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Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

theverge.com

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Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#251

Post by RockRobotRock »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #245
RockRobotRock wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the age matter? It's a popular game for a reason, but VR gaming is still obviously niche. I think that HL:A is easily the best VR game that exists, but it doesn't have a lot of replay value and can only be played on desktop.

Platforms with so few noteworthy games in the past 6 years are a red flag of the health of it. Nothing wrong with that, but plenty of folks argue that VR gaming is great. HL:A, as I said in another comment, is just a case study on why VR won't work. With no disrespect to the devs because I think they really did do a good job with what they had, but it still sucks if you dare to peek under the hood. It coddles you (be…

The people I know that are heavily into VR all play VRChat. The games might not be that fantastic, but the social immersion is really amazing.

During lockdown, I was playing 8 hours a day. It became a problem.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#252

Post by KronisLV »

Topfi wrote: post #6

This is a very in-depth, informative and factual review. My hats off to the Verge; great job. I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3, so to say that I am a big proponent of the ideas that Apple is trying to advance would be an understatement. This makes me all the more disheartened to read that, for all their efforts, this release is mired by the same drawbacks that I have en…

> I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3...

I have a Quest 2 right now and attempting to use it for desktop computing just doesn't work all that well for me (their Quest Link app with desktop windows, or SteamVR desktop feature; might also have to use the Meta Workspace app or whatever it was called in the future). All of the text feels a bit blurry and it's like the resolution just isn't there.

I don't even have that high of a resolution dev setup outside of VR, just four 21.5" monitors running at 1080p. I do catch myself squinting a little bit at them sometimes, but 10, 11 and 12 font sizes (in JetBrains IDEs and VS Code) seem too small in VR and going bigger decreases the lines of code per screen to an annoying degree.

Best I can do in VR for that ends up being one huge monitor in front of me, two on each side, as well as a huge overhead one, but that leads to a lot of turning my head, maybe just a bit more than I'd like to.

I'm not sure whether it's the headset with the lenses that's messed up, whether it's my eyes that are just bad, or the fact that the distance between the lenses should be a little higher than the headset allows for (at least based on what an IPD test I read online suggests), but the end result is that the experience isn't very good... yet.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#253

Post by kemayo »

monkeynotes wrote: post #49
bombcar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device. xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole stra…

> No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language.

I'm extremely skeptical of this, just because of the vast number of situations where speaking-out-loud isn't going to be desirable. It'll have a place, for sure, but I think it'll be more of a supplement to our current phone paradigm.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#254

Post by penjelly »

bombcar wrote: post #16
Topfi wrote: post #6

This is a very in-depth, informative and factual review. My hats off to the Verge; great job. I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3, so to say that I am a big proponent of the ideas that Apple is trying to advance would be an understatement. This makes me all the more disheartened to read that, for all their efforts, this release is mired by the same drawbacks that I have en…

The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…

it feels like theyve been doing RnD on VR/AR, bleeding cash, and theyre making a product to "justify" this cash burn to me. That plus shipping a product is the only way you can iterate, and a common mentality in tech companies is "to ship". IMO theyre late to the game, and excited to see if they can offer anything new

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#255

Post by elicash »

kccqzy wrote: post #244
_xnmw wrote: post #153

This review confirmed this is exactly what I need. I don’t care about my hair messing up, I work from home. I don’t care if the display doesn’t look as good as reality, that was never my expectation anyway. The display just needs to look good enough to work with fine text and hi-res images. I don’t care if it’s too heavy to wear for hours at a time, I always work in 25 minute blocks anyway. Breaks are good. I don’t c…

The hand tracking system is among the faults in the review. I'm not sure whether this will be addressed by having a real keyboard and mouse. The reviewer never tried the device with a real mouse. Do you know how the experience will be when using a mouse rather than the hand-tracking system? Anyways this sounds infuriating: > you have to be looking at something in order to click on it, and that means you are constantl…

Brian Tong's review shows use of it with a trackpad, 9:09 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkPw6ScHyb4&t=549s

This seems, to me, the only possible way to use this as a productivity device and wish more reviews would have tried it to get a better sense of whether it changes things.

Gruber's review also talks about the trackpad a bit:

https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/the_vision_pro

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#256

Post by rootusrootus »

_xnmw wrote: post #153

This review confirmed this is exactly what I need. I don’t care about my hair messing up, I work from home. I don’t care if the display doesn’t look as good as reality, that was never my expectation anyway. The display just needs to look good enough to work with fine text and hi-res images. I don’t care if it’s too heavy to wear for hours at a time, I always work in 25 minute blocks anyway. Breaks are good. I don’t c…

> the ability to walk around the room and place different open Safari windows and apps around my physical space as I think and study some new topic

That right there might be worth the price of admission.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#257

Post by bakje »

PaulHoule wrote: post #223
timcederman wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not feel Apple has been successful with the Watch and AirPods? Their wearables revenue dwarfs the revnue of most top tech companies.

Both of those are accessories to the phone.

Actually, I find airpods to be very usable as bluetooth earbuds for all kinds of devices, these days I mostly use them behind my desktop PC when playing games and they work just fine. When I pop them out of the case they automatically connect to my PC just like they would an iPhone or other apple device. They won't automatically switch to the PC like they would for apple devices but they also won't just switch from the PC so I don't mind. Taking them out doesn't pause media but the play/pause controls do work.

I do think that most people without an iPhone won't buy them so they're essentially still bought as iPhone accessories, but they don't have to be!

I agree about the watch though, that's definitely an iPhone accessory.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#258

Post by rootusrootus »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #174
browningstreet wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR headsets have been around for many years now and why does anyone believe a somewhat better version of those things would hit critical mass? It seems like the form factor is as much the problem as any of the implementations. Many people really wanted an Apple version to be a game changer. Maybe this game can’t really be changed?

If this was $500 I’d call it a game changer, and hopefully it gets there in 5 years

I wonder what the BOM cost of the device is. At $500 they'd sell 100x as many. Hell, even at $999 they'd sell quite a lot of them. I'd probably give it a try for that price, but I'm hesitant to blow $3500.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#259

Post by tsunamifury »

oatmeal1 wrote: post #55

> Apple is so incredibly capable, stocked with talent, and loaded with resources that the company simply went out and engineered the hell out of the hardest problems it could think of in order to find a challenge. That’s good! I think they knew before halfway through that it was not possible to build a practical product, but Apple thinks it's important to stay relevant and appear innovative, so they went along and bu…

I was told Jony Ive personally quit over this project. He felt it was fundamentally wrong, and the first product Apple made post Jobs that directly contradicted the vision of the company.

And not in a Porsche shouldn't make an SUV sort of way -- rather on the way out he shared some pretty well articulated moral issues with the product and how Jobs would release buggy products, but rarely fundamentally flawed ones.

This IMO is Tim Cooks first totally original product. The Watch was an Ive product. It will mark whether or not he can find original needs in the market, or simply will fall into what Jobs accused every bad CEO of doing -- SKUs for SKUs sake.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not

#260

Post by spywaregorilla »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #251
spywaregorilla wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platforms with so few noteworthy games in the past 6 years are a red flag of the health of it. Nothing wrong with that, but plenty of folks argue that VR gaming is great. HL:A, as I said in another comment, is just a case study on why VR won't work. With no disrespect to the devs because I think they really did do a good job with what they had, but it still sucks if you dare to peek under the hood. It coddles you (be…

The people I know that are heavily into VR all play VRChat. The games might not be that fantastic, but the social immersion is really amazing. During lockdown, I was playing 8 hours a day. It became a problem.

sure. VR chat is good. Closer to the metaverse and its defining features as described in the actual book than any self proclaimed metaverse fan seem to know.

But yeah, not really game.

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