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Notes on Vision Pro

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Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#301

Post by pharmakom »

mikenew wrote: post #69
balaji1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fitness and gaming wasn't demoed much yesterday, but are going to be insane on the Vision Pro - so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. But how big of a deal is the M2+R1? Anyway the metaverse was already being retracted, else this Vision Pro could have hammered Meta. Clearly Occulus has to evolve to match VisionPro. Controller has to be optional. It has…

> I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? Gaming can't be good, because there's no controllers. Even if the hand and eye tracking is absolutely S-tier, you're never getting something like button input from swinging your empty hands around, twitching your fingers. Just the occlusion from the back of your hand would be enough enough for that to be impossible. Fitness might be more doable, but even then I thi…

having a virtual screen that is way bigger than the space you are in is a huge selling point for me. I'm more interested in this than VR stuff honestly.

if it was under 1k usd I would probably pick one up for work. maybe give it a few more years.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#302

Post by hazebooth »

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 tried the HoloLens ages ago and honestly the only upgrade would be the display & how often the inputs worked. Microsoft was demoing the HoloLens @ some hackathon and had a program where you could flip pages in a virtual book. On top of the book looking super low quality / illegible, I could never get the controls to work. The only thing that will make the vision pro seem like a worthwhile purchase would be if the controls worked flawlessly. I already have faith in the displays & picture.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#303

Post by tsimionescu »

gnicholas wrote: post #273
FabHK wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Sure, that works for certain contexts. But what about a game, where your vision is used to aim a weapon? The app has to know where you are looking in order to know where to shoot. If it's an online game, then the information cannot be isolated on the device since you're shooting at other players. Now imagine the game has advertisements, or loot boxes, or something else that the game company wants to know if you've lo…

Shooting is typically an action you take, not just a matter of the direction you're pointing in - so this fits the model well: the game gets information about motion to swing the camera, and gets the exact position when you press a button, but doesn't get to know exactly what you're looking at if you're not pressing the button.

The question will be how easy it is to reconstruct that information from the last exact position + movement info...

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#304

Post by tsimionescu »

vlovich123 wrote: post #119
lostmsu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are immersive, 100%. But also nauseating and forehead heating.

Have you tried a Quest? I found the SW on that fixed all neaseau I experienced on earlier headsets and I think the Quest 2 was even better but I don’t recall at this point.

There's no plauible way to allow you to move around the virtual space without moving in the real world and not give many people motion sickness, since by definition that is exactly what triggers it. The better the illusion of immersion, the worse sickness you'll get when your eyes tell you you're moving but your body and inner ear say you're not.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#305

Post by kalleboo »

rvz wrote: post #291
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.

> VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. A flop indeed. /s From [0] "Standalone VR headset Quest 2 from Meta (formerly Oculus under Facebook) has outsold Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S consoles, according to the latest information from the International Data Corporation (IDC)." > Apple is right to ignore it. Incorrect. Apple didn't ignore it be…

The Kinect sold even more devices, but as a paradigm was still a massive failure. Nobody used them beyond some original demos.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#306

Post by nullandvoid »

The primary input is eye tracking to me is really exciting, feels like the future.

I wonder what happens in games though. Will this not essentially be aimbot, looking at the target and then shoot?

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#307

Post by jillesvangurp »

cobertos wrote: post #272

I find it interesting that Microsoft had _so much of this_ 9 years go. I developed with the HoloLens 1 around 2016 and I recall: * Fingers together gesture clicking. * Voice activated menu navigation. It was glitchy/I never used it though. In 2023 these sorts of systems are much better though. * No controllers. It was all gesture based. Opening the start menu required your hand upturned, fingers together then outstre…

Microsoft and other companies ultimately chickened out of taking risk with this. It happens a lot. I worked for Nokia around the time that the rumors about the iphone started swirling in 2006. Exact same thing. At that time, Nokia had multiple touch screen operating systems, a linux based internet tablet running a mozilla based browser with a webcam, Symbian phones running browsers based on khtml (which later evolved into webkit, safari and chrome), lots of nice hardware, lots of investment in hardware, chips, radio technology, etc. A lot of mobile firsts happened long before there were iphones, android phones, ipads, etc. Nokia had a huge technical moat.

Six years later Nokia pulled the plug on the whole thing because it got absolutely steam rolled by Apple who had none of those things but started building them around the same time Nokia decided to focus o flip phones instead (sorry, this level of corporate insanity still makes me angry). They were worried about the Motorola Razr more than they were about the iphone. They actually killed multiple touch screen platforms because of that before scrambling to re-build one around the sinking ship that was Symbian. And then they badly botched that. Reason: Nokia management was arrogant, out of touch, clueless, incompetent, complacent and utterly in denial about there even being a problem. Six years later the whole lot got fired and sold off to ... Microsoft. Who of course promptly killed it because Apple had won already and between them and Google, MS saw no path to success. So, they walked away from the whole thing.

That's the company we're talking about here. So, sure, MS has stuff that they've been sitting on for ages. But what they've lacked for years is any clue as to what to do with all that stuff. Like with the iphone, Apple has been known to prepare something for years. And people just assumed it would be fine and disappointing.

IMHO things are not that hopeless for MS and they could pull a few things together. XBox, holo lens, and some other bits and pieces could make for a half decent experience. Apparently they are talking to magic leap about licensing some of their tech as well. But that's not going to happen overnight and a rush job is not going to be good enough here.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#308

Post by pazimzadeh »

zmmmmm wrote: post #19

Interesting notes. I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningf…

Yeah it kind of sucks because it seems like won't be able to use something like Hammerspoon to control windows and other UI elements the same way you can on Mac.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#309

Post by ako »

cobertos wrote: post #272

I find it interesting that Microsoft had _so much of this_ 9 years go. I developed with the HoloLens 1 around 2016 and I recall: * Fingers together gesture clicking. * Voice activated menu navigation. It was glitchy/I never used it though. In 2023 these sorts of systems are much better though. * No controllers. It was all gesture based. Opening the start menu required your hand upturned, fingers together then outstre…

It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple has been working on this for more than 9 years. They know not to release until all parts are mature enough to make a successful release. Sometime the hardware just isn’t there yet, and you have to wait a few generation for it to be smaller/faster/have more pixels/use less energy. And even today it seems that hardware is not at a level where they can do a successful consumer release, so they have a pro version for markets that can work around the limitations of todays hardware, like the huge size of the goggles or the BOM cost.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#310

Post by jillesvangurp »

I think Apple is doing smart things here with their software:

- leverage existing content means they won't have an empty room problem or a big "now what?!" moment for users after the novelty wears off. Without Steam, most existing VR platforms would be completely pointless. So far VR is for games and most of those are published on Steam. That's because most VR hardware vendors suck at software and end up outsourcing that to game studios. Meta included. Despite their ambitions, their goggles are mainly devices for running games not developed by Meta.

- a focus on the living room experience with a high end movie theater experience running, again, off existing content. Genius move because people already spend lots of money on home theaters. Some people buy 10K$ plasma screens even. This market is very real. Also, involving Disney with their huge back catalog of completely unmonetized 3D movies ... so obvious.

- Extend the highly successful IOS ecosystem to the new experience. They have tens of millions of apps already. And they'll work fine in AR. Why not do that?

The strategy is about content. It's the right strategy. The first generation hardware is of course amazing too and it will bootstrap a new generation of application developers that will be using Apple SDKs and tools to target all this with new content. But to bootstrap the ecosystem they need an audience.

Here too the strategy is genius: SDKs are based on things developers already use. They just co-announced a push into gaming for Mac along with some convenient porting kits for developers. That was just a footnote buried deep into the mac related announcements. But of course this means more content coming to AR as well. All that lovely content currently available via Steam.

Top to bottom the strategy is about compelling content. I think it's going to work.

This is not the final answer to AR but the opening salvo in a decades long push to completely own this space. Step 0 is to get millions of these things in the market with enough content to get people hooked and keep them consuming content. The rest will come later. It's appropriately radical, pragmatic, and conservative at the same time.

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