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Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

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Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#61

Post by kamaal »

vlunkr wrote: post #27
Mithaldu wrote: post #3

Apple doesn't innovate. It combines proven technologies into polished products. When VR has proven itself, with R&D investments of other companies, Apple will release a near-perfect refinement of all things VR and everyone will hail them as the savior who brought VR to the world.

> It combines proven technologies into polished products. Is that not innovation? Maybe technically the iPhone was just a combination of existing technologies, but it went above and beyond them to the point that it was essentially new.

>>Is that not innovation?

Yes but not at the same level of complexity. The processor, electronics, battery technology and manufacturing processes require multi-decade spanning consistent efforts, iterations and investments to make it happen.

Once the difficult part is done. What remains now is building a end user product. Which has its own complexities. But once the hard part is done, the other parts are relatively easy.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#62

Post by tmikaeld »

nilkn wrote: post #47

I'm really surprised at how much skepticism there is here towards VR. I have a feeling a large majority of the commenters here have simply never tried the latest offerings and/or are not up-to-date on where the field is. The consumer versions of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive are both very good. In particular, Oculus has very much already taken the Apple approach to VR. The final Rift has a high-end, premium design…

Was thinking the same thing. I've had both DK1 and DK2 of the Oculus headsets and have followed VR from the start to the now and there have been SO much happening with hardware and software that it's hard to grasp!

There is so much hardware for body tracking, environment tracking and soon Magic Leap that Apple really will be irrelevant when or if they enter the market.

I mean, just consider the patents involved here - it will be hell for them to enter!

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#63

Post by saturdaysaint »

Jtsummers wrote: post #58
saturdaysaint wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad? Who is going to pay/develop and what is this content going to be... can it actually deliver, making good immersive software is incredibly hard." The real problem with this question is that it's like asking someone in 1990 what the point of 3d graphics are. Beyond what's been announced, there's no definite timeline for anything - who besides John Carmack w…

The "unique" experiences of something like having the best seats in the stadium or more immersive experience with a golf simulator would be awesome. But for movies, it takes a commonly social experience and makes it strictly solo. You cannot use a shared VR headset. You may experience the same thing at the same time (or similar since you'd be looking in different directions, most likely), but it wouldn't be common. W…

"For movies, it takes a commonly social experience and makes it strictly solo."

Well, not if Netflix can make a "watch together" mode and you find yourself sitting with 3 college buddies' avatars who could be anywhere in the country. Facebook, for one, will have a strong interest in shoving "social" into everything - they certainly have the social graph, VOIP technology, infrastructure, etc. to make this easy to imagine.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#64

Post by dogma1138 »

jballanc wrote: post #33
codybrown wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between Apple making their own VR hardware and shipping a computer with a fast enough GPU to run other VR hardware (or ability to have a fast enough GPU via something like the Razer Core). The latter would be necessary for Apple in the growing VR ecosystem but it could be great for many other areas that require an intensive GPU. And that's the argument of the piece.

Apple's target customer doesn't need a graphics card to do anything more demanding than video editing. It's been probably at least 7 years since you could get a Mac with anything like a top-of-the-line graphics card. Are there potential customers that Apple is not grabbing by not having a high-end graphics option? Sure! But Apple doesn't care... The thing about Apple is that, unlike almost all of their competitors, t…

Apple's target customers tarted to switch to PC for video editing because editing 4K> even on an Mac Pro is a nightmare because the GPU is weak as hell.

Rendering also takes considerably longer because the GPU performance is fairly limited.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#65

Post by bsbechtel »

pessimizer wrote: post #35
bsbechtel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The article doesn't go into details as to why Apple should be doing anything with VR that isn't a) a proven technology nor is it b) anything more than a fad. You could say the same about cars, but Apple is supposedly working on building one. The same could be said about watches before the Apple Watch was released too. I agree with your point, but I'm just playing devil's advocate.

Cars and watches are definitely proven technologies and not fads.

Electric/self-driving cars are not proven technologies.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#66

Post by smt88 »

simonh wrote: post #39
smt88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are a first to market with an amazing, polished, product type That hasn't been true for a long time. The iPad might have been the last product fitting that description, and it was released in 2010.

Not the Apple watch, which is selling faster than the iPhone or iPad were at this point after launch and has captured ~70% of the smart watch market? Ok, 'amazing' and 'polished' are aesthetic judgements on which reasonable people can disagree. How much better would it have to do to count, in your opinion?

The iPod, iPhone, and iPad redefined (you might even say created) their categories. People have argued that tablets are fairly useless in the end, but the iPad still made tablets mainstream and is arguably still the best tablet.

The watch did none of those things. I saw lukewarm reviews at best, and I've never met anyone who raved about having one. Capturing 70+% of the smart watch market is probably more a function of demographics, since a smart watch is a huge luxury, than of the quality of the product.

How much better would Apple have to do? It would have to make smart watches mainstream. For VR, it would have to make VR mainstream. That's the bar that they set in the past.

(Note that I despise Apple and am certainly not just being nostalgic.)

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#67

Post by wmil »

codybrown wrote: post #50

How did this post drop from the front page to the 7th page in less than a few minutes?

I don't know the specifics of the algorithm that HN uses, but reddit used to factor in 'post velocity'.

Assuming HN does something similar then a relatively small number of quick early upvotes can send something to the front page.

A more mixed response from front page only viewers will send it crashing down.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#68

Post by exDM69 »

berberous wrote: post #52
exDM69 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to give a counter anecdote: I get terrible simulator sickness from using Oculus, I've tried DK1 and DK2. It's a huge, unsolved issue that affects a not insignificant portion of people.

What rig? What games? I got some truly awful nausea that lasted nearly 48 hours! I felt like I broke my brain. But I was running a DK2 on a wayyy underpowered rMBP on early firmware. I quickly learned: (1) if a game has judder or is otherwise not running smoothly, do not play it; and (2) do not move unnaturally (i.e. no fast strafing or running like in a FPS). When I followed those two rules, the nausea disappeared a…

It certainly wasn't an underpowered rig. It has a Titan X GPU and top of the line Broadwell or Haswell CPU. I tried some of the Oculus demos as well as War Thunder flight sim. DK2 was miles better than DK1, but the nausea was still there.

You're right about FPS strafing and some other unnatural movement, that seems to make things worse for some people.

Additionally, I think the situation might improve if you really take the time to adjust the lenses and the headset to match your head and eyes. This makes the Oculus headset a "personal" device in that you can't really borrow or share one, though.

However, I got terrible nausea that lasted for the rest of the day and rendered me incapable of doing any work (fucked up my eyes so I couldn't focus on text) after just 30 minutes of play. I'll need a pretty good reason to try it again.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#69

Post by minalecs »

As someone that works in the VR industry where I think Apple can make the biggest difference would be in the self contained headset using their mobile components. Google is reportedly already doing this, http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/google-is-reportedly-buildi....

Think something like the Samsung Gear but an all in one headset thats nicely designed. Out of all the current available headsets, I think the PS is the best designed and best fitting. I think Apple could do better.

Re: Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

#70

Post by bryanlarsen »

codybrown wrote: post #50

How did this post drop from the front page to the 7th page in less than a few minutes?

There are a lot more comments than there are upvotes to the article. The HN algorithm appears to penalize that heavily. There seems to be a cliff at about 40 comments: if you hit 40 comments before 40 upvotes, it falls off the front page.
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