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Comment by Syzygies | Hacker News Reader

I lucked into a demo yesterday while my wife bought a new iPhone and Apple Watch. The guy was free. The device is stunning, beyond our normal experience with other devices. One should try one, before debating its future.

My potential use case is to better understand 3-dimensional topology. I'm not concerned about "popular" uses other than how that affects the viability of the product.

There's a potential for some astounding abstract art, when visual artists catch up with musicians who master their own digital tools. This thing is capable of inducing drug-free hallucinations. And of course one recalls the killer app for VCRs...

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> One should try one, before debating its future.

Sound like a solution looking for problems

Or an alternative to existing solutions

for which existing problems?

Representing, manipulating and discussing data in a more detailed way

My buddy got one for free. The continual feedback is “this is cool but not worth anything close to $3500”. Unless Apple is willing to significantly reduce their normal margin profile this just isn’t ever going to see mass adoption.

It’s not the price. VR is just not generally useful. There will always be niche uses and a small audience for it, but it’s not the iPhone.

I bought a Newton when it came out. A very expensive way to glimpse the future, including the iPhone.

When VR gets more comfortable to wear, it will represent a more dramatic shift than moving from terminals to graphical user interfaces.

For now, the Vision Pro very accurately tracks your eyes, but waits for an explicit finger gesture to act. Future interfaces with deep learning will take the form of very sophisticated visual autocomplete, guided by observations of our reactions that would destroy us at poker.

The Vision Pro is the camel's nose under the tent.

One of my least favorite things about the VP is the lack of deterministic input. (Finger gestures failing to respond as intended maybe 5% of the time.) The last thing I want in VR is even less determinism.

We’re backsliding from 100% reliable buttons to slightly finicky touch inputs to inscrutable AI-backed gesture detectors. This goes against decades of HI research.

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