Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

Hope so! I would buy them immediately. :-D

(Not holding my breath, though...)

And yeah, the Oculus controllers wouldn't nail the butterfly on finger demo, but if they had controllers, the demo would be a hawk landing on your forearm. (And that would work, even though it doesn't quite make sense that your palm would vibrate when a bird lands on your forearm... but haptic feedback is weird.)

I've been reading all the comments on here in the several discussions that have made it to the front page, wondering if my use case is really so unique...

I'll buy it. No question. No hesitation.

The main reason is that I need a private workspace.

I work remotely and don't have a lot of physical space (I live in 80sq ft, at the moment. No, not a typo). I share it with my wife, who is a project manager and on calls all day.

This makes work quite challenging, it's easy to pull me from the "zone". Sometimes it's just because of an intense call she's on, sometimes it's because I'm so available.

She'll ask "are you in the middle of something? Can I ask you a quick question?" and just like that, I've lost 30-45 minutes of productivity.

The idea of having a virtual private workspace, surrounded by monitors, playing focus music, with the illusion of a vast space around me... This sounds like a dream.

I'd happily pay $3,500 for it.

In fact, we'll be buying two.

Any technology can be used for work as well as other stuff.

AVR is basically a extension of our monitors on our faces. You can do any real world physical work with that thing on.

It is an excellent choice for remote control and monitoring of systems though.

I see it will be primarily used as a consumption device for movies and games.

VR gets tiring after a while, and the effects on eyesight degradation are not fully known.

Maybe Apple doesn't actually want to sell a lot of a first generation product they know will quickly evolve?

The really good eye tracking seems like a big deal on the Apple device - that will feel like telepathy and I think will be significantly better than the controller nav that currently exists with meta devices.

Apple's focus on productivity is good too because it relies less on network effects for cool use cases. Part of why the Meta approach is hard is the social stuff requires everyone you know to have headsets, this (imo) is why Carmack was pushing for lighter, cheaper devices over the Meta Quest Pro - he saw growth and distribution as the core bottleneck for Meta's approach.

Since Apple's approach is around individual use and productivity, that frees them to build an expensive device that provides value to one user and then leverage that until lots of people have them, it's an easier way to bootstrap (and something they've done historically repeatedly). Of course it helps they already have a platform to extend too.

The big breakthrough IMO is commitment to pass-through for AR, this ultimately solves the "draw black" problem Michael Abrash wrote about at Valve in 2012 [0] before he joined Oculus. Ben Thompson of Stratechery makes an analogy to mirrorless cameras vs. DSLRs and I think it fits - people thought screens would never be good enough compared to natural light, but it turns out at some point they are. Palmer Luckey mentioned in 2021 that he thought this also should be the approach to it. The other major issue Abrash talks about in that blog post is latency, and Apple has solved this (though only just) because of their incredible custom silicon which was not easily visible back in 2012.

It's possible to imagine these devices getting smaller and lighter as they iterate, the AR and eye tracking means you may be able to do things like look at a light switch in your house and turn it out without anything else, UI for the real world becomes possible. Looking at little glass displays could become an anachronism of this time. Of course, it could also just be a common way to do desktop computing - hard to know.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120804140946/http://blogs.valv...

It's fun to look back on some old HN threads with predictions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...