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Apple Vision Pro review

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Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together." This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music. I wish the SDK for…

I think OP meant you can't include other people _in the same room_. If I want to watch Netflix (well, Apple TV, since Netflix doesn't have an app yet), my partner is completely out of luck if I do it on an Apple Vision. Unless he too has the money for one and we FaceTime each other to sync up our watching experience.

1. This problem has already been solved on the Meta Quest by a 3rd party app called Big Screen. I would imagine that they or someone else will attempt to do the same for VisionOS. Otherwise, I can see Apple fixing this later.

2. 52% of media viewing in the US is done alone.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. They ended up grabbing the patent portfolio and selling off the rest of the biz fairly quickly.

> You’re gonna love this — Motorola was bought by Google in an attempt to jumpstart their hardware business but it turned out to be a failed acquisition. I wouldn't call Motorola a failed acquisition - Google bought Motorola as a shield in an increasingly litigious environment: this was the age of Apple going "thermonuclear", Microsoft and patent trolls were wantonly shaking down Android vendors, and beginning to cir…

Yeah, I generally agree with that framing. That’s a good detail about samsung that I was not aware of. But I will say that from an ex-insider perspective — what you describe is mostly a failure.

Google was searching desperately for revenue diversity and was acquiring pretty hard at the time. I think the intent with Moto was to acquire a hardware shop and establish a market leading brand to compete directly with Apple. They eventually arrived at Pixel by building it entirely in-house. That Moto got raided for IP and spun out to Lenovo did not meet those (high) expectations. There was no need for anyone to take a loss but I think Google wanted to make a whole lot of money and did not.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming an arbitrary collection of windows instead of a single finished, composited framebuffer increases the bandwidth requirements by at least an order of magnitude. That's never going to work well over WiFi.

Use the touted eye tracking feature and compress that particular applications stream inversely to how much the user is focusing on it within the Vision Pro.

Does foveated rendering work with the extra latency of a round trip over WiFi? I can certainly see this working fine on a head tracking scale, but I'm less sure about eye tracking. I also wonder if existing video compression hardware can actually make use of such outside feedback to adapt bitrate and quality with the necessary flexibility.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first iPhone was terribly limited compared to what came after it was not in any way terrible for the time. The demo Steve Jobs did was so good that a lot of people just refused to believe it was possible, only to be proven wrong when the thing went on sale. You have to put it in context with what passed for a smart phone back then. No web browser (they sort of existed but were extremely cut down and not really us…

We all forgot how awesome inertial scroll was. Scrolling through emails or text messages was absolutely bonkers - it actually allowed us to use the full informational capacity of the screen.

Exactly this. I vividly remember watching that first public demo and thinking "sure, this is OK but touch screens are really annoying to use". When I saw Jobs flick through a list of contacts (or whatever it was) I was blown away. Finally somebody had made touch screens useful.

I am sure someone with quibble that some other product technically had something similar first, and they are probably right. But the iPhone demo was the first time I had seen anything quite like it.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming an arbitrary collection of windows instead of a single finished, composited framebuffer increases the bandwidth requirements by at least an order of magnitude. That's never going to work well over WiFi.

As long as the total number of pixels is less, I don't see what that has to be true, at least bandwidth wise? Compute wise, the vision might have to do slightly more to separate the buffer and composite them into the AR view in different places, but the bandwidth should be direction proportional to the number/size of each window. If I can fit all the windows on a 4K screen, then I don't see why the software can't spl…

It seems pretty obvious that nobody wants to be limited to the total number of pixels being merely equivalent to tiling across a 4k screen.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#606

Anyone remember when Memoji came out? It was pretty mid. Lots of problems with it. Now it's really good. It works really well now. Personas are like that. Same thing with eye tracking. This whole product is 90% of the way there. But the next 9% is just as hard as that original 90%. Apple is releasing it now to push it to 99%. It'll get better.

wait, Memoji is still a thing?

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#607
post #276

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the b…

To me, 3D home recording playback is a huge use case.

Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way.

But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone!

That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings.

And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you.

>> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol. Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices. There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better…

I think if you talked to someone working on Meta Quest they would say this is going to blow the competitors away. If you talk to a reviewer for a tech magazine they’re going to complain about any detail they can find in the 1.0 launch of a new product line as if it’s a colossal failure (aka PoC).

I think the difference is everyone knew market penetration on cell phones would be close to 90%. This may be better than the Quest but is it going to take AR/VR mainstream? Seems iffy. In which case drawbacks may never get ironed out.

Re: Apple Vision Pro review

#610
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This iPhone trope has gotta die. I worked at Motorola when the iPhone came out. Every single engineer knew this thing would blow everything else out of the water. It was one of the largest leaps in consumer tech devices ever. I assure you the Vision Pro is nowhere close to that.

I love how people just rewrite history on the internet lol. Iphone 1 was a collosal PoC. Slow, most of web didnt work. Its only appeal was the full touchscreen, which of course sucked to type on, but looked cool (which is the reason people bought it mostly). Everyone that needed mobile compute functionality was still on Blackberry and some other devices. There was a time during early 2010s where the iphone was better…

That's the history I remember tho.

I remember the first time I saw an iPhone. It was 2am at a house party with a bunch of 19-25 year olds. Pretty much everyone stopped drinking or dancing and played with this dudes phone for three hours.

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