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Apple’s new headset meets reality

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Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#181

Post by catchnear4321 »

cubefox wrote: post #138

From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality". Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

apple is all about ecosystem.

many little niceties you hardly notice but would immediately notice the loss of.

with vr and ar you are placing yourself directly within the ecosystem. (the os becomes your reality, if you will, extended… xr… wasn’t that clever of them…)

the iPhone long game shows apple’s willingness to creep slowly into lower cost tiers to preserve the brand value.

carmack doesn’t need to be wrong for apple to succeed. apple just needs to be patient. (and maybe get back to some fundamentals on the software, the operating systems fee like they are beginning to rot a bit.)

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#182

Post by anonymouse008 »

greedo wrote: post #178
anonymouse008 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, to put it another way, how many people do you know who complain about the difficulty in looking at their wrist or cell phone? Everyone who tries to speak a text message with Siri. Apple should have been brave and not reshaped messages - that screen is not meant to consume text messages at any length - they should have changed the communication to match the context.

I use the voice to text feature of the Watch's Messages app daily. It has worked flawlessly since I bought the Watch.

I mean the fatigue and awkwardness of holding a wrist up to speak to it. Think of twiddling your thumbs but productively for phones (how natural)… But yes, voice to text is a great solution to their problem - there’s just a lot left on the table

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#183

Post by yayr »

SXX wrote: post #165
yayr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think with respect to compute/GPU capability the Apple headset will be vastly superior. One of the major issues with the Quest is the lack of graphics quality that can be brought to the virtual environments. Unless you run it via Link to a PC with a top end GPU it is just a toy. Having VR experiences like the recent Unreal Engine provides is simply orders of magnitude away for Quest in the current state... Thats on…

Problem is: Apple mostly ruined their relationship with Epic, Meta and even Valve. Whatever excellent VR tech they come up with will be mostly ignored by the game industry. Good part of iPhone / iPad success was due to the excellent apps ecosystem. Who gonna make VR experiences for Apple new VR ecosystem? F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits f…

Let's see. Unreal Engine can build for Apple Silicon. So any game dev can make his choice himself. Unity and others are also there as good frameworks.

More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#184

Post by dom96 »

cubefox wrote: post #138

From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality". Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

> It may be more feasible to sell $3000 smartphones than to sell VR headsets at this price.

Sure, now it is. But what about when the iPhone was first introduced? It didn't cost anywhere near this much money. For a new product category such as this it makes sense to start out with a cheap product so that as many people adopt it as possible, then you can begin introducing more expensive versions when you have the apps ecosystem to support it.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#185

Post by ska »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #176
ska wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a useful analogy, I think. Most people do, or don't do, something that empirically is not optimal for their health. If your suggesting there is an objective downside - I think you have an uphill battle there.

No, just engaging with the ‘everyone else does it’ part which felt emphasized. Proving lost potential is hard without an example of something better - which I would argue is the Oura ring, but less popular for different reasons. And for Siri and Alexa, you probably use ChatGPT, so you know the difference when you see it

I'm having trouble making sense of your point, I guess.

You seem to try to draw a parallel between largely failed tech (VR) and largely successful tech (apple watches, etc), and then to massively popular consumer product (coke); then suggest there is 'bravery' in rejecting the 'way these creators want you to use their products'

I sort of get the idea applied to VR as it has never really clicked for anything. But the analogies are all to things that are unambiguously successful with consumers. They are all very much "pull" not "push" at this point. Well, maybe less so with voice apps, that's more "bundle".

I guess you lost me early in your argument, and I was trying to point out why (and figure out what you were actually trying to say)

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#186

Post by sli »

cubefox wrote: post #138

From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality". Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

I'm willing to spend a lot on VR, but Apple would have to absolutely blow everything else out of the water at that price point. I have no doubt that a lot of Apple enthusiasts will buy them, but they've certainly chosen a specific market.

You could buy a full Index kit, get the wireless upgrade for it, and then a full Vive Pro kit and its wireless upgrade, and have spent about the same amount of money.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#187

Post by dayvid »

vehemenz wrote: post #33
woah wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty simple. If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did. The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone. Denying this is like being…

> If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did. Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intru…

To add on, having a phone being your heavy computing device is a little silly if you think about it. It's essentially the smallest portable form factor people can conveniently carry around, connect to the internet, consume and send information.

A pair of glasses or monocle/power reader, wrist device with holo display or some other format makes much more sense as a way to interact with a portable computing device conveniently. The main bottleneck is hardware.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#188

Post by pornel »

ben_w wrote: post #91

At this point, while I would be interested if Apple do actually announce a headset, I've heard this hype cycle so many times already I don't really believe it. Also, so many previous pre-announcement visualisations of Apple products were so way off-base that even if a headset does get announced, it's got an equal chance of being a $400 Siri version of the Amazon Echo Frames as it does of being what's in this article.

There's so much speculation. People are declaring it's a game changer or a flop, while Apple hasn't even acknowledged its existence.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#189

Post by ProfessorLayton »

crooked-v wrote: post #116
JimtheCoder wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am going to spend $3000 on a VR headset, I don't really want to sweat all over it... Also, the sort of people who are going to work out consistently don't need a headset to work out. Or any other tech. They just do it. I know you're not implying this in your comment, but if anyone thinks you are going to take someone who is sedate, strap on a cool headset and give them some sort of virtual experience that will f…

The key to losing weight with VR for the average person isn't in exercise-specific apps, it's in replacing sitting video game time with something just as engaging but that has you standing, walking in circles, crouching, and waving your arms around for a few hours instead. You're obviously not going to get buff from it, but it can add up fast for an otherwise sedentary person.

While exercise is great and should be done regardless, the key to losing weight is almost entirely in the kitchen.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#190

Post by SXX »

yayr wrote: post #183
SXX wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is: Apple mostly ruined their relationship with Epic, Meta and even Valve. Whatever excellent VR tech they come up with will be mostly ignored by the game industry. Good part of iPhone / iPad success was due to the excellent apps ecosystem. Who gonna make VR experiences for Apple new VR ecosystem? F2P game companies? I guess they won't be interested either because Apple will try to bite off a lot of profits f…

Let's see. Unreal Engine can build for Apple Silicon. So any game dev can make his choice himself. Unity and others are also there as good frameworks. More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.

Majority of game development companies don't build their own tooling. Option to build a binary for ARM Mac is not sufficient to bring high quality experience to whatever proprietary tech Apple will put out there. And it's quite certain it's gonna be incompatible with Meta's offerings, wont integrate with other platforms, etc.

I not saying like Apple have no chances at all here, but building own gaming ecosystem is extremely prohibitive expensive even for large corporations. Both Microsoft and Sony spent a decades on building their console ecosystems as well as tens of billions of dollars.

Google and Meta both tried an failed miserably. Both Microsoft and Epic tried to compete with Valve on PC, spent billions and 5 years later their store is still dont have any real marketshare.

Most importantly Apple just can't really go out and buy some companies simply because Microsoft, Tencent and few other giants already own half of big players out there. So it's gonna be really really hard for them to create mass market product that can compete.

PS: I won't even start on fact that it's gonna be impossible to do it "in secret" for them this time. Competitors will be on them immediately.

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