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Notes on Vision Pro

notes.andymatuschak.org

181–190 of 700 posts

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a developer POV it's about the difference with the other platforms. If Apple provides a platform that bring the dev 50% more profit than the status quo, sure taking a cut of that extra profit could make sense. If that same dev would have made the same profits on other competing platforms, Apple is just fragmenting the market and it's take should be limited to basically management fees. I hope this new platform b…

In the iOS vs Android case, iOS does in fact typically bring at least 50% more profit to developers, often far more.

It's more complex than that...the whole limitation on promoting your existing membership services, the rules enforced on pricing and passing the 30% to the users etc. makes it a much muddier picture.

iOS sure brings some value to the table. How much actually ? who knows...

For comparison Youtube is also a platform regularily criticized by its participating creators, but you're not seeing high profile lawsuits or the EU slapping them fines at every turn.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#182

> What if programs live in places, live in physical objects in your space? For instance, you might place all kinds of computational objects in your kitchen: timers above your stove; knife work reference overlays above your cutting board; a representation of your fridge’s contents; a catalog of recipes organized by season; etc. I'd prefer an OS that spans multiple devices. Something how computers behave in “The Expans…

Simple protocols would enable this for existing hardware and software

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#183
post #51

I echo the awe at the hardware and the disappointment at the paradigm. I wish the keynote had three extra demos: - Something whimsical to inspire developers. Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile, or a task manager that shows processes as plants around me. Close apps by scrunching their screen like paper. A globe with my geotagged pictures. - A game, any game. Beat Saber was the killer app for…

> A game, any game.

By far the most disappointing part of the keynote was when they finally do show someone playing a game, and it's a basketball game played with a regular controller on a flat, virtual TV. The TV is even smaller than an average real-world TV.

It's typical of Apple to so completely ignore gaming, but it's disappointing that they're continuing that trend even with VR.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#184
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not be so sure, mainly because of ecosystem lock. I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs. Big problem with ecosystems is you don’t know what you’re missing.

You don’t need to even leave the ecosystem- Siri in 2023 is much worse than Siri in 2018 or so.

The regression in autocorrect is also nuts. It seems to aggressively modify grammar to the point of regularly changing the meaning of what I’m writing. It’s like a CS undergrad project where they went too hard on Markov chains.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#185

Sorry for hijacking this thread for a question about personal curiosity but does anyone know of an affordable way of measuring pupil distance? I want to measure my pupil distance while browsing social media. The reasoning is my reading in "Thinking Fast and Slow" that pupils dilate when we see something we find interesting / something we like / when we are thinking and vice-versa. I want to put it to the test and it…

Hold up a ruler to your face and look in the mirror. Or take a photo so you can measure distances in an image-editing app.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#186
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. This was Microsoft's warcry for years : who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware. Well guess what, software matters and it matters more than hardware. If you have both, you have literally a generationally-defining product (e.g. the iPhone), but even if you just have the software, you'll still eat your competitor's lunch. Why does everyone have…

>Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware. Oh, I don't know about that. Admittedly there were some awful choices made between 2015 and the emergence of M1 architecture, but Apple's reputation for making well engineered hardware goes at least as far back as to when they started milling Macs out of aluminum. I'm thinking back specifically to the PowerMac G…

I haven't liked the usability of the entire Macbook line though, and It's very upsetting that so many laptop makers have decided to just copy it.

There's lots of little details which are well made, but bad decisions: the screen hinges tend to be a little too floppy, the trackpad is oversized, removing the physical buttons makes it hard to use, moving the power button from a separate area to the "eject" button location on the keyboard (and making it look like a regular key), everything they've done with keyboards (flat, overlay spaced keys with no surface indentation and less and less travel). The ridiculously sharp edges of the body chassis which cut into your when you rest your hands there (seen at least one video of someone just filing a bevel into the machine to fix it).

They look great, but that's all they've ever seemed to me: in usability details they've always felt terrible (even MagSafe, which seems like it should be great, feels great, and yet has seemed pretty lacklustre when I've had to use it with a work machine).

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me files represented as physical blocks that I can pile Man, people still want a file manager like fsn on IRIX systems, 30 years later...

I used Eagle Mode[1][2] for a number of years, and it was non-ironically the best file manager I've ever used. I only stopped because it required dozens of very out-of-date packages for its preview features. But the point of whimsical demos is inspiration, like a concept car, not complete realism. [1] https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6yPQKt3mBA

Update: it seems there was a new release some months ago, and the UI feels a bit fresher. Time to give it another try.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#188
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the demo, I was hoping to see some app/screen/display anchored to certain walls or being fixed in a 3D spot. That way I can walk to a place to see that "screen".

Isn’t that an intractable problem without LiDAR? I suppose the naive solution would be to fix the screens in spots as you suggest as opposed to pinning onto real life locations. edit: ah, right the vision pro does have lidar. I look forward to seeing this pinning if it's implemented. I'm still skeptical it would work well - I've used ARKit and it's not really that accurate when you're moving around.

The Quest has been doing this for years with the guardian setup and now with their option to bring your desk and couch into VR. I think the Pro has more advanced features but I haven’t tried it. You do have to assist it by drawing our boundaries but it’s pretty easy to do

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#189

But it does put an enormous amount of pressure on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so far, the role of precise 2D control has been shifted to the eyes. I've got one good eye and one bad eye. The bad eye is legally blind, has an off-center iris and is kind of lazy w.r.t. tracking. I'm extremely curious to know how Vision Pro deals with this. One certainly hopes there's some kind of "single eye" mode; certainly s…

I’m with you on this one, but I also have nystagmus in both eyes. I’ve been curious but also somewhat apprehensive about stuff starting to rely on eye tracking and whether these edge cases will get handled.

Probably best for me not to be an early-adopter in this case :)

Edit to add: Can confirm that Apple stuff is amazing with accessibility, so I’m not surprised there are alternative input methods. My main thinking towards the future is around how nystagmus and foveated rendering will interact. That’s a giant and fascinating research topic I imagine.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine developing with the ultimate 10x setup: several files, documentation, and debuggers open at once, with a zen nature background. Or making music, or painting, or even writing a research paper. I used to believe this was the ideal setup, hell I even implemented it with monitors, but since I've integrated LLMs into my development process I find all I need are two side by side windows and now with CopilotX thos…

> but since I've integrated LLMs into my development process I find all I need are two side by side windows This irrelevant for those of us not doing cookie-cutter-been-done-1000000-times-before stuff. In such cases all the LLMs in the world are useless, but many pages of docs open at once are useful. Go tell your LLM to write a ARMv6M assembly MIPS-II emulator. I'll wait. Go on.

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