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A developer's view of Vision Pro

david-smith.org

161–170 of 371 posts

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#161

> 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…

“Bulkier glasses” is a deal breaker for me — LASIK was one of the best quality of life upgrades and I can’t imagine rushing back to that experience for many reasons.

Ambient computing of the style you describe I do think is a common use case and I look forward to less invasive form factors to tackle it.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#162

> When I sat down to write this article I was having trouble context shifting back from WWDC mode and wished that I could have gone up to a virtual cabin in the woods, opened a text editor and written it there. Or similarly while I was watching WWDC session videos in my hotel room on my 13” MacBook Pro I found myself wishing for a larger display where I could have the video, notes, documentation and Xcode open all at…

Ah yes, because college kids have $3500 to burn on a novelty.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#163
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Do you think it’ll allow Xcode for development? When you say you were wearing it while doing dev work were you pairing it with a MacBook? From what I understand the OS is more similar to iPadOS (no Xcode, ability to compile binaries) vs MacOS.

I honestly don't know that will be supported on the final version, but what I was referring to was developing on a Mac through the Vision Pro and deploying to the Vision Pro.

FWIW the iPad supports dumbed down app development through Swift Playgrounds and presumably the Vision Pro will at the very least support that if it supports all iPad apps, but that's pure speculation.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#164
post #27

I was kind of waiting for the day where a touchscreen based app would be more productive than a traditional laptop with keyboard. Yet, after many years all we got is fruit ninja and a concession from apple in the form of attachable keyboard for the iPad. So I’m equally sceptical that the investment in headset based interface is actually worth it.

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.

Eye tracking has been $100 to own for many years now through a certain company. Why hasn't it taken off?

The mouse is the superior input device. When people who actually need a better input device get one, they get more advanced mice:

https://3dconnexion.com/us/spacemouse/

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#165
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…

I guess the big question I have is... what's the point of an extremely expensive headset when it looks like Quest 3 at 7x less the price is going to deliver a roughly similar experience, quality-wise?

For what scenario? Gaming? What about use as a virtual screen? What about social interaction? What about some of the other scenarios that were depicted in the wedc demo?

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#166
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…

any opinion on why Apple isn't dogfooding this by allowing their software and non-hardware teams to work remotely? Seems like that would be one way to prove it is legit

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#167
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major limitation for using VR devices as "virtual monitors" has been the screen resolution. Vision Pro appears to have significantly higher resolution than anything available on the market right now; in your experience, was the resolution high enough for the pixels to disappear and not be a distraction, especially when e.g. reading text? Have you used other VR headsets to compare it to?

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.

So in terms of information density and readability, how does it compare to a 5K retina display on an iMac or Studio Display?

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#168
post #3

As an early developer (Day 1 of App Store launch in 2008 - iRetroPhone) there is some excitement of being the first on a new platform. Back in 2008, there was very little documentation on UIKit but it was fun to develop. The difference I see this time is we had access to the iPhone(released 2007) and this time[1] it looks like you need to either ask Apple to test the app for you, or go to one of the labs (not in NYC…

>> The difference I see this time is we had access to the iPhone(released 2007) and this time[1] it looks like you need to either ask Apple to test the app for you, or go to one of the labs (not in NYC strangely) or be one of the lucky ones to be selected for developer kit.

I'm pretty sure iPad's weren't available in advance of the launch day. And, it launched first in the US. I had an iPad app available on launch day and wasn't able to get my hands on an iPad for a month or two. Of course, developing only in the simulator for iPhone/iPad isn't a huge deal...visionOS is probably a lot harder to simulate particularly when it comes to understanding user interaction.

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I’m still curious how things will look in low light. All the demos were in an optimally lit room, but what about when you dim the lights and the camera has trouble picking up the room?

Re: A developer's view of Vision Pro

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think he’s mostly saying that whatever is in the visible field of view matches our eyes. Doesn’t mean the actual FOV is 180 :)
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