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Comment by saretup | Hacker News Reader

> Watching movies in Vision Pro is great at first but most people will stop doing it after the initial novelty excitement wears off Watching TV/movies in virtual reality seemed like such an incredibly compelling idea that we (the Oculus team at Meta/Facebook) built an entire product around that idea — Oculus Go. Launched in 2018, Oculus Go was the biggest product failure I’ve ever been associated with for the simple reason that it had extremely low retention despite strong partnerships with Netflix and YouTube. Most users who bought Oculus Go completely abandoned the headset after a few weeks.

You can't possibly extrapolate the movie watching retention rate from Oculus Go to Apple Vision Pro. That's like saying most people won't use ipod based on the data we collected from our walkman.

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I don't know. I have roughly 0 interest in watching movies with a VR headset. And I have a VR headset, such that I have tried it a bit.

You are also kind of... ignoring the fact that the walkman was very successful. Ridiculously so, in fact. Such that, people did predict ipod like things would be a success because of it. There was a whole line of successful portable music devices leading up to the ipod.

I thought this was one of the most interesting insights because there is a lot of discussion around why Meta isn't / hasn't gone after media viewing as a primary use case. Understanding now that they really tried and it failed hard at Oculus previously adds a lot of insight to that.

I do have to say, for me it does add up to one huge missing element for Vision Pro: why Apple didn't ship some kind of co-presence features on day 1 is totally baffling to me. I think it likely stems from the fact they clearly missed their mark with Personas and presumably they didn't want to then introduce cartoon style avatars like Meta did. They've decided to die on the hill of realistic avatars and they are actually dying there. It means people hate Personas, they don't have co-presence which is damaging the media viewing and preventing a lot of the AR and professional use cases from developing where co-presence is also a must, sometimes the primary feature.

It's fascinating to me because Apple pitched so hard at their headset not being socially isolating, but they ultimately created the most socially isolating headset of all.

Agreed, I've had my Vision Pro for a month, and I still use it to watch shows/movies and as my portable external display. It has its daily and weekly use cases

The OP says it's too uncomfortable (including too heavy) to wear for that long. What is your experience with that?

> It has its daily and weekly use cases

What do you do with it?

I loved movie watching with my AVP but I agree it's too uncomfortable, even lying in bed and having less weight on my cheek bones. I watched two hours of Guards of the Galaxy 3 and got tired of wearing it and finished the last hour on my 13" laptop screen

The dual loop makes a world of difference to me. Interestingly, lying in bed makes it more uncomfortable, not less, since more of the weight is on the face.

I wear it about 30 min at a time, 2 min breaks in between, 2-3 hours total daily.

Daily use case: portable Macbook monitor weekly use case: watching shows or a movie. I have to pause due to dry eyes, not due to the heaviness. After the first 2 days of using it, it's not actually that heavy afterward, but it is noticeable if you pay attention.

Why not? The device has a very similar form factor and the use case is the same, except they’re missing the partnerships with Netflix and YouTube. The Walkman was also an incredibly popular device for years. Not to undersell the iPod, either, but I think the innovation was as much in the distribution channel (iTunes) as the product design.

How do you watch a movie on the vision pro with your family?

i am going to reply earnestly here:

shareplay over facetime is wonderful. i have watched a few big movies with my buddies in this way

People keep vastly overestimating the amount of content that is consumed in group settings.

I watch a show / movie with my girlfriend a couple times a week. A nice TV is still better for that obviously.

But I watch stuff on my own every single day. Personal media consumption for me is probably 8x my group-based consumption. I would wager most people these days have similar habits.

It's the opposite for me so I'm outside of your "most people"

Most people !== everyone by definition :)

I do think my situation fits current society more though. Families under one roof consuming media only through the shared TV is less and less how the (at least Western) world operates.

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