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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

#461

Post by bombcar »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #458
wahnfrieden wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it is non-Retina for a reason, because the pixels are noticeable by eye so presumably less density would worsen that. It is obscured though by the softened out of focus presentation, maybe that blurring makes the difference unnoticeable.

Let me put it this way, then: having used a Vision Pro for two weeks (I bought one and returned it) I would gladly take a greater field of view in exchange for a slightly lower pixel density, and it would be a very easy decision. I had some major issues with the Vision Pro, but pixel density was not one of them.

Narrow FOV means you have to keep your eyes "locked forward" and people don't realize how much they look at things by moving their eyes.

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

#462

Post by esafak »

veidr wrote: post #240
homefree wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's wildly, embarrassingly bad - to such a point it feels like Zuck must not be using it. Maybe most of his attention is on the AI stuff and the Ray Bans? There's a ton of half-baked old ideas in the UI, it's extremely confusing. Even basic stuff like trying to add my dad as a friend is super hard to do. Literally every person I've helped set it up has also had to do a full manual restore (holding down hardware…

Did Mark Zuckerberg ever actually use it? I felt like it got shitty after John Carmack left FB. I don't think he was direct in the UI side much (more like increasing framerate in software updates) but I got the sense that as VR CTO or whatever he was able to say "Hey — what, come on, fuck that shit get rid of it" but now there is nobody to do that job.

I hope he said it just like that!!

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

#463

Post by Karrot_Kream »

alt227 wrote: post #402
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.

Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market. This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.

Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft were unable to stay innovative. All three brands had huge missteps entering emerging market categories. Xerox stumbled during the PC transition, IBM with commodity servers, and Microsoft with mobile. The risk of building a brand is building an inflexible brand that doesn't have the agility to change.

It's true that trying to enter every market and own a huge market share in it can lead to lower risk of having to stay ahead of every innovation (as we can see with Google and its inability to productize AI properly) but since Apple's turnaround its execution has been top notch, and that was 20 years ago. With products like the Vision Pro Apple is explicitly trying to avoid losing the innovation race that Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft did.

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

#464

Post by zmmmmm »

rurp wrote: post #319
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 an…

> 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

For some reason this illogical phrasing that totally excludes the value proposition has become the standard phrasing for arguing why VR/AR won't succeed. It makes no sense. You haven't expressed any part of the value proposition of the product, only a negative aspect of it, so why are you assessing it's value based on that? I could assess the value of a car as "a metal box you are trapped inside of for hours on end" or a phone as a "fragile object that requires constant charging" and decide these products will just never make it.

Of course people don't want goggles strapped to their face. But we already know they will do it, given a value proposition because humans do exactly that : they wear glasses and sunglasses and hats quite happily, sometimes all day long.

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

#465

Post by threeseed »

zaroth wrote: post #447

> This also begs the question… what if you could completely offload the Vision Pro’s compute to another Apple device? Instead of a battery pack on your waist, you just plug in your iPhone. It can provide charge and a nice bit of compute as well.

Vision Pro requires 13V so will never be able to be charged by iPhone.

You could be able to plug the iPhone into the battery pack though.

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

#466

Post by xcv123 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #166
throwaway74432 wrote: post #101

If people wanted to wear a phone screen taped over their eyes out in public, the technical limitations wouldn't barely make a dent in that desire. But the vast majority of people want to have real in-person human interactions when they're out in the world. That's what the makers of these devices fail to see. But they can't see that because they're self-described VR enthusiasts. If they talk to non VR enthusiasts (whi…

This is why linux perpetually has <5% adoption. It's made and maintained by linux enthusiasts who are incapable of understanding how the average person wants to use a computer.

> It's made and maintained by linux enthusiasts who are incapable of understanding how the average person wants to use a computer

They understand, but they don't care. The 5% want to have a system that is designed for themselves and not the other 95%.

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

#467

Post by threeseed »

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?…

Vision Pro front glass weighs 34g. There are bigger weight problems than that.

And they are anticipating a future where the weight is significantly lower and people are wearing them for many hours a day. And so they wanted a corollary for AirPod transparency mode i.e. being able to interact with people without taking device off.

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

#468

Post by zmmmmm »

masfoobar wrote: post #39

I remember being sooooo tempted to buy a devkit just so I could play about, see if I can get it to work with my own 3D games. Would it be a pointless exercise? Yes. However, would I learn from it as a programmer? Yes. To this very day, I still dont have a VR headset. I am actually a tad behind with the latest ones, if I am honest about it. There is a VR place in our City which I take my children to (and myself) for s…

I find it weird that people who are clearly interested will vacillate on buying a headset these days. Quest 3 is mind bogglingly cheap for what it is. It's selling in the millions and the Quest platform already has tens of millions of users.

If you are from a developed country with decent wages and think of yourself as a tech enthusiast you should just go buy it as a professional investment to learn about the tech. Even if you don't want the gaming it is easily good enough to give you insight into the the broader tech (working in VR, social experiences, etc) and it's a pretty good standalone WebXR viewer which very easy to pick up.

(I have the same logic that anybody who buys a Vision Pro for development is insane not to also pick up a Quest at 1/7th the price so that they can at least have a full perspective on where VR is at)

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

#469

Post by bigyikes »

onethought wrote: post #426
cyberpunk wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, what are you doing for 10 hours a day in there? Can you comfortable code all day in that? If you don't mind my asking, is it purely novelty or is it genuinely better than coding on a 5k monitor?

It’s genuinely better than a 5k monitor. In the recent update it now lets you mouse off your Mac and onto vision apps just like iPad hands over. It made me switch my desk setup to have the desk attached to my chair so I can have 360 range of screens. The resolution is stupidly high. I’ve attempted a coding workflow in all of the quests and it just wasn’t possible. It’s awesome in vision

Does it require light to work? What about space? Could you e.g. work in a dark closet, as an extreme example?

Do those semi-realistic virtual avatars work for non-FaceTime apps like Zoom?

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

#470

Post by zmmmmm »

saretup wrote: post #45

> Watching movies in Vision Pro is great at first but most people will stop doing it after the initial novelty excitement wears off Watching TV/movies in virtual reality seemed like such an incredibly compelling idea that we (the Oculus team at Meta/Facebook) built an entire product around that idea — Oculus Go. Launched in 2018, Oculus Go was the biggest product failure I’ve ever been associated with for the simple…

I thought this was one of the most interesting insights because there is a lot of discussion around why Meta isn't / hasn't gone after media viewing as a primary use case. Understanding now that they really tried and it failed hard at Oculus previously adds a lot of insight to that.

I do have to say, for me it does add up to one huge missing element for Vision Pro: why Apple didn't ship some kind of co-presence features on day 1 is totally baffling to me. I think it likely stems from the fact they clearly missed their mark with Personas and presumably they didn't want to then introduce cartoon style avatars like Meta did. They've decided to die on the hill of realistic avatars and they are actually dying there. It means people hate Personas, they don't have co-presence which is damaging the media viewing and preventing a lot of the AR and professional use cases from developing where co-presence is also a must, sometimes the primary feature.

It's fascinating to me because Apple pitched so hard at their headset not being socially isolating, but they ultimately created the most socially isolating headset of all.

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