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Notes on Vision Pro

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431–440 of 700 posts

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#431
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem to solve is that probably we don't want people to stand for hours and having to walk through the city or the world. They might not have the space at home to do it. They could sit on an office chair and rotate themselves 360°. If they spend 3k on the visor they can spend $100 on a chair. However you don't even have to do that kind of exercise on a screen.

Yes this is where lack of controllers is going to be an issue. I guess you could use a PS/Xbox controller but then you may as well be playing on a pc. I get why they didn't want to go the controller route, but they'll surely be very aware that it greatly limits what can be done with games.

They never said you can’t use a controller.

Remember, the iPad doesn’t come with a controller, but you can use a Pencil with it if you want.

Same thing will likely happen with the Vision products.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#432
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that so far that is where we've been, but imagine a Sim City or Civilization game on the Vision Pro. THAT would be a ton of fun. I'm sure Sid Meier could make something interesting on it. Frankly, I would love it if Apple would throw money at him to make one of his games on it.

One problem to solve is that probably we don't want people to stand for hours and having to walk through the city or the world. They might not have the space at home to do it. They could sit on an office chair and rotate themselves 360°. If they spend 3k on the visor they can spend $100 on a chair. However you don't even have to do that kind of exercise on a screen.

A screen would be nowhere near as immersive.

My point was that it would be like walking around Madurodam while playing a game.

And standing would be optional. Apple showed most people sitting down, so I’m presuming you could do that.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#433
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? True, but I don't recall smartphones ever being unveiled with promotional videos of people all being hunched over them at dinner. Smartphones were promoted by enabling us to do things on the go: making and receiving phone calls, getting directions, finding restaurants in the area. This is why this feels diff…

I wonder if anyone will feel brave enough to wear this on a bike... Until the time they're arrested for using a smartphone while biking, or for relying on the computer not to malfunction just to avoid riding blind.

Skiing was what I was wondering.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#434

> 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 been researching eye tracking for my own project for the past year. I have a Tobii eye tracker which is probably the best eye tracking device for consumers currently (or the only one really). It's much more accurate than trying to repurpose a webcam. The…

You have those problems mostly because your Tobii is external device much more far away - you won't get good enough accuracy comparing to any eye tracking that is just a camera few cm far away from your eyes.

With Apple solution (or any VR with eye tracking):

1. You have very accurate head 6d location (gyroscope, compass, accelerometer + lidar for translation) at 100+ fps minimum and very computationally cheaply without much latency

2. Cameras pointing at each eye from distance of few centimeters. In this situation Eye region of interest occupy full image resolution. Probably even VGA resolution (or less) is enough to have very accurate precision in this case

3. Because headset covers your face you don't have any problem with different lightning condition, cluttered background, whats more they use IR floodlight to have consistent lighting of pupils

4. Possibly they even use similar Truedepth IR dot pattern to get 3d depthmap of your pupils similar like truedepth sensor works with difference that here they can put thos camera more far away and have it more accurate disparity map

5. Who knows maybe they even use lidar instead of truedepth for even lower latency

6. Because sensors are so close they can have very accurate reconstruction of your eyes and distance between them - most people don't have completely symmetric eye/face

Tobii is a sensor that is just like 0.5m far away from your face. Has to track your head, estimate orientation and distance, and detected eye ROI will be a tiny crop of their image sensor even if they camera has 4K resolution (which I doubt they use such resolution). At that distance if you want to get accuracy of 1 cm of what you are looking at screen you need to detect pupil movement of ~1 degree angle. If you want even better accuracy without gitter like 1mm then you need to detect movement of pupils of 0.1 degree angle.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#435
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your mind it's not that different. Consider the importance of media on shaping your thoughts, beliefs, memories, emotions. Whether delivered through a cinema screen or a tiny phone doesn't matter. VR/AR has wow factor, but you quickly get used to it, and then your concerns are mostly pragmatic: the headset is huge, the battery life short and so on. Although AR at least has pass through, which is a big benefit, as…

I'm a fan of VR/AR but found Apple's reveal video to be profoundly sad. There's a sense of isolation running through the whole thing. The immediate connection many people made was to Black Mirror. The father wearing the headset and recording his children play around him really hit that note. From the children's perspective, instead of their father's face they see a pair of black goggles and rather than their father's…

>The father wearing the headset and recording his children play around him really hit that note.

"Hold still son so I can record this moment, I've only got 10 minutes out of the 2h of battery left on this headset" lol

The mental illnesses kids will have growing up with tech addicted parents are gonna be epic. Therapists are gonna be printing money.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if our current keyboard and mouse desktop setups, laptops, and displays are the real dystopia? Im not following. Why would that be the dystopia?

same antisocial outcome but shittier subjective experience

Shittier in that it’s real rather than virtual?

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#437
post #315

I use quite a few Apple products every day of the last 10 years, and I’m very impressed with certainly all the technology and reviews and explanations of how this device works and what the user experience will be. However, this is the first Apple device that really makes me pause. All of the marketing material, the WWDC videos, all of it feels very uncomfortable to see all these people isolating themselves in a room…

This whole thing would have been much better if they’d positioned it as a work and personal entertainment machine, similar to a bunch of monitors with a Mac mini, and replacing iPads or single-viewer TVs. By trying to show interactions with other people, it’s just highlights a weird isolation - what it’s not pointing it out is that the advantage for people like me who work in a private home office where I’m already i…

> This whole thing would have been much better if they’d positioned it as a work and personal entertainment machine

Honestly most of the presentation had this exact vibe for me. That the Vision Pro is directly positioned as a device for deep immersion, like movies, gaming, and engrossing work. The two exceptions I remember were those moments where a person plopped their Vision Pro on to take a 3D moment of their children and the one where a person answered a FaceTime call with the Vision Pro while packing their suitcase. I don't see those moments happening in reality with this sort of device.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#438
post #315

I use quite a few Apple products every day of the last 10 years, and I’m very impressed with certainly all the technology and reviews and explanations of how this device works and what the user experience will be. However, this is the first Apple device that really makes me pause. All of the marketing material, the WWDC videos, all of it feels very uncomfortable to see all these people isolating themselves in a room…

It'll become accepted I'm sure, if it breaks through; could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago [0] and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? Or 80 years ago and seeing everyone around a television? I mean I get what you mean, but I also think that some things get normalized in subsequent generations. Our 15 year old and his gf have their phones out at all times, frequently switching to inter…

> could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago [0] and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? Or 80 years ago and seeing everyone around a television?

True, but is it so different to be hunched over a phone than hunched over a book. You can still just look up and be present. With a headset, well… there isn’t such a parallel.

Maybe the Sony Walkman is a better comparison because finally you could go out in the world buffered from it.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#439
post #50

This is a bit of a rant, but I bought a Quest Pro last year, and I feel it was a total waste of money. It's actually embarrassing how much of an unpolished piece of garbage it feels like. Sure, it's fun as a PCVR headset, but as a productivity tool or as a multimedia consuming device, or as a social tool, it completely misses the mark. And I'd say that 80% of its failure can be attributed to bad software. It's buggy,…

It’s a long game. In both desktop and mobile, a viable and commercially successful alternative emerged even though Apple had the edge in sophistication and innovation.

A lot of people probably don’t remember what Android looked like in 2007. Using the Android pre-release SDK next to an iPhone, you’d come to a similar conclusion as yours: how does Google release a mobile OS so behind the curve? Should they fire all their product managers?

Same story with Windows in 1986. It was difficult to see how the graceless file manager from Microsoft could compete with Apple’s holistic GUI.

Give it four years. I think Meta intends to be the Windows and Android of this third wave of UIs. Validation of the market by Apple is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll become accepted I'm sure, if it breaks through; could anyone have imagined walking into a living room 30 years ago [0] and seeing everyone hunched over a phone? Or 80 years ago and seeing everyone around a television? I mean I get what you mean, but I also think that some things get normalized in subsequent generations. Our 15 year old and his gf have their phones out at all times, frequently switching to inter…

There’s been backlash to being on phones all day. iOS even guilt trips you every week with stats. It even guilt trips you for being too sedentary. If anyone is going to guilt trip you for doing too much of something, probably apple.

You should understand the guilt is on the recipient side (you). Here the sender (Apple) may have genuine concern about their users health or have marketing incentives to express the same concern. Probably a mix of both.
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