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.
The cost of the device is way off. Apple watch is still vaguely in line with the prices of other nice ish watches. $400 or so. Expensive but not otherworldly so. Vision pro is so expensive you rule out the middle class. Its price point was conceived by people who haven’t left northern california for some time.
For that matter, I don't think any other Apple products are so out of line with competitor's prices. Airpods, iPhones, and iPad are also about the same as Samsung/Google stuff. MacBooks are marked up, but still in range of Wintel machines. Same for their workstations. Then the Vision Pro rolls out at 600% more than the competition, and doesn't sell. Pitching it as a work machine was shooting themselves in the foot, too: a $3000 MacBook is so much more capable than a Vision Pro it's absurd. The VP is using the base processor from MacBook Airs two generations ago. I mean, come on.
> 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.
Wristwatch fitness trackers had already established this as baseline market fit long before Apple. The benefit of the Apple Watch for me is to not have to carry a phone in my pocket and still be able to do smartphone things like message, pay for things, or even make calls if I need to. Then the pandemic needed you to scan QR codes to do contract calls, and then normalized QR codes for restaurant orders, so I'm back to the phone and my watch gathers dust.
> 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
As a sibling notes, we already had had fitbit for 6 years by the time Apple came out with the Watch. They tried to make it about more than fitness and eventually conceded that that wasn't happening and focused on the market that existed before their release.
So if this plays out this same way then in a few years Apple will finally concede that VR is for video games and finally start focusing on the gamer market.
The Palm equivalent in that comparison would be Fitbit and possibly Pebble. Apple waited until there was a proven market in wearables, then figured out how to combine that market with the strengths of their existing ecosystem to improve upon value. Then they propped up the model line with $$$ until they actually became good enough for people to buy.
I’m relatively optimistic they can do that here too, but that device needs to have a model that does everything it does today (well, maybe not the creepy visor eyes) and more for less than $1000 and at about 2/3 the weight max, before I think AW-like adoption will possibly happen.
They have a long history of ridding the cost curve down, but it’s not that fast. The 2010 iPad was 720$ adjusted for inflation, the current iPad better in basically every way starts at 350$. Original 2007 iPhone would be 908$ inflation adjusted while the iPhone SE is 429$.
My guess is it’s either discontinued or the 2040 Vision (non pro) is going to be strictly better in basically every way but still more than 1000$ inflation adjusted. But honestly if it’s 1/3 the weight and essentially strictly better in every way that could be quite compelling. There’s definitely a point where headsets are going to be comfortable enough you can forget they’re there, and ~2k for something you’re using regularly for 4+ years isn’t crazy money.
Pricing the se and base model ipad is a bit disingenuous. You look at the flagships and they kept up with inflation adjusted pricing. Iphone and ipad 1 were flagships. Not old hardware released for a song.
I wouldn’t call either of them a flagship product, just the product. They added new titles for those premium products. At release it was called an “iPad” and in 2024 they still call the base model an “iPad” while also having an “iPad Air” and “iPad Pro.”
It makes sense as a strategy, a mid 90’s 2,000$ desktop is ~5,000$ today inflation adjusted. Few people spend that on a desktop today the market just shifts and you need to keep up. Meanwhile there’s a tiny percentage of people who just don’t care that much about money so you want something to milk such people for all they are willing to spend.
Exploration seems like an interesting use case. Probably more than gaming or wearable monitors in spite of the bubble here.
I'm still a bit meh on the Apple Watch in spite of buying an early one and then an Ultra that I got a good deal on. I don't care much about the quantified health thing and the battery life is still an issue even with the Ultra. Like for hiking though.
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.
Nvidia demanded Apple to allow its video driver to be able to phone home just like it does in the windows toy OS(running in ring 0 no less).
Epic/Tencent fortnight abuses the DNS protocol probably to bypass wirewalls. Both can be observed via wireshark, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Personally I’m glad Apple told both of them to go pound sand.
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
Sure, but it didn't stop them during the "great resignation" from moving around. Actions speak louder than words.
Statistically speaking, people are a lot more hesitant to switch jobs right now. That definitely points to legitimate fears (regardless of the objective economic outlook).
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.
how didnt porn run this over? honestly porn did advances the internet because it, and gaming, was THE usecase for most people. youtube etc wasnt there at the time it was porn and games. And porn and games should be the reason why VR shall sell
I think porn prefers open tooling so that it is less likely to be banned. Going inside Apple's walled garden is probably more risky in that regard and also there's only a small consumer base.
There are plenty of VR apps in this category available for PC-connected headsets. You can find tons of them on Steam or Patreon.
yeah i think apples no porn policy is ruining their vr headset and the future of vr ;).
not that i am into vr porn. i only think the market for that should be huge
TBH I feel like if I am into VR porn then I am definitely addicted and I'd need help from professional. Usually porn is like a quick dopamine hit, or a quick release for a biological need. For VR, you'd beed to be really really into porn, to spend all the setup time AND then still be in the mood ...
yes true. but isnt using addicted people for the own benefit the whole premise of most social media and alike. apple is maybe not into social media but I cant imagine zuckerberg not wetting his pants from joy if he thinks about million more people crippled to his attention gathering devices.
Porn can't make the big ticket sales needed to prop up VR. It's hard enough to get a payment processor because of how often charges get disputed and fears about touching the money for illegal and abusive material.
You can't be discreet about VR porning because it leaves you oblivious to your surroundings. You gotta plan ahead and really commit to the time and place.
Aren't all of them propped up by being tethered to some FAANG? I highly doubt they are interested in hiring the best and brightest to build VR porn devices.
I also suspect that the "kick" from porn is a voyeuristic one; i.e. most consumers would rather watch it than be in it.
when porn advanced the internet did it cost 2000 dollars to get entry to the porn? I don't remember that. I think when this advancing happened it was pretty cheap, in some ways cheaper than buying a bunch of magazines.
Porn advanced the internet because it was a cheaper delivery mechanism for a cheap commodity, games expanded the internet because it was a technologically innovative platform for high end products.
I wasn't a PC gamer but I bought a Dell in late nineties for near $3k. I think that was just the going rates for anything near max on RAM or CPU, even going big on disk space could drastically up the cost back then. I think I ended up adding a upgraded GPU to that PC that cost a good deal extra, and I wasn't even a gamer! I think I just wanted to edit or watch a certain video format/quality/etc and the stock GPU card wasn't able to handle it.
I don't remember exactly, but I do remember I used to collect videos of live performances from a handful of my favorite bands back then so think it might have been related to that hobby. As a side note, I had dozens of the 100 pack CD-R stacks full of these burned videos because HDD cost too much and I didn't need them to be available on demand.
Yeah and porn advances were specifically because the market leaders of the old school industry (publishers/distributors) could have their market stolen. So there was a large carrot out there, and it warranted market disruption. Just like dozens of other industries as the Internet and computing became widely available. The old guard of playboy and hustler and such did not invest heavily in the advances. It was small operators looking for an advantage in scale. Producers looking to cut out distributors, etc. I don’t think vr specifically offers that level of treasures and it’s not like any Joe can start a vr porn shop now. The internet originally offered the ability of a single person to sell millions of copies of their films. It (vr) probably actually consolidates it further again as larger investment in production equipment and editing is needed. But, it’s a tiny market so nobody really cares to be a first adopter. A lot of people are skeptical of Vr ever being widely available any time soon. That skepticism was optimism in early days of PC usage. Everyone knew computers were the future and we’d all be using them daily, in the home, etc. It was worth investing in for the porn industry.
PCs costs much around year 2000. and porn and email and messenger where the bonus to games. its was like
“hey look counter strikes etc .. nice games”
“hmm not sure”
“ there is also porn”
“bought”
I bought PCs around year 1998, and I don't remember porn being in the selling point, furthermore everyone I knew in 2000 had PCs because they had to use office. PCs had already infiltrated the market at the point the internet became a going concern.
In other words the internet was relatively cheap for people.
Unless perhaps you're severely disabled, holidays are so much more than just your eyes and ears.
Not just all of your five senses, and your ability to interact, but the social and human side as well, and your ability to interact physically with it all.
People said the same kind of things about TV - and while, on the one hand, they perhaps underestimated the profound effects of TV on society, nobody would confuse it with telepresence.
I'm not sure what VR offers here that web panoramas, detailed photos and customer reviews don't.. there's a marginal advantage there perhaps but it feels like a $250-300 peripheral rather than a $kk investment.
DonHopkins on Nov 15, 2021 | root | parent | next [–]
The iSmell developers were hoping to make money the same way, by selling big smell combination pack cartridges that you have to entirely replace after any one of the smells ran out.
>The iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer developed by DigiScents Inc. is a small device that can be connected to a computer through a Universal serial bus (USB) port and powered using any ordinary electrical outlet. The appearance of the device is similar to that of a shark’s fin, with many holes lining the “fin” to release the various scents. Using a cartridge similar to a printer’s, it can synthesize and even create new smells from certain combinations of other scents. These newly created odors can be used to closely replicate common natural and manmade odors. The cartridges used also need to be swapped every so often once the scents inside are used up. Once partnered with websites and interactive media, the scents can be activated either automatically once a website is opened or manually. However, the product is no longer on the market and never generated substantial sales. Digiscent had plans for the iSmell to have several versions but did not progress past the prototype stage. The company did not last long and filed for bankruptcy a short time after.
This Wired Magazine article is a classic Marc Canter interview. I'm surprised they could smell the output of the iSmell USB device over the pungent bouquet from all the joints he was smoking:
>DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution. Joel Lloyd Bellenson places a little ceramic bowl in front of me and lifts its lid. "Before we begin," he says, "you need to clear your nasal palate." I peer into the bowl. "Coffee beans," explains Bellenson's partner, Dexster Smith. […]
>"You know, I don't think the transition from wood smoke to bananas worked very well." -Marc Canter
The failed quest to bring smells to the internet (thehustle.co)
DigiScent had a booth at the 1999 Game Developers Conference, with scantily dressed young women in skunk costumes.
I told them about a game called "The Sims" I had been working on for a long time, and was hoping to finish and release some time soon.
They unsuccessfully tried to convince me to make The Sims support the iSmell, and even gave me a copy of the SDK documentation, because they thought it would enrich the player's experience of all those sweaty unwashed sims, blue puddles of piss on the floor, stopped up toilets in the bathroom, and plates of rotting food with flies buzzing around on the dining room table.
I guess the affect of the Internet would have been discounted at the times of books and libraries.
You might also be underestimating the brains ability to conjure a completely new reality. Our imagination can transport us anywhere - hence adventure, travel and crime books. VR/AR experience augmented by our own imagination, hence to discount the affect of VR is also discounting the ability of our imagination.
Of course holidays are much more but why do so many people prefer chatting online than chatting personally with other people? Why are online dating apps and food delivery so popular? I don't know but it definitely does not have something to do with people wanting to go out and interact with random people.
Online dating and food delivery are popular because they're an allegedly more efficient and safer (in the case of dating) way of getting what you're looking for delivered to your door. Online dating is basically pre-screening, and a substitute for various real-world stuff that's increasingly less accepted (the workplace) or normalised (bars.. still a thing, but much less so than they were).
If I could chat in person with the people I talk to online, I would. And sometimes, that happens. But they're typically far away (for various values of far), while also being more interesting (ditto) than many of those more nearby.
> guess the affect of the Internet would have been discounted at the times of books and libraries.
Not an argument. Besides, like 10-15 years in to WWW companies like amazon, google, facebook, youtube were there. 12 years after oculus rift VR is still a small niche.
> You might also be underestimating the brains ability to conjure a completely new reality. Our imagination can transport us anywhere - hence adventure, travel and crime books. VR/AR experience augmented by our own imagination, hence to discount the affect of VR is also discounting the ability of our imagination.
No, it is not discounting the ability of our imagination. It is more correct to say that you are discounting the ability of our imagination by suggesting that adventure, travel and crime books aren't all we need to immerse ourselves. By going this path of argumentation (if we can call it an argument) you are basically saying that VR is for those, well, lacking in imagination
> Of course holidays are much more but why do so many people prefer chatting online than chatting personally with other people?
Do they? I don't think they do. Chatting with someone they don't know? Maybe. Doing a video call with a friend/partner? No.
> Why are online dating apps and food delivery so popular?
You are conflating meeting (just meeting, once people meet they don't maintain their relationship on the app) someone new and not a social activity with, well, socializing with people that you want to socialize with.
> I don't know but it definitely does not have something to do with people wanting to go out and interact with random people.
You do understand that outsides is not filled only with random people?
What argument are you trying to make for VR? What use case, that would make VR "huge", are you suggesting?
That VR can provide a certain amount of immersive escape from the day to day. Just as the internet replaced certain offline activities and moved them online, I don't understand VR hasn't done the same.
Having used the Quest 2(?) which has automatic boundary detection and cameras that show you the surroundings if you step beyond those boundaries, I no longer had the worry of bumping into things. That made the experience very immersive.
So for me personally, there has been a definite improvement in the experience.
And I agree, the equipment is currently too cumbersome for the general consumer market. In addition to that, stupid vender-lock ideas such as with the Quest where you need a facebook account to use the device, also prevent the general application of the technology. (I would have bought myself a Quest if Facebook account wasn't a requirement. Vision Pro is simply too expensive.)
That doesn't mean that the technology won't one day find general application.
Also content does exist, sites such SketchFab have much free 3D content and with WebGL being generally compatiable with VR tech, it's relative easy to generate more content.
Yeck, I even worked on some code to make programming in 3D possible![1]
> What use case, that would make VR "huge", are you suggesting?
I assume you mean general consumer use-casae, there are definitely a number of use cases that are very niche.
But if I knew that, I most certainly won't share it with a public forum! ;)
> lower hanging fruit for reducing carbon emissions
Taking a bike (when possible) instead of a car, for example. I think many things that we can do fail because of our collective convenience: why take public transport when I can have my private space in a car?
There might be low hanging fruits, but there is human convenience to take into account. Making potential low hanging fruit become had to implement.
> I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset
Most certainly it wouldn't be the same however experiencing a Venice during the Renaissance period using a VR device? That would be better than nothing and would also equate to a "type of" holiday (if done well). Its certainly not something that I can do physically.
I’m 100% down the idea that we have individual responsibility to the environment and must make some personal sacrifice. Paper grocery bags are much less convenient than plastic but I’m in support of legislation to ban plastic bags even if all the cost and inconvenience is passed on to the customer. Biking to work is a great choice if you live in range.
Neither of these deprive you of truly transformative experiences like travel. Air travel will never be a green endeavor. It will always be something that we’ll have to compensate for elsewhere in pursuit of being carbon neutral.
I’m not willing to tell someone that they should not fly across the country to see their friend in order to be an environmentally responsible citizen. Not while we still burn coal and gas to keep the lights on.
Apparently global trade via ships is much worse than airplanes - in terms of environmental impact. Apparently container ships burn extremely dirty fuels once they enter international waters.
I guess regardless where humans start, the dependency on fossil fuels is simply too vast to rollback.
Container ships are definitely worse, but also sadly not feasible to electrify. Power plants are a good start. Short range commercial vehicles as well.
I believe the OP was more thinking of all those corporate flights for a one hour talk. But you don't need VR for that. They could hold them over sms if they could read and write.
It would be a smart, albeit self serving political move for VR headset makers to be advocating for carbon pricing to make their offerings more competitive with that of the travel industry.
Many many places of the world, if you are ok with not having all the comforts and more.
Usually the most expensive thing is the flight, so you've got to time that well. Go to places for more than 2 weeks and in the lowest season and you can make that $1000 last a while.
The limitations are generally on the traveller's side.
Of course, if you're looking for a full paid cruise, with kids and must have perfect everything in the "best" season then you pay like the rest.
I got curious and looked. I'm from Sweden and for $1000 I could get to Cabo Verde, Madeira and or course most parts of Europe (like Italy, Greece, France). That is for flight and hotel. You need to eat as well of course, but that you need to do at home as well.
OK, if you live in (Western) Europe, you can go, say, from Netherlands or Sweden to fabulous places like Barcelona or Rome or Istanbul, all very different, picturesque, and not hugely expensive. A flight, if you time it well, could cost less than €100, or even €60..
we in europe are lucky. i got a flight for 20€ to portugal and was staying there for a week for around 50€ a day. thats not even 500 bucks. this vr headset would be 5-8 weeks of holiday worth
So many options in Europe if you don't mind discomfort. From the UK, I'd maybe take a cheap flight to Poland or even the long distance bus. Once there, YHA hostels, camping etc.
Another option is fly to Greece and island hop on the ferries. Or Portugal and northern Spain. Buses are the cheapest way to get around there and fairly flexible although not quick. Sometimes you can hire a car for a week for $250, or some places hire mopeds for way less.
A lot of "meanwhile in Europe" replies here, but even within the United States there are great places you can fly to pretty cheap. Or make a road trip out of it.
Yeah, you've gotta budget it, but it's not impossible to get somewhere, have a great time, and get back for under $1000.
Spend a week camping at a state park nearby with the family. About $40 in transportation costs round trip for the whole family. Maybe $200 in food/snacks/other consumables. $70 for the yearly parks pass+ $15/night for campsite = $175. If I don't already have camping supplies, I can get decently kitted out for the family for this kind of camping for like $400. It'll last me a bunch of trips but let's assume you've got nothing. So that's like $815 for the first time, $415 every other time.
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.
I think tv usage is a hard comparison as it’s so well integrated into our lives and social fabric. These people are likely either just outfitting their house so it is more like furniture than a toy and they likely know exactly what value it adds for them (movie nights, sports gatherings, etc). Things people place great value on. And, I don’t think they’d see a vr experience as a substitute. Maybe in time they will. Once they get enough exposure to it, most likely by owning it, but that isn’t likely to happen if prices remain high. And there’s still something that’s missing, nobody is coming to your Super Bowl party just because you have an Apple Vision Pro. So it’s only useful if everyone that you’d invite also has a similar technology to have a shared virtual experience. So that further requires the prices to be lower. Beyond that is the question, does anyone actually want those types of experiences to be virtual? Would people just simply prefer that event to be IRL? I think the answer is going to be Yes for a very long time for a majority of folks. It will slowly penetrate the meatspace but will hit a fairly low ceiling at some point.
Well you need something entertaining to do with it. Right now the use cases seem to be just looking at pictures and watching videos alone. Or extending your computer monitor. There isn't even that much 3D content. Nobody really seems to care about movies and shows being in 3D. It's basically a $3000 portable monitor. Not entertaining.
> 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.
It actively gets in the way of cuddling in person, and doesn't help when away. Meanwhile I've had great experiences watching things together on a phone screen. If away, bluntly, with good friends a laptop screen and a shared stream via Jellyfin works _amazing_.
Like c'mon. The size of the screen is a fetish for people who think it's the screens fault that their hangout isn't emotionally impactful.
The context matters a lot. Early PCs were released at a time when there wasn’t really anything else like these products. That early pricing reflected the creation of a brand new category.
The Vision Pro is a remarkable piece of tech, but isn’t required to achieve many of the use cases it supports, and people are primarily paying for the immersive experience.
Given that, spending $3K on immersion in a market where a few hundred dollars will buy you most of the non-immersion capabilities is quite different than spending $3K on an early PC.
Around the time of the 386, weren’t there a bunch of lesser options that did a bunch of similar use cases well? I’m thinking Commodores, Amigas, even a NES.
There was a huge delta between what these systems could do.
e.g. the Commodore 64 was an 8-bit 1 MHz processor vs. the 386's 32-bit 12-40MHz, could not run a full operating system, had 64 KB RAM vs. 1MB or more on the 386, etc.
In terms of raw computing capability, the 386 was a significant advance over those cheaper systems and represented capabilities that just weren't yet on the market, and those capabilities unlocked entire worlds of possible use cases and unlocked general purpose computing.
The Amiga 1000 is closer to the 386 in terms of capability, but was ~$1,600 (with a monitor) and was still significantly slower, i.e. if your use case benefited from raw processing power, there was a clear value proposition for the 386.
I'd still put this in a very different category than what is effectively an iPad with + VR/AR interface.
Yeah, but that's because it's Apple. If the same hardware was made by pretty much anyone else, I'd probably be interested. It's like the iPad Pro. It could probably replace my laptop if it could run real Linux.
If the community had free reign to do whatever with the hardware, it would be much more than a toy. Someone would port SimulaVR (or a different window manager) and it would feel like a real computing device.
I can imagine a world where I travel with one of those headsets and a wireless keyboard. Then I can setup shop anywhere and do development work in a cloud environment. The headset just being a dumb terminal to render the terminal or whatever.
It really feels like we are only a few years away from that being reality. I really want the apple headset to succeed, so that other companies invest in open/hackable hardware.
What % of those sales are companies buying them for their employees? It's almost a B2B market. Whereas the Vision Pro is overwhelmingly B2C, at least it will be with the current state of the technology. Hence very different pricing dynamics.
I think the Vision Pro needs to be as comfortable and convenient to use as a TV, or it needs to be cheaper. And/or it needs a new killer app.
It's sitting in a weird place right now where it's too expensive for what you get, but it's fairly easy to imagine how it could improve to become something much more attractive/popular.
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.
One of the main reasons most apps do poorly here is our designers and PMs NEVER think about anything other than the standard size iPhone at normal font size in light mode. This is true at every company i worked at.
In Apple 1p apps the reason is also that the codebase is 15 years old now and very hard to make adaptive.
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).
Right, because the AVP is ignoring the only useful application for VR today by eschewing precision controllers to try to get OFFICE WORKERS to strap on this monstrosity of a strap-on facial PC to do PRODUCTIVITY tasks. What a joke.
I'm sure not going to drop $3k on one, but I've had bosses that would want to drop $300k to outfit the whole department with tech that we don't have a use for.
I mean I’d be all for that if there was value to the 3D user interface. A CAD program where you actually interact with the part, or a biomolecular research tool where you can actually handle scales-up proteins in your hand.
But strapping a heavy display to your head so that you can interact with the same flat 2d windows? I don’t get it.
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.
It depends on what you mean by "soon". For sure, it's not happening next year. But within 5 years I think the hardware will get to a point where it's possible, and then within 10 it will be compelling.
The "strapping computers to their faces" meme is just stupid hyperbole. It's no more insightful than declaring that nobody wants to stuff a computer into their pocket - when 99% of people now carry smart phones (and mostly, large ones - as large as they can possibly fit).
Maybe the equivalence was lost: in 1990s, a computer in your pocket would bring about visions of a tower PC and maybe a backpack strap, and then you could only walk as far as the power cord.
When VR/AR makes it, it won't be strapping what I imagine you are thinking to your face. I imagine glasses or maybe people will even entertain a visor or shield
No, it’s not an issue of form factor. It’s the disconnection from reality and the constant literally-in-your-face attention grabbing that would come from wearing AR glasses, no matter how slim and lightweight they become.
I have an Apple Watch. Why? Because it lets me use my phone less. It is a purposefully less capable and less attention-seeking device which I can use to check the nature of a notification in a socially acceptable way and then go back to living life without pulling out my phone.
AR/VR is fundamentally having a phone strapped to your eyeballs. You’re saying “but it can be made lightweight and comfortable!” I’m saying you’re missing the whole point: I don’t want a phone strapped to my eyeballs, even if it weighed 0 g and was soft and velvety. It’s a step backwards.
I would love for that technology to exist, because I have AR applications in mind that I think could be industrially useful. But I would despise that becoming the normal mode of interface to the world, the same way I despise people having their heads in their phones all day long.
The thing is the smartphone took off as soon as it hit the market because its use cases were just that compelling. Vr is nothing new. What are we 10 years into this market with barely any adoption or useful applications beyond a gaming stint until you hit your nausea limit? Says it all I think. Its biggest use case so far is using it to blow wind into the sails of your stock ticker for a few quarters.
>The thing is the smartphone took off as soon as it hit the market because its use cases were just that compelling.
That depends on how exactly you define "smartphone". I might still have an old Nokia brick with a little screen and a web browser lying around somewhere.
> The "strapping computers to their faces" meme is just stupid hyperbole. It's no more insightful than declaring that nobody wants to stuff a computer into their pocket - when 99% of people now carry smart phones
Depends on how you define 'computer': content creation or content consumption?
Because everyone with a 'computer' in their pocket has nothing more than 'interactive television' in their pocket.
They literally do not do computing on it in any meaningful way.[1]
[1] Maybe they use the calculator. But that's about it.
You are missing the forest for the trees here; what we call the device we strap to our face is neither here nor there and of no relevance to my earlier argument.
The issue is a great many people just won’t want to sit wearing anything at all on their face in a meeting - especially those who may have put effort into appearance of their hair and makeup etc etc as just one of many examples.
It’s also not a “meme”, or “hyperbole”. That is literally what you have to do today and in near term with an AVP or meta Quest etc- strap a heat generating, heavy, sometimes fan cooled (AVP) computer across your face.
Compelling to who? Might be to the managers who get some twisted satisfaction from spying on their employees, but most people aren't gonna want to wear a brick on their face so their manager can make sure you're paying attention or whatever.
I don't turn my camera on in meetings and it's often "broken", some idiotic headset that my manager forces on me is going to be similarly buggy and "broken"...
I mean, teams/zoom gets me 99% of the way there. I can see people, read lips. What do I gain from a "virtual environment"? Because I can already talk to people all over the world, right now. And they can share their screen and stuff. It's a pretty good system.
Yes - it’s even more intrusive - you have to strap a computer to your face instead of merely sitting in front of it. That was the entire point I’m making.
The barrier to using a webcam is already lower, and people routinely refuse to do it.
I almost never put my camera on. I think people mostly like turning their camera on to show off their home office, living room or book case. Beyond that, there is just no point. It is a distraction overall.
Business meetings in headsets is just completely delusional. It is one of the dumbest tech ideas of all time.
" 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.
I have tried the quest 3 and it’s like looking through a distorted version of the world through a low resolution camera with Vaseline slopped on top.
It’s impressive technology but it’s far from seamless. There’s less colours, less resolution, worse depth perception, more latency, and worse nightvision than your actual eyes. The quest makes your head quite a bit larger and you’re more likely to hang your head into something. It is very far from seamless.
They have a long way to go. Audio pass through still isn’t good enough for me to trust it never mind video pass through.
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.
CTRL-F Gibson, the tech and root parent comment eerily reminded me of Fragments of A Hologram Rose. We're closing the gap between fiction and reality. The short story was written in 1977! Gibson was prescient about so many things.
"He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sold purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible."
I suppose (and Gibson is great), but I've always felt that this sort of addiction doesn't require VR? Like, to whatever extent people are going to do this, it's ALREADY HERE.
With UBI and simstim soaps we can have people plug themselves into the Matrix voluntarily, no scary robotic creepers required!
And yes, addicts exist today, but we keep inventing better and better drugs. What would be available to a peasant? Crappy beer? Now a denizen of the SF underbelly can be permanently in an alternate universe thanks to fentanyl.
Have you noticed another trend? We keep making real experiences, real food, real exercise harder to obtain and more expensive while pushing cheap imitations on the masses. VR is not going to be a happy thing that will help disabled people. It will mostly be a source of worsening inequality and a lot of suffering. The "have-nots" will be able to vicariously live the lives of the "haves", but only a fake version.
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.
> I'm always flabbergasted that people watch concerts through a camera, rather than just enjoying the experience.
And can easily substitute concerts for all types of things here. Travel experiences, museums, art, the mona lisa room where I am pretty sure I was the only one looking-at/facing the actual painting...etc. For many, getting IG likes or emoji comments is more gratifying than the actual experience. I don't get it either.
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.
Not even the same thing. Watch or a car is not a platform. Clearly you're allergic to understanding my point so how about we end this here. Have a good day.
They can bugger off. I had my dinner ruined by some Instagram celebrities earlier this year who were flying around with a DSLR filming some food and screaming a lot. The staff were visibly pissed off but too afraid to tell them to go away and stop annoying the customers in case it reflected badly on their restaurant. Everyone was held ransom.
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.
For video, MV-HEVC (the Apple-pushed format) is probably the best bet, since it's both well-documented as a HEVC/H.265 extension and (because it stores diffs instead of full duplicate frames) it's way more practical for high-res and HDR video than previous de facto formats like side-by-side video. It's likely to be widely adopted by data hoarders, if only because it will save a huge amount of file space on 3D blu-ray rips.
Photos are more up in the air in part because the use and support of the Apple-pushed HEIC is much more limited than HEVC. But internally it's basically the same thing as MV-HEVC except with just the two still frames encoded instead of full videos, so any codebase that supports MV-HEVC should be able to support the 3D variant of HEIC as well without a lot of extra work over the long term.
(Not my area of expertise, but I believe this is about accurate with regard to the Apple ecosystem)
These were old photos, many taken with older digital cameras and early smartphones, and they worked very well. I believe as long as they're of a reasonably high resolution (so, any camera from the last 20 years or even more), it'll work. Of course, it's ML-based attempting to simulate 3D from a single image, so it's not always perfect, but I didn't run into any significant failures.
Btw, to capture spatial videos, the easiest way is to use an iPhone 15 Pro (with its camera in "spatial video" mode) or the Apple Vision Pro itself. I'd guess there are ways to convert videos from other formats into this, or to use other apps to view photos/videos in non-native formats, but I'm not personally familiar.
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.
Back in the day ~2010, Facebook was the app store. Farmville et al were more popular than the top games on mobile at the time. They really should have pushed for a mobile version of it, as the lack of that is what killed it.
it's likely dumber than that: bait and switch. Facebook had done this before: they gave third parties rich access to their data via Graph API, which in turn helped Facebook to grow.
Once their social graph growth phase began to slow down, Facebook severely cut off data access.
I will never believe Meta or Apple excuses for our computers not being computers. Video Game Consoles are about complete control to create a fake digital market and it needs to end.
I'm not a power-user though. I use a 3-generation-old Oculus Quest 1 that doesn't get first-party official updates anymore. Am I really supposed to expect Meta to push an update to a depreciated platform to disable a feature?
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.
Focus on the plate in front of you. Your home. The people you know in real life. Your job. Knowledge of an airstrike half a world away doesn’t mean anything actionable to you, so don’t fixate on that sort of information.
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.
It's definitely fixable, by both Meta and yourself [1]. I've done it twice. A replacement kit is $14 on Amazon.
You would think joysticks would be a solved problem by now, but no. Meta chose garbage, with the same garbage installed in the quest pro controllers that are not really serviceable, from being glued together and jam packed with electronics (3 camera inside out tracking in each controller).
Battery can also be replaced, but with somewhat ridiculous effort [2].
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
Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency was a major reason Meta stock went through the massive dip a few years ago, until it ended up not being that detrimental and AI hype took over.
I’m sure Meta would love to track their users way more than Apple allows.
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.
I wonder if you could almost add image-heavy social media to the list. I think the amount of tiktok and IG that boils down to looking at hot people is probably shocking.
Are you saying Japan has a more relaxed stance on porn? Don’t they have government mandated censorship of nude images? I would call that more strict, not less.
IMO, the way it is that hard distinction between child and adult is simply not understood. East Asians in general age in way more linear and continuous manner than Europeans for whatever reasons, and that makes it just harder to agree that some people aren't like others.
Genital-censorship laws in Japan are a fig leaf, barely ever upheld, afaik.
They are absolutely more relaxed with the type and amount of content getting published, and have been for a very long time. The likes of Miguel Angel Martin in Japan would be considered average, whereas in the west they shock the mainstream.
The anglosphere is still somewhat conditioned by the idea that comics are for kids; at the other end of the spectrum, the francosphere expects every comic to be an auteur-level masterpiece. East-Asians just see it as a product to sell: as long as they are correctly labelled, so that strong material ks not missold to kids, everything is fine.
I'm not a christian, but I wouldn't call this judeo-christian morals, just puritanism and purely an American mindset that is completely alien in other Western (mostly christian!) countries. I also don't associate puritanism with Israel either, so the "judeo" part is another misnomer.
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.'
Intels next gen iGPU has has similar benchmarks to a 3080. Compute is still scaling incredibly quickly. I think the optical problem will end up taking much longer than compute.
(phones are an obvious choice but I suspect you could jam significantly more power into the same form factor if you didn't need screen, speakers, mobile modem etc)
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.
Imo whether you overlay an image on your eyes or if they just do binocular camera passthrough, they could both count for VR. It's just most phones can't do binocular passthrough due to the lack of appropriately spaced cameras.
This is relevant for stuff like the f35 where you can look "through" the jet
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.
Raise your hand who was there during the first boom and doom of VR/AR headset/glasses in the 90's? A cycle or couple of more and we'll be there, maybe.
I feel like I have spectacular eyes. I can read absurdly small texts that shocks other people, great low light, yada yada.
The quest2 made my eyes hurt after just using it for maybe half an hour. Tried it a few times over several weeks and decided that my vision is worth more than some entertainment.
I'm not sure how they're going to get around that aspect.
The Quest 2 has minimal inter-pupillary distance (IPD) adjustment — only three fixed options. If your eyes don’t match closely enough to one of them, it can be very uncomfortable. Mine don’t, and I have the same experience as you, but I can put up with it for short bursts. More expensive headsets have much better lenses and adjustment options. It’s not an inherent problem with VR, just concessions to make a cheap device.
It's not dry eyes but more the 'muscles' in the eye that feel fatigued. I don't remember if it's from focusing or moving the actual eyeball around in an attempt to see edges of the screen instead of moving my head.
I’m short sighted and have been using VR for close too if not on a decade and have never experienced this. I spend entire days in VR and I’m completely fine with it.
I was there in the 80s when it made the mall arcade circuit and again in the 90s when it made the college student union circuit. I was there in the 00s when 25,000 devices made the Silicon Valley circuit. I was there in the 10s when Oculus stirred things up again. I'm here in the 20s when Apple is trying. I'll be here in the 30s when the next round hits AND FAILS AGAIN.
People care about their faces. They're not going to strap a 1.5 pound dork-box to their face and head mussing their hair and makeup to do what they can already do on their phones or laptops. What they cannot do on their phones or laptops (or game consoles or tablets or rings or watches or whatever) they can do on a $500 Quest.
There's no market for a PC-priced device that straps to your face like ski goggles. It's an accessory. Price it at $100 or $200 or even $500, but you can't price it at $1000 or $4000 because it's a toy.
I don't think Apple expected to move a ton of these. It's more a proof of concept that they can iterate on. In five years, it may look a lot different.
Oh yeah. I remember when it was only in pubs so I could only play these games with a guardian. I remember everyone knowing the traditional monitor would be gone in a few years.
The best TV and movie-watching experience _if you aren't eating or drinking_.
I love watching movies on my AVP, but the experience of groping for a popcorn bowl semi-blindly is enough of a turn-off that I end up just using our regular TV most of the time.
AVP is for when I want to binge Fallout in 2 days on a jaw dropping huge screen floating above me, when my fam has no interest in watching five minutes of it.
Your fam doesn't find it weird when you're strapped into a slightly smaller Daft Punk helmet for 2 entire days, just taking breaks to eat and do basic hygiene?
Maybe you can say it's the best movie watching experience ever. Id rather watch a movie on a $20 TV from Craigslist with my wife. Even if she hates it, we bond over it and that matters more, imo
But how does his family deal with him being essentially uncontactable for huge swaths of time for multiple days?
Did I ever say everyone has to conform to my worldview? He said his preference. I asked a question about his use case. I stated my preference. That's it
Not the OP but I’m surprised you are surprised this much.
In our 2-person family there are times where me and my wife spend an entire evening, sometimes even a full day or two independently doing whatever hobbies we have. We both appreciate the ability to hyper-focus when we like. It’s very easy to “deal with” too: you just continue your life until the other one becomes available. What is so wrong about it?
You are not uncontactable anyway, if someone needs to contact you they can still approach you. Obviously this wouldn’t work so well with a little kid.
I didn't say anything was wrong with it, I was just curious how it works?
But also I guess I assumed a "fam" is more than just a spouse. Sure if it's only one other person you live with, then you're probably not needed any time. Idk I'd still rather watch a movie together, but that's just me
Most people would not see any problem in spending 8 hours over two days enjoying an activity by oneself.
I can guarantee that if you watched 5 minutes of Dune or Gravity on your $20 (or $2000) TV and then on an AVP, you would say: “Oh, I see.” I’ve randomly paused in those movies (and Kill Bill, and others) just to marvel at the artistry of the cinematographer. The device provides a unique and, frankly, stunning visual experience, which I think is hard to understand with seeing it oneself.
VR just isn’t going to happen for a long time. It does have a real purpose or a strong drive to use. I have meta 3 and i played for a bit but then it ended up on the shelf for a variety of reasons.
It has a lot of good specific uses but struggles past that.
It continued to be very impressive technology wise but something that wont be adopted en mass for a long time. Tim Cook was right to be worried about this product - should have trusted his intuition on that one.
Don't you worry, Apple is still looking for a product market fit. And when you have enough billions, do enough brainstorming and cool ad videos you can actually find things that never existed in the first place. Then we will see mass adoption of this millennials' dream tech.
I'm going to try out the new travel mode on a transatlantic flight tomorrow - mildly excited by the possibility of escaping the claustrophobic confines of 11 hours in an airplane.
VR will probably never be more than a gimmick imo.
AR is where the market is at. Regular glasses, with current phone capabilities, like painting the actual road you’re going to travel green would already get hundreds of thousands of adopters.
Because the glasses are too big, or the implementation sucks.
I don’t want to see an arrow where I need to go. I don’t want to wear a VR headset.
I want regular glasses. I want the road I need to travel to be a yellow brick road. I want to see the person I’m calling in front of me. I want some details about the building or business I’m looking at when I ask for it, like opening hours, phone number, reviews.
Honestly, this is a shame, because I think a lot of the vision pro's flaws are Apple problems.
That said, meta seems to have found a sweet spot in price/performance, so maybe in a few generations we will have something with the quality of vision pro that is not locked down
Saying this is like the most anti-Apple thing ever. It literally sounds like Microsoft when they were designing Windows and when Apple started eating their market share away because they cared about the little details
It's not a sweet spot. It's less then 10 million MAU over 5 years for about $40 billion dollars. How is that a sweet spot. If you can't get 10 million MAUs in 5 years for $40 billion dollars, you're a failure. Quest is a failure. AVP being an even bigger failure doesn't make Quest a success.
One thing that frustrates me with this comment is that you're measuring their state today as if that's the end state.
Is waymo a failure? It's not deployed across the US yet, and it's been over a decade etc
No, they're just trying to solve hard technology problems. I want companies to be ambitious, that's way better than seeing them just focus on cutting costs etc
What is the goal of quest? Is it to get mau? Is it sales and marketing for eng (come work at _, where we have fun projects like these Glasses - sounds familiar), is it to develop and flex hardware muscles? Is it to make sure Meta is competitive if/when there is a paradigm shift away from mobile?
I think Mark is thrilled to have a hardware product that they can deploy their ML models to. Was that intentional? Obviously no, but at some point they're paying for optionality.
They want the option to build a million hardware units in a year, they want the option to build a competitor to Apple's next hardware device (frankly, in the counterfactual that AVP took off, Meta was extremely well-positioned)
Meta is a money-printing machine, and so they have choices: invest in moonshot hardware (or ai) projects, stock buybacks/dividends
They have a huge dividend. What do you want them to do? More stock buybacks? Make less money?
This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year. The worst part is that Meta is merely licensing the Ray-Ban form factor and this also comes at a hefty price tag. Specially if other companies such as Google enter a bidding war to snatch that exclusivity away from them.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/07/31/metas-reality-labs-posts...
> This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year
Yes, it has cost them billions of dollars (ongoing) to develop their AR/VR tech. You can definitely criticize that, but this spending is defensive. If Facebook (Meta) doesn't own at least some market share in a future device, that is an existential threat to them. How much did ATT cost Facebook? [1] Answer: north of $10 billion in 2022. But note: it's actually a reduction in Facebook's revenue by that amount, so in the fullness of time, the total damage is much worse.
> Ray-Ban
Facebook has multiple form factors. They have VR quest (3). They have AR glasses. I don't expect Ray-Ban to capture Facebook/Google's margin here, and Facebook would be able to build first party AR glasses if they wanted. You use Ray-Ban to sell v1 and then you make v2 good enough that it sells itself.
All of this seems tangential to my complaint that I would love an incredibly high res and reasonably hackable VR screen.
Point taken! I would only add that Ray-Bans have become somewhat of a timeless fashion icon and this isn't something that you can easily replicate no matter how much R&D money you have at your disposal. (Just look at how goofy Snap's Spectacles are in comparison)
Before the bandwagon jumps on "Metaverse is dead", Meta is pursuing multiple headsets, devices strategy and trying to find the right Features / Price mix.
Quest 2 is the most successful headset and it seem to have the perfect balance. Quest 3 although great, probably is slightly expensive for the mass market. But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.
It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit. Like a startup, you just have to keep iterating and I'm glad zuck is on it
If anything, what I’ve heard from friends at or adjacent to Meta is that they’re paring back metaverse ambitions and capabilities on their future devices because of the success of the Ray-Bans glasses and the relatively middling sales of the Quest 3.
The Ray-Bans are also a weird anomaly since they’re leaning on the Ray-Bans designer pricing to justify a lot of the cost. If you’re already buying a pair of luxury sunglasses that cost close to $200, what’s another $100 to get the smart version?
And I keep my sunglasses in my car's glove compartment to use when I'm driving, with the only times I wear them being then and when I'm doing physical activity (running, sports, etc).
New, less physically risky use cases for sunglasses will not appear in my life just because I get a more expensive pair of them.
Don’t understand the appeal being a spy cam for Facebook, but to each their own. The subsidized quest is on borrowed time if it keeps losing crazy billions a quarter as it currently does.
>But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years
Honestly I doubt it.
ChatGPT is a free service that is genuinely helpful. For the Metaverse you need to buy the headset and the hardware to run it for what? Wasting time in a virtual store instead of just using a UI? Using it on a worst version of VRchat?
> It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit.
Sure, "huge hit". Anecdote but the only time Ive ever seen anyone wear one was when I interviewed at meta and one of the folks interviewing me was wearing them.
The CEO of a company selling them says he likes them, and they are selling more quickly than a product which flopped. I am not particularly swayed by this information!
I would absolutely die of laughter if Tim Cook came on stage and said "we worked really hard and we think you will agree, this iPhone is definitely in our top 3 iPhone models ever released. It is really quite good. Seriously, its nearly as good as last year's model, which was great!"
After 10 years of building headsets and 5 years of selling them at scale Facebook has fewer than 10 million MAU on Quest. That's $30-50 BILLION spent for maybe 8-9M MAU.
The Ray-bans aren't AR or VR, they're sunglasses with a built in webcam. What a joke.
What a total failure and the fanboys pretending it's not.
Which other products out there cost tens of billions and gave fewer than ten million monthly users?
There was an interesting email from Zuck released during one of their trials where he explained why they were focused on VR: it was basically all about Apple and wanting to own the next platform.
Makes sense although gaming is and will remain the most significant use case for VR in the foreseeable future
If I remember correctly; Zuck wanted to acquire Unity because he thought Unity would be the next big AR/VR platform, which Meta would hopefully control, instead of Apple and Google controlling the next big distribution platform. In retrospect, it would've been better that way because Unity's management will destroy Unity sooner or later.
The Vision Pro is a solution looking for a problem. This is the same problem plaguing Apple Home. It just feels very - so what? Tech nerds like it because it's "cool", but everybody else is wondering why would I ever need this thing?
Personally, I think they need to be thinking of a more Apple Watch type device wearable in normal glasses frames. Something more akin to Google Glass, and yes, I'm familiar with the term "glasshole." But maybe it was a product too far ahead of it's time? Or maybe these are just products we don't need?
There was a time when you didn't "need" a PC, either, and they were seen as just nerd toys and things yuppies used to balance their checkbooks, back when "balancing your checkbook" was a thing you had to do. This changed with the advent of the Web, and held until desktops gave way to smartphones. If you could time-travel back to the 80s and 90s, plenty of folks would have scoffed that anyone would ever "need" a computer, let alone a computer in their pocket. But a lot of that is because "a computer" was a bulky beige thing with a CRT monitor, and maybe if you were really into it a 2400 baud modem. But then you'd have to splurge for a second phone line or pick which device to use, the modem or the phone.
So I'd be wary of writing off AR/MR/XR as a dead end, as opposed to a technology that still needs more innovation to reach the mainstream. Glasses themselves are mainstream, and have been for centuries. What's holding AR devices back is the ability to miniaturize the necessary holographic technology, as well as the batteries and processing power. This will eventually be solved, just like an iPhone now has more processing power than the supercomputers of decades before.
The problem with VR will always remain the same. You can't interact with other people while you have a big thing on your face that's designed to supplant your entire field of view, which limits desirable use cases.
> If you could time-travel back to the 80s and 90s, plenty of folks would have scoffed that anyone would ever "need" a computer, let alone a computer in their pocket.
Is that true? I feel like people have imagined portable communication / computing devices forever[1]. People maybe couldn't imagine that they could ever be small enough to be practical, but the utility of such a device was pretty obvious. Similarly, I think "VR" as a concept has obvious value and applications. However current implementations fall far short of what is necessary to unlock that value for most people / scenarios.
I guess you're both right. People knew there'd be reasons computers would be nice to have, but scoffed at the idea that it would be realistic, or would become an actual necessity. People now know that there are ways VR could be cool, but many aren't yet convinced it can be done well enough/cheap enough to be worth it, nor are they imagining it being day-to-day tech yet.
It cannot be done well enough or cheap enough or in a form factor people are willing to use at scale. It's a dead end until those all change. Decades at least.
> I feel like people have imagined portable communication / computing devices forever
Another example would be fictional comic-book detective Dick Tracy's wristwatch, which started as two-way audio in 1946 and got upgraded to video in 1964.
(1) Price matters. If Detroit was selling $25k reasonably sized EVs they'd be selling like hotcakes, even if they had limited range. There are a few people who will pay $75k+ for a luxury EV but they bought a Tesla 10 years ago. If Detroit wanted to sell XXXL EV SUVs at crazy high prices they should have done it ten years ago. Now it's too late and they have to make the kind of cars BYD does or pass legislation to keep BYD out of our market.
The Meta Quest consumer has proven they'd rather save a few bucks and buy an MQ2 instead of a better MQ3. It's a big problem for Meta because they're never going to move towards making better games that need an MQ3 to run.
(2) VR > AR Apple's just plain wrong about the focus on AR. The Apple Vision Pro has the hardware to provide far superior immersive world application story than the MQ3 but the software (and maybe controller) story isn't there. Apple acts as if there was something morally wrong with VR, like it is putting your hands in their toilet with all the conviction they have that it is OK to take 30% of all the revenue of the app economy. Sorry, visiting VR worlds is half the value you could get out of a product and throwing out half the value is like doubling the price.
A cheap set of XReal glasses can say "this is just good for watching the HDMI output of a game console" but at Apple Vision Pro prices product that expensive really has to "do it all" with no excuses. People really do subscribe to VR fitness apps, they really do have fun playing games like Asgard's Wrath 2 or games like Riven. Have you ever heard anyone say that they were engaged with an app for the Vision Pro?
In regards to VR, I think Valve could really move the hole situation by building/providing SteamLink VR on AVP, as they do on Meta Quest. Buy any Bluetooth (VR) Controller and enjoy games streamed.
And maybe in some future I will be able to stream from Linux hosts via SteamLink.
Exactly, a device that expensive has to deliver as much value as possible.
Trying to sell a lifestyle accessory for people who have to own every Apple product that there is the beginning of the end for Apple that they’ll be talking about in business school the way we talk about DEC, Tandem and Commodore today.
I contend that almost every problem solvable by a wearable can be solved “well enough” by a smartphone, to the point where an additional device is not worth the trouble for the marginal benefit (unless you’re a person who likes gadgets).
For exercise specifically I do see the value of a watch form factor since people don’t want to carry a phone in their exercise gear. But, that’s pretty niche.
> I contend that almost every problem solvable by a wearable can be solved “well enough” by a smartphone, to the point where an additional device is not worth the trouble for the marginal benefit
I've found glanceable notifications on my smartwatch to be really useful.
Dismissing or answering calls without taking out my phone (or without my phone at all since the watch has mobile connectivity), quickly seeing text messages (especially 2 factor auth codes).
The remote viewfinder for my camera lets me actually be in family photos. And of course exercise tracking (reminders to get a few thousand more steps today are helpful). AR/VR goggles would be useless for any of those, and make the last two worse.
I've found notifications period to be a net negative to my life. I have almost all of them off.
> Dismissing or answering calls without taking out my phone (or without my phone at all since the watch has mobile connectivity), quickly seeing text messages (especially 2 factor auth codes).
The distraction of even looking breaks me out of the zone. So no, don't need a watch for notifications.
> I've found notifications period to be a net negative to my life. I have almost all of them off.
I’ve found the complete opposite. Funny how that works.
Notifications have been one of the most significant and beneficial additions to my life. Especially on the watch, it is in fact really the only reason I own a watch.
To be fair, I only let calendaring /medical apps do notifications, but equally, that’s the reason I own it in the first place.
Same. I have found notifications on my Apple Watch even more distracting on the phone. The vibration is particularly annoying when you are in hyper-focus. So I have also disabled most notifications on my Watch.
I do like it a lot for other things like workouts, having connectivity without bringing my phone along, etc.
Also, I don't really understand the benefit for 2-factor codes. On the Mac and iPhone they can be autofilled from messages. So, I never need to see/read/type them.
The problem with VR gaming is that movement that doesn't match real world movement tends to make people barf. The types of games you can build in VR is just so much more limited as a result. For example, it's very cool to imagine a VR MMO but it would be hell to actually play it.
That's exactly it, they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough. This is the same problem that plagues the AI assistant devices - it doesn't matter what they can do, they won't replace your smartphone. Which means you're asking someone to carry (and pay for) a smartphone + an extra device. That's a big ask.
It's also the reason why you see these stories of people living smartphone-only lives, doing everything on their smartphones without needing or even having a desktop/laptop. Smartphones are good enough for everything, for a lot of people.
For the record: I -love- the Vision Pro. Tried it out, loved it. But I fall into the `Tech nerds like it because it's "cool"` part. I recognize that that's not going to be the popular opinion. Not now, not ever. There's just not enough value in VR/AR to really change societal norms to the point that everyone's going to want to wear these devices.
Ultimately: Just because a product is a cool idea, doesn't mean it's society-altering. Some products just aren't that valuable.
> If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough.
Sure, but I don't think nearly enough people are sufficiently critical of their need for a smartphone either; I tend to think of it like cars, we've just allowed ourselves to let these devices service so much our day-to-day tasks that they seem like necessary appendages. If it goes away, we panic and buy another one, never stopping to sit with that absence. If my mac had a built-in cellular modem, I'd leave the phone at home most days. It's not useless, but it is completely incidental to my life in terms of what I actually would need it for. Likewise, if people didn't have cars, they wouldn't likely have a life that's only palatable because they have one.
> If my mac had a built-in cellular modem, I'd leave the phone at home most days.
I can’t imagine having to open my wallet every time I want to pay for something. Apple Pay is my favorite feature out of all. Instant communication comes close second. The way we used to live… not being able to ask your partner if we have enough milk in the fridge.
But.. none of that does or should require a smart phone really. Even for the cellular modem bit I mentioned, I could find another way to do it; people had devices for this before these black mirrors came around. But a cellular modem built into my laptop would reduce the amount of crap I have instead of add to it, and I'd still use the smart phone for other reasons at other times, just not if I'm going to a cafe to work necessarily. Using technological conveniences with more intentionality instead of chronically is where I think we screw ourselves.
With the car comparison, my hunch is that a not insignificant contingent of car owning bi-pedal able-bodied people fit into the category of both not having any athletic pastimes/hobbies and also walk or move their body to get somewhere for less than 30 min a week. Just a hunch though. To do that without having had the influence of a car at some point would be remarkable; you'd have to be exceptionally sedentary, live immediately adjacent to a transit stop and do everything in your life right next to another.
If I took the cost of a car and put that into anything else in my life, it's the difference between hypothetically having access to the most expensive outdoor hobbies that don't directly depend on cars themselves, like rally. Not to shit on cars as hobbies either though, not requiring a car means I could afford to have a project car just for the hell of it.
Without an Apple Watch, I just.. tap my card, and retain 2 month's worth of food budget because I didn't get the damn thing.
> But.. none of that does or should require a smart phone really
Well yes, it doesn’t. I used to ask people for directions without a world map, not understand the street signs in a foreign county, come how to a spouse telling me go buy milk since we’re out of it.
Most of technological advances in the last 30 years are conveniences. You could argue ad absurdum since you don’t need most of technology to survive.
Like, you don’t need a laptop if you think about it. You could just do all your work in the office.
But it's not ad absurdum, it's a degree of visceral discomfort for tolerating either the most shallow of discomforts, or the least shallow such as experiencing the vulnerability of navigating a culture without knowing exactly where you are at all times.
A laptop is just a marginally different tech choice according to whether I like a bit of variety in my office setting. I don't have a printer or scanner at home, I walk down to the library, but if I no use for laptop over a desktop I'd pick that, which I do for my gaming pc. If I couldn't pick a laptop, that one could argue I've adapted to having, I'd just adapt to not, it's not a big deal.
To be fair, when you say "we've allowed cars to become necessary," you're talking about "we" as a society allowing that to happen-- me ditching my car after it breaks down tomorrow wouldn't be feasible unless I'm also willing to move to a much different part of my metro, get a new job, and find all-new hobbies and friend groups. That's not a decision most individuals have the power to make because they feel like trying it.
On the other hand, as you point out, a lot of what phones can do can also be done with larger computers. Most workplaces don't require employees to use their personal cell phones on a daily basis. It's practically a fad to "disconnect" for a while, and most individuals would be able to get by while doing that, especially if they still have a working computer.
Looking at this from a contradicting angle, cars actually have safety, environmental, and logistical concerns that make society's dependence on them a physically questionable idea. When I visited Japan for three weeks earlier this year and took public transportation everywhere, I was still using Google Maps on my cell phone to get just about everywhere, just like I do here at home in the US when I'm driving. So I think the "need" for a smartphone for navigation actually eclipses the societal need for cars to move people around.
So I don't think the comparison you're making holds up very deeply, other than on a very abstract societal level. Smartphones have a much wider array of possible usages than cars, and cars have a much more individually critical role in peoples' lives than cell phones.
> To be fair, when you say "we've allowed cars to become necessary," you're talking about "we" as a society allowing that to happen-- me ditching my car after it breaks down tomorrow wouldn't be feasible unless I'm also willing to move to a much different part of my metro, get a new job, and find all-new hobbies and friend groups. That's not a decision most individuals have the power to make because they feel like trying it.
What you describe here is exactly what I was thinking about; individuals in various societies that have either personally or consequently let so many facets of their life depend exclusively on the presence of the car that it feels like it would all come crumbling down in its absence. If we don't have the car, we'll literally lose our social circles, our hobbies, our job!? One would have to be crazy. Prior to me being more or less forced into that situation, I felt the same way, but it turned out that nothing like that happened at all, I'm saving money, I have closer relationships than ever with the people that matter and more of them, I conserve money more easily, I'm in better shape, and I literally never think about driving. The only downside is that some leisure activities take a bit more forethought, and it would be more difficult to have a job that's truly in random far-flung, unpredictable locations. When I was forced to sit with it, I did refuse to live in the city that didn't help me do that. Any friends that I had then and don't now turned out to either not be friends at all, or people I just see every once in a while when I rent a car and drive 8 hours to see them. At no time since getting rid of it has the thought of getting another one seemed appealing enough to pay even the tax on a low budget used car.
But to your analogous point, would I feel the same if I totally ditched the phone? I think ya probably, there's a decent chance of it.
> When I visited Japan for three weeks earlier this year and took public transportation everywhere, I was still using Google Maps on my cell phone to get just about everywhere, just like I do here at home in the US when I'm driving. So I think the "need" for a smartphone for navigation actually eclipses the societal need for cars to move people around.
Do you not feel like the only reason you do that is because it's what you've conditioned yourself to do? I also visited Japan for about the same length of stay for the first time last year, with my partner. While we did use maps somewhat, we only used it at the hostel for the first few days to get a vague sense of direction, and then used it only in the capacity that I would a static paper map or series of them, only in extremely rare travel circumstances have I ever purchased some temporary sim card or services, it's only rarely necessary and wildly detracts from my sense of adventure. Likewise, Tokyo is comically easy to navigate, it took a few days to get the hang of it and then I was good. Translation was pretty helpful (offline) but if I didn't have it I would have figured it out or bought a translation device. The amount of time I saved was incredible, and no I'm not being hyperbolic. If you frame it differently, would you not visit Japan if you didn't have a smartphone? Why?
Mapping apps are no-doubt super useful, but you don't need directions to everywhere you need to go, it's a convenience that we come to rely on, and I never use it day to day unless I'm comparing transit time to biking. Routes aren't that unpredictable most of the time, and there's signage, if my phone dies I'm not suddenly helpless, and that seems important.
Fwiw, I didn't read your comment as combative and I don't at all mean to be here, I just don't think we reconsider these things enough and let ourselves get too comfy with the conveniences of them, to such an extent that we no longer feel comfortable navigating the world, asking people for directions, talking to people on the street, making new friends, or diversifying our leisure. It's scary.
> and it would be more difficult to have a job that's truly in random far-flung, unpredictable locations. When I was forced to sit with it, I did refuse to live in the city that didn't help me do that.
I have a job that's a 30-minute drive from where I live (or a 7 hour walk, or a questionable 2 hour bike ride). My workplace is in a terrible part of town, and there's no way I'd live in the one (1) apartment complex within walking distance of it. Nobody takes public transportation to my workplace because no public transportation stops are within walking distance of it. On the other hand, I work at this company because I want to; I moved to this city to work at this company.
You're essentially saying people should just not care about where they work or where they live, and/or you're projecting your own privilege of being able to live and work wherever you want to onto everyone else.
> Do you not feel like the only reason you do that is because it's what you've conditioned yourself to do?
No, I did it because it was a foreign country that speaks a language I'm still not great at, and I didn't have any clue where anything was before I got there. I'm glad you and your partner had no actual schedule and had the luxury of just being able to bumble around wherever, whenever in order to fulfill whatever it is you think you got out of your trip.
I did not feel like taking hours in advance to look up and write down the same information that would've been needed to navigate the plethora of train and bus stops to go the places I wanted to go (which would then be rendered useless if I made a wrong turn en-route), or to be stuck within the immediate vicinity of my lodging in the various cities and towns where I stayed.
My earlier comment was not combative, but you're really coming off as a "just roll with it, maaaaan" hippy, which is not applicable to most people and not useful to discuss at a societal level. Do I wish normal people were more social and less tech-reliant? Sure. Me ditching my phone or throwing my career away to avoid driving is not going to fix the world, though. No functioning individual can or should be expected to do that.
(And for all your response, I don't think you strengthened your original case of comparing reliance on smartphones to reliance on cars, which is specifically what I objected to.)
Disagree, I’ve been coordinating a lot of things lately–house projects, social events, travel, healthcare, work, etc etc–and have basically had a phone glued to my hand, which means i’m one hand down and constantly cranking my neck. if i could go hands free and be able to mind tasks, even menial ones like laundry and cooking, while researching things online, going through phone menus, messaging with people etc, it would really help. i think we are getting really close to that capability with chatgpt voice mode, we just need a piece of hardware that can bridge the gap.
> they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough.
I disagree.
If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking at (that I’m connected to on LinkedIn) and why/how we were connected, I’d buy that in a heartbeat.
> If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking at (that I’m connected to on LinkedIn) and why/how we were connected, I’d buy that in a heartbeat.
The idea of wearing LinkedIn on my face makes my stomach churn, but while that's my personal reaction, is there a real world context you've found yourself in regularly enough that you've found yourself wanting such a product, or is it more like a conference thing? I can't even think of a physical space I've been in, ever, where there would be even one person that I'm both connected to on LinkedIn and don't know why.
Happens to me all the time. The company I work for has 1300 employees, and what I do means going cross-team pretty often, talking to people that I might have met once or twice a year ago. I speak to customer teams that pack consultants I might have worked with 10 years ago.
Generally speaking, I'm bad at remembering names. I'd buy a discreet "remind me who this is" device in a heartbeat.
Depends on what you do. But when I’m at events rather constantly (not big conferences) and people remember me, but I don’t remember them, it comes off as insulting.
VCs are a good example—founders will remember who they are for obvious reasons. But the ratio is way off—many more founders meet the same VC.
There are other industries where this happens as well.
Also, some people have problems recognizing faces in general.
> If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking
I could only hope that the EU would ban it ASAP if such a product existed making it unviable anywhere else. Except maybe China and such, should be pretty useful for the CCP enforcement agencies.
But there are so many things that can't be done without visual & audio context. I can't hold my smartphone camera up all day to capture and serialize useful data.
AI just made the value proposition for smartglasses 10x.
They're at the 1980s toy computer level of usefulness - fun to play with, a few useful applications, but hopelessly clumsy and underpowered in terms of real user needs.
No one was sure what real user needs would be in the 80s. It turned out the all-time killer USP was a global data network, which could be accessed through keyboard+screen terminals and pocket devices, and which replaced a lot of slow paper and phone call transactions of all kinds with near-instant access.
VR/AR is currently a wart on that. It won't come into its own until there's some equivalent new killer USP, which isn't just a different way of accessing what's there already.
I'd guess there's going to be some kind of live AI rendering of both real and simulated interactions. But it's going to have to be far beyond what we're used to today to be interesting.
Apple Home (as an integrated Matter/Thread client) is far more useful than the Vision Pro.
It's easy to fixate on things like colorful lights, but consider instead automations based on how much energy is used when. For example, if I have a box fan or a portable AC unit on a smart plug, I can automate it running while I'm gone only if the temperature gets to a excess (for the benefit of pets, fruit on the counter, running computers, etc) or only when electricity is cheaper and/or cleaner.
The most useful IoT devices, I think, aren't purpose devices that have a microcontroller integrated into them... so much as ones whose primary and only purpose bridge digital and physical by allowing you to actuate something remotely, be it the flow of electrify (smart plug), or physically flipping a switch (switchbot type).
If they wouldn't be too greedy they could make a device that combines: Apple TV, HomePod, Apple Router, Time Machine - that would be an ultimate smart home device... but they want to sell both Apple TV, HomePod and iCloud for storage.
Google Home was kind of magical when it launched, but as its reliability has degraded over time, its appeal has worn off. It is still nice to be able to ask it to play music or set an alarm or whatever without engaging with a screen.
I haven't used a HomePod, but I suspect it's Apple's version of that experience.
The Sonos patent wars sucked. Things are somewhat back to ok, but man, it's just absurd & sad seeing basic networked av get ravaged by lawyers like so.
I'm super glum about audio casting at the moment. It feels like less and less speakers have audio casting builtin. For a while there was a spare of speakers, some even battery powered, but it's turned into a trickle. There's also incredibly few options for amplifiers with builtin audio casting; what the NexusQ originally did! So frustrating.
This is an ecosystem I am super bought into, and it feels like it's fading and there's not a replacement (especially with Sonos's recent enshittification seppuku).
I ended up just getting normal speakers and attaching a dedicated box to them. I hate how it looks though, so many more wires, and you better hope your speakers are close enough to route a long USB cable for power to a wall outlet
I don't know if it's similar, only because I don't really use Google products. You can ask the HomePod to turn on the Apple TV and play something, or to read out your messages (depending on your settings and whatnot). I don't really have an issue with it doing anything but playing music. I use it for HomeKit controls constantly, and love my HomePod mini's.
I think something with the "wow" factor of the Vision Pro but the form factor of a pair of glasses would be the holy grail of AR/VR. I wonder if there are fundamental tradeoffs which would make that impossible in the near term? I think it would remain very niche indefinitely in that case.
I wonder if in the next 5 years there could be a device where the compute is your smartphone but it streams to a display on your AR/VR glasses. I guess the main issue would be where do you put the battery.
I'm pretty convinced that AR and specifically headset AR is just a dead end. No amount of sensors or pixels are going to make it viable for anything besides some tiny niches. VR is fun and has some uses. Everything else just needs a tactile keyboard or touchscreen.
There are very few situations where I'd want to wear a bulky headset for any length of time. Although I don't play video games, I could see that people who are into it might find them pretty cool.
The TV ads showing people at business meetings all wearing headsets and manipulating a shoe protoype in mid-air are just ridiculous. Or the one where a guy is trying to assemble a furniture kit and wearing a headset. Come on, you'll do better with a YouTube video and unobstructed eyes.
Silicon valley needs a product that will make us spend even more time online than our phones, in order to sell more ad inventory and make the line go up.
This is pretty much what's driving all of this, especially the AR stuff. It's not a solution in search of a problem. The problem is they need to sell more ads. The only issue is that it's a solution to their problem, not ours.
Why do you think the manufacturers would allow that? Sure, you can effectively block ads in a web browser, on a desktop. Everything on mobile is in an app which explicitly does not allow you to tailor your experience, erm, nuke the ads from orbit. And every platform that's followed smartphones, from tablets to headsets, has followed the phone model of pushing software: closed-down OS, software through app stores or gtfo. It's incredibly naive to think ads will get better and not a hell of a lot worse.
A suggestion to build a computer or headset from scratch, having to factor in all the compatibility hoops the big players throw at you before they nuke you anyway for having unsanctioned hardware, is proof of your unseriousness.
Yeah I frequently look at the vision pro reviews and think it would be cool to try, but I know after about a month I would get bored with it. $3500 is alot of money to spend on what is essentially the perfect device for watching movies on an airplane.
It is an insanely impressive technology; however, like the iPadOS I think it is going to take a decade or so to have enough functionality to even consider being useful for professional tasks. I don't want to have to buy a macbook just to stream it to the vision pro to do any coding tasks.
This is good news for Apple because their foot is not going off the pedal and now can create more firsts which can lead to more standards gearing toward them
I wish Meta also created something similar to xreal glasses or even better: some modular RayBan smart glasses that can be transformed into xreal with addon.
Never bought any headsets of any sort. And until there is a compelling, application, or a killer app I probably never will. Gaming is definitely not it.
Yes, also whatever high-end device they launch would also have a lower market capture from the TAM of high-end VR/XR headsets thanks to Apple being nearly uncompeteable in the hardware for it.
MAANG - N need to make compact AR goggles to assist with visualizing and interacting with the world containing additional context and interaction rather than a simulation of one in VR.
I think the chain of logic is that due to anaemic reception and the Quest3 being unexpectedly good, Apple has pulled forward the cheaper Vision Pro. This has lead to Meta launching head to head with that product, and hence needing to either produce something with comparable specs or do it for a much cheaper price than they thought previously. That not being feasible, they are falling back to their mass market strategy - fully own the low to middle end.
But none of this is about either company stepping back from the overall vision. What they are doing is jostling for market strategy, fit and timing - and adjusting to each other's moves as they go.
it still baffles me how Apple decided to release the Vision pro as an actual consumer product and not use this generation as just dev. kits and release a successor to the vision pro and have a cheaper one based on on the mobile chips too in 1 to 1.5 years
Not an expert, but my first impression was that once Meta got ahold of the Apple Vision Pro and took it apart in the lab, the conclusion was that had no chance of beating it, from a hardware point of view.
They do, but Meta's knows the market for $3500 device is way smaller than Apple realized. Sub $1000 is a must. Apple doesn't respect or support developers so there are no apps for it, no games for it. Everything but the screens are sub-par for the Apple device (to date, things might change).
Meta will come out with a Quest 4 that will be better than the 3 and sell WAY more than Apple's device. As heard on a podcast, I've seen more Cybertrucks than I have Apple Vision Pro's in the world.
I learned from these comments Apple Vision Pro isn't intended for gaming. No wonder Buffet sold out of them. WTF are they thinking? Might have to transition to Linux fully at some point before I die if they continue doing stupid things.
This is another big problem for VR: The headsets are very locked down. Getting something like an Ad Blocker, sideloading apps, or general functionality hacking is too cumbersome. You burn out and go back to your laptop before long.
Sideloading on the Meta headsets is trivial. Its probably as hard to change the bootloader as it is on Android (I mean, it IS Android) but I'm not sure what you would need that for.
I use Ethereum / Arbitrum every week at least. I use it for managing a lot of my finances. I provide liquidity on exchanges, provide liquidity for lending protocols, and use GMX for opening long/short positions and trading perpetuals. I also use USDC a lot, and also do self-custody
Maybe "what most companies use AI for" (i.e. glorified data collection) or "what most companies try to pass off as useful AI" (i.e. what we used to call machine learning, but now that ecommerce app can also tell you your latest sales in the form of a poem).
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 ?
Don't knock it till you try it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK63OSmF1FM
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.
The cost of the device is way off. Apple watch is still vaguely in line with the prices of other nice ish watches. $400 or so. Expensive but not otherworldly so. Vision pro is so expensive you rule out the middle class. Its price point was conceived by people who haven’t left northern california for some time.
For that matter, I don't think any other Apple products are so out of line with competitor's prices. Airpods, iPhones, and iPad are also about the same as Samsung/Google stuff. MacBooks are marked up, but still in range of Wintel machines. Same for their workstations. Then the Vision Pro rolls out at 600% more than the competition, and doesn't sell. Pitching it as a work machine was shooting themselves in the foot, too: a $3000 MacBook is so much more capable than a Vision Pro it's absurd. The VP is using the base processor from MacBook Airs two generations ago. I mean, come on.
The original Apple Watch was a luxury item too—remember the high-end fashion branding?
But it was a luxury item you would a) use all the time b) show off in your daily life.
That's why Rolex watches or Prada bags sell.
The vision pro is more like buying a painting, it's way more niche.
> 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.
Wristwatch fitness trackers had already established this as baseline market fit long before Apple. The benefit of the Apple Watch for me is to not have to carry a phone in my pocket and still be able to do smartphone things like message, pay for things, or even make calls if I need to. Then the pandemic needed you to scan QR codes to do contract calls, and then normalized QR codes for restaurant orders, so I'm back to the phone and my watch gathers dust.
The stumbling block here seems likely to be Apple's fundamental dislike of, and disconnect with, all things gaming.
It's an aesthetic and cultural divide. Like premium German car brands vs ricers, and I don't need to tell you which is which.
> 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
As a sibling notes, we already had had fitbit for 6 years by the time Apple came out with the Watch. They tried to make it about more than fitness and eventually conceded that that wasn't happening and focused on the market that existed before their release.
So if this plays out this same way then in a few years Apple will finally concede that VR is for video games and finally start focusing on the gamer market.
Yeah, that’s another good comparison.
The Palm equivalent in that comparison would be Fitbit and possibly Pebble. Apple waited until there was a proven market in wearables, then figured out how to combine that market with the strengths of their existing ecosystem to improve upon value. Then they propped up the model line with $$$ until they actually became good enough for people to buy.
I’m relatively optimistic they can do that here too, but that device needs to have a model that does everything it does today (well, maybe not the creepy visor eyes) and more for less than $1000 and at about 2/3 the weight max, before I think AW-like adoption will possibly happen.
They have a long history of ridding the cost curve down, but it’s not that fast. The 2010 iPad was 720$ adjusted for inflation, the current iPad better in basically every way starts at 350$. Original 2007 iPhone would be 908$ inflation adjusted while the iPhone SE is 429$.
My guess is it’s either discontinued or the 2040 Vision (non pro) is going to be strictly better in basically every way but still more than 1000$ inflation adjusted. But honestly if it’s 1/3 the weight and essentially strictly better in every way that could be quite compelling. There’s definitely a point where headsets are going to be comfortable enough you can forget they’re there, and ~2k for something you’re using regularly for 4+ years isn’t crazy money.
I think the ergonomics is an underappreciated aspect of adoption and regular usage.
> There’s definitely a point where headsets are going to be comfortable enough you can forget they’re there
I would really like to think so, but I am not at all confident that this is will happen.
Pricing the se and base model ipad is a bit disingenuous. You look at the flagships and they kept up with inflation adjusted pricing. Iphone and ipad 1 were flagships. Not old hardware released for a song.
I wouldn’t call either of them a flagship product, just the product. They added new titles for those premium products. At release it was called an “iPad” and in 2024 they still call the base model an “iPad” while also having an “iPad Air” and “iPad Pro.”
It makes sense as a strategy, a mid 90’s 2,000$ desktop is ~5,000$ today inflation adjusted. Few people spend that on a desktop today the market just shifts and you need to keep up. Meanwhile there’s a tiny percentage of people who just don’t care that much about money so you want something to milk such people for all they are willing to spend.
Exploration seems like an interesting use case. Probably more than gaming or wearable monitors in spite of the bubble here.
I'm still a bit meh on the Apple Watch in spite of buying an early one and then an Ultra that I got a good deal on. I don't care much about the quantified health thing and the battery life is still an issue even with the Ultra. Like for hiking though.
Hopefully Asahi Linux can be run on the thing, so it can be useful outside of Apple's walled garden too. :)
Yes, it’s the games stupid.
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.
Nvidia demanded Apple to allow its video driver to be able to phone home just like it does in the windows toy OS(running in ring 0 no less). Epic/Tencent fortnight abuses the DNS protocol probably to bypass wirewalls. Both can be observed via wireshark, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Personally I’m glad Apple told both of them to go pound sand.
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
Their decision to use glass for the housing is stupifying. It's on your head and swinging around, it should be absolutely as light as possible.
Agreed. I liked the demo at Apple Store except that it was freaking heavy. That was by far, the biggest deal breaker for me.
If they make it weigh half as much, I would buy one.
Too pricey in a time where many fear a recession. So it's an even worse launch to market than usual.
People have been fearing a recession for the last 16 years.
Sure, but it didn't stop them during the "great resignation" from moving around. Actions speak louder than words.
Statistically speaking, people are a lot more hesitant to switch jobs right now. That definitely points to legitimate fears (regardless of the objective economic outlook).
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Forget recession fears. Most people don’t have $3500 lying around flat out.
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.
how didnt porn run this over? honestly porn did advances the internet because it, and gaming, was THE usecase for most people. youtube etc wasnt there at the time it was porn and games. And porn and games should be the reason why VR shall sell
I think porn prefers open tooling so that it is less likely to be banned. Going inside Apple's walled garden is probably more risky in that regard and also there's only a small consumer base.
There are plenty of VR apps in this category available for PC-connected headsets. You can find tons of them on Steam or Patreon.
Small consumer base for porn or for the current $3000 apple headset?
The immersion is really good.
Apple would never allow it in their ecosystem, but OnlyFans + immersive VR could sell very well.
yeah i think apples no porn policy is ruining their vr headset and the future of vr ;). not that i am into vr porn. i only think the market for that should be huge
TBH I feel like if I am into VR porn then I am definitely addicted and I'd need help from professional. Usually porn is like a quick dopamine hit, or a quick release for a biological need. For VR, you'd beed to be really really into porn, to spend all the setup time AND then still be in the mood ...
yes true. but isnt using addicted people for the own benefit the whole premise of most social media and alike. apple is maybe not into social media but I cant imagine zuckerberg not wetting his pants from joy if he thinks about million more people crippled to his attention gathering devices.
Porn can't make the big ticket sales needed to prop up VR. It's hard enough to get a payment processor because of how often charges get disputed and fears about touching the money for illegal and abusive material.
You can't be discreet about VR porning because it leaves you oblivious to your surroundings. You gotta plan ahead and really commit to the time and place.
Aren't all of them propped up by being tethered to some FAANG? I highly doubt they are interested in hiring the best and brightest to build VR porn devices.
I also suspect that the "kick" from porn is a voyeuristic one; i.e. most consumers would rather watch it than be in it.
Apple Pro has an advantage of having no controllers to get in the way of holding your joystick.
I am waiting for the 2P version which replace your partner’s image with somebody else’s.
Meta quest does the same thing…
when porn advanced the internet did it cost 2000 dollars to get entry to the porn? I don't remember that. I think when this advancing happened it was pretty cheap, in some ways cheaper than buying a bunch of magazines.
Porn advanced the internet because it was a cheaper delivery mechanism for a cheap commodity, games expanded the internet because it was a technologically innovative platform for high end products.
Inflation calculator says Vision Pro price today is $1730 in 1995 dollars.
That is in the range of what a pc cost back then, I think? Like middle to high end but not out of the ballpark.
Evercrack, I knew a number of people who bought 3000 dollar computers in the mid nineties to play Everquest.
I wasn't a PC gamer but I bought a Dell in late nineties for near $3k. I think that was just the going rates for anything near max on RAM or CPU, even going big on disk space could drastically up the cost back then. I think I ended up adding a upgraded GPU to that PC that cost a good deal extra, and I wasn't even a gamer! I think I just wanted to edit or watch a certain video format/quality/etc and the stock GPU card wasn't able to handle it.
I don't remember exactly, but I do remember I used to collect videos of live performances from a handful of my favorite bands back then so think it might have been related to that hobby. As a side note, I had dozens of the 100 pack CD-R stacks full of these burned videos because HDD cost too much and I didn't need them to be available on demand.
Yeah and porn advances were specifically because the market leaders of the old school industry (publishers/distributors) could have their market stolen. So there was a large carrot out there, and it warranted market disruption. Just like dozens of other industries as the Internet and computing became widely available. The old guard of playboy and hustler and such did not invest heavily in the advances. It was small operators looking for an advantage in scale. Producers looking to cut out distributors, etc. I don’t think vr specifically offers that level of treasures and it’s not like any Joe can start a vr porn shop now. The internet originally offered the ability of a single person to sell millions of copies of their films. It (vr) probably actually consolidates it further again as larger investment in production equipment and editing is needed. But, it’s a tiny market so nobody really cares to be a first adopter. A lot of people are skeptical of Vr ever being widely available any time soon. That skepticism was optimism in early days of PC usage. Everyone knew computers were the future and we’d all be using them daily, in the home, etc. It was worth investing in for the porn industry.
PCs costs much around year 2000. and porn and email and messenger where the bonus to games. its was like “hey look counter strikes etc .. nice games” “hmm not sure” “ there is also porn” “bought”
I bought PCs around year 1998, and I don't remember porn being in the selling point, furthermore everyone I knew in 2000 had PCs because they had to use office. PCs had already infiltrated the market at the point the internet became a going concern.
In other words the internet was relatively cheap for people.
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By what the OP describes, these devices could become a limited but perhaps “profound” replacement for flying thousands of kms to have a holiday.
Or to have “power holidays” similar to a Power Nap, where you use an VR/AR device to relive a holiday for 5/10 mins.
Or to have “preview holidays” to experience a destination before booking a flight there.
If travel agents still existed, then they would be a perfect market for these VR devices but travel agents have long gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Unless perhaps you're severely disabled, holidays are so much more than just your eyes and ears.
Not just all of your five senses, and your ability to interact, but the social and human side as well, and your ability to interact physically with it all.
People said the same kind of things about TV - and while, on the one hand, they perhaps underestimated the profound effects of TV on society, nobody would confuse it with telepresence.
I'm not sure what VR offers here that web panoramas, detailed photos and customer reviews don't.. there's a marginal advantage there perhaps but it feels like a $250-300 peripheral rather than a $kk investment.
Does anyone know the current state of smell-o-vision technologies?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29225777
DonHopkins on Nov 15, 2021 | root | parent | next [–]
The iSmell developers were hoping to make money the same way, by selling big smell combination pack cartridges that you have to entirely replace after any one of the smells ran out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell
>The iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer developed by DigiScents Inc. is a small device that can be connected to a computer through a Universal serial bus (USB) port and powered using any ordinary electrical outlet. The appearance of the device is similar to that of a shark’s fin, with many holes lining the “fin” to release the various scents. Using a cartridge similar to a printer’s, it can synthesize and even create new smells from certain combinations of other scents. These newly created odors can be used to closely replicate common natural and manmade odors. The cartridges used also need to be swapped every so often once the scents inside are used up. Once partnered with websites and interactive media, the scents can be activated either automatically once a website is opened or manually. However, the product is no longer on the market and never generated substantial sales. Digiscent had plans for the iSmell to have several versions but did not progress past the prototype stage. The company did not last long and filed for bankruptcy a short time after.
This Wired Magazine article is a classic Marc Canter interview. I'm surprised they could smell the output of the iSmell USB device over the pungent bouquet from all the joints he was smoking:
You've Got Smell!
https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
>DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution. Joel Lloyd Bellenson places a little ceramic bowl in front of me and lifts its lid. "Before we begin," he says, "you need to clear your nasal palate." I peer into the bowl. "Coffee beans," explains Bellenson's partner, Dexster Smith. […]
>"You know, I don't think the transition from wood smoke to bananas worked very well." -Marc Canter
The failed quest to bring smells to the internet (thehustle.co)
https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460
DigiScent had a booth at the 1999 Game Developers Conference, with scantily dressed young women in skunk costumes.
I told them about a game called "The Sims" I had been working on for a long time, and was hoping to finish and release some time soon.
They unsuccessfully tried to convince me to make The Sims support the iSmell, and even gave me a copy of the SDK documentation, because they thought it would enrich the player's experience of all those sweaty unwashed sims, blue puddles of piss on the floor, stopped up toilets in the bathroom, and plates of rotting food with flies buzzing around on the dining room table.
Exactly. The sun on your skin, the breeze in your hair, sand in your toes, clean saltwater air ... good luck.
sounds like we might enjoy a wind machine and a heat lamp
I guess the affect of the Internet would have been discounted at the times of books and libraries.
You might also be underestimating the brains ability to conjure a completely new reality. Our imagination can transport us anywhere - hence adventure, travel and crime books. VR/AR experience augmented by our own imagination, hence to discount the affect of VR is also discounting the ability of our imagination.
Of course holidays are much more but why do so many people prefer chatting online than chatting personally with other people? Why are online dating apps and food delivery so popular? I don't know but it definitely does not have something to do with people wanting to go out and interact with random people.
Online dating and food delivery are popular because they're an allegedly more efficient and safer (in the case of dating) way of getting what you're looking for delivered to your door. Online dating is basically pre-screening, and a substitute for various real-world stuff that's increasingly less accepted (the workplace) or normalised (bars.. still a thing, but much less so than they were).
If I could chat in person with the people I talk to online, I would. And sometimes, that happens. But they're typically far away (for various values of far), while also being more interesting (ditto) than many of those more nearby.
> guess the affect of the Internet would have been discounted at the times of books and libraries.
Not an argument. Besides, like 10-15 years in to WWW companies like amazon, google, facebook, youtube were there. 12 years after oculus rift VR is still a small niche.
> You might also be underestimating the brains ability to conjure a completely new reality. Our imagination can transport us anywhere - hence adventure, travel and crime books. VR/AR experience augmented by our own imagination, hence to discount the affect of VR is also discounting the ability of our imagination.
No, it is not discounting the ability of our imagination. It is more correct to say that you are discounting the ability of our imagination by suggesting that adventure, travel and crime books aren't all we need to immerse ourselves. By going this path of argumentation (if we can call it an argument) you are basically saying that VR is for those, well, lacking in imagination
> Of course holidays are much more but why do so many people prefer chatting online than chatting personally with other people?
Do they? I don't think they do. Chatting with someone they don't know? Maybe. Doing a video call with a friend/partner? No.
> Why are online dating apps and food delivery so popular?
You are conflating meeting (just meeting, once people meet they don't maintain their relationship on the app) someone new and not a social activity with, well, socializing with people that you want to socialize with.
> I don't know but it definitely does not have something to do with people wanting to go out and interact with random people.
You do understand that outsides is not filled only with random people?
What argument are you trying to make for VR? What use case, that would make VR "huge", are you suggesting?
> What argument are you trying to make for VR?
That VR can provide a certain amount of immersive escape from the day to day. Just as the internet replaced certain offline activities and moved them online, I don't understand VR hasn't done the same.
Having used the Quest 2(?) which has automatic boundary detection and cameras that show you the surroundings if you step beyond those boundaries, I no longer had the worry of bumping into things. That made the experience very immersive.
So for me personally, there has been a definite improvement in the experience.
And I agree, the equipment is currently too cumbersome for the general consumer market. In addition to that, stupid vender-lock ideas such as with the Quest where you need a facebook account to use the device, also prevent the general application of the technology. (I would have bought myself a Quest if Facebook account wasn't a requirement. Vision Pro is simply too expensive.)
That doesn't mean that the technology won't one day find general application.
Also content does exist, sites such SketchFab have much free 3D content and with WebGL being generally compatiable with VR tech, it's relative easy to generate more content.
Yeck, I even worked on some code to make programming in 3D possible![1]
> What use case, that would make VR "huge", are you suggesting?
I assume you mean general consumer use-casae, there are definitely a number of use cases that are very niche.
But if I knew that, I most certainly won't share it with a public forum! ;)
[1]=https://flowhub.org/f/5f0c36ed4bd03058
That all sounds very depressing to me if I’m being honest.
So are the regular news concerning the destruction of the environment and our human caused climate change.
If a VR set can reduce travel, then that might be something positive for the environment.
I think there’s lower hanging fruit for reducing carbon emissions than swapping the annual family vacation for a bunch of VR headsets.
By all means if you’re willing to make that sacrifice be my guest, but I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset.
> lower hanging fruit for reducing carbon emissions
Taking a bike (when possible) instead of a car, for example. I think many things that we can do fail because of our collective convenience: why take public transport when I can have my private space in a car?
There might be low hanging fruits, but there is human convenience to take into account. Making potential low hanging fruit become had to implement.
> I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset
Most certainly it wouldn't be the same however experiencing a Venice during the Renaissance period using a VR device? That would be better than nothing and would also equate to a "type of" holiday (if done well). Its certainly not something that I can do physically.
I’m 100% down the idea that we have individual responsibility to the environment and must make some personal sacrifice. Paper grocery bags are much less convenient than plastic but I’m in support of legislation to ban plastic bags even if all the cost and inconvenience is passed on to the customer. Biking to work is a great choice if you live in range.
Neither of these deprive you of truly transformative experiences like travel. Air travel will never be a green endeavor. It will always be something that we’ll have to compensate for elsewhere in pursuit of being carbon neutral.
I’m not willing to tell someone that they should not fly across the country to see their friend in order to be an environmentally responsible citizen. Not while we still burn coal and gas to keep the lights on.
Apparently global trade via ships is much worse than airplanes - in terms of environmental impact. Apparently container ships burn extremely dirty fuels once they enter international waters.
I guess regardless where humans start, the dependency on fossil fuels is simply too vast to rollback.
Container ships are definitely worse, but also sadly not feasible to electrify. Power plants are a good start. Short range commercial vehicles as well.
> experiencing a Venice during the Renaissance period using a VR device
That's not a holiday. That's a game.
Literally: it's an ever-so-slightly more immersive Assassin Creed 2. I mean, great, but worth spending a grand? Probably not.
Gamification of holidays! /s
I believe the OP was more thinking of all those corporate flights for a one hour talk. But you don't need VR for that. They could hold them over sms if they could read and write.
Real deals aren't made over a zoom call. They just aren't. That's why they still fly there even though they are well aware of how to use zoom.
they fly there and do the deal over email from the hotel.
It would be a smart, albeit self serving political move for VR headset makers to be advocating for carbon pricing to make their offerings more competitive with that of the travel industry.
I mean, once for one place, if you are able bodied and have a week of vacation.
I feel like there's a difference...
At this point is basically quantity vs quality.
And plus, visiting again some places could lead to ruin the previous good memory.
That's the reason to take photos, is not like someone would argue that for them..
Where can you vacation for $1000?
Many many places of the world, if you are ok with not having all the comforts and more.
Usually the most expensive thing is the flight, so you've got to time that well. Go to places for more than 2 weeks and in the lowest season and you can make that $1000 last a while.
The limitations are generally on the traveller's side.
Of course, if you're looking for a full paid cruise, with kids and must have perfect everything in the "best" season then you pay like the rest.
The fidelity of a real local $1000 experience vs a fake one is a lot different even if you can’t travel as far.
Especially when that hallmark moment is left behind by Tim Cook deciding the format or platform legacy and no longer supported.
That doesn’t really answer the question. What real local experience can you have for $1000 that isn’t in your back yard?
I got curious and looked. I'm from Sweden and for $1000 I could get to Cabo Verde, Madeira and or course most parts of Europe (like Italy, Greece, France). That is for flight and hotel. You need to eat as well of course, but that you need to do at home as well.
I wouldn't call Africa my back yard.
OK, if you live in (Western) Europe, you can go, say, from Netherlands or Sweden to fabulous places like Barcelona or Rome or Istanbul, all very different, picturesque, and not hugely expensive. A flight, if you time it well, could cost less than €100, or even €60..
we in europe are lucky. i got a flight for 20€ to portugal and was staying there for a week for around 50€ a day. thats not even 500 bucks. this vr headset would be 5-8 weeks of holiday worth
I took a 4 day holiday to Athens from the UK for <$200 all-in (including flights and accomodation)
So many options in Europe if you don't mind discomfort. From the UK, I'd maybe take a cheap flight to Poland or even the long distance bus. Once there, YHA hostels, camping etc.
Another option is fly to Greece and island hop on the ferries. Or Portugal and northern Spain. Buses are the cheapest way to get around there and fairly flexible although not quick. Sometimes you can hire a car for a week for $250, or some places hire mopeds for way less.
I went a week a Norway from Germany, everything included for 4 people was less than 1k
A lot of "meanwhile in Europe" replies here, but even within the United States there are great places you can fly to pretty cheap. Or make a road trip out of it.
Yeah, you've gotta budget it, but it's not impossible to get somewhere, have a great time, and get back for under $1000.
From Europe, a 1 week package holiday in Thailand with flight+resort hotel included is $1000.
Link?
I really doubt this is true, I'm European and check this kind of stuff often.
https://www.pepper.pl/share-deal-from-app/881457
$700 - flight + hotel for a week
Spend a week camping at a state park nearby with the family. About $40 in transportation costs round trip for the whole family. Maybe $200 in food/snacks/other consumables. $70 for the yearly parks pass+ $15/night for campsite = $175. If I don't already have camping supplies, I can get decently kitted out for the family for this kind of camping for like $400. It'll last me a bunch of trips but let's assume you've got nothing. So that's like $815 for the first time, $415 every other time.
There are dozens of options for me and I don’t even have to leave the state.
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.
GoPro Fusion devices to record walking videos and serve in Vision Pro would be amazing for location bound people
> 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.
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.
I think tv usage is a hard comparison as it’s so well integrated into our lives and social fabric. These people are likely either just outfitting their house so it is more like furniture than a toy and they likely know exactly what value it adds for them (movie nights, sports gatherings, etc). Things people place great value on. And, I don’t think they’d see a vr experience as a substitute. Maybe in time they will. Once they get enough exposure to it, most likely by owning it, but that isn’t likely to happen if prices remain high. And there’s still something that’s missing, nobody is coming to your Super Bowl party just because you have an Apple Vision Pro. So it’s only useful if everyone that you’d invite also has a similar technology to have a shared virtual experience. So that further requires the prices to be lower. Beyond that is the question, does anyone actually want those types of experiences to be virtual? Would people just simply prefer that event to be IRL? I think the answer is going to be Yes for a very long time for a majority of folks. It will slowly penetrate the meatspace but will hit a fairly low ceiling at some point.
Well you need something entertaining to do with it. Right now the use cases seem to be just looking at pictures and watching videos alone. Or extending your computer monitor. There isn't even that much 3D content. Nobody really seems to care about movies and shows being in 3D. It's basically a $3000 portable monitor. Not entertaining.
> 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.
It actively gets in the way of cuddling in person, and doesn't help when away. Meanwhile I've had great experiences watching things together on a phone screen. If away, bluntly, with good friends a laptop screen and a shared stream via Jellyfin works _amazing_.
Like c'mon. The size of the screen is a fetish for people who think it's the screens fault that their hangout isn't emotionally impactful.
A 386 PC cost $3000+ after the 486 was released. Sometimes I think our expectations for dirt cheap supercomputers are out of whack.
The context matters a lot. Early PCs were released at a time when there wasn’t really anything else like these products. That early pricing reflected the creation of a brand new category.
The Vision Pro is a remarkable piece of tech, but isn’t required to achieve many of the use cases it supports, and people are primarily paying for the immersive experience.
Given that, spending $3K on immersion in a market where a few hundred dollars will buy you most of the non-immersion capabilities is quite different than spending $3K on an early PC.
Around the time of the 386, weren’t there a bunch of lesser options that did a bunch of similar use cases well? I’m thinking Commodores, Amigas, even a NES.
There was a huge delta between what these systems could do.
e.g. the Commodore 64 was an 8-bit 1 MHz processor vs. the 386's 32-bit 12-40MHz, could not run a full operating system, had 64 KB RAM vs. 1MB or more on the 386, etc.
In terms of raw computing capability, the 386 was a significant advance over those cheaper systems and represented capabilities that just weren't yet on the market, and those capabilities unlocked entire worlds of possible use cases and unlocked general purpose computing.
The Amiga 1000 is closer to the 386 in terms of capability, but was ~$1,600 (with a monitor) and was still significantly slower, i.e. if your use case benefited from raw processing power, there was a clear value proposition for the 386.
I'd still put this in a very different category than what is effectively an iPad with + VR/AR interface.
This isn't a "supercomputer". It's not even a computer. It's a locked-down device, with very few tailored apps and content (for now anyway).
Every multi-GHz multicore computing device today would place on the Top500 in the 90s. Your phone is a handheld supercomputer.
Yeah, but that's because it's Apple. If the same hardware was made by pretty much anyone else, I'd probably be interested. It's like the iPad Pro. It could probably replace my laptop if it could run real Linux.
If the community had free reign to do whatever with the hardware, it would be much more than a toy. Someone would port SimulaVR (or a different window manager) and it would feel like a real computing device.
I can imagine a world where I travel with one of those headsets and a wireless keyboard. Then I can setup shop anywhere and do development work in a cloud environment. The headset just being a dumb terminal to render the terminal or whatever.
It really feels like we are only a few years away from that being reality. I really want the apple headset to succeed, so that other companies invest in open/hackable hardware.
I pretty much feel like the vision pro is overkill for the tasks it wants to do.
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.
I think it will have a market at $2000.
MacBook Pros are 50% of Mac sales and they start at $2000.
What % of those sales are companies buying them for their employees? It's almost a B2B market. Whereas the Vision Pro is overwhelmingly B2C, at least it will be with the current state of the technology. Hence very different pricing dynamics.
I didn’t say it will sell as much as MacBook Pros as soon as it hits $2000.
I’m saying there will be a market.
They need to get the weight and price down substantially.
> I’m saying there will be a market.
Perhaps, but how is the price or popularity of MacBook pros particularly related to that?
That a fairly large market exists for $2000+ Apple device.
You can use them (MBPs) to actually make money. AVPs mostly make money to 2-bit YouTube influencers making videos about it…
Well, a $5000 80” TV doesn’t make you money either.
I think the Vision Pro needs to be as comfortable and convenient to use as a TV, or it needs to be cheaper. And/or it needs a new killer app.
It's sitting in a weird place right now where it's too expensive for what you get, but it's fairly easy to imagine how it could improve to become something much more attractive/popular.
MBPs are overwhelmingly bought by businesses for their employees.
MBP returns you the investment pretty soon
> I have family with disabilities.
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.
I think it's been said better elsewhere but it might be: https://atp.fm/483
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"
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.
iOS app guy here.
One of the main reasons most apps do poorly here is our designers and PMs NEVER think about anything other than the standard size iPhone at normal font size in light mode. This is true at every company i worked at.
In Apple 1p apps the reason is also that the codebase is 15 years old now and very hard to make adaptive.
Frankly web devs seem to have no idea you can enlarge fonts either.
I keep most of my browsing slightly zoomed in, especially on the laptop, and I get all sorts of glitches now and then.
Incidentally HN is Just Fine(tm).
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”.
Reminds me of the Cindy Li quote “we are all just temporarily 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.
Accessibility as it is in modern parlance isn't only for people with disabilities.
Disabling the annoying needless animations on iOS is in Accessibility for some reason.
I think that was because some people get motion sickness easily.
‘Accessibility’ is where the setting is because turning the feature off stops them being disabled... maybe?
But I don't get motion sickness from those. I still turn them off.
Because we are all disabled in that our lives are too short to sit through all that pointless theatrical animation.
> The hardware is already there.
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 field of view is definitely not there with Vision Pro.
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).
Right, because the AVP is ignoring the only useful application for VR today by eschewing precision controllers to try to get OFFICE WORKERS to strap on this monstrosity of a strap-on facial PC to do PRODUCTIVITY tasks. What a joke.
I'm sure not going to drop $3k on one, but I've had bosses that would want to drop $300k to outfit the whole department with tech that we don't have a use for.
I mean I’d be all for that if there was value to the 3D user interface. A CAD program where you actually interact with the part, or a biomolecular research tool where you can actually handle scales-up proteins in your hand.
But strapping a heavy display to your head so that you can interact with the same flat 2d windows? I don’t get it.
Yeah, it was quite telling that most of the new features and demos, were for the most part already available on Holo Lens.
Seeing Vision Pro at WWDC was like a deja-vu from BUILD a couple of years earlier.
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.
It depends on what you mean by "soon". For sure, it's not happening next year. But within 5 years I think the hardware will get to a point where it's possible, and then within 10 it will be compelling.
The "strapping computers to their faces" meme is just stupid hyperbole. It's no more insightful than declaring that nobody wants to stuff a computer into their pocket - when 99% of people now carry smart phones (and mostly, large ones - as large as they can possibly fit).
I have no desire to strap a computer on my face, no matter how lightweight an unobtrusive it gets.
There is a fundamental disconnect in motivation here.
Maybe the equivalence was lost: in 1990s, a computer in your pocket would bring about visions of a tower PC and maybe a backpack strap, and then you could only walk as far as the power cord.
When VR/AR makes it, it won't be strapping what I imagine you are thinking to your face. I imagine glasses or maybe people will even entertain a visor or shield
No, it’s not an issue of form factor. It’s the disconnection from reality and the constant literally-in-your-face attention grabbing that would come from wearing AR glasses, no matter how slim and lightweight they become.
I have an Apple Watch. Why? Because it lets me use my phone less. It is a purposefully less capable and less attention-seeking device which I can use to check the nature of a notification in a socially acceptable way and then go back to living life without pulling out my phone.
AR/VR is fundamentally having a phone strapped to your eyeballs. You’re saying “but it can be made lightweight and comfortable!” I’m saying you’re missing the whole point: I don’t want a phone strapped to my eyeballs, even if it weighed 0 g and was soft and velvety. It’s a step backwards.
I would love for that technology to exist, because I have AR applications in mind that I think could be industrially useful. But I would despise that becoming the normal mode of interface to the world, the same way I despise people having their heads in their phones all day long.
The thing is the smartphone took off as soon as it hit the market because its use cases were just that compelling. Vr is nothing new. What are we 10 years into this market with barely any adoption or useful applications beyond a gaming stint until you hit your nausea limit? Says it all I think. Its biggest use case so far is using it to blow wind into the sails of your stock ticker for a few quarters.
>The thing is the smartphone took off as soon as it hit the market because its use cases were just that compelling.
That depends on how exactly you define "smartphone". I might still have an old Nokia brick with a little screen and a web browser lying around somewhere.
> The "strapping computers to their faces" meme is just stupid hyperbole. It's no more insightful than declaring that nobody wants to stuff a computer into their pocket - when 99% of people now carry smart phones
Depends on how you define 'computer': content creation or content consumption?
Because everyone with a 'computer' in their pocket has nothing more than 'interactive television' in their pocket.
They literally do not do computing on it in any meaningful way.[1]
[1] Maybe they use the calculator. But that's about it.
You are missing the forest for the trees here; what we call the device we strap to our face is neither here nor there and of no relevance to my earlier argument.
The issue is a great many people just won’t want to sit wearing anything at all on their face in a meeting - especially those who may have put effort into appearance of their hair and makeup etc etc as just one of many examples.
It’s also not a “meme”, or “hyperbole”. That is literally what you have to do today and in near term with an AVP or meta Quest etc- strap a heat generating, heavy, sometimes fan cooled (AVP) computer across your face.
Compelling to who? Might be to the managers who get some twisted satisfaction from spying on their employees, but most people aren't gonna want to wear a brick on their face so their manager can make sure you're paying attention or whatever.
I don't turn my camera on in meetings and it's often "broken", some idiotic headset that my manager forces on me is going to be similarly buggy and "broken"...
But... why? Why would you do this?
I mean, teams/zoom gets me 99% of the way there. I can see people, read lips. What do I gain from a "virtual environment"? Because I can already talk to people all over the world, right now. And they can share their screen and stuff. It's a pretty good system.
Yeah, it's more like "strapping space heaters to their faces".
> We can’t even get people to routinely turn a webcam on at most companies existing meetings.
AVP doesn't need the webcam on.
"Inside" it, your avatar could be anywhere wearing whatever, no bed pillows, PJs, or family creeping not-so-stealthily behind you.
Yes - it’s even more intrusive - you have to strap a computer to your face instead of merely sitting in front of it. That was the entire point I’m making.
The barrier to using a webcam is already lower, and people routinely refuse to do it.
I almost never put my camera on. I think people mostly like turning their camera on to show off their home office, living room or book case. Beyond that, there is just no point. It is a distraction overall.
Business meetings in headsets is just completely delusional. It is one of the dumbest tech ideas of all time.
This use-case is decades away from being compelling and to a rounding error, nobody wants it.
" 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.
Why did you cry?
Do you cry when you were on the mountain the first time in real life?
If you went again in real life would you immediately cry?
Why would you cry just for seeing it again?
Was it crying because of awe of the technology?
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.
6 hours a *week* doesn't sound like that much of a test for VR sickness. Try 6 hours a session and then tell me it's a solved issue.
Not once, for one second, did I have any motion sickness.
See the problem here?
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.
I have tried the quest 3 and it’s like looking through a distorted version of the world through a low resolution camera with Vaseline slopped on top.
It’s impressive technology but it’s far from seamless. There’s less colours, less resolution, worse depth perception, more latency, and worse nightvision than your actual eyes. The quest makes your head quite a bit larger and you’re more likely to hang your head into something. It is very far from seamless.
They have a long way to go. Audio pass through still isn’t good enough for me to trust it never mind video pass through.
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.
Not all tech is a destined to be all encompassing.
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.
If not for video phone we would not have the penetration of work from home we now have. It was science fiction when featured in Back to the Future
Makes sense:
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?
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.
CTRL-F Gibson, the tech and root parent comment eerily reminded me of Fragments of A Hologram Rose. We're closing the gap between fiction and reality. The short story was written in 1977! Gibson was prescient about so many things.
"He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sold purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible."
I suppose (and Gibson is great), but I've always felt that this sort of addiction doesn't require VR? Like, to whatever extent people are going to do this, it's ALREADY HERE.
With UBI and simstim soaps we can have people plug themselves into the Matrix voluntarily, no scary robotic creepers required!
And yes, addicts exist today, but we keep inventing better and better drugs. What would be available to a peasant? Crappy beer? Now a denizen of the SF underbelly can be permanently in an alternate universe thanks to fentanyl.
Have you noticed another trend? We keep making real experiences, real food, real exercise harder to obtain and more expensive while pushing cheap imitations on the masses. VR is not going to be a happy thing that will help disabled people. It will mostly be a source of worsening inequality and a lot of suffering. The "have-nots" will be able to vicariously live the lives of the "haves", but only a fake version.
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.
In practice, how often would you “teleport”? Once a month maybe? The experience you mentioned sounds profound, but also fairly niche
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 know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before.
Were you wearing some field-of-view limiting device at the time?
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.
Right now the environments are like Apple Watch faces. First party only, and we’re getting about 1 new one per year.
Gotcha thanks for the info. It's funny, Apple's new OS is called Sequoia, yet there is no environment in the sequoias (aka redwoods)!
I did find some discussion about how they are made, but there does not yet seem to be a documented process. https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1am8e00/how_to_c...
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.
> Give it a few years
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.
> I'm always flabbergasted that people watch concerts through a camera, rather than just enjoying the experience.
And can easily substitute concerts for all types of things here. Travel experiences, museums, art, the mona lisa room where I am pretty sure I was the only one looking-at/facing the actual painting...etc. For many, getting IG likes or emoji comments is more gratifying than the actual experience. I don't get it either.
You can already record in 3D both from the headset, from iPhone 15 Pro and higher and with Canon’s new upcoming lense:
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.
It’s not upcoming. I just bought it last night.
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.
The 1991 sci fi movie is called until the end of the world by wim wenders with William hurt who travels the world recording visions for his dying mom
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’ve “teleported” to several places including Mars. Imo it was just about the same experience as looking at some big pictures at a museum.
In this case the emotional experience is likely because the person was physically there before and his brain was filling in the gaps.
Not saying it’s not a a great experience..
Well I’m saying it’s barely better than traditional photographs
Try The Quest: Everest next.
https://www.thequesteverest.com/
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.
360 cameras are cheaper than you think. I like the GoPro 360 Max. You'll have to post process video to get it onto YouTube but you can then watch it.
You still need a professional to make the video otherwise it could be unpleasant for other viewers.
There is a lot to consider in making VR videos.
Angles, view points, speed of movement etc.
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.
Are you saying that it's unethical to buy something that most people in the world can't afford?
I'm saying it's unethical to start a new medium/platform where majority of the world would be simply be left out.
Is it unethical to sell a luxury watch or car? Is it unethical to start a pizza shop that only delivers locally?
Not even the same thing. Watch or a car is not a platform. Clearly you're allergic to understanding my point so how about we end this here. Have a good day.
I can 'teleport' elderly friends to wherever in the world with the Wander app on Oculus Quest
Would you be willing to describe in a bit more detail what your rich visual memory is like?
That is not unique to the mixed reality though. Which is what this is about.
The missing point here is always: do I want to haul all the shit up the mountain to record that or not?
At least we will be able to see what celebrities are doing.
They can bugger off. I had my dinner ruined by some Instagram celebrities earlier this year who were flying around with a DSLR filming some food and screaming a lot. The staff were visibly pissed off but too afraid to tell them to go away and stop annoying the customers in case it reflected badly on their restaurant. Everyone was held ransom.
The second part of your comment reminded me about that South Park episode where Cartman was "reviewing" restaurants on Yelp ...
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.
[1] https://accessmars.withgoogle.com/
>It was literally like being transported there.
Really? Despite the total lack of smell, taste, random atmospheric sensations against the body and also the lack of haptic feedback?
Imagine an experience like that but on mars or the moon. With real footage. Now that would be something!
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.
This make somehow… uncomfortable. Perhaps humans are not meant to have perfect recall of, and dwell on, the past.
I mean, I guess! I can’t say I feel damaged by it in the least (rather, enriched!), but I’m sure not every person will have the same experience.
Is there a future proof way to capture photos today to view in 3D/VR devices of the future?
For video, MV-HEVC (the Apple-pushed format) is probably the best bet, since it's both well-documented as a HEVC/H.265 extension and (because it stores diffs instead of full duplicate frames) it's way more practical for high-res and HDR video than previous de facto formats like side-by-side video. It's likely to be widely adopted by data hoarders, if only because it will save a huge amount of file space on 3D blu-ray rips.
Photos are more up in the air in part because the use and support of the Apple-pushed HEIC is much more limited than HEVC. But internally it's basically the same thing as MV-HEVC except with just the two still frames encoded instead of full videos, so any codebase that supports MV-HEVC should be able to support the 3D variant of HEIC as well without a lot of extra work over the long term.
(Not my area of expertise, but I believe this is about accurate with regard to the Apple ecosystem)
These were old photos, many taken with older digital cameras and early smartphones, and they worked very well. I believe as long as they're of a reasonably high resolution (so, any camera from the last 20 years or even more), it'll work. Of course, it's ML-based attempting to simulate 3D from a single image, so it's not always perfect, but I didn't run into any significant failures.
Btw, to capture spatial videos, the easiest way is to use an iPhone 15 Pro (with its camera in "spatial video" mode) or the Apple Vision Pro itself. I'd guess there are ways to convert videos from other formats into this, or to use other apps to view photos/videos in non-native formats, but I'm not personally familiar.
Panoramic photos also convert nicely into spatial experiences.
Wait what, it has an app that will convert a picture into a 3d environment? That's amazing.
Yes, it’s the iOS photos app (in visionOS 2.0) and it’s 100% the Killer App of the product.
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If you’re asking yourself:
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 dumber than that. Meta just wants to own an App Store and get 30% of some platform's revenue.
Meta already owns an app store. They introduced their own payments channel, then they cancelled it
They want to own a successful app store.
Back in the day ~2010, Facebook was the app store. Farmville et al were more popular than the top games on mobile at the time. They really should have pushed for a mobile version of it, as the lack of that is what killed it.
I fondly remember those days. It feels like such a missed opportunity.
Imagine Craiglist / Facebook Marketplace taking 30%.
I'd believe that better if Meta didn't also deliberately provide a sideloading mechanism and encourage homebrew.
It's a believable end-goal, but it doesn't seem to be the direction they want to go in the immediate future.
it's likely dumber than that: bait and switch. Facebook had done this before: they gave third parties rich access to their data via Graph API, which in turn helped Facebook to grow.
Once their social graph growth phase began to slow down, Facebook severely cut off data access.
I have an Oculus Quest 1. How are they going to update it to stop supporting sideloading when they've stopped supporting it officially altogether?
They don't have to. If this market pans out for them:
1. Almost every VR device is not yet sold. It doesn't matter what you can do with existing devices because they are a tiny fraction of the market.
2. Devices are going to improve drastically. No one is going to be using a VR device from today except as a retro computing device anyways.
Well, that's an interesting way of framing it.
Yeah it’s wrong. They locked it down because it was a regulatory and reputational disaster.
I will never believe Meta or Apple excuses for our computers not being computers. Video Game Consoles are about complete control to create a fake digital market and it needs to end.
Normal people don't know how to side load.
The 5% that actually care are power users, these are the folks who buy every iteration, develop for the device, etc.
I'm not a power-user though. I use a 3-generation-old Oculus Quest 1 that doesn't get first-party official updates anymore. Am I really supposed to expect Meta to push an update to a depreciated platform to disable a feature?
?
I agree with you, I actually use Android since I prefer to be able to install what I want.
They can close that door any time they want, all they have to do is add a paywall for a developer account.
You don't need a developer account to sideload on the Quest.
Unless something has changed, you need a Meta account and must enable developer mode, which requires signing up as a developer in order to sideload.
e: Checked and confirmed, though they call it Debug Mode now. Still need to sign up as a developer.
you are reading too much into Meta. They arent the NSA
True, the NSA needs a FISC warrant to conduct mass surveillance.
My sense is that every generation we have engineers that grew up on some sort of VR-like sci-fi trope and keep trying to invent that thing.
Like flying cars, I'm not sure the writers are always right.
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.
Focus on the plate in front of you. Your home. The people you know in real life. Your job. Knowledge of an airstrike half a world away doesn’t mean anything actionable to you, so don’t fixate on that sort of information.
No it's because they need to have a growth plan and developing massive new markets is what shareholders have wet dreams about.
Failure is irrelevant. It keeps the share price high while they try other things at the same time.
All they want is mind control. All of them. All the time
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.
Unexpected as in Apple was expected to offer something less clunky.
Hey, I though Magic Leap had it all figured out! Are you telling me those guys are totally full of shit??! SHOCKED I say SHOCKED!
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. [...]
:( no hope of scanning fiber displays ever i guess
I have a Quest 2.
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.
> developed unfixable drift
It's definitely fixable, by both Meta and yourself [1]. I've done it twice. A replacement kit is $14 on Amazon.
You would think joysticks would be a solved problem by now, but no. Meta chose garbage, with the same garbage installed in the quest pro controllers that are not really serviceable, from being glued together and jam packed with electronics (3 camera inside out tracking in each controller).
Battery can also be replaced, but with somewhat ridiculous effort [2].
[1] DIY joystick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3N_ZIGo2YM
[2] Battery: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Meta+Quest+2+Headset+Battery+Re...
Btw, I call it garbage because of the five Quest headsets I have, four have developed drift.
Thanks for the awesome info. Edit: I just took a look at the battery replacement instructions. Ouch.
The Quest 2 has a NON-REPLACEABLE battery?
Whoa. I was considering buying one, but I won't buy it anymore.
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 love daft punk’s music but I have no desire to look like them while going about the day’s business.
Do you have a source for that quote from Carmack?
This is HackerNews, we all know who Carmack is.
>Apple Vision Pro was an unexpected dud
???
Just about everyone (even diehard Apple fanboys) knew this would flop.
I agree with you, I don't know of anybody who looked at the price combined with the form factor and concluded it will be a hit.
You might want to go back to that thread (or rather the few threads) when Vision Pro was released, and reread the responses from the fanboys.
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.
If Valve makes a Deckard Linux headset thats fun to dev for and achives a solid Linux VR experience it could change the field of computer science.
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
Meta thinks they got screwed by Apple’s (and to a lesser extent Google’s) walled gardens, so now they want their own.
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
Apple’s Ad Tracking Transparency was a major reason Meta stock went through the massive dip a few years ago, until it ended up not being that detrimental and AI hype took over.
I’m sure Meta would love to track their users way more than Apple allows.
Yes but that's not "walled garden" that's just a feature they allowed users to turn on.
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.
They struggled because they didn’t actually have good software to run
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.
$3500 is also a big reason. Why pay that when I can get a Quest2 for $199 new for the anime-loli-porn content?
That must be one of big reasons, but doesn't explain why AVP had regressed into the fanciest possible privacy filter for laptops.
Extremely high res anime-loli-porn content?
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.
The coomers are also nearly entirely responsible for the success of
Home video
Payments on the Internet
Streaming video
HD streaming and downloadable video
The Patreon style business model
I wonder if you could almost add image-heavy social media to the list. I think the amount of tiktok and IG that boils down to looking at hot people is probably shocking.
cough tumblr cough
its incredible how different the West is to Japan
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
Are you saying Japan has a more relaxed stance on porn? Don’t they have government mandated censorship of nude images? I would call that more strict, not less.
They’d censor genitals in porn, but erotic cartoons involving children seem to be socially accepted? I don’t know, it’s hard to understand them.
IMO, the way it is that hard distinction between child and adult is simply not understood. East Asians in general age in way more linear and continuous manner than Europeans for whatever reasons, and that makes it just harder to agree that some people aren't like others.
Genital-censorship laws in Japan are a fig leaf, barely ever upheld, afaik.
They are absolutely more relaxed with the type and amount of content getting published, and have been for a very long time. The likes of Miguel Angel Martin in Japan would be considered average, whereas in the west they shock the mainstream.
The anglosphere is still somewhat conditioned by the idea that comics are for kids; at the other end of the spectrum, the francosphere expects every comic to be an auteur-level masterpiece. East-Asians just see it as a product to sell: as long as they are correctly labelled, so that strong material ks not missold to kids, everything is fine.
then they created sex with tentacles
I'm not a christian, but I wouldn't call this judeo-christian morals, just puritanism and purely an American mindset that is completely alien in other Western (mostly christian!) countries. I also don't associate puritanism with Israel either, so the "judeo" part is another misnomer.
I don't think Japan is a good example of sexual liberation. The fact they have women-only train cars immediately comes to mind.
I'd argue the mere fact that digital mosaic still exists in... well you know what I mean.
Not really. Midjourney has no coomers and still does incredibly well
StabilityAI suffered because of a good frontend and poor models for high quality, production grade imagery
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.
Also YouTube was already available on Symbian, and other OSes, before iPhone came to be.
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).
You mean 21st century Apple. Because 20th century Apple had plenty of good flops: Newton, Pippin, Macintosh TV (no, not Apple TV).
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/01/14/apples-biggest-hardware...
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.
Because they're 10 years late to the party, everyone has moved into AI now, and even those headsets are hardly selling a lot.
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.)
The ARM porting device for the x86 transition, but that was optional to return.
I was thinking of something that was an actual "product".
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.
> it just has no reason to exist
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?
It would be great to have a personal rollercoaster at home.
C'mon, you know after the first week it would sit in the backyard and gather rust.
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.
Steve Jobs and invention is always sort of looking at the problem backwards.
He could enunciate a concept and knew when to put the boot down to enforce his taste.
Every company knows this, the problem is that you can’t fit the compute you need for AR/VR + AI into a form factor like this, at least not right now.
Why can't the glasses be dumb displays streamed to by my phone?
Because then you don't get to break the Android/Apple duopoly
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.'
Your comment won't age well.
Guess we'll see in a few decades.
People thought VR was on the brink of mass market breakthrough in the 90s too.
Intels next gen iGPU has has similar benchmarks to a 3080. Compute is still scaling incredibly quickly. I think the optical problem will end up taking much longer than compute.
You already can in something the size of an old cassette walkman, run an extra flexible USB c cable to the glasses or something and problem solved
(phones are an obvious choice but I suspect you could jam significantly more power into the same form factor if you didn't need screen, speakers, mobile modem etc)
The offloading is easy, I don't think the optical aspects of breakthrough VR/AR will be overcome for quite a while.
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.
That’s a phone. You are describing a smartphone. Does this make all phones “AR” devices?
This you? https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/01/36/71/61/1000_F_136716109_nK...
Glasses are a fundamentally different UX than a smartphone.
Put your phone in a shirt pocket, its camera visible. Add headphones (wired or bluetooth). Done.
The question remains: Does an audio-only interface qualify as “AR”?
Yes! The true magic of AR is a computer understanding the user's real wolrd context. The UX modality is secondary.
There was an app over a decade ago called Layar that used the camera, screen, and GPS for AR.
Also for VR there's, of course, https://arvr.google.com/cardboard/
Imo whether you overlay an image on your eyes or if they just do binocular camera passthrough, they could both count for VR. It's just most phones can't do binocular passthrough due to the lack of appropriately spaced cameras.
This is relevant for stuff like the f35 where you can look "through" the jet
“That’s AR”
That’s funny, because when I look up AR, that’s not at all what I see and it’s certainly not what anybody I know expects from AR.
“a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.”
They're not AR or VR, they're an open air experiment to determine what the display-bearing devices will be.
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.
Have you seen the snap glasses. Meta glasses aint goin anywhere
Pretty sure the Meta glasses routinely sell out and the Spectacles had a hard time selling. Maybe they both sell them at a loss, who knows
I would buy this today if it filmed horizontal video.
Raise your hand who was there during the first boom and doom of VR/AR headset/glasses in the 90's? A cycle or couple of more and we'll be there, maybe.
I feel like I have spectacular eyes. I can read absurdly small texts that shocks other people, great low light, yada yada.
The quest2 made my eyes hurt after just using it for maybe half an hour. Tried it a few times over several weeks and decided that my vision is worth more than some entertainment.
I'm not sure how they're going to get around that aspect.
The Quest 2 has minimal inter-pupillary distance (IPD) adjustment — only three fixed options. If your eyes don’t match closely enough to one of them, it can be very uncomfortable. Mine don’t, and I have the same experience as you, but I can put up with it for short bursts. More expensive headsets have much better lenses and adjustment options. It’s not an inherent problem with VR, just concessions to make a cheap device.
Just to note, Quest 3 has significantly improved on it and has granular IPD adjustments now.
Ive work vr googles over 20 hours without issues. Are you sure youre not having dry eyes? I cant do it as long after ive had lasik
It's not dry eyes but more the 'muscles' in the eye that feel fatigued. I don't remember if it's from focusing or moving the actual eyeball around in an attempt to see edges of the screen instead of moving my head.
I’m short sighted and have been using VR for close too if not on a decade and have never experienced this. I spend entire days in VR and I’m completely fine with it.
Never had that personally and I regularly code (or at least interact with code) in VR
Remember Dactyl Nightmare? https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=dactyl-nightmare&page=deta...
I tried it once at the local mall as a kid. There was a fantasy-rpg type of game as well, but I didn't get to try that one.
I was there in the 80s when it made the mall arcade circuit and again in the 90s when it made the college student union circuit. I was there in the 00s when 25,000 devices made the Silicon Valley circuit. I was there in the 10s when Oculus stirred things up again. I'm here in the 20s when Apple is trying. I'll be here in the 30s when the next round hits AND FAILS AGAIN.
People care about their faces. They're not going to strap a 1.5 pound dork-box to their face and head mussing their hair and makeup to do what they can already do on their phones or laptops. What they cannot do on their phones or laptops (or game consoles or tablets or rings or watches or whatever) they can do on a $500 Quest.
There's no market for a PC-priced device that straps to your face like ski goggles. It's an accessory. Price it at $100 or $200 or even $500, but you can't price it at $1000 or $4000 because it's a toy.
I don't think Apple expected to move a ton of these. It's more a proof of concept that they can iterate on. In five years, it may look a lot different.
sim crowd seems to disagree
Me, saw them at Lisbon computer expo back in 1994, exactly playing Doom.
I am yet to be impressed, and my eyes can't take screens so close, which already makes a waste of money to buy something like that.
Oh yeah. I remember when it was only in pubs so I could only play these games with a guardian. I remember everyone knowing the traditional monitor would be gone in a few years.
I have an AVP. It’s the best TV and movie-watching experience I’ve ever had, in some ways even better than Metreon IMAX
The best TV and movie-watching experience _if you aren't eating or drinking_.
I love watching movies on my AVP, but the experience of groping for a popcorn bowl semi-blindly is enough of a turn-off that I end up just using our regular TV most of the time.
And if you don't watch stuff with your friends or family.
AVP is for when I want to binge Fallout in 2 days on a jaw dropping huge screen floating above me, when my fam has no interest in watching five minutes of it.
Your fam doesn't find it weird when you're strapped into a slightly smaller Daft Punk helmet for 2 entire days, just taking breaks to eat and do basic hygiene?
Maybe you can say it's the best movie watching experience ever. Id rather watch a movie on a $20 TV from Craigslist with my wife. Even if she hates it, we bond over it and that matters more, imo
Well, you do that then. Not everyone has to conform to your world view or preferences. Some people are perfectly fine with using a VR device.
But how does his family deal with him being essentially uncontactable for huge swaths of time for multiple days?
Did I ever say everyone has to conform to my worldview? He said his preference. I asked a question about his use case. I stated my preference. That's it
Not the OP but I’m surprised you are surprised this much.
In our 2-person family there are times where me and my wife spend an entire evening, sometimes even a full day or two independently doing whatever hobbies we have. We both appreciate the ability to hyper-focus when we like. It’s very easy to “deal with” too: you just continue your life until the other one becomes available. What is so wrong about it?
You are not uncontactable anyway, if someone needs to contact you they can still approach you. Obviously this wouldn’t work so well with a little kid.
I didn't say anything was wrong with it, I was just curious how it works?
But also I guess I assumed a "fam" is more than just a spouse. Sure if it's only one other person you live with, then you're probably not needed any time. Idk I'd still rather watch a movie together, but that's just me
Most people would not see any problem in spending 8 hours over two days enjoying an activity by oneself.
I can guarantee that if you watched 5 minutes of Dune or Gravity on your $20 (or $2000) TV and then on an AVP, you would say: “Oh, I see.” I’ve randomly paused in those movies (and Kill Bill, and others) just to marvel at the artistry of the cinematographer. The device provides a unique and, frankly, stunning visual experience, which I think is hard to understand with seeing it oneself.
I'll try it then. I know my family will find it weird. Glad yours don't!
My wife laughs when she walks into the room and I’m sitting there with my space goggles
The killer app is pr0n, but Apple won't allow it while Zuck loves to watch over your shoulder.
vr porn ain't that good. the artists need to up their game
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
It’s really not.
Porn isn’t really any better on a Vision Pro than it is on a Quest 3 - or, for that matter, a Quest 2.
I think they meant for AR/VR in general and not specifically for the AVP vs Quest et all
VR just isn’t going to happen for a long time. It does have a real purpose or a strong drive to use. I have meta 3 and i played for a bit but then it ended up on the shelf for a variety of reasons.
It has a lot of good specific uses but struggles past that.
It continued to be very impressive technology wise but something that wont be adopted en mass for a long time. Tim Cook was right to be worried about this product - should have trusted his intuition on that one.
Don't you worry, Apple is still looking for a product market fit. And when you have enough billions, do enough brainstorming and cool ad videos you can actually find things that never existed in the first place. Then we will see mass adoption of this millennials' dream tech.
I'm going to try out the new travel mode on a transatlantic flight tomorrow - mildly excited by the possibility of escaping the claustrophobic confines of 11 hours in an airplane.
When you say "a long time" do you mean 2026, or 2029?
2030s
VR will probably never be more than a gimmick imo.
AR is where the market is at. Regular glasses, with current phone capabilities, like painting the actual road you’re going to travel green would already get hundreds of thousands of adopters.
My perception is that AR is also a gimmick that won't seem to take off any time soon. How many times AR technologies have come and went in whimper?
Because the glasses are too big, or the implementation sucks.
I don’t want to see an arrow where I need to go. I don’t want to wear a VR headset.
I want regular glasses. I want the road I need to travel to be a yellow brick road. I want to see the person I’m calling in front of me. I want some details about the building or business I’m looking at when I ask for it, like opening hours, phone number, reviews.
Instead we get shitty shooter games.
Honestly, this is a shame, because I think a lot of the vision pro's flaws are Apple problems.
That said, meta seems to have found a sweet spot in price/performance, so maybe in a few generations we will have something with the quality of vision pro that is not locked down
I still can’t believe they expected people to be excited about a floating iPad OS UX as the main experience.
It is just a launcher for your applications.
The main experience are the apps just like on every other device.
Saying this is like the most anti-Apple thing ever. It literally sounds like Microsoft when they were designing Windows and when Apple started eating their market share away because they cared about the little details
It's not a sweet spot. It's less then 10 million MAU over 5 years for about $40 billion dollars. How is that a sweet spot. If you can't get 10 million MAUs in 5 years for $40 billion dollars, you're a failure. Quest is a failure. AVP being an even bigger failure doesn't make Quest a success.
One thing that frustrates me with this comment is that you're measuring their state today as if that's the end state.
Is waymo a failure? It's not deployed across the US yet, and it's been over a decade etc
No, they're just trying to solve hard technology problems. I want companies to be ambitious, that's way better than seeing them just focus on cutting costs etc
MAU == monthly active users.
What is the goal of quest? Is it to get mau? Is it sales and marketing for eng (come work at _, where we have fun projects like these Glasses - sounds familiar), is it to develop and flex hardware muscles? Is it to make sure Meta is competitive if/when there is a paradigm shift away from mobile?
I think Mark is thrilled to have a hardware product that they can deploy their ML models to. Was that intentional? Obviously no, but at some point they're paying for optionality.
They want the option to build a million hardware units in a year, they want the option to build a competitor to Apple's next hardware device (frankly, in the counterfactual that AVP took off, Meta was extremely well-positioned)
Meta is a money-printing machine, and so they have choices: invest in moonshot hardware (or ai) projects, stock buybacks/dividends
They have a huge dividend. What do you want them to do? More stock buybacks? Make less money?
This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year. The worst part is that Meta is merely licensing the Ray-Ban form factor and this also comes at a hefty price tag. Specially if other companies such as Google enter a bidding war to snatch that exclusivity away from them. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/07/31/metas-reality-labs-posts...
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-steal-ray-ban-meta-m...
> This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year
Yes, it has cost them billions of dollars (ongoing) to develop their AR/VR tech. You can definitely criticize that, but this spending is defensive. If Facebook (Meta) doesn't own at least some market share in a future device, that is an existential threat to them. How much did ATT cost Facebook? [1] Answer: north of $10 billion in 2022. But note: it's actually a reduction in Facebook's revenue by that amount, so in the fullness of time, the total damage is much worse.
> Ray-Ban
Facebook has multiple form factors. They have VR quest (3). They have AR glasses. I don't expect Ray-Ban to capture Facebook/Google's margin here, and Facebook would be able to build first party AR glasses if they wanted. You use Ray-Ban to sell v1 and then you make v2 good enough that it sells itself.
All of this seems tangential to my complaint that I would love an incredibly high res and reasonably hackable VR screen.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/04/23/appl...
Point taken! I would only add that Ray-Bans have become somewhat of a timeless fashion icon and this isn't something that you can easily replicate no matter how much R&D money you have at your disposal. (Just look at how goofy Snap's Spectacles are in comparison)
100%!! Ray-Bans are iconic, so whatever comes next will be extremely dorky in comparison.
The proof will be in the pudding: how useful is it to chat with llama? (I'm extremely skeptical but want it to be cool)
Before the bandwagon jumps on "Metaverse is dead", Meta is pursuing multiple headsets, devices strategy and trying to find the right Features / Price mix.
Quest 2 is the most successful headset and it seem to have the perfect balance. Quest 3 although great, probably is slightly expensive for the mass market. But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.
It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit. Like a startup, you just have to keep iterating and I'm glad zuck is on it
If anything, what I’ve heard from friends at or adjacent to Meta is that they’re paring back metaverse ambitions and capabilities on their future devices because of the success of the Ray-Bans glasses and the relatively middling sales of the Quest 3.
The Ray-Bans are also a weird anomaly since they’re leaning on the Ray-Bans designer pricing to justify a lot of the cost. If you’re already buying a pair of luxury sunglasses that cost close to $200, what’s another $100 to get the smart version?
I'm constantly losing, scratching, or breaking sunglasses. I buy them at $30 tops, not $300.
Sounds like there is an obvious feature for having FindMy / location beacons in your smart sunglasses.
Not FindMy, FixMy.
Some of us can’t live without glasses and can’t afford to be this careless.
In my experience I tend to lose my sunglasses less when they’re expensive :)
And I keep my sunglasses in my car's glove compartment to use when I'm driving, with the only times I wear them being then and when I'm doing physical activity (running, sports, etc).
New, less physically risky use cases for sunglasses will not appear in my life just because I get a more expensive pair of them.
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Don’t understand the appeal being a spy cam for Facebook, but to each their own. The subsidized quest is on borrowed time if it keeps losing crazy billions a quarter as it currently does.
> But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.
You mean lose billions within an unclear race that may ultimately lead to commodity prices like TVs?
>But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years
Honestly I doubt it.
ChatGPT is a free service that is genuinely helpful. For the Metaverse you need to buy the headset and the hardware to run it for what? Wasting time in a virtual store instead of just using a UI? Using it on a worst version of VRchat?
> It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit.
Sure, "huge hit". Anecdote but the only time Ive ever seen anyone wear one was when I interviewed at meta and one of the folks interviewing me was wearing them.
Also, completely anecdotal, but the only people I’ve ever seen wearing them are Facebook employees.
I'm getting Google Glass flashbacks.
Here's Nat Friedman saying he's a DAU of them: https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1796986709751759304
> DAU
"Daily active user" apparently.
DAU is really a common terminology used in mobile web apps and games(aka modern day tobacco and gambling).
Well now we know at least one person uses them.
He's the CEO of EssilorLuxottica saying that they've sold more units of the latest version in a few months than the previous version did in 2 years.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/n...
These things ARE selling, the product is just early.
The CEO of a company selling them says he likes them, and they are selling more quickly than a product which flopped. I am not particularly swayed by this information!
Hope you're sitting down, because the next iPhone is going to be the Best iPhone Ever.
I would absolutely die of laughter if Tim Cook came on stage and said "we worked really hard and we think you will agree, this iPhone is definitely in our top 3 iPhone models ever released. It is really quite good. Seriously, its nearly as good as last year's model, which was great!"
Anecdotal but of the few people that showed me their smart ray bans, 0 actually wear them, let alone use the smart functionality.
After 10 years of building headsets and 5 years of selling them at scale Facebook has fewer than 10 million MAU on Quest. That's $30-50 BILLION spent for maybe 8-9M MAU.
The Ray-bans aren't AR or VR, they're sunglasses with a built in webcam. What a joke.
What a total failure and the fanboys pretending it's not.
Which other products out there cost tens of billions and gave fewer than ten million monthly users?
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I have been bearish on VR, but could never overcome motion sickness. This obviously puts a limit on viable content types for me.
Can anyone speak to any differences in motion sickness between VR and Apple’s implementation of AR/MR?
There was an interesting email from Zuck released during one of their trials where he explained why they were focused on VR: it was basically all about Apple and wanting to own the next platform.
Makes sense although gaming is and will remain the most significant use case for VR in the foreseeable future
The original email is from 2015, posted on HN in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742#33540359
If I remember correctly; Zuck wanted to acquire Unity because he thought Unity would be the next big AR/VR platform, which Meta would hopefully control, instead of Apple and Google controlling the next big distribution platform. In retrospect, it would've been better that way because Unity's management will destroy Unity sooner or later.
There is no future for the Vision Pro unless they can scale it to a comfortable stylish form factor or establish a killer app.
Nobody wants to walk around wearing goggles all day just to read email.
The Vision Pro is a solution looking for a problem. This is the same problem plaguing Apple Home. It just feels very - so what? Tech nerds like it because it's "cool", but everybody else is wondering why would I ever need this thing?
Personally, I think they need to be thinking of a more Apple Watch type device wearable in normal glasses frames. Something more akin to Google Glass, and yes, I'm familiar with the term "glasshole." But maybe it was a product too far ahead of it's time? Or maybe these are just products we don't need?
There was a time when you didn't "need" a PC, either, and they were seen as just nerd toys and things yuppies used to balance their checkbooks, back when "balancing your checkbook" was a thing you had to do. This changed with the advent of the Web, and held until desktops gave way to smartphones. If you could time-travel back to the 80s and 90s, plenty of folks would have scoffed that anyone would ever "need" a computer, let alone a computer in their pocket. But a lot of that is because "a computer" was a bulky beige thing with a CRT monitor, and maybe if you were really into it a 2400 baud modem. But then you'd have to splurge for a second phone line or pick which device to use, the modem or the phone.
So I'd be wary of writing off AR/MR/XR as a dead end, as opposed to a technology that still needs more innovation to reach the mainstream. Glasses themselves are mainstream, and have been for centuries. What's holding AR devices back is the ability to miniaturize the necessary holographic technology, as well as the batteries and processing power. This will eventually be solved, just like an iPhone now has more processing power than the supercomputers of decades before.
The problem with VR will always remain the same. You can't interact with other people while you have a big thing on your face that's designed to supplant your entire field of view, which limits desirable use cases.
> If you could time-travel back to the 80s and 90s, plenty of folks would have scoffed that anyone would ever "need" a computer, let alone a computer in their pocket.
Is that true? I feel like people have imagined portable communication / computing devices forever[1]. People maybe couldn't imagine that they could ever be small enough to be practical, but the utility of such a device was pretty obvious. Similarly, I think "VR" as a concept has obvious value and applications. However current implementations fall far short of what is necessary to unlock that value for most people / scenarios.
[1] https://www.geeksandbeats.com/2016/02/star-trek-technology-t...
I guess you're both right. People knew there'd be reasons computers would be nice to have, but scoffed at the idea that it would be realistic, or would become an actual necessity. People now know that there are ways VR could be cool, but many aren't yet convinced it can be done well enough/cheap enough to be worth it, nor are they imagining it being day-to-day tech yet.
It cannot be done well enough or cheap enough or in a form factor people are willing to use at scale. It's a dead end until those all change. Decades at least.
There are people alive today who can’t fathom why anyone ‘needs’ a computer/smartphone.
> I feel like people have imagined portable communication / computing devices forever
Another example would be fictional comic-book detective Dick Tracy's wristwatch, which started as two-way audio in 1946 and got upgraded to video in 1964.
> I feel like people have imagined portable communication / computing devices forever
Yeah, the visionaries. 90% of the population didn’t, and now they all have smartphones.
(1) Price matters. If Detroit was selling $25k reasonably sized EVs they'd be selling like hotcakes, even if they had limited range. There are a few people who will pay $75k+ for a luxury EV but they bought a Tesla 10 years ago. If Detroit wanted to sell XXXL EV SUVs at crazy high prices they should have done it ten years ago. Now it's too late and they have to make the kind of cars BYD does or pass legislation to keep BYD out of our market.
The Meta Quest consumer has proven they'd rather save a few bucks and buy an MQ2 instead of a better MQ3. It's a big problem for Meta because they're never going to move towards making better games that need an MQ3 to run.
(2) VR > AR Apple's just plain wrong about the focus on AR. The Apple Vision Pro has the hardware to provide far superior immersive world application story than the MQ3 but the software (and maybe controller) story isn't there. Apple acts as if there was something morally wrong with VR, like it is putting your hands in their toilet with all the conviction they have that it is OK to take 30% of all the revenue of the app economy. Sorry, visiting VR worlds is half the value you could get out of a product and throwing out half the value is like doubling the price.
A cheap set of XReal glasses can say "this is just good for watching the HDMI output of a game console" but at Apple Vision Pro prices product that expensive really has to "do it all" with no excuses. People really do subscribe to VR fitness apps, they really do have fun playing games like Asgard's Wrath 2 or games like Riven. Have you ever heard anyone say that they were engaged with an app for the Vision Pro?
In regards to VR, I think Valve could really move the hole situation by building/providing SteamLink VR on AVP, as they do on Meta Quest. Buy any Bluetooth (VR) Controller and enjoy games streamed.
And maybe in some future I will be able to stream from Linux hosts via SteamLink.
Exactly, a device that expensive has to deliver as much value as possible.
Trying to sell a lifestyle accessory for people who have to own every Apple product that there is the beginning of the end for Apple that they’ll be talking about in business school the way we talk about DEC, Tandem and Commodore today.
I contend that almost every problem solvable by a wearable can be solved “well enough” by a smartphone, to the point where an additional device is not worth the trouble for the marginal benefit (unless you’re a person who likes gadgets).
For exercise specifically I do see the value of a watch form factor since people don’t want to carry a phone in their exercise gear. But, that’s pretty niche.
> I contend that almost every problem solvable by a wearable can be solved “well enough” by a smartphone, to the point where an additional device is not worth the trouble for the marginal benefit
I've found glanceable notifications on my smartwatch to be really useful.
Dismissing or answering calls without taking out my phone (or without my phone at all since the watch has mobile connectivity), quickly seeing text messages (especially 2 factor auth codes).
The remote viewfinder for my camera lets me actually be in family photos. And of course exercise tracking (reminders to get a few thousand more steps today are helpful). AR/VR goggles would be useless for any of those, and make the last two worse.
I've found notifications period to be a net negative to my life. I have almost all of them off.
> Dismissing or answering calls without taking out my phone (or without my phone at all since the watch has mobile connectivity), quickly seeing text messages (especially 2 factor auth codes).
The distraction of even looking breaks me out of the zone. So no, don't need a watch for notifications.
> I've found notifications period to be a net negative to my life. I have almost all of them off.
I’ve found the complete opposite. Funny how that works.
Notifications have been one of the most significant and beneficial additions to my life. Especially on the watch, it is in fact really the only reason I own a watch.
To be fair, I only let calendaring /medical apps do notifications, but equally, that’s the reason I own it in the first place.
Same. I have found notifications on my Apple Watch even more distracting on the phone. The vibration is particularly annoying when you are in hyper-focus. So I have also disabled most notifications on my Watch.
I do like it a lot for other things like workouts, having connectivity without bringing my phone along, etc.
Also, I don't really understand the benefit for 2-factor codes. On the Mac and iPhone they can be autofilled from messages. So, I never need to see/read/type them.
But as the parent poster said, most of those things are adequate without the watch. I have a watch but it's a nice to have rather than essential.
A mobile connected tablet could do everything a smartphone can well enough (and more), but I still prefer to carry a phone over that.
I definitely wouldn't get a smartwatch instead of a phone (except for a kid), but there are definitely some small set of things it does better.
Yeah we might end up just circling back to VR over AR and prioritizing immersive gaming, the only thing you can't do on a smartphone / desktop.
The problem with VR gaming is that movement that doesn't match real world movement tends to make people barf. The types of games you can build in VR is just so much more limited as a result. For example, it's very cool to imagine a VR MMO but it would be hell to actually play it.
> Or maybe these are just products we don't need?
That's exactly it, they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough. This is the same problem that plagues the AI assistant devices - it doesn't matter what they can do, they won't replace your smartphone. Which means you're asking someone to carry (and pay for) a smartphone + an extra device. That's a big ask.
It's also the reason why you see these stories of people living smartphone-only lives, doing everything on their smartphones without needing or even having a desktop/laptop. Smartphones are good enough for everything, for a lot of people.
For the record: I -love- the Vision Pro. Tried it out, loved it. But I fall into the `Tech nerds like it because it's "cool"` part. I recognize that that's not going to be the popular opinion. Not now, not ever. There's just not enough value in VR/AR to really change societal norms to the point that everyone's going to want to wear these devices.
Ultimately: Just because a product is a cool idea, doesn't mean it's society-altering. Some products just aren't that valuable.
> If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough.
Sure, but I don't think nearly enough people are sufficiently critical of their need for a smartphone either; I tend to think of it like cars, we've just allowed ourselves to let these devices service so much our day-to-day tasks that they seem like necessary appendages. If it goes away, we panic and buy another one, never stopping to sit with that absence. If my mac had a built-in cellular modem, I'd leave the phone at home most days. It's not useless, but it is completely incidental to my life in terms of what I actually would need it for. Likewise, if people didn't have cars, they wouldn't likely have a life that's only palatable because they have one.
> If my mac had a built-in cellular modem, I'd leave the phone at home most days.
I can’t imagine having to open my wallet every time I want to pay for something. Apple Pay is my favorite feature out of all. Instant communication comes close second. The way we used to live… not being able to ask your partner if we have enough milk in the fridge.
But.. none of that does or should require a smart phone really. Even for the cellular modem bit I mentioned, I could find another way to do it; people had devices for this before these black mirrors came around. But a cellular modem built into my laptop would reduce the amount of crap I have instead of add to it, and I'd still use the smart phone for other reasons at other times, just not if I'm going to a cafe to work necessarily. Using technological conveniences with more intentionality instead of chronically is where I think we screw ourselves.
With the car comparison, my hunch is that a not insignificant contingent of car owning bi-pedal able-bodied people fit into the category of both not having any athletic pastimes/hobbies and also walk or move their body to get somewhere for less than 30 min a week. Just a hunch though. To do that without having had the influence of a car at some point would be remarkable; you'd have to be exceptionally sedentary, live immediately adjacent to a transit stop and do everything in your life right next to another.
If I took the cost of a car and put that into anything else in my life, it's the difference between hypothetically having access to the most expensive outdoor hobbies that don't directly depend on cars themselves, like rally. Not to shit on cars as hobbies either though, not requiring a car means I could afford to have a project car just for the hell of it.
Without an Apple Watch, I just.. tap my card, and retain 2 month's worth of food budget because I didn't get the damn thing.
> But.. none of that does or should require a smart phone really
Well yes, it doesn’t. I used to ask people for directions without a world map, not understand the street signs in a foreign county, come how to a spouse telling me go buy milk since we’re out of it.
Most of technological advances in the last 30 years are conveniences. You could argue ad absurdum since you don’t need most of technology to survive.
Like, you don’t need a laptop if you think about it. You could just do all your work in the office.
But it's not ad absurdum, it's a degree of visceral discomfort for tolerating either the most shallow of discomforts, or the least shallow such as experiencing the vulnerability of navigating a culture without knowing exactly where you are at all times.
A laptop is just a marginally different tech choice according to whether I like a bit of variety in my office setting. I don't have a printer or scanner at home, I walk down to the library, but if I no use for laptop over a desktop I'd pick that, which I do for my gaming pc. If I couldn't pick a laptop, that one could argue I've adapted to having, I'd just adapt to not, it's not a big deal.
To be fair, when you say "we've allowed cars to become necessary," you're talking about "we" as a society allowing that to happen-- me ditching my car after it breaks down tomorrow wouldn't be feasible unless I'm also willing to move to a much different part of my metro, get a new job, and find all-new hobbies and friend groups. That's not a decision most individuals have the power to make because they feel like trying it.
On the other hand, as you point out, a lot of what phones can do can also be done with larger computers. Most workplaces don't require employees to use their personal cell phones on a daily basis. It's practically a fad to "disconnect" for a while, and most individuals would be able to get by while doing that, especially if they still have a working computer.
Looking at this from a contradicting angle, cars actually have safety, environmental, and logistical concerns that make society's dependence on them a physically questionable idea. When I visited Japan for three weeks earlier this year and took public transportation everywhere, I was still using Google Maps on my cell phone to get just about everywhere, just like I do here at home in the US when I'm driving. So I think the "need" for a smartphone for navigation actually eclipses the societal need for cars to move people around.
So I don't think the comparison you're making holds up very deeply, other than on a very abstract societal level. Smartphones have a much wider array of possible usages than cars, and cars have a much more individually critical role in peoples' lives than cell phones.
> To be fair, when you say "we've allowed cars to become necessary," you're talking about "we" as a society allowing that to happen-- me ditching my car after it breaks down tomorrow wouldn't be feasible unless I'm also willing to move to a much different part of my metro, get a new job, and find all-new hobbies and friend groups. That's not a decision most individuals have the power to make because they feel like trying it.
What you describe here is exactly what I was thinking about; individuals in various societies that have either personally or consequently let so many facets of their life depend exclusively on the presence of the car that it feels like it would all come crumbling down in its absence. If we don't have the car, we'll literally lose our social circles, our hobbies, our job!? One would have to be crazy. Prior to me being more or less forced into that situation, I felt the same way, but it turned out that nothing like that happened at all, I'm saving money, I have closer relationships than ever with the people that matter and more of them, I conserve money more easily, I'm in better shape, and I literally never think about driving. The only downside is that some leisure activities take a bit more forethought, and it would be more difficult to have a job that's truly in random far-flung, unpredictable locations. When I was forced to sit with it, I did refuse to live in the city that didn't help me do that. Any friends that I had then and don't now turned out to either not be friends at all, or people I just see every once in a while when I rent a car and drive 8 hours to see them. At no time since getting rid of it has the thought of getting another one seemed appealing enough to pay even the tax on a low budget used car.
But to your analogous point, would I feel the same if I totally ditched the phone? I think ya probably, there's a decent chance of it.
> When I visited Japan for three weeks earlier this year and took public transportation everywhere, I was still using Google Maps on my cell phone to get just about everywhere, just like I do here at home in the US when I'm driving. So I think the "need" for a smartphone for navigation actually eclipses the societal need for cars to move people around.
Do you not feel like the only reason you do that is because it's what you've conditioned yourself to do? I also visited Japan for about the same length of stay for the first time last year, with my partner. While we did use maps somewhat, we only used it at the hostel for the first few days to get a vague sense of direction, and then used it only in the capacity that I would a static paper map or series of them, only in extremely rare travel circumstances have I ever purchased some temporary sim card or services, it's only rarely necessary and wildly detracts from my sense of adventure. Likewise, Tokyo is comically easy to navigate, it took a few days to get the hang of it and then I was good. Translation was pretty helpful (offline) but if I didn't have it I would have figured it out or bought a translation device. The amount of time I saved was incredible, and no I'm not being hyperbolic. If you frame it differently, would you not visit Japan if you didn't have a smartphone? Why?
Mapping apps are no-doubt super useful, but you don't need directions to everywhere you need to go, it's a convenience that we come to rely on, and I never use it day to day unless I'm comparing transit time to biking. Routes aren't that unpredictable most of the time, and there's signage, if my phone dies I'm not suddenly helpless, and that seems important.
Fwiw, I didn't read your comment as combative and I don't at all mean to be here, I just don't think we reconsider these things enough and let ourselves get too comfy with the conveniences of them, to such an extent that we no longer feel comfortable navigating the world, asking people for directions, talking to people on the street, making new friends, or diversifying our leisure. It's scary.
> and it would be more difficult to have a job that's truly in random far-flung, unpredictable locations. When I was forced to sit with it, I did refuse to live in the city that didn't help me do that.
I have a job that's a 30-minute drive from where I live (or a 7 hour walk, or a questionable 2 hour bike ride). My workplace is in a terrible part of town, and there's no way I'd live in the one (1) apartment complex within walking distance of it. Nobody takes public transportation to my workplace because no public transportation stops are within walking distance of it. On the other hand, I work at this company because I want to; I moved to this city to work at this company.
You're essentially saying people should just not care about where they work or where they live, and/or you're projecting your own privilege of being able to live and work wherever you want to onto everyone else.
> Do you not feel like the only reason you do that is because it's what you've conditioned yourself to do?
No, I did it because it was a foreign country that speaks a language I'm still not great at, and I didn't have any clue where anything was before I got there. I'm glad you and your partner had no actual schedule and had the luxury of just being able to bumble around wherever, whenever in order to fulfill whatever it is you think you got out of your trip.
I did not feel like taking hours in advance to look up and write down the same information that would've been needed to navigate the plethora of train and bus stops to go the places I wanted to go (which would then be rendered useless if I made a wrong turn en-route), or to be stuck within the immediate vicinity of my lodging in the various cities and towns where I stayed.
My earlier comment was not combative, but you're really coming off as a "just roll with it, maaaaan" hippy, which is not applicable to most people and not useful to discuss at a societal level. Do I wish normal people were more social and less tech-reliant? Sure. Me ditching my phone or throwing my career away to avoid driving is not going to fix the world, though. No functioning individual can or should be expected to do that.
(And for all your response, I don't think you strengthened your original case of comparing reliance on smartphones to reliance on cars, which is specifically what I objected to.)
Disagree, I’ve been coordinating a lot of things lately–house projects, social events, travel, healthcare, work, etc etc–and have basically had a phone glued to my hand, which means i’m one hand down and constantly cranking my neck. if i could go hands free and be able to mind tasks, even menial ones like laundry and cooking, while researching things online, going through phone menus, messaging with people etc, it would really help. i think we are getting really close to that capability with chatgpt voice mode, we just need a piece of hardware that can bridge the gap.
> they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough.
I disagree.
If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking at (that I’m connected to on LinkedIn) and why/how we were connected, I’d buy that in a heartbeat.
> If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking at (that I’m connected to on LinkedIn) and why/how we were connected, I’d buy that in a heartbeat.
The idea of wearing LinkedIn on my face makes my stomach churn, but while that's my personal reaction, is there a real world context you've found yourself in regularly enough that you've found yourself wanting such a product, or is it more like a conference thing? I can't even think of a physical space I've been in, ever, where there would be even one person that I'm both connected to on LinkedIn and don't know why.
Happens to me all the time. The company I work for has 1300 employees, and what I do means going cross-team pretty often, talking to people that I might have met once or twice a year ago. I speak to customer teams that pack consultants I might have worked with 10 years ago.
Generally speaking, I'm bad at remembering names. I'd buy a discreet "remind me who this is" device in a heartbeat.
Depends on what you do. But when I’m at events rather constantly (not big conferences) and people remember me, but I don’t remember them, it comes off as insulting.
VCs are a good example—founders will remember who they are for obvious reasons. But the ratio is way off—many more founders meet the same VC.
There are other industries where this happens as well.
Also, some people have problems recognizing faces in general.
> If LinkedIn made AR glasses that told me who the person is I’m looking
I could only hope that the EU would ban it ASAP if such a product existed making it unviable anywhere else. Except maybe China and such, should be pretty useful for the CCP enforcement agencies.
LinkedIn users volunteer their information to connected people. There is nothing wrong with that.
Why? It would only search the people I am connected to, not the whole planet.
But there are so many things that can't be done without visual & audio context. I can't hold my smartphone camera up all day to capture and serialize useful data.
AI just made the value proposition for smartglasses 10x.
Why do you need to "capture and serialize useful data?" Wouldn't it be more fun to just be present where you're at?
Wouldn't it be more fun to smash up your iPhone and be present where you're at?
The Humane AI pin says hello and that the almonds in your hand have 16000 calories.
> it doesn't matter what they can do
No it very much matters what they can do, and it's "not much". If they could do a lot more any of these products would be very popular.
They're at the 1980s toy computer level of usefulness - fun to play with, a few useful applications, but hopelessly clumsy and underpowered in terms of real user needs.
No one was sure what real user needs would be in the 80s. It turned out the all-time killer USP was a global data network, which could be accessed through keyboard+screen terminals and pocket devices, and which replaced a lot of slow paper and phone call transactions of all kinds with near-instant access.
VR/AR is currently a wart on that. It won't come into its own until there's some equivalent new killer USP, which isn't just a different way of accessing what's there already.
I'd guess there's going to be some kind of live AI rendering of both real and simulated interactions. But it's going to have to be far beyond what we're used to today to be interesting.
Er, the killer apps were word-processing and spreadsheets, dude.
The Internet is nice, but the PC Revolution happened long before it.
You don’t need a smart phone either. “Need” is the wrong verb when talking about consumer electronics.
Apple Home (as an integrated Matter/Thread client) is far more useful than the Vision Pro.
It's easy to fixate on things like colorful lights, but consider instead automations based on how much energy is used when. For example, if I have a box fan or a portable AC unit on a smart plug, I can automate it running while I'm gone only if the temperature gets to a excess (for the benefit of pets, fruit on the counter, running computers, etc) or only when electricity is cheaper and/or cleaner.
The most useful IoT devices, I think, aren't purpose devices that have a microcontroller integrated into them... so much as ones whose primary and only purpose bridge digital and physical by allowing you to actuate something remotely, be it the flow of electrify (smart plug), or physically flipping a switch (switchbot type).
If they wouldn't be too greedy they could make a device that combines: Apple TV, HomePod, Apple Router, Time Machine - that would be an ultimate smart home device... but they want to sell both Apple TV, HomePod and iCloud for storage.
I feel like Apple missed the ZIRP window to release this to a larger quantity of tech nerds who weren’t continually worried about being laid off.
Google Home was kind of magical when it launched, but as its reliability has degraded over time, its appeal has worn off. It is still nice to be able to ask it to play music or set an alarm or whatever without engaging with a screen.
I haven't used a HomePod, but I suspect it's Apple's version of that experience.
The Sonos patent wars sucked. Things are somewhat back to ok, but man, it's just absurd & sad seeing basic networked av get ravaged by lawyers like so.
I'm super glum about audio casting at the moment. It feels like less and less speakers have audio casting builtin. For a while there was a spare of speakers, some even battery powered, but it's turned into a trickle. There's also incredibly few options for amplifiers with builtin audio casting; what the NexusQ originally did! So frustrating.
This is an ecosystem I am super bought into, and it feels like it's fading and there's not a replacement (especially with Sonos's recent enshittification seppuku).
I ended up just getting normal speakers and attaching a dedicated box to them. I hate how it looks though, so many more wires, and you better hope your speakers are close enough to route a long USB cable for power to a wall outlet
I don't know if it's similar, only because I don't really use Google products. You can ask the HomePod to turn on the Apple TV and play something, or to read out your messages (depending on your settings and whatnot). I don't really have an issue with it doing anything but playing music. I use it for HomeKit controls constantly, and love my HomePod mini's.
I think something with the "wow" factor of the Vision Pro but the form factor of a pair of glasses would be the holy grail of AR/VR. I wonder if there are fundamental tradeoffs which would make that impossible in the near term? I think it would remain very niche indefinitely in that case.
I wonder if in the next 5 years there could be a device where the compute is your smartphone but it streams to a display on your AR/VR glasses. I guess the main issue would be where do you put the battery.
The display technology is simply not there at the moment.
I'm pretty convinced that AR and specifically headset AR is just a dead end. No amount of sensors or pixels are going to make it viable for anything besides some tiny niches. VR is fun and has some uses. Everything else just needs a tactile keyboard or touchscreen.
Not everyone is capable of using a keyboard or touch screen even today. For this reason I hope to see continued advancement in voice capabilities.
I have it better than most but have to rely on dictation a lot due to issues in my hands/arms following an incomplete spinal cord injury.
There are very few situations where I'd want to wear a bulky headset for any length of time. Although I don't play video games, I could see that people who are into it might find them pretty cool.
The TV ads showing people at business meetings all wearing headsets and manipulating a shoe protoype in mid-air are just ridiculous. Or the one where a guy is trying to assemble a furniture kit and wearing a headset. Come on, you'll do better with a YouTube video and unobstructed eyes.
> Or maybe these are just products we don't need?
Silicon valley needs a product that will make us spend even more time online than our phones, in order to sell more ad inventory and make the line go up.
This is pretty much what's driving all of this, especially the AR stuff. It's not a solution in search of a problem. The problem is they need to sell more ads. The only issue is that it's a solution to their problem, not ours.
Or, on the other hand, AR could BLOCK all ads that you ever see. Sanitise your entire visual input, replace all ads with a grey square!
Why do you think the manufacturers would allow that? Sure, you can effectively block ads in a web browser, on a desktop. Everything on mobile is in an app which explicitly does not allow you to tailor your experience, erm, nuke the ads from orbit. And every platform that's followed smartphones, from tablets to headsets, has followed the phone model of pushing software: closed-down OS, software through app stores or gtfo. It's incredibly naive to think ads will get better and not a hell of a lot worse.
Because you can just build things yourself. You don't need permission from anyone else.
A suggestion to build a computer or headset from scratch, having to factor in all the compatibility hoops the big players throw at you before they nuke you anyway for having unsanctioned hardware, is proof of your unseriousness.
Yeah I frequently look at the vision pro reviews and think it would be cool to try, but I know after about a month I would get bored with it. $3500 is alot of money to spend on what is essentially the perfect device for watching movies on an airplane.
It is an insanely impressive technology; however, like the iPadOS I think it is going to take a decade or so to have enough functionality to even consider being useful for professional tasks. I don't want to have to buy a macbook just to stream it to the vision pro to do any coding tasks.
You mean HomeKit? I'm a big fan, despite the warts. I think that's really useful.
This is good news for Apple because their foot is not going off the pedal and now can create more firsts which can lead to more standards gearing toward them
I wish Meta also created something similar to xreal glasses or even better: some modular RayBan smart glasses that can be transformed into xreal with addon.
Never bought any headsets of any sort. And until there is a compelling, application, or a killer app I probably never will. Gaming is definitely not it.
For VR really taking the next step, (realistic) haptic feedback is needed. Just better graphics and the like won't do anymore.
Just want to point out this headline or article doesn’t say that one is the cause of the other, just that they coincide.
Yes, also whatever high-end device they launch would also have a lower market capture from the TAM of high-end VR/XR headsets thanks to Apple being nearly uncompeteable in the hardware for it.
MAANG - N need to make compact AR goggles to assist with visualizing and interacting with the world containing additional context and interaction rather than a simulation of one in VR.
I think the chain of logic is that due to anaemic reception and the Quest3 being unexpectedly good, Apple has pulled forward the cheaper Vision Pro. This has lead to Meta launching head to head with that product, and hence needing to either produce something with comparable specs or do it for a much cheaper price than they thought previously. That not being feasible, they are falling back to their mass market strategy - fully own the low to middle end.
But none of this is about either company stepping back from the overall vision. What they are doing is jostling for market strategy, fit and timing - and adjusting to each other's moves as they go.
Apple probably need to choose between vision pro (i.e. experimental hardware) and making movies and TV.
If they do the latter, everyone (i.e. netflix) will fight them.
Apple has enough money and people to do both things
Their competitors also have money and people
It struggles mostly because it’s far too expensive, which also prevents bootstrapping some ecosystem of usecases.
it still baffles me how Apple decided to release the Vision pro as an actual consumer product and not use this generation as just dev. kits and release a successor to the vision pro and have a cheaper one based on on the mobile chips too in 1 to 1.5 years
Not an expert, but my first impression was that once Meta got ahold of the Apple Vision Pro and took it apart in the lab, the conclusion was that had no chance of beating it, from a hardware point of view.
They do, but Meta's knows the market for $3500 device is way smaller than Apple realized. Sub $1000 is a must. Apple doesn't respect or support developers so there are no apps for it, no games for it. Everything but the screens are sub-par for the Apple device (to date, things might change).
Meta will come out with a Quest 4 that will be better than the 3 and sell WAY more than Apple's device. As heard on a podcast, I've seen more Cybertrucks than I have Apple Vision Pro's in the world.
I think everyone knew this wouldn't work or simply because we aren't ready for this tech yet? But kudos to Apple for giving it a go!!
Zuckerberg really is grasping at straws now. Failed projects:
- metaverse
- VR
- digital currency
- failed to reel in on misinformation campaigns on social networks
- meta/facebook killed “crowdtangle” (misinformation tracking tool)
The only thing keeping them afloat is advertising money (which has been dwindling due to people fleeing their shit platform).
I learned from these comments Apple Vision Pro isn't intended for gaming. No wonder Buffet sold out of them. WTF are they thinking? Might have to transition to Linux fully at some point before I die if they continue doing stupid things.
Is it time for another company rename to llama or data or something a la AI ?
aww man i was looking forward to consuming even more content and seeing even more relevant ads in virtual reality!
This is another big problem for VR: The headsets are very locked down. Getting something like an Ad Blocker, sideloading apps, or general functionality hacking is too cumbersome. You burn out and go back to your laptop before long.
Sideloading on the Meta headsets is trivial. Its probably as hard to change the bootloader as it is on Android (I mean, it IS Android) but I'm not sure what you would need that for.
Computer headsets. Blockchain. AI.
Really hitting the mark recently.
I use all three of those things every day... Couldn't imagine my life without them now.
There are dozens of you, dozens!
I’m racking my brain hard to try to imagine how someone uses the blockchain everyday
I use Ethereum / Arbitrum every week at least. I use it for managing a lot of my finances. I provide liquidity on exchanges, provide liquidity for lending protocols, and use GMX for opening long/short positions and trading perpetuals. I also use USDC a lot, and also do self-custody
Not sure why AI is on that list.
Maybe "what most companies use AI for" (i.e. glorified data collection) or "what most companies try to pass off as useful AI" (i.e. what we used to call machine learning, but now that ecommerce app can also tell you your latest sales in the form of a poem).