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Notes on Vision Pro

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Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#241

Post by samplatt »

gcr wrote: post #32
JohnBooty wrote: post #21

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 have pendulum nystagmus since birth. My eyes saccade and shake very rapidly, even when I'm focused on something. Folks who talk with me certainly notice. I really hope I won't be locked out of using vision pro just because its input modality isn't compatible with my body...

Curious. How do you go with 'normal' VR? Are there any problems playing games?

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#242

Post by MBCook »

roblh wrote: post #8
stephc_int13 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text is still a large part of the interfaces we use. We are all highly trained to read text, it seems basic but it is in practice quite abstract. Text is still best read on a flat surface. The great innovation I can see with this new Apple device is eye tracking, they have not invented it, but they might have perfected it enough to be useable. Eyes could be better than a mouse.

Yeah, if their eye tracking plus foveated rendering works as advertised, it could be a huge step forward. I'm really curious how responsive the gesture controls will be too, it was really cool seeing the finger pinches(?) being used as an input method. I wonder if it's specifically designed just for that thing or if it's all built out to track any arbitrary hand gesture accurately. And I wonder what the language/api…

I don’t doubt them. The PSVR2 has both and it supposedly works very well.

That lacks other features of course and must be tethered to a PlayStation 5.

But eye tracking + foveated rendering seems like it’s going to become table stakes in the next few years.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#243

Post by FabHK »

gnicholas wrote: post #217
wahahah wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it notable Apple has this to say about eye tracking under the "Learn more about privacy and security" section: >Eye input is not shared with Apple, third-party apps, or websites. Only your final selections are transmitted when you tap your fingers together. Along with this small video: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e2... Which is great and important for me to see, but I'm unsure ho…

I imagine there will be some developers that try to have analytics fire when certain events happen, correlated with eye-hovering. Hopefully Apple will catch these tricks before they can go live. The potential value of knowing where someone's eyes are (whether they saw an advertisement, for example) could be very high, so I envision a cat-and-mouse game.

Apple addressed that in the keynote. There’ll be an invisible canvas over the window content, and the app never learns where you look (nor Apple, ie it is not further stored or processed). Only when you click (ie tap your thumb and index together) does the app get an event.

(Downside is that one loses the capability for hovering, but strikes me as the correct trade off.)

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#244

Post by TX81Z »

jolux wrote: post #204
TX81Z wrote: 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.

> I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs I strongly doubt you're right. Apple is full of geeks; just because they tend to be tight-lipped doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to all the same stuff we are.

Double digit? I live walking distance to Apple HQ and there’s not exactly a lot of people in the shops and cafes with Android phones and you practically never see someone pulling out Google pay at a register.

Whereas I’d wager more than half of Google employees use iPhone, and a lot of Google staff work exclusively on iOS and Mac apps. Apple software runs in their hardware, period. It makes them too insular and unable to see their shortcomings.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#245

Post by MBCook »

astrange wrote: post #109
eyelidlessness wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. They’re the same foundation, iOS is a fork of OS X and was originally announced as such. I’d be shocked if there isn’t a well maintained internal build of iOS which keeps parity with macOS windowing etc. The difference in restrictions between the platforms is entirely arbitrary. If this device…

It certainly isn't arbitrary, macOS has swap and doesn't kill apps and iOS doesn't have swap and does kill apps. This makes everything very different, and one makes it easier to do real-time rendering than the other.

The recent iPads based on M series chips now support swap. I think it was added in iPadOS 16 last year.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#246

Post by pjot »

hackernewds wrote: post #230
mdorazio wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a joke, but I think it's still a good illustration: https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png From everything I've heard, Apple's org structure is a lot more focused and UX-driven from the top down than basically any other large tech company. That means you get a lot less compromising and in-fighting. The other side is how Apple makes money compared to other companies. Meta makes money mostly by selling you (the us…

If you just draw the org structure for Apple differently in the link, it's same as Amazon..

Look again. Amazon is a tree, Apple is hub and spoke.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#247

Post by MBCook »

armchairhacker wrote: post #61

I think the big usecase of the Vision Pro is just a larger screen and immersion. That's what it looks like Apple highlights in the demos. 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. Imagine playing a video game but the environment wraps around you. Imagine watchin…

> I think the big usecase of the Vision Pro is just a larger screen and immersion

No one has come up with anything better yet. That’s one of the big problems with VR that I’ve seen. Do you have games on one hand, and a virtual environment showing mostly 2D stuff on the other.

I think that’s one of the reasons Apple is releasing this when they are. I sort of suspect they’ve gone about as far as they can. They don’t have a killer app, but that’s ok.

They’re putting it out there for developers, and we’ll see. Someone will come up with something compelling.

VisiCalc, Lotus 123, WordPerfect, Photoshop, PageMaker, Angry Birds, the web… none of them came from the platform vendor. So what will someone come up with that will make everyone rush to order the Vision 2 when it’s announced for $1500?

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#248

Post by csomar »

JohnBooty wrote: post #21

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…

Lazy eyes, I think, are probably popular among software developers (I got one, and most devs I know have eyes issues). I think that's why Apple got lenses too. I think (hope) they got us covered since we'll be the first to use, develop on, and afford these devices.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#249

Post by motoxpro »

eclipxe wrote: post #239
kalleboo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. Apple is right to ignore it.

It’s a billion dollar business.

VR games? Sure gaming, but I didn't know VR games specifically made so much money.

Either way, if I was gaming, playing a new single player 2D (Last of Us, etc) game on a MASSIVE screen on the Vision Pro seems so exciting. Beat Saber and throwing my hands around? Not so much.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#250

Post by bern4444 »

hackernewds wrote: post #230
mdorazio wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a joke, but I think it's still a good illustration: https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png From everything I've heard, Apple's org structure is a lot more focused and UX-driven from the top down than basically any other large tech company. That means you get a lot less compromising and in-fighting. The other side is how Apple makes money compared to other companies. Meta makes money mostly by selling you (the us…

If you just draw the org structure for Apple differently in the link, it's same as Amazon..

I don't think so.

Apple builds an insanely strong core from which any and all other teams can (maybe must) build on top of and use to power their team's platform.

You have a core messages team for example - off of which Mac, iPhone, and Apple Watch teams integrate. Do that for each core service or product (photos, safari, notes, music, etc).

The Amazon structure is such that everything flows from the person above you, work is not shared between teams.

One is compositional (Apple). The other is inheritance (Amazon).

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