224 points and not single positive comment in the comments, sigh.
I think this is awesome, as the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar), e.g. hand & eye tracking + color passthrough. Sure, these might be not of the same quality (especially when it comes to passthrough), but this allows people to verify their experiences/concepts for the Vision Pro before they actually get their hands on one.
I don't think that Meta, nor Apple will have a problem with this tbh. Maybe because of the assets/icons used in the HUD, but those can easily be replaced if needed.
This is a great idea even if the hardware was quite different. I honestly can't imagine developing for visionOS armed only with a simulator. And since Apple afaik doesn't have a hardware devkit, this sounds miles better.
This is like fancy VNC. Apple doesn't have any problem with VNC, in fact they explicitly support it.
I think Apple can feel fairly safe that the experience will always be so hacky and low quality that it's not going to be a threat to Vision Pro. In the meantime it helps developers get a head start developing for Vision Pro which is only good for Apple.
They can charge a premium because they never sacrificed quality in any systemic way (obviously you can comment with your pet issues but the bottom line is that Apple has kept the quality bar very high for decades). That trust is earned and they charge accordingly.
Some immediately jump to Harvard MBA teachings that caused such widespread lack of quality, or capitalism, whatever. In my opinion a deep focus on quality is rare in any business. It is very hard to scale and keep in a business’s DNA. One reason small businesses continue to be formed and attract customers (beyond “buy local” pandering) is that solid small businesses are run by dictators that create an entity that is an extension of themselves, sacrificing nothing. Therefore they can charge a premium. Extending that to large companies is very difficult and requires solving an incentives and reputation puzzle to make each layer of the organization focus on quality.
I patronize businesses that maintain their quality and I pay for it. Life is too short and I have too much spare cash not to. Apple achieves such standards. You may have to upgrade hardware every few years but that’s part of the price.
It’s the “longtermism” mindset that goes against the grain of human behavior. Eating well, working out, maintaining friendships, putting in consistent effort - the fundamentals of quality. These are values that are hard and I try and notice it when anyone does it - people or businesses.
> the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar)
I find this questionable given the reviews people have given Vision Pro. I have used quest pro, and it is pretty good as a high end gaming style headset but nowhere near the experience people describe from Vision Pro.
There is also a free to download Vision Pro UI panel simulator made by Nova, who have an excellent UI dev package on the Unity Asset Store. The demo is for the Quest Pro and source code with APK is on GitHub.
I was extremely impressed at how well this demo functioned on my Quest Pro. Obviously I haven’t used the Apple HMD, but I was able to easily eye-select nearly every UI element in the demo (resize boxes were a bit wonky) and could even do the whole “pinch with hand in lap” thing from the Apple reveal.
Surprisingly enough, I came away preferring where Meta is going with the whole “Direct Touch” thing (Quest users should have it under the Experimental tab in Settings). Lack of physical feedback (when using hand tracking only) is definitely an issue, but treating the virtual displays like physical touchscreens actually isn’t too bad. It’s definitely my preferred control scheme when I’m not using the controllers.
I can even sorta type at a reasonable enough speed for emails/instant messaging - though nowhere near good enough for coding. Essentially you input text like a Boomer on an iPad (ie: slow one finger pecking) but at twice the speed because you can use two hands.
Is this stereoscopic? I don't see any mention in the readme or demo video link but based on the description of hooking the compositor, unless it's translating rapidly for left/right eyes or the simulator gives left+right textures in real time, this would be monoscopic right?
It's not like anyone who wants to develop for the Vision Pro is going to get a Meta Pro and decide they don't care about the Vision Pro. Also it opens the door to people who already have Meta Pros who want to develop/port apps to the Vision Pro.
If I was serious about developing for the Vision Pro I'd eat the difference between a Meta Pro now and then selling it after the Vision Pro ships.
I think by limiting the simulator to an obviously non-realistic output, they avoid the uncanny valley and unrealistic-judgement of using their operating system in lower-speced hardware.
Meta can't shut this down. Sideloading has been a feature of the Quest since the start, stopping this would represent a paradigm shift for developers of the platform.
> The project reinforces the idea that the Quest products are of low quality (evidenced by comments here).
They are. That's why they cost $400 (game console territory) instead of $3,500 (OLED TV or iMac territory).
"Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
You still do need to make an account and give them a phone number/credit card to get into developer mode and enable adb. They'd be dumb to, but stopping people is entirely within their ability.
Really wish sideloading was a thing you could do on your own/offline like most other android devices.
> "Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
It's amazing how many people miss this crucial point. Apple and Meta share a high level ambition – to dominate the next wave of computing platform -- but that's pretty much the only similarity between them.
If you look at Quest and Vision Pro and think about the constraints placed on the teams building them it seems like:
1. Apple's teams are given the constraint of producing an amazing user experience in terms of screens, gesture control, etc. Price flexes upwards to deliver this.
2. Meta's teams are given the constraint of achieving a mass market price, and the quality of the product flexes down to achieve this.
Apple's position makes sense to me. They are no longer an underdog[^1] and can fast follow anyone who has a more compelling vision for AR/VR which launches before they get theirs out the door.
Meta needed to get this going before Apple for obvious reasons. That's why, for example, of the 20 million units you referred to as being sold, 5 million of them (!) had safety recall notices because the fabric of one of the components caused such serious skin irritation that some number of users were hospitalised.
Meta can move fast and break things (& people), but Apple can't do that any more. (No judgement of either company.)
That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time. E.g. autofocus in cameras began life on the giant cameras which sports photographers used to use, but over time it became cheap enough to manufacture that all cameras shipped with it.
Do you think Meta genuinely thought they were just a few years away from delivering a mass market-ready device (for playing BeatSabre and talking to cartoon versions of your friends)?
My guess is that Meta saw themselves as being curators of the best bits of the existing AR/VR proposition: tie all the best bits of the existing field of hardware and software companies and put them into a package at a $400 price point. Just iterate on the existing ideas a bit and focus on getting the price down.
Apple seems to have looked at the existing ideas around UX (input and screen quality especially) and scope (what do I use this for?) and decided that there needed to be dramatically different (better, in Apple's view) solutions.
Given Meta's internal rhetoric about Quest not retaining users, I'd say Apple was wise to approach this from first principles. But I really don't know what Meta has been working on for so long?
If I think back to the original iPhone launch, it made literally every other phone on the market look preposterously antiquated (to the point that RIM execs famously believed it was "impossible" for Apple to actually be delivering the phone they demoed). Vision Pro does that to the Vive Pro gathering dust in my cupboard, but I'll need to use one to say for sure whether it does the same to the Quest 3. My hunch is that the disparity isn't as huge as it was with cell phones, but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.
Wdyt?
[^1]: Inside Apple around the time iTV / Apple TV was introduced, it was characterised as a "foot in the door": Steve Jobs kept calling it a "hobby" in public, and the strategy changed around a lot. Since then they've introduced several products which have either seen strategy shift over time (iPadOS multi tasking…) or which were known to be a "foot in the door" (Apple Watch), but they don't acknowledge them as such, they just pretend that the plan all along was for Apple Watch to be a fitness tracker, and that they did not in fact spend 30 minutes of the keynote talking about sending digital heartbeats to each other as if it was the most meaningful thing ever.
That'd be a little tricky and probably have undesirable collateral damage. The Oculus side of this is a general-purpose streaming VR app called ALVR that's mainly designed to stream desktop VR apps running under SteamVR (which Oculus do dislike enought that it has to be sideloaded, but there's not really a clean way to do the same with the desktop Oculus runtime). This also means that in theory you should be able to stream to other headsets like the Pico or even an Android phone used Cardboard-style, though the set up and compatibility on that last option is a bit of a pain.
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I think this is awesome, as the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar), e.g. hand & eye tracking + color passthrough. Sure, these might be not of the same quality (especially when it comes to passthrough), but this allows people to verify their experiences/concepts for the Vision Pro before they actually get their hands on one.
I don't think that Meta, nor Apple will have a problem with this tbh. Maybe because of the assets/icons used in the HUD, but those can easily be replaced if needed.
That's not what's happening here. It's just streaming data.
I think Apple can feel fairly safe that the experience will always be so hacky and low quality that it's not going to be a threat to Vision Pro. In the meantime it helps developers get a head start developing for Vision Pro which is only good for Apple.
Only Apple can charge a high premium and still have others pay
Some immediately jump to Harvard MBA teachings that caused such widespread lack of quality, or capitalism, whatever. In my opinion a deep focus on quality is rare in any business. It is very hard to scale and keep in a business’s DNA. One reason small businesses continue to be formed and attract customers (beyond “buy local” pandering) is that solid small businesses are run by dictators that create an entity that is an extension of themselves, sacrificing nothing. Therefore they can charge a premium. Extending that to large companies is very difficult and requires solving an incentives and reputation puzzle to make each layer of the organization focus on quality.
I patronize businesses that maintain their quality and I pay for it. Life is too short and I have too much spare cash not to. Apple achieves such standards. You may have to upgrade hardware every few years but that’s part of the price.
It’s the “longtermism” mindset that goes against the grain of human behavior. Eating well, working out, maintaining friendships, putting in consistent effort - the fundamentals of quality. These are values that are hard and I try and notice it when anyone does it - people or businesses.
I find this questionable given the reviews people have given Vision Pro. I have used quest pro, and it is pretty good as a high end gaming style headset but nowhere near the experience people describe from Vision Pro.
https://github.com/NovaUI-Unity/AppleXRConcept/releases/tag/...
Surprisingly enough, I came away preferring where Meta is going with the whole “Direct Touch” thing (Quest users should have it under the Experimental tab in Settings). Lack of physical feedback (when using hand tracking only) is definitely an issue, but treating the virtual displays like physical touchscreens actually isn’t too bad. It’s definitely my preferred control scheme when I’m not using the controllers.
I can even sorta type at a reasonable enough speed for emails/instant messaging - though nowhere near good enough for coding. Essentially you input text like a Boomer on an iPad (ie: slow one finger pecking) but at twice the speed because you can use two hands.
Deleted Comment
Comments won't show on Twitter either.
Dead Comment
Apple should do the right thing and support early VisionOS development using the Quest Pro.
Why would that be the right thing?
Quest Pro doesn’t have the same capabilities as Vision.
Deleted Comment
If I was serious about developing for the Vision Pro I'd eat the difference between a Meta Pro now and then selling it after the Vision Pro ships.
The project reinforces the idea that the Quest products are of low quality (evidenced by comments here).
It also improves the developer experience the ecosystem of Meta’s competitor.
Thus, providing greater pre-release momentum to the Vision Pro at Facebook’s cost.
> The project reinforces the idea that the Quest products are of low quality (evidenced by comments here).
They are. That's why they cost $400 (game console territory) instead of $3,500 (OLED TV or iMac territory).
"Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
Really wish sideloading was a thing you could do on your own/offline like most other android devices.
It's amazing how many people miss this crucial point. Apple and Meta share a high level ambition – to dominate the next wave of computing platform -- but that's pretty much the only similarity between them.
If you look at Quest and Vision Pro and think about the constraints placed on the teams building them it seems like:
1. Apple's teams are given the constraint of producing an amazing user experience in terms of screens, gesture control, etc. Price flexes upwards to deliver this.
2. Meta's teams are given the constraint of achieving a mass market price, and the quality of the product flexes down to achieve this.
Apple's position makes sense to me. They are no longer an underdog[^1] and can fast follow anyone who has a more compelling vision for AR/VR which launches before they get theirs out the door.
Meta needed to get this going before Apple for obvious reasons. That's why, for example, of the 20 million units you referred to as being sold, 5 million of them (!) had safety recall notices because the fabric of one of the components caused such serious skin irritation that some number of users were hospitalised.
Meta can move fast and break things (& people), but Apple can't do that any more. (No judgement of either company.)
That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time. E.g. autofocus in cameras began life on the giant cameras which sports photographers used to use, but over time it became cheap enough to manufacture that all cameras shipped with it.
Do you think Meta genuinely thought they were just a few years away from delivering a mass market-ready device (for playing BeatSabre and talking to cartoon versions of your friends)?
My guess is that Meta saw themselves as being curators of the best bits of the existing AR/VR proposition: tie all the best bits of the existing field of hardware and software companies and put them into a package at a $400 price point. Just iterate on the existing ideas a bit and focus on getting the price down.
Apple seems to have looked at the existing ideas around UX (input and screen quality especially) and scope (what do I use this for?) and decided that there needed to be dramatically different (better, in Apple's view) solutions.
Given Meta's internal rhetoric about Quest not retaining users, I'd say Apple was wise to approach this from first principles. But I really don't know what Meta has been working on for so long?
If I think back to the original iPhone launch, it made literally every other phone on the market look preposterously antiquated (to the point that RIM execs famously believed it was "impossible" for Apple to actually be delivering the phone they demoed). Vision Pro does that to the Vive Pro gathering dust in my cupboard, but I'll need to use one to say for sure whether it does the same to the Quest 3. My hunch is that the disparity isn't as huge as it was with cell phones, but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.
Wdyt?
[^1]: Inside Apple around the time iTV / Apple TV was introduced, it was characterised as a "foot in the door": Steve Jobs kept calling it a "hobby" in public, and the strategy changed around a lot. Since then they've introduced several products which have either seen strategy shift over time (iPadOS multi tasking…) or which were known to be a "foot in the door" (Apple Watch), but they don't acknowledge them as such, they just pretend that the plan all along was for Apple Watch to be a fitness tracker, and that they did not in fact spend 30 minutes of the keynote talking about sending digital heartbeats to each other as if it was the most meaningful thing ever.