I was thinking of this guy. It's bonkers. Nobody wants Zuck's version of VR, unless you are one of the few basement dwellers for whom VRChat or Horizon is a way to cope with your social anxiety. That much is certain. What struck me about the presentation from Apple is how much it leaned into "this is just another way to interact with a computer". Do Macbooks have a killer app? Do iPads? No, they're just a different device to do the things on you're already doing on other devices, sometimes enhanced and sometimes limited by the device specifics. I'll use my iPad on the couch for some browsing, and I think people will enjoy using the Vision from time to time to do mostly things that can already be done on other devices, and partially to do things you can only do in such a device. I would not be surprised if it isn't for you, but I would also not be surprised to see myself buying/using this regularly in a year or two, because this seems to be the first device that achieves the visual acuity needed for normal people to do fairly normal things in AR with a new interaction method that relies mostly on looking and tapping. How sure are you about that? You might not ever trade in your physical sliders but this device is not really meant to replace what you already have, it's meant to drastically give people more 'room' to do stuff when that room isn't really available. I could buy 5 large 4K screens and put them on an array on my desk and it would be maybe a third of what's capable when you wear the Vision (and it'd be more expensive too). I could buy a large setup of physical devices and spend thousands to get that right... or I could just have it pop into and out of existance whenever I need to. You want most of a production studio but you don't have a large spare room? You're on the go in a hotel and you want 5 large screens to do some work? Here you go. Hell, if the passthrough is really as good as people are claiming, I could even see a hybrid solution where you have your physical sliders but you enhance them with half a dozen movable screens and dials. They already demoed that you can just type on your Macbook and have the entire wall as your screen. It's not that the use cases for this aren't possible in other (and often better) ways. Normally I browse Hubski on my iPad, and it's an okay experience but to type out a comment I really need to find my laptop or get behind my pc. I sometimes watch YouTube on my iPad, sometimes on my PC but it's best on my smart TV, but I really think the Vision Pro experience could knock my TV out of the park. Some devices have some killer apps but really, it's the variety of options that makes it work. I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest" and, well, one bonkers guy is, but the whole experience is so awful that it's repellant for 99,999% of people. My impression is that Apple's relentless focus on eliminating motion sickness, having screens so sharp that reading text is actually nice, having smooth transitions in/out, and their dynamic level of immersion make a very compelling case for this device being less awful and, say, only repelling 50% of people. Which is enough of a difference that this might just be the one AR device to actually pop off.Yeah but nobody wants that. Beating my dead horse, Second Life is legit two weeks from crossing the 20-year mark and nobody, ever, in that entire ecosystem has ever cried out for immersion. The tech industry has been fishing around for a killer app for VR since Lawnmower Man and it just don't exist.
Neither does anyone else.
You don't hear me thinking that, though. Let me clarify: the things that make this untenable are not solved by resolution or refresh rate. Twice now you have brought up my "expensive" rig without realizing that it's three of the cheapest models you can buy. You can run touch screens virtually for free - I have three Kindle Fire HDs which I think were like $120 ea? And the software to talk to them costs nothing. And yet, people will pay $1300 for eight channels of "knob, fader, and eight buttons each" to throw in their travel luggage. I helped spec these monsters - never got to mix on them, but we took a system that was almost entirely in the box and spent $4m just to improve the interface. And I was working ten hours a day in a room that was literally a wall of monitors. Your crazy guy - thanks for bringing him to my attention, he's crazy - dismissively makes the assertion that you can't use voice transcription for coding. I knew a guy who did that all day long back in 2003; we had to make his computer work for him, and then I had to listen to him bark at a Pentium II two doors down. it's not like he had a disability, either, he just liked shouting at Windows NT4. Dragon Naturally Speaking was gonna be a revolution from, like, 1998 to 2004; before Ray Kurzweil was the crazy guy who thought vitamins would make you live forever, he was the crazy guy who said speech recognition was going to change the world. So yeah - that guy can dismissively say you can't use voice transcription for coding. he can say that because billions have been spent proving it in the main, while I have personally dealt with the exceptions that prove the rule. Some fundamentals of ergonomics, provided to you by about $8k worth of seminars and training necessary for my firm to apply for a role involving pilot simulation of military aircraft for the DoD/Boeing: - The useful area of visual acuity for command and control applications, as determined by expensive DoD studies, is 5 degrees above your sightline and fifteen degrees below... and roughly 25 degrees side-to-side - The effective spacing for visual information is the equivalent focal distance of double the screen-height to six times the screen height - The human eye, with 20/20 vision, can resolve one arc-minute of resolution Let's run some numbers. I have a display 36" from my face. it is 11" tall. Converting out of freedom units gives us 914mm and 280mm respectively. 914sin(1/60) = 0.266mm; 1080 of those is 287mm is holy shit it's almost like I did that on purpose. 3840 of those is 1021mm is 40" to convert back to my freedom-units tape measure, which puts my visual workspace at 47" but that's okay because 9" of it is the Jellyfish in the middle, because when you're mixing, that shit matters the most. Really? Two HD monitors at arm's length are all you can fucking see but more importantly, they're all that generations of exhaustive DARPA studies have revealed we pay attention to with any regularity. And to be clear - I've got eight monitors, not two. There are three tiny, shitty little Kindle Fires that I use to basically watch levels bob up and down. There's a laptop to the right that mostly exists to show me processes on that computer while I work on other computers. And there's a giant 50" LCD "client monitor" that shows the movie while I'm working on it, in a place I can largely ignore. I throw timecode up there to make sure it always matches the timecode on the burn-in because otherwise catastrophe ensues. That hasn't happened in years... but ultimately you need to make sure the punches match the fists. All of them are out of my sightline, and I only switch my attention to them when I have to. To drive the point home, I own a spare KVM switcher that would allow me to drive two more monitors. I own the monitor arms that would let me do it. I have three (of four) computers all set and ready to drive four monitors at a time, all I lack are the monitors, whose prices are bloody nominal these days. But I don't. I could wrap myself in a 90 degree semicircle of information. I've been doing CAD for 25 years, the multi-monitor frontier has been mine since the Pentium and yet "two HD monitors plus a command line text window" has been my happy place the entire time. A lot of people subconsciously grok this; they don't need $8k worth of DARPA training to get it, just if they really wanted to know why. No one wants this. They might have asked for it at some point but I wouldn't have four fucking monitor arms if eBay wasn't replete with day traders purging their excess Humanscale due to walls of financial data sucking from a UI standpoint. IMAX is a big-ass screen, right? Turns out nobody really wants that. Hundreds were built, people would show up sometimes, Wall Street lost a fuckton of money, they started showing normie movies on the screens, people still didn't really care. OmniMAX is worse - it's a big-ass screen wrapped around the room that was an attempt to use planetariums to show movies and they suck balls for that. OmniMAX was the bright-hot thing of my youth that everyone saw once and went "...yeah." So we can act like we haven't tried this style of information display in the real world but we have, and we hated it, and moving your physical focal distance from "over there" to "an inch in front of your eye" does nothing but up the eyestrain and alienation. Wikipedia tells me we've had planetarium domes for about 2500 years. It's not like we've been incapable of this sort of information display until now, we just haven't had any justification. It's like speakers - you can absolutely put together a set of transducers that will reproduce sound from DC to light. The industry has stuck to 40-ish Hz to 20k-ish Hz because that's where our ears are. Note that my opinion about VR and AR has not changed since I was just a kid with a Society for Information Display membership. I bought a PSVR because my wife said "Beat Saber looks like fun." It exactly met my expectations: there are corner-cases where VR is fun in doses but by and large, it's not worth the fuss. I haven't bought a PSVR2 because none of the games I want to play have been ported to it (and there's only two). Would the extra resolution be nice? For sure. PSVR has 2k resolution across a hundred degree field of view; doesn't take much math to recognize that it's a long, long way from visual acuity. But zero of my productivity comes from my peripheral vision, so why do I care? I can buy another HD monitor right now for $150. $3500 would buy me a 4x6 grid of those fuckers - I would have 4k x 12k resolution. Yeah there would be shenanigans getting data to 24 monitors but take it from a lad with a more-than-passing interest in information display - there are methods. And yet the tech industry is at "$3500 for a nerd helmet is reasonable and 24 monitors is bugshit insane." I've been involved with video walls of various shapes and sizes since the late '90s. They're always a weird-ass corner-case travesty made of money and chewing gum because if you need to do that, you'll pay. I've been involved with control systems of various shapes and sizes since the late '90s. 99% of what used to take $50k of Crestron can now be done by Alexa for free. When I bought my first projector? They were three-eyed monsters requiring unistrut, constant collimation and a $2500 video scope to keep happy. I've seen things... you people wouldn't believe And yet I've seen nothing - nothing - that has changed my mind about VR in thirty fuckin' years. And I say that as a multi-monitor-usin', spacemouse-drivin', 3d designin' mutherfucker going back to haptics-over-RS422. There's no there there.I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest"
Screenshots don’t do it justice. Videos fail to capture the scale and grandeur of the experience. These pictures are a poor illustration of what I see in the headset—low resolution, compressed field-of-view, lacking depth and scale. The low display down front? That’s the size of an executive desk. The code is like an IMAX® theater—I can’t even see all of it at once.
Sigh. You’re right. There’s a part of me that wants to double down and talk about the significance of specific corner-cases where it’ll be fun or slightly useful, but that doesn’t counter your larger point much if at all. We don’t need this. Mostly it leads me to wonder why I’m so intrigued by this device in the first place. Because I can still see myself buying and using some version of this, even if I know I don’t need it. It’s not just this device’s marketing too, I’ve been intrigued by the potential of VR for longer than that. I think it taps into a desire for new environments and experiences, so a new way to experience computing sounds fascinating to me.
Something snapped a couple days ago and I heard Tim Cook's subconscious dialogue, clear as a bell: ______________________ Stupidest fictional weapon ever invented? The light saber. It has an effective range of about an arm's length, for some reason it can be deflected by other light sabers, apparently you can cobble one together out of vienna sausages and an answering machine. But it's the supreme weapon of a powerful cult of monks who can warp your brain, levitate rocks, deflect lasers, all sorts of dumb shit. So in order to make the light saber not suck: - lasers must travel at the velocity of a slow-pitch softball - they must make extremely loud noises - their accuracy must be on par with a super-soaker in a cross-wind George Lucas had two things in mind when he came up with Star Wars: Swashbucklers like Captain Blood, and newsreel footage of the Pacific theater of WWII. You've got little fighters zooming around, you've got ground-based cannons blasting the bad guy out of the sky, and Errol Flynn will triumph over Basil Rathbone, but not before cutting off every candle wick below decks. Thing is, in the real world Errol Flynn is going to eat total shit the minute he takes on anyone with so much as a crossbow. Real battles are ugly and awful and it's a rare engagement where you even know about the guy who just killed you. Imagine Luke and Leia escaping the Death Star, except instead of a bunch of hapless dick-helmeted extras they're facing the 101st Airborne out of Saving Private Ryan. No lasers, no night vision, no sci fi scary shit, just Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Ed Burns and Tom Sizemore, regrettably plugging the pretty girl in the bathrobe with an M1 Garand from semi-prone positions. You're seeing Tom Hanks scowl right now. He doesn't like this movie. He wants out of it. The narrative of VR does not match the reality of VR. It never has. The whole of my professional careers (all of them!) have been VR-adjacent since the cathode ray tube. I remember when Los Alamos National Labs built a room out of TVs and polarized goggles so you could be "inside the reaction" - a supercomputer, a Beowulf cluster just for the TVs, bajillions of DoD money and still nobody used it. We want the damn light saber. We know it's stupid, and we want it anyway. Because when you twist the narrative the right way it's so fucking cool.Here you go, mutherfuckers. Here's your goddamn headset. Because Google lost a lot of money on it, and Facebook lost a lot of money on it, and Microsoft lost a lot of money on it, but you're so fucking blind to the reality of the situation that if we DON'T lose a lot of money on it you'll punish us for being "old fashioned" or "too conservative" or "hidebound" rather than "reasonable" so here it is. It costs us a lot more than we'll sell it for. It's undeniably better than anything anyone has made before, or will ever make again. It looks so much like that stupid prop from Ready Player One that we were honestly concerned you'd catch us trolling you but really, we shouldn't have been. You see this as such an inevitability that you don't care if it works, you don't care if nobody ever buys it, you don't understand what it's for but you've been promised this for forty years and if we don't come out with it you'll think we stole Christmas. So here it is. Useless, bereft of application, shiny and sparkly and "developery" and you'll never be able to say we didn't make one and two years from now? Three? We'll unexist it, and we'll make no announcement, and nobody will care except Gizmodo for some reason, because that's what we do, we disappear our failures like Stalin, and we disappear our successes, I mean we killed iTunes and didn't tell you, we killed the iPod and didn't tell you, and our fandom is so vehement that should you write ten years from now about how we were never really serious about this, a legion of nerds will emerge from the woodwork and bury you. So here it is. Here's your useless thing. Our stock price thanks you.
Mostly it leads me to wonder why I’m so intrigued by this device in the first place.
You see this as such an inevitability that you don't care if it works, you don't care if nobody ever buys it, you don't understand what it's for but you've been promised this for forty years and if we don't come out with it you'll think we stole Christmas. So here it is. Useless, bereft of application,
Just be happy that if this fails this will be the final death blow to VR. Like you wont see anyone try VR for another decade or two. Zuck is already been knocked to the ground on his VR vision an apple headset failure would be final kick in the balls. When apple products fail there is basically just a vaccum left in the market afterwards because everyone knows they cant do any better for a good part of a decade.
That's an interesting take. It hadn't occurred to me that Apple might do this in part to show up Oculus. What will be interesting is if they can goad Zuck into making something really expensive. Facebook's drive into VR is far, far, far too expensive to back down.Zuck is already been knocked to the ground on his VR vision an apple headset failure would be final kick in the balls.
Unlike Google, at least they're not trying to get their customers to wear their nerd helmets in public. I've been trying to come up with a way it would be useful for me for the last week and I also keep coming up empty-handed. Worse for drafting as you've already pointed out. Almost all my design sketching today is done on paper and with physical models, to be able to easily manipulate real objects in space, sometimes in collaboration with other people who doesn't know AutoCAD/Rhino/Sketchup. Replacing it with virtual objects kind of defeats the purpose. Which leaves representation and presentation. I can see how "immersion" can help sell a project to a client, but I also see hundreds of roof goats that will have to be put down at later stages. Working with plan, section-elevation and perspectives (even a digital model fly-through) allows you to direct attention to what you think is the design's strengths while hand-waving away the things you haven't had time to think through or talk to an engineer about. Plus, who the hell has time or money for it.
I don't see it happening, honestly. There's no reason for it, adoption is low, and the one aspect of Google Glass that made me go I fucking want that was an AR motorcycle helmet. There is exactly no part of a motorcycle's gage cluster that fits within the DoD's sight window. Putting essential stuff up in your field of view where you can reference it when you need to is actually a great application of AR. And like I said, heads-up displays on cars are, in my opinion, a net good. I think they're largely dumb on fighter aircraft because fighter aircraft have been refining heads-up displays for fifty fucking years.
I think it’s got potential. Idk what the use case would look like and it’s likely we will mostly use them for road trips or long flights or for folks who live in shared housing or whatever the edge case is but as long as people actually use them then the platform will develop to be not shit. When the iPad first came out it really did nothing better than the competition and I struggled to see a use case for it that laptops with touch screens couldn’t already do but here were are, using iPads and struggling to type basic things into them where a laptop would probably be a better fit but requires getting up and actually grabbing it.