Meta cancels high-end mixed reality headset after Apple Vision Pro struggles | Hacker News Reader

Meta cancels high-end mixed reality headset after Apple Vision Pro struggles

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357 pointstosh526 comments

A counter point on premium VR headsets. They are teleportation devices.

I've used every popular VR device, but one Vision Pro experience stood out - 'The Haleakala environment'[1]

It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.

The Vision pro's lack of a killer app because development is unintuitive, userbase is small, the UX is alien and the hardware costs of constructing these experience is still rather high. Give it a few years. The hardware is already there. This isn't a solution in search of a problem. This is PalmOS, a solution that is too early to the market.

I have family with disabilities. Being able to teleport my loved ones to places they could never go themselves is worth the $3000. If I could record my most profound memories with 'VR recorder', I would. My parent missed my graduation because of being continents away. You think they wouldn't want to be teleported to it ? Wedding photographers cost $4000+, so we can relive those memories through shoddy snapshots. Why not be teleported back to the most beautiful day ?

Don't knock it till you try it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK63OSmF1FM

The thing is that I don’t really see the Vision Pro as Palm OS. Palm OS was out for years and years and was really successful, all things considered.

Sure, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as iOS or Android now, but it obviously filled a niche for a large enough number of people that it stuck around and pioneered that market. I had a Kyocera 6035 Palm “smartphone” over half a decade before the iPhone came out, and the Handspring Treos were also awfully popular among early adopters.

That credit here goes squarely to Oculus/Meta, and the Quest in specific.

Vision Pro, at best, is a Newton, stuffed with tech cool enough to be Really Neat, but with either too much tradeoff or that doesn’t go far enough to be a sea change in usability. There’s a little bit of Pippin in there too, with Apple not quite understanding how much games and game like activities drive VR adoption and how best to leverage that. Ultimately, the Vision Pro is a tech demo for a much better device and ecosystem in the future.

I think the one thing the VP has going for it over a Newton is timing. For once, later is better. Newton did all their stuff way early—then Palm came out with a fraction of it and turned out to be Good Enough so everyone forgot the Newton.

In this case, we already have Quest out as the Good Enough device, which makes it the right time to start discussing what the evolution would be. In that sense, I think the Vision Pro is very interesting.

My hope is that the Vision Pro is like the Apple Watch. It launched without a clear idea of why people would buy it--originally Apple tried to sell their bland aluminum box as a fashion accessory--and it was only after multiple iterations that they found out health and fitness was the main appeal and focused on it. If they pay attention to how people do use VR headsets, maybe they can do that again.

The cost of the device is way off. Apple watch is still vaguely in line with the prices of other nice ish watches. $400 or so. Expensive but not otherworldly so. Vision pro is so expensive you rule out the middle class. Its price point was conceived by people who haven’t left northern california for some time.

> originally Apple tried to sell their bland aluminum box as a fashion accessory--and it was only after multiple iterations that they found out health and fitness was the main appeal and focused on it.

Wristwatch fitness trackers had already established this as baseline market fit long before Apple. The benefit of the Apple Watch for me is to not have to carry a phone in my pocket and still be able to do smartphone things like message, pay for things, or even make calls if I need to. Then the pandemic needed you to scan QR codes to do contract calls, and then normalized QR codes for restaurant orders, so I'm back to the phone and my watch gathers dust.

The stumbling block here seems likely to be Apple's fundamental dislike of, and disconnect with, all things gaming.

It's an aesthetic and cultural divide. Like premium German car brands vs ricers, and I don't need to tell you which is which.

As a sibling notes, we already had had fitbit for 6 years by the time Apple came out with the Watch. They tried to make it about more than fitness and eventually conceded that that wasn't happening and focused on the market that existed before their release.

So if this plays out this same way then in a few years Apple will finally concede that VR is for video games and finally start focusing on the gamer market.

Yeah, that’s another good comparison.

The Palm equivalent in that comparison would be Fitbit and possibly Pebble. Apple waited until there was a proven market in wearables, then figured out how to combine that market with the strengths of their existing ecosystem to improve upon value. Then they propped up the model line with $$$ until they actually became good enough for people to buy.

I’m relatively optimistic they can do that here too, but that device needs to have a model that does everything it does today (well, maybe not the creepy visor eyes) and more for less than $1000 and at about 2/3 the weight max, before I think AW-like adoption will possibly happen.

Exploration seems like an interesting use case. Probably more than gaming or wearable monitors in spite of the bubble here.

I'm still a bit meh on the Apple Watch in spite of buying an early one and then an Ultra that I got a good deal on. I don't care much about the quantified health thing and the battery life is still an issue even with the Ultra. Like for hiking though.

Hopefully Asahi Linux can be run on the thing, so it can be useful outside of Apple's walled garden too. :)

Yes, it’s the games stupid.

There is one group of people who are willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money for this product, and that’s gamers.

Unfortunately Apple does not and has never understood games as art. They only care about casual games that bring in the $$.

Apple also has beefs with Khronos, NVIDIA, and Epic.

I had thought that when VP came out, Apple would make amends with the gaming industry particularly Epic because they really need Epic’s on their side for VP to succeed. Who is going to build games for this thing in the best engine if Apple can ban Epic’s developer account at any time?

Nope. App Store revenue comes first. It’s just the same as the iPad Pro. Great hardware squandered because of App Store rent seeking.

Nvidia demanded Apple to allow its video driver to be able to phone home just like it does in the windows toy OS(running in ring 0 no less). Epic/Tencent fortnight abuses the DNS protocol probably to bypass wirewalls. Both can be observed via wireshark, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Personally I’m glad Apple told both of them to go pound sand.

Is just too pricey and a bit cumbersome for masses, the tech is good and we could all use it even just for some experiences that can only be done in VR

Their decision to use glass for the housing is stupifying. It's on your head and swinging around, it should be absolutely as light as possible.

Too pricey in a time where many fear a recession. So it's an even worse launch to market than usual.

I want to believe you but until the price range becomes below $1000 or so there’s virtually no market. It’s a toy. People don’t need a teleportation device. It’s fun to play with, like a toy. It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost. It’s also too expensive to be given as a holiday or birthday gift by most family members.

I believe the “just give it a few years thing” but only if it has a footnote saying that “few” could mean 10 or 15. I don’t think anyone really knows.

> It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost

Exactly this, for now the minimal use cases for these kinds of high-end VR headsets leave them firmly in the "gimmick" category. I'm pretty sure some mass-market use case will be found for them, maybe even outside of gaming, but the fact that some pretty smart people haven't found this one already is a teensey-tiny bit worrying too.

  until the price range becomes below $1000 or so there’s virtually no market.

Probably because it's cheaper to fly and literally be somewhere and actually enjoy it rather than exist there for a minute or two and then get bored.

If Apple could make the UX of the physical device a bit better and had a larger library of places to explore I would absolutely give it to my grandma. She’s mostly stuck in a her flat alone all day. Walking is hard. She FaceTimes and calls people, but going to see beauty is mostly something she doesn’t get to experience anymore. If she could watch a sunrise in Hawaii instead of worrying about political news I think her day to day would be much better and I would be happy to spend the money to give her that QoL improvement.

> Until the price range becomes below $1000 or so there’s virtually no market. It’s a toy. People don’t need a teleportation device. It’s fun to play with, like a toy. It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost.

This argument seems valid to anyone that hasn't browsed "The Sharper Image" catalog in the back of an airline seat, or even the "high end" showroom at a Best Buy.

There's been a huge market for >70" TVs since mid 2010s, costing $3,500 - $10,000 US for much of that timeframe. Today you'd have to compare to 100" class: https://www.amazon.com/100-inch-tv/s?k=100+inch+tv&s=price-d...

All your objections would certainly apply. It's a toy. People don't need it. It's fun, but doesn't solve a "real" problem. It's too expensive to be given as a gift.

AVP offers a >240" screen, and fully immersive 3D. It needs very little to make movie watching a shared experience in the same room, or with friends far away.

Priced solely against a TV, people have proven happy to pay for entertainment toys. If the initial OOTB release had supported "seeing" someone watching the same content "with" you in Disney's theater or the VR spaces, this buying segment would have taken more interest.

A 386 PC cost $3000+ after the 486 was released. Sometimes I think our expectations for dirt cheap supercomputers are out of whack.

I pretty much feel like the vision pro is overkill for the tasks it wants to do.

For a newbie a meta quest 3 is more than enough.

Index or meta quest pro? That's the shit.

But i liked the battery begin a separate thing from the headset himself, i think that's good user design.

I think it will have a market at $2000.

MacBook Pros are 50% of Mac sales and they start at $2000.

> I have family with disabilities.

This has an interesting history. I’m struggling to find it and hope I have it right. John Gruber or maybe Accidental Tech Podcast did a segment on an podcast ages ago in relation to accessibility settings on the iPhone.

Whoever it was credited a particular Apple engineer who pushed hard with accessibility features arguing that at some point, everyone has some sort of issue (sight, hearing, movement etc).

I’ve tried, but can’t find the episode, which is a shame as this sort of thing is Apple at its best, which does get lost in the swamp of depressing decisions they have made in recent years.

I think it's been said better elsewhere but it might be: https://atp.fm/483

John for a bit @ 1:11:44

Casey and John @ 1:15:30 "The more time you spend on this planet the more likely one of these features will be useful for you"

It's nice that they try, but I wish the accessibility features weren't so terrible.

Case in point: I put off getting a new prescription, and ended up setting the font size up + enabling bold text on my iPhone. The first party apps often don't work well.

Of everything on my phone, GasBuddy handled it best. It's basically unusable with large fonts, but it suggested I go into per-app settings and disable display accessibility settings just for it. Now that I know that's a thing, I can blacklist the 90% of apps on the phone that don't display right, I guess.

Since the new glasses arrived, I'll probably just disable accessibility. However, my experience doesn't bode well for people that actually need reading glasses and want to use their phones when they're out and about.

I felt this keenly when my children were very young. At times I only had one arm/hand free because I was holding a child in the other. Or I could only read poorly in the dark because I didn’t want to turn on the lights and disturb the kids.

Since then I always see accessibility thinking as a universal benefit, not just for the “abled”.

Reminds me of the Cindy Li quote “we are all just temporarily abled”

This is awesome, and this type of accessibility (noting that it can be temporary, permanent or situational) and consideration is known as inclusive design in modern parlance.

Accessibility as it is in modern parlance isn't only for people with disabilities.

Disabling the annoying needless animations on iOS is in Accessibility for some reason.

> The hardware is already there.

Well, sort of. The quality of display and control hardware is there; the comfort of the device as a whole absolutely is not. And I'm saying that as one of those weirdos who will get into VR for 4-hour sessions.

It's also absolutely worse off than it could have otherwise been, to an extent way more severe than any other Apple device, by the Apple obsession with aesthetics over functionality. Even aside from the weight issues with all the glass and metal, they created the worst possible design for comfort when it comes to how it actually sits on your head.

The field of view is definitely not there with Vision Pro.

Sometimes one needs to have the vision (no-pun intended) realized as hardware-in-hand for the problems to actually sink-in. I would bet that the next version of vision pro will be a significant jump in usability and addressing of the issues (which is also made more probable by the fact that this is a segment still in its infancy, by measure of the possibilities it offers, so changes will be big compared to, say, changes in a mature ecosystem like Android).

I had the opposite experience. Have had nearly every device. Rift, Rift S, Quest 2, Quest 3, PSVR, PSVR2, Index. Was not impressed at all the the AVP when I tried it. Worse experience almost entirely. Hand gestures suck. Stare to select sucks. Experiences weren't as good as even Rift for me.

You can use a mouse keyboard and game controller for a cursor if you want. You can also turn on a mode to do normal neck controlled cursor (I mapped it to triple click of the button)

Seriously? Come on. I was one of the first hundred people to kickstart the Rift and have owned every major consumer headset (except the Index) since. The AVP absolutely destroys the Rift in every way.

The only strong argument for Rift/etc. would be for gaming, but the AVP isn’t being sold as a gaming device. The new beta Vision OS2 also signicantly improves hand gestures.

I too was unimpressed with the Apple Store AVP demo, but after owning it for a while I absolutely see where it fits in (especially once a non-Pro version comes along).

Yeah, it was quite telling that most of the new features and demos, were for the most part already available on Holo Lens.

Seeing Vision Pro at WWDC was like a deja-vu from BUILD a couple of years earlier.

I think the teleportation angle is even more compelling from the point of view of enabling virtual co-presence. With photo-realistic avatars as Apple and Meta have both demonstrated are fully possible, we'll soon be in a situation where you can click a button and be fully present with anybody anywhere, any time. This is as close to true physical teleportation that humanity will ever get, and I expect that once it's mature and reliable and available at accessible price points, the tangible benefits will make this tech take off in a huge way.

We can’t even get people to routinely turn a webcam on at most companies existing meetings. Even internally at Meta and Apple, staff aren’t exactly falling over themselves to take meetings in headsets right now.

The idea people will be strapping computers to their faces for meetings will “take off in a huge way” any time soon is extremely far fetched for me.

This use-case is decades away from being compelling and to a rounding error, nobody wants it.

" This is PalmOS, a solution that is too early to the market."

But Apple has the resources to keep supporting and evolving it in response to user feedback until it can be cheap enough for mass use, at which point, if they don't blow it, their lead will be hard for competitors to overcome. They know exactly what they're doing.

> I've used every popular VR device, but one Vision Pro experience stood out - 'The Haleakala environment'[1]

> It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.

Honest question, but how much was your own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories. Did you have the same feelings with other VR experiences?

Not sure. The other environments felt just as real.

But lake, snow and fake moon felt sterile in comparison. There is something about being at the top of mountain with clouds and the sun rising on the horizon that hits different.

> own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories

Doubt it, but even if it was, I don't see this as a bad thing.

Not to deny the experience or the emotional value, its niche use. This would e.g. justify a co-pay from a health fund or an NHS program to make them available for people with profound issues, to have richer experience. Or, maybe old age care or people with dementia.

But thats not how either Apple or FB are approaching this. They aren't addressing what your niche is: something to give value to people in very specific need.

Unknowingly you made the perfect argument against the Vision Pro. What you described is a VR experience which is precisely what apple set out not to do. They wanted an MR device and MR experiences. So if an immersive experience is what you want a cheap device will deliver it over time as the hardware catches up

Sure if you only care about 2 of the 5 senses and don't mind VR sickness. Then sure it's a teleportation device. For everyone else it's basically an expensive and awkward portable display.

I have worn my AVP for about 6 hours a week since it came out. Not once, for one second, did I have any motion sickness.

It’s a completely solved issue. The head tracking runs on a completely different chip and hyper visor layer from the OS so even with a kernel panic the tracking doesn’t fail.

When I look at the commonality between all the successful consumer electronics, it's really about how easily they fit into people's lives. The AirPods and Apple Watch were two of the most recent smash hits because they are an improvement on what existed before

For me to watch a video on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV is easy. Turn on screen. Play video. With wedding photos, you can make them your phone screen background, you can printout photos and put them on your wall, they fit into your life.

With VR, I have to blind myself to my surroundings, I have to either not move around sitting perfectly still or clear out a bunch of space. What has become more popular in recent years is Podcasting and a huge reason why is because how nonintrusive it is, you can listen to a podcast doing the dishes or on your way to work. VR is the opposite of nonintrusive.

I feel the immersion of VR is what's holding it back, not why it will be successful. It's only when mixed reality takes off that I think we're going to see a big change.

Have you tried the quest 3? A lot of your concerns, I feel, go away with pass thru. Like you say, mixed or augmented reality is going to be society altering.

I was walking through my house, navigating doorways, stairs, and changes in lighting, with my son's headset while I had the equivalent of a 30in monitor playing Netflix following me around. I sat on the couch and pinned the "tv" to the wall, enlarged it to be a 80in tv.

What truly is missing is a shared environment between multiple headsets in the same location. Movie night where the whole wall is a shared experience, and it can be synced with grandma who is three states over; even better, we can look over and see grandma in AR and she sees us. Distributed family night! Some ergonomics to work out. That, and seeing faces.

The immersive videos are amazing. Stick a VR camera on the best seat at a concert, sports event, wedding, etc. People will pay for Taylor Swift or the Super Bowl. The tech is very close, the Quest is a good price, VR cameras are ~$5k. The only thing left is the content creators.

The potential is amazing, and it's what has gotten so many people to sink so much time, effort, and money into developing these things ever since the Oculus devkits.

But the hardware isn't there yet either. If it keeps enough momentum to develop, we're going to look back at these headsets like 90s smartphones. The AVP and the Quest are heavy. They're thick. Their battery life is terrible, and despite how good Apple's screens and camera software are, they still have a long way to go in lots of areas before they really deliver on a virtual reality.

The software is probably the bigger problem, but the hardware needs a lot of help before normal people are going to use these on a regular basis.

Not all tech is a destined to be all encompassing.

VR has been “the next big thing” for more than 50 years. VR was invented in 1968

Video phone was invented way back. (1936). It took a very long time to be common and in frequent use. And it’s still not a killer feature.

If not for video phone we would not have the penetration of work from home we now have. It was science fiction when featured in Back to the Future

Makes sense:

But do you need to BUY one? This is the thing I realized with VR sets, personally.

They are a great day at the fair, but who goes to the fair EVERYDAY?

Exactly. All the use cases for new tech like vr headphones or watches or whatever is just the exact same functionality I already have in another form factor. Why bother. I don’t need to pay $400 to look at incoming texts on my wrist instead of the slab in my pocket I already own. I don’t need to spend $3500 to look at 40 foot wide emails.

An addict, that's who. And this is exactly what this technology will eventually enable - seeing the world through an influencer's eyes while sitting on a ratty couch in a dilapidated apartment. William Gibson painted this picture beautifully in Count Zero.

It's still photogrammetry + skybox, not that much different from what Valve were showing off in The Lab back in 2016. PPD is higher on account of the more advanced headset and that does make a difference, but it didn't blow me away or anything. You can still see the seams when you look close, the cutoff point between geometry and façade, you notice that there's never much foliage nearby, that anything animated tends to look like a mesh from a video game, because it is.

They really need to figure out true, perspective correct volumetric video already.

In practice, how often would you “teleport”? Once a month maybe? The experience you mentioned sounds profound, but also fairly niche

If VR is to compete with smartphones, it needs at least more screen pixels, and AVP delivers. The multi-user UX is still undecided (hence the device leans so much on “teleporting” capability). But for sales calls, group work, education etc, high fidelity is a requirement.

As much as I don't like Apple or Steve Jobs, it's clear that they're missing a visionary who owns this sort of project and has a specific vision in mind. I doubt the Vision Pro would be flailing like this and Apple wouldn't be second-guessing itself and canceling related projects or reorganising. Maybe it's the lack of a reality distortion field or just a lack of somebody to present or develop a holistic vision for this project both internally and externally, somebody who has long-term dreams that would be fulfilled by this project, eventually.

If even Apple doesn't know what to do with it and is doubting itself, why would anybody outside Apple have faith in it not being quietly discontinued in the coming years? So why invest in the platform? Why do research and develop use cases for it?

Jobs knew how to sell something, but more importantly, he knew how to sell the future of something, the potential.

> I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before.

Were you wearing some field-of-view limiting device at the time?

I grew up in the redwood forest and I do not always have enough time in my life to go back to them. I would love a vision pro experience where I can be in the redwoods! I think for me the teleportation experience is more important than gaming, tho gaming is rad too (I loved Half Life Alyx on my Index).

Do you know if there are environments available that are in the redwood forest?

Also does anyone know what kind of money someone could make publishing these environments? I have some videography experience - I would be inclined to rent a high end VR camera and create some captures for Vision Pro, but it would be nice if I could sell them on the app store and earn enough to buy a Vision Pro.

Right now the environments are like Apple Watch faces. First party only, and we’re getting about 1 new one per year.

I have been thinking about my first experiences in World of Warcraft in the early years. It changed me. The forests, mountains and trails were real to me and I enjoyed meeting friends and people from work in that world.

I realized the value of something like that but tweaked with different stories and contexts. I imagine elderly people being able to live a whole other life inside something like WOW instead of withering away alone as most people tend to do. You don't even need fancy AR hardware, though that wouldn't hurt and probably has better UX than banging on a keyboard.

> Give it a few years

you can give it 50 years. with the trash treatment apple gives developers, they won’t ever again release a new successful platform like iphone. They burnt the bridge to get there

You're right and I think it would make sense to have a feature that allows you to do a 3d recording.

If I could watch my daughter's first step in full 3d, I would be happy to pay the $3k and more.

I know you can do it right now with insta360 or whatever but I think there is a bit of a learning curve and it just isn't it that seamless.

Being able to record directly from the headset and play it back exactly how you saw it would make things much simpler and WYSIWYG and may be the reason for mass adoption

If I could watch my daughter's first step in full 3d, I would be happy to pay the $3k and more.

Don't you want to experience the authentic event rather than peering through a camera so that you can relive it later in 3D?

I'm always flabbergasted that people watch concerts through a camera, rather than just enjoying the experience. The facsimile is often poor compared to the experience itself. Also, reliving the same experience over and over can devalue it. Our memory is very good at making rose-tinted representations of past experiences.

I do understand the grandparent's travel example much better, especially for people who can't easily travel due to disabilities, etc.

You can already record in 3D both from the headset, from iPhone 15 Pro and higher and with Canon’s new upcoming lense:

https://www.usa.canon.com/newsroom/2024/20240610-lens

It’s uncanny to record something with the Vision Pro and then play it back while you’re sitting in the same location…feels like a glitch in the matrix.

You can do that. There are only two buttons on the device and one of them is “record this experience as a memory in the iCloud photos app exactly as how I experienced it”.

Since the cameras are small the ISO is at cell phone level, not great indoors.

So I just spent $5800 on the Canon R5 C + Stereo VR Lens kit, to record my baby boy’s moments in 8K for future VisonPro (2,3,4…) devices.

Weirdly, that aspect kind of turned me off from the VP. I found the forest lake and moon environments very immersive, but these were exactly the sorts of places I’d spend hours daydreaming about and mentally exploring. With the VP, all I can do is enjoy an artist’s limited vision. I don’t want to use a device that will weaken the muscles of my imagination.

The 1991 sci fi movie is called until the end of the world by wim wenders with William hurt who travels the world recording visions for his dying mom

Apple was late to the party, jumping onto AR/VR, when the companies that were there 10 years earlier started to move into AI as the next big thing.

Additionally, the current issues with the Apple developer community, on a device that targets a very niche market, even more niche as Apple doesn't want to associate it with games, makes the appeal of the Vision Pro quite lacklustre for most app developers.

I’ve “teleported” to several places including Mars. Imo it was just about the same experience as looking at some big pictures at a museum.

In this case the emotional experience is likely because the person was physically there before and his brain was filling in the gaps.

Not saying it’s not a a great experience..

Try The Quest: Everest next.

https://www.thequesteverest.com/

I don't doubt that it is awesome as an experience. However unless it gets cheaper it is not going to get enough users, and without enough users it is not going to get enough apps. Software devs are expensive and businesses want to address the largest possible market.

I tell everyone to schedule a Vision Pro demo. It’s 20 minutes, completely free, and will blow your mind. I would never actually buy one, but that was the best tech demo I’ve ever seen by a mile.

360 cameras are cheaper than you think. I like the GoPro 360 Max. You'll have to post process video to get it onto YouTube but you can then watch it.

You still need a professional to make the video otherwise it could be unpleasant for other viewers.

There is a lot to consider in making VR videos.

Angles, view points, speed of movement etc.

The thing is that you can have similar experience with 10 times cheaper Quest 3. The diminishing returns here is just staggering.

In fact people were teleporting themselves visually in 2016 with HTC Vive for 800$. I had it, it was awesome.

Honestly I'm happy to see AVP fail here to set precedence where entry point to a medium is the price of an average 3month salary (considering current global avg is around 1,500/mo) which is wildly unethical imo.

Are you saying that it's unethical to buy something that most people in the world can't afford?

I can 'teleport' elderly friends to wherever in the world with the Wander app on Oculus Quest

Would you be willing to describe in a bit more detail what your rich visual memory is like?

That is not unique to the mixed reality though. Which is what this is about.

The missing point here is always: do I want to haul all the shit up the mountain to record that or not?

At least we will be able to see what celebrities are doing.

Yeah, I get where you are coming from. There’s a VR experience made by Google that takes all the images from the Curiosity Rover’s stereo mast cam and turns them into a VR recreation of the surface of Mars.[1] I definitely felt some kind of way standing there on Mars, even though it was an imperfect rendering on a Quest 2. I was where no one has ever stood before and without a suit which no one will ever be able to do. VR is truly magical.

[1] https://accessmars.withgoogle.com/

>It was literally like being transported there.

Really? Despite the total lack of smell, taste, random atmospheric sensations against the body and also the lack of haptic feedback?

Imagine an experience like that but on mars or the moon. With real footage. Now that would be something!

I had such an emotional experience using the visionOS 2 beta to spatialize old photos. It was already amazing seeing it take a photo from 15 years ago and turn it 3D; but then when I "pinched" into it to make it become immersive and was suddenly in a place I hadn't been in years, with my (then young) kids looking just as they did back then, seeming to be standing there in the room with me… it was profound. I can't think of any other experience with technology I've had that even comes close.

This make somehow… uncomfortable. Perhaps humans are not meant to have perfect recall of, and dwell on, the past.

Is there a future proof way to capture photos today to view in 3D/VR devices of the future?

Wait what, it has an app that will convert a picture into a 3d environment? That's amazing.

If you’re asking yourself:

Why are all these giant companies going hard on AR and repeatibly in cycles it’s for one reason:

Egocentric data and full control of the highest bandwidth human I/O (vision + sound) is the most important possible data pipeline to get

Its the penultimate data pipe, with direct connection to the brain being the ultimate data pipe (see:Neuralink)

Every company that is winning and going to win in the future is the company that can best predict human behavior, such that it’s directly shaped by the platform itself

Google had a internal teaser trailer about this a decade ago that I’m sure someone has seen. Hyperreality was a short video about this probable and likely future

So it’s all a game to get perfect attention and the best way to do that is - literally - something like the interface that is used for the matrix on each hovercraft

If you introduce that too quickly - like now - then you scare everyone. So Apple rushed it and Meta is a actually good at timing in AR cause they have a giant lead, so they can wait till people forget.

The goal is titration of all encompassing spyware that eventually literally controls your behavior. The short story Manna is currently, unironically, and not hyperbolically what the employee experience at Target, Amazon warehouses and Walmart are 1:1. The corporate goal is to have everyone in their ecosystem deterministically creating, consuming and engaging at the peak for optimal tuning of the attention system.

It's dumber than that. Meta just wants to own an App Store and get 30% of some platform's revenue.

Meta already owns an app store. They introduced their own payments channel, then they cancelled it

They want to own a successful app store.

Imagine Craiglist / Facebook Marketplace taking 30%.

I'd believe that better if Meta didn't also deliberately provide a sideloading mechanism and encourage homebrew.

It's a believable end-goal, but it doesn't seem to be the direction they want to go in the immediate future.

it's likely dumber than that: bait and switch. Facebook had done this before: they gave third parties rich access to their data via Graph API, which in turn helped Facebook to grow.

Once their social graph growth phase began to slow down, Facebook severely cut off data access.

Normal people don't know how to side load.

The 5% that actually care are power users, these are the folks who buy every iteration, develop for the device, etc.

They can close that door any time they want, all they have to do is add a paywall for a developer account.

you are reading too much into Meta. They arent the NSA

My sense is that every generation we have engineers that grew up on some sort of VR-like sci-fi trope and keep trying to invent that thing.

Like flying cars, I'm not sure the writers are always right.

What you have to keep in mind is that this is already a done deal and was for decades. Rather than ai goggles people had 3 5 and 8 and Croncite was the source of truth. Before that it was the preacher. Before that the shaman. People are hardwired to outsource fact checking to the most compelling and charismatic choice to them. Probably for pragmatic reasons considering if you actually sat down and thought critically about everything going on, you wouldn’t have time for anything else. Don’t worry about it, think inwardly, chop wood, carry water. Keep your focus on what you see in front of you in life over what others want you to focus on for their own benefit.

Do you have advice on how to survive in the modern world? Society is pretty complex. I need an AR map just to know where its safe to sleep without trespassing.

Focus on the plate in front of you. Your home. The people you know in real life. Your job. Knowledge of an airstrike half a world away doesn’t mean anything actionable to you, so don’t fixate on that sort of information.

No it's because they need to have a growth plan and developing massive new markets is what shareholders have wet dreams about.

Failure is irrelevant. It keeps the share price high while they try other things at the same time.

All they want is mind control. All of them. All the time

As Carmack (the game guy, head of Oculus, etc.) says, until the headgear gets down to swim goggle size, it's not going to get any traction, and until it gets down to eyeglass size, it's not going mainstream.

The Apple Vision Pro was an unexpected dud. Something more eyeglass sized, with phone-like functionality and good design, would have been more in line with Apple's aesthetic. Instead, it was another half brick on your head VR headset. Apple had a success with iDweebs, their ear pieces, as something worn full time. The Apple Vision Pro could not be used that way.

You say it was unexpected, I say it was entirely expected given the form factor (comfort), battery life (awful), and lack of a killer app to drive adoption (if anyone knew what that was, Meta and Microsoft would be all over it already).

But Apple has tons of money, so they can learn from the devices in market now and decide how best to target Gen 2.

Microsoft seems to be exiting AR other than the military contract. Meta continues spending billions on their research project that might someday be a product, though they also continue iterating on their VR products.

We're still waiting for the tech to get cheap enough, small enough, and with a good enough ecosystem people will want to put up with it.

Meanwhile, Apple put out a tech demo to test the market. And probably to light a fire under the VP in charge of the program.

Unexpected as in Apple was expected to offer something less clunky.

Hey, I though Magic Leap had it all figured out! Are you telling me those guys are totally full of shit??! SHOCKED I say SHOCKED!

The synthesis of imagination: Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap at TEDxSarasota

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

Hold my beer...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838421

>Are you referring to the sex discrimination lawsuit and nepotistic sexist bro culture that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838500

>Or are you referring to the ridiculous 12/12/2012 TEDX "talk" that Rony Abovitz performed at the Ringling College of Art, and all the FAKE and DECEPTIVE videos they posted and lied about on youtube, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850230

>That didn't stop them from making fraudulent concept video demos that they falsely claimed to be actual existing games that they were already playing around the office, and that they promised much much more than they could actually deliver.

>So if you can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen, then fake it and lie, you're saying? That IS the whole point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838443

>Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped off so many other people's original designs and IP in their patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838737

>The point is that the name Magic Leap IS extremely and deeply tarnished, in so many ways, and Magic Leap pretending it's not just makes them look more laughably delusional than they already are (which is extremely), just like Trump still believing that he won the election. [...]

:( no hope of scanning fiber displays ever i guess

I have a Quest 2.

Half Life: Alyx is one of the most amazing games I've ever played. And yet... I haven't finished it. When I have free time to play games I'd rather play my Switch. It's a lot more hassle setting up HL: Alyx, and the heavy headgear bugs my nose and causes eye strain headaches eventually if I play too much. So instead I play Tetris 99.

I have a Quest 2. After 6 months the non-replaceable battery lost 70% of its capacity and the controllers developed unfixable drift. Never making the Meta mistake again.

> developed unfixable drift

It's definitely fixable, by both Meta and yourself [1]. I've done it twice. A replacement kit is $14 on Amazon.

You would think joysticks would be a solved problem by now, but no. Meta chose garbage, with the same garbage installed in the quest pro controllers that are not really serviceable, from being glued together and jam packed with electronics (3 camera inside out tracking in each controller).

Battery can also be replaced, but with somewhat ridiculous effort [2].

[1] DIY joystick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3N_ZIGo2YM

[2] Battery: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Meta+Quest+2+Headset+Battery+Re...

The Quest 2 has a NON-REPLACEABLE battery?

Whoa. I was considering buying one, but I won't buy it anymore.

Alyx is really a bad game. People don’t recognize this because they play it for a very short time and then that’s it.

The gun and grabbing UX is fantastic. It’s really good. But the enemies and movement are awful. The enemies are simply not designed to handle your movement. The game is secretly an on rails arcade shooter except you can control the rails.

This is a fundamental problem with VR. You cannot expect humans to move to the degree required for game movement irl, so most of your movement HAS to come from control stick movement. But if most of your movement is coming from control stick movement then your irl movement is largely pointless.

But people WANT the irl movement to be the thing that matters. Because it is fun to duck in and out of cover. So that’s what Alyx largely is. You see enemies. You play the duck and peeking game, and if the enemies come too close or are melee you yeet yourself back to a safer spot.

The basic enemies with guns and melee and drones are pretty good with this gameplay. When they start trying to do something a little bit more interesting in the game later, it really falls apart. Why? Because the enemies are incredibly dumb. Much dumber than a typical game. And the basic concept you get to is that any enemy that does not respect peeking is just asking you to do this clumsy movement scheme rather the fun arcade on rail gun shooter gameplay and it feels dumb.

Imo the Valve team did a very good job trying to accommodate what they found were enormous limitations. But the end result is really underwhelming. You can’t play many games like that for the novelty of on rails shooter gameplay to still work.

can't wait to be back in Bangkok so I can go to a VR cafe and play HL: Alex. Huge fan of the series and haven't been able to justify buying a headset myself.

It's not about the hardware but about the content. There's a lack of compelling content. And because the audience is so small, publishers aren't in a hurry to create that content. And they cross publish what little they create to boost its value. Which further dilutes the value of these devices.

Apple and Meta need to start investing in exclusive content for these devices. Neither of them is really doing that. Apple has some bits and pieces but it doesn't really add up to much. Both are spending billions on the hardware; but not on the content. They need to be doing both. And not just on launch content but on a steady stream of content, games, and apps that people will want, talk about, review, etc. That will create demand for these devices.

I think the problem isn’t size, after all people are happy to put ever larger TVs in their homes.

I think the problem is that VR/AR are such dislocating experiences, so unlike anything else that consumers can’t relate to the technology.

These devices do not follow a technological linage such as TV. First came radio, then cinema and then TVs - each technology gave the consumer a relationship to understand the new technology: TV is like having cinema at home, cinema is like radio with pictures etc

There isn’t this same graduation in technology with VR/AR hence consumers are overwhelmed with this technology and don’t grasp the use cases yet.

Thinking of TVs as size comparison is wrong thing... Think of laptops. How big laptops people want if they are going to move around with them?

Unwieldy gaming laptop are reasonable if you move them once a week or absolutely need them. But otherwise people would go for lighter and thinner devices.

And here the weight is carefully balanced on your head...

I think it's more likely it was an expected dud (look at how limited the manufacturing numbers were) and they were perfectly happy setting the money on fire for however long it takes to iterate down to that eyeglass-sized device 10 or 20 years form now.

I love daft punk’s music but I have no desire to look like them while going about the day’s business.

Do you have a source for that quote from Carmack?

This is HackerNews, we all know who Carmack is.

>Apple Vision Pro was an unexpected dud

???

Just about everyone (even diehard Apple fanboys) knew this would flop.

I agree with you, I don't know of anybody who looked at the price combined with the form factor and concluded it will be a hit.

You might want to go back to that thread (or rather the few threads) when Vision Pro was released, and reread the responses from the fanboys.

I suspect these newer headsets have struggled because of walled gardens and crazy pricing, and thus lack of developer interest.

The Oculus DK2 was just a second monitor, amazingly simple and fun to develop for. One of the most developer friendly devices I worked with.

Oculus CV1 proprietary driver, forced experience, worsening SDK and dropping linux basically killed the device (and VR) for me, even before fb got their grubby mits on it.

So I struggle to understand these premium devices, when there seems to be no developer incentive to build for these platforms. Shame, I think VR still has some great potential, but I will never don a headset that needs an account or shows me even a single advert.

I got a Quest 3 recently, and the necessity for side-loading apps onto it to make it useful is kind of puzzling. SideQuest is almost mandatory. You can't easily copy files on or off it to network locations without CX File Explorer, side loaded from an untrusted source, hidden from the default application launcher.

You'd think they'd loosen the reins a bit in order to get a bigger installed base, but it's trying to drive so hard towards this Horizon Worlds metaspace thing that I just do not give one whit for.

If Valve makes a Deckard Linux headset thats fun to dev for and achives a solid Linux VR experience it could change the field of computer science.

I always found it funny they call the Apple Vision Pro a "spatial computer". In my view, for a computer to be a computer, it should be capable of self-hosting development of its own software and operating system. But the Apple Vision Pro can't do that, to develop software for it you need to plug it into a computer

Meta thinks they got screwed by Apple’s (and to a lesser extent Google’s) walled gardens, so now they want their own.

I don't think this makes much sense. Meta sells ads. Apple and Google don't walled garden ads on apps do they? Meta doesn't use the Google and Apple ad APIs. They have their own ad marketplace, etc.

I really do think it's as simple as them seeing a future where people use a different form factor from a phone to do what they do much of what they do with their phones. I think that will be something closer to Google Glass but modern day

I ordered my DK2 a few hours after it got announced. The FB take over was between the release of the DK2 and the CV1 and with the CV1 (and the FB takeover) came that terrible Software.

They struggled because they didn’t actually have good software to run

Isn't it simple why AVP isn't moving? They don't treat anime-loli-porn content, chiefly VRChat, as first class citizens, if they support those at all. Tons of people have bought and are buying Quest 2 and 3 as well as its competitors with sole intent of using it with VRChat.

Don't you guys all remember that iPhoneOS had YouTube since version 1.0, before it even had App Store? Where would you think iOS would have been if it didn't? No way it could have been like Apple TV+ would have launched years earlier and completely obsoleted YouTube. But to me it looks that that is what Apple is banking on.

$3500 is also a big reason. Why pay that when I can get a Quest2 for $199 new for the anime-loli-porn content?

That must be one of big reasons, but doesn't explain why AVP had regressed into the fanciest possible privacy filter for laptops.

Extremely high res anime-loli-porn content?

The problem is less that they don’t serve games natively and more that it just sucks for the intended usecase. $3,500 VR headset, $3,000 more than the aforementioned Quest 3, and while some of that is due to the differing specs you have to wonder how much is due to an Apple charge. As for weight, compared to the Quest 3 it’s around 6oz heavier, which isn’t great, and from reviews I’ve read that 6oz and the general design makes a large difference. It should be noted though, AVP is 2oz less than the Quest Pro and may be more comfortable than that, but considering Apple has always been on the forefront of miniaturizing tech (for good and bad) I’m surprised they went for a premium weight in this instance. And finally, app support is minimal and they didn’t allow for enough direct access to ease development, leading to an expensive device that can’t even attempt to find a solution for the problem it’s trying to find.

Watching the same dynamic play out in GenAI. Stability AI refused to cater to this crowd (the chief actual users of their models) and are paying like hell for it. The reality is that coomers ARE the market for a lot of GenAI, no matter how much puritans don't want to admit it.

The coomers are also nearly entirely responsible for the success of

Home video

Payments on the Internet

Streaming video

HD streaming and downloadable video

The Patreon style business model

its incredible how different the West is to Japan

the lack of judeo-christian moral nannyism hardly means a dangerous society but a peaceful one

just look at all the accusations on X and calling Japan weird and worse

Not really. Midjourney has no coomers and still does incredibly well

StabilityAI suffered because of a good frontend and poor models for high quality, production grade imagery

On top of that AVP is very limited for 3rd party developer - much more limited than ARKit on iPhone - cannot access raw camera stream, run own CoreML object detection model, cannot even scan barcode/qrcode, pose detection. They openning up some API in new VisionOS 2.0 but only for enterprise applications.

Meta isn't treating NSFW stuff as a first class citizen either. Most VR porn apps have a roundabout way of accessing them. E.g. you have DeoVR which is absolutely, 100%, intended for normal content consumption and it's just a coincidence that its video protocol is compatible with SLR.

Well, the fact that sideloading a porn app is no more difficult than sideloading a patched version of BeatSaber, which is unimaginable on any "mobile" Apple device, says plenty.

Also YouTube was already available on Symbian, and other OSes, before iPhone came to be.

That’s a slightly unfair characterization. VRC kept me sane during quarantine as I suspect it did for a lot of people. It’s also a nice oasis for people with a lot of social anxiety.

Sure there’s unsavory content on there, no denying that. So does every platform with user generated content. Have you seen Meta Horizon? It’s no less than an Orwellian nightmare.

I’ve seen people form meaningful relationships, and achieve amazing things by fostering a real sense of community.

IMHO: the AVP is a DevKit that is sold to consumers. But more polished then the typical DevKit.

But looking into the past and seeing how many people where eager to buy GoogleGlas/Oculus Devkits, why shouldn’t a brand like apple decide to push out a devkit as high price consumer device, instead of trying to keep a devkit for a upcoming product a secret?

I’m still wondering what direction the product can and will take from here on. If you compare it with iphone1 vs iPhones today, it could be quite interesting.

Because they invested billions of dollars into making said devkit and despite seeming promising the actual general usefulness of it was still extremely unclear, so it was down to 2 choices: a) kill it, or b) ship it and see what happens when the rubber meets the road.

Arguably Apple has never done b) before, but then again they’ve also never poured billions into a R&D project like this before. (The only other example that comes to mind is the car, and that one got killed, so maybe they were loath to kill the two billion dollar science fair projects at the same time).

You mean 21st century Apple. Because 20th century Apple had plenty of good flops: Newton, Pippin, Macintosh TV (no, not Apple TV).

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/14/apples-biggest-hardware...

I think the issue is just that the developers Apple wants to poach for this are the ones that they push away the most.

Not only does Meta already control a large chunk of VR game development (to the point that even regular PCVR has been kind of starved for content), but game developers, besides for the iPhone, don't really care for Apple, and considering that the AVP does not have the things that the iPhone has going for it...

I disagree, given Apple’s marketing around it, features like Persona FaceTime, and integrating spatial camera shooting on iPhones. But even if it were true, it’s also failing as a devkit, given how few devs are interested in it.

Because they're 10 years late to the party, everyone has moved into AI now, and even those headsets are hardly selling a lot.

When have Apple ever shipped a product as a "dev kit"? Dev kit is a euphemism for failed market launch. (Maybe Apple should retroactively call the Newton a dev kit as well.)

The ARM porting device for the x86 transition, but that was optional to return.

To me it seems obvious that the end goal is something with identical functionality to the AVP but in the form factor of a pair of wraparound shades, and that somebody high-up at Apple decided it was perfectly acceptable to set money on fire for 20 years if it let them eventually get something like that to market before anyone else and thereby replace the entire phone/tablet market.

It has been clear from fairly early on the AVP should never have launched - it just has no reason to exist. I cannot escape thinking there must have been some internal argument where the choices ended up as kill the project or release what we have, and the latter was chosen because it was seen to be easier.

Let’s face it, without Zuck’s personal interest reality labs would have gone years ago.

It is one thing for companies with billions to burn them chasing non existent markets but when they attempt to drag in lots of smaller third parties in order to build demand for their platforms . . . well, developers should be a lot more skeptical. The low hanging fruit of the personal computing age appears to have been picked.

> it just has no reason to exist

I’ve seen plenty of people who have found a legitimate use for it. And as many have pointed out it serves as a dev kit that also happened to be sold to consumers. It helps Apple and developers figure out what people actually want to use the device for.

There also seems to be a lot of people who find it to be a near perfect implementation of VR/AR, except for size/weight, price and perhaps the resolution and fov could be just a tad better.

These seem like things they could fix with a second gen non-pro headset.

The automatic eye adjustment and external screen may be an expression of an ultimate VR experience but can easily be dropped with a non pro version. With less heat the fans can be smaller. Perhaps they can start using those new piezo based blowers. The metal body and external battery pack will already help keep things cool despite the powerful chips and high power consumption.

The existence of the pro version will give a halo effect that will make it easier for Apple to sell a non pro version, even if it’s still more expensive than the most expensive Oculus headsets.

Whether they’ll increase resolution and fov is uncertain. They might wait until it can inherit the tech from a second gen pro version.

At least Meta has bootstraped a niche in the console market. They identified a market and can iterate on it. Apple seems content to provide essentially nothing to do on the device.

> the choices ended up as kill the project or release what we have

Yeah, kill the project would have made the shareholders very displeased.

I don't think what Apple has is incomplete, VR is just not all that. Immersion for most people is like a roller coaster — fun for a bit but who wants to ride all day?

It would be great to have a personal rollercoaster at home.

I feel like they have struck gold with the Meta Ray-ban glasses. Perfect form factor, looks cool, not obtrusive, has actual features that people want to use. That IMO is the future of wearables + AR/VR + AI, not a bulky headset.

The same thing happened with previous technologies. Steve Jobs didn't "invent the smartphone" -- he just made a smartphone at the time when the underlying tech (VLSI, displays, WLAN, WWAN) got to the point where it could fit in a pocket and have battery life of a day. Similarly he didn't invent the MP3 player. He made one at the point when Toshiba were able to manufacture a very small, low power hard drive that meant you could get more than 10 songs on one.

Steve Jobs and invention is always sort of looking at the problem backwards.

He could enunciate a concept and knew when to put the boot down to enforce his taste.

Every company knows this, the problem is that you can’t fit the compute you need for AR/VR + AI into a form factor like this, at least not right now.

Why can't the glasses be dumb displays streamed to by my phone?

I don't think you'll ever be able to. Maybe not for decades for AR/VR. The AI stuff is cool; you can offload that, but mostly they'll just be a glorified camera mount and headphones for the actual 'glasses.'

But the Ray-bans aren't AR or VR. They're just glasses with a camera, microphone, and speakers plus connectivity for streaming the camera's feed. How is that AR or VR in any way?

If I'm going about my day and a voice in my ear gives me context about my surroundings, identifies people and objects, answers questions, tells me which direction I need to walk in, records and live streams my POV and more, that's AR. The experience doesn't always have to be visual.

They're not AR or VR, they're an open air experiment to determine what the display-bearing devices will be.

They're working from both ends. VR/Passthrough content on a device with a screen and then the ideal form factor on the Raybans. The goal is to merge them. Its still TBD on when and if that's possible.

Have you seen the snap glasses. Meta glasses aint goin anywhere

Pretty sure the Meta glasses routinely sell out and the Spectacles had a hard time selling. Maybe they both sell them at a loss, who knows

I would buy this today if it filmed horizontal video.

Raise your hand who was there during the first boom and doom of VR/AR headset/glasses in the 90's? A cycle or couple of more and we'll be there, maybe.

I feel like I have spectacular eyes. I can read absurdly small texts that shocks other people, great low light, yada yada.

The quest2 made my eyes hurt after just using it for maybe half an hour. Tried it a few times over several weeks and decided that my vision is worth more than some entertainment.

I'm not sure how they're going to get around that aspect.

The Quest 2 has minimal inter-pupillary distance (IPD) adjustment — only three fixed options. If your eyes don’t match closely enough to one of them, it can be very uncomfortable. Mine don’t, and I have the same experience as you, but I can put up with it for short bursts. More expensive headsets have much better lenses and adjustment options. It’s not an inherent problem with VR, just concessions to make a cheap device.

Ive work vr googles over 20 hours without issues. Are you sure youre not having dry eyes? I cant do it as long after ive had lasik

I’m short sighted and have been using VR for close too if not on a decade and have never experienced this. I spend entire days in VR and I’m completely fine with it.

Never had that personally and I regularly code (or at least interact with code) in VR

Remember Dactyl Nightmare? https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=dactyl-nightmare&page=deta...

I tried it once at the local mall as a kid. There was a fantasy-rpg type of game as well, but I didn't get to try that one.

I was there in the 80s when it made the mall arcade circuit and again in the 90s when it made the college student union circuit. I was there in the 00s when 25,000 devices made the Silicon Valley circuit. I was there in the 10s when Oculus stirred things up again. I'm here in the 20s when Apple is trying. I'll be here in the 30s when the next round hits AND FAILS AGAIN.

People care about their faces. They're not going to strap a 1.5 pound dork-box to their face and head mussing their hair and makeup to do what they can already do on their phones or laptops. What they cannot do on their phones or laptops (or game consoles or tablets or rings or watches or whatever) they can do on a $500 Quest.

There's no market for a PC-priced device that straps to your face like ski goggles. It's an accessory. Price it at $100 or $200 or even $500, but you can't price it at $1000 or $4000 because it's a toy.

I don't think Apple expected to move a ton of these. It's more a proof of concept that they can iterate on. In five years, it may look a lot different.

sim crowd seems to disagree

Me, saw them at Lisbon computer expo back in 1994, exactly playing Doom.

I am yet to be impressed, and my eyes can't take screens so close, which already makes a waste of money to buy something like that.

Oh yeah. I remember when it was only in pubs so I could only play these games with a guardian. I remember everyone knowing the traditional monitor would be gone in a few years.

I have an AVP. It’s the best TV and movie-watching experience I’ve ever had, in some ways even better than Metreon IMAX

The best TV and movie-watching experience _if you aren't eating or drinking_.

I love watching movies on my AVP, but the experience of groping for a popcorn bowl semi-blindly is enough of a turn-off that I end up just using our regular TV most of the time.

And if you don't watch stuff with your friends or family.

The killer app is pr0n, but Apple won't allow it while Zuck loves to watch over your shoulder.

vr porn ain't that good. the artists need to up their game

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

It’s really not.

Porn isn’t really any better on a Vision Pro than it is on a Quest 3 - or, for that matter, a Quest 2.

I think they meant for AR/VR in general and not specifically for the AVP vs Quest et all

VR just isn’t going to happen for a long time. It does have a real purpose or a strong drive to use. I have meta 3 and i played for a bit but then it ended up on the shelf for a variety of reasons.

It has a lot of good specific uses but struggles past that.

It continued to be very impressive technology wise but something that wont be adopted en mass for a long time. Tim Cook was right to be worried about this product - should have trusted his intuition on that one.

Don't you worry, Apple is still looking for a product market fit. And when you have enough billions, do enough brainstorming and cool ad videos you can actually find things that never existed in the first place. Then we will see mass adoption of this millennials' dream tech.

I'm going to try out the new travel mode on a transatlantic flight tomorrow - mildly excited by the possibility of escaping the claustrophobic confines of 11 hours in an airplane.

When you say "a long time" do you mean 2026, or 2029?

2030s

VR will probably never be more than a gimmick imo.

AR is where the market is at. Regular glasses, with current phone capabilities, like painting the actual road you’re going to travel green would already get hundreds of thousands of adopters.

My perception is that AR is also a gimmick that won't seem to take off any time soon. How many times AR technologies have come and went in whimper?

Because the glasses are too big, or the implementation sucks.

I don’t want to see an arrow where I need to go. I don’t want to wear a VR headset.

I want regular glasses. I want the road I need to travel to be a yellow brick road. I want to see the person I’m calling in front of me. I want some details about the building or business I’m looking at when I ask for it, like opening hours, phone number, reviews.

Instead we get shitty shooter games.

Honestly, this is a shame, because I think a lot of the vision pro's flaws are Apple problems.

That said, meta seems to have found a sweet spot in price/performance, so maybe in a few generations we will have something with the quality of vision pro that is not locked down

I still can’t believe they expected people to be excited about a floating iPad OS UX as the main experience.

It is just a launcher for your applications.

The main experience are the apps just like on every other device.

It's not a sweet spot. It's less then 10 million MAU over 5 years for about $40 billion dollars. How is that a sweet spot. If you can't get 10 million MAUs in 5 years for $40 billion dollars, you're a failure. Quest is a failure. AVP being an even bigger failure doesn't make Quest a success.

One thing that frustrates me with this comment is that you're measuring their state today as if that's the end state.

Is waymo a failure? It's not deployed across the US yet, and it's been over a decade etc

No, they're just trying to solve hard technology problems. I want companies to be ambitious, that's way better than seeing them just focus on cutting costs etc

MAU == monthly active users.

What is the goal of quest? Is it to get mau? Is it sales and marketing for eng (come work at _, where we have fun projects like these Glasses - sounds familiar), is it to develop and flex hardware muscles? Is it to make sure Meta is competitive if/when there is a paradigm shift away from mobile?

I think Mark is thrilled to have a hardware product that they can deploy their ML models to. Was that intentional? Obviously no, but at some point they're paying for optionality.

They want the option to build a million hardware units in a year, they want the option to build a competitor to Apple's next hardware device (frankly, in the counterfactual that AVP took off, Meta was extremely well-positioned)

Meta is a money-printing machine, and so they have choices: invest in moonshot hardware (or ai) projects, stock buybacks/dividends

They have a huge dividend. What do you want them to do? More stock buybacks? Make less money?

This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year. The worst part is that Meta is merely licensing the Ray-Ban form factor and this also comes at a hefty price tag. Specially if other companies such as Google enter a bidding war to snatch that exclusivity away from them. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/07/31/metas-reality-labs-posts...

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-steal-ray-ban-meta-m...

> This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year

Yes, it has cost them billions of dollars (ongoing) to develop their AR/VR tech. You can definitely criticize that, but this spending is defensive. If Facebook (Meta) doesn't own at least some market share in a future device, that is an existential threat to them. How much did ATT cost Facebook? [1] Answer: north of $10 billion in 2022. But note: it's actually a reduction in Facebook's revenue by that amount, so in the fullness of time, the total damage is much worse.

> Ray-Ban

Facebook has multiple form factors. They have VR quest (3). They have AR glasses. I don't expect Ray-Ban to capture Facebook/Google's margin here, and Facebook would be able to build first party AR glasses if they wanted. You use Ray-Ban to sell v1 and then you make v2 good enough that it sells itself.

All of this seems tangential to my complaint that I would love an incredibly high res and reasonably hackable VR screen.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/04/23/appl...

Before the bandwagon jumps on "Metaverse is dead", Meta is pursuing multiple headsets, devices strategy and trying to find the right Features / Price mix.

Quest 2 is the most successful headset and it seem to have the perfect balance. Quest 3 although great, probably is slightly expensive for the mass market. But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.

It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit. Like a startup, you just have to keep iterating and I'm glad zuck is on it

If anything, what I’ve heard from friends at or adjacent to Meta is that they’re paring back metaverse ambitions and capabilities on their future devices because of the success of the Ray-Bans glasses and the relatively middling sales of the Quest 3.

The Ray-Bans are also a weird anomaly since they’re leaning on the Ray-Bans designer pricing to justify a lot of the cost. If you’re already buying a pair of luxury sunglasses that cost close to $200, what’s another $100 to get the smart version?

I'm constantly losing, scratching, or breaking sunglasses. I buy them at $30 tops, not $300.

Don’t understand the appeal being a spy cam for Facebook, but to each their own. The subsidized quest is on borrowed time if it keeps losing crazy billions a quarter as it currently does.

> But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.

You mean lose billions within an unclear race that may ultimately lead to commodity prices like TVs?

>But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years

Honestly I doubt it.

ChatGPT is a free service that is genuinely helpful. For the Metaverse you need to buy the headset and the hardware to run it for what? Wasting time in a virtual store instead of just using a UI? Using it on a worst version of VRchat?

> It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit.

Sure, "huge hit". Anecdote but the only time Ive ever seen anyone wear one was when I interviewed at meta and one of the folks interviewing me was wearing them.

Also, completely anecdotal, but the only people I’ve ever seen wearing them are Facebook employees.

Here's Nat Friedman saying he's a DAU of them: https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1796986709751759304

Anecdotal but of the few people that showed me their smart ray bans, 0 actually wear them, let alone use the smart functionality.

After 10 years of building headsets and 5 years of selling them at scale Facebook has fewer than 10 million MAU on Quest. That's $30-50 BILLION spent for maybe 8-9M MAU.

The Ray-bans aren't AR or VR, they're sunglasses with a built in webcam. What a joke.

What a total failure and the fanboys pretending it's not.

Which other products out there cost tens of billions and gave fewer than ten million monthly users?

I have been bearish on VR, but could never overcome motion sickness. This obviously puts a limit on viable content types for me.

Can anyone speak to any differences in motion sickness between VR and Apple’s implementation of AR/MR?

There was an interesting email from Zuck released during one of their trials where he explained why they were focused on VR: it was basically all about Apple and wanting to own the next platform.

Makes sense although gaming is and will remain the most significant use case for VR in the foreseeable future

The original email is from 2015, posted on HN in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742#33540359

If I remember correctly; Zuck wanted to acquire Unity because he thought Unity would be the next big AR/VR platform, which Meta would hopefully control, instead of Apple and Google controlling the next big distribution platform. In retrospect, it would've been better that way because Unity's management will destroy Unity sooner or later.

There is no future for the Vision Pro unless they can scale it to a comfortable stylish form factor or establish a killer app.

Nobody wants to walk around wearing goggles all day just to read email.

The Vision Pro is a solution looking for a problem. This is the same problem plaguing Apple Home. It just feels very - so what? Tech nerds like it because it's "cool", but everybody else is wondering why would I ever need this thing?

Personally, I think they need to be thinking of a more Apple Watch type device wearable in normal glasses frames. Something more akin to Google Glass, and yes, I'm familiar with the term "glasshole." But maybe it was a product too far ahead of it's time? Or maybe these are just products we don't need?

There was a time when you didn't "need" a PC, either, and they were seen as just nerd toys and things yuppies used to balance their checkbooks, back when "balancing your checkbook" was a thing you had to do. This changed with the advent of the Web, and held until desktops gave way to smartphones. If you could time-travel back to the 80s and 90s, plenty of folks would have scoffed that anyone would ever "need" a computer, let alone a computer in their pocket. But a lot of that is because "a computer" was a bulky beige thing with a CRT monitor, and maybe if you were really into it a 2400 baud modem. But then you'd have to splurge for a second phone line or pick which device to use, the modem or the phone.

So I'd be wary of writing off AR/MR/XR as a dead end, as opposed to a technology that still needs more innovation to reach the mainstream. Glasses themselves are mainstream, and have been for centuries. What's holding AR devices back is the ability to miniaturize the necessary holographic technology, as well as the batteries and processing power. This will eventually be solved, just like an iPhone now has more processing power than the supercomputers of decades before.

The problem with VR will always remain the same. You can't interact with other people while you have a big thing on your face that's designed to supplant your entire field of view, which limits desirable use cases.

> If you could time-travel back to the 80s and 90s, plenty of folks would have scoffed that anyone would ever "need" a computer, let alone a computer in their pocket.

Is that true? I feel like people have imagined portable communication / computing devices forever[1]. People maybe couldn't imagine that they could ever be small enough to be practical, but the utility of such a device was pretty obvious. Similarly, I think "VR" as a concept has obvious value and applications. However current implementations fall far short of what is necessary to unlock that value for most people / scenarios.

[1] https://www.geeksandbeats.com/2016/02/star-trek-technology-t...

(1) Price matters. If Detroit was selling $25k reasonably sized EVs they'd be selling like hotcakes, even if they had limited range. There are a few people who will pay $75k+ for a luxury EV but they bought a Tesla 10 years ago. If Detroit wanted to sell XXXL EV SUVs at crazy high prices they should have done it ten years ago. Now it's too late and they have to make the kind of cars BYD does or pass legislation to keep BYD out of our market.

The Meta Quest consumer has proven they'd rather save a few bucks and buy an MQ2 instead of a better MQ3. It's a big problem for Meta because they're never going to move towards making better games that need an MQ3 to run.

(2) VR > AR Apple's just plain wrong about the focus on AR. The Apple Vision Pro has the hardware to provide far superior immersive world application story than the MQ3 but the software (and maybe controller) story isn't there. Apple acts as if there was something morally wrong with VR, like it is putting your hands in their toilet with all the conviction they have that it is OK to take 30% of all the revenue of the app economy. Sorry, visiting VR worlds is half the value you could get out of a product and throwing out half the value is like doubling the price.

A cheap set of XReal glasses can say "this is just good for watching the HDMI output of a game console" but at Apple Vision Pro prices product that expensive really has to "do it all" with no excuses. People really do subscribe to VR fitness apps, they really do have fun playing games like Asgard's Wrath 2 or games like Riven. Have you ever heard anyone say that they were engaged with an app for the Vision Pro?

In regards to VR, I think Valve could really move the hole situation by building/providing SteamLink VR on AVP, as they do on Meta Quest. Buy any Bluetooth (VR) Controller and enjoy games streamed.

And maybe in some future I will be able to stream from Linux hosts via SteamLink.

I contend that almost every problem solvable by a wearable can be solved “well enough” by a smartphone, to the point where an additional device is not worth the trouble for the marginal benefit (unless you’re a person who likes gadgets).

For exercise specifically I do see the value of a watch form factor since people don’t want to carry a phone in their exercise gear. But, that’s pretty niche.

> I contend that almost every problem solvable by a wearable can be solved “well enough” by a smartphone, to the point where an additional device is not worth the trouble for the marginal benefit

I've found glanceable notifications on my smartwatch to be really useful.

Dismissing or answering calls without taking out my phone (or without my phone at all since the watch has mobile connectivity), quickly seeing text messages (especially 2 factor auth codes).

The remote viewfinder for my camera lets me actually be in family photos. And of course exercise tracking (reminders to get a few thousand more steps today are helpful). AR/VR goggles would be useless for any of those, and make the last two worse.

Yeah we might end up just circling back to VR over AR and prioritizing immersive gaming, the only thing you can't do on a smartphone / desktop.

> Or maybe these are just products we don't need?

That's exactly it, they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough. This is the same problem that plagues the AI assistant devices - it doesn't matter what they can do, they won't replace your smartphone. Which means you're asking someone to carry (and pay for) a smartphone + an extra device. That's a big ask.

It's also the reason why you see these stories of people living smartphone-only lives, doing everything on their smartphones without needing or even having a desktop/laptop. Smartphones are good enough for everything, for a lot of people.

For the record: I -love- the Vision Pro. Tried it out, loved it. But I fall into the `Tech nerds like it because it's "cool"` part. I recognize that that's not going to be the popular opinion. Not now, not ever. There's just not enough value in VR/AR to really change societal norms to the point that everyone's going to want to wear these devices.

Ultimately: Just because a product is a cool idea, doesn't mean it's society-altering. Some products just aren't that valuable.

> If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough.

Sure, but I don't think nearly enough people are sufficiently critical of their need for a smartphone either; I tend to think of it like cars, we've just allowed ourselves to let these devices service so much our day-to-day tasks that they seem like necessary appendages. If it goes away, we panic and buy another one, never stopping to sit with that absence. If my mac had a built-in cellular modem, I'd leave the phone at home most days. It's not useless, but it is completely incidental to my life in terms of what I actually would need it for. Likewise, if people didn't have cars, they wouldn't likely have a life that's only palatable because they have one.

Disagree, I’ve been coordinating a lot of things lately–house projects, social events, travel, healthcare, work, etc etc–and have basically had a phone glued to my hand, which means i’m one hand down and constantly cranking my neck. if i could go hands free and be able to mind tasks, even menial ones like laundry and cooking, while researching things online, going through phone menus, messaging with people etc, it would really help. i think we are getting really close to that capability with chatgpt voice mode, we just need a piece of hardware that can bridge the gap.

> they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough.

I disagree.

If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking at (that I’m connected to on LinkedIn) and why/how we were connected, I’d buy that in a heartbeat.

But there are so many things that can't be done without visual & audio context. I can't hold my smartphone camera up all day to capture and serialize useful data.

AI just made the value proposition for smartglasses 10x.

> it doesn't matter what they can do

No it very much matters what they can do, and it's "not much". If they could do a lot more any of these products would be very popular.

You don’t need a smart phone either. “Need” is the wrong verb when talking about consumer electronics.

Apple Home (as an integrated Matter/Thread client) is far more useful than the Vision Pro.

It's easy to fixate on things like colorful lights, but consider instead automations based on how much energy is used when. For example, if I have a box fan or a portable AC unit on a smart plug, I can automate it running while I'm gone only if the temperature gets to a excess (for the benefit of pets, fruit on the counter, running computers, etc) or only when electricity is cheaper and/or cleaner.

The most useful IoT devices, I think, aren't purpose devices that have a microcontroller integrated into them... so much as ones whose primary and only purpose bridge digital and physical by allowing you to actuate something remotely, be it the flow of electrify (smart plug), or physically flipping a switch (switchbot type).

If they wouldn't be too greedy they could make a device that combines: Apple TV, HomePod, Apple Router, Time Machine - that would be an ultimate smart home device... but they want to sell both Apple TV, HomePod and iCloud for storage.

I feel like Apple missed the ZIRP window to release this to a larger quantity of tech nerds who weren’t continually worried about being laid off.

Google Home was kind of magical when it launched, but as its reliability has degraded over time, its appeal has worn off. It is still nice to be able to ask it to play music or set an alarm or whatever without engaging with a screen.

I haven't used a HomePod, but I suspect it's Apple's version of that experience.

The Sonos patent wars sucked. Things are somewhat back to ok, but man, it's just absurd & sad seeing basic networked av get ravaged by lawyers like so.

I'm super glum about audio casting at the moment. It feels like less and less speakers have audio casting builtin. For a while there was a spare of speakers, some even battery powered, but it's turned into a trickle. There's also incredibly few options for amplifiers with builtin audio casting; what the NexusQ originally did! So frustrating.

This is an ecosystem I am super bought into, and it feels like it's fading and there's not a replacement (especially with Sonos's recent enshittification seppuku).

I don't know if it's similar, only because I don't really use Google products. You can ask the HomePod to turn on the Apple TV and play something, or to read out your messages (depending on your settings and whatnot). I don't really have an issue with it doing anything but playing music. I use it for HomeKit controls constantly, and love my HomePod mini's.

I think something with the "wow" factor of the Vision Pro but the form factor of a pair of glasses would be the holy grail of AR/VR. I wonder if there are fundamental tradeoffs which would make that impossible in the near term? I think it would remain very niche indefinitely in that case.

I wonder if in the next 5 years there could be a device where the compute is your smartphone but it streams to a display on your AR/VR glasses. I guess the main issue would be where do you put the battery.

The display technology is simply not there at the moment.

I'm pretty convinced that AR and specifically headset AR is just a dead end. No amount of sensors or pixels are going to make it viable for anything besides some tiny niches. VR is fun and has some uses. Everything else just needs a tactile keyboard or touchscreen.

Not everyone is capable of using a keyboard or touch screen even today. For this reason I hope to see continued advancement in voice capabilities.

I have it better than most but have to rely on dictation a lot due to issues in my hands/arms following an incomplete spinal cord injury.

There are very few situations where I'd want to wear a bulky headset for any length of time. Although I don't play video games, I could see that people who are into it might find them pretty cool.

The TV ads showing people at business meetings all wearing headsets and manipulating a shoe protoype in mid-air are just ridiculous. Or the one where a guy is trying to assemble a furniture kit and wearing a headset. Come on, you'll do better with a YouTube video and unobstructed eyes.

> Or maybe these are just products we don't need?

Silicon valley needs a product that will make us spend even more time online than our phones, in order to sell more ad inventory and make the line go up.

This is pretty much what's driving all of this, especially the AR stuff. It's not a solution in search of a problem. The problem is they need to sell more ads. The only issue is that it's a solution to their problem, not ours.

Or, on the other hand, AR could BLOCK all ads that you ever see. Sanitise your entire visual input, replace all ads with a grey square!

Yeah I frequently look at the vision pro reviews and think it would be cool to try, but I know after about a month I would get bored with it. $3500 is alot of money to spend on what is essentially the perfect device for watching movies on an airplane.

It is an insanely impressive technology; however, like the iPadOS I think it is going to take a decade or so to have enough functionality to even consider being useful for professional tasks. I don't want to have to buy a macbook just to stream it to the vision pro to do any coding tasks.

You mean HomeKit? I'm a big fan, despite the warts. I think that's really useful.

This is good news for Apple because their foot is not going off the pedal and now can create more firsts which can lead to more standards gearing toward them

I wish Meta also created something similar to xreal glasses or even better: some modular RayBan smart glasses that can be transformed into xreal with addon.

Never bought any headsets of any sort. And until there is a compelling, application, or a killer app I probably never will. Gaming is definitely not it.

For VR really taking the next step, (realistic) haptic feedback is needed. Just better graphics and the like won't do anymore.

Just want to point out this headline or article doesn’t say that one is the cause of the other, just that they coincide.

Yes, also whatever high-end device they launch would also have a lower market capture from the TAM of high-end VR/XR headsets thanks to Apple being nearly uncompeteable in the hardware for it.

MAANG - N need to make compact AR goggles to assist with visualizing and interacting with the world containing additional context and interaction rather than a simulation of one in VR.

I think the chain of logic is that due to anaemic reception and the Quest3 being unexpectedly good, Apple has pulled forward the cheaper Vision Pro. This has lead to Meta launching head to head with that product, and hence needing to either produce something with comparable specs or do it for a much cheaper price than they thought previously. That not being feasible, they are falling back to their mass market strategy - fully own the low to middle end.

But none of this is about either company stepping back from the overall vision. What they are doing is jostling for market strategy, fit and timing - and adjusting to each other's moves as they go.

Apple probably need to choose between vision pro (i.e. experimental hardware) and making movies and TV.

If they do the latter, everyone (i.e. netflix) will fight them.

Apple has enough money and people to do both things

Their competitors also have money and people

It struggles mostly because it’s far too expensive, which also prevents bootstrapping some ecosystem of usecases.

it still baffles me how Apple decided to release the Vision pro as an actual consumer product and not use this generation as just dev. kits and release a successor to the vision pro and have a cheaper one based on on the mobile chips too in 1 to 1.5 years

Not an expert, but my first impression was that once Meta got ahold of the Apple Vision Pro and took it apart in the lab, the conclusion was that had no chance of beating it, from a hardware point of view.

They do, but Meta's knows the market for $3500 device is way smaller than Apple realized. Sub $1000 is a must. Apple doesn't respect or support developers so there are no apps for it, no games for it. Everything but the screens are sub-par for the Apple device (to date, things might change).

Meta will come out with a Quest 4 that will be better than the 3 and sell WAY more than Apple's device. As heard on a podcast, I've seen more Cybertrucks than I have Apple Vision Pro's in the world.

I think everyone knew this wouldn't work or simply because we aren't ready for this tech yet? But kudos to Apple for giving it a go!!

Zuckerberg really is grasping at straws now. Failed projects:

- metaverse

- VR

- digital currency

- failed to reel in on misinformation campaigns on social networks

- meta/facebook killed “crowdtangle” (misinformation tracking tool)

The only thing keeping them afloat is advertising money (which has been dwindling due to people fleeing their shit platform).

I learned from these comments Apple Vision Pro isn't intended for gaming. No wonder Buffet sold out of them. WTF are they thinking? Might have to transition to Linux fully at some point before I die if they continue doing stupid things.

Is it time for another company rename to llama or data or something a la AI ?

aww man i was looking forward to consuming even more content and seeing even more relevant ads in virtual reality!

This is another big problem for VR: The headsets are very locked down. Getting something like an Ad Blocker, sideloading apps, or general functionality hacking is too cumbersome. You burn out and go back to your laptop before long.

Sideloading on the Meta headsets is trivial. Its probably as hard to change the bootloader as it is on Android (I mean, it IS Android) but I'm not sure what you would need that for.

Computer headsets. Blockchain. AI.

Really hitting the mark recently.

I use all three of those things every day... Couldn't imagine my life without them now.

There are dozens of you, dozens!

Not sure why AI is on that list.

Maybe "what most companies use AI for" (i.e. glorified data collection) or "what most companies try to pass off as useful AI" (i.e. what we used to call machine learning, but now that ecommerce app can also tell you your latest sales in the form of a poem).

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