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Notes on Vision Pro

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Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#21

    But it does put an enormous amount of pressure 
    on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so 
    far, the role of precise 2D control has been 
    shifted to the eyes.
I've got one good eye and one bad eye. The bad eye is legally blind, has an off-center iris and is kind of lazy w.r.t. tracking.

I'm extremely curious to know how Vision Pro deals with this. One certainly hopes there's some kind of "single eye" mode; certainly seems possible with relatively small effort and the % of the population who'd benefit seems fairly significant.

Eye tracking most certainly sounds like the way to go, relative to hand-waving.

The Minority Report movie probably set the industry back by a decade or two. Waving your hands around to control stuff seems logical but is quickly exhausting.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#22
post #19

Interesting notes. I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningf…

Definitely pros and cons. I remember reading that because of the tight integration with iOS this allowed them to achieve best in class latency for iPad + pencil that couldn't be achieved on any other platform. Having followed Oculus / Quest development that low latency is not optional in this context and every millisecond counts so I can see why they would go this route.

On the other hand, the closed ecosystem is definitely cause for concern. Fingers crossed that WebXR support comes out from behind a feature flag to allow for progressive (spatial) web apps.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#23

But it does put an enormous amount of pressure on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so far, the role of precise 2D control has been shifted to the eyes. I've got one good eye and one bad eye. The bad eye is legally blind, has an off-center iris and is kind of lazy w.r.t. tracking. I'm extremely curious to know how Vision Pro deals with this. One certainly hopes there's some kind of "single eye" mode; certainly s…

Track record wise, apple is one of the best in terms of serving accessibility. So I’d bet greater than 50% odds that they’re thinking about lazy eye or one eye or derivatives there of.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#24

But it does put an enormous amount of pressure on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so far, the role of precise 2D control has been shifted to the eyes. I've got one good eye and one bad eye. The bad eye is legally blind, has an off-center iris and is kind of lazy w.r.t. tracking. I'm extremely curious to know how Vision Pro deals with this. One certainly hopes there's some kind of "single eye" mode; certainly s…

It would have been much less exciting to see Tom Cruise sitting on a couch, hands in his lap, gently flicking his fingers to scroll through crime scene footage. IIRC he talked about how tired his arms got during filming.

EDIT: found it — he didn't talk about it, but it was reported that he had to frequently rest his arms: https://medium.com/@LeapMotion/taking-motion-control-ergonom...

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#25
post #19

Interesting notes. I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningf…

Be more specific what you mean by building on "OSX". AppKit is very old and crusty. Why would they build on AppKit? You want that?

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#26

> But it does put an enormous amount of pressure on the eye tracking. As far as I can tell so far, the role of precise 2D control has been shifted to the eyes. I've been researching eye tracking for my own project for the past year. I have a Tobii eye tracker which is probably the best eye tracking device for consumers currently (or the only one really). It's much more accurate than trying to repurpose a webcam. The…

From reading/listening to reports of people who were able to demo the device, I think Apple may have nailed it, or come close. Everyone I've seen has absolutely raved about how accurate and intuitive the eye tracking + hand gesture feels.

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#27
post #19

Interesting notes. I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningf…

Yeh this was my main thought. However good the hardware is doesn't matter if the software can't fully utilise it. The idea of virtual displays (the most obvious immediate benefit of Vision imo) for MacOS seems like a huge benefit, but for iPadOS its downgraded to pretty cool. I've never felt any particular need to add multiple displays to my iPad, and whilst a big display would be nice, I wouldn't describe it as groundbreaking (especially as others such as XReal are already doing this in a much smaller form factor).

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that an intractable problem without LiDAR? I suppose the naive solution would be to fix the screens in spots as you suggest as opposed to pinning onto real life locations. edit: ah, right the vision pro does have lidar. I look forward to seeing this pinning if it's implemented. I'm still skeptical it would work well - I've used ARKit and it's not really that accurate when you're moving around.

It should be relatively simple with a QR code or similar physical marker in the real world.

With yeah I agree. Without though it seems difficult

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eye tracking is almost certainly more accurate and faster. To the point where we make it an entire game to see who can who can move the mouse to what their eyes are already looking at fastest, in the form of shooter games.

Interesting point — if you no longer need to use a joystick to aim your weapon, how will controllers evolve? Will the second joystick be used for some other function, or will it be replaced by a different type of input method? It would be funny if controllers evolved to be more like the single-joystick models that we had decades ago, with the joystick on the left and rows of buttons on the right. History doesn't repe…

One joystick has to exist since there are many videogames where the character is not in focus (barely), thinking of hack and slash with top down camera (the recent diablo 4),the majority of the focus is on where the attacks are going.

In top down bullet hell shooters the player had to aim and shoot in one direction as it walks in another (potentially opposite), so one stick is still needed

Re: Notes on Vision Pro

#30
post #19

Interesting notes. I'm disappointed even though it's entirely predictable that VisionOS is built on the iOS/iPadOS foundation rather than OSX. I guess we'll see how "walled in" it is but it's hard to see any reason Apple isn't going to be just as constraining and controlling about what happens on this OS as they are on iOS, if not more so. Which ultimately means I'll be very reluctant to ever adopt it in any meaningf…

Be more specific what you mean by building on "OSX". AppKit is very old and crusty. Why would they build on AppKit? You want that?

Ultimately its more about the openness of the OS. If they built on iPadOS but they made a reasonable experience for freely sideloading apps, I'd be OK with it. Or even if they support WebXR really well, I might (just) find a way to be OK with that. But if they lock this down and position themselves as rentseekers to take a cut from every piece of software that runs there regardless of how much they contributed to it - I'm out.
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