The only strong argument for Rift/etc. would be for gaming, but the AVP isn’t being sold as a gaming device. The new beta Vision OS2 also signicantly improves hand gestures.
I too was unimpressed with the Apple Store AVP demo, but after owning it for a while I absolutely see where it fits in (especially once a non-Pro version comes along).
But strapping a heavy display to your head so that you can interact with the same flat 2d windows? I don’t get it.
Seeing Vision Pro at WWDC was like a deja-vu from BUILD a couple of years earlier.
This has an interesting history. I’m struggling to find it and hope I have it right. John Gruber or maybe Accidental Tech Podcast did a segment on an podcast ages ago in relation to accessibility settings on the iPhone.
Whoever it was credited a particular Apple engineer who pushed hard with accessibility features arguing that at some point, everyone has some sort of issue (sight, hearing, movement etc).
I’ve tried, but can’t find the episode, which is a shame as this sort of thing is Apple at its best, which does get lost in the swamp of depressing decisions they have made in recent years.
John for a bit @ 1:11:44
Casey and John @ 1:15:30 "The more time you spend on this planet the more likely one of these features will be useful for you"
Since then I always see accessibility thinking as a universal benefit, not just for the “abled”.
Case in point: I put off getting a new prescription, and ended up setting the font size up + enabling bold text on my iPhone. The first party apps often don't work well.
Of everything on my phone, GasBuddy handled it best. It's basically unusable with large fonts, but it suggested I go into per-app settings and disable display accessibility settings just for it. Now that I know that's a thing, I can blacklist the 90% of apps on the phone that don't display right, I guess.
Since the new glasses arrived, I'll probably just disable accessibility. However, my experience doesn't bode well for people that actually need reading glasses and want to use their phones when they're out and about.
One of the main reasons most apps do poorly here is our designers and PMs NEVER think about anything other than the standard size iPhone at normal font size in light mode. This is true at every company i worked at.
In Apple 1p apps the reason is also that the codebase is 15 years old now and very hard to make adaptive.
I keep most of my browsing slightly zoomed in, especially on the laptop, and I get all sorts of glitches now and then.
Incidentally HN is Just Fine(tm).
Disabling the annoying needless animations on iOS is in Accessibility for some reason.
‘Accessibility’ is where the setting is because turning the feature off stops them being disabled... maybe?
Were you wearing some field-of-view limiting device at the time?
Sure, it wasn’t as ubiquitous as iOS or Android now, but it obviously filled a niche for a large enough number of people that it stuck around and pioneered that market. I had a Kyocera 6035 Palm “smartphone” over half a decade before the iPhone came out, and the Handspring Treos were also awfully popular among early adopters.
That credit here goes squarely to Oculus/Meta, and the Quest in specific.
Vision Pro, at best, is a Newton, stuffed with tech cool enough to be Really Neat, but with either too much tradeoff or that doesn’t go far enough to be a sea change in usability. There’s a little bit of Pippin in there too, with Apple not quite understanding how much games and game like activities drive VR adoption and how best to leverage that. Ultimately, the Vision Pro is a tech demo for a much better device and ecosystem in the future.
I think the one thing the VP has going for it over a Newton is timing. For once, later is better. Newton did all their stuff way early—then Palm came out with a fraction of it and turned out to be Good Enough so everyone forgot the Newton.
In this case, we already have Quest out as the Good Enough device, which makes it the right time to start discussing what the evolution would be. In that sense, I think the Vision Pro is very interesting.
I'm still a bit meh on the Apple Watch in spite of buying an early one and then an Ultra that I got a good deal on. I don't care much about the quantified health thing and the battery life is still an issue even with the Ultra. Like for hiking though.
The Palm equivalent in that comparison would be Fitbit and possibly Pebble. Apple waited until there was a proven market in wearables, then figured out how to combine that market with the strengths of their existing ecosystem to improve upon value. Then they propped up the model line with $$$ until they actually became good enough for people to buy.
I’m relatively optimistic they can do that here too, but that device needs to have a model that does everything it does today (well, maybe not the creepy visor eyes) and more for less than $1000 and at about 2/3 the weight max, before I think AW-like adoption will possibly happen.
My guess is it’s either discontinued or the 2040 Vision (non pro) is going to be strictly better in basically every way but still more than 1000$ inflation adjusted. But honestly if it’s 1/3 the weight and essentially strictly better in every way that could be quite compelling. There’s definitely a point where headsets are going to be comfortable enough you can forget they’re there, and ~2k for something you’re using regularly for 4+ years isn’t crazy money.
It makes sense as a strategy, a mid 90’s 2,000$ desktop is ~5,000$ today inflation adjusted. Few people spend that on a desktop today the market just shifts and you need to keep up. Meanwhile there’s a tiny percentage of people who just don’t care that much about money so you want something to milk such people for all they are willing to spend.
> There’s definitely a point where headsets are going to be comfortable enough you can forget they’re there
I would really like to think so, but I am not at all confident that this is will happen.
That's why Rolex watches or Prada bags sell.
The vision pro is more like buying a painting, it's way more niche.
It's an aesthetic and cultural divide. Like premium German car brands vs ricers, and I don't need to tell you which is which.
Wristwatch fitness trackers had already established this as baseline market fit long before Apple. The benefit of the Apple Watch for me is to not have to carry a phone in my pocket and still be able to do smartphone things like message, pay for things, or even make calls if I need to. Then the pandemic needed you to scan QR codes to do contract calls, and then normalized QR codes for restaurant orders, so I'm back to the phone and my watch gathers dust.
As a sibling notes, we already had had fitbit for 6 years by the time Apple came out with the Watch. They tried to make it about more than fitness and eventually conceded that that wasn't happening and focused on the market that existed before their release.
So if this plays out this same way then in a few years Apple will finally concede that VR is for video games and finally start focusing on the gamer market.
Statistically speaking, people are a lot more hesitant to switch jobs right now. That definitely points to legitimate fears (regardless of the objective economic outlook).
If they make it weigh half as much, I would buy one.
There is one group of people who are willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money for this product, and that’s gamers.
Unfortunately Apple does not and has never understood games as art. They only care about casual games that bring in the $$.
Apple also has beefs with Khronos, NVIDIA, and Epic.
I had thought that when VP came out, Apple would make amends with the gaming industry particularly Epic because they really need Epic’s on their side for VP to succeed. Who is going to build games for this thing in the best engine if Apple can ban Epic’s developer account at any time?
Nope. App Store revenue comes first. It’s just the same as the iPad Pro. Great hardware squandered because of App Store rent seeking.
Personally I’m glad Apple told both of them to go pound sand.
But the hardware isn't there yet either. If it keeps enough momentum to develop, we're going to look back at these headsets like 90s smartphones. The AVP and the Quest are heavy. They're thick. Their battery life is terrible, and despite how good Apple's screens and camera software are, they still have a long way to go in lots of areas before they really deliver on a virtual reality.
The software is probably the bigger problem, but the hardware needs a lot of help before normal people are going to use these on a regular basis.
These were old photos, many taken with older digital cameras and early smartphones, and they worked very well. I believe as long as they're of a reasonably high resolution (so, any camera from the last 20 years or even more), it'll work. Of course, it's ML-based attempting to simulate 3D from a single image, so it's not always perfect, but I didn't run into any significant failures.
Btw, to capture spatial videos, the easiest way is to use an iPhone 15 Pro (with its camera in "spatial video" mode) or the Apple Vision Pro itself. I'd guess there are ways to convert videos from other formats into this, or to use other apps to view photos/videos in non-native formats, but I'm not personally familiar.
Photos are more up in the air in part because the use and support of the Apple-pushed HEIC is much more limited than HEVC. But internally it's basically the same thing as MV-HEVC except with just the two still frames encoded instead of full videos, so any codebase that supports MV-HEVC should be able to support the 3D variant of HEIC as well without a lot of extra work over the long term.
Well, sort of. The quality of display and control hardware is there; the comfort of the device as a whole absolutely is not. And I'm saying that as one of those weirdos who will get into VR for 4-hour sessions.
It's also absolutely worse off than it could have otherwise been, to an extent way more severe than any other Apple device, by the Apple obsession with aesthetics over functionality. Even aside from the weight issues with all the glass and metal, they created the worst possible design for comfort when it comes to how it actually sits on your head.
Do you know if there are environments available that are in the redwood forest?
Also does anyone know what kind of money someone could make publishing these environments? I have some videography experience - I would be inclined to rent a high end VR camera and create some captures for Vision Pro, but it would be nice if I could sell them on the app store and earn enough to buy a Vision Pro.
I did find some discussion about how they are made, but there does not yet seem to be a documented process. https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1am8e00/how_to_c...
The idea people will be strapping computers to their faces for meetings will “take off in a huge way” any time soon is extremely far fetched for me.
The "strapping computers to their faces" meme is just stupid hyperbole. It's no more insightful than declaring that nobody wants to stuff a computer into their pocket - when 99% of people now carry smart phones (and mostly, large ones - as large as they can possibly fit).
That depends on how exactly you define "smartphone". I might still have an old Nokia brick with a little screen and a web browser lying around somewhere.
There is a fundamental disconnect in motivation here.
When VR/AR makes it, it won't be strapping what I imagine you are thinking to your face. I imagine glasses or maybe people will even entertain a visor or shield
I have an Apple Watch. Why? Because it lets me use my phone less. It is a purposefully less capable and less attention-seeking device which I can use to check the nature of a notification in a socially acceptable way and then go back to living life without pulling out my phone.
AR/VR is fundamentally having a phone strapped to your eyeballs. You’re saying “but it can be made lightweight and comfortable!” I’m saying you’re missing the whole point: I don’t want a phone strapped to my eyeballs, even if it weighed 0 g and was soft and velvety. It’s a step backwards.
I would love for that technology to exist, because I have AR applications in mind that I think could be industrially useful. But I would despise that becoming the normal mode of interface to the world, the same way I despise people having their heads in their phones all day long.
I don't turn my camera on in meetings and it's often "broken", some idiotic headset that my manager forces on me is going to be similarly buggy and "broken"...
Depends on how you define 'computer': content creation or content consumption?
Because everyone with a 'computer' in their pocket has nothing more than 'interactive television' in their pocket.
They literally do not do computing on it in any meaningful way.[1]
[1] Maybe they use the calculator. But that's about it.
The issue is a great many people just won’t want to sit wearing anything at all on their face in a meeting - especially those who may have put effort into appearance of their hair and makeup etc etc as just one of many examples.
It’s also not a “meme”, or “hyperbole”. That is literally what you have to do today and in near term with an AVP or meta Quest etc- strap a heat generating, heavy, sometimes fan cooled (AVP) computer across your face.
I mean, teams/zoom gets me 99% of the way there. I can see people, read lips. What do I gain from a "virtual environment"? Because I can already talk to people all over the world, right now. And they can share their screen and stuff. It's a pretty good system.
Business meetings in headsets is just completely delusional. It is one of the dumbest tech ideas of all time.
AVP doesn't need the webcam on.
"Inside" it, your avatar could be anywhere wearing whatever, no bed pillows, PJs, or family creeping not-so-stealthily behind you.
The barrier to using a webcam is already lower, and people routinely refuse to do it.
But thats not how either Apple or FB are approaching this. They aren't addressing what your niche is: something to give value to people in very specific need.
> It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.
Honest question, but how much was your own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories. Did you have the same feelings with other VR experiences?
But lake, snow and fake moon felt sterile in comparison. There is something about being at the top of mountain with clouds and the sun rising on the horizon that hits different.
> own brain filling up the experience and bringing back all those memories
Doubt it, but even if it was, I don't see this as a bad thing.
Do you cry when you were on the mountain the first time in real life?
If you went again in real life would you immediately cry?
Why would you cry just for seeing it again?
Was it crying because of awe of the technology?
I realized the value of something like that but tweaked with different stories and contexts. I imagine elderly people being able to live a whole other life inside something like WOW instead of withering away alone as most people tend to do. You don't even need fancy AR hardware, though that wouldn't hurt and probably has better UX than banging on a keyboard.
Really? Despite the total lack of smell, taste, random atmospheric sensations against the body and also the lack of haptic feedback?
There is a lot to consider in making VR videos.
Angles, view points, speed of movement etc.
But do you need to BUY one? This is the thing I realized with VR sets, personally.
They are a great day at the fair, but who goes to the fair EVERYDAY?
And yes, addicts exist today, but we keep inventing better and better drugs. What would be available to a peasant? Crappy beer? Now a denizen of the SF underbelly can be permanently in an alternate universe thanks to fentanyl.
Have you noticed another trend? We keep making real experiences, real food, real exercise harder to obtain and more expensive while pushing cheap imitations on the masses. VR is not going to be a happy thing that will help disabled people. It will mostly be a source of worsening inequality and a lot of suffering. The "have-nots" will be able to vicariously live the lives of the "haves", but only a fake version.
"He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sold purpose of taking a nap and his morning's exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible."
Additionally, the current issues with the Apple developer community, on a device that targets a very niche market, even more niche as Apple doesn't want to associate it with games, makes the appeal of the Vision Pro quite lacklustre for most app developers.
I believe the “just give it a few years thing” but only if it has a footnote saying that “few” could mean 10 or 15. I don’t think anyone really knows.
MacBook Pros are 50% of Mac sales and they start at $2000.
It's sitting in a weird place right now where it's too expensive for what you get, but it's fairly easy to imagine how it could improve to become something much more attractive/popular.
I’m saying there will be a market.
They need to get the weight and price down substantially.
Perhaps, but how is the price or popularity of MacBook pros particularly related to that?
until the price range becomes below $1000 or so there’s virtually no market.
I feel like there's a difference...
I feel like there's a difference...
And plus, visiting again some places could lead to ruin the previous good memory.
That's the reason to take photos, is not like someone would argue that for them..
Usually the most expensive thing is the flight, so you've got to time that well. Go to places for more than 2 weeks and in the lowest season and you can make that $1000 last a while.
The limitations are generally on the traveller's side.
Of course, if you're looking for a full paid cruise, with kids and must have perfect everything in the "best" season then you pay like the rest.
I really doubt this is true, I'm European and check this kind of stuff often.
$700 - flight + hotel for a week
I wouldn't call Africa my back yard.
Another option is fly to Greece and island hop on the ferries. Or Portugal and northern Spain. Buses are the cheapest way to get around there and fairly flexible although not quick. Sometimes you can hire a car for a week for $250, or some places hire mopeds for way less.
Yeah, you've gotta budget it, but it's not impossible to get somewhere, have a great time, and get back for under $1000.
For a newbie a meta quest 3 is more than enough.
Index or meta quest pro? That's the shit.
But i liked the battery begin a separate thing from the headset himself, i think that's good user design.
Exactly this, for now the minimal use cases for these kinds of high-end VR headsets leave them firmly in the "gimmick" category. I'm pretty sure some mass-market use case will be found for them, maybe even outside of gaming, but the fact that some pretty smart people haven't found this one already is a teensey-tiny bit worrying too.
Or to have “power holidays” similar to a Power Nap, where you use an VR/AR device to relive a holiday for 5/10 mins.
Or to have “preview holidays” to experience a destination before booking a flight there.
If travel agents still existed, then they would be a perfect market for these VR devices but travel agents have long gone the way of the dinosaurs.
If a VR set can reduce travel, then that might be something positive for the environment.
By all means if you’re willing to make that sacrifice be my guest, but I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset.
Taking a bike (when possible) instead of a car, for example. I think many things that we can do fail because of our collective convenience: why take public transport when I can have my private space in a car?
There might be low hanging fruits, but there is human convenience to take into account. Making potential low hanging fruit become had to implement.
> I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset
Most certainly it wouldn't be the same however experiencing a Venice during the Renaissance period using a VR device? That would be better than nothing and would also equate to a "type of" holiday (if done well). Its certainly not something that I can do physically.
That's not a holiday. That's a game.
Neither of these deprive you of truly transformative experiences like travel. Air travel will never be a green endeavor. It will always be something that we’ll have to compensate for elsewhere in pursuit of being carbon neutral.
I’m not willing to tell someone that they should not fly across the country to see their friend in order to be an environmentally responsible citizen. Not while we still burn coal and gas to keep the lights on.
I guess regardless where humans start, the dependency on fossil fuels is simply too vast to rollback.
Not just all of your five senses, and your ability to interact, but the social and human side as well, and your ability to interact physically with it all.
People said the same kind of things about TV - and while, on the one hand, they perhaps underestimated the profound effects of TV on society, nobody would confuse it with telepresence.
I'm not sure what VR offers here that web panoramas, detailed photos and customer reviews don't.. there's a marginal advantage there perhaps but it feels like a $250-300 peripheral rather than a $kk investment.
DonHopkins on Nov 15, 2021 | root | parent | next [–]
The iSmell developers were hoping to make money the same way, by selling big smell combination pack cartridges that you have to entirely replace after any one of the smells ran out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell
>The iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer developed by DigiScents Inc. is a small device that can be connected to a computer through a Universal serial bus (USB) port and powered using any ordinary electrical outlet. The appearance of the device is similar to that of a shark’s fin, with many holes lining the “fin” to release the various scents. Using a cartridge similar to a printer’s, it can synthesize and even create new smells from certain combinations of other scents. These newly created odors can be used to closely replicate common natural and manmade odors. The cartridges used also need to be swapped every so often once the scents inside are used up. Once partnered with websites and interactive media, the scents can be activated either automatically once a website is opened or manually. However, the product is no longer on the market and never generated substantial sales. Digiscent had plans for the iSmell to have several versions but did not progress past the prototype stage. The company did not last long and filed for bankruptcy a short time after.
This Wired Magazine article is a classic Marc Canter interview. I'm surprised they could smell the output of the iSmell USB device over the pungent bouquet from all the joints he was smoking:
You've Got Smell!
https://www.wired.com/1999/11/digiscent/
>DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution. Joel Lloyd Bellenson places a little ceramic bowl in front of me and lifts its lid. "Before we begin," he says, "you need to clear your nasal palate." I peer into the bowl. "Coffee beans," explains Bellenson's partner, Dexster Smith. […]
>"You know, I don't think the transition from wood smoke to bananas worked very well." -Marc Canter
The failed quest to bring smells to the internet (thehustle.co)
https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460
DigiScent had a booth at the 1999 Game Developers Conference, with scantily dressed young women in skunk costumes.
I told them about a game called "The Sims" I had been working on for a long time, and was hoping to finish and release some time soon.
They unsuccessfully tried to convince me to make The Sims support the iSmell, and even gave me a copy of the SDK documentation, because they thought it would enrich the player's experience of all those sweaty unwashed sims, blue puddles of piss on the floor, stopped up toilets in the bathroom, and plates of rotting food with flies buzzing around on the dining room table.
You might also be underestimating the brains ability to conjure a completely new reality. Our imagination can transport us anywhere - hence adventure, travel and crime books. VR/AR experience augmented by our own imagination, hence to discount the affect of VR is also discounting the ability of our imagination.
Of course holidays are much more but why do so many people prefer chatting online than chatting personally with other people? Why are online dating apps and food delivery so popular? I don't know but it definitely does not have something to do with people wanting to go out and interact with random people.
Not an argument. Besides, like 10-15 years in to WWW companies like amazon, google, facebook, youtube were there. 12 years after oculus rift VR is still a small niche.
> You might also be underestimating the brains ability to conjure a completely new reality. Our imagination can transport us anywhere - hence adventure, travel and crime books. VR/AR experience augmented by our own imagination, hence to discount the affect of VR is also discounting the ability of our imagination.
No, it is not discounting the ability of our imagination. It is more correct to say that you are discounting the ability of our imagination by suggesting that adventure, travel and crime books aren't all we need to immerse ourselves. By going this path of argumentation (if we can call it an argument) you are basically saying that VR is for those, well, lacking in imagination
> Of course holidays are much more but why do so many people prefer chatting online than chatting personally with other people?
Do they? I don't think they do. Chatting with someone they don't know? Maybe. Doing a video call with a friend/partner? No.
> Why are online dating apps and food delivery so popular?
You are conflating meeting (just meeting, once people meet they don't maintain their relationship on the app) someone new and not a social activity with, well, socializing with people that you want to socialize with.
> I don't know but it definitely does not have something to do with people wanting to go out and interact with random people.
You do understand that outsides is not filled only with random people?
What argument are you trying to make for VR? What use case, that would make VR "huge", are you suggesting?
That VR can provide a certain amount of immersive escape from the day to day. Just as the internet replaced certain offline activities and moved them online, I don't understand VR hasn't done the same.
Having used the Quest 2(?) which has automatic boundary detection and cameras that show you the surroundings if you step beyond those boundaries, I no longer had the worry of bumping into things. That made the experience very immersive.
So for me personally, there has been a definite improvement in the experience.
And I agree, the equipment is currently too cumbersome for the general consumer market. In addition to that, stupid vender-lock ideas such as with the Quest where you need a facebook account to use the device, also prevent the general application of the technology. (I would have bought myself a Quest if Facebook account wasn't a requirement. Vision Pro is simply too expensive.)
That doesn't mean that the technology won't one day find general application.
Also content does exist, sites such SketchFab have much free 3D content and with WebGL being generally compatiable with VR tech, it's relative easy to generate more content.
Yeck, I even worked on some code to make programming in 3D possible![1]
> What use case, that would make VR "huge", are you suggesting?
I assume you mean general consumer use-casae, there are definitely a number of use cases that are very niche.
But if I knew that, I most certainly won't share it with a public forum! ;)
If I could chat in person with the people I talk to online, I would. And sometimes, that happens. But they're typically far away (for various values of far), while also being more interesting (ditto) than many of those more nearby.
There are plenty of VR apps in this category available for PC-connected headsets. You can find tons of them on Steam or Patreon.
The immersion is really good.
Apple would never allow it in their ecosystem, but OnlyFans + immersive VR could sell very well.
I am waiting for the 2P version which replace your partner’s image with somebody else’s.
Porn advanced the internet because it was a cheaper delivery mechanism for a cheap commodity, games expanded the internet because it was a technologically innovative platform for high end products.
That is in the range of what a pc cost back then, I think? Like middle to high end but not out of the ballpark.
In other words the internet was relatively cheap for people.
I don't remember exactly, but I do remember I used to collect videos of live performances from a handful of my favorite bands back then so think it might have been related to that hobby. As a side note, I had dozens of the 100 pack CD-R stacks full of these burned videos because HDD cost too much and I didn't need them to be available on demand.
You can't be discreet about VR porning because it leaves you oblivious to your surroundings. You gotta plan ahead and really commit to the time and place.
Aren't all of them propped up by being tethered to some FAANG? I highly doubt they are interested in hiring the best and brightest to build VR porn devices.
I also suspect that the "kick" from porn is a voyeuristic one; i.e. most consumers would rather watch it than be in it.
If the community had free reign to do whatever with the hardware, it would be much more than a toy. Someone would port SimulaVR (or a different window manager) and it would feel like a real computing device.
I can imagine a world where I travel with one of those headsets and a wireless keyboard. Then I can setup shop anywhere and do development work in a cloud environment. The headset just being a dumb terminal to render the terminal or whatever.
It really feels like we are only a few years away from that being reality. I really want the apple headset to succeed, so that other companies invest in open/hackable hardware.
The Vision Pro is a remarkable piece of tech, but isn’t required to achieve many of the use cases it supports, and people are primarily paying for the immersive experience.
Given that, spending $3K on immersion in a market where a few hundred dollars will buy you most of the non-immersion capabilities is quite different than spending $3K on an early PC.
e.g. the Commodore 64 was an 8-bit 1 MHz processor vs. the 386's 32-bit 12-40MHz, could not run a full operating system, had 64 KB RAM vs. 1MB or more on the 386, etc.
In terms of raw computing capability, the 386 was a significant advance over those cheaper systems and represented capabilities that just weren't yet on the market, and those capabilities unlocked entire worlds of possible use cases and unlocked general purpose computing.
The Amiga 1000 is closer to the 386 in terms of capability, but was ~$1,600 (with a monitor) and was still significantly slower, i.e. if your use case benefited from raw processing power, there was a clear value proposition for the 386.
I'd still put this in a very different category than what is effectively an iPad with + VR/AR interface.
This argument seems valid to anyone that hasn't browsed "The Sharper Image" catalog in the back of an airline seat, or even the "high end" showroom at a Best Buy.
There's been a huge market for >70" TVs since mid 2010s, costing $3,500 - $10,000 US for much of that timeframe. Today you'd have to compare to 100" class: https://www.amazon.com/100-inch-tv/s?k=100+inch+tv&s=price-d...
All your objections would certainly apply. It's a toy. People don't need it. It's fun, but doesn't solve a "real" problem. It's too expensive to be given as a gift.
AVP offers a >240" screen, and fully immersive 3D. It needs very little to make movie watching a shared experience in the same room, or with friends far away.
Priced solely against a TV, people have proven happy to pay for entertainment toys. If the initial OOTB release had supported "seeing" someone watching the same content "with" you in Disney's theater or the VR spaces, this buying segment would have taken more interest.
It actively gets in the way of cuddling in person, and doesn't help when away. Meanwhile I've had great experiences watching things together on a phone screen. If away, bluntly, with good friends a laptop screen and a shared stream via Jellyfin works _amazing_.
Like c'mon. The size of the screen is a fetish for people who think it's the screens fault that their hangout isn't emotionally impactful.
It’s a completely solved issue. The head tracking runs on a completely different chip and hyper visor layer from the OS so even with a kernel panic the tracking doesn’t fail.
See the problem here?
In fact people were teleporting themselves visually in 2016 with HTC Vive for 800$. I had it, it was awesome.
Honestly I'm happy to see AVP fail here to set precedence where entry point to a medium is the price of an average 3month salary (considering current global avg is around 1,500/mo) which is wildly unethical imo.
If I could watch my daughter's first step in full 3d, I would be happy to pay the $3k and more.
I know you can do it right now with insta360 or whatever but I think there is a bit of a learning curve and it just isn't it that seamless.
Being able to record directly from the headset and play it back exactly how you saw it would make things much simpler and WYSIWYG and may be the reason for mass adoption
Don't you want to experience the authentic event rather than peering through a camera so that you can relive it later in 3D?
I'm always flabbergasted that people watch concerts through a camera, rather than just enjoying the experience. The facsimile is often poor compared to the experience itself. Also, reliving the same experience over and over can devalue it. Our memory is very good at making rose-tinted representations of past experiences.
I do understand the grandparent's travel example much better, especially for people who can't easily travel due to disabilities, etc.
And can easily substitute concerts for all types of things here. Travel experiences, museums, art, the mona lisa room where I am pretty sure I was the only one looking-at/facing the actual painting...etc. For many, getting IG likes or emoji comments is more gratifying than the actual experience. I don't get it either.
https://www.usa.canon.com/newsroom/2024/20240610-lens
It’s uncanny to record something with the Vision Pro and then play it back while you’re sitting in the same location…feels like a glitch in the matrix.
Since the cameras are small the ISO is at cell phone level, not great indoors.
So I just spent $5800 on the Canon R5 C + Stereo VR Lens kit, to record my baby boy’s moments in 8K for future VisonPro (2,3,4…) devices.
VR has been “the next big thing” for more than 50 years. VR was invented in 1968
Video phone was invented way back. (1936). It took a very long time to be common and in frequent use. And it’s still not a killer feature.
you can give it 50 years. with the trash treatment apple gives developers, they won’t ever again release a new successful platform like iphone. They burnt the bridge to get there
They really need to figure out true, perspective correct volumetric video already.
If even Apple doesn't know what to do with it and is doubting itself, why would anybody outside Apple have faith in it not being quietly discontinued in the coming years? So why invest in the platform? Why do research and develop use cases for it?
Jobs knew how to sell something, but more importantly, he knew how to sell the future of something, the potential.
For me to watch a video on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV is easy. Turn on screen. Play video. With wedding photos, you can make them your phone screen background, you can printout photos and put them on your wall, they fit into your life.
With VR, I have to blind myself to my surroundings, I have to either not move around sitting perfectly still or clear out a bunch of space. What has become more popular in recent years is Podcasting and a huge reason why is because how nonintrusive it is, you can listen to a podcast doing the dishes or on your way to work. VR is the opposite of nonintrusive.
I feel the immersion of VR is what's holding it back, not why it will be successful. It's only when mixed reality takes off that I think we're going to see a big change.
I was walking through my house, navigating doorways, stairs, and changes in lighting, with my son's headset while I had the equivalent of a 30in monitor playing Netflix following me around. I sat on the couch and pinned the "tv" to the wall, enlarged it to be a 80in tv.
What truly is missing is a shared environment between multiple headsets in the same location. Movie night where the whole wall is a shared experience, and it can be synced with grandma who is three states over; even better, we can look over and see grandma in AR and she sees us. Distributed family night! Some ergonomics to work out. That, and seeing faces.
It’s impressive technology but it’s far from seamless. There’s less colours, less resolution, worse depth perception, more latency, and worse nightvision than your actual eyes. The quest makes your head quite a bit larger and you’re more likely to hang your head into something. It is very far from seamless.
They have a long way to go. Audio pass through still isn’t good enough for me to trust it never mind video pass through.
But Apple has the resources to keep supporting and evolving it in response to user feedback until it can be cheap enough for mass use, at which point, if they don't blow it, their lead will be hard for competitors to overcome. They know exactly what they're doing.
Not saying it’s not a a great experience..
I've used every popular VR device, but one Vision Pro experience stood out - 'The Haleakala environment'[1]
It was literally like being transported there. I know because I had been in that exact spot a few years before. I have a rich visual memory which served as reference, and no exaggeration, it felt like was there. I was immediately in tears. It was profound.
The Vision pro's lack of a killer app because development is unintuitive, userbase is small, the UX is alien and the hardware costs of constructing these experience is still rather high. Give it a few years. The hardware is already there. This isn't a solution in search of a problem. This is PalmOS, a solution that is too early to the market.
I have family with disabilities. Being able to teleport my loved ones to places they could never go themselves is worth the $3000. If I could record my most profound memories with 'VR recorder', I would. My parent missed my graduation because of being continents away. You think they wouldn't want to be teleported to it ? Wedding photographers cost $4000+, so we can relive those memories through shoddy snapshots. Why not be teleported back to the most beautiful day ?
Don't knock it till you try it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK63OSmF1FM