Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#571

Post by codeulike »

roomey wrote: post #482
darawk wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled. I think it's very hard to tell the difference between these things ex ante. Everything that succeeds looks like it was pulled. But many things were pushed before they were pulled. Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea tha…

I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis of the dot com boom of the late 90s. Everyone saw the potential and lashed money into it. It didn't deliver at the time, but that dynamic is totally different to vr headsets. Think smart phones, they weren't pushed, people wanted them in a serious way

It the late 90s a technology professional calmly explained to me that nobody would ever do their supermarket shopping online because they would not able to select fruit and vegetables by hand to look for the 'good' ones

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#572

Post by auggierose »

ynx wrote: post #562
nologic01 wrote: post #393

There is something quite remarkable and puzzling about the VR/AR and now SC (spatial computing) space. All major (ad)tech companies are convinced that this is a major market that will materialize and be profitable if the right combination of hardware and software is developed. Their VR "visions" differ but only at the margin. No matter how you execute it, we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major som…

One of the most persistently irritating parts of being deep in this space is people loudly proclaiming what it is that VR is truly missing. The answer is not only different for different people, but very different for some of them. It's a way for trans people to express their real gender in a way that seriously alleviates their dysphoria, or for people to explore sexuality in a place they are fully equipped to defend…

You see a bench in your garden, and you cannot sit on it. That's just very disappointing. I don't even want to translate that into the sexual domain ...

The idea of VR/AR is super exciting, and beat saber is super fun. The reason why beat saber is super fun is because it manages to transcend the visual only aspect of VR. I don't see how this can be done in general. Unless you can go full Holodeck, I don't see the general appeal for most things. Immersive cinema is certainly a nice application, 3D-avatar facetime is not.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#573

Post by jasode »

roomey wrote: post #482
darawk wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled. I think it's very hard to tell the difference between these things ex ante. Everything that succeeds looks like it was pulled. But many things were pushed before they were pulled. Buying things on the internet, for instance. This was laughed at for quite a while, while a few people and companies were committed to the idea tha…

I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis of the dot com boom of the late 90s. Everyone saw the potential and lashed money into it. It didn't deliver at the time, but that dynamic is totally different to vr headsets. Think smart phones, they weren't pushed, people wanted them in a serious way

>I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at,

Yes, it was laughed at and during the early internet days, people were skeptical that online shopping would become mainstream. An example includes the famous prediction from Clifford Stoll from 1995[1] :

>Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. [...] Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Clifford was correct in that brick & mortar stores wouldn't become obsolete. But he was very wrong about the mass consumer adoption of internet shopping. Many agreed with his mispredictions at the time.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#574

Post by nwienert »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #520
marcus_holmes wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest contrast is ChatGPT vs VR right now. OpenAI is up to over a billion of users and hundreds of millions of subscribers in There is no demand for VR outside gaming. Efforts to try and create that demand are failing.

Any new sources on the billion users of OpenAI? I know they hit 100 million users pretty quickly, but has any new data come out on subscribers and MAU of free users?

It’s completely made up and untrue. Think about it, a billion users is 1/7 of all people on earth. If you assume that number has to be at least 3x in the US (extremely conservative, given we’re incredibly rich and at least 100x more exposed to it in media than most of the world), you’d have to expect that basically 40% of people you know are actively using it.

Impossible. My extended circle which leans tech overall is maybe 4%. And many just tried it and aren’t really actively using it.

They’re counting numbers very funny.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#575

Post by layer8 »

sneak wrote: post #523
layer8 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, but that only appeals to gaming or movie/TV aficionados, and otherwise is only for very occasional use as a novelty. It’s not something that would become an integral part of most people‘s life like a smartphone.

> It can, but that only appeals to gaming or movie/TV aficionados I think you just described something like 95%+ of the US population. TV and movies and games are exceedingly popular.

That’s not what “aficionados” means.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#576

Post by nologic01 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #502
roomey wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but buying things on the internet wasn't laughed at, if anything people were worried about it cause of their credit card numbers. It was that basis of the dot com boom of the late 90s. Everyone saw the potential and lashed money into it. It didn't deliver at the time, but that dynamic is totally different to vr headsets. Think smart phones, they weren't pushed, people wanted them in a serious way

The simplest contrast is ChatGPT vs VR right now. OpenAI is up to over a billion of users and hundreds of millions of subscribers in There is no demand for VR outside gaming. Efforts to try and create that demand are failing.

> ~10 years

Actually its more like 30 years.

People get too focused on devices and the recent storyline around Google/Oculus/Meta/Apple etc. Any and all devices are and will always be WIP, they get refined once there is strong demand in the direction of that demand. The concept and experierence of immersive / interactive computing is much older and we should not ignore the lessons it may try to teach us.

What we have here is a new round of device refinement in anticipation of strong demand for an alternative computer interface that did not materialize in several decades - even though it could have.

It may be that VR is an exception. Some people are arguing that there is some sort of threshold that needs to be reached. Its possible.

But this is not the usual pattern. People are extremely adept and keen at glossing over grave limitations and filling in the blanks if a technology helps them achieve something relevant to them.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#577

Post by cracrecry »

nologic01 wrote: post #393

There is something quite remarkable and puzzling about the VR/AR and now SC (spatial computing) space. All major (ad)tech companies are convinced that this is a major market that will materialize and be profitable if the right combination of hardware and software is developed. Their VR "visions" differ but only at the margin. No matter how you execute it, we are talking about people (homo sapiens) putting a major som…

>So far at least, this is a tech that is being pushed onto people rather than being pulled.

Like anything else in life?

How much it took for the Guthenberg press to be "successful". It took at least 50 years since Guthenberg died bankrupted until there were millions of books being printed and people realised what the printing was by the consequences.

Guthenberg pushed so hard his entire life.

Aviation was not pushed by fanatics that killed themselves for at least 50 years(they were gliders in India thousands of years ago that killed themselves trying to fly) before it became a normal thing.

Read about Otto Lilienthal or the casualty rate of early aviators and then tell me that it was not pushed.

The nuclear bomb was not pushed with project Manhattan, one of the biggest expenditures on earth ever?

Rockets were not pushed? Going to the moon was not pushed? The diode and the transistor were not pushed by the germans and later the Americans?

Lasers were not pushed before we knew what could be done with them? Computers were not pushed?

>I don't think this was the case with any of the major steps in the development of digital computing but would be quite interested if people can think of historical precedent.

The entire Silicon Valley thing was created by the Pentagon at first. It did not went from zero to billions of devices instantly. The military were paying the development of early (ultra expensive)microprocessors in the dozens to power submarines and spaceships, like the hand weaved RAM of the Apollo devices.

The early entire DARPA internet was at first 56Kbits, the entire network!!

Certainly things like Xerox PARC machines were pushed when every single machine did cost a fortune. It was not pulled because Xerox had no idea of what to do with the technology, just like lasers before.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#578

Post by aembleton »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #565
LeoPanthera wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody gave a shit about smart phones before the iphone. 2 out of 3 isn't bad, but this is revisionist history, and simply wrong. Nokia dominated the pre-iPhone smartphone market with Symbian phones, which supported 3G for years before the first iPhone, which didn't even have 3G. And are we assuming that Blackberries aren't "smartphones"? Because I think they probably are.

Blackberries are very borderline. They could do some things but really they were just an extension of regular phones with a big keyboard. There wasn’t really anything “smart” about them. Sure you could browse the web but with a keyboard so it was trash.

What was trash about the blackberry? The browser wasn't great, but the keyboard was excellent from what I remember.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#579

Post by calf »

alaskamiller wrote: post #319
atleastoptimal wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"spatial computing" is such a silly marketing phrase. All we saw was 2D windows placed in a fake 3D world. It's all just an aesthetic upgrade, a minor QOL improvement that has its own downsides, nothing more.

Spatial computing as an idea is from early 2000s. It was in Wired and sci-fi pulp and something the graybeards would hobnob about. Sometimes it just takes 20 years for an idea to come to fruition.

I wanted to know what Douglas Englebart would think about all this VR stuff, while I was watching the Apple Vision video.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg on Apple’s Vision Pro headset

#580

Post by d--b »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #558
d--b wrote: post #546

[flagged]

> Nobody gave a shit about smart phones before the iphone. 2 out of 3 isn't bad, but this is revisionist history, and simply wrong. Nokia dominated the pre-iPhone smartphone market with Symbian phones, which supported 3G for years before the first iPhone, which didn't even have 3G. And are we assuming that Blackberries aren't "smartphones"? Because I think they probably are.

Not saying it didn't exist, but that it wasn't mainstream. Ask your mother if she's ever heard of Symbian phones...
Post reply on HN