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Apple’s new headset meets reality

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Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#391

Post by crooked-v »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #191
ska wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aye captain, I can see that. My premise is that watches failed (even though they sell millions of units) as the bar for success is higher for Apple, and they left a lot on the table by just putting a mini phone on your wrist. So I think screens on wrists is a dumb use of compute. Then I went in a roundabout way to say, a dumb use of calories / sugar is Coke. Sugar and Compute have better uses, so their lost potential…

Watches failed... how? "Did not adopt my theoretical UX scheme" is not the same thing as "failure".

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#392

Post by dwaite »

smoldesu wrote: post #222
yayr wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most important thing is frameworks. No joke, nothing is currently stopping Apple from making a headset that ships with support for Half Life: Alyx. If they support DXVK at a protocol level and ship a Wine runtime like the Steam Deck does, they could support Beat Saber, Tabletop Sim and VRChat without their developers even knowing. But they won't. As-is, Apple's insistence on iron-fisting their ecosystem is hurtin…

They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx (a Steam exclusive designed for the Valve Index) or Beat Saber (by Meta-owned Beat Games).

> It's the reason gaming on Mac died

Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles on one side and custom-built gaming rigs on the other. The majority of their sold systems are battery-powered, and your first chance at a GPU power envelope of even 150W is the Mac Pro. Which, coincidentally, is also the only Mac left that has a dGPU option.

The real question is why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#393

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

jmull wrote: post #102

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and if there really is a viable Apple-scale device here. The overarching XR vision makes sense to me -- that you could instantly drop into any kind of environment you might want to, whether for work or entertainment or socializing. But who creates these environments, and for what purpose? They seem like they'd be quite expensive if done well, and if not done well, you…

Had this Twilight Zone-like dream that all our visions of the future which include a screen are utterly wrong, Sci-Fi included.

It's somewhat hard to argue that the Command-Line Interface is better overall than the Graphical User Interface, look at Apple, they made $2.75 trillion for themselves from the GUI. But with large language models now the easiness and even the beauty falls back into the CLI, a simple blank screen with a blinking prompt awaiting your commands, and maybe we could remove the screens altogether. Why do I have to write this message while staring into, funnily, an Apple screen, when I could be drinking my coffee admiring the city skyline and the mountains nearby while whispering gently the words into the wind. Why must I know that for whatever need that I have from a software product, I must press some menu button, then 3 drop downs down, select some weirdly named options, and then go back and drag and drop some asset into the window: just do the thing already, I don't care about your software-y details. The GUI might be dying, perhaps we should strive to kill it.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#394

Post by crooked-v »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #130
themagician wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a headset that allows me to have the equivalent desktop space of quad HiDPI displays for the price of one display, and the ability to bring that anywhere. The ability to edit video on a display that is absolutely massive would be a win for me.

Yes, this can definitely be true, but is the context really so that you can be social with someone else - or is it for you to have the creative space to work on an idea? I feel there's no idea of what the context is anymore - and that's what's killing all of these devices. No one can say 'this is the emphasis we gave these products for this reason' - because they all want the success of the iPhone, everyday use and w…

You seem to be conflating "anywhere" and "social" in a way the post you're replying to wasn't using at all.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#395

Post by dwaite »

chaostheory wrote: post #326
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…

Valve has only made one VR game to date I’m not aware of Epic making any VR games Meta doesn’t make new games for other platforms even now. They’ve culled many od their own game studios. The only issue would be Beat Saber. Imo it’s still VR’s killer app. Still, there are plenty of passable clones and similar games that are good enough The bigger issue is that Apple doesn’t like games. They never did. They only tolera…

> Apple Arcade is a good start, but it still doesn’t convince me that they’re serious about catering to anyone beyond casual gamers

To be fair, a huge portion of the gaming market is casual gamers, and Apple does incredibly well there on iPhone.

Apple isn't going to make a huge dent in the console market because games have to be restructured to deal with touch controls vs controllers, and to have a revenue model that doesn't start out with a $60 purchase. For all the power of an iPhone, it also still lags a generation behind in graphics performance (because batteries, size, and heat)

There isn't a PC gaming rig market that Apple would make a dent in either. The baseline price of a modular Mac that could have a top-of-line dGPU is too high, and they won't sell enough of them to convince developers to port and support their titles.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#396

Post by [deleted] »

jdprgm wrote: post #280

One thing which I don't get why people don't seem to get is long term (and perhaps with this release from Apple) headsets should be replacing tv's for at least a substantial amount of viewing. For example I have a fairly high end 4k projector setup but in an apartment with limits on light control. Even with a dedicated room and $3k allocated to a projector and a screen and high enough resolution (which i'm expecting…

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#397

Post by jillesvangurp »

It's all about the content. It won't matter how nice this thing is if there is no content to go with it.

The pricing will ensure this market will be small and niche for some time to come. And Apple being Apple, we can expect locked down SDKs, walled gardens, and all the rest. Why would content creators target that? And with what tools? Which are the launch partners (if any)? Who is already working to produce content? What kind of content?

Is it going to be games or is this being aimed at people wanting to do meetings (which meta seems to insist is the killer use case). Or are they like MS trying to target companies with some fancy AI use cases around people fiddling with complicated 3d models professionally? I don't think anyone has nailed content for AR just yet.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#398

Post by FredPret »

oblio wrote: post #378
neural_thing wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to spend $3,000 on a device that I would want to use every day. The reason I don't spend that much on existing VR tech is that I don't want to use it.

Most people don't have $3k of disposable income for a single non key purchase. How big even is this market, at $3k? 50 million people worldwide?

Even with 50 million people spending $3k, that’s still a $150b market.

But there are lots more rich people in the world than that.

And they will spend more than the initial cost, because they will buy apps, Apple Care, and next year some will buy version 2 of the headset.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#399

Post by throwaway675309 »

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…

"From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware"...

So a $3000 VR headset with a FOV that's still the equivalent of looking out of a periscope on a submarine. Fantastic.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#400

Post by crooked-v »

pradn wrote: post #275
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 seems like consumers just don't want VR/AR. We've had compelling experiences for a decade. But it seems like only a subset of console gamers, already a small population, care to buy a VR headset.

Consumers don't want VR/AR that requires wearing a deeply uncomfortable bulky headset, that means facing a significant chance of framerate- and tracking-induced nausea, and that isn't good enough resolution to use for even basic stuff like web surfing.

I would be very surprised if Apple releases a device that has those problems.

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