That thing that gets me is just how weak the scenarios were in their promotional videos.
After building this device, the best that they could offer as benefits were viewing 3D photographs of your children, looking at multiple screens around you, or watching a single large screen for a movie or photo-browsing. (I mean, they showed somebody browsing the web. Why even dedicate time your video to show that?)
It feels like they're either out of ideas or really playing it safe. I'm guessing they do want to make "fetch" happen but don't really know how and are just going to bet on third party devs creating some killer app they haven't thought of. They've certainly got the time and money to work it out over the next few years.
This sounds indeed like Apple doesn't know what it might be good for, while hoping app developers will find some novel use case.
Otherwise it will not be much more than an AR window manger.
this is a new general purpose computing device, so most of the regular things you might do with a laptop would be doable here. Of course the difference here is that you have an immersive view and a nearly unlimited screen to work with and one where you can seamlessly blend the virtual and physical world. I think that is going to be transformative for the existing applications and will open up a space for other activities that we haven’t seen yet.
If it's as good as sold I actually do wonder how chess websites will deal with it. Faster input technology has been a problem before: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/35358/why-is-liche...
Otherwise, I think Apple's focus on "spatiality" is what is key.
But what they did get right was the hardware and operating system itself and the fact that it needs to be boring and “just work”.
As a young 3d artist and software engineer I just desperately want it, and want to develop for it. I want to walk around in my 3d creations and want to let other people experience what I can envision in my head.
While I don’t see it being as big of a leap as the desktop computer, internet or smartphone in terms of _productivity_, I do think enabling creativity is the “killer” app.
Imagine building and playing with an unlimited world like Minecraft or with LEGO bricks, right in your living room :)
Personally I’m building an app that allows me to put my 3D art from Blender into AR on the Meta Quest Pro [0], and it’s so much fun to do. It gives me a childlike joy to walk through my own creations and share them with others.
Anyway, I got a bit carried away, but I feel like HN is quite pessimistic about AR and VR, and want to give some positive counter views.
I'm disappointed that Apple is focused so much on office productivity AR, I'd rather be transported somewhere else in space and time with VR - not marginally more productive at work. But still crossing fingers that this is the start of something.
While paying lip service to "Spacial computing" their product name is "Vision", so the core of it arguably the display part and they'll be pushing it as viewing device more than anything (I like TheVerge's "Apple made a TV" headline). And VR staying a minor platform only used as a display will be totally fine by them, they'll just keep selling computers on the side.
PS: For comparison, this was the pitch for Hololens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqFqtAJMtYE
But if you want to displace the iPhone/smartphone it has to be 1000x better, which today's tech simply can't do yet.
If the glasses that I'm wearing right now could become an AR device at Vision Pro's abilities then take-my-money would be in full swing and easily displace the iPhone as the "center of our lives" computing device.
Smartphones went from "Pointless waste of time" to "Inevitable and incomprehensibly-important technology" overnight when that happened. Jobs had the sense to understand that, probably as a result of prior misfires with things like the Newton. Cook, well, not so much.
Ignoring price for a moment (remember that early Apple computers cost $11,000 in today's money), Vision Pro is positioned for general computing, including games, and has a vibrant App Store so there's actually something to do.
All you can do to alleviate it is close your eyes. You can't rest them by gazing out the window, across the room. Things you do naturally without realizing, that give your eyes a break.
In my experience this is as much an issue as headset physical comfort. In fact it's the one aspect that prevents me wearing a headset beyond a couple of hours.
(Plus it is a real pain to drink coffee, have a snack, open the mail; all the little side tasks we tend to do at desks)
Please tell me we'll have a virtual window app for the VP that will simulate looking out a window. Anywhere. And it'll be touted as a way to rest your eyes without removing the VP.
That's quite a claim that I've seen no evidence for in the years I've been using and following this industry.
Actually the light hitting your eyes is much dimmer that you are regularly exposed to all the time so...
With VR I could easily do (when I had the time) a full day (~12 hours), with only a single 15 minute food/washroom break in the middle and no signs of discomfort at all.
Wait until folks catch on that by being aware of your environment, using the washroom doesn’t require leaving AR.
As to having a drink or snack or other activities, the crown control lets you dial in more or less of the real world around you and let you choose the degree of blending.
What do you imagine people doing that isn't done about as well on some other Apple device? I can sort of get the gaming use case; I think it's wildly oversold, but it's legitimately different. But even Apple's launch video doesn't suggest that general computing will be notably improved here.
The actual potential "killer app" is something like a holodeck: a movie that it puts you inside of so there isn't any screen at all.
The problem is that the only part of their $3500 device that is better for this than an oculus quest is the screen resolution. All of that other stuff makes operating menus and AR aspects better, things that are useful for tasks you can already do on a device 1/4 the price.
> The actual potential "killer app" is something like a holodeck: a movie that it puts you inside of so there isn't any screen at all.
We'll see how this turns out, as Hollywood is doing a lot of VR experimentation. But most modern movies will not translate at all to VR, because they control attention and aesthetic experience very precisely, all based on the constraint of the viewing frame.
I think the experiences compatible with a user looking around as a facehugger display allows will have to be much more like dioramas. They may be very interesting, but they won't be movies.
As a Quest Pro owner, that is exactly what a headset needs. Passthrough on the quest is a blurry, noisy mess that feels like looking through two original iPhone cameras attached to your eyes. The VR part is great currently, and you get that “for free” if your screens/cameras can do an impressive AR mode. I can work in VR mode on the quest, but the AR mode gets way too distracting when you can’t read a phone notification that popped up on the device in your peripherals.
The screens aren’t the only upgrade though, hand tracking on the quest is mediocre currently, doing simple hand gestures requires me to do them repeatedly often as they don’t get recognized. Eye gaze + small gestures on the Vision Pro are the “pinch to zoom” moment of the VR space.
Hand tracking and eye gestures are really nice to have for sure and they make navigating menus feel like actual magic, but again the vast vast majority of what I'm doing when I'm wearing a headset is not navigating menus. This is the point I was making: I don't highly value navigation because if there IS an application in that style I'm probably just going to do it on a phone or PC, menus are not immerse and gain nothing from existing in 3d space.
If I want to move around in a virtual space that's larger than the physical space I'm in I essentially need a controller for smooth movement unless I'm going to be making constant hand gestures.
Also, I'm skeptical that immersion matters all that much. People manage to get quite immersed in their phones, after all.
And I'll again point you to phones. Despite tablets, laptops, and ever-larger TVs, people spend an awful lot of time on those small, rigidly bound rectangles.
We'll find out! And as a UI geek and someone who enjoys exploring new tech, I'm totally gonna buy it, though I reservations about its commercial success.
Or do you mean you can install iPhone apps? That's a completely different thing and makes your statement highly misleading
Also, are you implying that the Quest App Store is somehow not "vibrant"?
There are many reasons why I am super excited about the Vision Pro, but the App Store do not number among them
There are some enthusiastic people who use HMD (like Quest Pro) over 10 hours everyday for virtual display. Though currently the number of people is far less than Blackberry era.
That's probably a big reason Apple has ignored the current VR market segment.
In the UK Blackberry and BBM remained very popular for a long time.
That Blackberry was additively used for email (even in a business setting) implies a lot of use for friends. The crackberry addicts were emailing their friends, who were likely also work colleagues, fellow execs, etc.
That's when the "Please excuse the typos, sent from my mobile device" became popular too.
The visual exp will b better.
But if your prediction is correct, then I think we'll have some better use cases than looking at fake screens. That's my bet.
Better visual exp is worth it alone. It doesn’t need 2 b better than that.
All useful perceived vision will b 2D plane. Stone tablet, paper workstation, crt monitor, lcd, vr. All showing 2d planes
The reason why I would prefer to use a real screen is that I (imagine) the visual experience to be better. At least we agree about the reason.
Going back to the original analogy, while you could argue about the iphone in terms of price maybe, it was undeniable that it was flat out better than a feature phone in every possible way.
Like...
> the analogy feels so off the mark here to be downright misleading.
I mean, come on, you're obviously nitpicking here.
It's not 100% the same, but the parallel between having devices that were basically dumb phones -> internet computers is there, and there was no real indication at the time that a smart phone like blackberry would become a mass market device. None. Zero.
It was a niche device for rich people; most people were, and let's be absolutely honest here, absolutely, perfectly OK with simple feature phones, sending text messages and making calls.
So, the analogy here is pretty clear; once the device existed, it created a market that didn't exist or maybe extended a tiny market that already existed, but come onnnnnnnn, is it really that epic a stretch to imagine that it might happen again? ...can you not imagine this as a gen1 device that improves over time?
It is really so completely different?
I don't think it is.
I'm not convinced it will, but the parallel is not nearly as misleading as you're making it out to be.
Here's what I think is interesting: People want this is fail.
Lots of people. Not because they don't like apple. Not because they don't like VR. They just seem to hate it because its expensive and people are being positive about it and they feel like it's somehow wrong for apple to be:
- Selling something this expensive
- That is a risky bet that might not play out
- That people are willing to talk about favorably on the basis of the Apple brand.
...but, here's the thing right?
1) Who cares? They're rich. Let them fail.
2) Apple has the brand it has because it can deliver, and it has delivered in the past.
What kind of numpy stands here and thinks... "Oh gee, these guys at Apple are stupid. They're never going to sell these. They'll regret this. Look at all their failed products and their unsuccessful business. Haha!"
> I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.
...if some people are excited and enthusiastic about it...
...let them be enthusiastic about it?
In Finland, mobile internet was already a big thing during the dot-com boom. The early attempts failed, because the hardware wasn't ready. Regardless, "mobile portal" remained one of the big buzzwords, and even taxi drivers knew that the mobile was the future. In a few years, new phones got color displays, cameras, 3G connections, and GPS receivers. Ordinary people bought them, because flagship phones were cheaper than they are today. And then mobile internet started finally making sense. I remember using the local public transit journey planner on my phone in 2005 or 2006 to determine the right stop after taking an unfamiliar bus.
I don't know. Holding a phone in your hand is very different than putting something directly onto your face.
> I will happily go on the record as saying that this will be as revolutionary as the iPhone, perhaps even more so.
> But it's going to be a hit. HN is going to be swamped with "How I used Vision Pro to..." posts when it comes out.
> Well fuck me. This thing looks absolutely insane. It’s come in at $3499 and if it performs as good as those videos make out then, if anything, it’s a bargain.
> I think Apple designed an incredible piece of hardware here
No, not really. Like Steve Jobs said, smartphones weren't very "smart". Most people did not have blackberries (those that did have Blackberries, were mostly business users). The rest of us that were technically savvy were playing some crappy java games(the ones allowed by mobile carrier stores), and browsing the web with WAP browsers in our flip phones. Most people were not even doing any of that. And why would they? The experience was terrible.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
Using the same metric, people already use VR headsets, and just "want them to be better". Sure, the marketshare is a fraction of phone marketshare(https://www.statista.com/statistics/677096/vr-headsets-world...). But we can argue that most headsets are tethered to high end PCs, Meta's version is one of the few decent standalone versions.
Apple's device has lots of potential. It's all about the execution now, and subsequent devices.
In my experience, practically nobody. I agree that the Vision Pro is a technological marvel, but it's still a solution looking for a problem, and it's striking to me how even Apple had a difficult time presenting actually compelling use cases in their videos.
To be clear, I think there are some viable uses: gaming obviously, and potentially media consumption, but even there this solution is so much worse than a home theater system (as another commenter mentioned, I can get a group of people together in my house to all watch a movie on a big screen TV that costs much less than the headset that each of my friends would also have to own).
The difference, IMHO, is that those with pre-iPhone smart phones were largely business users who didn't have a choice. Not that there weren't exceptions - I'm sure many had personal smart phones - but I vividly remember (in both Europe and the US) conversations with friends where the idea of paying for a data plan was considered the height of absurdity and would never happen for personal use.
Retconning phone history as if there was nothing between flip phones and first iPhone, or that transition time was short is dishonest.
(Also, Blackberry was big for UK teenaged girls due to free BBM)
The product is not designed for gamers for instance but provides a VR interface for pretty much your everyday iPhone/Mac/Watching movies use.
Personally the thought of people putting that on as soon as they get home/in office or even in the street is somehwat nightmarish but I think they're hoping for something like that...
"where the iPhone was a more-or-less drop-in replacement for the phone you already had, nine years after Meta bought Oculus, VR is still a new device and a new category for almost everyone. Indeed, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984, and most people didn’t know why they needed one."
While I think the statement here is generally accurate, the analogy feels so off the mark here to be downright misleading.
The pre-iPhone cellphone and "mobile internet device" era was totally different than the current VR/AR era. Most importantly, people actually used their devices all the time, they just wanted them to be better. There was a reason they called them "Crackberries" - Blackberry fans were on them 24/7, and they got tons of utility from them. There was none of this "If we build it, I hope they'll come" feeling of the current VR/AR era.
Honestly, it saddens me to think that technology used to be about solving problems for humanity and has morphed into more of this "What substances can we sell to the masses that are sufficiently addictive to make our stock price go up?"
I fully understand how much Meta, Apple and others "want to make fetch happen". Many of us are simply just not interested.