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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

#621

Post by zarzavat »

crooked-v wrote: post #511
IshKebab wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are drastically ahead. They have VR games, which are the only real reason to own a VR headset at the moment (and for at least 5 years).

There's a real chicken-and-egg recursion there: VR headsets are only good for VR games because the only thing made for VR headsets is VR games because VR headsets are only good for VR games because...

It’s not chicken and egg, it’s simply the reality about the hardware. Even Apple, with all their resources and a $3500 price tag, could only make a mediocre passthrough on a very heavy headset. The hardware isn’t ready for AR yet.

Games are where it’s at for the foreseeable future. Games don’t need passthrough and they don’t need especially high resolution.

Look at how much of the vision pro is about giving people a connection to the real world while they are using the device. Games don’t need that, people want to be immersed while they are playing a game.

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

#622

Post by astrange »

alt227 wrote: post #295
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 have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption. iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device. The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market. Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin? They are paying off…

That's not what marketing is. Marketing is knowing what products people will enjoy buying, not just making ads after the fact.

I also don't think most customers are old enough to remember those ads.

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

#623

Post by astrange »

alt227 wrote: post #334
swatcoder wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That interpretation seems pretty out of sync with their financial history across divisions, their operating margin across divisions, their customer loyalty across divisions, and pretty much everyone's experience of the world, but maybe you're right. You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by…

>You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something. Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment? I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage…

MacBook Pros are a highly differentiated product from other laptops; for instance they have an entirely different OS and CPU architecture.

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

#624

Post by interpol_p »

ForHackernews wrote: post #498
zmmmmm wrote: post #481

Coming from a senior Oculus lead, the most interesting thing about this write up for me, is what it lacks: it says almost nothing about the software stack / operating system. Still 100% talking about hardware at the bottom and end user applications at the other end. But there is no discussion of the platform which to me is actually the highest value proposition Apple is bringing here. In short: Apple has made a fully…

He talks about how "Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment" but... if that's really the case, then it's quite an indictment of the VR industry: > The hardware needed to track eyes and hands in VR has been around for over a decade, and it’s Apple unique ability to bring everything together in a magical way that makes this UI superpower the most important achievement of the entire V…

Putting it together is not as simple as it seems. I think it was an immense engineering and design effort from Apple to get it to the point where it feels effortless and obvious

Not only do they have two cameras per eye, and all the hardware for wide angle out-of-view hand tracking, they had to consider:

Privacy: the user’s gaze is never delivered to your process when your native UI reacts to their gaze. Building this infrastructure to be performant, bug free and secure is a lot of work. Not to mention making it completely transparent for developers to use

Design: they reconsidered every single iOS control in the context of gaze and pinch, and invented whole new UI paradigms that work really well with the existing SDK. You can insert 3D models into a SwiftUI scroll view, and scroll them, and it just works (they even fade at the cut off point)

Accessibility: there is a great deal of thought put into alternative navigation methods for users who cannot maintain consistent gaze

In addition to this they clearly thought about how to maintain “gazeable” targets in the UI. When you drag a window closer or farther it scales up and down maintaining exactly the same visual size, trying to ensure nothing gets too small or large to gaze at effectively

There are so many thousands of design and engineering decisions that went into making gaze and pinch based navigation work so simply, so I can understand how it hasn’t been done this effectively until now

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

#625

Post by astrange »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #249
ryandrake wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over? Why are they the only ones who seem to be able to knock a product category out of the park and legitimize it? Is it just the vast amount of money? Are they the only ones who can create products? Is everyone else that bad? Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes…

> Is it just the vast amount of money? No, it is the vast amount of risk they are willing to take. Microsoft/alphabet have vast amounts of money too, but no appetite for risk. Apple is willing to dump tens of billions and years into R&D for physical products, fail, and then try again. Microsoft half asses it, and then pulls back instead of plowing through (see them shutting down Microsoft retail stores and windows ph…

Microsoft is actually doing great right now, but the thing they're doing great at is Azure and cloud services like 365, plus some very lucky AI investments.

Shutting down their bad products was a good move, even if they should've made good products in the first place.

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

#626

Post by astrange »

hedora wrote: post #95
65 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll only buy a VR device if it's in the form of glasses, not big goggles I need to strap to my face.

My main concern with the vision pro is that all use cases I know of (other than gaming) work better with some sort of pass through HUD display like the HoloLens. They spent a ton of company resources, weight and power making the wrong form factor emulate the right form factor, and are shipping with zero killer apps. You can’t even let your friends play with it without getting it re-fit to their head at the Apple Stor…

If you want glasses the friend problem would be even more complicated, not least because of US regulations on selling prescription lenses.

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

#627

Post by thih9 »

in3d wrote: post #619
zmmmmm wrote: post #481

Coming from a senior Oculus lead, the most interesting thing about this write up for me, is what it lacks: it says almost nothing about the software stack / operating system. Still 100% talking about hardware at the bottom and end user applications at the other end. But there is no discussion of the platform which to me is actually the highest value proposition Apple is bringing here. In short: Apple has made a fully…

None of this matters compared to the number of apps available. Given the high price of the Vision Pro and the resulting low sales, it would make little business sense for app developers to invest in creating apps for it instead of for the Quest 3.

Perhaps it matters because of apps. With OS that natively supports spatial features it could be easier to expand functionality of existing ios apps or interact with them in the ar/vr context.

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

#628

Post by mirsadm »

zmmmmm wrote: post #464
rurp wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 negati…

It seems fairly obvious to me that no amount of improvement of the technology will make people accept that barrier. Even if every technical hurdle is solved I still firmly believe most people would rather not have a thing on their head and be isolated from their friends and family.

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

#629

Post by astrange »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #74
noneeeed wrote: post #30

I think the description of the VisionPro as a dev kit is spot on. It's also a beta product in many way. Apple know full well that this is not a mass market product, they have made no attempt to make it even remotely affordable to most people. But they also know that every aspect of the hardware will improve over the next decade, and as it does they will have ironed out many of the problems with how we use AR/VR and w…

I think, crucially, Apple also invented a price anchor for VR computing. Previously, only the extreme high end of VR broke $1.5k. Now if apple puts out an Apple Vision SE or non-pro or whatever at $1,999 it will be seen as an absolute steal.

The Vision Pro costs less than Microsoft HoloLens did, considering inflation.

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

#630

Post by atoav »

zmmmmm wrote: post #481

Coming from a senior Oculus lead, the most interesting thing about this write up for me, is what it lacks: it says almost nothing about the software stack / operating system. Still 100% talking about hardware at the bottom and end user applications at the other end. But there is no discussion of the platform which to me is actually the highest value proposition Apple is bringing here. In short: Apple has made a fully…

And as an educator who thought an VR-development course at university for a few times since 2018 setting up and maintaining 15 Oculus Quest Mk I glasses was an absolute pain, with accounts that I have to setup, etc. Sure it worked somewhat like a android phone, but there was no real fast pass for users like me, a lot of the features and the UI changed over the time and it ultimately felt like the platform took itself too seriously and therefore had no problem wasting my time.

When designing a concept the core difference is always whether your design respects the user or whether it does not and tries to make them do things, spend more time on the platform, spend more money on the platform, etc.

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