p resolution like Meta Remote Desktop. I can pop browser tabs into their own floating windows separate from my main virtual displays, and set up a floating portrait window for discord or slack.
Immersed is a non-starter for me bc of their subscription requirement to have anything approaching a decent monitor setup. Their sales tactics and YouTube spam are also a turnoff. It’s also nowhere near as customizable as what I was describing above, which has been fantastic.
Is this the one you meant? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1494460/Desktop/
It's actually the option I tried because SteamVR itself was too blurry to be readable, however I ended up with a weird issue where the mouse cursor wasn't visible, no matter what I tried.
That said, the Immersed marketing feels very... I'm not sure, brand heavy, as opposed to just "here's a cool tool, hope it serves you with great utility", even if it mostly fits the other category in my mind?
In my case it works out nicely even without virtual screens because I have 4 1080p monitors, but honestly, I already pay for JetBrains IDEs and the likes of MobaXTerm, so I could imagine throwing some money their way, even if their coworking/social aspects do rub me slightly the wrong way.
But hey, I'm just happy to find anything that gives me passable visual quality, though I wonder if getting a better GPU or overriding the bitrate limits might improve things, or maybe supersampling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678041 ?
Might be worth comparing to for those who've tried the AVP.
I used to try to code in the quest3 but the resolution felt like I might as well be coding on my phone. I'll go buy one today if this would be an office replacement for me.
I have a great workspace well-tailored for me with a massive desk, ultrawide monitor, nice speakers, etc., but I still pop into my vision pro and screen mirror my laptop to get work done. If I'm having trouble focusing, the environments and white noise generation are really helpful. I've also noticed that it really boosts my productivity when I would otherwise be disturbed by a cluttered environment.
One day it will get there, today is not that day. That said, you should go try it at an Apple Store, it's free to do.
Signed up for a demo, booked a week in advance, got there and waited the entire length of the demo (30 min) to even have the one person doing demos get to me. Then, no way for them to show the only thing I care about for this, which is viewing a display to see if working is possible. Not only that, but unlike Quest demos I’ve done, there seemed to Be a very strict demo flow. Might as well have just watched a video.
Welp, going to just cost them money instead since they have a 14 day return policy so planning on “demoing” myself. I’ll keep it if it can actually do this but 80% sure they’ll be processing a return from me in two weeks.
Weird way to try to sell an expensive device. Also seeing returns are like 50% which aligns with them not actually letting people demo beyond a set path to find if they want it or not.
Now I can sit on my couch in a much more comfortable and ergonomic? position with 4k screen size virtual display.
Plus I can watch movies with the sound on and not wake anyone up.
One improvement vs phones is there’s no more bending the neck down to look at something in your hands.
Interesting times!
I link it up to my phone, wire up a 60% keyboard and fire up a VPN/ssh. The Galaxy DeX environment is pretty usable for other apps, and a BT mouse can alleviate the goofiness of the "phone as a touchpad" control scheme.
I've used it with an HDMI/usb-c cable from my desktop and it works just as well, though attempting to switch between virtual and real displays through the glasses is headache-inducing at best.
I'd say you accomplish 60% of the effect of the AVP, conservatively.
You can tell by the icon floating at the top right of the windows, which appears for "compatible apps" aka iPad apps.
It helps that I have optimised a great part of my workflow due to me liking tablets.
Like others have said, AVP is like strapping an iPad on your head - I happen to like my iPad, too.
So it's not multiple desktop screens it's multiple windows from locally running apps.
No, the only reason you can't run vscode is that no one has put in the effort to port it. It's a problem of financial incentives and not a problem of "fences."
Edit: so it is indeed similar/same; cannot run normal desktop software even though desktop cpu.
Edit: Desktop software can be ported to other operating systems. Just because an operating system can't run a different, desktop operating system's software that doesn't mean it can't run desktop software. The CPU is used in iPads too. It is used between 3 different form factors.
At the end of the day what's possible under the current rules aren't that different from just running it in Safari, so why bother ?
Probably what they do and it's most likely more marketing than a really new OS with breaking changes to how apps run, but I haven't looked into it.
I’d also like to see app re-render your iPhone, Apple Watch and ipad screens which are pretty blurry in pass through. Also some sort of workaround for Face ID on iPhone when you’re wearing Vision Pro. Seems like things Apple is uniquely positioned to do.
Totally agree, I just made the same comment elsewhere in this thread. And yes, if I've authenticated with IrisID or whatever it's called then when I raise my phone do the same thing that allows my mac to unlock from my watch. Throw a little notification in the headset (some sound/animation) so if it's not me picking up the phone then it alerts me that someone else is and/or force me to do the IrisID to unlock the phone. After years of FaceID I just expect it to work 99% of the time and it was annoying to enter in my code to use my phone, felt very anti-Apple. A very Apple thing was the Universal Control when using Mac Virtual Display which lets you control/type in other AVP apps, that felt like magic.
It's not impossible, it's just annoying.
It would be nice if they could take input as well, to display inside a screen somewhere (HDMI or whatever).
I feel pretty confident we're going to have this available as sunglasses before I'm dead, which is pretty cool.
Talk about bad UX.
I was somewhat intrigued by why people would recreate the same kind of setup in AR with monitor screens. Ok you get more of them, but at some point more screens is just distracting.
What if instead this was the occasion for a true AR experience. Like instead of popping up a monitor, you can open a textbook. As in a physical text book sitting on your desk, each page would be covered in qr codes or whatever uniquely identifying that page. Then the vision pro could fill in the page with a computer generated UI: buttons, text inputs and so on.
And then you could spread all these pages around your desk and actually touch them, and carry them around. Imagine your code being on a sheet of paper instead of in one window.
Imagine your trello board being actual postit notes stuck on your wall that you can unstick and edit.
Imagine your wall full of papers, each of them showing some monitoring aspect of your system.
Like all your browser tabs are displayed on the wall.
Jesus I am excited
A virtual book can’t give you the same level of interaction as a physical one. Virtual interaction are clunky at best.
Define dystopia.
But the scene I pictured when I read that line, rightly or wrongly, was straight out of pearl jam's do the evolution. It's evolution baby.
Those apps might not take off just now, but in a generation or five, the pioneering app creators might be laughing at the rest of us. Or at least until Apple decides to take down their apps due to sudden ToC changes. Just think of the plethora of reasons AVP apps could be taken down for 'failing to comply with safety standards' and the like.
Sounds nice for the office, but find myself conflicted with the notional operating value prop of continuously juicing north of 200W less graphics compute (?!) just putting idle pixels on screen on a home workstation that seldom gets shutdown.
Curious if you've realized meaningful productivity gains since switching to that setup, and what graphics card(s) are you using to drive them?
Glad to answer any questions.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inspect-browser/id1203594958
If the weather is good, I can take my gear + NReal Air places and not just into the dusty attic.
True, in good weather it also means mosquitoes and gnats, but you can repel them.
Real experiences for freakin’ .1x the price, and it works in Linux too.
Hopefully one day apple will come to their senses and let this thing be open for real development work, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yes, I am exaggerating a little bit, but frankly coding like this is kinda silly, you don't need this headset to fancy manipulate text presentation when the really important thing, the abstractions, are in your brain.
Tons of people buy high spec laptops, or high spec desktops with high spec monitors and high spec keyboards just to code.
Turns out people pay for an experience that suits them.
Yet, I find it very interesting to explore what tomorrow's work could look like given this approach to 'spatial computing'.
Because tech will eventually become cheaper and better, perhaps reaching a level that is won't costs more than any other piece of gear.