A counter point on premium VR headsets. They are teleportation devices.
I've used every popular VR device, but one Vision Pro experience stood out - 'The Haleakala environment'[1]
It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.
The Vision pro's lack of a killer app because development is unintuitive, userbase is small, the UX is alien and the hardware costs of constructing these experience is still rather high. Give it a few years. The hardware is already there. This isn't a solution in search of a problem. This is PalmOS, a solution that is too early to the market.
I have family with disabilities. Being able to teleport my loved ones to places they could never go themselves is worth the $3000. If I could record my most profound memories with 'VR recorder', I would. My parent missed my graduation because of being continents away. You think they wouldn't want to be teleported to it ? Wedding photographers cost $4000+, so we can relive those memories through shoddy snapshots. Why not be teleported back to the most beautiful day ?
The thing is that I don’t really see the Vision Pro as Palm OS. Palm OS was out for years and years and was really successful, all things considered.
Sure, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as iOS or Android now, but it obviously filled a niche for a large enough number of people that it stuck around and pioneered that market. I had a Kyocera 6035 Palm “smartphone” over half a decade before the iPhone came out, and the Handspring Treos were also awfully popular among early adopters.
That credit here goes squarely to Oculus/Meta, and the Quest in specific.
Vision Pro, at best, is a Newton, stuffed with tech cool enough to be Really Neat, but with either too much tradeoff or that doesn’t go far enough to be a sea change in usability. There’s a little bit of Pippin in there too, with Apple not quite understanding how much games and game like activities drive VR adoption and how best to leverage that. Ultimately, the Vision Pro is a tech demo for a much better device and ecosystem in the future.
I think the one thing the VP has going for it over a Newton is timing. For once, later is better. Newton did all their stuff way early—then Palm came out with a fraction of it and turned out to be Good Enough so everyone forgot the Newton.
In this case, we already have Quest out as the Good Enough device, which makes it the right time to start discussing what the evolution would be. In that sense, I think the Vision Pro is very interesting.
My hope is that the Vision Pro is like the Apple Watch. It launched without a clear idea of why people would buy it--originally Apple tried to sell their bland aluminum box as a fashion accessory--and it was only after multiple iterations that they found out health and fitness was the main appeal and focused on it. If they pay attention to how people do use VR headsets, maybe they can do that again.
There is one group of people who are willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money for this product, and that’s gamers.
Unfortunately Apple does not and has never understood games as art. They only care about casual games that bring in the $$.
Apple also has beefs with Khronos, NVIDIA, and Epic.
I had thought that when VP came out, Apple would make amends with the gaming industry particularly Epic because they really need Epic’s on their side for VP to succeed. Who is going to build games for this thing in the best engine if Apple can ban Epic’s developer account at any time?
Nope. App Store revenue comes first. It’s just the same as the iPad Pro. Great hardware squandered because of App Store rent seeking.
Is just too pricey and a bit cumbersome for masses, the tech is good and we could all use it even just for some experiences that can only be done in VR
I want to believe you but until the price range becomes below $1000 or so there’s virtually no market. It’s a toy. People don’t need a teleportation device. It’s fun to play with, like a toy. It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost. It’s also too expensive to be given as a holiday or birthday gift by most family members.
I believe the “just give it a few years thing” but only if it has a footnote saying that “few” could mean 10 or 15. I don’t think anyone really knows.
> It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost
Exactly this, for now the minimal use cases for these kinds of high-end VR headsets leave them firmly in the "gimmick" category. I'm pretty sure some mass-market use case will be found for them, maybe even outside of gaming, but the fact that some pretty smart people haven't found this one already is a teensey-tiny bit worrying too.
If Apple could make the UX of the physical device a bit better and had a larger library of places to explore I would absolutely give it to my grandma. She’s mostly stuck in a her flat alone all day. Walking is hard. She FaceTimes and calls people, but going to see beauty is mostly something she doesn’t get to experience anymore. If she could watch a sunrise in Hawaii instead of worrying about political news I think her day to day would be much better and I would be happy to spend the money to give her that QoL improvement.
> Until the price range becomes below $1000 or so there’s virtually no market. It’s a toy. People don’t need a teleportation device. It’s fun to play with, like a toy. It doesn’t really solve enough of a “real” problem to justify the current cost.
This argument seems valid to anyone that hasn't browsed "The Sharper Image" catalog in the back of an airline seat, or even the "high end" showroom at a Best Buy.
All your objections would certainly apply. It's a toy. People don't need it. It's fun, but doesn't solve a "real" problem. It's too expensive to be given as a gift.
AVP offers a >240" screen, and fully immersive 3D. It needs very little to make movie watching a shared experience in the same room, or with friends far away.
Priced solely against a TV, people have proven happy to pay for entertainment toys. If the initial OOTB release had supported "seeing" someone watching the same content "with" you in Disney's theater or the VR spaces, this buying segment would have taken more interest.
This has an interesting history. I’m struggling to find it and hope I have it right. John Gruber or maybe Accidental Tech Podcast did a segment on an podcast ages ago in relation to accessibility settings on the iPhone.
Whoever it was credited a particular Apple engineer who pushed hard with accessibility features arguing that at some point, everyone has some sort of issue (sight, hearing, movement etc).
I’ve tried, but can’t find the episode, which is a shame as this sort of thing is Apple at its best, which does get lost in the swamp of depressing decisions they have made in recent years.
It's nice that they try, but I wish the accessibility features weren't so terrible.
Case in point: I put off getting a new prescription, and ended up setting the font size up + enabling bold text on my iPhone. The first party apps often don't work well.
Of everything on my phone, GasBuddy handled it best. It's basically unusable with large fonts, but it suggested I go into per-app settings and disable display accessibility settings just for it. Now that I know that's a thing, I can blacklist the 90% of apps on the phone that don't display right, I guess.
Since the new glasses arrived, I'll probably just disable accessibility. However, my experience doesn't bode well for people that actually need reading glasses and want to use their phones when they're out and about.
I felt this keenly when my children were very young. At times I only had one arm/hand free because I was holding a child in the other. Or I could only read poorly in the dark because I didn’t want to turn on the lights and disturb the kids.
Since then I always see accessibility thinking as a universal benefit, not just for the “abled”.
This is awesome, and this type of accessibility (noting that it can be temporary, permanent or situational) and consideration is known as inclusive design in modern parlance.
Well, sort of. The quality of display and control hardware is there; the comfort of the device as a whole absolutely is not. And I'm saying that as one of those weirdos who will get into VR for 4-hour sessions.
It's also absolutely worse off than it could have otherwise been, to an extent way more severe than any other Apple device, by the Apple obsession with aesthetics over functionality. Even aside from the weight issues with all the glass and metal, they created the worst possible design for comfort when it comes to how it actually sits on your head.
Sometimes one needs to have the vision (no-pun intended) realized as hardware-in-hand for the problems to actually sink-in. I would bet that the next version of vision pro will be a significant jump in usability and addressing of the issues (which is also made more probable by the fact that this is a segment still in its infancy, by measure of the possibilities it offers, so changes will be big compared to, say, changes in a mature ecosystem like Android).
I had the opposite experience. Have had nearly every device. Rift, Rift S, Quest 2, Quest 3, PSVR, PSVR2, Index. Was not impressed at all the the AVP when I tried it. Worse experience almost entirely. Hand gestures suck. Stare to select sucks. Experiences weren't as good as even Rift for me.
You can use a mouse keyboard and game controller for a cursor if you want. You can also turn on a mode to do normal neck controlled cursor (I mapped it to triple click of the button)
Seriously? Come on. I was one of the first hundred people to kickstart the Rift and have owned every major consumer headset (except the Index) since. The AVP absolutely destroys the Rift in every way.
The only strong argument for Rift/etc. would be for gaming, but the AVP isn’t being sold as a gaming device. The new beta Vision OS2 also signicantly improves hand gestures.
I too was unimpressed with the Apple Store AVP demo, but after owning it for a while I absolutely see where it fits in (especially once a non-Pro version comes along).
I think the teleportation angle is even more compelling from the point of view of enabling virtual co-presence. With photo-realistic avatars as Apple and Meta have both demonstrated are fully possible, we'll soon be in a situation where you can click a button and be fully present with anybody anywhere, any time. This is as close to true physical teleportation that humanity will ever get, and I expect that once it's mature and reliable and available at accessible price points, the tangible benefits will make this tech take off in a huge way.
We can’t even get people to routinely turn a webcam on at most companies existing meetings. Even internally at Meta and Apple, staff aren’t exactly falling over themselves to take meetings in headsets right now.
The idea people will be strapping computers to their faces for meetings will “take off in a huge way” any time soon is extremely far fetched for me.
" This is PalmOS, a solution that is too early to the market."
But Apple has the resources to keep supporting and evolving it in response to user feedback until it can be cheap enough for mass use, at which point, if they don't blow it, their lead will be hard for competitors to overcome. They know exactly what they're doing.
> I've used every popular VR device, but one Vision Pro experience stood out - 'The Haleakala environment'[1]
> It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.
Honest question, but how much was your own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories. Did you have the same feelings with other VR experiences?
Not sure. The other environments felt just as real.
But lake, snow and fake moon felt sterile in comparison. There is something about being at the top of mountain with clouds and the sun rising on the horizon that hits different.
> own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories
Doubt it, but even if it was, I don't see this as a bad thing.
Not to deny the experience or the emotional value, its niche use. This would e.g. justify a co-pay from a health fund or an NHS program to make them available for people with profound issues, to have richer experience. Or, maybe old age care or people with dementia.
But thats not how either Apple or FB are approaching this. They aren't addressing what your niche is: something to give value to people in very specific need.
Unknowingly you made the perfect argument against the Vision Pro. What you described is a VR experience which is precisely what apple set out not to do. They wanted an MR device and MR experiences. So if an immersive experience is what you want a cheap device will deliver it over time as the hardware catches up
Sure if you only care about 2 of the 5 senses and don't mind VR sickness. Then sure it's a teleportation device. For everyone else it's basically an expensive and awkward portable display.
I have worn my AVP for about 6 hours a week since it came out. Not once, for one second, did I have any motion sickness.
It’s a completely solved issue. The head tracking runs on a completely different chip and hyper visor layer from the OS so even with a kernel panic the tracking doesn’t fail.
When I look at the commonality between all the successful consumer electronics, it's really about how easily they fit into people's lives. The AirPods and Apple Watch were two of the most recent smash hits because they are an improvement on what existed before
For me to watch a video on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV is easy. Turn on screen. Play video. With wedding photos, you can make them your phone screen background, you can printout photos and put them on your wall, they fit into your life.
With VR, I have to blind myself to my surroundings, I have to either not move around sitting perfectly still or clear out a bunch of space. What has become more popular in recent years is Podcasting and a huge reason why is because how nonintrusive it is, you can listen to a podcast doing the dishes or on your way to work. VR is the opposite of nonintrusive.
I feel the immersion of VR is what's holding it back, not why it will be successful. It's only when mixed reality takes off that I think we're going to see a big change.
Have you tried the quest 3? A lot of your concerns, I feel, go away with pass thru. Like you say, mixed or augmented reality is going to be society altering.
I was walking through my house, navigating doorways, stairs, and changes in lighting, with my son's headset while I had the equivalent of a 30in monitor playing Netflix following me around. I sat on the couch and pinned the "tv" to the wall, enlarged it to be a 80in tv.
What truly is missing is a shared environment between multiple headsets in the same location. Movie night where the whole wall is a shared experience, and it can be synced with grandma who is three states over; even better, we can look over and see grandma in AR and she sees us. Distributed family night! Some ergonomics to work out. That, and seeing faces.
The immersive videos are amazing. Stick a VR camera on the best seat at a concert, sports event, wedding, etc. People will pay for Taylor Swift or the Super Bowl. The tech is very close, the Quest is a good price, VR cameras are ~$5k. The only thing left is the content creators.
The potential is amazing, and it's what has gotten so many people to sink so much time, effort, and money into developing these things ever since the Oculus devkits.
But the hardware isn't there yet either. If it keeps enough momentum to develop, we're going to look back at these headsets like 90s smartphones. The AVP and the Quest are heavy. They're thick. Their battery life is terrible, and despite how good Apple's screens and camera software are, they still have a long way to go in lots of areas before they really deliver on a virtual reality.
The software is probably the bigger problem, but the hardware needs a lot of help before normal people are going to use these on a regular basis.
Exactly. All the use cases for new tech like vr headphones or watches or whatever is just the exact same functionality I already have in another form factor. Why bother. I don’t need to pay $400 to look at incoming texts on my wrist instead of the slab in my pocket I already own. I don’t need to spend $3500 to look at 40 foot wide emails.
An addict, that's who. And this is exactly what this technology will eventually enable - seeing the world through an influencer's eyes while sitting on a ratty couch in a dilapidated apartment. William Gibson painted this picture beautifully in Count Zero.
It's still photogrammetry + skybox, not that much different from what Valve were showing off in The Lab back in 2016. PPD is higher on account of the more advanced headset and that does make a difference, but it didn't blow me away or anything. You can still see the seams when you look close, the cutoff point between geometry and façade, you notice that there's never much foliage nearby, that anything animated tends to look like a mesh from a video game, because it is.
They really need to figure out true, perspective correct volumetric video already.
If VR is to compete with smartphones, it needs at least more screen pixels, and AVP delivers. The multi-user UX is still undecided (hence the device leans so much on “teleporting” capability). But for sales calls, group work, education etc, high fidelity is a requirement.
As much as I don't like Apple or Steve Jobs, it's clear that they're missing a visionary who owns this sort of project and has a specific vision in mind. I doubt the Vision Pro would be flailing like this and Apple wouldn't be second-guessing itself and canceling related projects or reorganising. Maybe it's the lack of a reality distortion field or just a lack of somebody to present or develop a holistic vision for this project both internally and externally, somebody who has long-term dreams that would be fulfilled by this project, eventually.
If even Apple doesn't know what to do with it and is doubting itself, why would anybody outside Apple have faith in it not being quietly discontinued in the coming years? So why invest in the platform? Why do research and develop use cases for it?
Jobs knew how to sell something, but more importantly, he knew how to sell the future of something, the potential.
I grew up in the redwood forest and I do not always have enough time in my life to go back to them. I would love a vision pro experience where I can be in the redwoods! I think for me the teleportation experience is more important than gaming, tho gaming is rad too (I loved Half Life Alyx on my Index).
Do you know if there are environments available that are in the redwood forest?
Also does anyone know what kind of money someone could make publishing these environments? I have some videography experience - I would be inclined to rent a high end VR camera and create some captures for Vision Pro, but it would be nice if I could sell them on the app store and earn enough to buy a Vision Pro.
I have been thinking about my first experiences in World of Warcraft in the early years. It changed me. The forests, mountains and trails were real to me and I enjoyed meeting friends and people from work in that world.
I realized the value of something like that but tweaked with different stories and contexts. I imagine elderly people being able to live a whole other life inside something like WOW instead of withering away alone as most people tend to do. You don't even need fancy AR hardware, though that wouldn't hurt and probably has better UX than banging on a keyboard.
you can give it 50 years. with the trash treatment apple gives developers, they won’t ever again release a new successful platform like iphone. They burnt the bridge to get there
You're right and I think it would make sense to have a feature that allows you to do a 3d recording.
If I could watch my daughter's first step in full 3d, I would be happy to pay the $3k and more.
I know you can do it right now with insta360 or whatever but I think there is a bit of a learning curve and it just isn't it that seamless.
Being able to record directly from the headset and play it back exactly how you saw it would make things much simpler and WYSIWYG and may be the reason for mass adoption
If I could watch my daughter's first step in full 3d, I would be happy to pay the $3k and more.
Don't you want to experience the authentic event rather than peering through a camera so that you can relive it later in 3D?
I'm always flabbergasted that people watch concerts through a camera, rather than just enjoying the experience. The facsimile is often poor compared to the experience itself. Also, reliving the same experience over and over can devalue it. Our memory is very good at making rose-tinted representations of past experiences.
I do understand the grandparent's travel example much better, especially for people who can't easily travel due to disabilities, etc.
It’s uncanny to record something with the Vision Pro and then play it back while you’re sitting in the same location…feels like a glitch in the matrix.
You can do that. There are only two buttons on the device and one of them is “record this experience as a memory in the iCloud photos app exactly as how I experienced it”.
Since the cameras are small the ISO is at cell phone level, not great indoors.
So I just spent $5800 on the Canon R5 C + Stereo VR Lens kit, to record my baby boy’s moments in 8K for future VisonPro (2,3,4…) devices.
Weirdly, that aspect kind of turned me off from the VP. I found the forest lake and moon environments very immersive, but these were exactly the sorts of places I’d spend hours daydreaming about and mentally exploring. With the VP, all I can do is enjoy an artist’s limited vision. I don’t want to use a device that will weaken the muscles of my imagination.
Apple was late to the party, jumping onto AR/VR, when the companies that were there 10 years earlier started to move into AI as the next big thing.
Additionally, the current issues with the Apple developer community, on a device that targets a very niche market, even more niche as Apple doesn't want to associate it with games, makes the appeal of the Vision Pro quite lacklustre for most app developers.
I don't doubt that it is awesome as an experience. However unless it gets cheaper it is not going to get enough users, and without enough users it is not going to get enough apps. Software devs are expensive and businesses want to address the largest possible market.
I tell everyone to schedule a Vision Pro demo. It’s 20 minutes, completely free, and will blow your mind. I would never actually buy one, but that was the best tech demo I’ve ever seen by a mile.
The thing is that you can have similar experience with 10 times cheaper Quest 3. The diminishing returns here is just staggering.
In fact people were teleporting themselves visually in 2016 with HTC Vive for 800$. I had it, it was awesome.
Honestly I'm happy to see AVP fail here to set precedence where entry point to a medium is the price of an average 3month salary (considering current global avg is around 1,500/mo) which is wildly unethical imo.
Yeah, I get where you are coming from. There’s a VR experience made by Google that takes all the images from the Curiosity Rover’s stereo mast cam and turns them into a VR recreation of the surface of Mars.[1] I definitely felt some kind of way standing there on Mars, even though it was an imperfect rendering on a Quest 2. I was where no one has ever stood before and without a suit which no one will ever be able to do. VR is truly magical.
I had such an emotional experience using the visionOS 2 beta to spatialize old photos. It was already amazing seeing it take a photo from 15 years ago and turn it 3D; but then when I "pinched" into it to make it become immersive and was suddenly in a place I hadn't been in years, with my (then young) kids looking just as they did back then, seeming to be standing there in the room with me… it was profound. I can't think of any other experience with technology I've had that even comes close.
Why are all these giant companies going hard on AR and repeatibly in cycles it’s for one reason:
Egocentric data and full control of the highest bandwidth human I/O (vision + sound) is the most important possible data pipeline to get
Its the penultimate data pipe, with direct connection to the brain being the ultimate data pipe (see:Neuralink)
Every company that is winning and going to win in the future is the company that can best predict human behavior, such that it’s directly shaped by the platform itself
Google had a internal teaser trailer about this a decade ago that I’m sure someone has seen. Hyperreality was a short video about this probable and likely future
So it’s all a game to get perfect attention and the best way to do that is - literally - something like the interface that is used for the matrix on each hovercraft
If you introduce that too quickly - like now - then you scare everyone. So Apple rushed it and Meta is a actually good at timing in AR cause they have a giant lead, so they can wait till people forget.
The goal is titration of all encompassing spyware that eventually literally controls your behavior. The short story Manna is currently, unironically, and not hyperbolically what the employee experience at Target, Amazon warehouses and Walmart are 1:1. The corporate goal is to have everyone in their ecosystem deterministically creating, consuming and engaging at the peak for optimal tuning of the attention system.
What you have to keep in mind is that this is already a done deal and was for decades. Rather than ai goggles people had 3 5 and 8 and Croncite was the source of truth. Before that it was the preacher. Before that the shaman. People are hardwired to outsource fact checking to the most compelling and charismatic choice to them. Probably for pragmatic reasons considering if you actually sat down and thought critically about everything going on, you wouldn’t have time for anything else. Don’t worry about it, think inwardly, chop wood, carry water. Keep your focus on what you see in front of you in life over what others want you to focus on for their own benefit.
Do you have advice on how to survive in the modern world? Society is pretty complex. I need an AR map just to know where its safe to sleep without trespassing.
As Carmack (the game guy, head of Oculus, etc.) says, until the headgear gets down to swim goggle size, it's not going to get any traction, and until it gets down to eyeglass size, it's not going mainstream.
The Apple Vision Pro was an unexpected dud. Something more eyeglass sized, with phone-like functionality and good design, would have been more in line with Apple's aesthetic. Instead, it was another half brick on your head VR headset. Apple had a success with iDweebs, their ear pieces, as something worn full time. The Apple Vision Pro could not be used that way.
You say it was unexpected, I say it was entirely expected given the form factor (comfort), battery life (awful), and lack of a killer app to drive adoption (if anyone knew what that was, Meta and Microsoft would be all over it already).
But Apple has tons of money, so they can learn from the devices in market now and decide how best to target Gen 2.
Microsoft seems to be exiting AR other than the military contract. Meta continues spending billions on their research project that might someday be a product, though they also continue iterating on their VR products.
We're still waiting for the tech to get cheap enough, small enough, and with a good enough ecosystem people will want to put up with it.
Meanwhile, Apple put out a tech demo to test the market. And probably to light a fire under the VP in charge of the program.
>Or are you referring to the ridiculous 12/12/2012 TEDX "talk" that Rony Abovitz performed at the Ringling College of Art, and all the FAKE and DECEPTIVE videos they posted and lied about on youtube, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]
>That didn't stop them from making fraudulent concept video demos that they falsely claimed to be actual existing games that they were already playing around the office, and that they promised much much more than they could actually deliver.
>So if you can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen, then fake it and lie, you're saying? That IS the whole point.
>Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped off so many other people's original designs and IP in their patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]
>The point is that the name Magic Leap IS extremely and deeply tarnished, in so many ways, and Magic Leap pretending it's not just makes them look more laughably delusional than they already are (which is extremely), just like Trump still believing that he won the election. [...]
Half Life: Alyx is one of the most amazing games I've ever played. And yet... I haven't finished it. When I have free time to play games I'd rather play my Switch. It's a lot more hassle setting up HL: Alyx, and the heavy headgear bugs my nose and causes eye strain headaches eventually if I play too much. So instead I play Tetris 99.
I have a Quest 2. After 6 months the non-replaceable battery lost 70% of its capacity and the controllers developed unfixable drift. Never making the Meta mistake again.
Alyx is really a bad game. People don’t recognize this because they play it for a very short time and then that’s it.
The gun and grabbing UX is fantastic. It’s really good. But the enemies and movement are awful. The enemies are simply not designed to handle your movement. The game is secretly an on rails arcade shooter except you can control the rails.
This is a fundamental problem with VR. You cannot expect humans to move to the degree required for game movement irl, so most of your movement HAS to come from control stick movement. But if most of your movement is coming from control stick movement then your irl movement is largely pointless.
But people WANT the irl movement to be the thing that matters. Because it is fun to duck in and out of cover. So that’s what Alyx largely is. You see enemies. You play the duck and peeking game, and if the enemies come too close or are melee you yeet yourself back to a safer spot.
The basic enemies with guns and melee and drones are pretty good with this gameplay. When they start trying to do something a little bit more interesting in the game later, it really falls apart. Why? Because the enemies are incredibly dumb. Much dumber than a typical game. And the basic concept you get to is that any enemy that does not respect peeking is just asking you to do this clumsy movement scheme rather the fun arcade on rail gun shooter gameplay and it feels dumb.
Imo the Valve team did a very good job trying to accommodate what they found were enormous limitations. But the end result is really underwhelming. You can’t play many games like that for the novelty of on rails shooter gameplay to still work.
can't wait to be back in Bangkok so I can go to a VR cafe and play HL: Alex. Huge fan of the series and haven't been able to justify buying a headset myself.
It's not about the hardware but about the content. There's a lack of compelling content. And because the audience is so small, publishers aren't in a hurry to create that content. And they cross publish what little they create to boost its value. Which further dilutes the value of these devices.
Apple and Meta need to start investing in exclusive content for these devices. Neither of them is really doing that. Apple has some bits and pieces but it doesn't really add up to much. Both are spending billions on the hardware; but not on the content. They need to be doing both. And not just on launch content but on a steady stream of content, games, and apps that people will want, talk about, review, etc. That will create demand for these devices.
I think the problem isn’t size, after all people are happy to put ever larger TVs in their homes.
I think the problem is that VR/AR are such dislocating experiences, so unlike anything else that consumers can’t relate to the technology.
These devices do not follow a technological linage such as TV. First came radio, then cinema and then TVs - each technology gave the consumer a relationship to understand the new technology: TV is like having cinema at home, cinema is like radio with pictures etc
There isn’t this same graduation in technology with VR/AR hence consumers are overwhelmed with this technology and don’t grasp the use cases yet.
Thinking of TVs as size comparison is wrong thing... Think of laptops. How big laptops people want if they are going to move around with them?
Unwieldy gaming laptop are reasonable if you move them once a week or absolutely need them. But otherwise people would go for lighter and thinner devices.
And here the weight is carefully balanced on your head...
I think it's more likely it was an expected dud (look at how limited the manufacturing numbers were) and they were perfectly happy setting the money on fire for however long it takes to iterate down to that eyeglass-sized device 10 or 20 years form now.
I suspect these newer headsets have struggled because of walled gardens and crazy pricing, and thus lack of developer interest.
The Oculus DK2 was just a second monitor, amazingly simple and fun to develop for. One of the most developer friendly devices I worked with.
Oculus CV1 proprietary driver, forced experience, worsening SDK and dropping linux basically killed the device (and VR) for me, even before fb got their grubby mits on it.
So I struggle to understand these premium devices, when there seems to be no developer incentive to build for these platforms. Shame, I think VR still has some great potential, but I will never don a headset that needs an account or shows me even a single advert.
I got a Quest 3 recently, and the necessity for side-loading apps onto it to make it useful is kind of puzzling. SideQuest is almost mandatory. You can't easily copy files on or off it to network locations without CX File Explorer, side loaded from an untrusted source, hidden from the default application launcher.
You'd think they'd loosen the reins a bit in order to get a bigger installed base, but it's trying to drive so hard towards this Horizon Worlds metaspace thing that I just do not give one whit for.
I always found it funny they call the Apple Vision Pro a "spatial computer". In my view, for a computer to be a computer, it should be capable of self-hosting development of its own software and operating system. But the Apple Vision Pro can't do that, to develop software for it you need to plug it into a computer
I don't think this makes much sense. Meta sells ads. Apple and Google don't walled garden ads on apps do they? Meta doesn't use the Google and Apple ad APIs. They have their own ad marketplace, etc.
I really do think it's as simple as them seeing a future where people use a different form factor from a phone to do what they do much of what they do with their phones. I think that will be something closer to Google Glass but modern day
I ordered my DK2 a few hours after it got announced. The FB take over was between the release of the DK2 and the CV1 and with the CV1 (and the FB takeover) came that terrible Software.
Isn't it simple why AVP isn't moving? They don't treat anime-loli-porn content, chiefly VRChat, as first class citizens, if they support those at all. Tons of people have bought and are buying Quest 2 and 3 as well as its competitors with sole intent of using it with VRChat.
Don't you guys all remember that iPhoneOS had YouTube since version 1.0, before it even had App Store? Where would you think iOS would have been if it didn't? No way it could have been like Apple TV+ would have launched years earlier and completely obsoleted YouTube. But to me it looks that that is what Apple is banking on.
The problem is less that they don’t serve games natively and more that it just sucks for the intended usecase. $3,500 VR headset, $3,000 more than the aforementioned Quest 3, and while some of that is due to the differing specs you have to wonder how much is due to an Apple charge. As for weight, compared to the Quest 3 it’s around 6oz heavier, which isn’t great, and from reviews I’ve read that 6oz and the general design makes a large difference. It should be noted though, AVP is 2oz less than the Quest Pro and may be more comfortable than that, but considering Apple has always been on the forefront of miniaturizing tech (for good and bad) I’m surprised they went for a premium weight in this instance. And finally, app support is minimal and they didn’t allow for enough direct access to ease development, leading to an expensive device that can’t even attempt to find a solution for the problem it’s trying to find.
Watching the same dynamic play out in GenAI. Stability AI refused to cater to this crowd (the chief actual users of their models) and are paying like hell for it. The reality is that coomers ARE the market for a lot of GenAI, no matter how much puritans don't want to admit it.
On top of that AVP is very limited for 3rd party developer - much more limited than ARKit on iPhone - cannot access raw camera stream, run own CoreML object detection model, cannot even scan barcode/qrcode, pose detection. They openning up some API in new VisionOS 2.0 but only for enterprise applications.
Meta isn't treating NSFW stuff as a first class citizen either. Most VR porn apps have a roundabout way of accessing them. E.g. you have DeoVR which is absolutely, 100%, intended for normal content consumption and it's just a coincidence that its video protocol is compatible with SLR.
Well, the fact that sideloading a porn app is no more difficult than sideloading a patched version of BeatSaber, which is unimaginable on any "mobile" Apple device, says plenty.
That’s a slightly unfair characterization. VRC kept me sane during quarantine as I suspect it did for a lot of people. It’s also a nice oasis for people with a lot of social anxiety.
Sure there’s unsavory content on there, no denying that. So does every platform with user generated content. Have you seen Meta Horizon? It’s no less than an Orwellian nightmare.
I’ve seen people form meaningful relationships, and achieve amazing things by fostering a real sense of community.
IMHO: the AVP is a DevKit that is sold to consumers. But more polished then the typical DevKit.
But looking into the past and seeing how many people where eager to buy GoogleGlas/Oculus Devkits, why shouldn’t a brand like apple decide to push out a devkit as high price consumer device, instead of trying to keep a devkit for a upcoming product a secret?
I’m still wondering what direction the product can and will take from here on. If you compare it with iphone1 vs iPhones today, it could be quite interesting.
Because they invested billions of dollars into making said devkit and despite seeming promising the actual general usefulness of it was still extremely unclear, so it was down to 2 choices: a) kill it, or b) ship it and see what happens when the rubber meets the road.
Arguably Apple has never done b) before, but then again they’ve also never poured billions into a R&D project like this before. (The only other example that comes to mind is the car, and that one got killed, so maybe they were loath to kill the two billion dollar science fair projects at the same time).
I think the issue is just that the developers Apple wants to poach for this are the ones that they push away the most.
Not only does Meta already control a large chunk of VR game development (to the point that even regular PCVR has been kind of starved for content), but game developers, besides for the iPhone, don't really care for Apple, and considering that the AVP does not have the things that the iPhone has going for it...
I disagree, given Apple’s marketing around it, features like Persona FaceTime, and integrating spatial camera shooting on iPhones. But even if it were true, it’s also failing as a devkit, given how few devs are interested in it.
When have Apple ever shipped a product as a "dev kit"? Dev kit is a euphemism for failed market launch. (Maybe Apple should retroactively call the Newton a dev kit as well.)
To me it seems obvious that the end goal is something with identical functionality to the AVP but in the form factor of a pair of wraparound shades, and that somebody high-up at Apple decided it was perfectly acceptable to set money on fire for 20 years if it let them eventually get something like that to market before anyone else and thereby replace the entire phone/tablet market.
It has been clear from fairly early on the AVP should never have launched - it just has no reason to exist. I cannot escape thinking there must have been some internal argument where the choices ended up as kill the project or release what we have, and the latter was chosen because it was seen to be easier.
Let’s face it, without Zuck’s personal interest reality labs would have gone years ago.
It is one thing for companies with billions to burn them chasing non existent markets but when they attempt to drag in lots of smaller third parties in order to build demand for their platforms . . . well, developers should be a lot more skeptical. The low hanging fruit of the personal computing age appears to have been picked.
I’ve seen plenty of people who have found a legitimate use for it. And as many have pointed out it serves as a dev kit that also happened to be sold to consumers. It helps Apple and developers figure out what people actually want to use the device for.
There also seems to be a lot of people who find it to be a near perfect implementation of VR/AR, except for size/weight, price and perhaps the resolution and fov could be just a tad better.
These seem like things they could fix with a second gen non-pro headset.
The automatic eye adjustment and external screen may be an expression of an ultimate VR experience but can easily be dropped with a non pro version. With less heat the fans can be smaller. Perhaps they can start using those new piezo based blowers. The metal body and external battery pack will already help keep things cool despite the powerful chips and high power consumption.
The existence of the pro version will give a halo effect that will make it easier for Apple to sell a non pro version, even if it’s still more expensive than the most expensive Oculus headsets.
Whether they’ll increase resolution and fov is uncertain. They might wait until it can inherit the tech from a second gen pro version.
At least Meta has bootstraped a niche in the console market. They identified a market and can iterate on it. Apple seems content to provide essentially nothing to do on the device.
> the choices ended up as kill the project or release what we have
Yeah, kill the project would have made the shareholders very displeased.
I don't think what Apple has is incomplete, VR is just not all that. Immersion for most people is like a roller coaster — fun for a bit but who wants to ride all day?
I feel like they have struck gold with the Meta Ray-ban glasses. Perfect form factor, looks cool, not obtrusive, has actual features that people want to use. That IMO is the future of wearables + AR/VR + AI, not a bulky headset.
The same thing happened with previous technologies. Steve Jobs didn't "invent the smartphone" -- he just made a smartphone at the time when the underlying tech (VLSI, displays, WLAN, WWAN) got to the point where it could fit in a pocket and have battery life of a day. Similarly he didn't invent the MP3 player. He made one at the point when Toshiba were able to manufacture a very small, low power hard drive that meant you could get more than 10 songs on one.
I don't think you'll ever be able to. Maybe not for decades for AR/VR. The AI stuff is cool; you can offload that, but mostly they'll just be a glorified camera mount and headphones for the actual 'glasses.'
But the Ray-bans aren't AR or VR. They're just glasses with a camera, microphone, and speakers plus connectivity for streaming the camera's feed. How is that AR or VR in any way?
If I'm going about my day and a voice in my ear gives me context about my surroundings, identifies people and objects, answers questions, tells me which direction I need to walk in, records and live streams my POV and more, that's AR. The experience doesn't always have to be visual.
They're working from both ends. VR/Passthrough content on a device with a screen and then the ideal form factor on the Raybans. The goal is to merge them. Its still TBD on when and if that's possible.
Readit News
I've used every popular VR device, but one Vision Pro experience stood out - 'The Haleakala environment'[1]
It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.
The Vision pro's lack of a killer app because development is unintuitive, userbase is small, the UX is alien and the hardware costs of constructing these experience is still rather high. Give it a few years. The hardware is already there. This isn't a solution in search of a problem. This is PalmOS, a solution that is too early to the market.
I have family with disabilities. Being able to teleport my loved ones to places they could never go themselves is worth the $3000. If I could record my most profound memories with 'VR recorder', I would. My parent missed my graduation because of being continents away. You think they wouldn't want to be teleported to it ? Wedding photographers cost $4000+, so we can relive those memories through shoddy snapshots. Why not be teleported back to the most beautiful day ?
Don't knock it till you try it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK63OSmF1FM
Sure, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as iOS or Android now, but it obviously filled a niche for a large enough number of people that it stuck around and pioneered that market. I had a Kyocera 6035 Palm “smartphone” over half a decade before the iPhone came out, and the Handspring Treos were also awfully popular among early adopters.
That credit here goes squarely to Oculus/Meta, and the Quest in specific.
Vision Pro, at best, is a Newton, stuffed with tech cool enough to be Really Neat, but with either too much tradeoff or that doesn’t go far enough to be a sea change in usability. There’s a little bit of Pippin in there too, with Apple not quite understanding how much games and game like activities drive VR adoption and how best to leverage that. Ultimately, the Vision Pro is a tech demo for a much better device and ecosystem in the future.
I think the one thing the VP has going for it over a Newton is timing. For once, later is better. Newton did all their stuff way early—then Palm came out with a fraction of it and turned out to be Good Enough so everyone forgot the Newton.
In this case, we already have Quest out as the Good Enough device, which makes it the right time to start discussing what the evolution would be. In that sense, I think the Vision Pro is very interesting.
There is one group of people who are willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money for this product, and that’s gamers.
Unfortunately Apple does not and has never understood games as art. They only care about casual games that bring in the $$.
Apple also has beefs with Khronos, NVIDIA, and Epic.
I had thought that when VP came out, Apple would make amends with the gaming industry particularly Epic because they really need Epic’s on their side for VP to succeed. Who is going to build games for this thing in the best engine if Apple can ban Epic’s developer account at any time?
Nope. App Store revenue comes first. It’s just the same as the iPad Pro. Great hardware squandered because of App Store rent seeking.
I believe the “just give it a few years thing” but only if it has a footnote saying that “few” could mean 10 or 15. I don’t think anyone really knows.
Exactly this, for now the minimal use cases for these kinds of high-end VR headsets leave them firmly in the "gimmick" category. I'm pretty sure some mass-market use case will be found for them, maybe even outside of gaming, but the fact that some pretty smart people haven't found this one already is a teensey-tiny bit worrying too.
This argument seems valid to anyone that hasn't browsed "The Sharper Image" catalog in the back of an airline seat, or even the "high end" showroom at a Best Buy.
There's been a huge market for >70" TVs since mid 2010s, costing $3,500 - $10,000 US for much of that timeframe. Today you'd have to compare to 100" class: https://www.amazon.com/100-inch-tv/s?k=100+inch+tv&s=price-d...
All your objections would certainly apply. It's a toy. People don't need it. It's fun, but doesn't solve a "real" problem. It's too expensive to be given as a gift.
AVP offers a >240" screen, and fully immersive 3D. It needs very little to make movie watching a shared experience in the same room, or with friends far away.
Priced solely against a TV, people have proven happy to pay for entertainment toys. If the initial OOTB release had supported "seeing" someone watching the same content "with" you in Disney's theater or the VR spaces, this buying segment would have taken more interest.
For a newbie a meta quest 3 is more than enough.
Index or meta quest pro? That's the shit.
But i liked the battery begin a separate thing from the headset himself, i think that's good user design.
MacBook Pros are 50% of Mac sales and they start at $2000.
This has an interesting history. I’m struggling to find it and hope I have it right. John Gruber or maybe Accidental Tech Podcast did a segment on an podcast ages ago in relation to accessibility settings on the iPhone.
Whoever it was credited a particular Apple engineer who pushed hard with accessibility features arguing that at some point, everyone has some sort of issue (sight, hearing, movement etc).
I’ve tried, but can’t find the episode, which is a shame as this sort of thing is Apple at its best, which does get lost in the swamp of depressing decisions they have made in recent years.
John for a bit @ 1:11:44
Casey and John @ 1:15:30 "The more time you spend on this planet the more likely one of these features will be useful for you"
Case in point: I put off getting a new prescription, and ended up setting the font size up + enabling bold text on my iPhone. The first party apps often don't work well.
Of everything on my phone, GasBuddy handled it best. It's basically unusable with large fonts, but it suggested I go into per-app settings and disable display accessibility settings just for it. Now that I know that's a thing, I can blacklist the 90% of apps on the phone that don't display right, I guess.
Since the new glasses arrived, I'll probably just disable accessibility. However, my experience doesn't bode well for people that actually need reading glasses and want to use their phones when they're out and about.
Since then I always see accessibility thinking as a universal benefit, not just for the “abled”.
Disabling the annoying needless animations on iOS is in Accessibility for some reason.
Well, sort of. The quality of display and control hardware is there; the comfort of the device as a whole absolutely is not. And I'm saying that as one of those weirdos who will get into VR for 4-hour sessions.
It's also absolutely worse off than it could have otherwise been, to an extent way more severe than any other Apple device, by the Apple obsession with aesthetics over functionality. Even aside from the weight issues with all the glass and metal, they created the worst possible design for comfort when it comes to how it actually sits on your head.
The only strong argument for Rift/etc. would be for gaming, but the AVP isn’t being sold as a gaming device. The new beta Vision OS2 also signicantly improves hand gestures.
I too was unimpressed with the Apple Store AVP demo, but after owning it for a while I absolutely see where it fits in (especially once a non-Pro version comes along).
Seeing Vision Pro at WWDC was like a deja-vu from BUILD a couple of years earlier.
The idea people will be strapping computers to their faces for meetings will “take off in a huge way” any time soon is extremely far fetched for me.
But Apple has the resources to keep supporting and evolving it in response to user feedback until it can be cheap enough for mass use, at which point, if they don't blow it, their lead will be hard for competitors to overcome. They know exactly what they're doing.
> It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.
Honest question, but how much was your own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories. Did you have the same feelings with other VR experiences?
But lake, snow and fake moon felt sterile in comparison. There is something about being at the top of mountain with clouds and the sun rising on the horizon that hits different.
> own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories
Doubt it, but even if it was, I don't see this as a bad thing.
But thats not how either Apple or FB are approaching this. They aren't addressing what your niche is: something to give value to people in very specific need.
It’s a completely solved issue. The head tracking runs on a completely different chip and hyper visor layer from the OS so even with a kernel panic the tracking doesn’t fail.
For me to watch a video on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV is easy. Turn on screen. Play video. With wedding photos, you can make them your phone screen background, you can printout photos and put them on your wall, they fit into your life.
With VR, I have to blind myself to my surroundings, I have to either not move around sitting perfectly still or clear out a bunch of space. What has become more popular in recent years is Podcasting and a huge reason why is because how nonintrusive it is, you can listen to a podcast doing the dishes or on your way to work. VR is the opposite of nonintrusive.
I feel the immersion of VR is what's holding it back, not why it will be successful. It's only when mixed reality takes off that I think we're going to see a big change.
I was walking through my house, navigating doorways, stairs, and changes in lighting, with my son's headset while I had the equivalent of a 30in monitor playing Netflix following me around. I sat on the couch and pinned the "tv" to the wall, enlarged it to be a 80in tv.
What truly is missing is a shared environment between multiple headsets in the same location. Movie night where the whole wall is a shared experience, and it can be synced with grandma who is three states over; even better, we can look over and see grandma in AR and she sees us. Distributed family night! Some ergonomics to work out. That, and seeing faces.
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But the hardware isn't there yet either. If it keeps enough momentum to develop, we're going to look back at these headsets like 90s smartphones. The AVP and the Quest are heavy. They're thick. Their battery life is terrible, and despite how good Apple's screens and camera software are, they still have a long way to go in lots of areas before they really deliver on a virtual reality.
The software is probably the bigger problem, but the hardware needs a lot of help before normal people are going to use these on a regular basis.
VR has been “the next big thing” for more than 50 years. VR was invented in 1968
Video phone was invented way back. (1936). It took a very long time to be common and in frequent use. And it’s still not a killer feature.
But do you need to BUY one? This is the thing I realized with VR sets, personally.
They are a great day at the fair, but who goes to the fair EVERYDAY?
They really need to figure out true, perspective correct volumetric video already.
If even Apple doesn't know what to do with it and is doubting itself, why would anybody outside Apple have faith in it not being quietly discontinued in the coming years? So why invest in the platform? Why do research and develop use cases for it?
Jobs knew how to sell something, but more importantly, he knew how to sell the future of something, the potential.
Were you wearing some field-of-view limiting device at the time?
Do you know if there are environments available that are in the redwood forest?
Also does anyone know what kind of money someone could make publishing these environments? I have some videography experience - I would be inclined to rent a high end VR camera and create some captures for Vision Pro, but it would be nice if I could sell them on the app store and earn enough to buy a Vision Pro.
I realized the value of something like that but tweaked with different stories and contexts. I imagine elderly people being able to live a whole other life inside something like WOW instead of withering away alone as most people tend to do. You don't even need fancy AR hardware, though that wouldn't hurt and probably has better UX than banging on a keyboard.
you can give it 50 years. with the trash treatment apple gives developers, they won’t ever again release a new successful platform like iphone. They burnt the bridge to get there
If I could watch my daughter's first step in full 3d, I would be happy to pay the $3k and more.
I know you can do it right now with insta360 or whatever but I think there is a bit of a learning curve and it just isn't it that seamless.
Being able to record directly from the headset and play it back exactly how you saw it would make things much simpler and WYSIWYG and may be the reason for mass adoption
Don't you want to experience the authentic event rather than peering through a camera so that you can relive it later in 3D?
I'm always flabbergasted that people watch concerts through a camera, rather than just enjoying the experience. The facsimile is often poor compared to the experience itself. Also, reliving the same experience over and over can devalue it. Our memory is very good at making rose-tinted representations of past experiences.
I do understand the grandparent's travel example much better, especially for people who can't easily travel due to disabilities, etc.
https://www.usa.canon.com/newsroom/2024/20240610-lens
It’s uncanny to record something with the Vision Pro and then play it back while you’re sitting in the same location…feels like a glitch in the matrix.
Since the cameras are small the ISO is at cell phone level, not great indoors.
So I just spent $5800 on the Canon R5 C + Stereo VR Lens kit, to record my baby boy’s moments in 8K for future VisonPro (2,3,4…) devices.
Additionally, the current issues with the Apple developer community, on a device that targets a very niche market, even more niche as Apple doesn't want to associate it with games, makes the appeal of the Vision Pro quite lacklustre for most app developers.
Not saying it’s not a a great experience..
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https://www.thequesteverest.com/
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There is a lot to consider in making VR videos.
Angles, view points, speed of movement etc.
In fact people were teleporting themselves visually in 2016 with HTC Vive for 800$. I had it, it was awesome.
Honestly I'm happy to see AVP fail here to set precedence where entry point to a medium is the price of an average 3month salary (considering current global avg is around 1,500/mo) which is wildly unethical imo.
[1] https://accessmars.withgoogle.com/
Really? Despite the total lack of smell, taste, random atmospheric sensations against the body and also the lack of haptic feedback?
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Why are all these giant companies going hard on AR and repeatibly in cycles it’s for one reason:
Egocentric data and full control of the highest bandwidth human I/O (vision + sound) is the most important possible data pipeline to get
Its the penultimate data pipe, with direct connection to the brain being the ultimate data pipe (see:Neuralink)
Every company that is winning and going to win in the future is the company that can best predict human behavior, such that it’s directly shaped by the platform itself
Google had a internal teaser trailer about this a decade ago that I’m sure someone has seen. Hyperreality was a short video about this probable and likely future
So it’s all a game to get perfect attention and the best way to do that is - literally - something like the interface that is used for the matrix on each hovercraft
If you introduce that too quickly - like now - then you scare everyone. So Apple rushed it and Meta is a actually good at timing in AR cause they have a giant lead, so they can wait till people forget.
The goal is titration of all encompassing spyware that eventually literally controls your behavior. The short story Manna is currently, unironically, and not hyperbolically what the employee experience at Target, Amazon warehouses and Walmart are 1:1. The corporate goal is to have everyone in their ecosystem deterministically creating, consuming and engaging at the peak for optimal tuning of the attention system.
It's a believable end-goal, but it doesn't seem to be the direction they want to go in the immediate future.
Like flying cars, I'm not sure the writers are always right.
Failure is irrelevant. It keeps the share price high while they try other things at the same time.
The Apple Vision Pro was an unexpected dud. Something more eyeglass sized, with phone-like functionality and good design, would have been more in line with Apple's aesthetic. Instead, it was another half brick on your head VR headset. Apple had a success with iDweebs, their ear pieces, as something worn full time. The Apple Vision Pro could not be used that way.
But Apple has tons of money, so they can learn from the devices in market now and decide how best to target Gen 2.
Microsoft seems to be exiting AR other than the military contract. Meta continues spending billions on their research project that might someday be a product, though they also continue iterating on their VR products.
We're still waiting for the tech to get cheap enough, small enough, and with a good enough ecosystem people will want to put up with it.
Meanwhile, Apple put out a tech demo to test the market. And probably to light a fire under the VP in charge of the program.
The synthesis of imagination: Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap at TEDxSarasota
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
Hold my beer...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838421
>Are you referring to the sex discrimination lawsuit and nepotistic sexist bro culture that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838500
>Or are you referring to the ridiculous 12/12/2012 TEDX "talk" that Rony Abovitz performed at the Ringling College of Art, and all the FAKE and DECEPTIVE videos they posted and lied about on youtube, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28850230
>That didn't stop them from making fraudulent concept video demos that they falsely claimed to be actual existing games that they were already playing around the office, and that they promised much much more than they could actually deliver.
>So if you can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen, then fake it and lie, you're saying? That IS the whole point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838443
>Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped off so many other people's original designs and IP in their patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation? [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838737
>The point is that the name Magic Leap IS extremely and deeply tarnished, in so many ways, and Magic Leap pretending it's not just makes them look more laughably delusional than they already are (which is extremely), just like Trump still believing that he won the election. [...]
Half Life: Alyx is one of the most amazing games I've ever played. And yet... I haven't finished it. When I have free time to play games I'd rather play my Switch. It's a lot more hassle setting up HL: Alyx, and the heavy headgear bugs my nose and causes eye strain headaches eventually if I play too much. So instead I play Tetris 99.
The gun and grabbing UX is fantastic. It’s really good. But the enemies and movement are awful. The enemies are simply not designed to handle your movement. The game is secretly an on rails arcade shooter except you can control the rails.
This is a fundamental problem with VR. You cannot expect humans to move to the degree required for game movement irl, so most of your movement HAS to come from control stick movement. But if most of your movement is coming from control stick movement then your irl movement is largely pointless.
But people WANT the irl movement to be the thing that matters. Because it is fun to duck in and out of cover. So that’s what Alyx largely is. You see enemies. You play the duck and peeking game, and if the enemies come too close or are melee you yeet yourself back to a safer spot.
The basic enemies with guns and melee and drones are pretty good with this gameplay. When they start trying to do something a little bit more interesting in the game later, it really falls apart. Why? Because the enemies are incredibly dumb. Much dumber than a typical game. And the basic concept you get to is that any enemy that does not respect peeking is just asking you to do this clumsy movement scheme rather the fun arcade on rail gun shooter gameplay and it feels dumb.
Imo the Valve team did a very good job trying to accommodate what they found were enormous limitations. But the end result is really underwhelming. You can’t play many games like that for the novelty of on rails shooter gameplay to still work.
Apple and Meta need to start investing in exclusive content for these devices. Neither of them is really doing that. Apple has some bits and pieces but it doesn't really add up to much. Both are spending billions on the hardware; but not on the content. They need to be doing both. And not just on launch content but on a steady stream of content, games, and apps that people will want, talk about, review, etc. That will create demand for these devices.
I think the problem is that VR/AR are such dislocating experiences, so unlike anything else that consumers can’t relate to the technology.
These devices do not follow a technological linage such as TV. First came radio, then cinema and then TVs - each technology gave the consumer a relationship to understand the new technology: TV is like having cinema at home, cinema is like radio with pictures etc
There isn’t this same graduation in technology with VR/AR hence consumers are overwhelmed with this technology and don’t grasp the use cases yet.
Unwieldy gaming laptop are reasonable if you move them once a week or absolutely need them. But otherwise people would go for lighter and thinner devices.
And here the weight is carefully balanced on your head...
>Apple Vision Pro was an unexpected dud
???
Just about everyone (even diehard Apple fanboys) knew this would flop.
The Oculus DK2 was just a second monitor, amazingly simple and fun to develop for. One of the most developer friendly devices I worked with.
Oculus CV1 proprietary driver, forced experience, worsening SDK and dropping linux basically killed the device (and VR) for me, even before fb got their grubby mits on it.
So I struggle to understand these premium devices, when there seems to be no developer incentive to build for these platforms. Shame, I think VR still has some great potential, but I will never don a headset that needs an account or shows me even a single advert.
You'd think they'd loosen the reins a bit in order to get a bigger installed base, but it's trying to drive so hard towards this Horizon Worlds metaspace thing that I just do not give one whit for.
I really do think it's as simple as them seeing a future where people use a different form factor from a phone to do what they do much of what they do with their phones. I think that will be something closer to Google Glass but modern day
Don't you guys all remember that iPhoneOS had YouTube since version 1.0, before it even had App Store? Where would you think iOS would have been if it didn't? No way it could have been like Apple TV+ would have launched years earlier and completely obsoleted YouTube. But to me it looks that that is what Apple is banking on.
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Home video
Payments on the Internet
Streaming video
HD streaming and downloadable video
The Patreon style business model
the lack of judeo-christian moral nannyism hardly means a dangerous society but a peaceful one
just look at all the accusations on X and calling Japan weird and worse
StabilityAI suffered because of a good frontend and poor models for high quality, production grade imagery
Sure there’s unsavory content on there, no denying that. So does every platform with user generated content. Have you seen Meta Horizon? It’s no less than an Orwellian nightmare.
I’ve seen people form meaningful relationships, and achieve amazing things by fostering a real sense of community.
But looking into the past and seeing how many people where eager to buy GoogleGlas/Oculus Devkits, why shouldn’t a brand like apple decide to push out a devkit as high price consumer device, instead of trying to keep a devkit for a upcoming product a secret?
I’m still wondering what direction the product can and will take from here on. If you compare it with iphone1 vs iPhones today, it could be quite interesting.
Arguably Apple has never done b) before, but then again they’ve also never poured billions into a R&D project like this before. (The only other example that comes to mind is the car, and that one got killed, so maybe they were loath to kill the two billion dollar science fair projects at the same time).
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/14/apples-biggest-hardware...
Not only does Meta already control a large chunk of VR game development (to the point that even regular PCVR has been kind of starved for content), but game developers, besides for the iPhone, don't really care for Apple, and considering that the AVP does not have the things that the iPhone has going for it...
Let’s face it, without Zuck’s personal interest reality labs would have gone years ago.
It is one thing for companies with billions to burn them chasing non existent markets but when they attempt to drag in lots of smaller third parties in order to build demand for their platforms . . . well, developers should be a lot more skeptical. The low hanging fruit of the personal computing age appears to have been picked.
I’ve seen plenty of people who have found a legitimate use for it. And as many have pointed out it serves as a dev kit that also happened to be sold to consumers. It helps Apple and developers figure out what people actually want to use the device for.
There also seems to be a lot of people who find it to be a near perfect implementation of VR/AR, except for size/weight, price and perhaps the resolution and fov could be just a tad better.
These seem like things they could fix with a second gen non-pro headset.
The automatic eye adjustment and external screen may be an expression of an ultimate VR experience but can easily be dropped with a non pro version. With less heat the fans can be smaller. Perhaps they can start using those new piezo based blowers. The metal body and external battery pack will already help keep things cool despite the powerful chips and high power consumption.
The existence of the pro version will give a halo effect that will make it easier for Apple to sell a non pro version, even if it’s still more expensive than the most expensive Oculus headsets.
Whether they’ll increase resolution and fov is uncertain. They might wait until it can inherit the tech from a second gen pro version.
Yeah, kill the project would have made the shareholders very displeased.
I don't think what Apple has is incomplete, VR is just not all that. Immersion for most people is like a roller coaster — fun for a bit but who wants to ride all day?
He could enunciate a concept and knew when to put the boot down to enforce his taste.