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First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

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Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people still do shoot movies and make video games. It takes more work, but also (hopefully) provides an additional value. At sufficient scale it might make sense to do this (something like IKEA).

> But people still do shoot movies There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones. Figures range from 500,000 to one million books published annually. However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.

> There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones

> However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.

Combining those, you claim that less than 4,000 movies are shot each year, “even including material shot by amateurs with their phones”.

I can’t see how that can be true. Google tells me there are about 2 million weddings in the USA each year. From that, I think it’s a very, very safe bet that over 10,000 wedding videos are shot in the USA each year, with the real number probably over a million.

Add in corporate videos, wedding anniversaries, videos about sports teams winning championships, high-quality tube channels, etc, and I expect the total number to easily be over 4 million.

And that still puts the bar higher than “material shot by amateurs with their phones”

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#272
I think headsets like this one, will replace screens for sit-down cases… working at your computer, watching movies, browsing the internet, etc.

But it’s going to take time. The uptake on this particular device will be small due to the price (very small by Apple’s standards).

For V2 maybe they can save a chunk of money by dropping the wearer pass-through display, and just indicate the wearer’s status with some LEDs (You’ve got a big headset on. People around you being able to see a representation of your eyes isn’t going to make them feel more comfortable/connected to you.)

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#273

> Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with. It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ? > In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far…

They advertise the "4K per eye" as some kind of an advantage. They need to do this to have 3D vision, but it doesn't improve the resolution, it's still just 4K. And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes. I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (…

I think 4k might really be a bare minimum for this kind of thing. For the text heavy use cases that apple are pushing things like pixel density are going to be much more important than the gaming usecases VR has been used for thus far.

Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.

I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#274
post #233

I see big potentials for this device with DIY contents among others. Imagine putting this on to fix your car? It can guide you through exploded views and help you pin point problems. That could be big in professional settings too. HOWEVER, I still believe it will be very niche. It’s still putting on a sizable headset and placing two screens right up your eye balls. We don’t yet know the health effects from doing that…

Unless there’s some radio wave danger, I don’t see how headsets could be harmful. Your eyes are not actually focusing on a close screen, they’re focused however far away the objects appear to be. Is there a danger to letting your eyes be unfocused and placing an iPhone right next to them (letting the screen be blurry, not trying to focus on it).

Maybe it’s the inner ear that is going to get hurt after prolonged disorientation, but astronauts should surely have that worse and I haven’t heard of any studies about it. Maybe something will show up about it.

I don’t see an obvious mechanism where this is harmful and VR headsets have been around long enough that this should be a well-understood safety space.

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#275

I don't understand why there is no AR or VR killer app for this thing. Their sales pitch was "it makes it amazing to read articles in safari"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&t=5410s $3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to pain…

Because no one will really do the stuff you suggest. All the things you describe just take too much effort to make Assembling furniture - 1d written description : 1 person half a day - 2d illustration : ~2 people and a 3 days - 3d animation : ~3 people and 2 weeks - 3d interactive thing : a small team and a month.. At least ? Is it really going to yield a ton more sales? You can see it in other media. Zillions of cre…

Yeah if only 3D scanning went through the same revolution digital photography did.

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#276
All these optimistic articles without showing a single AR application - is Apple allowing access to devices only to pre-vetted publishers that would never criticize their products? 4k per eye sounds good but if it's only used for displaying 2D stuff it's kinda pointless as the resolution is still too low for that and the GPU is too weak for 3D stuff at that resolution (that would need like a minimized 5090 to make it work).

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#277
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how precise is it? Eye tracking may be good enough for foveated rendering, hand tracking good enough for pushing buttons, but how does it compare to handheld controllers for drawing something in Photoshop?

Marques Brownlee picks out the quality of the eye tracking as a standout feature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI

It depends on task though. Selection is easy to do using eye-tracking as you just have to shift your attention onto the object long enough to click.

Drawing is a task that is more like aiming - attempting to hold your gaze at a precise location for a period of time. It is possible, but you are fighting against the natural saccade pattern of your eye and it becomes tiring very quickly. You can expect fatigue / eye-strain within a few minutes.

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#278
post #211

I don't understand why there is no AR or VR killer app for this thing. Their sales pitch was "it makes it amazing to read articles in safari"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYkq9Rgoj8E&t=5410s $3500 to... look at a floating web browser? Surely they can come up with something. Give me UV/IR vision, let me see the pipes under the ground, show me how to assemble the furniture I'm looking at, give me a template to pain…

The first iPhone was pretty crappy. No apps. 2G only. Poor battery life. Limited global distribution - not even Canada could get it. But it captivated people who didn’t own it yet, and it proved out some essential ideas like multitouch. And when the iPhone 3G came out, improving on some of the original device’s shortcomings, it was wildly popular. The rest is history. There is no doubt that AR will eventually get goo…

> The first iPhone was pretty crappy

It had some must have killer features for the time. Blackberry and feature phones had some pathetic "mobile web" while the original iPhone would load real websites.

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But people still do shoot movies There are at least 1,000 books written for every movie shot, even including material shot by amateurs with their phones. Figures range from 500,000 to one million books published annually. However, if you include self-published authors you’re looking at close to 4 million new book titles published each year.

And yet, that small relative quantity of movies compared to books is enough to sell millions of new screens every year.

if book publishers spent the same amount of money movie publishers spend on marketing a single blockbuster movie (50% of the budget, i.e. billions of dollars) books would sell a lot more too.

Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.

Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.

But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too

By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion

The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.

Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.

Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.

It's a completely different market.

Re: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They're targeting all use cases Except for the one use case where there has actually been demand for VR: gaming. Apple's plan is to eat Meta's lunch. Meta's lunch consists of two peas and a leaf of wilted lettuce.

What makes you think they aren't targeting gaming? They just didn't have anything to show yet, since none of the studios have one of these and Apple don't make games. I would imagine gaming with this will be great, you get all the benefits of VR without having to use one of those stupid motion controllers.

I kinda prefer controllers. Tapping my fingers together and waving them around with even less feedback will mean the gesture recognition needs to be extremely far beyond anything we’ve had before, or is going to feel awful to use. Any time you’re in a game and are meant to be holding an object, having something to hold helps a lot, and most games want that.

If we can turn everyday objects into the thing you hold, that’d be great, but I’m not sure it’s feasible yet. We’ll see if anyone tries.

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