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Native visionOS platform support

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Re: Native visionOS platform support

#271

Post by asadotzler »

JeremyNT wrote: post #151
arjonagelhout wrote: post #147

This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future. While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses. In this line of thinking — not just focu…

Can you read that much into it? It seems equally possible that they're beginning to wind things down and they're just releasing what they've got to the public now.

This is precisely what they're doing, shipping everything that was mostly already cooked, clearing out the pipleline for their own developers and for third parties, particularly the supply chain they left high and dry when they ended Vision Pro production early, but also their own OS devs and the ones working with third party software and content sponsorships.

They've already moved all the top talent and the next thing looks like a PCVR device that guts the PC from Vision Pro and maybe a chip and ship bump or even a cheaper model with sub-premium materials and lower fidelity optical stack.

What ever is going on, it's clearly not the priority it was and most people paying close attention see a steep decline in the viability of goggles at Apple. That form factor was a flop, as the ergonomics simply didn't align with the use cases for most normal people.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#272

Post by asadotzler »

arghwhat wrote: post #171
JeremyNT wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you read that much into it? It seems equally possible that they're beginning to wind things down and they're just releasing what they've got to the public now.

Official upstreaming efforts are a significant investment even if they have internal PoCs. You can't just "release what you've got".

Not if it was 90% done and you want to clear the decks of nearly completed work before moving on. It's absolutely common to ship stuff to make third party suppliers and partners whole even when you've decided not to continue investing in a product. Keeping partners happy is critical to the smooth functioning supply chain Cook built and which gives Apple most of their success today.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#273

Post by asadotzler »

arghwhat wrote: post #258
jayd16 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.

No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly. If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like the…

You really don't understand how much money Apple's sunk on this and how little comparatively it takes to wind down operations in a way that makes partners and suppliers happy. Keeping a couple small teams going, even with entirely new versions shipping, to keep your supply chain whole and your partners coming back for future products is cheap and easy and very likely what Apple's doing now that most of the top talent was moved to spectacles and Siri. Letting your OS and partner software teams clear their pipelines is absolutely common at Apple and elsewhere. Denying that is silly.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#274

Post by asadotzler »

_mlbt wrote: post #180
arjonagelhout wrote: post #147

This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future. While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses. In this line of thinking — not just focu…

The core idea is solid. At this point it just needs to be lighter, have better battery, and a much lower price. With further refinement and increased economies of scale these issues could potentially be fixed. Nearly all of the reviews I’ve read say that it’s a good user experience overall, but it’s not worth the price.

No, it's not. The form factor cannot possibly shrink enough in size and weight or gain enough input ergonomics to make the gorgeous outputs worth it. Not gonna happen for goggles, ever. People won't smash a PC into their faces for no use cases beyond what their laptops and smartphones amply provide for. You think women who spend half a trillion dollars a year and an average of an hour a day on their hair and makeup are going to smash any kind of PC, no matter how small and light, into their faces requiring they redo their hair and makeup after every use? Really?

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#275

Post by arjonagelhout »

khazhoux wrote: post #226
arjonagelhout wrote: post #147

This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future. While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses. In this line of thinking — not just focu…

> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good product Do you own one, or have used one extensively, to dismiss it so confidently? I own one, and it's a great product. The experience watching movies/shows is unparalleled.

Unfortunately the price tag is too high for me, and since I'm based in the Netherlands, I did not manage to schedule a demo. However, what makes a good product is subjective and you're right that in many ways it is a good product.

From what I can see, the hardware and software quality are high, and the user experience is greatly simplified in contrast to something like Meta Quest, which' UX is often rough and clunky.

My main argument for saying it's not a good product, is that the form factor is not where it should be for mass consumer appeal.

Another subjective and personal pet peeve is that it's not possible to create an AR experience using custom rendering logic with Metal. One has to use RealityKit. Only a fully immersive experience (VR) can be created with Metal. (This might have changed since it came out and I'm happy to be proven wrong, then I'll definitely buy one). I understand the reasoning behind locking this down, but I would love to experiment with writing AR 3D modeling software for visionOS.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#276

Post by asadotzler »

vFunct wrote: post #183
_mlbt wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core idea is solid. At this point it just needs to be lighter, have better battery, and a much lower price. With further refinement and increased economies of scale these issues could potentially be fixed. Nearly all of the reviews I’ve read say that it’s a good user experience overall, but it’s not worth the price.

It doesn't need a battery at all. Just have it connect directly to a Mac to use as a virtual Mac display. It's what I use my Vision Pro for as its primary use case, to have an ultra-wide monitor in front of me without taking up any physical space. I use it for hours every day as my primary programming platform. I really have no other use case, and don't need the VR/AR features. The virtual ultra-wide display of the l…

Apple (and Meta) didn't want a great PC accessory, they wanted new platforms they could own and monetize. They spent 10 years, both of them, integrating the whole PC inside the goggles because the display only approach had little value to them. Apple may try a PCVR headset, probably similar to the Beyond 2 but with glass and aluminum instead of plastic, as "big Mac display" is the only value any decent number of Vision Pro users get from their devices and Apple's got plenty of unused component supply and supply chain lined up already, but goggles are likely a dead form factor.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#277

Post by doctorpangloss »

dagmx wrote: post #244
doctorpangloss wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Apple does not allow applications to render traditionally nor gives them access to the camera or other interesting effects. You are instead given a DOM (really imagine idiosyncratic SVG for 3D) API and you must facade it to your engine object model. Apple has forced library developers into a situation even worse than Metal: a single, idiosyncratic scene graph like API. None of the performance benefits of using…

Your comment is highly incorrect You can render traditionally all you want with metal. You just don’t get some of the features like camera access, or gaze. Which does have its downsides, but is a long way from what you’re describing. I’ve ported a metal based renderer to visionOS for companies already, and you already have engines like Unreal supporting it too. I’m not even sure what DOM you’re talking about. SwiftUI…

It's true, I stopped paying attention to the AVP after I returned it.

At the time it was released, which is not that long ago, AVP didn't support what I see is now called "mixed immersion mode." Unity's rendering was built upon the cockamamie scheme Apple had at launch and is the one I was describing in my comment, which is all I was familiar with.

Broadly speaking, you caught me, I don't stay up to date about stuff where everyone knows ahead of time that there is no audience. That's not your fault or my fault, it's Apple's fault.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#278

Post by asadotzler »

khazhoux wrote: post #233
jayd16 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its clearly not a popular product and not for lack exposure.

It’s clearly not “popular” but the statement was that it’s not good. That’s wrong — it is a very good product.

Good means fit for purpose and a product your CEO pitched from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and devoted half of his massive store real estate and staff to making successful that sells only about 350K units in the first year and projected to sell only about 150K units in its second year because even the huge number of in-store demos couldn't convince people to put PCs on their faces, is clearly not fit for purpose. If it was truly the future of PCs today as Tim Cook told us, it would not have flopped but the form factor and resulting ergonomics make it useful for little more than novelty experiences for a few nerds with more cash than most.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#279

Post by asadotzler »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #105

This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.

They've mostly given up on the goggles form factor, though the winding down will probably be over the next couple of years. That technology will never be ready so they're moving on to entirely new technologies for far less capable spectacles that will be more like Apple Watch for your eyes, a heads up display much like your car's.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#280

Post by asadotzler »

jitl wrote: post #131
lordofgibbons wrote: post #105

This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.

The media loves to spin Apple things as failures right up until the point when they’re a success. See coverage of iPhone, Apple Pay, iPad, etc. Even “Apple faithful” media like MacRumors.com will be measured but pessimistic about Apple’s new efforts because negativity drives clicks more than positivity across the board.

Apple sold ~17M iPhones in its first 2 years, ~20M Apple Watches in the same timeframe, and ~370K Vision Pros in its first year from a production run of ~500K. No further Vision Pro v1 production is planned, with remaining units allocated for second-year (2025) demand.

Vision Pro is an absolute flop compared to even the "everyone said it would fail the first year" products that went on to success. 500K units across 2 years when the presumed Watch sold 20M in the same timeframe and fanboys are still telling us "you're saying the same thing about AVP as you did iPhone and Watch when they first came out." Maybe so, but Vision Pro is orders of magnitude worse off out of the gate than those other products and Apple's already moved the top AVP talent to Siri, spectacles, and other projects so it's pretty clear Apple agrees it's not going to be a success.

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