https://www.theverge.com/24253908/meta-orion-ar-glasses-demo...
Wireless compute puck. 70 degree FOV. Resolution high enough to read text. Wrist band detects hand gestures and will be used in another product.
It's interesting that meta went through the effort of bundling an accessory but stuck with hand gestures anyway.
Anyway, Logitech made an awesome little handheld keyboard for home theater PCs, called DiNovo Mini HTPC, I was able to pair it with Vision Pro.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226367904044?_skw=Logitech+DiNovo+M...
I wonder if Apple decided against a controller in order to allow third party solutions to flourish . They can take their time and see what people gravitate towards.
Uses: Being able to physically walk around a life-sized 3d model of an engine, human body, etc.
2. Tying AR to a point relative to the user
Uses: Heads-up Display notifications, virtual screens, etc.
These things are not mutually exclusive.
Even once you've placed a "AR object" at some static absolute location, I'm sure you can scroll through the list of active processes similar at any time, and snap it back to your body.
As somebody who hates the sedentary aspect of software engineering, I messed around with a friend's Apple Vision Pro and fell in love with the spatial computing aspect. I do a great deal of pacing when working through problems, and the ability to physically move around multiple virtualized workspaces was really engaging.
If your only experience is the HoloLens, you’re roughly a decade out of date with how well it can work today.
There’s also not been much until the Vision Pro that combines eye tracking with hand tracking which is what’s really needed.
You should really try the Vision Pro, because it really does move hand tracking to the point where it’s the best primary interaction method. Controllers might be good for some stuff , in the way an Apple Pencil is, but most interactions do not need it.
It has almost as many gestures as the trackpad or iPhone though. More gestures can be handled app side.
There’s also direct touch of surfaces too.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/23/vision-pro-will-t...
Controllers have their strength for games but most things that people do with their computers are better with hand tracking.
I can only imagine this is an extreme minority view, as hand tracking is next to useless for these tasks, outside of tech demos.
Ofc Vision Pro users are extreme minorities so you are not wrong. But I highly encourage you to try out Vision Pro if you haven't.
Hand tracking is not a feasible input method for routine computing.
What exactly are you missing that a controller gives you for those tasks?
Haptic feedback, discrete buttons and precise analog input from controllers are also very important. The downside of controllers is that your hands are full and it's just not feasible for an all day wearable.
Hopefully someone figures out a good compromise be it rings or gloves or whatever.
Where it falls apart is not being able to feel yourself touching objects which nothing other than a full glove is going to be able to simulate. Controllers and rings provide no benefit over Apple's approach.
When I touch a good quality button, I can feel the actuation point, and it's the same every time - I can learn to tell reliably whether I've pressed it or not.
When I touch my thumb and forefinger for a camera, I can't reliably tell what point it'll get detected as touching, because it isn't the same point each time.
As a result, I have to hold them together until I'm sure it's registered.
As a user, knowing unambiguously whether you've activated a control or not is a huge advantage for controllers & buttons.
I mean, it's just laughable to suggest that inpu work just as well on the AVP. People are not using the virtual keyboard if a real one is available. Gamers want clicky buttons too.
There are clear benefits and disadvantages of each setup.
This is the problem with fanboi-ism... the hyperbole is so clearly false. Let me list the ways that controllers are better: - Typing/Chording - Cheaper - More efficient, no cameras pointing at things the user can't see. No continuous video processing. - No dead zones where the camera can't see. - Accuracy. For all but a few camera angles, Apple has to guess when you're fingers make contact. it works best with bigger movements, but the bigger the movement, the longer that movement takes. There's a reason no big-name competitive games have been ported over. - Actual haptic feedback. Play Horizon: Forbidden West on PS5 to understand just what haptics can communicate to you... it's so much more than tapping your fingers together.
Apple's approach is amazing, and it's good for the use cases that Apple tells you are important... but there's so much more than that. You're doing a disservice to Apple by going full fanboi.
And all the sensors, cameras and superfast processing will still be needed for that immerse quasi AR simulated experience, so there are no cost savings there.
Where did you experience this? My only experience is with the Apple Vision Pro and it failed like half the time
* I pressed my finger
* nothing happened
* it feels broken
the reason is that it is camera based, unlike Orion. And this is why people describe Orion as magical, whereas nobody talks about the hand gestures of the Apple Vision Pro (but people do talk about the eye tracking of the AVP as magical)
Electromyography is an awesome technology, among other reasons, because it can (or will) detect neural signals below the activation (movement) threshold, meaning you should be able to train yourself to type without moving your fingers. A viable way to thought control without the invasive aspects of other approaches.
Back in the nineties, I said the computer user fifty years from then would look like a hippy. Headband (neural interface), sunglasses (I thought monitor, but AR is cooler), and a crystal around their neck (optical computer, maybe a miss, we'll see what the next decade brings, a slab in a pocket will do for now). Given my zero trust of end stage capitalism near my noggin, wristbands are an excellent transitional, as long as they're local (or can be made so, happy jail breaking)
For typing, I'd expect you need to combine with eye tracking. So you're back to the Vision Pro UI.
On its own, EMG makes a good button, I'd expect. Maybe 1-axis control.
No 6dof either ?
Sorry for using you as the 'say something wrong, get corrected' research method, but kudos for jumping in. ;}
Try it out , it’s really neat
Something named after a small rodent that we use already. And a monitor that we use already. Then you are cooking. You've invented the desktop pc.
Its interface is unlike anything else and really can only be experienced in person. The ability to simply glance at UI controls and slightly move your head whilst resting on your leg really does feel like magic.
And the UI is built around it so if you are looking for example at a sidebar it will lock you into choosing the options unless you substantially look away. This makes using it much easier and faster than a controller.
Gaze/click is for interacting with 2D planes.
Hand tracking is for interacting with the 3D world.
You can move the point at least as fast as your eyes and a button press will be faster and more accurate than pinch, and no occlusion. Plus more buttons gives you additional actions for the same onscreen target.
If all you wanted was a pointing device to make selections on a 2D gui interface, then the laser pointer form factor would be better. But I’m going to be an old fart and ask why are you doing this in AR then? Just use a screen. I’m more interested in the different human interface possibilities that are opened up by tactile input and 3D visual controls.
For a pointing device, moving a stylus on a small graphic tablet (in relative mode, i.e. like a mouse, not in absolute mode), in order to position a visible cursor on a target, is both faster and more precise and also much more comfortable than pointing forward with a laser pointer or an equivalent device.
When you are not at a desk, perhaps one can make a pointing device with a stylus that you hold like for writing and you point downwards, but the relative movements of the stylus are used to control a visible cursor that is in front of you, or in any other direction. That would still be much better than a pointing device that forces you to point in the real direction of the target.
Especially when only the relative movements are of interest, it is easy to measure the 3D orientation of a stylus with a combined accelerometer/magnetometer sensor.
While analog manipulation devices (mice, trackpads, joysticks, the 3D controllers) are good at physically precise manipulation and navigation, keys and buttons are good at symbolic / textual entry and logical / symbolic navigation with comparatively very low effort and high speed.
When VR / AR acquires a fast and low-effort symbolic input mode, comparable in efficiency to a keyboard, and it becomes possible to build highly productive interfaces driven by it, like Vim and MS Excel are driven by the keyboard, many interesting developments will happen.
Also the gestures are recognised by something you wear rather than cameras, so I'd expect them to be more reliable.
The Vision Pro uses optical sensors for hand tracking, so if your hands aren't visible to the device it obviously can't track them. Electromyography solves that problem, and I could imagine Apple integrating some variant of this in a future Apple Watch, and just falling back to optical sensors if you don't own one.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/10/apple-watch-double-ta...
Wireless compute puck = iPhone Wrist band = Apple watch (although most people wear it on their non-dominant hand)
From the videos it looks like Meta adopted Apple's UI of a horizontal handle bar underneath a window for interacting with a piece of content.
Considering that the 100 degree field of view of the Apple Vision Pro is already noticeable, 70 degrees seems really limiting.
Facebook seems better aligned in that regards.
Many conversations you will have when you wear smart glasses (I wear meta's ray bans often since October) is people's concerns..oh u are filming me and I don't know ..stuff to that extent.
It's also possible they don't ever put out an offering in this form factor. They never released a dual screen phone. They never released a touchscreen laptop. This might be one of those things they just don't touch.
Also, I wonder if they'll have a tough time filling the form factor with stuff to do. The lack of apps was a huge reason the APV flopped, while Meta has a large headstart in making it possible for devs to build for their device, even those without exp in spatial dev / game dev / etc.
Couldn't disagree more, if it was possible to bet on this I would bet all my money that they do release something like this. It'll probably be called the Vision Air or something. I don't remember which article it was, but there are reports that Tim Cook only agreed to fund and ship the Vision Pro because he was told that the same tech will be put into glasses in a few years.
For an AR headset, 70 degrees is pretty good.
I had a Quest2 but sold it years ago. I'm not comparing AVP to any previous VR experiences, I don't even remember what the FOV felt like.
You can emulate this on the Vision Pro by removing the light seal entirely. It makes a dramatic difference, but also makes it impossible to use virtual environments or any immersive experiences.
did meta buy them out?
https://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-acquires-ctrl-labs-develop...
I had the first myoband sdk and didn’t work for me. I imagine tech is much improved now
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/ctrl-labs-scoops-up-myo-ar...
Context: I was part of this acquisition, but am no longer at Meta.
Is that true? Last time I was reading about holographic lenses, it was a flat white laser backlight fed into a waveguide (the hologram part), and filtered through an LCD. An actual LED projector would have darker darks, but I would much rather have a higher resolution..
It's definitely helpful to hear about the waveguide production problems. Obviously, that's going to be the greatest hurdle; after all, they are manufacturing a completely unique object with very small feature sizes.