Here's some actual journalism from an actual journalist who has actually put it on.
- Apple has done it again. The $3,500 Vision Pro headset takes all the major computing trends of the past two decades, places them around your eyes in a way that looks sleek and feels comfortable, and offers an intuitive interface that is novel and intimate.
But Y tho
- Among the features Apple could not show in its presentation were the 3D photos and videos that the headset could capture. In my private demo, I could sit around a fire with friends or have a seat at the table as children blew out birthday candles in uncanny depth.
"I can watch videos"
This can be accomplished for substantially less than $3500
- Gene Munster, portfolio manager at Deepwater Asset Management, said this part of the demo blew him away. “3D memories are going to change how we remember things,” he said. “I’m not going to want to take a birthday party video again, unless it’s like that.”
- Apple proclaimed a “new era” in “spatial computing”, suggesting the Vision Pro could do for AR/VR what the iPhone did to revolutionise mobile computing.
Look - I'm like 200 hours into No Man's Sky. I bought the wife and kid a PSVR because they love Beat Saber. And while NMS can be played in VR? I fucking don't. Because rather than hold a keypad in my hands I have to reach behind my back and flail my flippers around to "interact" with the world and fuck you.
"Interaction" is not "find the simplest possible thing and do something stupid so a machine can interpret your moves from across the street." You don't improve the user experience by trading all fine motor control for coarse drunken moves. I don't want to fucking semaphore a computer screen and neither does anyone else.
- “All other VR companies are in deep trouble because Apple has raised the threshold,” said Rony Abovitz, the founder and former chief of Magic Leap, a maker of augmented reality glasses. “They just laid down a gauntlet for companies like HTC and Samsung and Meta to chase. They have surpassed all of them in one shot.”
Magic Leap, you may recall, was going to revise the entire universe back in like 2012, came out with a headset nobody wanted or needed, laid off half their employees and hangs on in the twilight selling products nobody buys. This is the first you're learning that HTC and Samsung make nerd helmets and what you know about Oculus is it was founded by a Nazi and Facebook lost half their value and a lot of their staff in an attempt to will Ready Player One into existence.
- Just days before the demo, I attended AWE, a major conference for mixed reality in Santa Clara, where start-ups showcased all manner of cutting-edge technology that pointed towards a post-smartphone future.
- Magic Leap 2 glasses cost $3,200, while top-end headsets from Finnish group Varjo cost $6,500. I came away thinking this sort of technology had a future, but a distant one. The Apple event changed that.
They said this shit about the Segway too
- Munster from Deepwater Asset Management said he was initially “shocked” by the $3,500 price point and drafted a note to clients emphasising his disappointment. After using it, he conceded his perspective had “totally” changed. “I think it’s priced right,” he said.
Gene Munster will pay $3500 to experience children's birthday parties in 3d, alone
- “The thing that immediately grabbed me was the fact that anyone who used an Apple product will have instant familiarity with the device,” said Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight.
Analysts discover Apple has brand language, film at 11
- Impressive as it is, though, it is difficult to make the case that any consumer “needs” this device. It was entertaining to watch movie clips, view photos and take a call, and I was surprised by the clarity and comfort of simply reading a PDF document.
Holy shit for $3500 I can read text
- Jeronimo added that after 20 minutes, he was ready to take it off. Despite Apple’s “EyeSight” tech — which shows the wearer’s eyes to others in real life so the device does not look antisocial — he was not sure he would wear it in a social setting.
- During my demo, I conversed with two Apple employees in the same room, and a third appeared in a moveable window through a FaceTime call. She was wearing the Vision Pro, but Apple had rendered it invisible so I could see her entire face. Apple calls this a “persona”, which sounds cartoonish, but even when I asked her to dart her eyes back and forth or made her laugh, her reactions were lifelike.
To my embarrassment, I even yelped when a dinosaur emerged from the wall in the demo room, recognised my presence and tried to bite my hand. I was told this had happened all day long.
Use case: now velociraptors can eat your stand up meeting.
- Apple also developed proprietary cameras to take 3D videos of sports games and events such as a studio concert, enabling the wearer to feel like the action was directly in front of them. It was impressive enough to wonder if Ticketmaster was about to get disrupted.
Reader, it was not.
- Disappointment that the headset would not go on sale until “early next year” was palpable. Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies, an avatar tools company, said he was surprised that Apple made little to no attempt to gear the device towards Gen Z consumers. There was nothing about social media or dating apps, for example.
Those consumers that can't afford rent or a car payment? Those consumers? Also, what the fuck is an "avatar tools company"?
- But millions of developers now have months to build content. And once they do, Vision Pro’s potential could emerge in ways not even Apple understands.
Hey let's check in on the content side, courtesy the Financial Times:
- To test opinion we visited Horizon Worlds on Tuesday, when the busiest room was The Soapstone Comedy Club(opens a new window) with a population of 24.
I had a similar urge, so I just posted the least bad take on the Vision Pro I've read so far: It is fascinating the number of technological breakthroughs that Apple has made to accomplish this device. Dual 8K 90+Hz screens, on the fly predictive eye tracking to drastically reduce latency, an enormous day-one app ecosystem enabled by their aggressive merger of iOS, macOS (and visionOS), and all the little design details that have made it so that not a single reviewer reports the usual VR headaches and dizzyness. but is it a good product? This device: no. But this isn't a good product for the masses, this device is what the Pixelbook tried to be for Chromebooks, aka the expensive thing to kickstart a platform. The inevitable $999 Vision that will arrive in a few years though? With the pareto 80/20 features it needs to be good for most? I currently don't think it's all too far-fetched to see that as a good product, hypothetical as it may be. That product, I think, is immersion slash flow slash escapism. To me, the idea to have the rotating crown as an immersion-slider is one of the most interesting features of this thing, as it addresses the big elephant in the room of any VR/AR device which is that it shuts you off from the real world almost instantly almost entirely. I don't think anyone really likes that other than basement dwelling gamorz. Where previously the device itself was designed around a specific level of immersion (from 'none' in the case of Google Glass to 'as much as possible' in the case of regular VR), Apple seems to correctly realize that depending entirely on the situation, person, surroundings, and activity varying degrees of immersion are needed or desired. I mean, the bane of VR is that you surrender your visual senses to the shitty fidelity and lag of whatever you strap on your face. You're either in the magical cave or you're out. Yeah there's some passthrough but it's not integral to the experience or device. Transitioning in and out is always jarring, nausea is always around the corner. The way Gruber describes it the Vision Pro does such a fantastic job of relaying the world around you (the entire world, the full vision) that I can totally see this blurring the line between regular vision and VR. A line that desparately needs blurring if this is ever going to work for the masses. The unmet need of AR/VR that the Vision Pro solves is that complete control over the level of immersion. And for that gradient you need the 'no immersion' part to be flawless. But still, just because it enables a much smoother transition and thus I think enables it to potentially reach a larger audience than any device until now, that doesn't answer the question whether people actually need this new 'spatial computing' device. Personally I think this is where flow and escapism might be the big sellers. Escapism is the easy one: consumeth content in the best possible format. I think it was MKBHD who said he'd totally pay per view to watch big sports games in 3D at courtside with the Vision Pro, because it is so convincingly immersive. I wouldn't call it comfortable just yet with how heavy it supposedly is, but a bit of completely immersive escapism could definitely be enough for people to consider this device. And yes there will probably be people buying this to escape their shitty apartment / environment, but that's what people have done for decades in all sorts of ways. The flow-part that Gruber talks about is interesting. There are already completely deranged weirdos who spend their working days inside a Quest Pro. They wave their arms around like inflatable tube men because that kind of interface is the only one available. So the idea of opening a fucking Excel in the Vision Pro is ridiculous to me at face value. But I have a crisp, large, wonderful 1440p 144hz screen in front of me that does the task of displaying a single window or maybe two next to each other just fine. Most of the regular desktop computing apps I use from day to day do not seem to be any better in visionOS. However... there are many apps that I don't use all the time whose UIs are, if you're really honest, a nightmare of decades of compromises that a 2D screen requires. GIS. DAWs. Blender. Illustrator. The choice to make 3D item interaction largely vision based is another thing that does set this device apart from all the other VR wavy arms bullshit, because it seems to enable (near) full control with an interaction that is not that much different than using a mouse. Really, what I wish Apple would've shown was a demo version of Logic where you can arrange everything in 3D space and move sliders by looking at them and moving a finger or something like that. I know how impressive your audio setup is, but I also vaguely know how expensive it is, and if I can get your setup for $3500 in an interactive 3D space instead of building it out? With a UI that knocks a DAW out of the water because it does not depend on me holding some plastic gizmo? I think I would.Again, it doesn’t look at all like looking at screens inside a headset. It looks like reality, albeit through something like a pair of safety glasses or a large face-covering clear shield.
Let's talk about that platform. Chromebooks are for people who need to type but don't need to do any real work. My kid has one through school and when she's serious she whips out an iPad or a Windows PC. We're buying two Macbooks this month because we have new employees who walk around with Chromebooks but discovered they can't do a single fucking thing with our office infrastructure because it's real. The Pixelbook was an expensive, useless thing with no ecosystem to try and move a cheap, useless thing with no ecosystem upmarket. Yeah but nobody wants that. Beating my dead horse, Second Life is legit two weeks from crossing the 20-year mark and nobody, ever, in that entire ecosystem has ever cried out for immersion. The tech industry has been fishing around for a killer app for VR since Lawnmower Man and it just don't exist. It doesn't matter how great you render the world around you - what matters is whether or not you benefit from having something floating virtually in front of you. Here's a theory - everyone is chasing this because we've been promised holograms since Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It's an easy trick to do in camera or in post and so everyone's got it in their minds that volumetric displays are the future. They're also much, much harder than strapping on a set of goggles, though, so goggles we strap. And have done since these things. Yeah friend just got back from Turkey where he was shooting footage for MSG. The Sphere has the keen advantage of you don't have to do it alone. 'cuz you can pretend that that avatar next to you is a person? But it's not. It's an avatar. And it always will be. They haven't been, though. It's not a lack of technology, it's a lack of application. Thirty years after Lawnmower Man and we still have nothing to do in VR. Meta has lost double-digit billions trying to come up with something and they have fuck-all. Three billion Facebook users, headsets sold at a loss, and 24 people in their comedy club. I don't think there are. I've never seen one, I've never heard of one. Can you point to one? And there's the fatal mistake. See, I pay a premium for buttons. I pay for knobs. I pay for faders. And I pay that premium because what makes me fast is muscle memory. I've got three touch screens in front of me right now - I used 'em this morning to cut a DJ session. didn't touch a single touch screen. No, I touched the buttons and the faders and the knobs. And I reached for them and they were there regardless of where I was sitting, and I didn't need to look at my fingers while I did it because my body knows where they are, and uses tactile feedback to tell me what the fuck is going on. Wanna see the most important mouse in my day? Six axes of control, I never look at it. I use that thing like a rented mule, all day every day, moving stuff around in 3d space on a pair of $170 HD monitors. I'd turn down 3D if you gave it to me because I don't need it - at middle distance my 3d sense comes from moving my head around or moving the subject around and I just don't need it in three dimensions. I don't even turn on perspective most of the time. My sense of the objects I work on is tactile by virtue of how I move them around minutely through a 2D display. All the channels and such I have in my life are laid out the way they are because it is logical. I don't want them in 3D, any more than I want a piano keyboard in 3D. Neither does anyone else.This device: no. But this isn't a good product for the masses, this device is what the Pixelbook tried to be for Chromebooks, aka the expensive thing to kickstart a platform.
That product, I think, is immersion slash flow slash escapism.
I think it was MKBHD who said he'd totally pay per view to watch big sports games in 3D at courtside with the Vision Pro, because it is so convincingly immersive.
And yes there will probably be people buying this to escape their shitty apartment / environment, but that's what people have done for decades in all sorts of ways.
There are already completely deranged weirdos who spend their working days inside a Quest Pro.
I know how impressive your audio setup is, but I also vaguely know how expensive it is, and if I can get your setup for $3500 in an interactive 3D space instead of building it out?
I was thinking of this guy. It's bonkers. Nobody wants Zuck's version of VR, unless you are one of the few basement dwellers for whom VRChat or Horizon is a way to cope with your social anxiety. That much is certain. What struck me about the presentation from Apple is how much it leaned into "this is just another way to interact with a computer". Do Macbooks have a killer app? Do iPads? No, they're just a different device to do the things on you're already doing on other devices, sometimes enhanced and sometimes limited by the device specifics. I'll use my iPad on the couch for some browsing, and I think people will enjoy using the Vision from time to time to do mostly things that can already be done on other devices, and partially to do things you can only do in such a device. I would not be surprised if it isn't for you, but I would also not be surprised to see myself buying/using this regularly in a year or two, because this seems to be the first device that achieves the visual acuity needed for normal people to do fairly normal things in AR with a new interaction method that relies mostly on looking and tapping. How sure are you about that? You might not ever trade in your physical sliders but this device is not really meant to replace what you already have, it's meant to drastically give people more 'room' to do stuff when that room isn't really available. I could buy 5 large 4K screens and put them on an array on my desk and it would be maybe a third of what's capable when you wear the Vision (and it'd be more expensive too). I could buy a large setup of physical devices and spend thousands to get that right... or I could just have it pop into and out of existance whenever I need to. You want most of a production studio but you don't have a large spare room? You're on the go in a hotel and you want 5 large screens to do some work? Here you go. Hell, if the passthrough is really as good as people are claiming, I could even see a hybrid solution where you have your physical sliders but you enhance them with half a dozen movable screens and dials. They already demoed that you can just type on your Macbook and have the entire wall as your screen. It's not that the use cases for this aren't possible in other (and often better) ways. Normally I browse Hubski on my iPad, and it's an okay experience but to type out a comment I really need to find my laptop or get behind my pc. I sometimes watch YouTube on my iPad, sometimes on my PC but it's best on my smart TV, but I really think the Vision Pro experience could knock my TV out of the park. Some devices have some killer apps but really, it's the variety of options that makes it work. I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest" and, well, one bonkers guy is, but the whole experience is so awful that it's repellant for 99,999% of people. My impression is that Apple's relentless focus on eliminating motion sickness, having screens so sharp that reading text is actually nice, having smooth transitions in/out, and their dynamic level of immersion make a very compelling case for this device being less awful and, say, only repelling 50% of people. Which is enough of a difference that this might just be the one AR device to actually pop off.Yeah but nobody wants that. Beating my dead horse, Second Life is legit two weeks from crossing the 20-year mark and nobody, ever, in that entire ecosystem has ever cried out for immersion. The tech industry has been fishing around for a killer app for VR since Lawnmower Man and it just don't exist.
Neither does anyone else.
You don't hear me thinking that, though. Let me clarify: the things that make this untenable are not solved by resolution or refresh rate. Twice now you have brought up my "expensive" rig without realizing that it's three of the cheapest models you can buy. You can run touch screens virtually for free - I have three Kindle Fire HDs which I think were like $120 ea? And the software to talk to them costs nothing. And yet, people will pay $1300 for eight channels of "knob, fader, and eight buttons each" to throw in their travel luggage. I helped spec these monsters - never got to mix on them, but we took a system that was almost entirely in the box and spent $4m just to improve the interface. And I was working ten hours a day in a room that was literally a wall of monitors. Your crazy guy - thanks for bringing him to my attention, he's crazy - dismissively makes the assertion that you can't use voice transcription for coding. I knew a guy who did that all day long back in 2003; we had to make his computer work for him, and then I had to listen to him bark at a Pentium II two doors down. it's not like he had a disability, either, he just liked shouting at Windows NT4. Dragon Naturally Speaking was gonna be a revolution from, like, 1998 to 2004; before Ray Kurzweil was the crazy guy who thought vitamins would make you live forever, he was the crazy guy who said speech recognition was going to change the world. So yeah - that guy can dismissively say you can't use voice transcription for coding. he can say that because billions have been spent proving it in the main, while I have personally dealt with the exceptions that prove the rule. Some fundamentals of ergonomics, provided to you by about $8k worth of seminars and training necessary for my firm to apply for a role involving pilot simulation of military aircraft for the DoD/Boeing: - The useful area of visual acuity for command and control applications, as determined by expensive DoD studies, is 5 degrees above your sightline and fifteen degrees below... and roughly 25 degrees side-to-side - The effective spacing for visual information is the equivalent focal distance of double the screen-height to six times the screen height - The human eye, with 20/20 vision, can resolve one arc-minute of resolution Let's run some numbers. I have a display 36" from my face. it is 11" tall. Converting out of freedom units gives us 914mm and 280mm respectively. 914sin(1/60) = 0.266mm; 1080 of those is 287mm is holy shit it's almost like I did that on purpose. 3840 of those is 1021mm is 40" to convert back to my freedom-units tape measure, which puts my visual workspace at 47" but that's okay because 9" of it is the Jellyfish in the middle, because when you're mixing, that shit matters the most. Really? Two HD monitors at arm's length are all you can fucking see but more importantly, they're all that generations of exhaustive DARPA studies have revealed we pay attention to with any regularity. And to be clear - I've got eight monitors, not two. There are three tiny, shitty little Kindle Fires that I use to basically watch levels bob up and down. There's a laptop to the right that mostly exists to show me processes on that computer while I work on other computers. And there's a giant 50" LCD "client monitor" that shows the movie while I'm working on it, in a place I can largely ignore. I throw timecode up there to make sure it always matches the timecode on the burn-in because otherwise catastrophe ensues. That hasn't happened in years... but ultimately you need to make sure the punches match the fists. All of them are out of my sightline, and I only switch my attention to them when I have to. To drive the point home, I own a spare KVM switcher that would allow me to drive two more monitors. I own the monitor arms that would let me do it. I have three (of four) computers all set and ready to drive four monitors at a time, all I lack are the monitors, whose prices are bloody nominal these days. But I don't. I could wrap myself in a 90 degree semicircle of information. I've been doing CAD for 25 years, the multi-monitor frontier has been mine since the Pentium and yet "two HD monitors plus a command line text window" has been my happy place the entire time. A lot of people subconsciously grok this; they don't need $8k worth of DARPA training to get it, just if they really wanted to know why. No one wants this. They might have asked for it at some point but I wouldn't have four fucking monitor arms if eBay wasn't replete with day traders purging their excess Humanscale due to walls of financial data sucking from a UI standpoint. IMAX is a big-ass screen, right? Turns out nobody really wants that. Hundreds were built, people would show up sometimes, Wall Street lost a fuckton of money, they started showing normie movies on the screens, people still didn't really care. OmniMAX is worse - it's a big-ass screen wrapped around the room that was an attempt to use planetariums to show movies and they suck balls for that. OmniMAX was the bright-hot thing of my youth that everyone saw once and went "...yeah." So we can act like we haven't tried this style of information display in the real world but we have, and we hated it, and moving your physical focal distance from "over there" to "an inch in front of your eye" does nothing but up the eyestrain and alienation. Wikipedia tells me we've had planetarium domes for about 2500 years. It's not like we've been incapable of this sort of information display until now, we just haven't had any justification. It's like speakers - you can absolutely put together a set of transducers that will reproduce sound from DC to light. The industry has stuck to 40-ish Hz to 20k-ish Hz because that's where our ears are. Note that my opinion about VR and AR has not changed since I was just a kid with a Society for Information Display membership. I bought a PSVR because my wife said "Beat Saber looks like fun." It exactly met my expectations: there are corner-cases where VR is fun in doses but by and large, it's not worth the fuss. I haven't bought a PSVR2 because none of the games I want to play have been ported to it (and there's only two). Would the extra resolution be nice? For sure. PSVR has 2k resolution across a hundred degree field of view; doesn't take much math to recognize that it's a long, long way from visual acuity. But zero of my productivity comes from my peripheral vision, so why do I care? I can buy another HD monitor right now for $150. $3500 would buy me a 4x6 grid of those fuckers - I would have 4k x 12k resolution. Yeah there would be shenanigans getting data to 24 monitors but take it from a lad with a more-than-passing interest in information display - there are methods. And yet the tech industry is at "$3500 for a nerd helmet is reasonable and 24 monitors is bugshit insane." I've been involved with video walls of various shapes and sizes since the late '90s. They're always a weird-ass corner-case travesty made of money and chewing gum because if you need to do that, you'll pay. I've been involved with control systems of various shapes and sizes since the late '90s. 99% of what used to take $50k of Crestron can now be done by Alexa for free. When I bought my first projector? They were three-eyed monsters requiring unistrut, constant collimation and a $2500 video scope to keep happy. I've seen things... you people wouldn't believe And yet I've seen nothing - nothing - that has changed my mind about VR in thirty fuckin' years. And I say that as a multi-monitor-usin', spacemouse-drivin', 3d designin' mutherfucker going back to haptics-over-RS422. There's no there there.I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest"
Screenshots don’t do it justice. Videos fail to capture the scale and grandeur of the experience. These pictures are a poor illustration of what I see in the headset—low resolution, compressed field-of-view, lacking depth and scale. The low display down front? That’s the size of an executive desk. The code is like an IMAX® theater—I can’t even see all of it at once.
Sigh. You’re right. There’s a part of me that wants to double down and talk about the significance of specific corner-cases where it’ll be fun or slightly useful, but that doesn’t counter your larger point much if at all. We don’t need this. Mostly it leads me to wonder why I’m so intrigued by this device in the first place. Because I can still see myself buying and using some version of this, even if I know I don’t need it. It’s not just this device’s marketing too, I’ve been intrigued by the potential of VR for longer than that. I think it taps into a desire for new environments and experiences, so a new way to experience computing sounds fascinating to me.
Something snapped a couple days ago and I heard Tim Cook's subconscious dialogue, clear as a bell: ______________________ Stupidest fictional weapon ever invented? The light saber. It has an effective range of about an arm's length, for some reason it can be deflected by other light sabers, apparently you can cobble one together out of vienna sausages and an answering machine. But it's the supreme weapon of a powerful cult of monks who can warp your brain, levitate rocks, deflect lasers, all sorts of dumb shit. So in order to make the light saber not suck: - lasers must travel at the velocity of a slow-pitch softball - they must make extremely loud noises - their accuracy must be on par with a super-soaker in a cross-wind George Lucas had two things in mind when he came up with Star Wars: Swashbucklers like Captain Blood, and newsreel footage of the Pacific theater of WWII. You've got little fighters zooming around, you've got ground-based cannons blasting the bad guy out of the sky, and Errol Flynn will triumph over Basil Rathbone, but not before cutting off every candle wick below decks. Thing is, in the real world Errol Flynn is going to eat total shit the minute he takes on anyone with so much as a crossbow. Real battles are ugly and awful and it's a rare engagement where you even know about the guy who just killed you. Imagine Luke and Leia escaping the Death Star, except instead of a bunch of hapless dick-helmeted extras they're facing the 101st Airborne out of Saving Private Ryan. No lasers, no night vision, no sci fi scary shit, just Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Ed Burns and Tom Sizemore, regrettably plugging the pretty girl in the bathrobe with an M1 Garand from semi-prone positions. You're seeing Tom Hanks scowl right now. He doesn't like this movie. He wants out of it. The narrative of VR does not match the reality of VR. It never has. The whole of my professional careers (all of them!) have been VR-adjacent since the cathode ray tube. I remember when Los Alamos National Labs built a room out of TVs and polarized goggles so you could be "inside the reaction" - a supercomputer, a Beowulf cluster just for the TVs, bajillions of DoD money and still nobody used it. We want the damn light saber. We know it's stupid, and we want it anyway. Because when you twist the narrative the right way it's so fucking cool.Here you go, mutherfuckers. Here's your goddamn headset. Because Google lost a lot of money on it, and Facebook lost a lot of money on it, and Microsoft lost a lot of money on it, but you're so fucking blind to the reality of the situation that if we DON'T lose a lot of money on it you'll punish us for being "old fashioned" or "too conservative" or "hidebound" rather than "reasonable" so here it is. It costs us a lot more than we'll sell it for. It's undeniably better than anything anyone has made before, or will ever make again. It looks so much like that stupid prop from Ready Player One that we were honestly concerned you'd catch us trolling you but really, we shouldn't have been. You see this as such an inevitability that you don't care if it works, you don't care if nobody ever buys it, you don't understand what it's for but you've been promised this for forty years and if we don't come out with it you'll think we stole Christmas. So here it is. Useless, bereft of application, shiny and sparkly and "developery" and you'll never be able to say we didn't make one and two years from now? Three? We'll unexist it, and we'll make no announcement, and nobody will care except Gizmodo for some reason, because that's what we do, we disappear our failures like Stalin, and we disappear our successes, I mean we killed iTunes and didn't tell you, we killed the iPod and didn't tell you, and our fandom is so vehement that should you write ten years from now about how we were never really serious about this, a legion of nerds will emerge from the woodwork and bury you. So here it is. Here's your useless thing. Our stock price thanks you.
Mostly it leads me to wonder why I’m so intrigued by this device in the first place.
You see this as such an inevitability that you don't care if it works, you don't care if nobody ever buys it, you don't understand what it's for but you've been promised this for forty years and if we don't come out with it you'll think we stole Christmas. So here it is. Useless, bereft of application,
Just be happy that if this fails this will be the final death blow to VR. Like you wont see anyone try VR for another decade or two. Zuck is already been knocked to the ground on his VR vision an apple headset failure would be final kick in the balls. When apple products fail there is basically just a vaccum left in the market afterwards because everyone knows they cant do any better for a good part of a decade.
That's an interesting take. It hadn't occurred to me that Apple might do this in part to show up Oculus. What will be interesting is if they can goad Zuck into making something really expensive. Facebook's drive into VR is far, far, far too expensive to back down.Zuck is already been knocked to the ground on his VR vision an apple headset failure would be final kick in the balls.
Unlike Google, at least they're not trying to get their customers to wear their nerd helmets in public. I've been trying to come up with a way it would be useful for me for the last week and I also keep coming up empty-handed. Worse for drafting as you've already pointed out. Almost all my design sketching today is done on paper and with physical models, to be able to easily manipulate real objects in space, sometimes in collaboration with other people who doesn't know AutoCAD/Rhino/Sketchup. Replacing it with virtual objects kind of defeats the purpose. Which leaves representation and presentation. I can see how "immersion" can help sell a project to a client, but I also see hundreds of roof goats that will have to be put down at later stages. Working with plan, section-elevation and perspectives (even a digital model fly-through) allows you to direct attention to what you think is the design's strengths while hand-waving away the things you haven't had time to think through or talk to an engineer about. Plus, who the hell has time or money for it.
I don't see it happening, honestly. There's no reason for it, adoption is low, and the one aspect of Google Glass that made me go I fucking want that was an AR motorcycle helmet. There is exactly no part of a motorcycle's gage cluster that fits within the DoD's sight window. Putting essential stuff up in your field of view where you can reference it when you need to is actually a great application of AR. And like I said, heads-up displays on cars are, in my opinion, a net good. I think they're largely dumb on fighter aircraft because fighter aircraft have been refining heads-up displays for fifty fucking years.
I think it’s got potential. Idk what the use case would look like and it’s likely we will mostly use them for road trips or long flights or for folks who live in shared housing or whatever the edge case is but as long as people actually use them then the platform will develop to be not shit. When the iPad first came out it really did nothing better than the competition and I struggled to see a use case for it that laptops with touch screens couldn’t already do but here were are, using iPads and struggling to type basic things into them where a laptop would probably be a better fit but requires getting up and actually grabbing it.
The only productive use I've heard of for VR is in some limited industrial design applications. When projects are in early stage and they don't want to waste sculptors' valuable time, my wife's company will mock stuff up in VR and view models as such. It's something they only use when they have to AND it's not that important--first pass stuff. I know they talk about surgery practice and the like, but I have no idea if that has progressed at all. My friend tried really hard to get me to like a first person shooter game in his Meta goggles, but as someone who doesn't even like regular games to begin with, it was a big shrug from me. Although I didn't get a smartphone for years after they were available, I could see the utility of them immediately...just didn't see the utility for me for a while. But these things just continue to confound me. I think they're a product of circle jerks in tech companies more than a connection to what consumers are clamoring for. Groupthink is a hell of a drug.
Yeah that's Hololens' raison d'etre. It's the only reason to bother. it is a heartfelt desire for a volumetric display that has been repeatedly and thoroughly trounced by physics. It's also the opposite of the operative word of VR: immersive. You don't need an "immersive" car model. Maybe you do if you climb around in it? But we're even more corner-case. The other reason to bother is okay, you're working on an F-35 but you have no idea how to fix an F-35 so you slap on a hololens and it overlays the wiring schematic on top of the wing so you know what panel to pull off. But the operant concern there is "you have no idea how to fix an F-35" and once you've done that once or twice you prolly don't need the hololens anymore. There's a certain tactility to surgery (major or minor) that you're never going to get from AR or VR. This is why we have a long list of biological analogues for vagnias, cervixes, etc. We had our pantheon back when I was doing heart shit. Everybody has something that feels and acts like the thing you're doing surgery on. Whether or not it looks like what you're working on isn't even a consideration. The amount of surgery you can do where you have an unoccluded view of the action is like a dozen ICD10 codes and the force-feedback of "am I poking this needle in right" is still more important. Yeah see there's that "immersive" word again. "Immersive" matters for some things. We've probably been through fifteen? Twenty? Games with VR. There are three that are worth bothering with: 1) Beat Saber. 'cuz shit flies at you like crazy and you have to wave your arms around like a maniac. It's fuckin' fun. 2) Wipeout. 'cuz shit flies at you like crazy and you have to sit stock fucking still to keep from throwing up. I'm serious. Two-dozen-odd games and none of them have three levels of safeties you have to defeat before you get the real experience. 3) Tripp. Because circular breathing exercises are really entertaining when you're sitting on a fluorescent mushroom. (3) is kind of an asterisk? Because I mostly use it for contrast neurotherapy with (2). 20 minutes of Wipeout followed by 10 minutes of Tripp is wringing your brain out like a sponge and then soaking it back up again. It's mental zit-popping followed by a warm washcloth. And none of it is "useful." EA made a big deal about Star Wars: Squadrons. It's shit. It's space bumper cars. Nothing moves fast, there's no real immersion because they're afraid of making you vomit (Wipeout is also afraid to make you vomit, but went "on your own head be it"). Paper Beast is fun but it's fun without VR but that's not an option. Paper Beast is basically Shape of the World, which isn't VR, with added interaction to frustrate you with how shitty controls are in VR. There's others I could mention but it really comes down to "unless you are absolutely pummeling your senses don't bother. And first person shooters will never meet that threshold. Nearly all the action is in the middle distance where our distance cues don't come from binocular vision anyway. There's very little point to looking around like crazy while doing a first person shooter because the whole arrangement of battle is designed to keep your sides safe and free and if they aren't, you're going to change your perspective until it is. Wipeout? You actually have to look around turns and look up through the ceiling to steer. I think they're a fundamental misunderstanding of how we perceive the world. I think they're as big a mistake as touch screens. I think if Nintendo can come out with a VR headset in 1995 and have it move things about as much as the Power Glove did, you can evaluate that nerd helmets are about as essential as power gloves. We could do the shit out of a power glove these days. We don't.When projects are in early stage and they don't want to waste sculptors' valuable time, my wife's company will mock stuff up in VR and view models as such.
I know they talk about surgery practice and the like, but I have no idea if that has progressed at all.
My friend tried really hard to get me to like a first person shooter game in his Meta goggles, but as someone who doesn't even like regular games to begin with, it was a big shrug from me.
I think they're a product of circle jerks in tech companies more than a connection to what consumers are clamoring for. Groupthink is a hell of a drug.
good eye tracking effectively pulled into a user interface system is new, and useful. Plus the highest quality of any VR screen allowing you to actually use it for text or media work. A quality platform for 3d interfaces may challenge our dependence on 2d rectangles to convey information. It's expensive, imo not unreasonably. Is 3500 worth not hunching over a 2d screen all day to get some work done? Can a (well-paid) white collar office worker be more comfortable with a free-moving headset rather than be locked to a desk to rest their laptop and peripherals off of? I think they could be, but remains to be seen once this launches. I'll give it a shot. Not a fan of Oculus Quest 3 though, resolution is too low for real work, plus I don't game that much. I'm imagining the software ecosystem around apple's new VR OS will take a few years to mature. I like the immersion dial too, oddly the most dystopian thing for me is the how it generates a 3d model of you for FaceTime 🤷. Gargoyles are here ❄️💥🍕
It's not, though. DoD rolled out IHADSS for Apache pilots in '85. It was a major plot component in 1990's "Firebirds." DoD was so impressed with the results that they went "behind me Satan" and kept it off everything else until 2015. Okay, I'll play. What information? An anecdote: I resisted cell phones until about 2005. It was only when people got angry at me for not being available that I relented, and I immediately got something that ran Windows. My thinking? places have phone numbers, not people. If someone wanted to get ahold of me they could call me at home. at work. If I wasn't at those places, then I wasn't available by phone. End of story. I haven't had a real job in more than 15 years? But fuck you I'm not strapping my job to my face. Never ever ever. The ability to put it down is the difference between "working a job" and "being a job" and for ten years I held a profession in which I was surrounded by literal millions of dollars of technology. Literally dozens of screens in front of me, literally hundreds of channels of audio. I should be the poster child of this whole push and with no ambivalence: hell no.good eye tracking effectively pulled into a user interface system is new, and useful.
A quality platform for 3d interfaces may challenge our dependence on 2d rectangles to convey information.
Can a (well-paid) white collar office worker be more comfortable with a free-moving headset rather than be locked to a desk to rest their laptop and peripherals off of?
I'll bite. seems like apples and oranges, IHADSS tech is over 30 years old, is over twice as heavy and is a monocular display which quote When...used, the visual input to the two eyes differs greatly. This...gives rise to binocular rivalry, a competition between the two eyes for the information that gains attention Which won't occur with the vision pro. More criticisms in the paper you linked are difficult to also levy against the vision pro: Most problems that I have had are due to faulty equipment. Examples: The greyscale is not able to be properly adjusted. This leads to reduced resolution and the inability to 'break out' details uncomfortable, and the thinner versions of the cord gets wrapped around things in the cockpit. Getting a decent picture requires the combiner lens to be placed right next to the eye - anything interfering with that placement (such as NBC masks) makes it impossible to get a full field of view (and the "full" field of view isn't sufficient anyway You can still have your switches and dials, they'll still be programmable, but now with the option to keep them static or have them change function based on what you're looking at. I think that's cool and smoother than alt-tab'ing. Your choice is strapping your work to your face or to your lap/desk, like how you strap the time to your wrist. It's new, but not extreme. I also don't think it will be necessary for anyone to get their work done, but it may be more comfortable or effective. Just because your computer is now strapped to your face does not mean you're a slave to it and cannot unstrap it. That's is the slippery slope that everyone has to climb up off of in order to deal with the difficulties of modernity today. For better or for worse, in our own lives we have to find habits that handle isolation, distance from nature, lack of physical exercise, hustle/overwork culture, tech addiction, and mindless consumption. It's either that or you make choices to take temptations out of your life, i.e. don't strap your job to your face. (I'm also waiting for a good speech-to-text interface demo, that's the biggest need for a keyboard right now. As a programmer, I would also like spoken dialects/grammars that make speech-to-code fast)"The is a very poor system in every respect. It is heavy, sloppy, provides a poor quality picture and a narrow field of view, the monocular display is annoying and
My point exactly. The deep pockets of the defense industry has had 30 years to go "well this is a nice idea but" and instead, they largely went "nope." The F-35 has a $400k nerd helmet because there's this one Israeli company that's been going gangbusters on helmet displays ever since and there is no tech that wasn't slapped on the F-35. At an acquisition cost of $1.5b per fighter, what's a $400k helmet between friends? Cadillac first demo'd a heads-up display in 1982. GM finally put it on a Corvette in '99. What has been an obvious and necessary innovation for fighter aircraft since the DeHavilland Mosquito finally made it onto passenger aircraft in the mid '90s... and fully-farkled sports cars not long after. I'd pay extra for a HUD, and I'd pay more extra to turn off half the shit Cadillac thinks you need because the point is the disco lights, not the information. There's a logical progression in HUDs, from cutting-edge to expensive car to, probably, normie shit in the next ten years. The logical progression with AR is from "yay" to "nope" to "I guess this is a buzzword now." My switches and dials are programmable. They switch based on what I have focus on. I've got a $5k control surface that will latch to anything across two computers. I've had it for ten years. Never once - not once - have I had the slightest desire to slave it to anything but Pro Tools. Every time I download new software for it, which is often, because I've been a part of the NDA beta for the entirety of that ten years, I hit the "stop switching focus" radio button in the control software. This shit won a red dot design award in 2006 and everyone went "...nope." Nobody wants that. You think it's cool because you've never been in a position to need knobs and switches at all so it's all hypothetical to you.I'll bite. seems like apples and oranges, IHADSS tech is over 30 years old
They never pulled an iPhone out of those deep pockets. You can be sure an iPhone is in most of them today. You still have a hard time comparing a HUD built for a fighter pilot in a F-35 with an AR device built for a digital work and life-style. Keep your knobs and switches, give up a couple displays. I'm no technophile, I think there's a greater movement towards real-world experiences coming, but I think AR will be more and more common for work and entertainment.
here's Vannavar Bush describing an iPad in 1945. Again, speaking as a CAD monkey, I first used a Digitizer in 1988. UI for design predates UI for anything else; the digitizer was available before the mouse, but wasn't as widely adopted. A mouse is basically a digitizer with diarrhea and despite trackballs predating them by a dozen years, nobody really wants one. Trackpads are used on laptops because they take up less room, but if we're serious about it we still grab a mouse. Windows laptops have had touchscreens almost by default for seven or eight years now and yet touch interfaces remain largely unused. iPhones? iPhones were about the fifth generation tech device; we started with the Newton, then Windows PDAs, then Blackberries, then Windows phones, then the iPhone and the iPhone really took off because you could fuck around with it without pretending you bought it for Excel. It's all just Ubiquitous Computing which has been a buzzword since '88. Technologically? The iPhone was not a revolutionary device. The advantage of the iPhone is that it wasn't a Steve Ballmer piece of shit. More than that, it permanently killed the one thing you really need for productivity: a keyboard. So no, I don't have a hard time comparing a HUD for a fighter with a HUD for "digital work and lifestyle." The fighter ostensibly NEEDS it at any price while the "digital work and lifestyle" crew can be talked into buying it. This is a utility discussion through and through. My argument is "if we needed that we'd have it by now" and your argument is "well we have it now surely we'll find something to do with it." Nah. Doesn't work that way. iPhones and iPads recognize that nobody really needed computers for more than facebook, instagram and youtube so now that's all anybody uses them for. I've got grown women in their '30s on my payroll who are fucking flabbergasted by email because it's just not a part of their lives. Roughly a third of the patients we call at any given time have full mailboxes that can't accept messages because voicemail is simply not a part of their horizon. Our utilization of technology has gone down over the past 20 years while our consumption of technology has gone up; we're doing more with less. Nerd helmets run contrary to this trend. You won't hate Zoom less if it's on your face. Spreadsheets will be no cooler, and if seeing Youtube videos that fill a wall is what you want, you can buy two 85" Sony LCD TVs for less than the Apple thing. For that matter, you can buy a 76" LCD for less than a Meta Quest 2, so most people do.