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Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

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Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#311

Post by nerdjon »

atommclain wrote: post #302
nerdjon wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product. I really feel like too many people are ignoring this. If anyone understands how to play the long game with a new product it is Apple. I mean the Apple TV was a "Hobby" for many years. Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version? I think it also helps the clear sharing of technology between this and other products. From…

> Has Apple ever put out a "Pro" version of a product before the "normal" version? Yes they introduced the MacBook Pro before the MacBook.

I did not know that, however that is a bit different since they had the Powerbook. So that's more of a rebranding than a new product.

I do realize that the name change came with a switch from PowerPC to Intel.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#312

Post by kjkjadksj »

nottorp wrote: post #301

> What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right Hmm so basically they say Apple massively overengineered it and doesn't expect to sell it to more than 3 people at that price, which is right. But Occulus has been owned by Facebook for a long time now, what stopped them? They could at least have an aspirational "research" device that they sold for 5000, in addition to the semi-affordable (minus privacy concerns) stu…

What stopped oculus was the realities of a headset. Some of my friends were early adapters to oculus which I got to test out. They would use it as a toy really not as a main device (for gaming in this case) because you’d get nauseous before long and playing in VR is kind of an annoying gimmick once the luster wears off. Mouse and keyboard and a good monitor (or three) is more than fine and you can actually game for hours on that.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#313

Post by swatcoder »

matwood wrote: post #299
swatcoder wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many ways, they work like the very very large version of a successfully bootstrapped business. Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC lau…

> Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities It's hard to call anything selling 200M+ units/year low volume.

That's the happy accident. That's the point.

They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins.

Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#314

Post by jayd16 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #280
jayd16 wrote: post #178

I'm going to die on the hill that gaze sucks. I really hate focus follows gaze and not having a workable keyboard or buttons makes it hard to actually use this for productivity. It's fine for an alt mode type thing but as the main form of input I kind of hate it. That said, forcing your hands to be full of controllers also sucks but at least you can play a game. I don't have a solution but it needs to get solved for…

Have you tried the Vision Pro? Not doubting your take here, just curious if it's informed by the actual implementation.

Yes I have. It's the best implementation so far but still very limiting.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#315

Post by colinjoy »

BowBun wrote: post #259
monocularvision wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as Apple keeps it locked down like an iPad, I don’t see much of a future for the device replacing general purpose computers in the workforce.

Businesses are not their target market, never has been. They dominated the mobile phone market with their iPhone, and the iPad is still a gold standard product for tablets compared to the dozens of shoddy Android versions out there (coming from someone who leans more Android than Apple with their tech). I can see GP's point regardless of the rollout. Before the VR app stores become such critical masses, Apple will ha…

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/20/apples-enterprise-evolutio... (2018)

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#316

Post by kjkjadksj »

liendolucas wrote: post #243

One of the things that I will never understand of the Vision Pro is why on earth they went to design and build the front of the headset to have that colorful alive gradient or a truly bad rendering of the user's face. That screams bad overengineering with undesired added weight and extra power consumption. Also it seems that the front glass from some batches crack exactly the same way. Again, why go with that at all?…

This is apple. They see users break their phone screens and they go OK, lets make them more soap bar like and also give them glass on the backside too so you can’t get lucky landing on that side. All to pocket your couple hundred dollars replacing it or in applecare coverage which probably costed you more than the one screen replacement did over its life.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#317

Post by nottorp »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #312
nottorp wrote: post #301

> What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right Hmm so basically they say Apple massively overengineered it and doesn't expect to sell it to more than 3 people at that price, which is right. But Occulus has been owned by Facebook for a long time now, what stopped them? They could at least have an aspirational "research" device that they sold for 5000, in addition to the semi-affordable (minus privacy concerns) stu…

What stopped oculus was the realities of a headset. Some of my friends were early adapters to oculus which I got to test out. They would use it as a toy really not as a main device (for gaming in this case) because you’d get nauseous before long and playing in VR is kind of an annoying gimmick once the luster wears off. Mouse and keyboard and a good monitor (or three) is more than fine and you can actually game for h…

I know, I'm one of the unfortunates that gets nauseous in 15 minutes. Tested on a gen 1 PSVR that i was able to borrow for a weekend. I strongly doubt even the 3500 apple thingy would be much better.

But when Facebook bought them, they could have afforded to do the same thing as apple. Make a very expensive "here's the future, now queue up in an orderly manner and wait while we make it affordable" Rift Mega-Giga-Something model.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#318

Post by mrguyorama »

rswail wrote: post #29

There's no consideration of the other "killer app" for VR/AR, porn. Porn is what got VHS to succeed over Beta. Porn is what got CC payments working online. Porn drives a lot of Twitch and other platforms. Apple won't allow porn on its platform, but someone will.

VR porn is a neat gimmick.

It's not that immersive because you either get a video that you can't interact with where you get to play the part of dead fish wearing a camera rig, or it's absolutely insanely bad 3D models that will only ever get deeper into the uncanny valley. The videos are also terrible quality because making VR porn is expensive, and if you prefer somewhat amateur content, you are completely out of luck, because couples moonlighting porn aren't buying those camera rigs.

I have shown VR porn to many people. They go "woah". I tell them they can have a similar experience literally on their phone with a normal $30 phone holder "headset", none of them buy the headset. None of them even try it ever again.

Very very few whales are optimizing their porn experience. The vast majority of human beings simply scroll through pornhub for 12 minutes and watch half of two videos and then continue their lives.

"Immersiveness" is not a strict benefit for everything.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#319

Post by rurp »

lefstathiou wrote: post #245

My two cents (as an owner of a Vision Pro): 1) This is a beta product and I wouldnt recommend it to anyone that is not a developer or in a position to create apps for it, 2) this is going to have as big of an impact on humanity as the computer or the internet did and every engineer or aspiring entrepreneur should pay it attention. This device is magical. Yes it's too heavy, yes there are not enough apps, yes sharing…

VR is the most extreme case of a product that a subset of technophiles absolutely love and that the rest of the population is decidedly meh on. I think that you are vastly overestimating the amount of people who want to spend a large portion of their daily life with large googles strapped to their head isolating them from the people and things in their immediate environment.

This isn't to say that VR won't improve and find some useful niches, but the idea that it could have anywhere near the global impact of smart phones seems wildly optimistic to me.

Re: Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right

#320

Post by mrguyorama »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #133
adamors wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solo-movie watching seems like _a_ usecase, but I'd argue most people don't watch movies alone.

How difficult would it be to build an app where your friends could join remotely, watch the same movie, and appear right next to you? With good enough latency you could talk to each other like you were sitting right next to each other?

Those have existed pretty much since the start of VR multiplayer games. VR chat has them, RecRoom has them I think, there are dedicated apps for this, and many "screen mirroring" apps also have multi-user and presence.

They aren't used that much because it's a silly gimmick and nothing more. People don't roleplay nearly as much in actual VR experiences. Real life isn't Ready Player One, and real people may say they want this, but then they try it and never do it again.

It was neat to socialize with strangers in VR during covid lockdowns. It was instantly less neat when I could socialize with my real friends again. I don't have any friends from that period, and I was hanging out with VR strangers for tens of hours a weekend. There's just too many real, physical drawbacks to doing anything in VR that means unless you specifically crave the experience that ONLY VR can provide, like a driving simulator game, you don't really do it.

I've gone clubbing in VR. It's just not that special.

All the talk about AVP is full of people who seem to have zero understanding of what has existed for almost a decade in the VR space, don't seem very familiar with VR, and haven't tried to get friends and family to try VR. They all think Ready Player One, or The Matrix is right around the corner. Reality isn't magic.

For reference, VR is literally a game changer for Sim Racing, and even there most people don't care about it. Even then, it's only brought out occasionally, or for specific reasons. Headsets just suck, blocking your eyes with some form of screen will always suck for a social species like humans.

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