Initially I thought 'oh I'm sure I can just turn off the fake eyes' assuming that unnecessary heat, battery usage, EM radiation, and social awkwardness were the only downside.
I'm glad that this review explained more of the downfalls of this design choice before I plunked down the credit card.
I’m wondering what kinds of APIs will be available.
It would be a hoot to see people write modifiers for the displayed eyes, to show things like cat pupils.
As for the rest, we’ll have to see. There’s a long history of really difficult problems with 3D/VR/AR, but Apple has more money than some countries, so, if anyone can solve them, they can.
I remember when the iPhone came out. I worked for a camera manufacturer, at the time. One of my employees brought one of them, and I looked it over. One of the things that immediately jumped out at me, was the built-in rear camera. It was pretty limited, with crappy resolution, poor light-gathering, weird depth-of-field, shaky image quality, and noticeable latency, but you could preview the image, live, on a fairly big screen.
People may also remember, that, when the iPhone first shipped, there was no SDK, and the App $tore did not yet exist. No one could write any apps for the phone. The JS Web apps thing sucked (even though many folks now write iPhone apps in JavaScript). Even Steve Jobs couldn’t make developing for iPhone attractive.
Nonetheless, using the device was incredibly convenient. I knew that if they could improve these issues, it would be a winner.
I mentioned it to our marketing folks, and was laughed out of the room.
A few years later, our entire consumer camera division, which had made us billions of dollars, was in the toilet. Even our pro camera division took some serious hits. A couple of major newspapers fired all their pro shooters, and told their reporters to use iPhones.
I'm sitting on a $7k mac pro with a second GPU that has never recieved electrons because it takes custom software, $1500 Google glass, a "self driving" Tesla, and multiple generations of VR headsets...
Sometimes tech doesn't go anywhere but a whole lot of promises..
> unnecessary heat, battery usage, EM radiation, and social awkwardness were the only downside.
Oh you are hilarious.
First let's cover "unnecessary heat, battery usage". The headset is based around Apple Silicon. And as Apple has perfectly demonstrated with their Apple Silicon MacBook range they are very much the market-leaders in eliminating unnecessary heat and maximising battery usage. I suspect we will find the same with the headset, I doubt there will be a problem.
> EM radiation
Oh right. Because VR headsets (from ANY manufacturer) are so amazingly useful without Bluetooth or WiFi enabled ! if you're worried about EM radiation, then don't buy one ... oh and whilst your at it, throw away your cell phone, computers, laptops and build a faraday cage around your house.
I'm sorry but I can't show sympathy for EM radiation concerns of VR headsets when you are clearly using 101 other devices in your every day life that emit EM.
> social awkwardness
That applies to anyone wearing a VR headset from ANY manufacturer on their head.
Whether the front of the unit is Apple's eyes or Meta's plastic, it's the same thing .... a weird contraption siting yon your head.
I'm glad that this review explained more of the downfalls of this design choice before I plunked down the credit card.