Posted by mfiguiere 10/23/2024
We've had 10-15 years of companies trying to make VR (and AR more recently) happen. I just don't think it's ever going to happen.
People are led astray by books like Snow Crash but there are fundamental issues with both VR and AR. Latency is a huge one for both. AR fundamnetally has an issue producing true blacks.
Additionally at such a price, and with the current developer feelings regarding store practices impose by Apple.
Naturally it turned out to be such a niche product, unstainable to keep going.
Apple has repeatedly said that AR is where they want to be and glasses are what they want to do (directly and via leaks) but the tech wasn't there yet. "There yet" can mean "we can't figure out how to get the cost down to something reasonable". The AVP was clearly a "Let's fake it till we make it" product with faux-AR (or maybe it's still just "AR" but faux-"glasses"?) with the end goal of removing the ski visor for just glasses.
I think I'll end up getting a MQ3 eventually or maybe the next version at launch but I'm just not really drawn to VR. After the first few months of my MQ2 I lost interest and it's just collecting dust.
It’s not like customers (aside from those who already have the hardware) are beating down anyone’s door asking for the Vision Pro.
This is very handwavy, but if Apple does intend to pursue the glasses form factor it would probably benefit them to do the very make the very un-apple move of articulating how investments into developing for Vision Pro will extend into glasses.
I doubt they will come out and say that specifically but they pushed ARKit and VRKit for year prior to the AVP.
Personally, I have 0 interest in glasses, but a lot in quality, privacy respecting VR. Just not $3500 of it.
I would have been interested in a $3500 headset if that M1 chip had run macOS, so I could ditch my laptop on trips and take my office with me.
I don't want to spend 8 hours a day in some corporation's world, even more than we already are. The incentives are not aligned.
The personal computer revolution (that Apple helped kickstart) was amazing. People could actually run the software locally, instead of a mainframe. People bought apps to run on their computer and videos to run on their own VCR. I feel like the Web started taking things backwards, empowering "the remote server" again, like a mainframe.
Now, we have Netflix, YouTube etc. and the broadband internet hurdle has been surmounted for many. We are fighting the wrong battles with "net neutrality". The real battle should be whether we can host the software on machines of our choice, or not.
Evidently there is a market for those who want to run their own software and those who don’t care.
Apple caters to the latter. Meta seems to be taking the more open route.
Luckily pretty much all major VR platforms use OpenXR, so we have a better start than in the past.
But when it comes to everything else, it is the opposite, in my opinion.
Apple sells you the hardware and you install apps locally. It’s not open source, but at least it runs locally. And Apple cares about your privacy.
Facebook is the opposite, it is ad-supported, it will never give you their backend source code or let you run your own social network. They only promote “React” front end framework and other ancillary things. They will try to take your data by hook or by crook (surreptitiously recording your camera and audio as well). Their “Metaverse” play would have to recouo the tens of billions spent on development.
But yeah when it comes to AI, you guys lucked out. Zuck’s image has improved since the first 15 years of “dumbf%[#s” giving him their data. He now surfs in a suit and looks much cooler. But remember — it’s people like Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, and all the “BDFL”s of all the languages you use (like Guido Vom Rossum for Python and the Zend guys behind PHP) who really create most of the wealth for the world. If not for open source, you’d be spending more and more of your life in some corporation’s world.
Just ask yourself, when the following technologies enter your home or your body, would you rather all be hooked up to a corporation like the Borg, or at least have your own installation where you have a say:
TeslaBot in your house
Neuralink in your brain
Microsoft Recall recording
Hours in “the Metaverse”
Security cameras everywhere
When facing the temptation. Microsoft has already done it. Facebook has already done it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
But it can go far beyond that. How difficult would it be for TeslaBot to get all the info to impersonate you? All your mannerisms, voice recordings, your heartbeat rhythms, gait, everything?
Through their cloud service.
AR will be the 'future' for a very, very long time I think. Maybe there will be a Metaverse chatroom where all the worker bees can bounce around and have a happy hour on Friday or something
If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I want to be explicit: I love VR and have been hugely into it since the very first oculus dev kits, but other than flight/driving simulators and gun games which all hugely hugely benefit from the physical immersion VR provides, there is nothing worth doing in VR. Not that many games actually benefit from a physical presence. Almost nobody playing FIFA or CoD actually wants to do it in VR. The (really fun and quite well made) CoD ripoffs and other shooters in VR are nearly empty, because so few people are willing to stand up while playing. The Wii made this clear 18 years ago FFS.
I'm still waiting for a single use case that isn't sim driving, sim flying, or shooting, or beat saber. Billions invested into producing something, and still there is nothing.
Yes, either external or the ones built into my MBP
> If you ARE carrying around a mouse and keyboard and AVP, that seems like a lot more clunk and silliness than just using a damn laptop. What are you doing that actually benefits from gluing the screen to your face?
I was hoping to use it as a companion (replacement was always "maybe in the future") initially so I was going to carry the AVP+MBP if things had worked out. Not always, but if I was going to be somewhere for an extended period of time (vacation/visiting friends or family/etc) then I would take both and have the "same setup" that I have at my desk at home (AVP+MBP). This was going to be an alternative to my 3-4 monitors (I have the same desk setup in 2 locations and duplicating everything was expensive and annoying). Unfortunately the MVD was too blurry and VR is too limiting (but mosting the MVD issues) so I returned my headset but that's what I was hoping to accomplish and how I was going to use it all.
For a start you get multiple very large virtual screens that are a lot bigger than the screen in a notebook. This to me is an interesting use case.
Actual VR/AR desktop mirroring is a thing that exists now. It's a niche of a niche of a niche because it's not a good experience. It's interesting for the five minutes until it becomes unbearable.
Consider that many simracers, the niche that VR is the absolute best for, do not regularly use VR, because it's just too much fuss to put a damn set of goggles on, even when you are already sat in a purpose built simracing rig!
I believe I am decent earner, but 3500$ is not justifiable from the benefit I get from it. _and I wanted to buy it really bad_
I assume they could not yet make glasses happen in a way that fit their expectations or at a reasonable price point.
Even the Vision Pro is a device with big trade-offs (external battery, crazy expensive).
Instead of an Orion puck for processing - it's your iPhone
Instead of the bracelet for extra precision - it's a future Apple Watch prototype.
They just won't do what Meta did - show off prototype hardware that they know they won't release in its current form and are working towards making viable for mass production.
By giving it all the bells and whistles they get to find out about more things and keep it at such a price range that it avoids being viewed as a colossal consumer level failure (instead if it's known by the general public at all it's as a weird but impressive premium level failure)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/n...
Granted, it’s relative: “… the new generation of smart glasses have sold more in a few months than the old ones did in two years.”
But it doesn’t sound like they’re discouraged.
If the product was a hit, we'd just know about it. We'd see it around, people would talk about it. It wouldn't require an ambiguous comment from the CEO.
Now Meta is out here demoing very impressive glasses - which was the goal Apple had but couldn’t make work - so I’m curious if Meta is likely the more exciting place to work for this tech.
But I think they did this more to break into a new territory than to sell units. Of course, they didn't market it that way but that was probably their intention.
Next they're gonna come up with a cheaper device, hopefully below 2000 dollars with most of the things that made the vision pro interesting.
I'm happy to concede that AVP is probably great for watching movies on an airplane, but that's hardly comparable to the iPhone level of "world-changing".
I remember there was a lot of initial excitement on HN about the possibilities of using it as virtual monitors for work or as a more immersive way to watch movies. Is it good for these applications long term, after the novelty wears off?
For me, the killer function has been doing display mirroring with my Mac and leveraging the environments like Mt Hood or the Moon as a way to get into a focused flow. I love the idea of windowing in a virtual space, but the there is the same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad. I've used it to capture some VR photos and videos of family, survey the house to identify the source of a water leak, used it for a couple workouts, to play some Xbox games in bed without waking my wife.
Weight only seems to be an issue for me at the 3h mark or so, but at that point I am taking a break. My eyes don't seem to be effected so far and the only visual quality issues have been either due to pancake lense physics or fogging up when the device is cold. App quality has been okish for the most part. I periodically check the app store for something new, but so far nothing that feels incredible. I'll probably buy a MetaQuest Pro after this just to see what that is like
I'm ultimately waiting for the ultrawide enhancement they teased earlier this year and hoping they add a few more environments.
same feeling of limitation that I get with this device as I get with my iPad
Lessons:
(a) never launch new plaforms without jailbreaks
(b) never disable jailbreaks until the best use cases found by hackers have been sherlocked into platform's core functions
(c) never derive $NEW_THING from $PREMATURELY_FROZEN_THING
With that said, I haven't used it for non-hobbyist productive things because the weight and (more importantly) the really bad head strap design makes it awful for use in a sitting-up position for long. I feel like that comfort factor what drags it down most. The passthrough quality and UX stability is 100% there already to be fine wearing it for several hours at a time, including while doing unrelated tasks, if only it was actually comfortable enough for that.
For constrast, see the designs that companies like BOBOVR make for other headsets like the Quest 3 - https://www.bobovr.com/products/bobovr-m3-pro - which look bulky and silly but are perfectly comfortable for long high-activity VR sessions because of the fundamentally better design, even though they add extra battery weight to the headset itself.
Using it as a virtual monitor is tiring. It’s too damned heavy. The FOV is too small. The resolution isn’t terrible but it’s not great either (compared with a physical screen.) I get exhausted after an hour of using it, an 8 hour work day is just too much.
I used to use it to watch YouTube or movies but at some point it just becomes a chore to go get it and put it on when the TV is already there and doesn’t cause fatigue after 20 minutes.
spouse works night shift 3 days a week and ill develop on it and/or watch something.
our work has a cloud based ide for web stuff and ill commonly use AVP and virtual display on my personal mac for that and its better than my 2 monitor setup.
its for big nerds for sure and i am that. really is the best value for the best possible screen. i got it to have fun developing for novel xr hardware and watch great movies on the best screen. my advice is not to get one unless youre in that intersection of interests.
personally find it exciting i might be developing on discontinued hardware. always read and heard about hardware thats come and gos but dorks keep building stuff for it. i assumed everything is too well planned and managed these days for me to take part in something like that.
Edit: Or perhaps the software has improved and it's even better now that it was at launch?