$3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to paint by numbers of a real canvas -- why is this basic concept of "a $3500 novelty device should enable me to do something _new_" so hard for a 3 trillion dollar company to grasp?
Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months? If they did, would anyone care? $3500 is relatively a lot of money if you're already giving them iPhone and Macbook money. The supermajority of the world doesn't make more then 60k a year, pre-tax. Actually, the supermajority makes vastly less than that.
I guess I'll wait and watch and see if they prove me wrong, but I suspect no matter how good it is, it'll flop.
The first iPhone was pretty crappy. No apps. 2G only. Poor battery life. Limited global distribution - not even Canada could get it. But it captivated people who didn’t own it yet, and it proved out some essential ideas like multitouch. And when the iPhone 3G came out, improving on some of the original device’s shortcomings, it was wildly popular. The rest is history.
There is no doubt that AR will eventually get good enough that the devices are paper thin, weigh nothing, and have no external battery (of course). Everyone wants _that_ device, but you have to start somewhere. Apple can afford to be patient in this space and their considerable moat of intellectual property will allow them to carve out the high end of the AR market and then work down as they did with iPhone.
It would not surprise me if they are earning 90% of the gross margins in the AR device space within three years.
I recall not long after the iPod was released in the early 00’s that peeps were clamoring for an Apple phone. It took seven years before Apple fans got their wish. IPhone landed in the world of Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola. All juggernauts in the mobile phone industry.
Just not the same scenario and game plan. Brilliant design is one thing, but Apple has landed at the intersection of Hardware & Software in a developed field. Right? Steve Jobs pulled back from running OS on clone hardware, because Apple’s winning scenario was to do both to make great designed products.
At 3k+ this is classic early adopter scenario. Maybe there are enough people with stupid money who will work out issues for the later ~1k version…provided another company doesn’t sweep in and eat Apple’s lunch
The first iphone let you have a real web browser anywhere you had cell coverage. This lets you have a web browser floating at home. Its not the same (and I love VR)
I didn’t get one until the 3G came out, but I have a very clear memory of the “wow!” feeling: right after buying the phone, I went down the street to a coffee shop and started browsing the web while waiting in line. I was instantly cured of my prior skepticism that it could actually be a major improvement over my flip phone + iPod.
Also GPS maps with that shiny glass dot. You bought a phone, and you got a GPS navigator for free.
I had a friend who had just bought a high end Nokia. We arranged to meet for lunch. She got hopelessly lost because Nokia's GPS and mapping were crap.
Apple's just worked. Same with the App Store.
I'd guess this is going to have some kind of VApp Store. But I suspect what it really needs is plain old MacOS running everything as usual, with slightly customised support for virtual displays.
I don't have much to add except for a "back in my day" story:
I still remember when the only option for GPS directions was buying a dedicated Garmin, or paying your cell carrier for an extremely crappy and very expensive service that was hard to use because phone screens were too small. Everyone I knew used printed map quest for directions.
GPS being standard on smart phones is just so flipping good compared to what we had before and am positive is still the killer app that pushes people to get smart phones.
It’s worth remembering the original iPhone did not have GPS at all. It had google maps for calling up information like you would with map quest, but no turn by turn/live navigation
Cellular triangulation worked really well on the classic iPhone - if you were in a very crowded place. In more rural areas, you could be off by many kilometers. I’m not sure if they had Wi-Fi SSID location back then.
Not sure what maps your friend was using, Nokia S60 series has Google Maps, it’s not bad compared to original iPhone. I could use keyboard to zoom in and out, after log in all the layered map stuff works.
In comparison, iPhone’s Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation till a while later.
Yep I actually remember standing on the sidewalk on my lunch break outside of a cafe, and I pulled up the Reddit website.
It sounds so incredibly unrelatable in 2023, but you have to put yourself in that time. Web browsing was just something you did at work, or at home. Period. Visiting that website while on the sidewalk was really one of the major game-changers in my life.
In Spring 2008 I got my first iPhone as a hand me down from my brother. He didn’t like it at all, since iPhone OS 1 was very limited and went back to Windows Mobile. However, I became a very spoiled kid with access to Wikipedia at the age of 14 in a classroom, at least 3 years before smartphones became mainstream. It most certainly didn‘t improve my character to have such an expensive phone at that age.
Holy sht. Can people really* stop comparing launch of VR and with Iphone?
I have been reading tons of comments here and only to see the OP, and folks with similar post here to be proven wrong. Again after again, proven wrong!
The fundamentals question is where is the killer app! Like original poster, this shouldn't be hard for a three trillion dollar company!
Only if there was a way to filter out post that go along the lines of
Lmao, but the first iPhone was a major improvement over other phones at the time and offered a form of consistence/stability versus the often very experimental models other companies had.
The difference here is of course that VR/AR has been thriving already. Apple is late to the game as they are most of the time, but the reactions I have seen so far in YT/Twit comments are the amazed reactions of the tech illiterate general public, they don't care what it does, but it does have an Apple logo!
Apple is not bringing anything new to the table. No virtual objects, no 3d anything, just 2d planes showing video/photos which non-Apple VR/AR has had for the longest time.
This is just from the briefest search: https://www.vrdesktop.net/. Already exists and looks more fully featured than Apple's stuff.
Apple is a 1T company, the "richest and most technologically advanced company in the world", so why don't they act like it?
They do seem to have an impressive resolution on the thing, but only Apple can ask for 3.5k, no other headset bothers to have as high a resolution atm because they know consumers will balk at such a high price...
Apple's press release shows it as if some rando people are using the thing at home as if it's not going to be art studios, etc that buy the headset and a couple of hardcore Apple fans. No regular person is buying a 3.5k VR/AR set to look at a crappy 2d photo gallery app.
Other VR/AR software for existing headsets like the Vive/Oculus etc already do actual virtual objects/interaction as baseline and Apple couldn't even be bothered to include something like that for their press release. Because they don't need to, I suppose. People will eat it up anyway.
This device looks to be a monumental improvement over any current consumer AR/VR headset. From the user reviews that've come out so far, they've talked about the very forgiving hand-tracking, the high-fidelity screens, the nearly imperceptible delay from the cameras, how comfortable it is to wear, etc.
For your point about the no virtual objects, what would you want Apple to do? Create an entirely new OS requiring developers to build everything in a purely 3D environment? It'd be DOA if they did that. They have to highlight how EASY it is to port their current apps to VisionOS. Hell, they released Rosetta years before the M1 came out and there's STILL some apps that don't support M1 Macs. They have to make it easy, and allow the developers to decide to flex their muscle on this thing.
iOS apps in the first year or two of the app store looked god awful because no one really knew what to DO with the thing, but now we do. I think VR like this is going to be the same way.
From what they showcased and the initial reviews out right now, this does look to be the most technologically advanced mixed reality headset. But obviously the most technology advanced headset is going to be eyewateringly expensive.
Apple back in the day was always, the customer doesn't know what they want, you have to show it to them. This is going to light a fire under every other headset makers ass that they can't push out headsets with shit camera delays, poor screens, and shody controls anymore and expect to make money.
And you're right, people will eat it up because it's Apple and only they can get away with it. I'm not buying it, I have to afford groceries somehow. But the rich finance bros buying it to show off their wealth bankrolling Apple's R&D for the next few years to make a more consumer-friendly one? Yeah, knock yourself out. I'll buy refurbished one in 2026.
For sure this thing is much better than something like the Meta Quest 3, but is it _seven times_ as good?
Let's look at the actual improvements here over the quest, roughly in order from what I consider best to worst:
1) higher resolution screens. This requires more powerful onboard processing and more expensive screens and is an obvious win.
2) better pass through. Again requires better onboard processing and cameras on the front of the device. This is nice to have but I don't think it's a game changer.
3) hand tracking by default. No controllers is in some ways nice but also limits the number of inputs you can have (unless you have virtual controllers, but I can see a lot of accidental button presses with that). It also doesn't preclude adding controllers later but they haven't shown any sign of even considering this.
4) displaying your eyes on the front when talking to people. This is by far the most dubious feature, it looks ridiculous and requires them to add a high definition curved screen to the front of the device. How much does this add to the cost? I think it could be easily cut, just take the damn thing off when talking to people.
The actual value this brings over something like the meta quest is probably, to me at least, a 2x improvement. I might be proven wrong (or they might come out with a real killer app) but as it is I can't see the point.
1) Agree with you on the higher resolution screens. Yeah it's gonna be a resource hog but from what I've heard it looks downright gorgeous.
2) I'm okay with the better passthrough, from what the initial impressions have said, it really does help alleviate the headaches or nausea from the delay in lower-end systems. I get serious motion sickness and nausea in the PSVR2 headset, if this can solve that problem I'm all for it.
3) I know they highlighted PS5 and XBox controller support for games, so I'm holding out hope for third party motion controller support for when you need finer control.
4) I hate the eyes on the front feature, I agree it looks gimmicky, added too much to the cost, and I don't see it lasting long in future releases.
It's definitely not for me, but I feel like I'm getting their vision for the future of this product line and I'm gonna go conspiracy theorist for a minute here.
1) The clips of people wearing them in from of their kids or doing laundry, etc just screams that we want to get people used to having a screen in front of them, and cameras on their face. Make this the "norm" or at least some form of socially acceptable to do what Google Glass tried and failed to do in 2013.
2) The heavy focus on hand-tracking, eye-tracking, voice controls, and built-in speakers makes me think they want this to be used without needing to carry anything additional with you, obviously. No AirPods, no iPhone, no Mac needed.
I find this product to be an introduction to tackle these societal issues so that when they release a pair of regular-looking glasses that have this type of tech, people aren't going to be afraid of cameras looking at them all the time, or feel disconnected from the person wearing them. And be able to control it all with just their hands.
To me, this product was released way before it should have (frankly I believe it needs 5 more years), but as a lot of companies are pushing AR/VR and it's kinda floundering around right now, Apple had to release something that could keep interest in the product group alive long enough that they can release their proper vision.
1 & 2 are essential for one of the main functions of this thing for now, which is to replace or extend a laptop. I am buying it simply for this purpose. I hate working at my desktop and my Air doesn’t have enough screen estate for efficient dev work on the couch or bed lol.
Proper, well integrated passthrough that seamlessly works with my laptop is crucial for this to work and judging by the marketing material it seems to be extremely well implemented. I simply can’t work with even the quest pro, because the clarity (resolution) simply isn’t there and all the implementations are cumbersome (yea I’ve tried all apps including metas own).
All the other features like 3D video recording are gimmicks to me, but it doesn’t matter.
They did show 3D objects in the key note, someone sent one through messenger that the user pulled out from the message and interacted with it. Then they showed a 3D heart which could be taken apart in to sections. Next they showed a life size 3D formula 1 car with the aerodynamics.
Presumably this will be a thing since they support on the iPhone and tries making a pretty big deal from by showing virtual legos and other stuff in a keynote a year or two ago.
The ARKit seems to have been designed for this thing since it wasn’t ever a very good experience on the iPhone.
Spurious enough comparison given there were phones, a developed phone market which was 150m+ globally even at that stage, and demonstrated clear use cases for an iphone (an ipod, a phone and an internet browser combined).
Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.
AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.
I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.
The potential is to replace computers. In its current version, it is basically an iPad on your face. Look a little forward and it is a laptop on your face. Imagine that the price came down to $1500-2000 in a couple years, now you can buy an Apple Vision instead of a laptop. And you wouldn't need to buy a TV either. So this does have device consolidation potential like the iPhone did and it can tap into an existing market like the iPhone tapped into the phone markets.
I think previous AR/VR devices didn't quite have the right sweetspot of hardware features (too low resolution, tied to one spot, extra controllers), but this one looks like it might just do it. What it doesn't have is a low enough cost, so it will be a slow start. I'm also still curious if there will be a "killer app" that encourages people to get into it, but the long-term vision of spatial computing is itself enough of a killer feature. I just wonder how long that will take.
> Imagine that the price came down to $1500-2000 in a couple years, now you can buy an Apple Vision instead of a laptop. And you wouldn't need to buy a TV either.
I can compile code on my laptop - can I do that on a vision?
I can plug a xbox on my TV, or watch it with 4 people. Can I do that with a vision?
I think this replacing TVs is a really hard sell, except in remarkably niche people. Sitting on the couch together playing Nintendo just can’t be replaced, and apple surely doesn’t want to allow third party inputs, they want an internal app ecosystem, which Nintendo and PlayStation won’t ever do. (Xbox maybe). Laptop replacement, I can buy though. But only some fraction of those, nothing large, and certainly no larger than iPhone market share percentages.
First iphone had this WOW effect, before there were clunky crappy Microsoft-OS powered boxes with pens and crappy slow imprecise displays. I recall, I had one, it was a massive shift and basically a new type of device.
This... judging by extremely careful wording of a web which needs to play very very nice with vendors to get these early access peeks, seems to not have it. More like nicely polished hammer looking for nails everywhere. Yes, many aspects fine tuned above competition, but competition is not asleep and the gap is not that big. In some aspects, it will be objectively worse (constant powerbank cable which lasts barely 2 hours, realistically a bit above 1 hour breaks immersion very effectively compared to ie Quest, plus you want to have 4 powerbanks and furiously swapping over one longer evening? Not even going into sharing ultra expensive device with rest of household).
Phones are absolute must in modern world, they were already 90% there when first iphone arrived. VR/AR goggles are still considered idiotic by majority of population, maybe Apple can change that but it will take few years at least.
A large multitouch display was a pretty big deal. I watched movies on my iPod classic but it wasn’t a very nice experience and the scroll wheel is not exactly the most flexible input method..
The first iphone was the first time most people could actually use the internet on something they could carry around, even if it was just with wifi. It did everything phones did but much better since it was all touch. Interfaces to alarms, the calculator, the camera etc was entirely different. Anyone who used it knew that everyone else would either copy it or go out of business.
Windows Mobile and Symbian devices were a thing for years and had functioning browsers. The iPhone was an improvement (as long as you had wifi) but it took a couple of years before it actually become widespread
Exactly, you’d use the to do the same thing more or less but the iPhone had way better UX. The idea of browsing the web on your phone wasn’t something new or revolutionary, it was all about the implementation.
No, it wasn't the same. Before people would only be able to use special mobile pages and scroll through a few options at a time. Looking at a general site like reddit was basically impossible. Reading a news article on a normal site was basically impossible. It was a total game changer and most people went from never using the mobile internet to using it frequently.
You seem to have forgotten Blackberrys were incredibly popular. Most people in the business world browsed and did emails on them. Windows phone, LG Prada, Hiptop - all of these had non WAP browsers well before the iPhone. You've missed the 2-4 year gap between WAP only phones and first iPhone.
And how did you navigate them? With a scroll ball? Even some phones that were single touch with pressure were slightly better but most people wanted nothing to do with that until the iphone.
It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.
As people below have pointed out, arguable it was crappy. Sure, lacked 3G, lacked apps, but the utter ease of connecting to wifi and flicking through Safari…
…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.
I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.
The lack of 3G was barely an issue back then, I used my iPhone on the go with text messengers and web browsing without too many issues. Edge/2G+ wasn’t too horrible, since the web was so much lighter back then (especially since flash didn’t load).
The first iPhone was fantastic. The instant people saw it they wanted it and when they laid hands on it they needed it. The Apple Vision on the other hand is.. a screen strapped to your face.
Exactly this. It's taken 14 iterations to get the iPhone to where it is. Apple Watch has taken 8 or so. Apple has taking a long time iterating to get to where we are today on this platforms. Baby steps really. Each version introduced things we totally take for granted today. I remember just getting the Retina screen on the iPhone 4 was a massively big deal.
Just think what Vision will be after 10 iterations and a decade of time.
To add to the appeal of iPhone's original release; do not forget the iPod Touch. Released in late 2007, it was available far more broadly and was a great entry point into the world of those crazy new iPhones.
It was my first iOS device and I even paid the 14.99$ for the update to get mail, calendar and contacts. I played way more games back then than I do now since I was often without a Wi-Fi network.
The first iPhone was the first phone with a proper touch screen.
The Vision is about the 50th VR device, in a market that's already quite busy with the Vives, Indexes and Quests. It brings nothing new, and is just one more high resolution VR device (which existed before for cheaper).
Yeah, people forget that the iPhone was actually considered a flop when it first launched; it was too expensive so despite the interest in the product relatively few people were actually willing to pay for it.
The true genius was getting AT&T to subsidize the handsets and pay for the marketing, which gave Apple a lifeline worth billions and essentially created the market.
Because no one will really do the stuff you suggest. All the things you describe just take too much effort to make
Assembling furniture
- 1d written description : 1 person half a day
- 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days
- 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks
- 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ?
Is it really going to yield a ton more sales?
You can see it in other media. Zillions of creative people write books, a lot fewer shoot movies, and fewer still make interactive narrative video games
All the 3D experiences you end up having are quite simplistic bc no one wants to invest in it. Could you make an Avatar level narrative in VR? It'd be super tricky, but maybe with enough money you could. (arguably there aren't enough people at the moment who know how to make compelling 3d interactive experiences). Will it be worth the extra cost ? Unlikely. It's hard to imagine it being more than marginally better at best
Maybe AI will somehow help speed up the process substantially (and lower the costs), but I'm a bit skeptical it'll help enough
The only thing I can think of where VR would make a huge difference is maybe horror. I'm not into horror, but I could see VR being a huge step up in terms of spookyness
You can already very easily animate an assembly in modern CAD programs by setting up connectors and constraints, which you normally do as a matter of course anyway. There's literally nothing to do, you just click on the "assembly" tab and start dragging parts around.
Yes, in the same way as you can trivially restyle a Word document with a few clicks around the Style section of the ribbon - making it easy to adjust for the demands of your publisher, or to the new corporate color scheme.
That is, it's trivial if you carefully followed the best practices, did everything correctly at every step to make sure the internal representation is semantically correct and complete - and not bashed stuff around, copying and pasting and dragging by hand, until it looked okay-ish on the screen, like everyone else does.
But if you want to publish something that will be visible to the public, you can't just export the default output from your CAD app. You want something that fits with your brand's aesthetic/guidelines, that looks professional, that clearly communicates without distraction. These things require consideration. Look at an IKEA diagram—they are carefully designed to make assembly as obvious as possible to a layperson; animations are invariably slower to produce than a static print diagram.
3D scanning only gets you a mesh, it doesn't get you interactivity or functionality. If you just want to manhandle a bunch of meshes, modding H3 VR is easy, and there's a 3D modelling program for SteamVR that opens and edits meshes just fine.
Hell, you can even interactively edit things in the Unreal IDE. But it's still a serious task.
Sure, but it's a very useful first step. When you want to do something like, say, 3D printing a case for your bluetooth earbuds, there is no approach that isn't tedious.
> There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones
> However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.
Combining those, you claim that less than 4,000 movies are shot each year, “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones”.
I can’t see how that can be true. Google tells me there are about 2 million weddings in the USA each year. From that, I think it’s a very, very safe bet that over 10,000 wedding videos are shot in the USA each year, with the real number probably over a million.
Add in corporate videos, wedding anniversaries, videos about sports teams winning championships, high-quality tube channels, etc, and I expect the total number to easily be over 4 million.
And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
I think they do in the context of “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones” and comparing them to a market that includes self-published books.
IMO self-published books would be better compared to self-published movies (which isn’t what the original commenter said, but they were just too obviously wrong).
So this would include things like YouTube videos, Twitch, etc, but not a private wedding video that doesn’t get published.
> And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”
When I talk about “material shot by amateurs with their phones” I was referring to independent very low budget movies, the modern version of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, not videos shot by people at parties, they do not classify as movies IMO.
Should we also include in the book category people's personal diaries, internal companies documents, sportsbooks, wedding picture books, school yearbooks, etc.?
Yes but what's your point? The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger. The video game market is much larger than both combined.
Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products (movies, games) pay off despite the initial expense.
> The movie market is comparable to the book market, probably larger
Only for a handful of titles though.
Most movies lose money, they sell very little if not nothing at all.
Most books don't sell as well, but it costed a very tiny fraction of the cost of a movie production to publish them.
It's mostly a single person in their homes in their spare time.
> Therefore the effort people put into making the complicated products pay off despite the initial expense
The initial point was that most can't afford the more complicated products, but can still produce useful low tech manuals. It's doubtful that the high tech version of the manual would drive more sales, because the product in this case is not the manual, but the furniture (or whatever else).
The AR/VR manual could cost more than the actual product to make.
The politics of this are interesting. 3D movie and game content restores some of the exclusivity lost by amateur/phone content.
I'm not convinced that's a good bet. YouTube and especially TikTok exploded by going in the opposite direction.
But it's a move that could integrate Apple's movie and audio software, high end hardware (Studio and Pro), content studio ambitions, and now Vision Pro as a consumption device.
There's a lot more money in lowering the cost of entry to a new ecosystem than raising it. That's how the App Store exploded and drove iPhone sales, and how Amazon has a unicorn business just from self-publishing.
Going for the high end can work too, as long as the content and product are good enough. But it's a much tougher challenge.
if book publishers spent the same amount of money movie publishers spend on marketing a single blockbuster movie (50% of the budget, i.e. billions of dollars) books would sell a lot more too.
Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.
Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.
But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too
By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion
The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.
Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.
Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.
Counterpoint, there's always been a desire to have a virtual environment as first shown in 80's sci-fi films like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, etc; immerse yourself in a system, have it become like a natural extension of yourself.
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
The smartphone had multiple killer apps: web browsing, maps when you needed them most instead of having to print MapQuest directions, and device consolidation (iPod, cell phone, GPS, and web browser all in one!)
The touch interface elegantly solved the problem of not having a full keyboard and mouse.
The ultimate vision for these headsets is not yet realized: to unintrusively overlay enriched visual information over our surroundings. This doesn't hit the unintrusively piece by a longshot, nor are the apps that realize this vision even announced.
Vision Pro does, however, provide a first step platform to develop those apps when the tech does shrink to an everyday wearer.
> smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe
The smartphone's killer apps were messages, phone, email and calendar. By the time the iphone came around it was just to eat Blackberry's lunch because it gave us multitouch as the killer interface.
"Calling emergency services is the killer app for phones" - yes.
"Calling emergency services is the killer app for smartphones" - no. "Killer app " implies that this is the reason people buy them. If this statement was true then people would buy cheap feature phones.
It's worth repeating the original statement here:
> smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. [...]
to which alach11 replied:
> The killer app for smartphones is being a phone.
This was a reported rumour prior to the reveal yesterday: no significant use case. This is a significant departure from Apple's usual MO: find a USP and NAIL the implementation. They're using a scattergun approach here and it's risky. They better be sending these headsets free of charge to thousands of studios in the hopes that some of them develop THE killer app, because this is the only way I see this succeeding. Especially because this is a first gen product from Apple with a maximum of two hours of battery life, a wire hanging off the headset, and no controllers. I'd be much more confident about the future of this device if it weren't $3,500 + tax. At this price I don't understand who will be buying it.
Anyone who flies a lot will be able to use it as advertised now for entertainment and work.
And this is WWDC. They’re getting this in front of developers to build the first third-party apps. Years ago, we applied to get Apple TVs for $1 and then came up with an app to launch on it. If you’re early, you have limited competition and can rank in the charts relatively easily (obviously at the risk of fighting over a smaller market).
It might sound silly, but I would be fine using this with a keyboard and touchpad. The lousy thing about working from a laptop is the screen being tiny and in the wrong place. It's bad in general, but it's intolerable on a plane. This solves that.
It looks like you either dial up/down the immersion, so you could always see people at the fringes, or the passthrough would mean you could see someone like a steward appearing to get your attention.
Those USB charging ports are usually very low power. The circuits also have maximum loads, meaning that if too many people are using USB charging ports, they drop even further. I've measured output on several airlines. Two topped out at 5W. The other at 12W. This is likely WELL below the requirements for this headset.
One will have more success with the wall outlets, but most flights don't have these. Even many international flights don't offer them.
I feel like this is the original Apple MO that has worked for them for all their most innovative products. Looking at iMac, iPods, iPhone, Apple watch - it was never a perfectly polished product they were pushing, it was a paradigm shift.
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
Difference is that Apple enters categories that have already product-market fit (PCs, MP3 players, laptops, smartphones, fitness trackers). Only exception probably being the iPad. VR doesn’t have product-market fit except for some games genres (driving / flight simulators, rythme / dancing)
I somewhat agree, somewhat disagree. There was also some product-market fit, but they never entered a formed market - their specialty is creating a need for a product through marketing and product strategy.
When they released the iMac, they sold 800.000 computers by the end of the year, and that was 32% of those buys were people who have never owned a computer previously. So they were going for the Windows users, but also for people who have previously never seen the need for a computer. By creating an easy to use product aimed at the masses, they created a product-market fit in an untapped market segment where there was none.
When you think about it, smart phones did not exactly have a product market fit - there were mostly mobile phone users, and kind of smallish dying market of handheld computers, some Blackberry/other users that were I guess what you'd call a smartphone users. First iPhone did a lot for unifying those users into a smartphone market.
So I see some of that here as well. By introducing Vision Pro in a demo that showcases all the most popular uses of desktop/mobile computing, they are pushing the XR into the space of mobile/desktop users who were not interested in XR previously. It's the opposite of the killer app approach, but I think it can work for them and is a tried tactic. And it pushes bring XR closer to general use than gaming.
But definitely a larger leap of fate, as you point out.
PCs and smartphones were both proven markets regardless of market size in a way VR is not today.
People owned smartphones (blackberries and palm) and PCs, use them a lot and had established (not speculative) use cases. Clear market signal while VR only has significant traction for a handful of games.
I will buy it for my entire team just for the video conferencing - assuming it is actually as good as promised, of course. Anything beyond that is gravy.
Video conferencing is probably the #1 time I just don't have nearly enough screen space. I'm always switching back and forth between dev tools, chat, whatever's being presented, other video chat participants. Would be great to be able to fit all that in front of me where I can switch with a glance.
For some reason I assumed you meant traditional non-realistic avatars - but yes - I concur those are avatars.
However the only reason these are needed is because you're wearing something that obscures your face. With your iPad scenario, you could use the camera view of your actual face.
Indeed, so you have a worse experience, I still think that they could have the avatars for other devices so that folks can use them if they have their camera off it would be nice.
Whereas with an iPad I can use it as a second display with my Mac anyway and put the chat on it. It might be better, but it doesn't sound to me to be quite the slam dunk that it sounds like to you.
I am happy to be proved wrong though so I'll be waiting for reviews of how it actually works with groups
With digital avatars you can fix the gaze offset issues.
It's oddly draining doing zoom or meets where you can't make mutual eye contact. If you look at the camera you cant see their eyes, and vice versa.
If the digital avatar is as good as it looks, it could resolve that and make teleconferencing less exhausting. Not to mention worry less if you're having a bad hair day. ;)
I guess my point was that digital avatars are being bundled with AR/VR but they dont have a lot to do with it.
What you are describing happens today without VR, so having these avatars from or to my iPad would be a benefit.
I don't see what the headset brings to the table other than forcing people to fix existing issues.
The experience is worse because the VR now introduces avatars so I can pretend to pay attention whilst doing coding, whereas if it was on my iPad I could do coding, unload the washing machine, etc. It is restrictive.
Also fixing the eye focus is already a thing for streamers and ML video correction.
If it doesn’t blow me away, I won’t do it. But I think it will blow me away. Apple rarely disappoints on the experience by the time they launch something, in my experience anyhow.
It will need a virtual virtual avatar so you can disable the sensors and have options for how your avatar should be animated. Attentive, bored, marble statue...
Meh, this is the same thing they did with the Watch - the last "new thing" they released. The initial Apple Watch release was a pretty scatter gun approach. I mean, one of the headline features was "send your heartbeat to someone else".
They didn't really find a unique selling point, and they didn't really nail the implementation. Few versions later they refined the product and their messaging for it, and carved out a decent market for it. I actually think the original iPhone announcement was pretty close to this VR headset. It's only selling point was that it did everything nicer and better than the competition, and then it relentlessly iterated. iPhone was an easier sell though than expensive ski goggles - barrier is much lower with it.
It's clear(ish) they have some impressive tech in it, and are 'best in market'. I wouldn't be surprised if "Vision Pro" became a lot more of a compelling device in 5 years time. But right now it doesn't really seem to give me $3500 worth of benefit.
This is what's concerning. A team that just spent years creating revolutionary hardware that is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, who by far have the most context to come up with a killer app, could not come up with one. The best they could offer is reading articles in safari an enhancing the viewing experience of movies/shows/live sports.
They should be bursting at the seams with out of this world ideas that this amazing hardware could support. And yet, nothing.
I think that we need new tools --- I'd love to see a 3D sculpting tool which uses this to show the 3D object to me in real space --- it'd be great for furniture design.
Looking for a killer app you are looking at this to be a traditional VR or even AR device, that is not what this is.
This is about having a screen anywhere, multiple screens and turning anything into a screen and any environment into one, hence the name Vision Pro, that is how Apple are trying to sell it.
If you watched the keynote I think that was clear, everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
The fact when they showed gaming, it wasn't a VR or AR game, it was a traditional game on an AR screen says it all.
But that's silly, it can do all that and also have a killer app.
I can already do all that traditional stuff on a macbook or ipad, and "have a screen anywhere", and those things are more portable because I can just sit it on the table instead of having to untangle A CABLE from my clothing and then find somewhere to place a headset that doesnt sit flat like an ipad or macbook.
Then there's the fact that ipads and macbooks have keyboards.
With no killer app, this is a boondoggle, I think.
I suspect that, like self driving, that last 10%, 1%, 0.1% will be both functionally essential and exponentially difficult.
Video calls work great (well once we've sorted out the eye contact issue - now there's a real problem that needs really solving[1]), even with all the ML in the world avatars will be just a pale reflection of the real thing.
[1] You need a screen that is also a composite camera array, so that software can track the eyes on the incoming video feed and place the camera for the outgoing feed at that (moving) location. Sort of like a phased array for light. Thus when you look at someone's eyes, they see you looking directly down the camera.
Looking at the WWDC video, for me it looks like it's gone through uncanny valley and reached the final climb towards realism, but it's still not quite right.
I've noticed different people have the valley in different places, so I'm not at all surprised if it creeps some people out.
That comparison comes with the form factor though -- it's a headset. It's not something you can wear and mostly forget about. It needs a purpose to make me want to wear it, otherwise it's just an iPad without the nice tactile association.
> everyone else seems to missing the point and comparing this to traditional headsets.
I think most people are trying to find better value in the product.
Headsets focused on providing a screen already exists, NReal is a decently selling product. Sure the Vision Pro has way better resolution, but we're also assuming that NReal and co will have better resolution in their next iterations.
To jest, if a VR screen dedicated device comes to market in 2024 with a tad lower resolution than the Vision Pro at half or a third of the price, will the Vision Pro still have a market as a virtual screen ? At that point it will need to justify the price with all the other things, the hand tracking, the surroundings integration etc. All the stuff people are trying to find value in outside of it being a screen.
I own a pair of NReal. They'd need to do serious improvements in reducing jitter and improving AR tracking. Now I like their glasses form factor better, but I doubt they'll be able to match Apples polish. Even if it's just due to not being able to purchase ARM chips as powerful as Apple's.
I suppose Project Looking Glass was more of a demo of Java. Maybe because Java on the desktop had a bad name? Such DEs and WMs already existed (3DWM, for example), and Compiz was also taking off back then.
However, Vision Pro is by Apple. The first iteration is probably as useless as the first iPhone and first Apple Watch. Its for early adopters, and it just has to be Good Enough (tm), with prospect to become better. Compared to say AirPower, the hurdles were purely technical, and couldn't be solved for the first iteration to be Good Enough (tm); so it was canned. Also, once its a commodity, Apple seems to shy away. See AirPort.
> Also, once its a commodity, Apple seems to shy away
Apple only works on something after it's a commodity that they can polish better than others and overprice it. Which is why I'm amazed about statements that they are the ones that introduced personal computing, mobile computing and other stuff. The reality distortion field pays off really well.
Most of what I do with computers is reading browser windows.
Merely being able to do that on a nice screen is enough for me. I don’t want to or need to get directions for assembling my furniture. Heck, in real life, I like many people will just fiddle with the furniture and read no directions at all…
What if just not instructions, but instructions from the perspective of your eyes? Imagine an interactive instruction that guides you step by step according to your progress
Imagine putting a floating PDF in the air next to the pile of parts and you get 90% of the experience for 10% of the dev effort. That's what Apple is clearly focused on. Making your regular computer use functional while wearing techno googly eyes. That's Apple's killer app. AR is not going to get a lot of those experience investments because it makes no monetary sense. It's a massive money and time sink for a very fickle audience. Disney announced exactly what you're asking for, but it's crystal clear that we'll get something like four things a year. Maybe next season of Captain America gets a cool interactive border when looking at it. You can put Disney World on your kitchen table.
No one will care and studios are going to explore this field until they converge on a cheap but good enough standard to enhance their regular content. Maybe it will be a projection of the color palette of the scene outside the viewport. Maybe they will scan the surroundings of the scene and project it. But I'm pretty sure they'll just tout the quality of the 3D experience and that'll be good enough.
How do I find the right PDF? What if it’s big? What if it has two pages on each page and it’s kind of hard to read? What if the PDF is high res and causes the interface to choke out?
This happened early in the life of the iPad. Insurance companies wouldn’t include it in personal articles since there was high theft rate. That subsided over time due to ubiquity and software security.
To me, it wasn't that I could use Safari that was killer app, but the fact I can use it as a monitor that impresses me. I don't think most VR setups allow you to read text as easily as on a monitor and that is what Apple is claiming. (First impressions seem to support). The second part is not requiring a controller. If I can control this with my eyes, hand and voice. That means I can use a keyboard with it. I assume they'll have some virtual version too. With those two things, a whole lot more use cases open up around it. I don't plan on getting one right away or anything, but an actual usable computer is far more interesting than something that plays games, moves some models around in space and does video conferencing with avatars.
It doesn’t run any desktop apps yet though, only Safari and Photos and a few content apps. They also demoed mirroring only a single Mac display. I think people are overlooking this and expecting to get multi monitor displays for heavy workload apps like on the Meta Quest Pro, but Apple are committed as always to making this a standalone system.
It's not going to be successful unless Apple get this right. I expect a lot of people here spend a lot of their time looking at text in various development environments. with a smaller number working on content creation.
I would love a huge virtual area with multiple screen so I can see far more of whatever I'm working on.
That would be a game changer.
But Safari, 3D movies, Avatar FaceTime, and maybe some games? And that's all?
It could have had a killer app: games. Most VR headsets suck in one way or another, Apple could make one that's actually nice to use.
Sadly, for some bizarre reason Apple still don't understand games. They even have pretty good GPUs now and they're still not making an Apple TV Pro to compete with the PS5.
Even just the Vision could've been announced along with a couple exclusives, but instead they have an offhand mention of Arcade.
What's strange to me is that they roll out Hideo Kojima to talk about some gaming thing for the Mac OS, yet when it came to the headset all they can give is some creepy demos of a fathers wearing this thing while their kinds play at home.
Could they really not have given some units to some game devs and tell them to come up with some cool ideas?
This thing just feels incredibly rushed. It's like Apple felt left out of the all the AI hype the last couple months, so they were forced to show this thing before it was really ready.
Except, video game developers have had like ten years to figure out a VR "killer app" game. Even Valve failed. VR just isn't a significant enough increase in experience for the vast vast VAST majority of games to justify the annoyance of having a mask on, let alone the price. If you are super into simulators, then you have some incredible options, but otherwise it's just a bunch of beat saber clones and mediocre shooters.
VR is a peripheral, not a console. Very few people would choose a VR Magic game over Magic the gathering arena.
Exactly! Even just a small Kojima game exclusive to the Vision Pro would've been interesting.
Kojima is sufficiently famous and well liked to bootstrap a gaming ecosystem, though. They could've gone further and announced an Apple TV Pro, a decent controller, Vision non-Pro (cheaper headset that requires an M1 Mac or Apple TV Pro) and one full Kojima VR game as an exclusive. That could've been enough to start competing with Microsoft and Sony for console games.
> I don't understand why there is no AR or VR killer app for this thing.
Because if you go outside wearing this you're going to get instantly mugged. If they were to release something like Pokemon Go before the price comes down, that would likely just result in a bunch of kids getting murdered on the subway or whatever. Much better to drive down the costs by first selling it to people who are excited to use it for coding or whatever.
Because it requires greater integration. For VR the whole environment has to participate. At least if we’re talking about VR glasses that you can wear outside, every store, road, building block and what not should provide information. Who would create all that info, and for what purpose. Adoption is non-existent. There is no platform to submit your data. All we have is the interface. If you’re to wear them only inside then all you can do is the things you already do with a slightly modified UI. Which defies the purpose. I don’t want a virtual keyboard because I get no feedback from it. Virtual screens might be good if I’m in a hotel room, but then again I’ll have my laptop which has better interface. Text reading is an interesting use case but what happens with eye strain if you look at those screens for prolonged time periods. And by the way, what happens if you're wearing eyeglasses? Will they fit?
Perhaps they can find application is e-commerce. Sites could start building virtual stores and you get a feeling that you’re browsing wardrobes. I don’t know if that’s a thing but it kind of makes sense as a use case.
I am also not too optimistic about vision pro’s success, but regarding your glasses question: you would order specific lenses for it. They may even do that inside app stores from what I’ve seen in the video? Hopefully it won’t add an extra charge as lenses are expensive.
You can draw users with a killer app but you can also draw developers with a killer user base. I believe they're leaning on iPhone/iPad app compatibility and Mac screen display to launch it as a peripheral first with existing third party apps, then establish it as a place your customers are waiting for you.
Early adopters first, of course. Maybe it really is too early? Depends on the response.
When they seriously started designing this thing 2+ years ago they probably assumed Facebook's metaverse play would be a smashing success and get VR (and apps like its horizon metaverse) into the mainstream.
Yeah it's why I said seriously started--I'm sure this idea was floating around and the tech worked on for a decade or more, but only in the last couple years did they decide it was viable to make a consumer product. I'm sure Facebook ramping up and betting big on metaverse helped Apple decide to keep going on shipping it.
Two large screens in a hotel room - so sold (plus on a plane, if that's not socially annoying)
Being able to stand side by side with people to work on something rather than broadcast my face into their face. It's just... so much more natural. All of the social cues like concentration, wandering away to think, nodding your head along with a group conversation you stumble upon and are now actively engaged in. If I can bring my data/apps in but keep them private - sold
Interacting digitally with the environment - this is a new one but I think it's going to be huge. Anything involving maps or layouts, you can plan it prior, and then overlay it on the day when you get on site. AR on a phone is meh because you have to hold it up, but when it's just a gesture I think it's going to open up whole new use cases that were just out of reach (pun intended)
It's 4k per eye. That's great compared to current headsets, but please remember that the screen of your normal screen likely already has 4k, and that's just a rectangle a few cm of everything you see. The 4k per eye means that it's likely going to be <fullhd depending on just how gigantic you want to make the screens
It could be great, but productivity will likely need over 4k per eye to be anything beyond a novelty.
Depending on how the hardware develops, it could become something great for sure. most people calling it a novelty are taking about the device as it's been announced, not the theoretical future it could potentially have if it was different.
Personally I'd make the monitors the same size as real monitors. So... yeah maybe they'd be HD if they took up 2/3rds of peripheral vision, which would match my current monitors. But you could also have more of them, and handwave them away when you want the table back
And when on the move would be better than... nothing, which is what it's competing against. Look at phones, they're absolutely abysmal for both input and output. But they're mobile. Laptops? They're not as good as desktops.... but they're mobile. Virtual displays? They're mobile, allowing more bandwidth in, it's going to be good
To be clear, it'd be below 720p if you're making them at the same size as an 27" display at the regular distance.
I do completely agree that the promise is there, I've been saying for years that VR/AR is completely pointless as a gaming medium and it's only future is in exactly what Apple is aiming for, here. 4k per eye is just not going to be enough realistically
It will have an App Store like the phone (this was in the keynote I think). I don’t think there will be side loading unless it is govt mandated requirement.
It is aimed at general population and not developers.
I want it "hackable", not because I myself is gonna do anything with it, but because I want that kind of innovation. Not the boring, polished, exec-vision thingy. Let other people invent new ways of doing stuff!
If you only can do Apple-approved-stuff on it, it will be boring. Let people release half-baked demos and cool tech. Don't force everything to go through their "review" process.
Why not try to understand what I'm saying, instead of being so obnoxiously dismissive?
Would you rather: a. wait 5 years for apple to release some functionality in their SDK. or b. wait 3 months for someone to release their own software doing the same?
Yes, the iPhone is boring. It's taken a decade to reach its potential, because everything needs to be provided by Apple. Compare to an actual general computing device like a desktop computer, where you can innovate at your own speed.
I do understand what you are saying, I just don’t agree.
If it is your expectation that Apple would make an openly hackable headset, I think you have unrealistic expectations, so I find a strange thing to be frustrated about.
As to what is better, open or closed, I think it is very challenging to deliver a complete product in an open way, I can’t think of one successful consumer device that ships in that way.
When I consider privacy and security, the locked down devices Apple create are a positive, especially with a device as personal as a headset with eye tracking etc.
iPhones are not boring, they are used by billions of people to do amazing things every day. Don’t Under estimate the significance of ‘boring’ things like a high quality camera and the ability to share photos easily, Apple Pay / Wallet, and safari in your pocket. It is literally life changing for people, eg grandparents can get daily photos of their grandkids, that is the kind of thing Apple try to do with their devices and services. TBH I don’t know what that ‘boring’ thing is with the Vision Pro, but I’m sure if there’s a future where headsets / glasses are common place Apple will be part of it, and this is the starting point for it.
Apple is IMO attempting to brute-force create a market here. Facebook/Meta couldn't do the job - for one, Zuck has no idea what he's doing other than chasing buzzwords, for other, they have destroyed a lot of user trust over the past years. And I'm not sure if the stock could take more billions sunk.
Apple in contrast? They deliver a whole different game in terms of quality and capability, and now others will take up developing stuff for the platform, just like it happened with every new class of device Apple pushed out. And financially, Apple doesn't have to take care of anything, they have more cash on hand than the GDP of entire countries (165 billion $ [1], more than Kuwait, Ukraine or Venezuela [2]).
And even if there don't appear any VR apps - movie addicts will love it.
Yeah I can't wait to spend €11000 so my family can strap a screen to each of our faces and watch movies like that rather than staring at a dumb old TV like some kinda poor people
Probably, in person, for the foreseeable future you'll just watch a movie IRL when people are in the same room, and that's fine and I like that.
What this will allow is for you to watch a movie with your friends remotely in a way that is compelling.
My gf and I were long distance for a few months. It was really hard, but being able to video chat every day really helped. Unfortunately, anything beyond that was difficult, like watching a movie, because the experience was awful. The closest we were able to do was use a browser extension that would sync our streams, and then have a chat box.
With this, remotely, you guys can watch the same movie, chat, see each other, hear each other, still hear the movie, etc...
Will it replace watching am movie IRL? Of course not, and it doesn't have to. I don't think they're trying to replace physical interactions, but they're making a great case for how we can augment and extend our virtual ones.
There's no killer app specific to this headset because this is just a supercomplicated me-too product, and also because there is no point in half baking a potential killer.
But it's okay, I think. It has the browser, Unity integration, okay visual passthrough, etc. Ticks all boxes.
Does it need one at launch? The Apple Watch wasn't specifically a health-tracker at launch, but that's what they've really leaned into now. When they launched the iPhone, one of the most vaunted features was "Visual Voicemail", which I'm not even sure still exists?
It's a platform. It'll get cheaper, it'll get better, and developers and the market will do the rest. There's a lot of time between now and "early next year" for 3rd party devs to come up with a lot of apps and ideas.
As someone else said, this is the first release of something that'll end up the size and weight as a pair of sunglasses; at that point, I think it will be as ubiquitous as iPhones are.
The killer app is replacing my giant monitor with this device.
When I travel this is a game changer for me. Right now I lug a small second screen so I can work. I will happily drop $5k to fix this problem and just travel with this plus a small laptop.
None of the Apple apps they showed for the VisionPro had any substantial photogrammetry mapping. They didn’t paste virtual TVs to the walls, or place furniture into an empty room. All the Apple apps were contained to virtual floating screens, even the keyboard (instead of placing in on a surface).
They did show a few third party apps interacting with real world objects (the train moving on a table) but I wonder what amount of that was concept and what was real.
Connecting the virtual objects to those in the real world I feel is a killer feature that will open up a huge set of opportunities. If this doesn’t have that yet, it’s still more VR than AR in my book.
I worked for a digital creative agency that partnered with a few AR/VR companies including the big ones creating demos and POCs for conferences or events. We spent so much time brainstorming and testing with some really bright people and never really came up with more than diverting bits of motion art. We made one pretty decent mini game. Nothing substantive.
And think about the mainstream industry. It's been years and the peak of AR is still Pokemon Go and VR is Beat Saber. Apple Vision looks to be twice as good as the Meta Quest for 10x the price.
What killer app did laptops have that made them the success they are today? Does new technology necessarily need a killer app if the ergonomics end up being more desirable to a broad range of users?
I don't necessarily know the answer here, but my gut feeling is that defining this device based on a "killer app" is like trying to define the original iPhone as needing a "killer app". It didn't necessarily have such a thing but it did end up being pretty big.
The Maps app was so much better than printing MapQuest maps or trying to use the flip phone version of MapQuest.
Being able to access the real internet from anywhere was futuristic.
You could use iMessage without paying $0.10 per text?!?! Can you even imagine paying $0.10 per text (and $0.25 for every text after the first 100 per month?)
Visual voice mail was also a game changer at the time.
And you got an ipod along with all that. (The iphone was my first "big" ipod device)
The built in apps of the iphone were more of a technology demonstration than anything else. They few that existed were also kind of useless because the iphone didn't have mobile data other than glacial slow GSM until the iphone 3G.
This new headset also looks like a technology demonstration. That doesn't mean it will become the next iphone, but it certainly has potential.
iPhone severely depended on how shitty US networks were in general, and honestly if MS didn't bumble things with WP7 I'm not sure it would get that popular that fast.
Arguably word processing combined with some method to transfer files (especially modems) was first, with spreadsheets coming second. But yes, 1990s the laptop was business executive tool and status symbol.
The killer app of laptops is portability. That killer app was so damn powerful it worked even when laptops were called "luggables" because they were fifty pounds and you couldn't use them without a power outlet.
The original iPhone's killer app was an affordable data plan. At the time, data was stupid expense, priced almost as a velben good. But by 2007, AT&T launched a $60 unlimited data plan for their iPhones. Feature phones have been using the web since the turn of the millennium, but nobody could afford it. Nobody bought the smart phones that existed because nobody could afford it. The Motorola Sidekiq was an unattainable toy for most families, but that unlimited data plan suddenly made smart phones viable to most of the population.
For reference, that plan with unlimited data still had a limited number of calling minutes and texts per month!
Not when the first laptop came out. Imagine lugging around a heavy piece of computer, with crammed keyboard and not so nice monitor. Why should one be subjected to such a subpar experience?
By the time laptop form factor became somewhat common, yes, it was spreadsheets, word processing, and a communication suite (mail, file transfer, etc).
Those were the critical features that fueled laptops for several years, taking money from people who found a reason to work on the go. It was a considerable jump up from super tiny (but still used!) computers like Epson HX-20 or super heavy (luggables). The people using them for spreadsheets and word processing joined the field engineering and military applications.
Hell, laptops stopped being synonymous with "business executive" in popular vernacular only after 2000s.
I had a Toshiba T1x00 in my house (probably a T1000) and I can confirm it was able to do Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar. Games were strange on the wide screen, and its other killer app was as a serial terminal.
The TRS-80 model 100, an earlier laptop, found a killer app as a word processor and communication device for reporters. Some were still using them into the late 90s.
And the ones that didn't really have killer apps are from a litany of defunct companies/model lines like GRiD.
Those form factors were massive improvements in portability and accessibility, without necessarily having a killer app compared to its predecessor (laptop not doing anything a desktop didn't do, iphone didn't do much new at first but now has translator apps and GPS and stuff)
The headset, though, seems clunkier (awkward non-flat shape, has cables, no keyboard) and you trade that off for... a bigger, 3D screen that shows you mostly the same thing.
I could be wrong, but it feels like an expensive regression in portability.
If it has no killer app and isn't a revolutionary form factor in terms of portability and ease of access, can it win? Maybe it's easier to access than I'm imagining. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.
Laptops had killer apps in word processing and spreadsheets and various early email systems, bringing them clients other than field engineering and military.
But laptop made it possible for the executive, reporter, etc. to work on the go much better than with previous (luggables) or not at all, and the ensuing combination was the killer app.
I think this will be one of those “iPod, less storage than a Nomad, lame” comments in a few years, but I guess we'll see.
I'd love to work comfortably lying in a hammock, couch or bed. The monitor part is solved, it seems, I just need one of those split keyboards where each half attaches to one hand.
I'd also love to feel like I'm in a colossal movie theater without all the viruses, noise and popcorn from other people.
Walk into a physical store and stand in an aisle. How many products can you see in a 360 field of vision?
Visit any webstore. How many products can you see on your screen at once?
To me this is the completely obvious application for VR. But in order for it to be actually useful you would need an online shopping experience that worked with it. At the very least you would have to 3D model every product.
This is laughable. Walmart literally has a demo of an "AR experience" shopping experience and it is absurdism, on the same level as that pepsi logo design document.
Nobody wants that. People shop online to avoid the annoyance of a physical location. I can shop for things while I squeeze out turds, why would I ever exchange that for strapping an overpriced screen to my face? The average person favors convenience and cheapness above all else, to a huge extent.
It doesn't work, because you can't constrain the user's hand to match what's happening in the game, meaning it completely removes any immersion benefit you get from VR in the first place.
Melee in VR feels awful. It feels like swatting flies.
Shooting in VR is amazing. There are multiple games that let you play Star Wars battlefront knockoffs so you can cosplay the droid army.
Isn't the actual killer app for Advertisers? "Glue this thing to peoples faces and you now have the most effective most intrusive way to slam ads in front of people ever created!" Don't see why any consumer would buy this for 3500 though.
You should try VR porn. Like actually try it. I have heard it loses it's gimmick really fast. It's extremely limited because the camera rig required for video content is restrictive, and the only ones who can afford it are really boring studios, and it's not actually "VR", but merely "3D with a large field of view", which turns out to not be that great, and the "games" that let you interact are often cash grabs, and plenty more often just store bought 3D assets with extremely mediocre animation.
Go look at the VR porn subreddit. It's really not impressive. Also the story that VHS won because of porn is a lie. Porn doesn't drive innovation like most people claim.
With $3500 you can go on an epic drug fueled sex party with high quality real live escorts that will make your mates jealous and will be an experience you remember for life.
Spending $3500 just to wank at VR videos is crazy.
Yeah but that involves going out, talking to people, and actually having a witness to your own desires.
Don't underestimate the power of shame; it's not about getting off, it's about getting off in private without anyone knowing about it. And it's about being in control, because an escort can say 'no', will not just disappear when you have post-nut clarity, will have their own boundaries.
At some point the signals going to your brain won't be too different. VR + AI experiences have way more potential, and will greatly accelerate the trend of people mapping out their limbic systems.
How? Maybe when we plug our brains directly into the matrix through a neural interface for direct electrical simulation but that's SciFi for now. We're still at the step of VR headsets.
Of course there will be variation in what people will accept. For many, near enough is good enough (I was surprised to hear that people had AI partners.)
You sound like those people who want AI to mimic human behavior, yet there are so many more interesting applications outside of that constraint.
If I had to live in a VR context for any reason, this really feels like the product I’d want to have to do it in. But I can’t think of a reason why I’d have to.
What nurturing ecosystem? We've had ten years or so to find an actual use case that every average person is willing to spend hundreds of dollars on, and we have come up empty handed. There's nothing magical or so new in this headset. The people who have an actual use for VR, simulation game turbo nerds, have been mostly satisfied, nobody else cares about VR. Most people who try the "floating web browser and custom theater and infinite monitors" experience quickly realize how unergonomic it is. VR is still an experience that one in ten cannot adjust to.
This is the same problem we saw with the metaverse. It's all hype and no substance. Their best ideas to put into the presentation were looking at web sites.
You don’t make money targeting those without money to spend.
By that logic, Tesla shouldn’t be the top selling car, why would you buy them instead of a 25k Corolla? Many are willing to pay a premium for a best-in class-experience, which is what this headset is.
There’s a lot, lot of disposable income in the world, but not held by the supermajority.
That kinda misses the question. It might very well be the best in class headset (at that price it kinda needs to be). The question was: okay, the hardware is great, but what is need-to-have app?
Other headsets highlighted gaming, metaverse, industrial/medical applications,....
> Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with.
It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
> In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far “distances” within your space.
That's the part I was most intrigued with, and on one size given the 4K resolution per eye, text being readable was expected, but I can't wait to have more details on how "crisp and legible at all sizes" it is. I have no idea of what's M.Panzerino's threshold is for "crisp", hope it's better than just Full HD level.
> > Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with.
> It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?
That I didn't understood. Should that be a message to the competition? What should that tell me as a developer? What should that message tell me as a consumer?
As a consumer may I don't care how many patents are there. Because I don't have a benefit at all.
As a developer may it means, that a develop for a consumer base, but it is hard to predict how big that will be. Competition needs to work around those patents or will not exists at all because of possible licensing fees. So, should I start development or not?
Having a patent moat is also a message to the consumer. Apple has had promised features pulled because it ran into somebody else’s patent minefield and it can affect device price considerably. Having a software update pull features for legal reasons is also a terrible experience.
Many non software folks I meet look at patents as a sign of ingenuity, a reward, and evidence of successful creations / engineering. Its not viewed as a negative. It also suggests Apple's version will be better than others, for a long time, because all of the good parts are patented.
They advertise the "4K per eye" as some kind of an advantage. They need to do this to have 3D vision, but it doesn't improve the resolution, it's still just 4K.
And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes.
I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (just better than all previous headsets).
At 90-100 degrees, a 4K/eye display will likely end up being around 35-40 PPD (pixels per degree). This is about equivalent to what a FHD display would like like (27" monitor at 60cm: https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/).
There are a lot of other factors like fill factor (screen door effect) and there are definitely some optical designs that can increase PPD as well. Apple bought Limbak recently, btw, it's possible they use a similar design as what is described here: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/
Assuming 4k resolution per eye and 120 degree FoV would give 3840*2/120 = 64 ppd.
Using the link that you gave a 4k screen at 60cm is 73 ppd, so it is reasonably close.
Apple haven't said what the FoV is yet, so I'm guessing 120 based on the pi-max and an early impressions video from mkbd. The horizontal range isn't clear either: 23 megapixels would be about three 4k screens so it depends on the overlap region between the eyes.
It's not that far off 4k, and when sitting that close to a 28" 4k screen I find the pixels barely noticeable, i.e. I can see them if they are aliased but would not notice them when the colour gradient is smooth.
Based on your followup post, I think you're confused. Binocular overlap doesn't magically give you double the perceived resolution. If it worked that way, everyone would have a way higher PPD, but it doesn't and they don't. For a naive calculation on resolution you should just use the per eye resolution.
As mentioned resolution on the centroid may be higher depending on the lens design, but there's so much dependent on the rendering pipeline and the optics that I don't think it's worth doing more than ballparking. If you're interested in HMD displays, Oliver Kreylos has posted a lot on resolution measurements over the past few years:
The correct number is somewhere between a multiplier of 1 and 2 depending on the setup of the display. But 2x 4k screens is only 16 megapixels, and so it also depends on where the other 7 megapixels are.
I can't edit this comment after 5 days but anybody coming along and find this - the multiplier is very close to 1. Go up a bit and find the sibling comment with the four links. Very good explanation of the difference between the monocular binocular FoV is buried within.
Apple’s keynote showed an image similar to the 3-lens optical train at the bottom of https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/ and they have a screenshot of HN.
I think 4k might really be a bare minimum for this kind of thing. For the text heavy use cases that apple are pushing things like pixel density are going to be much more important than the gaming usecases VR has been used for thus far.
Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.
I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.
Why the wondering, there are already devices on the market with higher resolutions than what Apple will bring in near future. It may not be comparable for some high FPS use case, but as virtual desktop, especially crispness of image is very much comparable.
Different market, I think. The PSVR2 is aimed at gaming where resolution matters less but the demands on graphics hardware to push that resolution are much higher because they're rendering complex scenes with fancy visual effects and fast motion, all on a console that's limited in graphics power compared to higher-end gaming PCs. Projecting mostly flat windows with little overdraw is much less graphically demanding; the SimulaVR folks and others experimenting with spatial computing have even managed it using the integrated graphics on low-power Intel CPUs, though admittedly with not quite as high a resolution as Apple.
Yeah, I actually wonder if 4k ends up being as good as it sounds in practice for the use-cases Apple are pushing.
A 27" 4k monitor in real life should look better than a virtual 27" window pushing the same resolution within the 4k display of the headset. For stuff like text that's going to have a corresponding loss in sharpness, and because you could be seeing something at an angle there's going to be lots of weird aliasing effects. There's a reason why Apple starting pushing 5k monitors.
I'd guess the tech would need to get to 8k+ for each eye before it starts feeling "really good" for these use cases.
I feel like they have their "game porting tool" out now, because they want to drum up games for visionOS, so it's likely that they'll also do gaming if they can.
The PSVR2 also does foveated rendering, which the Vision Pro does not seem to do, which is about the biggest disappointment about this. I don't care about millions of pixels in the corner of my eye eating up my battery life when I can't even see them.
It's not 4K per eye. They say 23M pixels across two eyes, which is 11.5M for each eye. 4K is 8.2M. It's 40% more pixels than 4K, with the intent presumably being to be able to display a 4K-resolution display within a larger space.
I think I’m noticing what people do all the time with Apple launches, not listen to the marketing. They told you exactly where they’re positioning this. Spatial computing. Not quite tvOS not quite iPadOS. If they’re lucky this is the watch all over again. If they’re truly lucky, this the new iPlatform. I’m just excited they’ve now confirmed this will be a market for at least another decade. I am bummed to see though that it is a queued release and not a global preorder.
24 million pixels across the two panels, orders of magnitude more than any headsets most consumers have come in contact with
The Quest 2 has about 4 million, which is undoubtedly more than 0.24 million. Has "order of magnitude" joined "exponential" as another math expression stolen as a synonym for "rilly rilly rilly"?
"Similarly, if the reference value is one of some powers of 2, since computers store data in a binary format, the magnitude can be understood in terms of the amount of computer memory needed to store that value. "
int(log2(n)) is a perfectly acceptable order of magnitude, especially when considering computers, at least to me.
I think the problem is the plural. You could convincingly say that 24 is _an_ order of magnitude bigger than 4, even if technically log(24) is 1.38 … it’s a close enough approximation.
4 vs 24 million is "about an order of magnitude", if you ask physics. We don't need to be accurate with that expression. And Log_10 (24/4) ≃ 0.78, it's not far away from 1.
More seriously the repeated quote-the-marketing in this article was annoying. You’re explaining your use of it, and your experience is the only thing that matters. Everyone has read the specs at this point.
> It never made sense back then and neither does now
Well, Apple was the first 1T company. I don't know which grade they were learning me that companies maximize profits and minimize expenses. Until it works for Apple, they will happily put whatever price tag. It makes no sense to complain. People will either complain with wallet (not able to buy it) or Apple will just continue to be a behemot.
Apple's position, in so many words, is that if you want a cheaper iPhone, buy an older model. Their products are so good, that the budget model is just the old one.
For example, I have an iPhone 11. I got it the day it came out, and I really don't need another phone. I will continue to use this one until it breaks, or probably for another 5 years, whichever comes first.
Maybe for some people, it's beneath them to buy an older, even if it's professionally refurbished and warranted, but to me that says something about the quality.
Last example. My brother in law was once complaining to me about how Apple is trash and that they purposely slow down their phones and that it's all a conspiracy. I asked him what phone he had and he told me an iPhone 5s! I was so impressed that he didn't even notice how outrageous this was.
That's to the point. There is also less and less reason to upgrade quickly nowadays. My phone is a 12 Pro and I see less than zero need to upgrade. For example, 120Hz display is super nice but downgrading from it is far more jarring than upgrading to it is beneficial. 60Hz is absolutely good enough for years but only if it isn't a downgrade from 120Hz.
I can also see my M1 MBP last as long as my trusty 2009 MBP which crapped out around 2016 (7 years!). It also means less waste and less consumerism which is a positive byproduct in my mind.
All these optimistic articles without showing a single AR application - is Apple allowing access to devices only to pre-vetted publishers that would never criticize their products? 4k per eye sounds good but if it's only used for displaying 2D stuff it's kinda pointless as the resolution is still too low for that and the GPU is too weak for 3D stuff at that resolution (that would need like a minimized 5090 to make it work).
How do you know the resolution is too low, and what do you think is needed? I find the Oculus Quest 2 (1920x1832 per eye) to be passable for working on virtual monitors. Not great, but feels 60% of the way there. I would expect 4K per eye to be a huge difference.
I have HP Reverb G2 which is 2048x2048 per eye and it's great for the MS Flight Simulator 2020 or Automobilista 2 but utterly terrible for virtual desktop. Imagining 2x denser pixels still doesn't cut it for working with text, i.e. one still will see jagged lines/edges. Also the lens are unfocused towards edges which would require head movement instead of eye movement to keep focused area sharp. Imagine programming a foot away from a 55" monitor.
Vision Pro is supposed to be 23Mpx so let's assume it's evenly distributed per eye, making it 11.5Mpx per eye, and with a square resolution per eye, so that's approximately 3391x3391, i.e. 1.65x denser than Reverb.
It could be that in 3-5 years a mass market emerges from this. Or it could be like apple's newton handheld computer, released in the early 1990s and discontinued without successor. The smartphone eventually arrived but a good decade later.
I'm seriously hoping it's a success. I grew up on Apple, but five years ago I jumped to Linux and ThinkPads and haven't looked back until now. I want a Linux-based XR environment, but that won't happen unless the hardware becomes cheap and common and hackable enough for a developer community to even think about seriously trying for it. So the range of headsets that have been offered until now have left me disheartened, focused as they are on entertainment. The HoloLens gave me some hope, but Microsoft can't touch Apple for hardware, and they wisely limited themselves to specialized use cases.
Apple isn't playing, though. They're targeting all use cases--entertainment, socializing, and working, even collaboratively. They don't want this just in the office, they want it in the home. If they succeed (on the second generation, mind you) then Microsoft and PC makers will be in the same position phone makers were when the iPhone took hold. They'll have to work together if they want to catch up, and they'll have to work fast, which means working openly.
Except for the one use case where there has actually been demand for VR: gaming. Apple's plan is to eat Meta's lunch. Meta's lunch consists of two peas and a leaf of wilted lettuce.
What makes you think they aren't targeting gaming? They just didn't have anything to show yet, since none of the studios have one of these and Apple don't make games.
I would imagine gaming with this will be great, you get all the benefits of VR without having to use one of those stupid motion controllers.
Did you miss the tiny little part of having no controllers? If you want to play some trivial games via tapping with fingers around for sure, but nothing sophisticated can be done. Whole UI is done for browsing and mimicking big screen and reading text.
Unless you mean holding mouse and keyboard, while sitting behind desk. For 1/5th of the price you can just buy big gaming curved screen which has many many technologies that help gaming experience, and Apple will have 0 (ie gsync/freesync, antiflickering etc.).
They already have you covered then. You'll be getting a comparable or marginally worse setup than couch gaming. It brings none of the benefits of the medium. There is no reason to use VR to game in this way. Perhaps you and some others want to do it, but it has no additional value prop to most people and is not what people mean when they say "VR gaming".
I may be in the minority (although that very much remains to be seen) but I think this approach gives you the only actual benefit of VR, namely immersion. I play video games to relax, having to jump around to avoid shiny lights is the opposite of relaxing.
I kinda prefer controllers. Tapping my fingers together and waving them around with even less feedback will mean the gesture recognition needs to be extremely far beyond anything we’ve had before, or is going to feel awful to use. Any time you’re in a game and are meant to be holding an object, having something to hold helps a lot, and most games want that.
If we can turn everyday objects into the thing you hold, that’d be great, but I’m not sure it’s feasible yet. We’ll see if anyone tries.
I've always dreamt of a good AR goggle. I'm just a bit apprehensive about Apple being the big player. My country isn't thaaat big on Apple. So I would never use facetime to call people, for instance. So I'm afraid that if it's locked down, as is typical for Apple, I won't get to experience it fully.
I want it hackable, not because I myself is gonna do anything with it, but because I want that kind of innovation. Not the boring, polished, exec-vision thingy. Let other people invent new ways of doing stuff!
If augmented reality can provide me with step-by-step guidance on diagnosing and fixing a car leak, replacing a diverter valve on a faucet, installing roof-customized solar panels, and various other DIY tasks, while also showing me the necessary tools, then I would be inclined to purchase this product. I'm growing weary of watching YouTube videos for car repairs and struggling to align the locations of bolts or parts with my own vehicle.
The concept of augmented reality also appeals to me when it comes to recipes. I've been considering investing in a Thermomix device, which costs around $1500, because I appreciate the convenience of their on-screen guided instructions rather than attempting to figure out the correct temperature, cooking time, slice size. If augmented reality can guide me through cooking two or three dishes simultaneously, that would be a very convenient time saver. For example, while the onions are sautéing for 5 mins, the software knows that I have enough time to prepare a 2nd dish like chopping romaine leaves for a salad. I’d end my subscription to Soylent pretty quick for something like that.
You bring up some good points. Mainly that teaching you to work on your car, your house, or cook is highly specific to your particular environment. Maybe that's an example of the missing killer app for XR.
OTOH these also sound like things a remote teacher could help you with if they could talk to you in an earpiece provided they could immerse themselves in your environment. So the remote teacher would be wearing the AR headset. But now maybe you'd need a robot avatar in your kitchen.
Just brainstorming here but these might be business opportunities.
Indeed, I have personally tried CozyMeals, which appears to be the prominent online platform for remote cooking instruction that you mentioned. They provide virtual live cooking classes as well as private 1-on-1 sessions. According to a reviewer's feedback on the live cooking class, it is advisable to have all the ingredients prepped, measured, and ready before the class begins, as the instructor progresses swiftly through each preparation step. While it is possible to ask questions, the overall concept remains similar: you observe them, but they are not observing you, which falls short of the guided instructions I previously mentioned. Opting for their private 1-on-1 cooking class, which costs approximately $300, allows you to simply watch as they handle all the prep work and cooking.
How would this, which has the hardware of two iPhones in it and stands in for a 100" screen and Dolby Atmos surround system, cost less than an iPhone Pro Max?
It was obvious as soon as they listed the cameras involved, the M2 chip, and the micro-OLED screens (plural), this was going to cost 2x a single top of line iPhone plus headset, so $3000+.
GP didn't say how much it should cost, just how much most people are willing to spend. Right now this is just a portable, private screen (maybe a really nice one, but without any killer XR app, that's all it is) . There are few people who have a use for that to make it worth spending $3.5k on. If an app comes out that enables something people want to do, but you can't do with a laptop, then it may start to become worth it.
If you can afford to pay $2800 more so people can't see what you are doing on your iPad, you are probably in the minority. It's really cool, but really expensive. I see this as like the Macintosh Portable.
Also, there's a good chance that devices like this have a strong future. Just like you could argue that a Macbook is a descendant of the Macintosh Portable, the fact that lots of people own macbooks doesn't mean the Macintosh Portable was a success.
It’s quite obvious that this will effectively duplicate 1440p monitors since the much lower resolution Quest Pro is (mostly) able to do so with 1080p. Hopefully it can do even better than 1440p, but honestly that might be “good enough” when comboed with multiple virtual displays. Multiple effectively-1080p virtual displays don’t really cut it on the QP, but it’s annoyingly close.
My bigger concern is comfort. Ski mask style HMDs went the way of the dinosaur for a good reason: they’re nightmarishly awful to use for extended periods of time. I did see an image of an attachable side-to-side head strap, which implies Apple is aware of the problem but prioritized aesthetics.
Also for anyone interested in FoV: this guy on Twitter mentioned that it’s similar to the Quest Pro [1]. Lower than I’d like for that price, especially with an enclosed face gasket.
> It’s quite obvious that this will effectively duplicate 1440p monitors since the much lower resolution Quest Pro is (mostly) able to do so with 1080p.
It doesn't sound like prior efforts work well for that use case at all.
> The resolution means that text is actually readable. Apple’s positioning of this as a full on computing device only makes sense if you can actually read text in it. All of the previous iterations of ‘virtual desktop’ setups have relied on panels and lenses that present too blurry a view to reliably read fine text at length. In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far ‘distances’ within your space.
> It doesn't sound like prior efforts work well for that use case at all.
Fwiw, this is essentially correct for all consumer grade HMDs prior to the end of 2022. Fresnel lenses meant you could only achieve (relative) text clarity inside a small sweet spot.
Pancake optics made this more of a question of panel resolution due to their nearly edge-to-edge clarity. The problem is that the two currently available pancake lens devices are the Pico 4 and the Quest Pro: neither of which have quite enough underlying pixels to make the “working in headset” dream viable.
I absolutely DON’T recommend the Quest Pro as a replacement monitor for that very reason. It CAN reasonably approximate a 1080p monitor, but not at a visual distance most people would be comfortable with using for extended times. Similar experience to using a large TV as a monitor (though not quite THAT bad). When you’re that up close and personal with your virtual display, adding extra desktops doesn’t really help much.
“Vision Pro” has pancake optics and a very dense display panel so the “sitting in front of a TV” thing shouldn’t be an issue. I’m very excited to try one out.
I'm sure it's good enough with that resolution and other high tech stuff. But can you work in it for extended periods of time?
I never wear wristwatches or smart watches unless I have to (hiking, running etc) because I dislike any trinkets that touch the skin 24/7, regardless of the material. This thing is almost like a diving mask, just not airtight. How about wearing it several hours straight?
Weight placed on the face makes a qualitative difference. More weight means bigger straps and more pressure against the face to keep it there. If the Apple vision is light enough then it might not be an issue, but the size of the strap they're using hints that it's much more significant than most everyday wearable objects.
It’s not a completely valid comparison - the ski goggles are much closer to your face so have less of a moment on your neck. While the vision pro notionally looks like a set of goggles from the front, the side view shows that they’re just as big as every other VR headset.
I don’t think we’re really going to know what they feel like until someone not from Apple puts them on their head!
My guess is that if you dislike even wristwatches then something like this is just going to be a nonstarter right? For me, I'm comfortable with nearly 24/7 wear of watches and an hour or so in the quest on beatsaber - if they manage to improve image quality I think k that's a major factor for making it more comfortable. Beatsaber is fine, but I couldn't imagine doing anything that actually required reading or the like, that would hurt my eyes pretty fast
I managed maybe 45 minutes at a go before face sweat/itch, eye strain, muscle ache, and nausea set in. The novelty wore off rapidly, it sat around for a year, and I sold it off. I wanted to believe.
I have a very comfortable third-party head strap (BOBOVR M2) and cooling facial interface so I don't really notice that I'm even wearing a headset after a few minutes.
Do you have any negative side effects? My brother has sinked many hours into it and it seems to have become a huge issue for him socially in the “real” world.
I feel light headed and forget to fully touch my phone screen outside of VR (thinking just pointing at it will work, as it does in VR).
But only for an hour or two after taking off my headset.
Not sure what you mean about socially? I can't see how interacting with people in a virtual space would have any strange effects on how I interact with people in a physical space. I don't really see a difference between chatting in a group around a virtual table versus a physical table.
is it really this difficult to project 3-5 years into the future where this thing is cheaper, more powerful, and has an app library ... because all of the actual pros bought the launch model to develop software for it in 2024? then give it a 24-36 app dev cycle and you're going to hit the adoption curve. in about 5 years.
this is literally how every single thing has worked in this industry for like 50 years now. are there really people on this site so young that they don't remember how this works beyond a single product hype cycle? is it that hard to remember how compact discs, dial-up internet, laptops, multi-CPU/cores, DVDs, mp3 players, broadband, smartphones, bluetooth, wifi, flash, SSDs, GPUs, plasma, lcd, led, smartwatches, EVs took 5-10 years to hit mass market? "well, that's different, those were obviously going to be hits" -- no. wrong. all of this stuff was atrocious and atrociously expensive when it first came out. anyone remember the first orinoco wifi cards? or bluetooth? the shit didn't even work.
here are some current things that sort of suck but will probably also continue get better: satellite internet, smart home tech, solar tech, LLMs. this stuff will get better. it's the housing, education, healthcare, financial services that are going to get worse and worse because all of the money flows to the people making the tech. talk about missing the forest for the trees.
i mean is it REALLY that hard to remember this stuff? am i REALLY that old? am i taking crazy pills?
>>. am i REALLY that old? am i taking crazy pills?
What you are, is snarky.
The only times Apple ever did this in the past, the product flopped because it was too expensive.
Maybe other companies have been leading with expensive tech waiting for the market to catch up, but Apple hasn't - not since the Lisa anyway.
And yes I am on old fogey - ol enough to remember that the industry has been waiting for consumers to "catch up" to VR for many many years. It's not happening - VR is a niche. Ordinary people don't want to put a VR headset on - they just don't - there's no catching up because 99% of the people I know would never put on a headset except for one impressive demo and never again.
This thing will at best do "okay" - it's too expensive - there won't be a critical mass of software for it, and VR is a niche.
> Ordinary people don't want to put a VR headset on - they just don't.
Why not?
Because it's heavy, sweaty, smelly, expensive, uncomfortable for the eyes, or some other reason?
I doubt people have real ideological aversion towards headsets. If people don't want them it's probably because of one of the practical reasons above. And honestly most of those are likely to be alleviated in the near future.
Why are you so hopeful any of these will be fixed in anything like the near future? Phones have been working to reduce weight per FLOPS for more than a decade, and you can only do so much - and you need many more FLOPS for VR. Similarly, the need to keep these screens glued in place relative to your eyes, and to use complex electro-mechanical optics in addition to the screens, put quite a strict limit on how comfortable or small they can physically be. Batteries only add to this, and weight-to-power ratio for batteries is progressing at a snail's pace.
I'd bet that if Apple thought in any way that they might have a sunscreen form-factor device in anything close to 5 years from now they would have held off on releasing anything to the public.
All signs 100% point to bulky headsets being the state-of-the-art for the foreseeable future, and this is going to keep dooming this technology.
Not to mention, the fact that no one has really found a good way to allow you to move around in the VR "space" that they're creating with anything other than a controller (to an extremely disorienting effect even then) also puts a serious damper on our ability to suspend disbelief while enjoying such a device.
No, its because most people hate the idea of being around other people who so blatantly disconnect from everybody and look like idiots, or being actually those people. Its the exact opposite of 'cool' - its desperate, rude, pathetic.
Those are not my words, I wouldn't mind wearing it in private (for open spaces with other people including my family definitely above is valid), its from my wife who is a doctor. And she generally likes tech, has latest iphone and garmin 6 pro watches. Just because you like some gadget, you can't force it on folks who properly detest the whole idea of it.
Let's not even start the discussion on negative physical and mental health effects of watching this for longer, especially in kids.
I don't understand how can people feel so strongly about this.
If someone wants to wear a headset, what's it to you?
Especially if it's not in your presence.
> Let's not even start the discussion on negative physical and mental health effects
Like the physical and mental health effects people complain about EVERY TIME a new form of media consumption technology is introduced. It's a complaint as old as the pyramids, literally.
Of course we should be careful and mindful about the well being of children. But let's not loose our heads, this is not fentanyl.
Do you see how prevalent people glue to their phone in public, or how earphones are everywhere. They were once frown upon. Now it’s social norm except for in person gatherings. Same will happen here.
A dentist friend of mine is so excited with the ability of using it for his work. He doesn’t want to look up to the X-ray screen, or has his assistant read out loud for him the number associated with the patient’s scanning result.
There was never nearly the kind of hatred towards looking at your phone as there will be towards strapping a TV to your head. You have the occasional person complaining that people aren't connecting, which is no different from newspapers in the 20th century.
This reminds me of a typical comment during the first Apple Watch release.
- “Too expensive”
- “Who is this for?!”
- “my $20 watch has 20x battery life”
- ”This will obviously flop because no one I know wants to strap a screen to their wrist and carry it around all day”
- ...and on and on.
I don’t have a guess as to whether this will flop or succeed, but I’m always amazed at how people are willing to announce publicly with confidence that a product they’ve never used will undoubtedly fail.
Apple famously dropped the price of the first iPhone by $200 (a 33% reduction from $599 to $399!) two months after launch; then gave people who bought it in that time a $100 credit.
Professional don’t buy new technology out of the goodness of their heart. They do it because there is a market to address generally business users. Yet Apple seems to be mostly positioning the Vision as an entertainment centred device targeting a large market. At this price point, it is quite surprising.
I think significant questions remain at this point about their actual go-to-market strategy (unsurprisingly considering they have only been given a short keynote presentation) which make people suspicious if not sceptical when you take into account the other notorious failures in this market.
Personally, I don't believe the business market actually exists.
I always hear people giving made up use cases like "oh, service engineers will be able to see instructions overlaid on the machines they're working on" but a paper service manual costs a lot less than a 3D augmented reality manual - and anyone who's worked with service engineers knows for any repair that's performed often enough that productivity is important, the service engineer will know the process by heart.
Oh sure, you can sell a few units to architecture companies that want to dazzle rich clients. But you can't sustain a product like this on sales of 1000 units per year.
Google Glass and HoloLens both targeted the "business market" but that's just them saving face when they can't hit a price point that makes any sense.
I have a friend that works on software and hardware for large industrial design and manufacturing. They apparently use and sell the HoloLens and it's quite useful. It's not really for showing off to clients. It can significantly reduce errors in repair.
It is best to think of this as a glorified dev-kit.
Developers are not going to be the primary demographic, this isn't going to be the final price and the product will definitely change over the coming year.
You could pay more than $50000 for a max spec Intel Mac Pro just a few days ago (at the risk of being outperformed by a Mac Mini). Marques Brownlee called it the most overpriced tech product currently on the market.
The Lisa and the Mac were very expensive for their day--probably at the same level as this.
The difference was that the Mac shipped with WYSIWYG editing software (MacWrite and MacPaint) that was so obviously better than anything on the IBM that it was a no brainer. People wanted them very much, but most of us simply couldn't afford them.
In addition, desktop publishing was a stupidly obvious killer app on the Macintosh (Fat Mac plus LaserWriter plus Aldus Pagemaker) and you could make your money back within a couple of jobs given how much money you would save.
That may be true, but my family only had my father working as a teacher. He got paid absolute crap for a very long time.
Even a $400 computer was a huge stretch for them. It was possibly the absolute best purchase they ever made for me as it sent me down the tech path, but they thought VERY long and hard about it.
Macintosh was somewhat cheap at release time - $2495 for graphical computer, albeit very limited in many ways. In fact, probably it's major "groundbreaking" aspect was that it was cheap - compared to nearly 10x more expensive graphical workstations used in professional settings.
A standalone Sun-2/120, with cpu, 1M of memory, 42MB hard drive, tape interface, ethernet interface and software, cost $16300 in 1984 dollars, over 45k today.
> is it that hard to remember how compact discs, dial-up internet, laptops, multi-CPU/cores, DVDs, mp3 players, broadband, smartphones, bluetooth, wifi, flash, SSDs, GPUs, plasma, lcd, led, smartwatches, EVs took 5-10 years to hit mass market?
Zoomers don’t remember a time before any of those things. Hell, they don’t even remember some of those things.
It is targeted at developers and companies who want to build apps. But there will of course be a huge contingent of early adopters.
The reason it is priced at $3500 is because Apple does not have the supply chain to build more of these things. There is simply no point pricing this at $300 and being perpetually Out of Stock which would devalue their brand for no benefit. Hence the Pro tag and release at WWDC.
Eventually there will be a non-Pro version that everyone can buy.
Realistically this "Pro" version is for early adopters. There will surely be a regular/SE/Lite version in a couple of years for the price of a MacBook Air.
> And who will develop software for something with such a small user base?
Everyone will, if they're smart. Being first to market on a new platform is huge, even if it will take a few years to have significant market penetration.
Angry Birds became a multi-billion dollar franchise for being one of the first iPhone games. Who knows what the equivalent will be for XR.
Respectfully, even the iPad hasn't fully evolved into a laptop replacement, so why should we think this device will fit all the multitude of use cases that necessitate the computing power represented by a laptop / desktop device?
In the presentation today, Apple specifically mentioned connecting to your macOS device as a seamless experience. In my opinion, this will be another "content consumption" device like an iPad that integrates with macOS devices and is not a replacement for them.
For now. I actually see them moving to this if it takes off both for battery life and computing. Them even labeling it as a spatial computer, shows there positioning this to be their future.
It is? As in it acts like a normal Mac OS machine that happens to be attached to your head, holds all your files and stuff without communicating to another PC?
It's no more a laptop replacement than iPad is. Almost 4 years down the road after the release of iPadOS and it's still a failure as a laptop replacement save for a few well-selected niches.
And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.
I agree with your general sentiment, except with one small caveat. I don't think it' s a laptop replacement per se. It's more like an immersive glue that will allow your laptop, if you have one in the future, to remain as a standalone device, but through handoff/side-care/R1 it'll stitch everything together into a virtual environment.
When you take it off, your laptop, phone, whatever will still work great as normal.
It's a caveat because for a lot of people, I don't think laptops will be necessary in the future. My mom doesn't have one but is obsessed with her phone. Probably one day laptops will mostly be for pros.
But yeah, in general I agree with everything you said.
The WWDC demos suggested that it would be a full development device, and it has the same M2 processor as the M2 Macbook. It is basically a Macbook in a different form factor and with a bunch of extra sensors.
I thought it would be absurd to be wearing these goggles in the street. Then I thought that at home it would also be strange being with the family with those things on the top of your head. I thought "This is perfect for people who live alone". And then it dawned on me: the killer app for this is p0rn.
It's priced just like Microsoft's Hololens and aimed at the same target audience that the first version of Hololens was: developers and early adopters.
The cheaper mass market consumer version comes later. They've been iterating for years now on something in a thick framed glasses form factor, and haven't gotten anything they think is worth shipping so far.
But HoloLens has pretty much entirely abandoned the consumer market and is now targeting the lucrative segment of professional usage where there is obvious gain to me made using AR, a segment Apple has always been mostly uninterested in.
The $600 price was with AT&T subsidies; some phones were free, or nearly free, when carrier subsidized. The Palm Centro was a contemporary smartphone you could get for under $200 with Sprint subsidies.
To be clear, for Apple, I would consider the Apple Watch a flop.
Sure the product exists and people buy them, but it's no earth shaker - in contrast, a success for Apple is iPad, iPhone, Macintosh - products that if you ask some random person in an affluent country, there's a pretty good chance they own one, two three or more of these products.
The Apple VR headset will not be a flop in the sense that Apple probably won't kill the product, but it also won't be any huge success by the measures above. It will at best be a niche, which is a flop for Apple.
Well, I've paid something like $200/year for a fitness app in VR. So I can easily imagine a small number of rich Apple users paying $500/year. If you can get a few thousand users paying $500/year, pretty soon you're talking about decent money.
But so far, that is the only app category I can think of that would justify me quitting my job and trying to bootstrap a business based solely on an app for Vision OS. I feel like I am probably overlooking a couple, though... :-D
there is a huge amount of comfortable people who are bought into the whole Apple ecosystem. Everything they use is Apple, it all looks, is built and works together very well and they have spent multiple amounts over the years than what this costs on its own. Cost is not important for them. Even monitor stands can never be classed as expensive.
Brand loyalty, consumerism, platform lock in. It's the reason why Apple is so wealthy.
People will defend the investment of their time and money by investing more.
It’s part but I think you disregard many of its “pro” userbase that prefers the often best-in-class hardware with okay software, which is much more privacy oriented than the alternative.
At least on the phone market, iphones have much longer lifetime and can often be used second-third time as well (I also use a used iphone, which I plan on passing down to my mother when I upgrade). Their M-series laptops are unbiasedly the best and it is not even funny by how far. There is simply no competitor that would be anywhere near on the performance-battery life plot, and for that its price is really not high (especially an M1 air, used or new).
Android’s wearables are toys compared to an apple watch also.
Same pattern over and over, futuristic hardware, closed source software. This looks boring to me. I don't expect anything ground breaking from it. It's gonna be an iphone sticked to your eyes. Those big tech companies remove all the fun and excitement we used to have with new hardware. We know how it's gonna behave and it's limitation before it's released to the public.
If you make a list of groundbreaking products that would include the light bulb, the bicycle, the refrigerator, the radio, the car, printed books, the newspaper, the TV, personal computers, mobile phones... The iPhone is great, but I doubt it could even make it to the top ten.
The things I listed are also products. I just didn't pick individual examples because for most of them I wasn't alive at the time and so I don't know what the equivalent "first mass produced model that popularised it" would be. For cars it would probably be the Model T, for example. The iPhone was a great product that sold very well, but it was more of an incremental improvement over mobile phones which had been a thing for a while. But I'm also not in the US, so maybe it doesn't seem that groundbreaking because it never was all that popular over here.
What does this level of reductionism get you? If you follow that to its logical conclusion then it's essentially "nothing matters, nothing is interesting, who cares about anything, it would have been invented anywhere, pyramids are more interesting".
It's just a deeply cynical point of view for cynicism's sake.
I don't know, it doesn't seem like that to me, I'd even say the opposite. There are plenty of groundbreaking and great inventions, so many that I think grandparents comment of calling the iPhone the greatest product ever is just biased due to it being a very recent product and very popular right now, and Apple being the most valued public company in the world at the moment. And also it's not that I don't think it's a great product and very innovative, I would definitely put it somewhere in the top 100, I just don't think it's the number 1 is all, so decided to argue that in the comments.
I feel like comparing categories of products to an individual make of product is a bit unfair.
Like, of course the car was a world-changing invention. And Ford's original model T remains a significant point of the history of automobiles.
The smartphone was certainly a world-changing invention, and it seems the iPhone was just as historically significant to it as a technology. I don't think the LG Prada is going to be so thoroughly remembered by history.
This is what Apple really sells. I read parent's comment and was sorta nodding along, and then read yours and realized 1) it's kind of a ludicrous statement, and 2) it sounded reasonable to me.
But the comparison is that it is "[arguably the most groundbreaking product ever] sticked to your eyes", and the property of groundbreakingness is not necessarily transitive.
I think with the Oculus, at least when developing with Unity, you target the Android platform. I'll admit I've never actually looked at what is under the hood in the Quest.
Open source software developers could never approach the masterpiece of software craftsmanship is on display here. Only exceptional, highly paid professionals with intense focus can achieve this. Generally, those who can, do and get paid handsomely, those who can't, pretend by volunteering their open source. We're talking Hollywood composer vs. music teacher, here.
A polished UI is only what you are looking at, not what is underneath. You have failed to understand the years and years of hardwork poured by vast majority of OSS that helped building all the systems that underpin every single system out there.
Your comparison of OSS developers as tinkerers who can't reach the Megacorp scale is totally absurd. I've worked at these corporations, and out of 10 only 1 or 2 would reach a scale of a great developer. But, OSS developers innovations, contributions and impact surpasses any company out there.
Also, nobody in their right mind wants to work 80 hours a week competing with a team who's trying to better you, if you pit the developers against each other it doesn't matter how much you get paid, your time is owned by the large corp at the end of the day. Easy to undermine the work of OSS developers who go unappreciated and hail the rat racing corporations.
1) I'm sure there's a lot of open source software hiding in every apple device.
2) I know Facebook and Google contribute to open source, probably Apple does too?
3) Of course you can get a lot of well qualified people working on a project if you pay them.
You should try Google and Facebook's internal SCM tools. Better than Git by miles. Git itself was a copy of the real innovator in the space, BitKeeper. Git, being free, has undercut commercial solutions, and that market is now a wasteland.
Interestingly GitHub and GitLab have captured most of that market by plugging the gaps in the developer journey. I sometimes use git standalone for personal work but wouldn't dare for a bigger project.
Whoa, you can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We ban accounts that break the rules this way.
>I was HIGHLY doubtful that Apple could pull off a workable digital avatar based off of just a scan of your face using the Vision Pro headset itself. Doubt crushed [...] It’s not totally perfect, but they got skin tension and muscle work right,[...] and the brief interactions I had with a live person on a call [...] did not feel creepy or odd. It worked.
One of the things that shocked me most from the keynote, was the Persona avatar demo. Meta has demoed what they call codec avatars[1] which are super impressive, but still very much in development and not anywhere on the horizon yet.
To see Apple demonstrate realistic avatars was honestly super impressive and will be imo one of the features that you just need experience to truly realize the world of a difference it makes to talk to someone on a flat video screen or feel like you're in the same space together thanks to these avatars and spatial audio.
Immersion is so powerful in VR, I can't wait to hang out with friends and family abroad, play tabletop games, watch a show together, or just shoot the sht.
Apple is notorious for retaliating against “news” companies giving them bad reviews especially for demo and preview. At this point, an article is worth approximately as much as a marketing copy straight from them.
The fact that Tim Cook didn’t wear the display once during the demo is all I needed to create my opinion on the device. They also didn’t show any developers using the device - why? Probably because this is a glorified iPad and Apple continues to artificially lock down their Apple Silicon on some devices to not cannibalize the lower-tier MacBook offerings.
My guess is Tim Cook didn't wear one because Apple's media team didn't want every news article to use the screen grab as the header image (which is what happened with Zuc). They want the their manicured marketing material front and center.
I believe they can use practically uneven pixel distribution by lenses. So if they render the “middle” over a larger area and later correct for that with lenses than in effect that part will be of higher pixel density.
I highly doubt it. The average pixel density is 33 pixels per degree (compared 60+ ppd of a no-frills monitor at a typical desk distance). Concentrating pixels in the centre to make a reasonable display would leave something like 10ppd for the periphery, which is like 1/5 of eye's resolution.
What remains to be seen is whether this is the greatest product in a product category with mainstream appeal, or whether this is the greatest product in a niche category that many people feel no need to be a part of.
Most of Apple’s other successful products are part of the former. Music players were a proven market. Headphones were a proven market. Cell phones were a proven market. Watches, fitness trackers, and jewelry were a proven market.
VR and AR are really not that. That market has sold an impressive amount of units mostly on the back of a cheap $300 device that its owners consider to be a toy, but the volume is nothing compared to all the other devices I mentioned.
This could very easily be the next HomePod (1st generation): an over-engineered niche product with a price that is too high to be palatable.
One thing is certain: people are getting fired over at Meta.
This is specifically for children under seven, and presumably (I have not yet read the actual study) only when a certain percentage of time is spent immersed in VR. I would be very surprised if this was solved, this looks more like a "just don't do this". That's eminently reasonable for the first seven years.
I'm curious if anyone's tried using the Varjo VR-3 as a monitor replacement? The Vision Pro seems like it might be in the same league. It's got this unique setup where the central focus area (27° x 27°) is a uOLED display with 70ppd and 1920 x 1920 px per eye, while the rest of the view is over 30ppd on an LCD display with 2880 x 2720 px per eye.
While they're not directly competing (given that the Varjo is entirely wired and lacks the key attraction of Apple's software and ecosystem), they do seem to be somewhat comparable in terms of price and resolution.
The Varjo would be more around 12 million per eye, but I think the actual feeling could be affect by the optics and how the central focus area is handled.
The central 70ppd feels like a pretty solid number. Funnily enough it's price not that far from Apple's headset.
Yeah, but given that the central focus display is 70 PPD on the Varjo, it's probably higher PPD compared to the Vision Pro in that part of the screen. So, I'm curious if that 70 PPD area truly matches up to the clarity of a real monitor.
Is anything known about health risks? I could imagine that if the eye no longer has to focus on distance, that this could lead to refractive errors more quickly with excessive use.
It's a risk mostly to small children as far as I understand. There's been a few case of semi-permanent eye issue I think in pretty young kids (6 or so ?), and temporary issues in older kids (10-13?), but I can't find the papers back.
Since these studies, it has become harder to experiment on small kids as it would be unethical, but on the other hand there's no specific report on kids older than 13 if I remember well.
Then a decent number of adults have been using the headsets for prolonged periods without anything critical reported at this point. It should still be used with awareness of potential risks, but I don't think there's any strong evidence of long term effects.
I don't know - monitors are physical objects in space that you are aware of. I would classify Vision Pro more as glasses.
I wear glasses myself. And sometimes I forget to take them off because they become part of my perception. That doesn't happen to me with my monitors :-D
I see big potentials for this device with DIY contents among others. Imagine putting this on to fix your car? It can guide you through exploded views and help you pin point problems. That could be big in professional settings too.
HOWEVER, I still believe it will be very niche. It’s still putting on a sizable headset and placing two screens right up your eye balls. We don’t yet know the health effects from doing that for an extended period. I imagine it is not good at all.
Unless there’s some radio wave danger, I don’t see how headsets could be harmful. Your eyes are not actually focusing on a close screen, they’re focused however far away the objects appear to be. Is there a danger to letting your eyes be unfocused and placing an iPhone right next to them (letting the screen be blurry, not trying to focus on it).
Maybe it’s the inner ear that is going to get hurt after prolonged disorientation, but astronauts should surely have that worse and I haven’t heard of any studies about it. Maybe something will show up about it.
I don’t see an obvious mechanism where this is harmful and VR headsets have been around long enough that this should be a well-understood safety space.
How well the new user interaction method works (eye and hand tracking) was the thing I was most interested in.
> I’ve used essentially every major VR headset and AR device since 2013’s Oculus DK1 right up through the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. I’ve tried all of the experiences and stabs at making fetch happen when it comes to XR.
Here’s what Apple got right that other headsets just couldn’t nail down:
The eye tracking and gesture control is near perfect.
But how precise is it? Eye tracking may be good enough for foveated rendering, hand tracking good enough for pushing buttons, but how does it compare to handheld controllers for drawing something in Photoshop?
It depends on task though. Selection is easy to do using eye-tracking as you just have to shift your attention onto the object long enough to click.
Drawing is a task that is more like aiming - attempting to hold your gaze at a precise location for a period of time. It is possible, but you are fighting against the natural saccade pattern of your eye and it becomes tiring very quickly. You can expect fatigue / eye-strain within a few minutes.
A new platform certainly doesn't have to be better at every task.
Even 20 years ago, a professional digital illustrator wouldn't try to draw everything on screen with a mouse, they would have a tool more suited to the task, like a Wacom tablet.
I think headsets like this one, will replace screens for sit-down cases… working at your computer, watching movies, browsing the internet, etc.
But it’s going to take time. The uptake on this particular device will be small due to the price (very small by Apple’s standards).
For V2 maybe they can save a chunk of money by dropping the wearer pass-through display, and just indicate the wearer’s status with some LEDs (You’ve got a big headset on. People around you being able to see a representation of your eyes isn’t going to make them feel more comfortable/connected to you.)
The display resolution is apparently acceptable for the simulated monitor case. So that threshold has been reached.
Still too bulky, though. It's niche at this size.
It's interesting that HN seems so divided on Vision Pro. Lots of skepticism, and also lots of acknowledgement that Apple has a habit of shutting down its doubters.
Personally, I'm still skeptical. They announced 2 hours of battery life, which basically means this needs to always be plugged in. And while this is much more useful and technologically superior to everything that came before, it suffers in other ways. It looks goofier and more dystopian than Google Glass (though maybe Apple's brand status can carry it through this), and is heavier and has a weaker exclusive value prop than Meta's Quest headsets.
For all the hate it gets, Meta at least has a core use case for its Quest headsets - VR gaming. If you want to play VR games, get a Quest. If you want to ??? get a Vision Pro. Still not sure what belongs there. Watch a movie in VR instead of on your TV? See your monitors in VR instead of on your desk? Record precious memories that you want to relive over and over with a huge chunk of tech strapped over your face instead of living and enjoying the moment with those around you?
I guess it's the HomePod strategy on steroids - release an ultra-premium device, then release the mass market version later, once you figure out what people actually want from it.
Either way, there's only so much that speculation can cover. Right now, no one can speak to very basic factors like comfort over extended periods of time, which can make or break this product.
The words that comes to mind when I see the pictures of a person wearing that in a room with another person:
Prank.
Carnival.
Grotesque.
Dystopian.
My prediction is this device is joining the hall of fame of technological misdirection's along with such products like the NES Power Glove.
Both John Gruber (daringfireball.net) and Ben Thompson (Stretechery et. al) showed strong praise for the headset after trying it at the event. John was a skeptic but he was won over. Ben, much more bullish on the headset, was also blown away. This bodes well.
It's an external battery anyway, so you can use an arbitrarily large battery or multiple backup batteries. It's not really a problem, but the battery being external is.
Well there is the in-house proprietary market. Imagine how billion dollar companies coulf leverage this. It's not really for mass consumption, just like microsofts AR glasses too. Army bought a bunch of those and make in-house killer apps
The author says he used all the VR systems that exist under the sun, but he doesn't mention SimulaVR.
Since for my use case it's the most direct competitor (using VR as working tool, not gaming), anybody got a comparison of the early test devices for both?
> The author says he used all the VR systems that exist under the sun, but he doesn't mention SimulaVR.
I don't think SimulaVR counts, since all they have so far is a few prototypes and a single pre-release build sent to an external reviewer (https://simulavr.com/blog/review-unit-in-transit/). And unless the author is that reviewer (or works for SimulaVR), he can't have used it.
Thank you, Generic Advertisement Camouflaged as an Article for Shiny New Thing from MegaCorp Inc!
Those conspiracy theories about chemicals in American tapwater must be onto something if people are genuinely (aka not obvious shills) excited about this clownery.
"Brigaded" usually means (in an online context) a coordinated attack from an outside source. I don't think there's any evidence of that - just sounds like a bunch of independent commenters who like the Apple or VR (both groups are common on HN) and want to say good things.
To me, it looks like a somewhat coordinated effort to give positive vibes to a relatively pointless (in its current state) product that likely nobody in this thread has had a chance to use.
Maybe it's not even coordinated - just a lot of like minded simps.
This reminds me of the problems I saw using Simula VR as a daily driver. Being able to spawn windows in midair at any angle is cool, but because of the odd angles it's not comfortable for viewing text. I'm a text-heavy person. The 4k screens per-eye might change this. Wasn't expecting micro-oled either, and I love OLED.
I don't want to spend time arranging windows around me at ideal viewing angles. I wanted the device or windowing system to align windows (at least vertically), perpendicular to my view. Straight up and down. I wanted to walk around them like phantom objects in this space, with silly stuff like the memory/resource usage and metadata about the window on the back of it.
What I really wanted to see here was a virtual workspace augmented by the physical space around you. I want to snap or 'throw' a window to a wall or a ceiling or tile them across my floor and walk around like I'm touring miniature golf. I'm sure the gestures and virtual anchors or snaps to do this will appear over time. 1st-generation woes I suppose.
As an alternative I wanted to create a series of nesting-doll-like orbs around myself, where windows fix themselves with equal gaps at optimum viewing angles around this orb and I'm only moving them around inside this sphere-layer, and up/down layers to inner/outer spheres. "Move to back" / "Move to front", etc.
Apple's probably further than any OS on preserving application state. Not just window geometry/placement, but application state. I want to put on these goggles and see 10+ windows "surface" from beneath the physical world around my room. I love the idea of my house/office being like the movie "Her" where it looks minimal and devoid of technology and putting on these goggles brings the virtual world out. Even just having dynamic art persist on the walls when virtual.
Further thought: I want to see 2+ of these goggles in action viewing the same content and applications and allowing for simultaneous/group/mesh controlling. Can I get 2 of these and have my boyfriend and I watch the same movie? Play the same game? I really hope it's something like wifi-direct or mesh networking for local AR stuff.
I think this is the start of something really pivotal and done with enough polish to launch the industry - finally. I just want more sooner, and I'm puzzled why they announced it so early if it's marketed next year.
Asahi Linux for Vision Pro soon? In at least 1 of the Apple videos I saw a window fixed to a wall. Linux needs devs that can build this AR/gesture/interface/compositor stuff.
I actually love the oddly buggy/bubbly design of the goggles. I like how they hid the cameras, and try to reproduce the face of the person, and the fade-in effect to show someone outside the goggles interacting with you. I'm really hoping the downward-facing cameras + sensors allow for speedy typing on a table surface with a virtual keyboard. I was so shocked I could type 80wpm on an iPad virtual keyboard when those were new. I love keyboards, but I want the movie Her with minimal/no tech visible.
They've got my purchase if I can play some reasonable percentage of Steam games on this thing. Vampire Survivors <3
I'm waiting for the rumoured AR glasses in reading glasses format in 2026. That seems useful for me; integrating computing into my typical workflow. I won't be wearing this thing around the office or for any extended period of time.
They mention 12ms, which is 83.3fps. It's a bit too slow for my tastes at $3500 price tag. It might be good for more stationary images, but anything moving will have ghosting/stutter. I'll wait for gen2/3. Still, I'm very happy there is new competition in this field.
My understanding is that the latency is 12ms, but that's orthogonal to the framerate. You could be updating at 240fps (doubtful, admittedly), but those frames are 12ms delayed from what's entering the camera.
The way it was described was the outside in vision to viewing loop (while layered with app frames), which felt like they were describing the latency or reality lag.
Given refresh rate technology on iPhone and iPad, and the microOLED, I'd expect a ProMotion-like framerate handling:
I think that they will hit the intersection of rich and young; and they will also get traction from their enterprise niches. This will create a beach head for developers and an onramp that doens't rely on someone just pouring money into it all endlessly.
If the market doesn't grow and evolve then it'll be clear that consumers don't want this, there will be no excuses like "wait for better kit, better designs, a functioning market"...
Their sales pitch was "it makes it amazing to read articles in safari"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&t=5410s
$3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to paint by numbers of a real canvas -- why is this basic concept of "a $3500 novelty device should enable me to do something _new_" so hard for a 3 trillion dollar company to grasp?
Are they just hoping someone comes up with all the above in the next 6 months? If they did, would anyone care? $3500 is relatively a lot of money if you're already giving them iPhone and Macbook money. The supermajority of the world doesn't make more then 60k a year, pre-tax. Actually, the supermajority makes vastly less than that.
I guess I'll wait and watch and see if they prove me wrong, but I suspect no matter how good it is, it'll flop.