Comment by marricks
3 years ago
So many technologies Apple has launched in the past 5 years seemed nifty & weird but were all being built to lead up to this:
- Spatial Audio - Is any one a huge fan of this? It doesn't matter a ton outside of AR but matters greatly within it
- Side Car - mirroring to a local apple device. It's useful as a second monitor but... mirroring your iPad or MacBook into VR and typing on it. Super useful.
- FaceID - is it really better than using your finger to unlock? I think it is now but it wasn't initially... This face scanning tech is an entry point into the whole "face as an avatar" integration into their ecosystem. Also keeping a secure local image of your face on device.
- Separating a subject from scene used live in iPhone "portrait" view and in photos to clip out w/ neural engine - sure that's fun, but in AR this is a lot more useful for presenter view they showed.
That's off the top of my head. This totally could fail but piece by piece Apple has been building and trying out the tech for this in their ecosystem. If it fails, it won't be because of a buggy ecosystem.
Actually, I still find side car buggy so it definitely could/will be buggy, but, it is a broad integration and feature set they've been working towards for a while.
I made a similar comment almost a year ago and it seems like it's panning out nicely:
> "Apple has been testing overengineered features that are suspiciously well suited for AR in broad daylight for a few years now. If they can't pull it off, I don't think anyone can."
They've reached a stage where outpacing the field is just a matter of reaching into their grab bag of miscellaneous technologies.
Ha, that turned out to be a pretty good prediction. Wonder what else can be gleaned from features in standard products.
> Spatial Audio - Is any one a huge fan of this?
Gigantic fan. Listening to music or movies/TV on headphones without it seems almost painful now -- I sound like I'm exaggerating but I'm not.
Once you get used to audio always sounding like it's coming from outside of your head, going back to non-spatial audio that seems like it's emanating from inside of your head is jarring and positively claustrophobic.
And nobody's as surprised as me to find myself typing something like that. I always imagined it would just be a gimmick, but at least on the AirPods it's anything but. And it wasn't until the "Spatialize Stereo" toggle appeared recently that it worked with everthing, like regular tracks on Spotify.
I switched from Spotify just for spatial audio
the fact that the latest 100 gecs album has a spatial master was a big tell for me. spatial is definitely going to stick
even just their boiler room set in spatial sounded more realistic than any other live thing i've ever listened to. hearing the crowd around you is surreal
Id never thought I would see a comment about 100 gecs in hacker news
Maybe add the 3D scanner on the back of the Pro iPhones (and some iPads?) to your list? It’s cool, but I never understood why they bothered, especially as they barely supported it with their own software.
Yeah. Apple tech portfolio is serious great for this. You miss Apple Silicon chip. Its performance(/watt) is now a bit overpowered for iPhone/iPad, but it's critical for AR headset.
Other things that come to my head:
- truedepth 3d camera and lidar
- 3d scene reconstruction
- arkit framework
- wifi 6 for higher bandwidth
- Uwb sensor with Proximity and orientation detection
- high fps motion sensors
- game controllers support for dualshock and joycons
- ultra low latency audio on iOS (since like forever - android improved but still behind)
I can't wait for more 3D photography - I bet an iPhone in the near future is going to support stereocameras somehow so that even pictures you take off the headset will be 3d. And I bet they're going to have more ways to view them without the headset.
>Spatial Audio - Is any one a huge fan of this? It doesn't matter a ton outside of AR but matters greatly within it
Not the thing with airpod head tracking, but I am always blown away by how effective the fake surround sound is with the M1 Air's speakers.
I think Apple TV+ may even be a part of this. On its own, its a below average streaming service. But as a proprietary production studio that can bootstrap a VR content library by force of will...?
Is Apple TV+ below average? I've liked all the original content I've watched on it, which is something I can't say for... literally any other streaming service.
Add the ones which are introduced with this product: most notably for me the eye and finger tracking UI
I've never heard such breathless praise of nonsense before. every vr headset has had spatial audio. mirroring a desktop to vr has been doable on vive or oculus for years and years. faceid literally has nothing to do with this vr headset. etc etc.
Oh I am definitely not saying they came up with any of that. I'm just saying they were laying the groundwork for their own ecosystem.
And sure, desktop mirroring is in every headset but sidecar isn't "plug a cable in and mirror your screen" it's project your screen to another device you own without any cables. That's more attractive for someone with a few apple devices.
Also not saying others haven't done that, but it's an ecosystem and having the talent for a thing.
>And sure, desktop mirroring is in every headset but sidecar isn't "plug a cable in and mirror your screen" it's project your screen to another device you own without any cables. That's more attractive for someone with a few apple devices.
Miracast, 2012
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The very first paper published by Apple's machine learning group, in 2016, was about using GANs to generate synthetic training data sets. The examples they used were eyes and hands.
sidecar in particular is useful for using an apple tv as a second display. i used to do this a lot when my kid was first born
face id is better than the fingerprint since you leave your key on the reader with the touch id
i do appreciate your perspective though. i didn't initially see how they were gearing up for this at the level you did.