781–790 of 1001 posts
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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
What they didn't anticipate was how many people don't buy fruits or vegetables.
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…
Been a gamer my entire life.
Ever since getting into VR 4 years ago, I basically haven't played a single "flat" (non-VR) game.
> pursuit of... what exactly
Experiences that you literally cannot get in real life without going to jail or dying. It's the same value proposition that gaming in general provides, but far more immersion and realism.
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> Watch movies, play tabletop games, exercise, play existing video games, visualize interior design, attend a virtual concert, etc etc Literally all of those are possible with your cell phone at slightly lower fidelity. We're not talking about zero to one applications here. Cell phone fundamentally unlocked new applications via mobile connected GPS, computer, camera, screen, accelerometer, internet. Fidelity is not w…
Yea I mean the point is that all of those already existed in other (worse) forms or were added later Fwiw, I’m a VR bear overall, but the idea that it’s somehow “not new” feels wild to me, like saying ChatGPT isn’t new because we’ve had chatbots for ages. Like, yea man but the preexisting stuff sucked lmao
VR so far only offers experiences that are moderately better in some ways (bigger screen, more immersive experience) while being objectively worse in others (heavy sweaty headset, lower resolution, nausea/headaches, high cost or be locked into a FB run ecosystem).
It won’t explode the way LLMs and other AI has lately until it solves the negative factors it has. I say this as someone who uses VR regularly and figured most of this out from feedback from my normie friends and family.
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> 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…
> The promise of VR is to unlock a world free of the constraints of physics. Where physical distance prevents certain styles of communication and interaction - where physical real estate is finite and therefore rivalrous, etc. There are many things that VR, in principle, could solve... See. You just did the exact same thing that Op is talking about. You didn't describe a single actual use case. You just talked about…
I'm in operational technology and deal with a lot of on-site tech, such as SCADA, factories, even stuff on trains or planes.
We have 3D lidar mapped files of factories that are scaled in such a way that users can throw on VR and "walk" through the facility and figure things out. It's not completely mature but it's pretty good, and there have been talks about putting a camera on a scooter and letting engineers remotely drive though the place in real-time -- not just the static files.
What do you do with it? erognomics engineering, looking at flows of goods, processes, etc.
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I remember the argument against tablets, I was one of them, I thought because of the weird hand/arm position, this can never be a serious format. It was pushed through several iterations, and now it is accepted.
For all intensive purposes tablets became normalized but are far from widely accepted or bought, Part of the reason it’s only kids and old people often seen using them.
" By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself." Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too. Its a blindfold on your face, and it doesnt matter if they are alone or in a crowd. Mark has got to be terrified. The power of Apple is the tight and efficient integration of hardware and software. Regarding battery power, I woukd not rule out versions that stream the video and o…
FB should absolutely be in panic mode. They bet everything on VR because they wanted to own an entire ecosystem and not be reliant on Google/Apple. No matter how good Oculus is, Apple will be the VR experience everyone will want to have. Apple will sell it vastly better and make it far more desirable than anything Meta can manage. If I have to strap on an invasive device to my face, what company am I going to trust m…
Not that I want to see Facebook succeed in their goals. I personally find a cheaper option like the quest more interesting than the vision, at least on paper, but won’t ever use a product that forces me to have a Facebook account.
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> 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…
Another example: Video-on-demand was pushed for decades and essentially laughed at outside of a narrow niche where it found purchase… until one day it ate the world.
For VR/AR however? Are we going to get to Black Mirror level of a weightless device that projects a huge AR screen without block your field of vision for the rest, and without making you look like a goof?
Even if that's the case, the benefit over using a phone screen wouldn't not be as big as getting a huge library of movies to be rented in seconds directly from your living room (compared to driving to Blockbuster during opening hours for a much smaller selection).
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…
> “By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” he said of Apple’s WWDC keynote earlier this week. Bullshit. There were many lifestyle video showing people moving around. That was actually worse than sitting on the sofa and being generally stylish.
The point is that Mark's vision is much more social... The most Apple showed was FaceTime but with added 3D on their avatar. There's so much missed opportunity here for true spatial social interaction that Apple avoided
We should remember that Meta probably has to:
a) fight against low employee morale
b) cool device from a company that has proved over and and over again that they're one of the best in creating consumer products
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Those are all things you can already do! And big, nice screens are already very cheap. The Vision Pro's problem is that it lets you do something you can already do "some percent better." But "some percent better" isn't what any of the companies pushing this need, because that doesn't translate into the volumes they need to sell. "Fundamentally different" does, but no one has described any use case like that. Examples…
All things can be described as “some percent better” For what it’s worth, the fitness use case is 0 to 1 because a million people are saying “I didn’t exercise; now I do; Oculus is why” No fitness > fitness is 0 to 1 In what way was the iPhone “fundamentally different,” by your definition? Its functionality all existed in a blackberry / mp3 player. It was just “some percent better” at everything - especially interact…
The fitness use case is a red herring and a software problem. Instilling motivation in people to do things they know are good but don't want to isn't traditionally a money-maker. You're building a better shame-er: how's Peloton doing these days? https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PTON/financials?p=PTON (and that is "fundamentally different"!)
The iPhone as initially released isn't the iPhone brand success we see today, looking back: that's the iPhone + iTunes + App Store.
Which explains why similarly featured hardware didn't experience iPhone success.
That combination was fundamentally different, because it allowed you to easily do the 3 things most people wanted to on their phones (browse the web, listen to music, get a specific app).
At the time, 2008, there was no competition for that.
It would be until ~2010 that Android even launched rough (very rough) parity: HTC Nexus One/Samsung Galaxy S + Google Music + Android Marketplace
Two. Years.