Comment by jablongo
3 years ago
The tech is amazing, but also ridiculous. Think about how much time and cost went into developing these features: - Creepy Eyes fake transparency (a work around for the fact that you look dumb wearing ski goggles on your face) - The realistic 3d facetime avatar (a work around for the fact that you look dumb wearing ski goggles on your face, creepy eyes isn't a good enough work around for facetime, and you need an external camera to do facetime).
None of the use cases seemed to compellingly improve productivity or well being, they just close the gap between the digital and physical w/ no benefit. I'd have been more convinced if it was depicted helping a mechanic assemble an engine with AI annotations and advice, but instead almost all of the demos seemed dystopian.
The eye tracking technology involves shining infrared light at your eyes at all times - not an expert but I can't help but wonder if that is going to have long term effects. https://ehs.lbl.gov/resource/documents/radiation-protection/.... It is ironic that Apple Health is launching an eye-health initiative which reminds kids to keep their device far enough from their face to prevent eye damage, and then is releasing another device that is covering your entire field of vision at like 2 centimeters away from your eyeballs (Edit: this last part is a non issue because the focal point is not so close due to the lenses).
>It is ironic that Apple Health is launching an eye-health initiative which reminds kids to keep their device far enough from their face to prevent eye damage, and then is releasing another device that is covering your entire field of vision at like 2 centimeters away from your eyeballs.
That's not how this works though. VR goggles have the focal point at least 20 feet from your eyes, it's way better for you than having a phone in front of your face.
You can actually make an app that will help train vision by making you focus on a closest point and on the furthest point and keeping on switching between those in VR/AR
Human eyes need to focus at 4 - 6 feet away, is how some popular headsets work today.
What kind of sucks about tech is you start realizing people mainly just do the same stuff they did 25 years ago with it. Only today, the hardware has to be 1000x as powerful to run all the shitty bloaty software that's still just serving email, rendering spreadsheets, chat, images, videos, news, online shopping, etc, as its ever been. It's like we've been in this arms race for sexier and more resource demanding window dressing, versus something that I actually couldn't do before, and there has been absolutely no letting up.
25 years ago we were in Windows 98 times.
UX and general day to day quality of life has been improved dramatically in the last 25 years for 'regular' consumer things. I would take everyday a 'shitty bloaty' modern operating system if the alternative is to run something from that era. Especially for mundane things like the ones you mentioned. I can open a spreadsheet on my computer and instantly have it in all my devices or shared with anyone in the world. I can have 4k video and max res pictures backed up everywhere. Maybe you don't remember how clunky were computers 25 years ago and how low resolution everything was.
For 'professional' things (Coding, Game Development, Video Editing, Design, Photoediting, Architectural work) today technology simply allow things that were not possible even 5 years ago, 25 years ago are ancient times. I don't know what you do with computers, but there are plenty of things that you couldn't do just a short time ago.
I have a several copies of Windows 98 running on emulators.
The quality of life is not that different from a modern OS. I wouldn’t call it dramatically improved. The paradigms have just changed, and not even that drastically. Business tasks are particularly similar. Certain tasks are actually easier on something like Excel 97 than they are on Excel 2021. Applications actually adhered to human interface guidelines.
Man, I was trying to think of examples of cool stuff we can do now that we couldn't in the 90s, and came up pretty short.. It's quicker and easier to load up bite-sized games in the web browser nowadays, but that comes with a whole mess of really awful dystopian shit and a lot of 100x code speed de-improvements thanks to JavaScript, Design Patterns, etc.
I don’t know where I heard this analogy, but there are lots of things in life that don’t change linearly, but asymptotically to some target, and the analogy ad absurdum goes something like: “Thousands of years ago we thought the earth was flat, now we think it’s round, what’s next? A torus?”
The idea being that there is a period of massive change as we figure out how something ought to work, but then once we do, the change gradually slows and then stops. Spreadsheets are basically a solved problem, and they’re also very useful, so for certain types of work, changing it is probably only going to make it worse. Multiply that by all sorts of different types of software, and it’s hard to find any areas where we fundamentally need a new paradigm.
So it’s not surprising that 25 years ago, software was changing all the time, and since then it only seems like we’ve changed the window dressing. Because most of the time, we actually got it right 25 years ago, and there’s no reason to change it further.
There are a number of things that are possible today that would have blown people's mind in 1998.
Streaming music - I remember downloading my very first mp3 (maybe around 96-ish) and my computer not being able to decode it in real-life (the audio skipped/stuttered). It also took 40 minutes to download. Streaming a song with near CD quality fidelity on a computer would have been mind boggling. Streaming music to a wireless pocket computer was unthinkable.
Streaming 4k video - similar to music but even more insane. I remember the first time I streamed video over the internet. It was on CNN's website around maybe 98 or 99. It used the real player, was some silly low resolution (lower than 320x240), and was so pixelated that you couldn't make out people's faces.
Google Maps with Street View
Google Translate
Actually good OCR (including handwriting support)
Actually good speech recognition.
Video calls
2 replies →
> rendering spreadsheets
I am dying to know what the next paradigm for spreadsheets will be. Is it some sort of "walk-through" spreadsheet?
The same 2d excel spreadsheet you've been staring at for the last 25 years, only rendered in VR 40 stories in height.
It's just spreadsheets plus AI, apparently
You likely get a lot more infrared in your eyes by going outside, and also a much higher amount of UV which is what actually causes damage.
As long as it's just a gentle/diffuse flood there is no cause for concern. When they start introducing scanning lasers then it's time to sit up in the seat.
Personally I think it's going to be super awesome when you can join an online TTRPG and you can change your animation to match your character, as well as having all your character sheets, maps and a battle map in front of you all at once.
Imagine seeing the characters of Critical Role brought to life in real time!
> The eye tracking technology involves shining infrared light at your eyes at all times - not an expert but I can't help but wonder if that is going to have long term effects.
For what it's worth, infrared beams and cameras is standard for psychology research using eye-tracking. Psychological studies are only 30-minutes long, but I've never heard anybody mention risks of this, and IRBs do not require mentioning anything like that in consent forms.
The presence tracking technology in Face ID iPhones uses infrared beams (not sure if it's the same as what's in the Vision Pro), and some people's eyes are in fact sensitive to this, resulting in eyestrain when used over a long period of time.
You can turn this feature off to get standard idle lock screen timeout behavior, and still continue to use Face ID; I don't know if there's a workaround on the Vision Pro)
> Creepy Eyes fake transparency (a work around for the fact that you look dumb wearing ski goggles on your face) - The realistic 3d facetime avatar (a work around for the fact that you look dumb wearing ski goggles on your face, creepy eyes isn't a good enough work around for facetime, and you need an external camera to do facetime).
And transparency mode on modern headphones is a waste of time since you can just take them off. I agree both the demoed features suck and I don't want them in my conference calls, but stuff like that is a necessary bridge for a new product category. Hard to call that wasted effort.
Couldn't headphone transparency limit earshattering noises like infant scream down to reasonable level?
Found the non-parent in the thread.
> And transparency mode on modern headphones is a waste of time since you can just take them off.
Unless you want to continue listening to what's playing through the headphones. I enjoy listening to both the nature and quiet music when I go on walks.
Maybe we can mod it for anime eyes