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A developer's view of Vision Pro

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Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#131

Post by ladberg »

hebrox wrote: post #114
ladberg wrote: post #20

> In short, my brain has crossed a Rubicon and now feels like experiences constrained to small, rectangular screens are lesser experiences. I left Apple 1.5 years ago but was working on the Vision Pro while I was there. I have spend many hours working in the headset and I know exactly the feeling he's describing! Leaving felt like going back in time to using clunky technology and I've been waiting for outside world t…

Did team members actually use it to develop it?

I was developing stuff to be shown inside the headset that wouldn't have worked in the simulator, so I was frequently using the headset regardless. It was often easier to just leave it on and develop than constantly put it on and take it off to test things out.

As for development of non-VR stuff I personally didn't because I already had a fully-featured desk setup and the OS at the time was buggy enough to not want to deal with it (as every OS is years before release, not a ding on Vision Pro at all). With a good OS (which it will be upon release) and more native apps (like Termius on iPad) I definitely would though!

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#132

Post by sleepybrett »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #102
ladberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the keyboard will remain as the best text input device but I'm pretty confident that eye tracking will be categorically better than a mouse/trackpad. I'll expect that eye tracking solutions for normal monitors will also become more mainstream once people get used to it in the Vision Pro and want to use it elsewhere.

I primarily use i3wm with 4-40 terminal windows + firefox open. I'd LOVE it if the terminal that I'm looking at was the `active` one. I can't count the number of times I'd lookup some error code, type in more commands, hit enter; only to discover that I had been typing away in the wrong window.

This will be no problem at all in the sdk. Hell I saw someone do this as some point on the mac using the macbook camera popping windows to the front based on eye-dwell... I think they started with cursor control.. essentially eye-mouse.

Oh wait some version of that is built into accessibility on mac already (eye tracking mouse): https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/mac-help/mchl437b47b0/...

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#133

Post by MBCook »

ladberg wrote: post #123
MBCook wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that because the ‘warping’/offset used to try to hide the cameras not being right where your eyes actually are starts to lose its effectiveness? I wondered about that. Great to hear about heat. That was always an issue for me in other headsets.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure what reprojection is like on the final device or even if it exists at all, so my experience might be off. There may have been things that changed since I left and I'm not sure what the final plans were.

I didn’t necessarily mean reprojection but whatever ‘trick’ is done to hide that the cameras aren’t in the same physical location the users eyes are without the headset on.

Either way, very fair.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#134

Post by ladberg »

jedberg wrote: post #101
ladberg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used other VR headsets and it's significantly better than everything I've tried. You'll be able to put up virtual monitors at the same density as real life and read stuff fine, I couldn't really discern pixels at all. Reading physical monitors through passthrough is a bit harder (I increased text size a few points when I needed to do this) but isn't really something you'd do for actual work.

Lol this comment made a fun image pop into my head. Being in a work meeting with my Vision Pro on looking at the presentation through passthrough while browsing HN on my virtual screen. :) The idea of looking at real screens in passthrough didn't even occur to me.

Lol, I'll expect people will figure out tells for whether you're slacking off irl in a headset just like being distracted in a zoom meeting. Reprojected eyes jumping around too much? Holding your hands below the table to pinch out of sight?

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#135

Post by MBCook »

sleepybrett wrote: post #124
bagels wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, it sends the message that the developer is better served by using a Mac, or that the Vision Pro is not capable. Maybe that was honest/intentional?

To correct the other sibling. It's got an M2 in it.

I’ll edit my comment. Thanks. I keep making that mistake for some reason.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#136

Post by BulgarianIdiot »

the_overseer wrote: post #106
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #38

> In short, my brain has crossed a Rubicon and now feels like experiences constrained to small, rectangular screens are lesser experiences. The funny thing about this statement is that Vision Pro is in fact the smallest rectangular screen of any device he's written code for. He's hyped up. That's normal. In time he'll understand Vision Pro doesn't provide any better UX for common activities. In fact it's worse in man…

These are just gen1 issues. I expect it will become lighter and lighter until it will probably be like some heavier/bulkier glasses. For the common user it will be amazing for cooking (tells you what to take next and from where and mix in what order, all that fully with arrows on the screen). Or let's say you want to leave your home and it knows that you forgot your keys and it tells you where they are with direction…

Do you recall the wave of people breaking their TVs with the Nintendo Wii controllers?

I'd expect a similar wave of people breaking their expensive Vision Pros if they try cooking with one. It's a terrible idea. First, most kitchens are cramped, full of low-hanging cabinets to break your Vision's fragile glass into.

And then, keeping those open vents around vapors full of fat and tasty food bits is a great way to cover the circuits with grease.

We already have a solution for something telling you what to do next, and it's called an iPad with a stand. A phone also does the job and has much lower chance of incidents than a headset, despite yes, you may need to wash your hands from time to time to scroll down. Or... you can simply use assistive features and voice for that. Siri is going to get a lot smarter thanks to LLM, much sooner than Vision Pro will become light and pragmatic for such purposes.

Regarding this "it'll know where things are in your home", let's use basic logic here. It can learn the layout of your rooms and where your immovable furniture is. But no, it can't know where everything that moves is, because this means you literally can't move anything unless you have the headset on to track its location. Or slap expensive AirTags on every single jar and utensil maybe. All solutions would be hilariously impractical. And... we'll end up with where I started: a broken Vision Pro glass as you slam it in a cupboard while trying to fish out a jar of condiments.

I don't know what is about VR that makes people pull out the fantasy scenarios. It's simply a (bulky) screen with pass through. It's not a wizard. It can't know things unless there's a way for it to find them.

We can imagine a super-thin model that you can keep on your face 24/7 and sleep with it too, so it tracks your entire life forever and knows you better than you know yourself. And it synchronizes with your spouse and children who also wear their own headsets 24/7. And it's unbreakable. And the battery never runs out. We can imagine many things. They don't exist, and won't exist any time soon. "Not on the horizon" as Steve Jobs used to say.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#137

Post by pilsetnieks »

iknowstuff wrote: post #107
ladberg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! My motivations were mostly comp based (I'm in HFT now), I loved the product and the team I was on! Feel free to ask any questions here and I'll answer anything I can (e.g. no unreleased info, but maybe go into more detail about the kind of stuff that was shown to devs at WWDC). No blog right now but maybe in the future :)

Resolution aside most headsets kinda feel like wearing a scuba mask because of a narrow field of view. How was the vision pro? I assume this should be public info since it was shown to the press and devs.

Gruber claims that it has the exact same FOV as actual human vision, and no discernible pixels.

https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/first_impressions_of_visi...

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#138

Post by fooker »

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #38

> In short, my brain has crossed a Rubicon and now feels like experiences constrained to small, rectangular screens are lesser experiences. The funny thing about this statement is that Vision Pro is in fact the smallest rectangular screen of any device he's written code for. He's hyped up. That's normal. In time he'll understand Vision Pro doesn't provide any better UX for common activities. In fact it's worse in man…

>To code, for example, you need to hook a bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

I have a hunch that coding as we know it is going to look very different in ~5-10 years.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#139

Post by losvedir »

ladberg wrote: post #20

> In short, my brain has crossed a Rubicon and now feels like experiences constrained to small, rectangular screens are lesser experiences. I left Apple 1.5 years ago but was working on the Vision Pro while I was there. I have spend many hours working in the headset and I know exactly the feeling he's describing! Leaving felt like going back in time to using clunky technology and I've been waiting for outside world t…

> For the past week I've been trying to explain to people how certain I am that doing work in headsets will become mainstream

This gets at my main question about this: does it feel to you like it will be great for "doing work", which generally happens at discrete places, or something which will apply to life generally, which is the kind of (some would say dystopian) ideal of "augmented reality"?

Or put another way, I felt a huge increase in immersion and interest going from the original Oculus's three degrees of freedom to the "room scale" six degrees of freedom in Quest.

I know this is "spatial computing" and you can put monitors in fixed positions in the environment, but is "desk scale" where you can kind of look around and pivot your head, or "room scale" where you can get up and move around the room, or "life scale" where you can leave the room entirely to check on the screens you left in the kitchen before coming back to sit down in front of the ones in your office?

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#140

Post by spywaregorilla »

sleepybrett wrote: post #127
spywaregorilla wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we all know, Apple would never offer products at an elevated price

you think meta is offering oculus devices at cost or as a loss leader? Fact is there is a laptop chip stuffed into this headset, there is a mobile soc in the oculus line.

I'm mostly just amused that someone would say Apple selling a product for a high price means anything.

Although I do think that facebook has sold a lot of their devices at a loss?

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