$3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to paint by numbers of a real canvas -- why is this basic concept of "a $3500 novelty device should enable me to do something _new_" so hard for a 3 trillion dollar company to grasp?
Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months? If they did, would anyone care? $3500 is relatively a lot of money if you're already giving them iPhone and Macbook money. The supermajority of the world doesn't make more then 60k a year, pre-tax. Actually, the supermajority makes vastly less than that.
I guess I'll wait and watch and see if they prove me wrong, but I suspect no matter how good it is, it'll flop.
The first iPhone was pretty crappy. No apps. 2G only. Poor battery life. Limited global distribution - not even Canada could get it. But it captivated people who didn’t own it yet, and it proved out some essential ideas like multitouch. And when the iPhone 3G came out, improving on some of the original device’s shortcomings, it was wildly popular. The rest is history.
There is no doubt that AR will eventually get good enough that the devices are paper thin, weigh nothing, and have no external battery (of course). Everyone wants _that_ device, but you have to start somewhere. Apple can afford to be patient in this space and their considerable moat of intellectual property will allow them to carve out the high end of the AR market and then work down as they did with iPhone.
It would not surprise me if they are earning 90% of the gross margins in the AR device space within three years.
I recall not long after the iPod was released in the early 00’s that peeps were clamoring for an Apple phone. It took seven years before Apple fans got their wish. IPhone landed in the world of Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola. All juggernauts in the mobile phone industry.
Just not the same scenario and game plan. Brilliant design is one thing, but Apple has landed at the intersection of Hardware & Software in a developed field. Right? Steve Jobs pulled back from running OS on clone hardware, because Apple’s winning scenario was to do both to make great designed products.
At 3k+ this is classic early adopter scenario. Maybe there are enough people with stupid money who will work out issues for the later ~1k version…provided another company doesn’t sweep in and eat Apple’s lunch
The first iphone let you have a real web browser anywhere you had cell coverage. This lets you have a web browser floating at home. Its not the same (and I love VR)
Holy sht. Can people really* stop comparing launch of VR and with Iphone?
I have been reading tons of comments here and only to see the OP, and folks with similar post here to be proven wrong. Again after again, proven wrong!
The fundamentals question is where is the killer app! Like original poster, this shouldn't be hard for a three trillion dollar company!
Only if there was a way to filter out post that go along the lines of
Lmao, but the first iPhone was a major improvement over other phones at the time and offered a form of consistence/stability versus the often very experimental models other companies had.
The difference here is of course that VR/AR has been thriving already. Apple is late to the game as they are most of the time, but the reactions I have seen so far in YT/Twit comments are the amazed reactions of the tech illiterate general public, they don't care what it does, but it does have an Apple logo!
Apple is not bringing anything new to the table. No virtual objects, no 3d anything, just 2d planes showing video/photos which non-Apple VR/AR has had for the longest time.
This is just from the briefest search: https://www.vrdesktop.net/. Already exists and looks more fully featured than Apple's stuff.
Apple is a 1T company, the "richest and most technologically advanced company in the world", so why don't they act like it?
They do seem to have an impressive resolution on the thing, but only Apple can ask for 3.5k, no other headset bothers to have as high a resolution atm because they know consumers will balk at such a high price...
Apple's press release shows it as if some rando people are using the thing at home as if it's not going to be art studios, etc that buy the headset and a couple of hardcore Apple fans. No regular person is buying a 3.5k VR/AR set to look at a crappy 2d photo gallery app.
Other VR/AR software for existing headsets like the Vive/Oculus etc already do actual virtual objects/interaction as baseline and Apple couldn't even be bothered to include something like that for their press release. Because they don't need to, I suppose. People will eat it up anyway.
Spurious enough comparison given there were phones, a developed phone market which was 150m+ globally even at that stage, and demonstrated clear use cases for an iphone (an ipod, a phone and an internet browser combined).
Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.
AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.
I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.
First iphone had this WOW effect, before there were clunky crappy Microsoft-OS powered boxes with pens and crappy slow imprecise displays. I recall, I had one, it was a massive shift and basically a new type of device.
This... judging by extremely careful wording of a web which needs to play very very nice with vendors to get these early access peeks, seems to not have it. More like nicely polished hammer looking for nails everywhere. Yes, many aspects fine tuned above competition, but competition is not asleep and the gap is not that big. In some aspects, it will be objectively worse (constant powerbank cable which lasts barely 2 hours, realistically a bit above 1 hour breaks immersion very effectively compared to ie Quest, plus you want to have 4 powerbanks and furiously swapping over one longer evening? Not even going into sharing ultra expensive device with rest of household).
Phones are absolute must in modern world, they were already 90% there when first iphone arrived. VR/AR goggles are still considered idiotic by majority of population, maybe Apple can change that but it will take few years at least.
The first iphone was the first time most people could actually use the internet on something they could carry around, even if it was just with wifi. It did everything phones did but much better since it was all touch. Interfaces to alarms, the calculator, the camera etc was entirely different. Anyone who used it knew that everyone else would either copy it or go out of business.
It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.
As people below have pointed out, arguable it was crappy. Sure, lacked 3G, lacked apps, but the utter ease of connecting to wifi and flicking through Safari…
…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.
I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.
The first iPhone was fantastic. The instant people saw it they wanted it and when they laid hands on it they needed it. The Apple Vision on the other hand is.. a screen strapped to your face.
Exactly this. It's taken 14 iterations to get the iPhone to where it is. Apple Watch has taken 8 or so. Apple has taking a long time iterating to get to where we are today on this platforms. Baby steps really. Each version introduced things we totally take for granted today. I remember just getting the Retina screen on the iPhone 4 was a massively big deal.
Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.
To add to the appeal of iPhone's original release; do not forget the iPod Touch. Released in late 2007, it was available far more broadly and was a great entry point into the world of those crazy new iPhones.
It was my first iOS device and I even paid the 14.99$ for the update to get mail, calendar and contacts. I played way more games back then than I do now since I was often without a Wi-Fi network.
The first iPhone was the first phone with a proper touch screen.
The Vision is about the 50th VR device, in a market that's already quite busy with the Vives, Indexes and Quests. It brings nothing new, and is just one more high resolution VR device (which existed before for cheaper).
Because no one will really do the stuff you suggest. All the things you describe just take too much effort to make
Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness
You can already very easily animate an assembly in modern CAD programs by setting up connectors and constraints, which you normally do as a matter of course anyway. There's literally nothing to do, you just click on the "assembly" tab and start dragging parts around.
Counterpoint, there's always been a desire to have a virtual environment as first shown in 80's sci-fi films like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, etc; immerse yourself in a system, have it become like a natural extension of yourself.
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
The smartphone had multiple killer apps: web browsing, maps when you needed them most instead of having to print MapQuest directions, and device consolidation (iPod, cell phone, GPS, and web browser all in one!)
The touch interface elegantly solved the problem of not having a full keyboard and mouse.
The ultimate vision for these headsets is not yet realized: to unintrusively overlay enriched visual information over our surroundings. This doesn't hit the unintrusively piece by a longshot, nor are the apps that realize this vision even announced.
Vision Pro does, however, provide a first step platform to develop those apps when the tech does shrink to an everyday wearer.
> smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe
The smartphone's killer apps were messages, phone, email and calendar. By the time the iphone came around it was just to eat Blackberry's lunch because it gave us multitouch as the killer interface.
This was a reported rumour prior to the reveal yesterday: no significant use case. This is a significant departure from Apple's usual MO: find a USP and NAIL the implementation. They're using a scattergun approach here and it's risky. They better be sending these headsets free of charge to thousands of studios in the hopes that some of them develop THE killer app, because this is the only way I see this succeeding. Especially because this is a first gen product from Apple with a maximum of two hours of battery life, a wire hanging off the headset, and no controllers. I'd be much more confident about the future of this device if it weren't $3,500 + tax. At this price I don't understand who will be buying it.
Anyone who flies a lot will be able to use it as advertised now for entertainment and work.
And this is WWDC. They’re getting this in front of developers to build the first third-party apps. Years ago, we applied to get Apple TVs for $1 and then came up with an app to launch on it. If you’re early, you have limited competition and can rank in the charts relatively easily (obviously at the risk of fighting over a smaller market).
I feel like this is the original Apple MO that has worked for them for all their most innovative products. Looking at iMac, iPods, iPhone, Apple watch - it was never a perfectly polished product they were pushing, it was a paradigm shift.
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
I will buy it for my entire team just for the video conferencing - assuming it is actually as good as promised, of course. Anything beyond that is gravy.
Meh, this is the same thing they did with the Watch - the last "new thing" they released. The initial Apple Watch release was a pretty scatter gun approach. I mean, one of the headline features was "send your heartbeat to someone else".
They didn't really find a unique selling point, and they didn't really nail the implementation. Few versions later they refined the product and their messaging for it, and carved out a decent market for it. I actually think the original iPhone announcement was pretty close to this VR headset. It's only selling point was that it did everything nicer and better than the competition, and then it relentlessly iterated. iPhone was an easier sell though than expensive ski goggles - barrier is much lower with it.
It's clear(ish) they have some impressive tech in it, and are 'best in market'. I wouldn't be surprised if "Vision Pro" became a lot more of a compelling device in 5 years time. But right now it doesn't really seem to give me $3500 worth of benefit.
This is what's concerning. A team that just spent years creating revolutionary hardware that is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, who by far have the most context to come up with a killer app, could not come up with one. The best they could offer is reading articles in safari an enhancing the viewing experience of movies/shows/live sports.
They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.
I think that we need new tools --- I'd love to see a 3D sculpting tool which uses this to show the 3D object to me in real space --- it'd be great for furniture design.
Looking for a killer app you are looking at this to be a traditional VR or even AR device, that is not what this is.
This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one, hence the name Vision Pro, that is how Apple are trying to sell it.
If you watched the keynote I think that was clear, everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
The fact when they showed gaming, it wasn't a VR or AR game, it was a traditional game on an AR screen says it all.
But that's silly, it can do all that and also have a killer app.
I can already do all that traditional stuff on a macbook or ipad, and "have a screen anywhere", and those things are more portable because I can just sit it on the table instead of having to untangle A CABLE from my clothing and then find somewhere to place a headset that doesnt sit flat like an ipad or macbook.
Then there's the fact that ipads and macbooks have keyboards.
With no killer app, this is a boondoggle, I think.
That comparison comes with the form factor though -- it's a headset. It's not something you can wear and mostly forget about. It needs a purpose to make me want to wear it, otherwise it's just an iPad without the nice tactile association.
> everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
I think most people are trying to find better value in the product.
Headsets focused on providing a screen already exists, NReal is a decently selling product. Sure the Vision Pro has way better resolution, but we're also assuming that NReal and co will have better resolution in their next iterations.
To jest, if a VR screen dedicated device comes to market in 2024 with a tad lower resolution than the Vision Pro at half or a third of the price, will the Vision Pro still have a market as a virtual screen ? At that point it will need to justify the price with all the other things, the hand tracking, the surroundings integration etc. All the stuff people are trying to find value in outside of it being a screen.
To me, it wasn't that I could use Safari that was killer app, but the fact I can use it as a monitor that impresses me. I don't think most VR setups allow you to read text as easily as on a monitor and that is what Apple is claiming. (First impressions seem to support). The second part is not requiring a controller. If I can control this with my eyes, hand and voice. That means I can use a keyboard with it. I assume they'll have some virtual version too. With those two things, a whole lot more use cases open up around it. I don't plan on getting one right away or anything, but an actual usable computer is far more interesting than something that plays games, moves some models around in space and does video conferencing with avatars.
It doesn’t run any desktop apps yet though, only Safari and Photos and a few content apps. They also demoed mirroring only a single Mac display. I think people are overlooking this and expecting to get multi monitor displays for heavy workload apps like on the Meta Quest Pro, but Apple are committed as always to making this a standalone system.
It could have had a killer app: games. Most VR headsets suck in one way or another, Apple could make one that's actually nice to use.
Sadly, for some bizarre reason Apple still don't understand games. They even have pretty good GPUs now and they're still not making an Apple TV Pro to compete with the PS5.
Even just the Vision could've been announced along with a couple exclusives, but instead they have an offhand mention of Arcade.
What's strange to me is that they roll out Hideo Kojima to talk about some gaming thing for the Mac OS, yet when it came to the headset all they can give is some creepy demos of a fathers wearing this thing while their kinds play at home.
Could they really not have given some units to some game devs and tell them to come up with some cool ideas?
This thing just feels incredibly rushed. It's like Apple felt left out of the all the AI hype the last couple months, so they were forced to show this thing before it was really ready.
> I don't understand why there is no AR or VR killer app for this thing.
Because if you go outside wearing this you're going to get instantly mugged. If they were to release something like Pokemon Go before the price comes down, that would likely just result in a bunch of kids getting murdered on the subway or whatever. Much better to drive down the costs by first selling it to people who are excited to use it for coding or whatever.
Because it requires greater integration. For VR the whole environment has to participate. At least if we’re talking about VR glasses that you can wear outside, every store, road, building block and what not should provide information. Who would create all that info, and for what purpose. Adoption is non-existent. There is no platform to submit your data. All we have is the interface. If you’re to wear them only inside then all you can do is the things you already do with a slightly modified UI. Which defies the purpose. I don’t want a virtual keyboard because I get no feedback from it. Virtual screens might be good if I’m in a hotel room, but then again I’ll have my laptop which has better interface. Text reading is an interesting use case but what happens with eye strain if you look at those screens for prolonged time periods. And by the way, what happens if you're wearing eyeglasses? Will they fit?
Perhaps they can find application is e-commerce. Sites could start building virtual stores and you get a feeling that you’re browsing wardrobes. I don’t know if that’s a thing but it kind of makes sense as a use case.
I am also not too optimistic about vision pro’s success, but regarding your glasses question: you would order specific lenses for it. They may even do that inside app stores from what I’ve seen in the video? Hopefully it won’t add an extra charge as lenses are expensive.
You can draw users with a killer app but you can also draw developers with a killer user base. I believe they're leaning on iPhone/iPad app compatibility and Mac screen display to launch it as a peripheral first with existing third party apps, then establish it as a place your customers are waiting for you.
Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.
When they seriously started designing this thing 2+ years ago they probably assumed Facebook's metaverse play would be a smashing success and get VR (and apps like its horizon metaverse) into the mainstream.
Two large screens in a hotel room - so sold (plus on a plane, if that's not socially annoying)
Being able to stand side by side with people to work on something rather than broadcast my face into their face. It's just... so much more natural. All of the social cues like concentration, wandering away to think, nodding your head along with a group conversation you stumble upon and are now actively engaged in. If I can bring my data/apps in but keep them private - sold
Interacting digitally with the environment - this is a new one but I think it's going to be huge. Anything involving maps or layouts, you can plan it prior, and then overlay it on the day when you get on site. AR on a phone is meh because you have to hold it up, but when it's just a gesture I think it's going to open up whole new use cases that were just out of reach (pun intended)
It's 4k per eye. That's great compared to current headsets, but please remember that the screen of your normal screen likely already has 4k, and that's just a rectangle a few cm of everything you see. The 4k per eye means that it's likely going to be <fullhd depending on just how gigantic you want to make the screens
It could be great, but productivity will likely need over 4k per eye to be anything beyond a novelty.
Depending on how the hardware develops, it could become something great for sure. most people calling it a novelty are taking about the device as it's been announced, not the theoretical future it could potentially have if it was different.
Apple is IMO attempting to brute-force create a market here. Facebook/Meta couldn't do the job - for one, Zuck has no idea what he's doing other than chasing buzzwords, for other, they have destroyed a lot of user trust over the past years. And I'm not sure if the stock could take more billions sunk.
Apple in contrast? They deliver a whole different game in terms of quality and capability, and now others will take up developing stuff for the platform, just like it happened with every new class of device Apple pushed out. And financially, Apple doesn't have to take care of anything, they have more cash on hand than the GDP of entire countries (165 billion $ [1], more than Kuwait, Ukraine or Venezuela [2]).
And even if there don't appear any VR apps - movie addicts will love it.
Yeah I can't wait to spend €11000 so my family can strap a screen to each of our faces and watch movies like that rather than staring at a dumb old TV like some kinda poor people
There's no killer app specific to this headset because this is just a supercomplicated me-too product, and also because there is no point in half baking a potential killer.
But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.
Does it need one at launch? The Apple Watch wasn't specifically a health-tracker at launch, but that's what they've really leaned into now. When they launched the iPhone, one of the most vaunted features was "Visual Voicemail", which I'm not even sure still exists?
It's a platform. It'll get cheaper, it'll get better, and developers and the market will do the rest. There's a lot of time between now and "early next year" for 3rd party devs to come up with a lot of apps and ideas.
As someone else said, this is the first release of something that'll end up the size and weight as a pair of sunglasses; at that point, I think it will be as ubiquitous as iPhones are.
The killer app is replacing my giant monitor with this device.
When I travel this is a game changer for me. Right now I lug a small second screen so I can work. I will happily drop $5k to fix this problem and just travel with this plus a small laptop.
None of the Apple apps they showed for the VisionPro had any substantial photogrammetry mapping. They didn’t paste virtual TVs to the walls, or place furniture into an empty room. All the Apple apps were contained to virtual floating screens, even the keyboard (instead of placing in on a surface).
They did show a few third party apps interacting with real world objects (the train moving on a table) but I wonder what amount of that was concept and what was real.
Connecting the virtual objects to those in the real world I feel is a killer feature that will open up a huge set of opportunities. If this doesn’t have that yet, it’s still more VR than AR in my book.
I worked for a digital creative agency that partnered with a few AR/VR companies including the big ones creating demos and POCs for conferences or events. We spent so much time brainstorming and testing with some really bright people and never really came up with more than diverting bits of motion art. We made one pretty decent mini game. Nothing substantive.
And think about the mainstream industry. It's been years and the peak of AR is still Pokemon Go and VR is Beat Saber. Apple Vision looks to be twice as good as the Meta Quest for 10x the price.
What killer app did laptops have that made them the success they are today? Does new technology necessarily need a killer app if the ergonomics end up being more desirable to a broad range of users?
I don't necessarily know the answer here, but my gut feeling is that defining this device based on a "killer app" is like trying to define the original iPhone as needing a "killer app". It didn't necessarily have such a thing but it did end up being pretty big.
The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.
Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.
You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)
Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.
And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)
The killer app of laptops is portability. That killer app was so damn powerful it worked even when laptops were called "luggables" because they were fifty pounds and you couldn't use them without a power outlet.
The original iPhone's killer app was an affordable data plan. At the time, data was stupid expense, priced almost as a velben good. But by 2007, AT&T launched a $60 unlimited data plan for their iPhones. Feature phones have been using the web since the turn of the millennium, but nobody could afford it. Nobody bought the smart phones that existed because nobody could afford it. The Motorola Sidekiq was an unattainable toy for most families, but that unlimited data plan suddenly made smart phones viable to most of the population.
For reference, that plan with unlimited data still had a limited number of calling minutes and texts per month!
Those form factors were massive improvements in portability and accessibility, without necessarily having a killer app compared to its predecessor (laptop not doing anything a desktop didn't do, iphone didn't do much new at first but now has translator apps and GPS and stuff)
The headset, though, seems clunkier (awkward non-flat shape, has cables, no keyboard) and you trade that off for... a bigger, 3D screen that shows you mostly the same thing.
I could be wrong, but it feels like an expensive regression in portability.
If it has no killer app and isn't a revolutionary form factor in terms of portability and ease of access, can it win? Maybe it's easier to access than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.
I think this will be one of those “iPod, less storage than a Nomad, lame” comments in a few years, but I guess we'll see.
I'd love to work comfortably lying in a hammock, couch or bed. The monitor part is solved, it seems, I just need one of those split keyboards where each half attaches to one hand.
I'd also love to feel like I'm in a colossal movie theater without all the viruses, noise and popcorn from other people.
Walk into a physical store and stand in an aisle. How many products can you see in a 360 field of vision?
Visit any webstore. How many products can you see on your screen at once?
To me this is the completely obvious application for VR. But in order for it to be actually useful you would need an online shopping experience that worked with it. At the very least you would have to 3D model every product.
This is laughable. Walmart literally has a demo of an "AR experience" shopping experience and it is absurdism, on the same level as that pepsi logo design document.
Nobody wants that. People shop online to avoid the annoyance of a physical location. I can shop for things while I squeeze out turds, why would I ever exchange that for strapping an overpriced screen to my face? The average person favors convenience and cheapness above all else, to a huge extent.
It doesn't work, because you can't constrain the user's hand to match what's happening in the game, meaning it completely removes any immersion benefit you get from VR in the first place.
Melee in VR feels awful. It feels like swatting flies.
Shooting in VR is amazing. There are multiple games that let you play Star Wars battlefront knockoffs so you can cosplay the droid army.
Isn't the actual killer app for Advertisers? "Glue this thing to peoples faces and you now have the most effective most intrusive way to slam ads in front of people ever created!" Don't see why any consumer would buy this for 3500 though.
You should try VR porn. Like actually try it. I have heard it loses it's gimmick really fast. It's extremely limited because the camera rig required for video content is restrictive, and the only ones who can afford it are really boring studios, and it's not actually "VR", but merely "3D with a large field of view", which turns out to not be that great, and the "games" that let you interact are often cash grabs, and plenty more often just store bought 3D assets with extremely mediocre animation.
Go look at the VR porn subreddit. It's really not impressive. Also the story that VHS won because of porn is a lie. Porn doesn't drive innovation like most people claim.
With $3500 you can go on an epic drug fueled sex party with high quality real live escorts that will make your mates jealous and will be an experience you remember for life.
Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.
If I had to live in a VR context for any reason, this really feels like the product I’d want to have to do it in. But I can’t think of a reason why I’d have to.
What nurturing ecosystem? We've had ten years or so to find an actual use case that every average person is willing to spend hundreds of dollars on, and we have come up empty handed. There's nothing magical or so new in this headset. The people who have an actual use for VR, simulation game turbo nerds, have been mostly satisfied, nobody else cares about VR. Most people who try the "floating web browser and custom theater and infinite monitors" experience quickly realize how unergonomic it is. VR is still an experience that one in ten cannot adjust to.
This is the same problem we saw with the metaverse. It's all hype and no substance. Their best ideas to put into the presentation were looking at web sites.
You don’t make money targeting those without money to spend.
By that logic, Tesla shouldn’t be the top selling car, why would you buy them instead of a 25k Corolla? Many are willing to pay a premium for a best-in class-experience, which is what this headset is.
There’s a lot, lot of disposable income in the world, but not held by the supermajority.
That kinda misses the question. It might very well be the best in class headset (at that price it kinda needs to be). The question was: okay, the hardware is great, but what is need-to-have app?
Other headsets highlighted gaming, metaverse, industrial/medical applications,....
> Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with.
It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
> In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far “distances” within your space.
That's the part I was most intrigued with, and on one size given the 4K resolution per eye, text being readable was expected, but I can't wait to have more details on how "crisp and legible at all sizes" it is. I have no idea of what's M.Panzerino's threshold is for "crisp", hope it's better than just Full HD level.
> > Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with.
> It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
That I didn't understood. Should that be a message to the competition? What should that tell me as a developer? What should that message tell me as a consumer?
As a consumer may I don't care how many patents are there. Because I don't have a benefit at all.
As a developer may it means, that a develop for a consumer base, but it is hard to predict how big that will be. Competition needs to work around those patents or will not exists at all because of possible licensing fees. So, should I start development or not?
Having a patent moat is also a message to the consumer. Apple has had promised features pulled because it ran into somebody else’s patent minefield and it can affect device price considerably. Having a software update pull features for legal reasons is also a terrible experience.
Many non software folks I meet look at patents as a sign of ingenuity, a reward, and evidence of successful creations / engineering. Its not viewed as a negative. It also suggests Apple's version will be better than others, for a long time, because all of the good parts are patented.
They advertise the "4K per eye" as some kind of an advantage. They need to do this to have 3D vision, but it doesn't improve the resolution, it's still just 4K.
And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes.
I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (just better than all previous headsets).
At 90-100 degrees, a 4K/eye display will likely end up being around 35-40 PPD (pixels per degree). This is about equivalent to what a FHD display would like like (27" monitor at 60cm: https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/).
There are a lot of other factors like fill factor (screen door effect) and there are definitely some optical designs that can increase PPD as well. Apple bought Limbak recently, btw, it's possible they use a similar design as what is described here: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
I think 4k might really be a bare minimum for this kind of thing. For the text heavy use cases that apple are pushing things like pixel density are going to be much more important than the gaming usecases VR has been used for thus far.
Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.
I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.
Why the wondering, there are already devices on the market with higher resolutions than what Apple will bring in near future. It may not be comparable for some high FPS use case, but as virtual desktop, especially crispness of image is very much comparable.
It's not 4K per eye. They say 23M pixels across two eyes, which is 11.5M for each eye. 4K is 8.2M. It's 40% more pixels than 4K, with the intent presumably being to be able to display a 4K-resolution display within a larger space.
I think I’m noticing what people do all the time with Apple launches, not listen to the marketing. They told you exactly where they’re positioning this. Spatial computing. Not quite tvOS not quite iPadOS. If they’re lucky this is the watch all over again. If they’re truly lucky, this the new iPlatform. I’m just excited they’ve now confirmed this will be a market for at least another decade. I am bummed to see though that it is a queued release and not a global preorder.
24 million pixels across the two panels, orders of magnitude more than any headsets most consumers have come in contact with
The Quest 2 has about 4 million, which is undoubtedly more than 0.24 million. Has "order of magnitude" joined "exponential" as another math expression stolen as a synonym for "rilly rilly rilly"?
"Similarly, if the reference value is one of some powers of 2, since computers store data in a binary format, the magnitude can be understood in terms of the amount of computer memory needed to store that value. "
int(log2(n)) is a perfectly acceptable order of magnitude, especially when considering computers, at least to me.
I think the problem is the plural. You could convincingly say that 24 is _an_ order of magnitude bigger than 4, even if technically log(24) is 1.38 … it’s a close enough approximation.
More seriously the repeated quote-the-marketing in this article was annoying. You’re explaining your use of it, and your experience is the only thing that matters. Everyone has read the specs at this point.
> It never made sense back then and neither does now
Well, Apple was the first 1T company. I don't know which grade they were learning me that companies maximize profits and minimize expenses. Until it works for Apple, they will happily put whatever price tag. It makes no sense to complain. People will either complain with wallet (not able to buy it) or Apple will just continue to be a behemot.
Apple's position, in so many words, is that if you want a cheaper iPhone, buy an older model. Their products are so good, that the budget model is just the old one.
For example, I have an iPhone 11. I got it the day it came out, and I really don't need another phone. I will continue to use this one until it breaks, or probably for another 5 years, whichever comes first.
Maybe for some people, it's beneath them to buy an older, even if it's professionally refurbished and warranted, but to me that says something about the quality.
Last example. My brother in law was once complaining to me about how Apple is trash and that they purposely slow down their phones and that it's all a conspiracy. I asked him what phone he had and he told me an iPhone 5s! I was so impressed that he didn't even notice how outrageous this was.
All these optimistic articles without showing a single AR application - is Apple allowing access to devices only to pre-vetted publishers that would never criticize their products? 4k per eye sounds good but if it's only used for displaying 2D stuff it's kinda pointless as the resolution is still too low for that and the GPU is too weak for 3D stuff at that resolution (that would need like a minimized 5090 to make it work).
How do you know the resolution is too low, and what do you think is needed? I find the Oculus Quest 2 (1920x1832 per eye) to be passable for working on virtual monitors. Not great, but feels 60% of the way there. I would expect 4K per eye to be a huge difference.
I have HP Reverb G2 which is 2048x2048 per eye and it's great for the MS Flight Simulator 2020 or Automobilista 2 but utterly terrible for virtual desktop. Imagining 2x denser pixels still doesn't cut it for working with text, i.e. one still will see jagged lines/edges. Also the lens are unfocused towards edges which would require head movement instead of eye movement to keep focused area sharp. Imagine programming a foot away from a 55" monitor.
Vision Pro is supposed to be 23Mpx so let's assume it's evenly distributed per eye, making it 11.5Mpx per eye, and with a square resolution per eye, so that's approximately 3391x3391, i.e. 1.65x denser than Reverb.
It could be that in 3-5 years a mass market emerges from this. Or it could be like apple's newton handheld computer, released in the early 1990s and discontinued without successor. The smartphone eventually arrived but a good decade later.
I'm seriously hoping it's a success. I grew up on Apple, but five years ago I jumped to Linux and ThinkPads and haven't looked back until now. I want a Linux-based XR environment, but that won't happen unless the hardware becomes cheap and common and hackable enough for a developer community to even think about seriously trying for it. So the range of headsets that have been offered until now have left me disheartened, focused as they are on entertainment. The HoloLens gave me some hope, but Microsoft can't touch Apple for hardware, and they wisely limited themselves to specialized use cases.
Apple isn't playing, though. They're targeting all use cases--entertainment, socializing, and working, even collaboratively. They don't want this just in the office, they want it in the home. If they succeed (on the second generation, mind you) then Microsoft and PC makers will be in the same position phone makers were when the iPhone took hold. They'll have to work together if they want to catch up, and they'll have to work fast, which means working openly.
Except for the one use case where there has actually been demand for VR: gaming. Apple's plan is to eat Meta's lunch. Meta's lunch consists of two peas and a leaf of wilted lettuce.
I've always dreamt of a good AR goggle. I'm just a bit apprehensive about Apple being the big player. My country isn't thaaat big on Apple. So I would never use facetime to call people, for instance. So I'm afraid that if it's locked down, as is typical for Apple, I won't get to experience it fully.
I want it hackable, not because I myself is gonna do anything with it, but because I want that kind of innovation. Not the boring, polished, exec-vision thingy. Let other people invent new ways of doing stuff!
If augmented reality can provide me with step-by-step guidance on diagnosing and fixing a car leak, replacing a diverter valve on a faucet, installing roof-customized solar panels, and various other DIY tasks, while also showing me the necessary tools, then I would be inclined to purchase this product. I'm growing weary of watching YouTube videos for car repairs and struggling to align the locations of bolts or parts with my own vehicle.
The concept of augmented reality also appeals to me when it comes to recipes. I've been considering investing in a Thermomix device, which costs around $1500, because I appreciate the convenience of their on-screen guided instructions rather than attempting to figure out the correct temperature, cooking time, slice size. If augmented reality can guide me through cooking two or three dishes simultaneously, that would be a very convenient time saver. For example, while the onions are sautéing for 5 mins, the software knows that I have enough time to prepare a 2nd dish like chopping romaine leaves for a salad. I’d end my subscription to Soylent pretty quick for something like that.
You bring up some good points. Mainly that teaching you to work on your car, your house, or cook is highly specific to your particular environment. Maybe that's an example of the missing killer app for XR.
OTOH these also sound like things a remote teacher could help you with if they could talk to you in an earpiece provided they could immerse themselves in your environment. So the remote teacher would be wearing the AR headset. But now maybe you'd need a robot avatar in your kitchen.
Just brainstorming here but these might be business opportunities.
How would this, which has the hardware of two iPhones in it and stands in for a 100" screen and Dolby Atmos surround system, cost less than an iPhone Pro Max?
It was obvious as soon as they listed the cameras involved, the M2 chip, and the micro-OLED screens (plural), this was going to cost 2x a single top of line iPhone plus headset, so $3000+.
GP didn't say how much it should cost, just how much most people are willing to spend. Right now this is just a portable, private screen (maybe a really nice one, but without any killer XR app, that's all it is) . There are few people who have a use for that to make it worth spending $3.5k on. If an app comes out that enables something people want to do, but you can't do with a laptop, then it may start to become worth it.
Readit News
Their sales pitch was "it makes it amazing to read articles in safari"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&t=5410s
$3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to paint by numbers of a real canvas -- why is this basic concept of "a $3500 novelty device should enable me to do something _new_" so hard for a 3 trillion dollar company to grasp?
Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months? If they did, would anyone care? $3500 is relatively a lot of money if you're already giving them iPhone and Macbook money. The supermajority of the world doesn't make more then 60k a year, pre-tax. Actually, the supermajority makes vastly less than that.
I guess I'll wait and watch and see if they prove me wrong, but I suspect no matter how good it is, it'll flop.
There is no doubt that AR will eventually get good enough that the devices are paper thin, weigh nothing, and have no external battery (of course). Everyone wants _that_ device, but you have to start somewhere. Apple can afford to be patient in this space and their considerable moat of intellectual property will allow them to carve out the high end of the AR market and then work down as they did with iPhone.
It would not surprise me if they are earning 90% of the gross margins in the AR device space within three years.
Just not the same scenario and game plan. Brilliant design is one thing, but Apple has landed at the intersection of Hardware & Software in a developed field. Right? Steve Jobs pulled back from running OS on clone hardware, because Apple’s winning scenario was to do both to make great designed products.
At 3k+ this is classic early adopter scenario. Maybe there are enough people with stupid money who will work out issues for the later ~1k version…provided another company doesn’t sweep in and eat Apple’s lunch
Holy sht. Can people really* stop comparing launch of VR and with Iphone?
I have been reading tons of comments here and only to see the OP, and folks with similar post here to be proven wrong. Again after again, proven wrong!
The fundamentals question is where is the killer app! Like original poster, this shouldn't be hard for a three trillion dollar company!
Only if there was a way to filter out post that go along the lines of
"....The first iPhone was pretty crappy.... "
The difference here is of course that VR/AR has been thriving already. Apple is late to the game as they are most of the time, but the reactions I have seen so far in YT/Twit comments are the amazed reactions of the tech illiterate general public, they don't care what it does, but it does have an Apple logo!
Apple is not bringing anything new to the table. No virtual objects, no 3d anything, just 2d planes showing video/photos which non-Apple VR/AR has had for the longest time.
This is just from the briefest search: https://www.vrdesktop.net/. Already exists and looks more fully featured than Apple's stuff.
Apple is a 1T company, the "richest and most technologically advanced company in the world", so why don't they act like it?
They do seem to have an impressive resolution on the thing, but only Apple can ask for 3.5k, no other headset bothers to have as high a resolution atm because they know consumers will balk at such a high price...
Apple's press release shows it as if some rando people are using the thing at home as if it's not going to be art studios, etc that buy the headset and a couple of hardcore Apple fans. No regular person is buying a 3.5k VR/AR set to look at a crappy 2d photo gallery app.
Other VR/AR software for existing headsets like the Vive/Oculus etc already do actual virtual objects/interaction as baseline and Apple couldn't even be bothered to include something like that for their press release. Because they don't need to, I suppose. People will eat it up anyway.
Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.
AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.
I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.
This... judging by extremely careful wording of a web which needs to play very very nice with vendors to get these early access peeks, seems to not have it. More like nicely polished hammer looking for nails everywhere. Yes, many aspects fine tuned above competition, but competition is not asleep and the gap is not that big. In some aspects, it will be objectively worse (constant powerbank cable which lasts barely 2 hours, realistically a bit above 1 hour breaks immersion very effectively compared to ie Quest, plus you want to have 4 powerbanks and furiously swapping over one longer evening? Not even going into sharing ultra expensive device with rest of household).
Phones are absolute must in modern world, they were already 90% there when first iphone arrived. VR/AR goggles are still considered idiotic by majority of population, maybe Apple can change that but it will take few years at least.
It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.
…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.
I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.
Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.
It was my first iOS device and I even paid the 14.99$ for the update to get mail, calendar and contacts. I played way more games back then than I do now since I was often without a Wi-Fi network.
This particular song has gotten pretty familiar.
No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
The Vision is about the 50th VR device, in a market that's already quite busy with the Vives, Indexes and Quests. It brings nothing new, and is just one more high resolution VR device (which existed before for cheaper).
Even if Apple made a similar price cut here, the device would still cost over $2000.
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Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness
of course still a gimmick
I’m more exciting about a new version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmFk0AKbXlQ
Given the design already in CAD, how about 1 person in a day.
It takes more work, but also (hopefully) provides an additional value. At sufficient scale it might make sense to do this (something like IKEA).
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
The touch interface elegantly solved the problem of not having a full keyboard and mouse.
The ultimate vision for these headsets is not yet realized: to unintrusively overlay enriched visual information over our surroundings. This doesn't hit the unintrusively piece by a longshot, nor are the apps that realize this vision even announced.
Vision Pro does, however, provide a first step platform to develop those apps when the tech does shrink to an everyday wearer.
The smartphone's killer apps were messages, phone, email and calendar. By the time the iphone came around it was just to eat Blackberry's lunch because it gave us multitouch as the killer interface.
And this is WWDC. They’re getting this in front of developers to build the first third-party apps. Years ago, we applied to get Apple TVs for $1 and then came up with an app to launch on it. If you’re early, you have limited competition and can rank in the charts relatively easily (obviously at the risk of fighting over a smaller market).
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
They didn't really find a unique selling point, and they didn't really nail the implementation. Few versions later they refined the product and their messaging for it, and carved out a decent market for it. I actually think the original iPhone announcement was pretty close to this VR headset. It's only selling point was that it did everything nicer and better than the competition, and then it relentlessly iterated. iPhone was an easier sell though than expensive ski goggles - barrier is much lower with it.
It's clear(ish) they have some impressive tech in it, and are 'best in market'. I wouldn't be surprised if "Vision Pro" became a lot more of a compelling device in 5 years time. But right now it doesn't really seem to give me $3500 worth of benefit.
They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.
Looking for a killer app you are looking at this to be a traditional VR or even AR device, that is not what this is.
This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one, hence the name Vision Pro, that is how Apple are trying to sell it.
If you watched the keynote I think that was clear, everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
The fact when they showed gaming, it wasn't a VR or AR game, it was a traditional game on an AR screen says it all.
I can already do all that traditional stuff on a macbook or ipad, and "have a screen anywhere", and those things are more portable because I can just sit it on the table instead of having to untangle A CABLE from my clothing and then find somewhere to place a headset that doesnt sit flat like an ipad or macbook.
Then there's the fact that ipads and macbooks have keyboards.
With no killer app, this is a boondoggle, I think.
I think most people are trying to find better value in the product.
Headsets focused on providing a screen already exists, NReal is a decently selling product. Sure the Vision Pro has way better resolution, but we're also assuming that NReal and co will have better resolution in their next iterations.
To jest, if a VR screen dedicated device comes to market in 2024 with a tad lower resolution than the Vision Pro at half or a third of the price, will the Vision Pro still have a market as a virtual screen ? At that point it will need to justify the price with all the other things, the hand tracking, the surroundings integration etc. All the stuff people are trying to find value in outside of it being a screen.
It's Project Looking Glass 2.0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
Which is what traditional VR and AR devices offer. Being able to use apps in VR or AR isn't new.
Dead Comment
It could have had a killer app: games. Most VR headsets suck in one way or another, Apple could make one that's actually nice to use.
Sadly, for some bizarre reason Apple still don't understand games. They even have pretty good GPUs now and they're still not making an Apple TV Pro to compete with the PS5.
Even just the Vision could've been announced along with a couple exclusives, but instead they have an offhand mention of Arcade.
Could they really not have given some units to some game devs and tell them to come up with some cool ideas?
This thing just feels incredibly rushed. It's like Apple felt left out of the all the AI hype the last couple months, so they were forced to show this thing before it was really ready.
Because if you go outside wearing this you're going to get instantly mugged. If they were to release something like Pokemon Go before the price comes down, that would likely just result in a bunch of kids getting murdered on the subway or whatever. Much better to drive down the costs by first selling it to people who are excited to use it for coding or whatever.
Perhaps they can find application is e-commerce. Sites could start building virtual stores and you get a feeling that you’re browsing wardrobes. I don’t know if that’s a thing but it kind of makes sense as a use case.
Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.
Oops.
At this point, floating pages and waypoints are the "Hello World" of AR platforms.
Being able to stand side by side with people to work on something rather than broadcast my face into their face. It's just... so much more natural. All of the social cues like concentration, wandering away to think, nodding your head along with a group conversation you stumble upon and are now actively engaged in. If I can bring my data/apps in but keep them private - sold
Interacting digitally with the environment - this is a new one but I think it's going to be huge. Anything involving maps or layouts, you can plan it prior, and then overlay it on the day when you get on site. AR on a phone is meh because you have to hold it up, but when it's just a gesture I think it's going to open up whole new use cases that were just out of reach (pun intended)
It could be great, but productivity will likely need over 4k per eye to be anything beyond a novelty.
Depending on how the hardware develops, it could become something great for sure. most people calling it a novelty are taking about the device as it's been announced, not the theoretical future it could potentially have if it was different.
This is a general purpose computing device, so seeing it have a great browser setup is a big deal.
Apple in contrast? They deliver a whole different game in terms of quality and capability, and now others will take up developing stuff for the platform, just like it happened with every new class of device Apple pushed out. And financially, Apple doesn't have to take care of anything, they have more cash on hand than the GDP of entire countries (165 billion $ [1], more than Kuwait, Ukraine or Venezuela [2]).
And even if there don't appear any VR apps - movie addicts will love it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/05/how-markets-biggest-companie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
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But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.
It's a platform. It'll get cheaper, it'll get better, and developers and the market will do the rest. There's a lot of time between now and "early next year" for 3rd party devs to come up with a lot of apps and ideas.
As someone else said, this is the first release of something that'll end up the size and weight as a pair of sunglasses; at that point, I think it will be as ubiquitous as iPhones are.
When I travel this is a game changer for me. Right now I lug a small second screen so I can work. I will happily drop $5k to fix this problem and just travel with this plus a small laptop.
They did show a few third party apps interacting with real world objects (the train moving on a table) but I wonder what amount of that was concept and what was real.
Connecting the virtual objects to those in the real world I feel is a killer feature that will open up a huge set of opportunities. If this doesn’t have that yet, it’s still more VR than AR in my book.
And think about the mainstream industry. It's been years and the peak of AR is still Pokemon Go and VR is Beat Saber. Apple Vision looks to be twice as good as the Meta Quest for 10x the price.
I don't necessarily know the answer here, but my gut feeling is that defining this device based on a "killer app" is like trying to define the original iPhone as needing a "killer app". It didn't necessarily have such a thing but it did end up being pretty big.
The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.
Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.
You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)
Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.
And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)
Very literally Excel, for business users. That's what most laptop users were running in the 90s.
Then Word for personal use, typically students writing their thesis/homework.
The original iPhone's killer app was an affordable data plan. At the time, data was stupid expense, priced almost as a velben good. But by 2007, AT&T launched a $60 unlimited data plan for their iPhones. Feature phones have been using the web since the turn of the millennium, but nobody could afford it. Nobody bought the smart phones that existed because nobody could afford it. The Motorola Sidekiq was an unattainable toy for most families, but that unlimited data plan suddenly made smart phones viable to most of the population.
For reference, that plan with unlimited data still had a limited number of calling minutes and texts per month!
Those form factors were massive improvements in portability and accessibility, without necessarily having a killer app compared to its predecessor (laptop not doing anything a desktop didn't do, iphone didn't do much new at first but now has translator apps and GPS and stuff)
The headset, though, seems clunkier (awkward non-flat shape, has cables, no keyboard) and you trade that off for... a bigger, 3D screen that shows you mostly the same thing.
I could be wrong, but it feels like an expensive regression in portability.
If it has no killer app and isn't a revolutionary form factor in terms of portability and ease of access, can it win? Maybe it's easier to access than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.
I'd love to work comfortably lying in a hammock, couch or bed. The monitor part is solved, it seems, I just need one of those split keyboards where each half attaches to one hand.
I'd also love to feel like I'm in a colossal movie theater without all the viruses, noise and popcorn from other people.
I'll pay good money for either.
Walk into a physical store and stand in an aisle. How many products can you see in a 360 field of vision?
Visit any webstore. How many products can you see on your screen at once?
To me this is the completely obvious application for VR. But in order for it to be actually useful you would need an online shopping experience that worked with it. At the very least you would have to 3D model every product.
Nobody wants that. People shop online to avoid the annoyance of a physical location. I can shop for things while I squeeze out turds, why would I ever exchange that for strapping an overpriced screen to my face? The average person favors convenience and cheapness above all else, to a huge extent.
Melee in VR feels awful. It feels like swatting flies.
Shooting in VR is amazing. There are multiple games that let you play Star Wars battlefront knockoffs so you can cosplay the droid army.
Go look at the VR porn subreddit. It's really not impressive. Also the story that VHS won because of porn is a lie. Porn doesn't drive innovation like most people claim.
Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.
This has no killer app and is being sold at full price.
I think it may be positioned more for professional use and then, "oh yeah, you can have a great movie and game experience, too."
Yes.
> If they did, would anyone care?
Also yes.
This is the same problem we saw with the metaverse. It's all hype and no substance. Their best ideas to put into the presentation were looking at web sites.
Why would web sites be better to look at in VR?
same goes to vx effects in movies.
what about designing App UI / UX where you're completely in the flow and don't want to be disturbed.
how about complex data anylsis ?
If the price was not an issue and apps are mature, I could defenitly imagine lots of use cases around immersive work tasks ...
By that logic, Tesla shouldn’t be the top selling car, why would you buy them instead of a 25k Corolla? Many are willing to pay a premium for a best-in class-experience, which is what this headset is.
There’s a lot, lot of disposable income in the world, but not held by the supermajority.
Other headsets highlighted gaming, metaverse, industrial/medical applications,....
With iphones you suddenly had a multipurpose device for relative little.
With this, we know the market and it's not strong by any means
It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
> In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far “distances” within your space.
That's the part I was most intrigued with, and on one size given the 4K resolution per eye, text being readable was expected, but I can't wait to have more details on how "crisp and legible at all sizes" it is. I have no idea of what's M.Panzerino's threshold is for "crisp", hope it's better than just Full HD level.
> It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
That I didn't understood. Should that be a message to the competition? What should that tell me as a developer? What should that message tell me as a consumer?
As a consumer may I don't care how many patents are there. Because I don't have a benefit at all.
As a developer may it means, that a develop for a consumer base, but it is hard to predict how big that will be. Competition needs to work around those patents or will not exists at all because of possible licensing fees. So, should I start development or not?
(It makes me sick to the stomach personally)
And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes.
I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (just better than all previous headsets).
There are a lot of other factors like fill factor (screen door effect) and there are definitely some optical designs that can increase PPD as well. Apple bought Limbak recently, btw, it's possible they use a similar design as what is described here: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.
I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.
Steve Jobs himself during the first iPhone presentation bragged “oh boy we’ve patented it” about multitouch technology.
The Quest 2 has about 4 million, which is undoubtedly more than 0.24 million. Has "order of magnitude" joined "exponential" as another math expression stolen as a synonym for "rilly rilly rilly"?
Even the Wikipedia page makes reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
"Similarly, if the reference value is one of some powers of 2, since computers store data in a binary format, the magnitude can be understood in terms of the amount of computer memory needed to store that value. "
int(log2(n)) is a perfectly acceptable order of magnitude, especially when considering computers, at least to me.
More seriously the repeated quote-the-marketing in this article was annoying. You’re explaining your use of it, and your experience is the only thing that matters. Everyone has read the specs at this point.
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Well, Apple was the first 1T company. I don't know which grade they were learning me that companies maximize profits and minimize expenses. Until it works for Apple, they will happily put whatever price tag. It makes no sense to complain. People will either complain with wallet (not able to buy it) or Apple will just continue to be a behemot.
The Macbooks look expensive too until you compare them to similar Windows laptops with equivalent screens, trackpads, and battery life.
For example, I have an iPhone 11. I got it the day it came out, and I really don't need another phone. I will continue to use this one until it breaks, or probably for another 5 years, whichever comes first.
Maybe for some people, it's beneath them to buy an older, even if it's professionally refurbished and warranted, but to me that says something about the quality.
Last example. My brother in law was once complaining to me about how Apple is trash and that they purposely slow down their phones and that it's all a conspiracy. I asked him what phone he had and he told me an iPhone 5s! I was so impressed that he didn't even notice how outrageous this was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENtxJcI5Ll4&t=1088s
Vision Pro is supposed to be 23Mpx so let's assume it's evenly distributed per eye, making it 11.5Mpx per eye, and with a square resolution per eye, so that's approximately 3391x3391, i.e. 1.65x denser than Reverb.
Apple isn't playing, though. They're targeting all use cases--entertainment, socializing, and working, even collaboratively. They don't want this just in the office, they want it in the home. If they succeed (on the second generation, mind you) then Microsoft and PC makers will be in the same position phone makers were when the iPhone took hold. They'll have to work together if they want to catch up, and they'll have to work fast, which means working openly.
So I'm hoping. But I ain't betting.
Except for the one use case where there has actually been demand for VR: gaming. Apple's plan is to eat Meta's lunch. Meta's lunch consists of two peas and a leaf of wilted lettuce.
I want it hackable, not because I myself is gonna do anything with it, but because I want that kind of innovation. Not the boring, polished, exec-vision thingy. Let other people invent new ways of doing stuff!
1. Seems quite cool in the demo but dorky in the real world.
2. Solves a problem no one really has.
3. Costs 10x more than most people are willing to spend.
4. Actual use case: Mall cops and tourists.
5. Some rich fanboy will buy out the entire inventory, use it outdoors, and fall off a cliff.
The concept of augmented reality also appeals to me when it comes to recipes. I've been considering investing in a Thermomix device, which costs around $1500, because I appreciate the convenience of their on-screen guided instructions rather than attempting to figure out the correct temperature, cooking time, slice size. If augmented reality can guide me through cooking two or three dishes simultaneously, that would be a very convenient time saver. For example, while the onions are sautéing for 5 mins, the software knows that I have enough time to prepare a 2nd dish like chopping romaine leaves for a salad. I’d end my subscription to Soylent pretty quick for something like that.
OTOH these also sound like things a remote teacher could help you with if they could talk to you in an earpiece provided they could immerse themselves in your environment. So the remote teacher would be wearing the AR headset. But now maybe you'd need a robot avatar in your kitchen.
Just brainstorming here but these might be business opportunities.
How would this, which has the hardware of two iPhones in it and stands in for a 100" screen and Dolby Atmos surround system, cost less than an iPhone Pro Max?
It was obvious as soon as they listed the cameras involved, the M2 chip, and the micro-OLED screens (plural), this was going to cost 2x a single top of line iPhone plus headset, so $3000+.