What filmmaker is going to put in all this effort and spend $30K to shoot videos for a single platform that no one uses? At the very least they need to ditch the proprietary format and support Quest and other headsets.
Moreover, it's not really a proprietary format and you can already play them officially on Quest.
That's not to say it cannot be used for other things. Blackmagic frequently market all their cameras for prosumer/professional film-making, but you can use the cameras for so much more than just recording films, although the marketing is geared towards film-markers. Doesn't make it misleading.
Nobody has been able to extract Apples immersive videos yet and I’m not convinced the Quest has the decoding power for it.
It’s a lot of pixels to decode (16k at 90fps) , while also doing reprojection of the frames (https://hackaday.com/2024/04/18/unraveling-the-secrets-of-ap...) and I don’t believe their Qualcomm chip used has enough juice leftover to do that.
The equivalent to the Cine from other makers starts at the $30k and goes up depending on what options you want. Except, at those prices, you're only getting 4K. Red, Arri, Sony, etc won't even get out of bed for anything less than $30k.
That's just BMD's DNA to give the customer so much bang for their buck. Every thing they offer is so much lower MSRPs than competitors. I remember when they first released Resolve for Mac, for free after BMD acquired DaVinci. Of course it couldn't do much without a $20k MacPro build, but the software was free. This was running right next to the $50k Resolve Linux build, so naturally it was jaw dropping.
Sometimes tech is amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3D_films_(2005%E2%80%9...
Of the 13 3D movies released this year only four are native 3D, and those are all fully CGI animation, so none of them used 3D cameras. Avatar 2 (2022) was the last movie to use 3D cameras for live action shots and Avatar 3 is the only upcoming movie known to be using them. It's beyond niche at this point unless your name is James Cameron.
If you pay attention in their work you can see how they try to hide the hard drive array that was required, and sometimes also the accountant holding on to it so that it doesn’t get swept away.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/13/apple-might-release-a-2000...
People that bought Vision Pro at $3,500 they are not using it all that much. A lower price will just result in more headsets gathering dust.
VR has no product-market fit except for a couple of game niches. Far from the “next computing platform” that justified investment of tens of billions of dollars a year.
Headsets and platforms need fundamental rethinking before optimizing for price.
People that bought Vision Pro are often using it for multiple hours a day. I am sure some collect dust, but many are heavily used.
The Meta Quest is outselling the Xbox series. VR clearly has product market fit, but it doesn't yet have iPhone or iPad levels of market fit.
Sometimes it’s ok to make Lamborghini and it’s not a failure to say it has less owners than the Corolla.
Also sales /= usage and retention. Engagement is what you need to grow a platform.
Your numbers about XBox sales might be true for a brief period of time between Quest2 and Quest3 releases. Still what matters is engagement and retention.
As mentioned only product-market (albeit niche) fit for VR has been some games subgenres. Can you point to any other applications with significant numbers?
I have no more data than you do when you say a "shrinking tiny fraction" of AVP buyers. I've been in the industry for 30 years. We both have our anecdata.
Vision Pro has been released for near a year now. I don't think it got the traction that's anywhere close to the hype when it was first announced. Not even among VR enthusiasts, let alone the mass consumer market.
There is an Apple Store near where I live. When I walk by it, 9 out of 10 times there is nobody around the Vision Pro booth, when many people are playing with iPhones and iPads.
My friend has one and I’ve got a Quest 2 and I was absolutely blown away by the AVP, significantly better VR experience in my opinion.
Vision Pro supporting PSVR2 controllers will help a lot.
The final piece is getting something like ALVR or Virtual Desktop to support PCVR without requiring fiddling.
The Q2 has horrible lenses that induce a terrible experience. I had mine for all of a week before I sold it and decided to wait another gen. The Q3 with better lenses is a significantly better product than Q2.
I’ve not had any issues with my Q2 though, I can play for quite extended amounts of time and it tends to be my arms and legs that stop me playing!
Would highly recommend!
It's more that the Vision Pro deliberately prioritized certain things that Meta or Vive or Valve or Sony have not: geometrically stable pass through, wide library of popular 3D movies via AppleTV and Disney+, high resolution immersive environments, seamless keyboard/mouse/trackpad migration between PC and native apps, strong iOS/iPadOS ecosystem integration, high fps / low latency wireless ultra-wide virtual displays for the Mac, etc.
In some ways it focuses on what the Oculus Go was trying to do but was underpowered to really do it. It's meant to replace other iOS devices for general productivity and entertainment, and to complement a Mac.
It's not focused on VR gaming though it can do that.
I have a Oculus Rift dev kit, Ovulus Go, Quest , Quest 2, Valve Index, PSVR2. The AVP is much better of an experience on almost every level but three: too much motion blur when moving your head (this isn't bad when watching high fps video), lack of controller support, not so great hand tracking (which the Quest had to do well due to lack of eye tracking). The controller support should be fixed with the Sony PSVR2 partnership. Motion blur and hand tracking I suspect will be software fixed as they evolve to prioritize active fitness with the AVP.
In the first year, they were constrained by the number of displays Sony could produce.
> Sony, the supplier of Vision Pro's ultra high resolution OLED microdisplays, can't manufacture more than 900,000 displays per year. Apple needs two displays per headset, so this bottleneck would impose severe limitations on how many Vision Pros can be produced.
https://www.uploadvr.com/apple-vision-pro-production-severel...
As far as I've seen, their sales were in line with the number of units they could be expected to build, at least until Sony is able to ramp up production.
> 2024 Apple Vision Pro Shipments Estimated Between 500–600 Thousand Units, Micro OLED Key to Cost and Volume
https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20240118-12003.h...
This is so that people can begin making content for the Apple AR headset that comes out 3 years from now, not the $3500 devkit.
People also forget how bleak the iPad app market was for the first year or so. They also forget that VR has existed for the quest for the better part of 12 years and there are .... 4? 5? very good apps.
Even now there's nothing -incredibly- compelling for the Quest. I'm not a hater, I've owned 5 of them starting at DK1.
No such equivalent exists for AVP, it's a new type of device for pretty much everybody.
Who builds half a million units of a dev kit?
Some stuff you can just tell is going to flop. This is one of them. Apple still doesn't get that people dont want to put on highly conspicuous headsets to watch a movie or play a game, they're fine using a phone or tablet for that. Zuckerberg still pretends like he didnt spend 2 years and untold billions trying to will Horizon Worlds into relevance. Similarly, nobody talks about immersive video on AVP as some kind of gamechanger, not even the usual Apple consumer strategy whisperers like Daring Fireball.
This is a 5-10 year strategy, not a 1-2 year one.
The closer you get to that 5-10 years, the more these types of capital intensive projects start looking non-viable (think Apple EV) compared to cash cows like the App Store and iCloud.
Apple is not Sony, who were happy to keep investing in their ecosystem even if people didn't buy it (Betamax, MiniDisc, GPS addon for the PSP).
Citation needed. The AVP is priced for supply constraints.
'A "gamechanger" in Apple-ese means tens of millions of units shifted'
Not at all. That may be an external party's definition of success. It is not Apple's.
"Apple is in the business of selling Big Macs, not wagyu steaks."
I can't even begin to describe how wrong this statement is, even based on a cursory glance of their current product line.
Pornographers
IMO vision pro is like the first iPhone/iPad and in a few years if they keep refining it there will be a larger adoption.
I think the main thing is that it should support full mac os apps without tethering to an external macbook/mac mini. They need to move the compute out of the headset itself and into the battery module. Apple probably would never do this, but imagine if you bought a mac mini sized compute module that could go on an external display or connect to a vision pro device. If the compute was separate the headset would be significantly lighter and more comfortable.