Comment by paxys
3 years ago
The hardware is no doubt impressive, as expected, but I just can't see myself in any of the situations they keep showing in VR/AR demos.
Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos? Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends? Would I want to be in a group call with generated avatars of people rather than their actual faces? If the kids are having a fun moment would I want to run inside, grab my headset, strap it on and record a video, or just go join them? Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?
And the one thing I could maybe see this being useful for – gaming – was barely even mentioned in their keynote.
If I'm dropping $3,500 and cutting myself off from the outside world (and no, that weird eye display thing doesn't count), a half-assed substitute for consuming the same content as I would on any other screen isn't going to cut it. Show me the actual future, in terms of software/content/communication/immersiveness, then we'll talk.
> massive
> sweaty
> strapped
> instead of [...] their family/friends
> generated avatars
> kids [...] grab my headset, strap it on [...] or just go join them?
> cutting myself off from the outside world
> half-assed substitute for consuming the same content
> Show me the actual future
It seems like you're trying very hard to convince yourself this will be a bad product that is unpleasant to use and carries unavoidable antisocial externalities. It could very well be all of that and more, but I don't really understand why you would bother with this level of self-assured negativity before there are even any unbiased hands-on impressions out there. Apple is historically very good at execution.
> Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?
You know, I very well might!
I don't think all those points seem like "trying very hard", they totally seem to me like the base case, and it's up to the product to rise to the occasion and show how this is all wrong.
Their points aren't really even about the product at all. They start off with (paraphrased) "I can't imagine using this myself" and then launch into a hilariously negative caricature of a hypothetical experience using it. It's heavy on the negatively-associated words and light on actual critical analysis beyond the hype. Like, of course you can't imagine using it! You seem to be really really really convinced it sucks hard. Who would imagine themselves voluntarily having an experience like that?
I mean, it doesn't matter. The product will come out either way and I have no stake in it. But this is the internet and we post things.
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/ˈpredʒədɪs/
Not that it's morally wrong in this case, I just don't see the upside of deciding what it's like now rather than waiting for data.
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How much do you know about VR? I can assure you, as someone who uses a VR headset every day, most of these generalizations are false.
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I don’t know if you’ve used any existing VR glasses, but that’s a pretty accurate characterisation.
Modulo the whole isolation paranoia thing, sure. I preordered an original Vive way back in 2016 or whatever so I think it's fair to say I know how hot, sweaty, and unpleasant some VR headsets can get.
However (again, modulo the isolation paranoia thing which I think is just completely silly) I am not a person who thinks it's impossible to make a VR/AR headset that doesn't suck to use. What can Apple do for several times the price of any extant consumer headset? I'm interested to find out!
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I think in some reactions, there's an element of "I can't justify this cost, so I want to convince myself I don't want it." I can't justify this early version, but at $1k I'd be quite happy to strap on the headset and cut myself off from the outside world in the evenings, or for some of my work.
I can absolutely see a future where many adults spend idle evenings with a headset instead of a TV or iPad.
Lonely adults.
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Shoot, I would. I've been dreaming of a headset to replace my monitors for years now.
This, and we can say the same of the current present where, we, people behaves like zombies watching our own mobile phones without looking at the faces around. Not saying that this is a good future but the technology is sound and Apple execution excels and is well integrated within their ecosystem.
Apple isn't devoid of any past mistakes though...
Removing ports that re useful, making a computer that looks like a trashcan etc.
Just because it's apple trying to fit a use case doesn't mean it will succeed, and I too am skeptical about it to say the least.
> Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?
That really is the $3,500 question. Can I see myself preferring to work streaming my Mac's screen to a Vision Pro for my IDE, having and things like Slack and e-mail off to the side running on the headset? I don't know, but if I can, this seems worth it to me.
All day is the key component. Most VR headsets recommend taking breaks every half hour, which isn't just a "cover your ass" warning. I know I can't use my personal headset for much longer without feeling woozy after I take it off.
By comparison, I'm at my laptop for 7+ hours just for work. I would need to see compelling evidence that the Vision Pro is safe and comfortable to use for that long before I'd even consider replacing my laptop. And if it can't replace the computers or displays I use, then it's just a $3,500 gimmick.
To be fair you are supposed to get up, walk around, and refocus your eyes on something far away every 20 mins or so no matter what computer you are using.
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They say that the battery on that is ~2 hours (?) So probably not for work yet.
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They did mention that their dual chip pipeline/low latency reduces the "woozy" effects (because it lines up better with what your brain is expecting I guess). It will be interesting to see
These days I've moved over to pomodoro technique to be able to get any work done in the face of WFH distractions and general indifference to my work.
So strapping on immersive goggles for 30m-1h chunks and taking lots of breaks actually fits my current work model perfectly and might improve my productivity.
It all comes down to.. how clear is text?
I think that price tag is not for end consumers, but early adopters/builders. There is going to be a gold rush of "maybe I can make that flashlight app that makes me a millionaire".
Fun times incoming.
> maybe I can make that flashlight app
I wonder if you could make a literal flashlight/headlamp, either by using the front-facing display as a light, or just leveraging the infrared/lidar sensor to make night-vision goggles
Great. A bunch of VR shit apps just like the regular app store.
A bigger question is – does it support mouse input? Because none of their demos showed it, and without it the headset is basically dead on arrival for any real work.
> You’re able to place multiple apps in the real world space and can type with either voice or a virtual keyboard, but you can also use Bluetooth keyboards and trackpads, and with a glance at your Mac, you can use it on a large virtual display.
https://www.macworld.com/article/1940428/apple-vision-pro-de...
My bigger worry is how I would type, if that's at all possible. My assumption, like the sibling comment notes, is that eye tracking would replace mouse input.
And I'm not yet typing code by talking to a computer. Maybe AI will work for 'typing' by talking and using copilot or some similar tech, but I've yet to try that and am not that confident that software has caught up to allow me to navigate folders and files within a codebase, edit the code, restart any servers if that's necessary, test (run tests, or visit a page, or send a curl request), post a pull request, etc. All of the disjoint steps I need to do to work, which change depending on the task, would need to work confidently in a system like this for me to switch over. And if speech is the way forward, I think my wife is going to be pretty upset with me since I WFH.
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The demo I saw showed a guy at a standing desk, using a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad. I remember I grimaced thinking what his shoulders must feel like typing with his hands so close together on that tiny, shitty little keyboard. It made me think of little T-Rex arms.
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They showed a demo with Bluetooth touchpad (and keyboard) input.
They mentioned the magic trackpad, so I can't imagine a mouse wouldn't also work.
Maybe they will sell you an iGlove )in the future) to go along with this so that you can type / click on your virtual keyboard & mouse
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I don't think that's self-evident. If the eye tracking is really good, it could obviate the need for a mouse.
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> That really is the $3,500 question.
For me the question rather is: is being able to work from the sofa a couple of hours a day without having to stare at a small screen worth $3.5k? Certainly.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I have no problem using my laptop on the couch for a few hours. It's quite comfortable.
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Is the small screen you're referring to your laptop, or the tiny screens in the headset?
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I can 100% see myself preferring working on this thing over a Mac, as long as I don’t need a Mac to host my dev environment.
I mean, depending on the work using it as a thin client would make the most sense imo, compiling still takes a toll on the battery life even with m2 magic
It really depends on how the fake screens actually look in use. You need a decent multiple of the number of pixels in the screen you want to emulate on your AR glasses to be able to pull it off well and so far we haven't really gotten it. I do not see myself getting these till they're a third or less the price either unless they're issued to me for work for some reason.
Anytime its on your face, you could be working.
Front and center, your work. anytime, anywhere. depending on how its implemented you can't get away. Hope they include a power button.
But 2 hours of battery life is a good amount of work, though it seems short somehow. Nice to know there is a limit on it taking over your time.
The key question is if this thing will stay cool enough to be comfortable.
Why?
Because if well done I get my reasonable high multi monitor like setup everywhere I want, no matter weather I'm sitting or lying or on the train or at home.
Fun thing is if you just skim the article it looks as if they copied https://simulavr.com/ :=) (They didn't this was developed independent of each other and Apple put some tweaks in it which they claim no one else did and gave it a new name and claim they are the first, like always.)
Exactly. You know it is worth it when corp pays for the gadgets ;)
I mean, how terribly over-priced is the Mac, and yet...
This is the same question i'm asking myself too
I'm in the camp that sees the whole thing as a novelty. I didn't see any use cases that made me go "Ooh, I need this in my life." I already have multiple screens around me. If I'm watching TV and want to look something up, I can open up my laptop or look at my phone.
The nice thing about those are I can physically close the laptop or turn off the phone. With a virtual screen, I have to use some UI to do it. I know it doesn't seem like much of a difference, but to me, there's enough lag and lack of real feel of control that I'd prefer a real object than a virtual one.
Interacting with app windows in 3D space also doesn't feel any faster than just using a flat window on a flat screen. I'm already super productive using keyboard + mouse and a flat display, so I don't see how using my voice and turning my head to look at things in a virtual space is any better.
I see a bunch of use-cases I might like, but they all have a big asterisk of "how well does it actually work".
And it would have to be pretty damn spectacular for me to drop ~AUD$5200 on it in a "I will be using this all the time, pro-actively sense". Which maybe it is!
But this press-release spends a lot of time talking around the hard numbers - i.e. 23 million pixels is a lot of things but its not a resolution. Nor is their any mention of the FOV angle (this data is obviously out there, but avoiding mentioning it in your own marketing copy means you know it's not what you want people up front comparing).
Same boat. $5k is massive. I'm considering buying a new ~$2k screen that would then be bound to either home or office, so there's budget to solve the visual side of work and be portable, but I wouldn't bet it on this before a lot of hands-on reviews.
And the reviews would have to be outrageous for me to not wait for a future, cheaper version.
One thing I don't like is the idea of being bound to their idea of what a spatial interface is. I use three screens and like more density, so my current situation is more useful than their demo. Give me that and good control over the environmental backdrop, and I'd start to be convinced. I like my work, but if I could do it while feeling like I'm in the desert permanently at golden hour, that'd be an upgrade.
Giving the total number of pixels is actually more honest, compared to competitors who claim that 2Kx2K*2 is a 4K headset
23 million is comfortably more than 4K resolution per eye, putting this at one of if not the highest resolution of any headset. It seems like they are telling the whole truth when they say you can view a 4K virtual screen on this - there is enough resolution headroom
That said, the lack of FOV is suspicious. Between that, the lack of proper VR game demos and the focus on virtual monitors, I get the feeling this headset will have poor FOV traded for sharpness across the whole image and reduced nausea
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They said 'anywhere you look, so I'm guessing the FOV is nearly all the way around to your peripheral vision. If not, the first review to say 'pay $3500 to experience glaucoma' will torpedo the product entirely.
To be fair when the iPhone 1 came out nobody really said they need it in their lives vs a Nokia or BB
> To be fair when the iPhone 1 came out nobody really said they need it in their lives vs a Nokia or BB
That's not how I remember it, that original keynote was magical. The benefits of the iPhone over current devices (both phones and MP3 players) were crystal-clear, the only damper being high price together with tying it to an AT&T contract.
While impressive technologically, this on the other hand gives rather creepy vibes - the whole presentation looks like a Black Mirror episode.
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My reaction to the original iPhone was, “that’s it. That is every phone from here on out.” The UX was so clearly years ahead of every other phone UX and it combined the wildly popular iPod with a phone. If nothing else it took two products that a lot of people carried with them and made it one and did that well.
While the vision pro is impressive it doesn’t make my pockets or luggage lighter. And there isn’t a thing I am not buying because I am buying this.
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I don’t remember it that way at all. The screen resolution. Touchscreen keyboard. Pinch and zoom, safari web browsing etc was all so much better than Nokia and BB offerings and many people immediately wanted the first iPhone. The earliest adopters would be hounded to show off their phone to family and friends.
For me, it's hard to make direct comparisons with the world of then. Today, everybody has so many devices and are so used to tech all around them every waking moment. An AR headset doesn't feel like a huge leap in additional day-to-day functionality compared with what a smartphone gave us at the time.
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The success of this really depends on the developers’ and consumers’ patience, and since that will fade quickly, probably also depends on the amount of dough Apple is willing to sink into it until the tech allows for more practical non-intrusive products.
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
Flights. This might become a must-have for the jet-setting class. That not only makes Apples first-year numbers, it fertilizes the market for developers.
VR movies in economy maybe. To tune out the awful experience of sitting in a 17" wide seat with not nearly enough leg room.
Nobody is paying business or first class prices and wearing a VR headset. Certainly not devoting carry on baggage space for it.
> Nobody is paying business or first class prices and wearing a VR headset. Certainly not devoting carry on baggage space for it.
Why not? The screens aren’t that great. And I may want to watch my own content.
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I fly business class all the time and would absolutely use this.
I get to watch my own content on a significantly larger and better quality screen.
I bet they absolutely will. If I could afford business/first, I'd absolutely buy something like this just to be able to watch content or work on a bigger screen and without the constant interruptions you get on in-flight entertainment.
Then in economy, not having to cram a laptop where it can get crushed by the seat in front, or craning your neck, etc - that'd be fantastic.
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Oh they 100% absolutely will. Also, most people in business class don’t actually pay full price. It’s mostly upgrades and such.
I met someone at a party once who does this. I later found out they founded a popular video game streaming website.
I’m not sure. If you regularly pay for first class, then these goggles probably seem downright cheap. P
But it fertilizes the market for what kind of developers? Currently I see no real convincing reason why this should be substantially different than existing headsets except for a better operating system experience.
I can see this being an exceptional gaming device if the screen specs are anything to go by. But any game that would justify spending the substantial premium for that device would likely need an extra PC with really beefy specs, bumping the price up even higher, further limiting the target audience.
I've read other peoples thoughts about 3D modelling usecases. For most CAD related use-cases this thing is almost definitely overspeced considering the shitty textures most CAD prototypes utilize. Maybe it would be cool for architecture studios, but thats also a fairly limited audience.
I'm sure developers will come up with very creative use-cases for that device, but I cant imagine most of them being as impactful in the average persons everyday life as the introduction of the iPhone was. What I'm very certain is that this device is launching at a bad time economically. 3.5k is a significant expense, even for people with higher incomes. In a time where disposable incomes shrink and uncertainty is continuing to stress many employees, I don't think as many people would be willing to drop the 3.5k on that device as maybe 3 years ago.
But hey, maybe this comment will age as poorly as the famous dropbox one.
Completely agree with your points here. I personally see nearly zero times when I would use this given what I've seen so far. I imagined consuming content with the cheap Oculus Go would be cool, but mine has been gathering dust for years.
This Apple device seems like a moonshot. I am actually really glad for them to use some of their $100B+ of cash to take a shot at this product rather than other things that might be more sure-fire profit makers. I think if there is a killer app for AR/VR, we haven't seen it yet, and also, it'll be mind-blowing. But I think the chance of that happening anytime in the next 5 years is minimal. It's a low probability of something really awesome, so I'm rooting for it even though Apple is overall not my favorite company.
Existing headsets are predominately VR.
This is the first true mixed reality headset as it allows you to gradually transition between VR to AR. That's going to make the headset a lot more usable outside or in collaborative environments.
Maybe it would be cool for architecture studios, but thats also a fairly limited audience.
A guy I know does VR high quality architectural renderings of apartments etc that are sold off plan. So the potential buyer can actually go through their apartment before it’s even built. That doesn’t seem like a small use case.
I also thought flights were a compelling use case until I saw that the battery life was “up to” a whopping 2 hours
Aside from the in-seat power, I think another likely solution will be third parties like Belkin making a less "apple-esque" but longer lasting battery that's compatible with the magnetic connector. The OEM solution looks quite small as is. [1]
1 https://www.apple.com/v/apple-vision-pro/a/images/overview/d...
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Unless it's plugged in, in which case it can be used indefinitely. Many planes today allow you to plug in devices from your seat.
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Two extra batteries will likely be trivial cost in the context of a $3500 device, not sure why this isn't clear to everyone critiquing the battery life?
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i can certainly see the appeal of a VR headset on flights, but if that's all i'm buying it for why would i go for a $3500 apple device instead of a $299 headset from meta?
can i even use noise-cancelling headphones with the reality pro, or is it locked to the built-in spacial audio headest? because i'd rather block out the noise than the peripheral vision on a plane.
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on a flight you just plug it into your seat
Maybe, but you'd need to wear bulky Bose on top of the VR headset to get decent audio quality + noise cancelation.
> you'd need to wear bulky Bose on top of the VR headset to get decent audio quality + noise cancelation
I have a Bose and AirPods Pros, and I can't say one is a class above the other.
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XReal(Nreal) glasses are much cheaper and lighter and with good reputations for that use case.
Does anyone know what is the privacy status of XReal? I would like to buy one, but I'm quite concerned about privacy.
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I kept picturing someone, having turned the "immersiveness" crown to the max and put on noise-cancellation, sitting in a window seat, smiling and calmly watching Ted Lasso all the way down while everyone around them braces for impact and grabs their life preservers!
That actually sounds preferable to being fully present, in that situation. I'd rather go out peacefully than screaming in panic
As somebody with severe airphobia, this is reason enough to buy this thing
Doubt. It might provide an (expensive) escape from the misery that is economy class, but if you are travel in first class or on private jets then you're already living in a very pleasant version of the world.
That’s my take as well. You can stretch out, watch a movie on a flat screen TV, sleep, stand up and walk around, have food and drink with a sturdy table, or curl up with a book or otherwise. I recently did international first class for the first time and wasn’t particularly dying to escape the hellishness of it all.
All the most enjoyable stuff I've done in VR has involved, at a minimum, lots of arm movement, and typically also leg movement as well. Think Beat Saber, or Half-Life: Alyx. I don't really see this working in a seated plane environment.
We're talking about watching movies, not playing rhythm games.
Is it going to be worth $3500 to have a better movie experience on an airplane? Absolutely not. Is it going to be awesome? Probably.
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My M2 air works great on flights no matter the seat configuration and I'm not small person. Costs a lot less than the ar as well.
For productivity, the M2 MBA is great. But for movie-watching, this is no comparison. I'm not a member of "the jet-setting class", but I completely agree that this is going to be de rigueur for those folks. I wouldn't be surprised if first class cabins came with free rentals in the near future.
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Flights are my most compelling use case for my Nreal Airs.
Nothing worse than being 1" too deep and having to work at a terrible, awkward angle.
They focus on AR experiences, so doesn't fit into flights. Why would I need to see my sweaty passenger?
They've said there's a "crown" (like on their watches) on the headset you can turn to adjust seeing your surroundings or not. And there's a video demonstrating that on the page this thread links to. So no, you're not stuck seeing your surroundings if you don't want to see them.
there's a lot of graded levels of visible background in the keynote
On flights you want noise cancellation. Maybe you could pair these with noise-cancelling AirPods, but then would you still get the "spatial audio"?
1. Airpod pros have spatial audio
2. Their presentation showed someone using it with airpods on a plane
https://twitter.com/techAU/status/1665790510093697024
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This sounds absolutely awful and everyone on the flight will think you're a massive tool. It also costs $3500, people that can afford that just for flights are flying business or first class anyhow. I also don't know how much hand room you need to navigate the thing and personally don't like the idea that the person next to me on a flight could be watching porn, flights are already kinda gross.
Who cares what anyone else on a flight thinks of them?
My goal on a flight is to spend as little time as possible interacting with anyone else, and then trying to purge the experience from my mind minutes after landing.
A headset that makes it all disappear sounds like a godsend.
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The idea that everyone who spends $3500 for a bleeding-edge device is surely spending $10k for a first class ticket is absurd.
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Might as well go all in after you land, get into your Tesla, put it in auto-pilot to home and continue looking absurd driving the down the road.
There was a lot of negativity online about the iPad and iWatch. I knew they'd all be successful the first time I boarded a flight after their intro.
Everyone in first class had one. As first class goes, so goes at least America.
That's an arbitrary over-generalization. I'm sure first class was carrying blackberries long after 2007.
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Phones, Tablets and smart watches existed and had big market penetration before those products were introduced. The same is true of earbuds, wireless and otherwise. This is a space with incredibly low penetration, it will be much harder to get traction.
Fair comparison, I felt the same about the AirPods. What these three devices have in common? They are not pro devices and their physicality is portable and easily accessible. Is the same true for the Vision Pro? I am purposefully excluding price.
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them
I just want to say, absolutely. Except it's not sweaty.
You're not going to do it in a social situation -- it's not replacing a movie the family watches together -- but in your bedroom or home alone absolutely. Just recline on your bed/couch and watch an IMAX-sized screen in the sky above you. Surround sound in your AirPods.
I already do it with my Quest 2 and it's glorious. It's hard to imagine how good the experience is until you've tried it.
And I'm convinced that within a few years, it's going to become the main way of watching movies together with friends/family/lovers when you're geographically apart -- whether 2,000 miles or 2 miles.
I must be old-fashioned or even anti-social, but what exactly is the point of watching a movie together remotely? Does it become some kind of group debate that constantly interrupts the movie?
With comedies you're laughing together and it's awesome. I did that constantly during COVID with friends. Especially great for reality TV shows, you can pause and make jokes about what's going on.
It's really fun to pause and chat about what's happening and then resume. Yes it's constantly interrupting the movie but that's the whole point. But because you pause you're not missing dialog or anything.
I mean, do you not see a difference in watching something on a couch with friends vs. watching the same thing by yourself?
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During Covid & lockdowns, loads of people watched movies together. It's not much different from watching a movie with a friend at your own place. VR gives the activity sense of presence which is hard to describe, but basically it's even more of a social experience.
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When I'm away on a remote site for a week or two, it is nice to be able to watch a movie with my wife after a shift. There's something nice about the feeling of being connected even though I'm 2000kms away from her.
I don't have a Quest 2 myself, but my nephew has one and even wearing it for 15 minutes has the padding full of sweat any time I've messed with it. I can't even imagine wearing it for 2+ hours.
I own a Quest 2 and it's far from glorious. The resolution makes everything a blurry mess, and the lenses make anything off-center even more blurry.
It DOES get sweaty, hot, and it leaves pressure marks on your face.
My 65" 4k OLED TV and shelf speakers absolutely destroy the Quest 2. I have also owned an HTC Vive and a Valve Index.
I would rather do nothing than use any of them for media consumption.
If you use an app like SkyBox you can make sure the screen is outputting full 1080p detail by adjusting the size and rendering quality of the virtual screen. Nothing is blurry or messy at all -- I've actually compared against stills from the same video on my laptop. Each eye is 1920 pixels wide but it's effectively a bit wider since you have two eyes without total overlap between the two images, so it matches up for 1080p pretty perfectly. (And you can watch 4K content but you're only going to get effective 1080p resolution.)
I'm happy you have a 65" 4K TV but not everyone does, and the vast majority of content out there is only 1080p as well. And my AirPods Pro, with noise cancelling, together with the Quest's own spatial audio, absolutely destroy any regular speakers I've ever owned. And everything can be as loud as I want without disturbing anyone's sleep or study.
> It DOES get sweaty, hot, and it leaves pressure marks on your face.
I guess we have different experiences, but it sounds to me like your strap is possibly much too tight. None of those things happen to me. But I'm also using it in a room-temperature environment -- I'm sure it would get sweaty and hot if it were 90°F indoors or something.
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You know as a parent (feels weird to write that) this highlights an entirely weird product oversight for me: is anyone doing shareable low-latency wireless headphones? Because in terms of putting things on your head, that's exactly what me and my wife need - a way to watch things at night without constantly riding the volume control, with shared audio (and microphone pick ups or something so we can talk to each other).
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All of this is true, but my biggest complaint is the only really good use case other than games for this sort of tech is immersing yourself in a bunch of terminals in VR, and they even botched that what with it not being a real OS that can run traditional dev environments and only allowing you to embed one mac screen in the whole thing. Like who wants to sit around in a glorified iOS all day and essentially screen cast your one mac screen into there? I should be able to have my vscode window to my left, browser to my right, more terminals to the side and above, etc..
This is going to very quickly become the product that allows CEOs and other megalomaniacs to sit on the couch for three hours watching photo albums of their accomplishments or whatever it is they alluded to. I can see why they went for the $3500 price tag, this is basically an admission that there isn't mass-market appeal for non-gaming VR stuff at the moment, so might as well get $$$ and make it a status symbol for the C suite. The problem is all the people within apple who sanity test this idea, are also those types..
This is not the category disruption they made this out to be.
>only really good use case other than games
I would actually say that games are NOT a good use case for VR. Some simulation games (mainly racing and flying) are fine for VR, but if you are really into those genres you probably already have better equipment to actually simulate cockpit equipment or at very least wheel and pedals.
All other games in VR suck ass. Either they are just 3d movies with some small interactive pits in them or they are tech demos which are stretched to couple hours and called a game or they are just "jump scare the game".
My main problem is the movement. Unless you dedicate entire room(s) to VR you have to use D-pad/stick to move - which for me defeats the whole purpose of VR - or you have to use the stupid teleportation which either breaks your game by completely trivializing it or makes movement extremely frustrating.
I think we have pretty definitely already showed that gaming isn't the killer VR app. We have had affordable VR headsets on the market for years, but the industry hasn't shifted (because VR is at best a mildly amusing gimmick). We need one of those infinite mats where you can walk and run to become actually usable and drop in price low enough that headset + the mat are together affordable.
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
Some of us don't have local friends we want to sit down and watch a movie with; and some of us don't have local friends at all.
I know people who already watch whole movies, etc, in VRChat. This usecase already exists.
We have multiple TVs in our house. After the kids are asleep, my wife will watch her preferred shows on an iPad in bed (or second screen while working) despite there being a TV in the room. I can see people using the headset like this.
Even when the kids are awake, if granted screentime, more often than not they split off and watch/play completely different things. They'll usually only watch the same thing on the same screen if we insist, usually watching a documentary or telling them to watch the same movie together. Otherwise, their different tastes prevail.
> I know people who already watch whole movies, etc, in VRChat. This usecase already exists.
mmmmm
this line of reasoning is a bit worrying to me.
I'll use an hyperbole here, apologizes in advance, it's not specifically a counter argument, just a thought, but to me it's like saying "some people are alone, don't have friends, so they use heroin, I can totally see a usecase for manufacturing heroin"
Maybe we should try to fix the underlying problem, before trying to exploit it?
I totally agree with everything you've written, but I'd just put forth that I think what Apple did with Apple Watch could be instructive here.
Apple Watch was basically originally marketed as a high-end app/notification device (remember the original 10k gold Apple Watch?) Over time they realized the real target market and use case was as a fitness/health tracker, and they doubled down on features and design for that.
With these AR/VR headsets, I agree that gaming is the one use case I've actually seen these headsets be great at, but all these companies keep trying to extend it to our daily lives that nobody seems to really want. But I could believe Apple would eventually come around to seeing one or two really good target markets (gaming and watching movies maybe?) and then just really hone in on that. Folks say games will be a tough sell because Apple isn't really known as a gaming platform, but I don't think this is really true if you take iOS games into account. I can easily see game developers wanting to build for this given the hardware capabilities.
No one is going to buy a $3500 headset for their puzzle and idle games, so Apple's existing games market is not going to help them sell this device.
For Apple to break into the VR games space they'll have to woo both serious gamers and large game studios, both of which seem extremely unlikely given the huge cultural disconnect.
Good point imo. In the Serious Gamer contingent, you’re perceived as being basically wheelchair-bound if you try to play any major title PC game on a Mac, regardless of its basic capability of running said game.
It’s similar to how many coders will scoff at someone running Windows, pointing out Mac’s higher quality ergonomics, nix OS, and overall friendliness to common dev tools. In recent years the gulf has closed a lot with Microsoft making solid gestures toward dev-ex, but the perception remains.
That said, Apple’s resistance to reaching out into the Serious Gamer market has always confused me, but as a Not Serious Gamer it’s very likely that I don’t really understand the engineering difficulties that they’d face in making those inroads (other than the fact that Mac products are seemingly modification-immune, and the Serious Gamer contingent avoids that mindset like cholera).
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> For Apple to break into the VR games space they'll have to woo both serious gamers and large game studios, both of which seem extremely unlikely given the huge cultural disconnect.
I have no idea if Vision Pro will ultimately be successful, but I'd easily bet that game developers would be willing to come on board. Is there anyone that really disagrees that this is the most impressive piece of consumer VR tech to be released so far? Wouldn't game devs be chomping at the bit to put that technological power to use?
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I worked at a games company that only made casual games and we had individual users who spent more that $3500 per month, admittedly not many, but more than one.
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But an Apple Watch is still a watch. Even though though first watch kind of sucked it still did what every other watch did and 90 percent of the time you just wore it and ignored it.
You can’t ignore this thing. If it isn’t offering utility 100 percent of the time you are using it you are going to take it off and set it aside.
> You can’t ignore this thing. If it isn’t offering utility 100 percent of the time you are using it you are going to take it off and set it aside.
Isn't one of its new innovative features the ability to turn the display transparent so you can still interact with the real world without having to take the whole thing off?
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Nobody really likes wearing ski goggles, especially for many hours. I can't begin to imagine how annoying it will be to wear something heavier. Hope it has some type of ventilation system!
Perhaps a HN opthamologist can chime in - what are the long term effects on vision likely to be from wearing/using a device like this for extended periods of time every day?
I wonder if there will be an answer for this.
I've spent the last 35 odd years of my working life peering at screens, from teensy phosphor numbers to decent wide screens. I've had issues with OOS but never with my eyes.
I have never heeded any of the warnings about taking a break, refocusing every 20 minutes etc. My eyes are just fine, well as good as most other people my age.
My pick is there will be some recommendations with this, but they'll be hand wavey and you won't know if ignoring them will fry your eyes or have no effect whatsoever.
Thats what I am wondering - is this good for us?
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos? Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
This was exactly my biggest question. In what situation do you sit and watch family photos of a vacation with your kids alone on your couch? In almost all cases, you're doing that with your family, or showing them to someone else. And if you've got a family (as many people in the ads did!) you're also watching movies together with them most of the time. Apple completely sidestepped talking about how other people might be able to share your experience. Even if this is amazing for actual work, and you're working in a physical office (as the guy in the ad did! as Apple requires all employees do a few days a week!), how will you show your coworker what you're working on? They also conspicuously focused on manufacturing, presentations, and conferencing as their office use cases, and not coding, despite repeatedly stating that small text looks very clear.
As for the "running inside and grabbing a headset" aspect, it felt like they were implying that people will wear this everywhere they go (which they similarly imply won't feel weird exactly due to the weird eye display thing), so you'll already be wearing the headset. But that feels like a very, very ambitious goal, that right now seems ridiculously unlikely/niche.
Regarding looking at family photos alone, this is typically only done in a film, when you, a character, have experienced some terrible tragedy.
Ha, I had the same thought! Felt almost like Blade Runner, some futuristic reality where a sad guy watches 3D videos of how great his life used to be.
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I mean, I have looked at old pictures of a vacation, but it's usually a pretty idle thing, often in response to some notification from Google photos or a facebook memory or something like that, it's definitely not something where I'm going to dedicate time to it or pull out a separate device.
As someone who lives alone in a tiny apartment I have watched a movie on my Quest 2, quite a few. It's better than watching a movie on my PC monitor that pulls double duty as a TV. Would I pay $3500 for that though? Absolutely not.
I'm curious how well gaming will work too. They didn't show off any sort of VR controller a la Quest or PS VR2.
I think they purposefully avoided showing a VR controller because they're making the claim that you don't need one at all for the use cases they were showing.
I think they're claiming that their hand and eye tracking are good enough that you don't need to be waving your arms around to navigate menus.
They did show people using a Playstation controller to play games so I assume there will eventually at least be a third party VR controller.
Yeah I get not showing it off for watching a movie or whatever if the hand/eye tracking work well but for VR gaming it's worrying. VR controllers need some sort of tracking and I'm unsure a 3rd party solution will be as seamless or well supported.
Because their gaming market would be tiny. Gaming on Mac is completely dead, and mobile gaming will take at least a lot of time to adapt to the hardware.
> Gaming on Mac is completely dead
"Dead" is an unnecessary exaggeration. I'm a Mac gamer and my Steam library has more Mac games in it than I can possibly play all the way through. No Man's Sky was just released for Mac, and I'm looking forward to playing that too. I just played through Subnautica at the same time as my friend who was playing it on his Switch and he was blown away at how much better and smoother it was on my M1 MacBook. Also Parallels and Crossover open up the ability to play a lot of Windows games on a Mac. I'm still impressed with just how well that works for some games. I'm not a bleeding-edge everything-in-my-life-is-about-gaming gamer, sure, but I still think I'm a gamer. Yes, compared to the Windows gaming market, the Mac gaming market is small, but it's not dead.
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But it's not a mac and gaming is the current biggest application for VR. Apple could have gone on a spending spree and built up a family of games if they were interested.
Hideo Kojima actually appeared earlier in the keynote to announce the arrival of Death Stranding on Apple Silicon Macs.
I agree that it's undoubtedly a very impressive device.
I think the next generation of computing devices is going to be centered around the device understanding the environment around you, what you are looking at and doing. E.g. you are shopping, cooking, fixing something at home, running, playing basketball and the device understands what you are doing and gives you info and help about the activity. Democratizing access to a personal universal coaching for everyone, like the Internet did with access to information. This device is kind of like a mac on your head, I think it doesn't differentiate itself enough from what is currently available. That's with the exception for entertainment: gaming and movies where I expect it will provide a much more immersive experience to what you can have at home with a traditional setup, like the other similar device do.
I do like the eye display on the front, I think Apple is making a correct bet that these devices can't cut you off from the outside world. In the long run they will be small enough not to cover the face at all. I think it's probably another 5-10 years before the next big thing, but with the Apple silicon advancements and few year of lessons from this device Apple is the best position to dominate that space then.
In the video they show luxurious, spacious interiors. To my mind, the virtual space makes much more sense when your pysical space is cramped (plane, train, car, cubicle) but you need a large display, preferably in 3D.
3D footage and movies, which can be relatively easily downcast to 2D for flat screen consumption, may be another hit. Especially the footage you shoot yourself, pretty exclusive and likely more future-proof. Imagine an upcoming iPhone with a stereo camera (in landscape mode).
Also there are obvious traditional applications of AR / VR that become more useful with a retina-class display, such as medical, mechanical / repairs work, and, of course, military. I suspect the medical market can be pretty large, because serious medicine, like heart surgery, won't be strained by the price.
I think in practice AR is the bigger use, e.g. the Louvre lets you rent one of these (or maybe you've bought one and the Louvre gives you an app for it) and it shows you where to walk to go see the painting of the guy made of vegetables or whatever. Like an audio tour but visual and interactive.
I imagine one museum actually making it quality, while the rest would just straight up suck. Suckiness in AR/VR I imagine is way worse than a bad UI on your phone.
I wonder what it will look like when your wall is 3 feet from your face, but your "monitor" is 10 feet away?
Simple: you don't see the wall.
The mask is not transparent. It shows the real world around through cameras. It can as well show none of it, or imitate a hole in it that leads into an endless perspective.
I have not developed a VR/AR game, but I imagine there are several chicken-egg problems making this possible killer app hard to achieve. One is that VR/AR adoption (and usage) is not enough to justify large studios spending huge sums of money developing games that make extensive use of Vr/ar features, at best they’ll take a regular game and port it to VR. Another is that there aren’t very many workers who are experienced at developing VR/AR applications yet, and that the tooling isn’t mature enough (or standardized enough) for this to be easy. But without killer apps there won’t be enough VR/AR users to begin with.
Also the hardware is rapidly developing and creating super flashy applications requires high-specced SKUs that are only supported by a small number of devices in the wild.
Porting 2D desktop applications with a couple VR/AR gimmicks to VR is something that is well scoped and comparatively easy, it also is mostly re-usable because any “render a 2D UI in 3d” tech is going to work in most or all applications. So in terms of getting features and applications to encourage adoption, it has very high ROI.
Also, people probably aren’t just going to strap on a VR headset to look at vacation photos or YouTube videos if the only thing it offers is a super wide field of view and immersive audio. But they will for… other kinds of photos and videos that Apple can’t demo on stage
I got very similar thoughts... I think the most promising future of this tech are simulations of all kinds: let's virtually open a human body and study it, let's disassemble an engine to see how each part works, let's project how a city should be wise-designed to avoid transport issues, etc.
Even most of these things can be also appreciated using regular tech. Why should Apple succeed when most of other companies have not succeeded (Occulus, Hololens, HTC Vive)? Putting aside not so stunning technology, people actually didn't get engaged with the tech so much.
I had the opportunity to use a version of the Occulus some years ago and found them pretty impressive, but even though at the time I saw it like a cool gadget only to be enjoyed for a very limited amount of time.
> Why should Apple succeed when most of other companies have not succeeded (Occulus, Hololens, HTC Vive)?
Because it is Apple and has shown success (excellent execution) where others don't? How can Apple make chips that astonish incumbents such as Intel without having their own fab? How can they run a real OS in iPhone 1 where Linux existed for long?
Surely Apple can fail as other companies do but I they can estimate a market potential with real data.
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos? Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
Not saying that I like it, but a very large swath of people mindlessly scroll instagram for hours a day, or watch movies on their laptop.
Regarding the photo library, I can speak for my wife. We have a kindergartener and one of my wife's favorite activities is to watch pictures / videos of our kid in bed. She can do this for hours on end to entertain herself.
She also likes to watch movies on an iphone instead of a big screen cause she can use it while performing other tasks (cooking, cleaning etc). She has always said no to a larger form factor like a iPad but I think this might be a good use case for her.
My wife also watches content on phone and iPad. Usually in a room with a TV in it. Doubt she's intentionally watched something on a TV screen for weeks. I mostly watch on a second or third screen while working.
Our TVs are used by the kids, and even then they will happily take an iPad instead.
I’m continually amazed by how many people translate “this product in its current form isn’t for me” into “this product shouldn’t exist, even as a gen 1”
That's not how I read OP at all. Everything they said is in the first person. It's very clear that they're saying they see no purpose for themselves, and people are upvoting because they also see no purpose for themselves.
If Apple finds a market, more power to them, but HN commenters was never going to be that market.
To be honest, I was looking to hate on this, but they sold it much better than the others...
I can see value in it where before it was a gimmick.
And come to think of it, isn't this where Apple does best? Taking the components of an idea that others have failed with, and using them to create a new market category.
That thing will have to be as light as a feather though...
What weirded me out most though, was the feeling that all the presenters had run their demonstrations through chatGPT "in the style of Steve Jobs". Maybe the SMT have rebooted Jobs via an LLM!
I enjoyed the memory of him though.
What value do you see here that others haven't already tried selling? I haven't watch the keynote yet, but the landing page looks like all the same concepts Meta's been trying and failing to get people excited about for years now.
Possibly it's the confidence that there is "something" behind it. I. E. Apple software...
To get all nostalgic again... "And one more thing... the iPhone runs OSX * rapturous applause *". It's that same kind of thing.
When I think of Meta, I think Facebook and it's absolutely over. I see Zuck avatar, I see cringe. Same with other manufacturers. Not many have the depth to deliver short and long term. Especially if dropping serious money on it.
You have to hand it to Apple, the presentation is cliché, but they know how to sell.
I won't be getting one, but I can imagine these selling decently. Not iPhone scale, obviously, but enough to cement the market
I feel this is an overly negative take on what they shipped. It's a platform. The platform seems to solve a lot of the problems of AR/VR (feeling of isolation, control of leaking outside world, better integration with your digital life, truly enhanced media - media that's more mainstream).
For those of us who have no use/space for a TV in their home, this is a SMASHING replacement. Imagine if you watch TV nightly but do so alone, this could bring a whole new meaning to "watch parties".
For those who don't have a desk and want to be able to stand and work on a kitchen bar, this is a great substitute for an office. I would love to have an office but some times you just can't. The idea that I could use my mac side by side with iOS features that matter to me is huge. I'm slightly disappointed that it's limited to one display, but still pretty nice.
I feel like the argument here is the same as the iPhone when it came out - it replaces a lot of low cost items with not 100% coverage but enough to be a compelling buy such that you can rid yourself of those other things.
If they make one that can stream 2 screens from my laptop and can be a standalone device for certain useful situations, it's a good buy for me.
Ultimately you have to try it to buy it because unlike an iPad, it sits on your face.
Maybe they are showing off this because they want to make a difference.
If you show someone playing Beat Saber, you are inviting comparison to $500 headsets. And chances are, the $500 headset plays Beat Saber just as well, maybe even better. Apple doesn't want that, so they are going into a different direction.
I don't know how it will turn out, but Apple is usually pretty good at marketing, so I think they know what they are doing.
I see myself using it for virtual screens as a work environment. But with real keyboard and mouse. And not for this price. I'll wait. Also for first experiences about comfort, reliability, practicality.
I despise desks and chairs with screens, that's why using laptop with internal screen only most of the time - which is not ideal, not at all -, relocating based on my needs and mood. But could use lot more screen space.
The watching movie and have a chat with a helmet on while moving around in the hotel room scenarios are just .... well, sorry, couldn't find kinder word for it, just stupid. I feel the sweat of the marketing folks through, trying to find a usecase they feel is pompus enough, worthy for fanfares. It is repelling. Especially for 3500, they are out of their minds! : ) It is in the way, physically and seriously in the way for movies and chat.
I am hopeful for the virtual monitor scenario, where the comfort is less demanding than on leasure (even an incentive for taking a break). Of course its exact level is to be discovered, I mean relative the two, office use needs adequate level of comfort too.
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos?
There was a time that people said the same thing about digital photos -- people swore nothing would ever replace physical photo albums, and thought the idea of having to look at a screen to view your vacation photos was insane.
Now just imagine a few generations from now when Apple Vision is the size of a pair of regular eye glasses.
When do you believe that time was? Because that's not how I remember it.
I borrowed an Apple QuickTake from friends in the mid '90s, and bought an Olympus 1-megapixel camera not too long after. People definitely complained about the low quality. And some said they didn't want to have to go to a desktop computer to view their photos, which was very plausible given the size and slowness of desktop computers of the time.
And they turned out to be basically correct. Digital photography became wildly more popular with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet. Basically computers had to get much more human-friendly, fitting into the existing human world, so that you could use photos as you would with an album, handing them around, pointing at them, etc.
Which is part of what makes me skeptical about facehugger VR. Instead of putting technology in their living rooms, it requires people to cut themselves off from their surroundings and pretend to be somewhere else. It's the exact opposite of what made digital photography work for the masses.
Digital photography had already won by the time the iPad came out 13 years ago, the DSLR and Point and Shoots were everywhere, and Kodak was on the brink of bankruptcy. Smartphones as awesome cameras didn't really take off until 2010-2011 with the iPhone 4/4s, where it was competing with point and shoots.
Facehugger AR is potentially great for bringing remote people into your living room. AppleTV is getting FaceTime, (and Zoom/webex), SharePlay already exists to sync media across remote participants, etc.
Also 3d moment captures / replays could be a killer app.
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Cool and in those few generations I will absolutely buy that magical device. But we are discussing what's in front of us today.
The conversation doesn't have to be limited to only whether this device is perfect today, I'm not sure why you object to people discussing the concept and its future potential also.
I guess the question is whether this the Newton or the iPad. It might take another 5-10 years before actual uses cases get figured out and at that point it might be very different from what Apple is offering now or are envisioning for the next couple of generations.
I wasn't around when the Newton happened so I'm curious - do you know if there were people at the time (outside Apple) believing it would be the next big thing?
As a general late adopter, I see the thing similarly. Flashy tech, no doubt, and I'm sure it would entertain me a bit, especially as I tend to be asocial.
However, it seems like a thing that wants a part of the user's life for itself, rather than adding to the life of the user. For this reason, I'm not enthusiastic for it at all.
I share some of your skepticism, but I do indeed watch movies in my VR headset (while running on my elliptical trainer).
I use the Meta Quest Pro right now, so it's not plugged into anything, but I would not be averse to plugging it into some phone-sized battery unit in my pocket or clipped to my belt or something.
And I definitely, desperately, do also want to do my software engineering job in VR (with many large displays or floating windows) and not my laptop. But the question is, will those of us who see this future coming and are waiting impatiently for it want to do it with this headset?
The Meta Quest Pro is pretty amazing in its own right (and pretty expensive, although not Apple expensive) but it nevertheless just isn't there yet.
It reminds me of using Linux for desktop computing in 1999. You can see it will be great one day, but it's definitely not great yet.
I feel like Apple could maybe build that if they wanted to... but do they?
Read the novel Warcross by Marie Lu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcross?wprov=sfti1
Imagine a world where visual, immersive tech is the default.
Look around your home. Realize how much money you have spent on cosmetics. Pictures, photographs, throw pillows, plants, paint, lighting, etc.
What if all of that could be replaced at the snap of a command? What if you could hang Christmas lights virtually in less than 10 seconds? What if a poor family who could not afford Christmas lights and decorations could now snap them into place in a second, for free?
Sure these goggles are not that mainstream yet. The battery life is too short. They are bulky and sweaty. But the tech will improve. What if wearing immersive goggles was no more difficult than wearing glasses? It might take a few decades but the tech will get there.
Sure but.. there’s just the fundamental “not real” element of digital “stuff”. It goes away when the $3500 headset comes off. And I’m not even a pure luddite about this shit, I enjoy getting a new sword in Diablo IV, but the notion that the average guy will buy VR Christmas deco for their AR home (which they don’t own) is hilarious/deluded in a special way
> What if a poor family who could not afford Christmas lights and decorations could now snap them into place in a second, for free?
Sure that would be neat, but wouldn't it be even more neat if "poor family who could not afford Christmas lights and decorations" didn't have to exist? It's not like that's how it _has_ to be. It just _will_ be like that if we just continue building this deranged tech-dystopia where we sell the problem as the "solution" to itself.
Almost all the furniture in my house we got for free—and it's not bad furniture, either! We just benefit from people who spend enough on regularly replacing their furniture that a $3500 device looks like an improvement.
As for Christmas lights, they run $10/25ft. The cost on these goggles would have to come down a lot for a family that can't afford lights to be able to afford a pair of these for every family member (because you can't have the 4yo excluded from the Christmas lights).
> Realize how much money you have spent on cosmetics. Pictures, photographs, throw pillows, plants, paint, lighting, etc
Like a $100 bucks at most? That poor family will surely buy every member a used car’s worth of device. And no, I don’t see it a reality neither in 3-4 generations — it is fundamentally more expensive to produce than a TV/laptop/phone so if its price lowers, so does the rest.
It is not a must like a phone is, so why would they not buy a really good TV instead for a tiny fraction of the money?
What makes a phone a must? Why can’t a pair of AR goggles (eventually) replace a phone? What if iPhones go the way of laptops and stop selling as much because people prefer an all in one device on their face?
That’s the sell here. You no longer need a laptop and tv and phone and touchscreen in your car. All that can be replaced with this one device.
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Is that another scifi novel where you forget it’s set in a dystopia?
We're talking about a product and you present a story.
The OP I replied to was asking about use cases for an augmented reality product, I listed a few.
I have type 1 narcolepsy and the prospect of being able to work laying horizontal in bed while my muscles are 90% shut off from a sleep attack is worth at least $3k.
>Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch
I have never watched movies in VR, but in my previous smaller apartment I did watch quite a lot of Youtube with Quest2. I didn't have room for larger solution, phone is way too small and pad is hard to position. With VR headset you could lie in a coffin and still have huge screen.
I am also pretty sure I spent longer than 2 hour sessions in VR and sweat wasn't an issue, but I live in Fennoscandia, so I won't just sweat while sitting still.
>with their family/friends?
It has been a hot minute since I have actually watched a movie with anyone else
I don't think this is for 'us' yet - which is why its labelled Pro.
I think this is definitely going to be like the Watch - they can see the segment could do with a high quality platform, but they don't know what the killer app will be.
This is about getting it into the hands of the developers and people with strong ideas on how it can be used.
Also, Apple is rumoured to have been spending lots of energy and money on relationships with high quality game developers lately. I think this shows how seriously they are taking gaming, and area they are really not done well at.
Hopefully, they can make this an Apple Watch hardware-wise, and Apple TV content-wise.
I excited to see what the clever 3rd parties come up with!
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos?
A male sitting alone in a dimmed room watching photos with a smug on his face. I think they were hinting at something else than “vacation photos”.
They are going to need a setting to disable hand gestures.
It was a special kind of vacation.
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> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
Let's be real, most media content is being consumed on phones these days. In those cases? Yes, a headset is basically just a smartphone for your face.
But I agree about the demos in general focusing on stuff you can do already just fine in 2D. There was very little that looked like a useful application of a HUD. No 3D modeling work, no superimposing digital info over relevant real-world objects... just normal computer and smartphone tasks, but wearing a big sweaty heavy expensive face-screen.
Can it be straining the eyes, head, ears, and jaws? Also, what are the negative mental effects of being lost in that world for 2+ hours? Staring at my phone, I still know what's beside me.. I can fall asleep with stuff still playing on my phone... but I can't imagine what sort of an experience it is to fall asleep with the headset still wrapped around your skull...lol
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
My mom does this because she's legally blind and the best assistive devices she can use for movies are AR goggles that do magnification/zoom. It's the only way she can make out a human face in a film.
I've worn them for parts of movies as well just to try them and it's really not so bad. The calculus here will obviously be different for people with normal vision, but I figured this experience with a similar use case was worth noting.
AR is so, so, so difficult and so much more than just good resolution. If they are trying to do passthrough camera then the framerate has to be super high while also delivering all that 4k video. The problems with opacity and occlusion of real and superimposed objects is almost impossible to make it truly immersive. I think their trick is likely going to be in the software and in the interaction modes. You can't strap this to your head and ride a bike with heads up display, this will be a seated experience with a controlled environment. And it may do that one job very, very well.
Unity as a partner. This thing hasn’t arrived yet. It’ll definitely have games.
Personally this is the first AR kit I’ve vaguely wanted. The software, hardware and partner list makes this a game changer. There are more like me.
> Unity as a partner.
Shovelware games drowning in ads and iAPs?
Meaning it's an indication that Apple are interested in games and that more partners will come. This is not the last game-oriented move; anyone with any sense in the market is currently staying up late to think how to leverage this. The people who buy this are the customers you want.
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos?
I would, yes.
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
Yes, absolutely. We have a very small 2 bed, 1 bath place and only 1 TV that's in the central area. If I want to watch a movie while my wife is involved in her studies or work, I'm limited to my iPad or my iPhone. With this, I can lay there and chill. We have no kids, and we don't have friends over for movies. I'm also very susceptible to outside distractions. This would allow me to focus a whole lot more.
> And the one thing I could maybe see this being useful for – gaming – was barely even mentioned in their keynote.
Perhaps Apple doesn't want it to be brushed off already as another Oculus or gaming toy?
> a half-assed substitute for consuming the same content
I don't think this is a half assed substitute at all. There's literally nothing else like this.
> Show me the actual future, in terms of software/content/communication/immersiveness, then we'll talk.
They just showed you. You weren't listening. You focused on gaming. Again, that's probably why they didn't.
The anatomy app demo alone would be reason enough for me to buy one. I am frequently in medical related classes and often refer to my anatomy guides on my iPad.
I always wanted something like this. I lived in small apartments where I cannot have large screens. I always thought having a good VR / AR headset will unlock a huge screen which I don't have access to otherwise.
Of course, it's anyone's speculation and numbers will give us answers in future.
I see very similar parallel to headphones imo - why would anyone wear a device instead of listening to amazing speakers. I feel the same for vision.
>but I just can't see myself in any of the situations they keep showing in VR/AR demos.
We said the same thing about fingering our way through endless content on a handheld slab of glass we now call smartphones. Innovation doesn't happen without some thinking outside of the box; most of them will be flops, but you'll never succeed if you never even try.
>Would I want to be in a group call with generated avatars of people rather than their actual faces?
Speaking as a gamer who reminisces the good old days of MMORPGs, I don't care for peoples' mugs. Speaking as a Japanese, the insistence on seeing peoples' mugs everywhere seems distinctly like a western thing that I can't really relate to. Besides, I see them all the time in person (or the rare video call) anyway.
>Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?
If it turns out the work flows better there, you'll probably say yes. Won't know until we try, though.
>And the one thing I could maybe see this being useful for – gaming – was barely even mentioned in their keynote.
Apple has given negatives damns to games since time immemorial. iOS being a great mobile gaming platform is an outlier, not the norm.
Oculus already lets you watch Netflix and stuff, visually it’s a pretty decent experience, but like … 42” TVs are $300 or something. you’re not gonna fall asleep on the couch with your headset on, or at least you certainly don’t want to.
I think it’s a beautiful and fascinating piece of tech, I doubt I’ll be an early purchaser, but I’d sure like one. It does feel like they are grasping at straws for mainstream use cases.
I wonder what you'd have to say when someone built the first laptop? It's large, slow, sluggish and not powerful enough as my desktop PC?
The device is an engineering marvel and this is the first time that an AR device that's bringing mass appeal. The demo with Disney looked sick, watching the replay of a sporting event in that table top 3-d view would be awesome!
Laptops fit a real use case, this not so much.
We’ll come back to this comment in 7 years. I’m sure most people on a plane or subway would be wearing this.
the 3D camera should be a separate device. Don't need a head mounted monster for it.
I am actually surprised that with prevalance of all the big powerful smartphones with cameras being a flagship feature, we haven't seen 3D cameras (two 2D cameras separated by the inter ocular distance, mounted on the back of a phone) become common yet.
I think if the hardware is good and even more importantly developer tools are easy to use and better than competition this could be successful. It doesn't really matter what Apple shows in their demo what the use cases are. Does anyone share heart-beats on Apple watch? No. Yet, Apple Watch is a best selling product.
Apple hasn't cared about gaming seriously for perhaps decades.
I find the gaming experience on the Apple TV really nice.
Why there isn’t an Apple TV Ultra with an M2 with extra GPUs to rival the traditional consoles is lost on me honestly.
Seems like a massive missed opportunity with relatively low development costs.
Its no PS5/Xbox/Gaming PC
What are you playing there?
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> Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?
Generally right there with you, but this is the one that I think ... maybe? I don't see laptops as an unbeatable experience, and I see work as probably the only thing in my life that might benefit from an "infinite digital canvas".
At least one use case I could think of is work on the go. I work from home but I can work from anywhere in my country. But I really do not like working on a small laptop screen, and wish my two 27” displays were with me. If this thing provides at least reasonable substitute- I am game.
> but I just can't see myself in any of the situations they keep showing
In other words, what problem is being solved by this product, and will the demand scale sufficiently to turn a profit?
Some solutions are enthusiastically -- almost pathologically -- in search of a problem.
What about glasses ? https://xreal.com/air/ https://global.rokid.com/ https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3/ https://www.tcl.com/eu/en/glasses/tcl-nxtwear-air
This is good for gamers actually not for the obvious one (hand tracking ) but actually the ability to immediately change the isolation. The biggest problem I have with doing stuff in VR is that I multitask in certain games and if you make it so I can switch to something else momentarily then that’s a big win. I agree with you though that why they haven’t been much more aggressive with gaming at wwdc unless at launch or nearer they wanted to announce then but that would be ridiculous since gamers preorder everything and announcing a game would push more gamers to that.
> but I just can't see myself in any of the situations they keep showing in VR/AR demos.
They told Steve Jobs that no one likes to tab on a piece of glass, people want physical buttons. And yet, here we are.
The "I'm dropping at $3,500" should take into consideration that Hololens 2 has a higher price tag [1] but nobody talks about their product, and price ;-) Microsoft seems invisible where Apple doesn't. I also assume with high estimation confidence that Apple has a deep market knowledge to launch this product.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy
I thought the hardware was a bit underwhelming considering Apple has an ultra-powerful chip that no one else has with amazing battery life...and they can only squeeze in 2 hours and there is a big cable running down/side of the headset. Maybe it's nicer in person. More impressive to me would be a really well-done pair of actual glasses that are "smart glasses" like the ThinkReality. This to me just doesn't solve any of the major problems with VR/AR (this is not really AR.)
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
I actually tried watching a downloaded Netflix movie on my quest while on a cross country flight once and it was surprisingly not terrible.
Also I managed to get away with not ending up on some viral twitter post despite probably looking ridiculous.
That said if it wasn’t so bulky I’d probably bring it on more flights but it’s such a pain to lug around I haven’t really done it since.
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos?
Right now they pull open a (what was once massive) laptop and scroll through vacation photos.
> If the kids are having a fun moment would I want to run inside, grab my headset, strap it on and record a video, or just go join them
Same as running inside to grab the camcorder, no?
>Would I rather work on this all day instead of a laptop?
If I got multiple monitors from a laptop on any desk then I would find that pretty compelling.
Recent phones like the 3GS have a camcorder built in and fit in a pocket.
Indeed, but its not like the scenario described has never happened. If anything, the camcorder dad was a very popular trope.
>Same as running inside to grab the camcorder, no?
Presumably new iPhone will record 3d video.
> Same as running inside to grab the camcorder, no?
I agree with this, plenty of us are old enough to remember our parents lugging a huge video camera around at family events. If the videos are compellingly better, this is a use case.
They're not going to show you jerking off to the most immersive porn ever in their ad
But that's what majority of people would actually buy VR headsets would do
I watch tv shows often and movies occasionally on my Quest 2. Often the TV shows aren't in 4K anyway so I'm not losing any resolution. The main reason I do it is the perfect darkness you get with the headset on. Shows like Silo are too dark to watch during the day in my southern california apartment. I know I could get blackout curtains or whatever but the Quest is actually cheaper and easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-kdRdzxdZQ
It's all going to plan ;)
I definitely watched Netflix on the Oculus go which was a crappy screen and a overheating headset, and yet it was amazing. The only thing that prevented me from finishing was the battery. I also joined a cinema experience and there were other people sitting next to me in the room. Man you really have to try it to understand how dope it is
> Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos?
If your photos are: 1. 3D movies 2. viewed in a collaborative setting instead of trying to show your stupid phone to everyone at the table, one at a time
yes, you are going to view photos in headset.
So, instead of projecting onto the TV, everybody in the same room is gonna put on a headset?
> Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?
I can see myself getting two of these when they’re less expensive and never going to a movie theater again.
Agreed. VR/AR headsets are amazing for gaming, and I imagine could be pretty useful for 3d modelling type applications too. But after the novelty wore off for me I couldn't imagine using it over just a regular screen for basically anything else.
> (and no, that weird eye display thing doesn't count)
That weird eye display thing is the only novel thing here, as far as I can tell? I actually thought that was pretty neat. (Not 3.5k suddenly-I'm-interested-in-VR neat, but still.)
We’re still really early in the AR/VR space. Hardware is bulky and expensive but that’ll change over time. Eventually we’ll have lightweight, high-fidelity, reasonably-priced hardware and AR/VR usage will be common
Historically, I think it dates back to Jobs not liking them, Apple doesn't really care about games. It begrudgingly accepts them on the platform as second rate citizens since there's a lot of money involved.
I wonder if they think you either have to be the top dog (PC? PS5?) or you're better off getting the casual gamers (iOS) and not distracting the core business? It's a massive, successful company. I don't think they begrudgingly accept it, or extrapolate from the personal preference of a past boss. The past boss taught them that style and status sells and they've continued with that because it's successful, not just because it was his thing.
Computers and peripherals have been coming closer to our bodies for decades.
Think of the first mobile phones and how strange it was to see people talking on the street.
Now, we have headphones with ANC.
So, something for eyes might very well be the next step.
I would totally rather work on this all day instead of being hunched over a laptop. The freedom of posture, and the expansiveness of the desktop real estate blow laptop productivity out of the water in my opinion.
And type on what exactly? On a keyboard in your desk/lap. I don’t see the posture that much more flexible.
I wouldn't mind having a huge monitor that I can use anywhere, set up just how I like it. Other than that, you are spot on. Also the camera presents a privacy issue. It has to be always on I suppose.
They're just advertising the tech and the platform. Probably so people could come up with some real use cases and apps for it... otherwise what's the point of introducing it a year earlier.
If I still flew 18 hour every two weeks to visit facilities in Asia from NYC I would want one of these for the flights.
Outside of that, I don’t think I could justify $3500 for one. Even if it’s a fun toy.
I totally want to get this thing! This is awesome! Ha ha ha! :) I don't know if I'd like it, but I certainly want to try it. Looks fucking great! Ha ha ha :)
They will never mass-sale this unless they unleash porn. We know it, they know it. Nobody is paying $3500 to look at their emails on a visor.
The audience right now, IMO, is mostly wealthy people who want a new toy. So with that in mind the use-cases they showed make more sense.
>"Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie..."
Avatar is 3+ hours. Would drain a battery which accordingly to specs lasts 2hrs.
Sure, for $500 get a Meta Quest 3 which works just fine. Apple is smoking Steve's ashes with the $3,500 price tag.
I would use this at work in the hospital, especially ultrasound guided procedures.
It is not 3.500. It is 3.500 plus tax. So closer to 3800. Almost 4000 dollars.
Don't forget the Apple Branded Case and cleaning cloth, which will easily push the cost to $5,200 /s
Agreed, bur just give this to some cool people, they'll figure it out
I have a 360 go pro. That does make the headset worth it.
Just buy your whole team the Quest 3.
No, but they will.
Sure, the announcement is full of cliches and more than a little cringeworthy. But I'm not aware of any device that provides this level of quality and immersion for things like 2D and 3D movies, games, or simply the amount of screen real estate for anything 2D people already use. The genius move with this strategy is that it is mostly about leveling up 2D and existing content and software. With some sprinkling of 3D content.
And probably this device is not fast enough for full immersive 3D gaming to begin with. You'd need that new Mac Studio in a backpack mounted on your back with probably a few kilos of battery dangling behind it and some cooling for you and all that hardware. Not going to happen. Some light gaming is probably fine. But it would be a mistake to aim this at gamers.
If this works as advertised, this could basically replace most of my devices. Why have a laptop when I can just project whatever in my field of view, grab a wireless keyboard and go to work. Not that different from what magic leap promised to deliver years ago. Only issue with that is of course that they never really delivered that. Apple seems a bit further with their R&D.
Probably the first generation will have some significant limitations and a certain level of being just a bit uncomfortable. That head band doesn't look fun without AC, for example. And of course motion sickness might be a thing. Not to mention headaches and other potential side-effects of prolonged exposure to this. And probably showing up in public with this is not a great idea in terms of getting robbed, beaten up, etc. Also, the whole interacting with family is seriously cringe-worthy to look at. This looks to me like a solo experience that has not much capability for sharing it with others.
On the other hand, I think they just presented a big money making machine with an amazing walled garden that is pretty much guaranteed to bring countless users if if gets even close to delivering what is on display here.
I think 3.5K$ is pretty OK as a price point. I don't have that kind of disposable income necessarily. But lots of people undeniably do. And this does have a certain level of wow that unlocks that kind of budget for those with this kind of money. I bet lots of people are itching to throw money at this thing on the off chance it is much than half as good as this announcement suggests.
I'm just hoping that this kicks the competition into gear. This looks like it is a lot nicer to have than some of the other stuff out there. The flip side is of course that it's all locked behind the towering walls of Apple's walled garden. This just screams for a more open answer. Meta looks like it just got its lunch eaten pretty thoroughly. Mark Zuckerberg going on about having meetings in VR just isn't quite going to be good enough. I'd love to see what MS comes up with. They've been working on holo lens for years and been holding off on putting it in the hands of consumers. This might prompt them to kick a few things into gear. A pro-sumer focused version of that maybe with some XBox and Steam action on the side could tempt a few people.
And of course all of this stuff is going to be cat nip for the adult entertainment industry. Forget games. I don't think I need to spell that out for this audience. I'm curious to see how Apple is going to contain that.
> Meta looks like it just got its lunch eaten pretty thoroughly
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. Meta's offerings looks far better in my view. Unless, I'm missing something here, Meta's Quest Pro appears to provide basically 95% of the experience for $2,500 less, while providing great controllers for gaming. All in a form factor which IMO is better (no wired hip battery).
You're seriously overestimating the experience of the Quest Pro. Have a read of Nilay Patel's experience with the Vision Pro: it doesn't even come close.
the wired hip battery is far better than the weight of the headset on your neck.
Ctrl-F
Did anyone say porn yet?
Looks like no.
So I guess I’ll say it.
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No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
AR/VR is still a solution in search of a problem and will be for a long time.
This is one of the most laughable launches and devices I have ever witnessed in my life.