Watch movies, play tabletop games, exercise, play existing video games, visualize interior design, attend a virtual concert, etc etc

All of those are use cases, and obvious ones.

Your argument is “none of these seem compelling to me” (you’re not pulling) which is fine, but don’t ignore the comment’s point that they could soon be compelling to you (which is why they’re being pushed).

This is especially true for network effect based use cases like Oculus is shooting for - even Facebook was useless until “everybody” was on it

> Watch movies, play tabletop games, exercise, play existing video games, visualize interior design, attend a virtual concert, etc etc

Literally all of those are possible with your cell phone at slightly lower fidelity. We're not talking about zero to one applications here. Cell phone fundamentally unlocked new applications via mobile connected GPS, computer, camera, screen, accelerometer, internet. Fidelity is not worth as much as people think to as many people as they think. 3D TVs were a flop. People still play and watch low res cell shaded games and movies.

To expand on this, it seems like the majority of people I know actually prefer consuming media on small screens, especially if I include people under 20 in that assessment.

On top of that so far VR only offers a bigger screen and can’t actually produce high fidelity images. My 4K TV has more pixels and produces a clearer picture with more detail and resolution. Only offering bigger doesn’t feel like a good selling point or revolutionary change.

I think unique games like Beatsaber (which I fucking love and play regularly) are an example of a completely new use case unlocked as a possibility because of VR but those are only compelling to a small percentage of people. VRs big problem is it hasn’t found a similar completely new experience that’s not just a new way to do existing things moderately better (often only in a some areas while being worse in others) and is actually compelling to a large audience. Until it does the potential audience is going to remain small.

> Beatsaber

That's what I'm talking about - this is a clear use case. Another example I can think of would be remote surgery.

You're exactly right though - the big problem is that it hasn't found the killer app yet. Something will probably materialize eventually, but it's not clear yet.

But Beat Saber is not fundamentally different from DDR.

Yea I mean the point is that all of those already existed in other (worse) forms or were added later

Fwiw, I’m a VR bear overall, but the idea that it’s somehow “not new” feels wild to me, like saying ChatGPT isn’t new because we’ve had chatbots for ages. Like, yea man but the preexisting stuff sucked lmao

The difference is ChatGPT is objectively better in every possible measure compared to what was available in the past with zero downsides to using it instead of old stuff. It’s also a lot better.

VR so far only offers experiences that are moderately better in some ways (bigger screen, more immersive experience) while being objectively worse in others (heavy sweaty headset, lower resolution, nausea/headaches, high cost or be locked into a FB run ecosystem).

It won’t explode the way LLMs and other AI has lately until it solves the negative factors it has. I say this as someone who uses VR regularly and figured most of this out from feedback from my normie friends and family.

Exactly. Revolutions usually happen because the friction to adoption is near-zero. If so, your benefits can even be modest!

The cost of using ChatGPT vs older chatbots was... nothing.

Once there are downsides, people weigh them and you lose chunks of your potential adoption base.

You’re using 2 different measuring sticks.

Oculus Pro is objectively better in all possible ways than other VR headsets (but has trade offs vs substitutes, like regular screens).

ChatGPT is objectively better in all possible ways than other chatbots (but has trade offs vs substitutes, like google search).

That comparison is wrong too though, the importance isn’t the “things” it’s the experiences and use cases those things provide.

VR headsets provide “large scale 2D experiences” and “immersive 3D experiences”. The resolutions on all VR headsets means for the first it’s objectively worse in a lot of ways, namely fidelity and detail. I agree the second one is a new experience and use case (I really like VR and have two different headsets I use regularly), but the only actual new thing is the “3D” part. People find plenty of other stuff immersive. Heck books provide that for a lot of people. That 3D part just isn’t enough, you can ask all of my friends and family that have tried my Index, said “wow that’s really cool” and then never buy a headset themselves.

ChatGPT provides a bunch of new use cases with regard to chat, text editing/manipulation/analysis, and knowledge recall/generation while also being significantly better and faster than Google with regard to finding answers or information. Meanwhile AI image generation has completely changed art and image creation to a ridiculous degree. I have friends and family asking me how concerned they should be about AI taking their jobs in fields as varied as writing, art/design, law, and medicine.

I do think in the future VR could reach the point where it’s that revolutionary, I just don’t feel like the two compare well now. VR is currently more like those old chatbots mentioned.

Those are all things you can already do! And big, nice screens are already very cheap.

The Vision Pro's problem is that it lets you do something you can already do "some percent better."

But "some percent better" isn't what any of the companies pushing this need, because that doesn't translate into the volumes they need to sell.

"Fundamentally different" does, but no one has described any use case like that.

Examples of "fundamentally different" would be "taking the ability to make and receive phone calls with you, wherever you go" or "taking the ability to browse the web with you, wherever you go."

All things can be described as “some percent better”

For what it’s worth, the fitness use case is 0 to 1 because a million people are saying “I didn’t exercise; now I do; Oculus is why”

No fitness > fitness is 0 to 1

In what way was the iPhone “fundamentally different,” by your definition? Its functionality all existed in a blackberry / mp3 player. It was just “some percent better” at everything - especially interaction - that unlocked all the apps we have today, no?

There's a difference between "infinite percent better" (because it was non-existent before) and "some percent better."

The fitness use case is a red herring and a software problem. Instilling motivation in people to do things they know are good but don't want to isn't traditionally a money-maker. You're building a better shame-er: how's Peloton doing these days? https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PTON/financials?p=PTON (and that is "fundamentally different"!)

The iPhone as initially released isn't the iPhone brand success we see today, looking back: that's the iPhone + iTunes + App Store.

Which explains why similarly featured hardware didn't experience iPhone success.

That combination was fundamentally different, because it allowed you to easily do the 3 things most people wanted to on their phones (browse the web, listen to music, get a specific app).

At the time, 2008, there was no competition for that.

It would be until ~2010 that Android even launched rough (very rough) parity: HTC Nexus One/Samsung Galaxy S + Google Music + Android Marketplace

Two. Years.

I’m gonna be honest, I just sincerely have no idea what you mean by “fundamentally different.”

Like, Peloton is an exercise bike. A cool one! A great brand and experience! But it’s an exercise bike.

And it’s somehow more “fundamentally different” than this device that is trying to materialize sci fi?

I guess I just don’t get it

I'd say Peloton is as fundamentally different... as you can get within the fitness category. Absolutely agreed: its an exercise bike with adjustable resistance and integrated, network-connected stats. In objective terms, not fundamentally different.

But if even it's having trouble financially, fitness isn't a great category to win with technology. Branding and advertising, absolutely! (Nike?) But not tech.

Beat saber is not fundamentally different from DDR. I love both.

But that "some percent better" has a tipping point. MP3 players and Camera's in a mobile phone only matter to most when the capacity, quality, and battery life were good enough. Once they were, they were everywhere, and that was revolutionary. (The iPhone as such was just a better version)

The Apple Vision Pro is an impressive improvement. But I'm skeptical its at that tipping point. Making the tech work in a pair of regularly sized glasses, that don't need plugged in or a heavy battery, yet has similar functionality, would push it much closer to reality. No regular person is strapping one of these on to interact with the world as is. IMHO its current stage is: a very impressive toy. Which is totally fine -- with what's at stake and Apple's market position and cash, it makes total sense to try and be the leader here, until it materializes into the next thing or fizzles out. Either position is likely acceptable to Apple.

I strongly disagree that only 100% novel uses are meaningful, and I disagree even more that “phone calls anywhere” or “web anywhere” are meaningful — nobody care about phone calls or the web. They care about what those enable: talking to people or doing research or shopping or whatever.

But, sure, fundamentally different: being able to surround yourself with any environment you want. Being able to navigate that environment with physical movement. Seeing a movie that exists in a sphere around you.

You may not want those things, just like my mom could not understand why anyone would want a smartphone, but that does not mean other people get no value.

That's the catch though: existing, screen-based solutions let your surround yourself with any environment you want. ("Some percent worse")

What's fundamentally different about AR/VR is that it lets you do that... while being anywhere.

But! The cost of doing it (putting on the goggles) is a direct and serious degradation of your physical experience of wherever you physically are.

So we have a device that's key value proposition is -- it lets you have your nice home media experience, out in the world, at the cost of losing the sensation of the world.

... but then why do I want to do that out in the world, instead of at home, on the couch, like Apple's demos are?

... and if I'm doing it on the couch, it has to compete directly with high fidelity existing solutions.

The mobile component is effectively worthless, until the hardware is capable of augmenting physical reality instead of muffling it. (Read: magic AR eyeglasses)

There does exists one very particular type of user for whom the above is valuable: the business traveler.

But that's not enough volume (especially now) to meaningfully contribute to Apple's revenue.

If I were Apple, I would have taken a page out of Blackberry/Bloomberg's success book and made a flagship launch app a very polished "Vision Pro iMessage, with 3d presence" and worked the social network angle. Call any important person during business hours, with presence, instantly, would be fundamentally different. (Especially with an AI agent if they're unavailable)

Do photons have a soul? On the surface level I kind of get the argument that headsets with camera passthrough are "artificial". The light that you see isn't the light that you're supposed to see, it's been captured by a photosensor, processed into data, projected and output on a display. Scary music cue, what a total dystopia. But if it gets to the point where you can't actually tell, does it matter?

Maybe it does to you, maybe a lot of people, but calling it degradation is still a subjective call.

> But, sure, fundamentally different: being able to surround yourself with any environment you want. Being able to navigate that environment with physical movement. Seeing a movie that exists in a sphere around you.

I agree there are some people that want it (I am one of those people, Beatsaber changed my life). The issue is the number of those people isn’t that large yet. I know this because pretty much all of my friends and family that tried my Index have said “wow that’s really cool!” and later none of them go buy a headset. It’s just not compelling enough to buy for most normal people yet.

It's the same fundamental reason that Forza and Grand Turismo is more popular than VR iRacing: For the vast majority of people, the goal is FUN, not authenticity or """immersion"""/fidelity and accuracy of simulation. A game that is "simulatorish" and easy to use with a controller, and has lots of average cars that normal people can connect with.

VR has proven itself pretty much only in VR racing and VR flying, where it provides an impossible to compete with improvement in experience, but at a huge cost and COMMITMENT. It takes effort to put on a headset, set aside some space, and commit to being "away from reality" for a bit

You can't get an IMAX screen for cheap, nor can you easily extend rooms to fit bigger TVs. Often the view from a couch isn't particularly optimal because so many living rooms have been built to accommodate dinky 20" sets of 30 years ago. It's also not easy to take a big screen TV from your living room and mount it to your bedroom ceiling, or watch something out on the balcony.

Laptops screens are small not because people want small screens, but that the form factor requires it. What if you could take the 30" display or multimonitor setup you have set up at your home office anywhere in your home? Anywhere in the world? Why bother with an iPad to watch movies on a flight when you can have a full cinema experience?

Because the HMD is heavy, the battery sucks and you look like an idiot when using it. All true, but the one stupid bet to make on computing technology is that it won't get smaller, faster and more efficient over time.

> You can't get an IMAX screen for cheap

> What if you could take the 30" display or multimonitor setup

The issue is VR doesn’t provide this either. Yes, it can provide screens the same size or larger, but IMAX currently provides 8K or higher resolution, my three monitors are each 4K, and even the screens in the Vision Pro can’t match that level of detail or fidelity regardless of how big the virtual screens are.

It’s the same reason people didn’t buy gigantic TVs back when the resolution was 480p or lower, bigger alone is not better, especially when combined with the problems you documented.

I say this as someone who uses VR regularly and has bought two headsets so far. I do agree that in the future the tech will probably reach a point it’s able to provide image quality that’s good enough and solve all of its negative factors. It’s also possible the Vision Pro reaches the necessary bar, no one has really tried it yet. But for the normies VR just hasn’t reached a compelling level yet.

Vision Pro might not be able to match 8K (yet) but based on the specifications it should be able to hit a level of pixel fidelity close to 4K with an IMAX sized screen. The vast majority of movies exist with only 2K digital masters available, with quite a lot of "4K" content being upscaled. This is the case even with new releases. My local cinema, a rather big chain, still has 2K projectors in the vast majority of their theaters. For film and TV content I don't see the resolution of the Vision Pro to be problem. For desktop use where screens are usually smaller I guess we'll see how close it gets, but even if it doesn't hit full 4K fidelity, ~1440p at ~32" inches is still plenty usable, particularly if desktop real estate is unlimited.

There were plenty of large format standard definition sets, they were just either way too big (CRTs) or rear projection (worse picture quality, which is saying something for 480i). DVD is SD and was a dominant format for a significant amount of time after the rapid rise of HD flatscreens. TVs got big because the technology allowed for it without requiring TVs to be installed via forklift or crane, not because people didn't want a big picture.

I've used a bunch of headsets too and it baffles me when people with plenty of time wearing these bricks can't extrapolate those experiences out, it doesn't require a whole lot of imagination. The Quest 2/Pro aren't cutting edge and their UI is jank, but even with the shitty passthrough it's pretty clear (to me at least) how virtual screens can be useful based on my experience with them.

> ...anywhere in your home... Anywhere in the world... on a flight...

See my comment down below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257804

if they can make me feel like I'm having a face to face conversation with someone who lives hours away then that would be fundamentally different

> those are all things you can already do!

Yes, think about being able to do it remotely AND still have presence ie imagine being able to still hangout with your college buddies or extended family for game night who live hundreds or thousands of miles away

> play tabletop games

I've played hundreds of hours of Tabletop Simulator (a game on Steam, if that's not clear) outside VR and it works great.

Tabletop Simulator also supports VR, I tried it a few times but it really didn't add anything. And honestly using a mouse and keyboard to click on board game pieces, select cards, and so on is far more precise and low effort than grabbing things with my hands.

I game regularly in VR and I believe in it, but not for board games or tabletop games.

iPhones didn't solve any "problems" per se, but they unquestionably ushered in a new era in smartphone user interfaces. And the public wasn't clamoring for a touchscreen phone, Apple just made one up and told everyone it was the best thing ever. And it was. The touchscreen is, for nearly 99% of uses, just better. In the same vein, you'd have to be pretty bereft of imagination to not see how AR/VR promises an incredibly useful and exciting approach to interfaces.

Instead of staring down at a tiny device or simply wracking your brain in desperation any time you need information about something in the world around you (driving/walking direction, business hours, the history of a sculpture in an art gallery, the name of an acquaintance approaching you down the sidewalk, etc.), imagine that the information is just... there. In the environment with you. That is incredibly useful, and is an incredible way to interact with information. Imagine cooking along to a recipe laid out on the countertop in front of you, with generative AI guiding you through different techniques (or even helping you change a tire on a busy roadside).

Instead of needing bunches of different tiny screens for bunches of different use cases (I wake up and sit at my medium work screen, sometimes scroll my tiny screen, go home and sit on the couch and watch my large screen, maybe over the weekend I'll catch a movie on the extra large screen), you just need a single device that produces exactly the screen and environment you want. That's the promise of VR. I could be on a cramped flight watching a movie on an Imax screen or writing code with 3 separate monitors in front of me.

We could go on and on and on just imagining excited scenarios where AR/VR would provide an incredible way to interact with tech. It all just hinges on how well it can be done.

I see the vision you’ve laid out. The idea of “the information is just… there” sounds useful to me, too. Maybe it’s even the next step in computing.

The hurdle to overcome in my opinion is the form factor. Everyone walking around wearing ski goggles is a deal breaker to me. Glasses, maybe; or even better, contacts. Right now that size technology is more sci-fi than reality, and I suspect it will be a very long time before we reach that (if we ever do).

It’s also important to keep in mind that information availability isn’t the end goal. The purpose of having more information is to improve other aspects of our lives so we can reach our goals more effectively. We want big data so we can optimize for outcomes of our choosing. We want to understand the natural world so we can use it for our benefit.

Connectedness to information does not benefit us if it comes at the cost of having face-to-face interactions with each other, IMO. A lot of people think in-person conversation has gotten worse since the advent of smartphones because they steal peoples’ attentions. Imagine the extent of that dynamic when everyone is always-connected and it is impossible to discern who is paying attention.

If a set of vr hardware can make it so I can work as ergonomically from my patio as from my desk I will throw money at it.

Doesn’t strapping on a VR helmet kind of counteract the fun of being outside? Might as well just load up a nice outdoor scene as your background environment

One wouldn’t even need to go outside to want it. This could be the ultimate standing desk — one that you can bring with you to the kitchen or to the basket of laundry.

Why would you want to bring your desk into the kitchen or to the basket of laundry?

Not being flippant -- I really think that's the big question.

Current AR/VR (Vision Pro included) lets us do desk things at not-desk places, but why would I want to do that?

Only you can say why you would, so I can't help you there.

But, for me, for example: to GSD around the house while one needs to be in a Zoom, so that menial chores aren't waiting for me when I'm off work. Even Airpods let me do that somewhat now, but at the expense of missing slides or what's being shared on someone's desktop.

I enjoy the breeze and sun. Plus the smell of my garden

No, a desktop background doesn't come within 100 miles of being physically on your patio when it's nice out (or when it's terrible out; either way, it's not the same experience).

Alright well then I'll bite.

I'm in operational technology and deal with a lot of on-site tech, such as SCADA, factories, even stuff on trains or planes.

We have 3D lidar mapped files of factories that are scaled in such a way that users can throw on VR and "walk" through the facility and figure things out. It's not completely mature but it's pretty good, and there have been talks about putting a camera on a scooter and letting engineers remotely drive though the place in real-time -- not just the static files.

What do you do with it? erognomics engineering, looking at flows of goods, processes, etc.

Telepresence devices have been a thing for years. No VR or AR needed.

Still waiting for a Visicalc for AR.

I am sure I read similar comments around 2008 - "We have phones with internet connectivity, phones with touchscreens and phones with apps. No iPhone needed".

And yet, here we are. iPhone truly revolutionized phone market and was the first real smartphone.

Enjoy a couple very similar HN discussions about the iPhone from 2007:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19185

Why I Don't Think The iPhone Will Sell Very Well (mattmaroon.com) 8 points by mattmaroon on May 4, 2007 | 11 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394

Why iPhone Will Win (kedrosky.com) 15 points by far33d on April 24, 2007 | 7 comments

Ding ding!

You didn't mention it, but same thing is true for remote surgery applicatons.

Telepresence for subject matter experts is a fundamentally new application that is unlocked by AR/VR tech. To nitpick, its more of an industry application rather than a consumer one(apple/meta releasing consumer-targeted products because the market is bigger) - but you're right that it's a good use case. Particularly in time-sensitive cases where industry would have to wait days to fly someone out when they need help immediately. To be fair though... a cell phone video call can already get you maybe half of the way there I'd say(where VR still might only get you to 80% given you cant smell/touch).

The use case I want is showing me someone's name and s few notes I wrote previously about them. I'd be so much more comfortable at parties. Creepier, too.

Ok, working out is really boring for me. I also don’t have the time to participate in team sports. What AR VR brings me is a fun way to do cardio exercise. Instead of just using a boring cycle or treadmill, I get to box someone in a ring, fight monsters, or dodge bullets and arrows

To date, I’ve lost 10-15 lbs