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.