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Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

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Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#361

Post by BaculumMeumEst »

It's weird how on one hand, Apple is pushing the envelope with graphics rendering, but they have been funneling absolutely everyone into Swift for years. They recently released metal-cpp to help developers that have existing C++ codebases bring them to apple by dropping in header files that bridge to Objective-C, it's hacky and unwieldly but kind of works I guess.

It's especially weird to me considering how nice Metal is to work with, but neither swift not some hacky ObjC/C++ approach seem suited to the task of pushing the envelope of graphics rendering to take full advantage of this hardware. Am I off base here?

Honestly, I hope this takes off is really successful, and kicks off enough investment in competitors so that I can hack on cool stuff in another software ecosystem.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#362

Post by bryanrasmussen »

NovaDudely wrote: post #278
leejoramo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1981, I received a computer as a birthday gift at the young age of 13. Likely the first micro-computer in my small California town. When I took it to my Junior High science fair people were like stunned by a kid with a computer. When you turned on the computer, all you got was a flashing cursor wait for you to program in BASIC. The next year, a successful local business person asked me, if I thought in the future…

This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere - sometimes simply due to being out maneuvered business wise. Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, tha…

>they had compititors that had better products but to Microsofts luck, could never get a foothold in the market.

hmm, this seems to be a rather biased description of the history.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#363

Post by brandall10 »

rvz wrote: post #359
andybak wrote: post #334

I don't think there's a single comment here that's about the developer tools. It's all just people debating the merits of the Vision Pro and XR in general. Again...

This just tells us that this version of Apple's Vision product line up is for the rich tech bros here and is not expected to be used by the general consumers who won't throw $3,500 on a XR headset just like the Hololens. Clearly in the comments it just shows how out of touch they are in reality. There will be a version of the vision product line-up that will be reduced to the size and naturalism of a pair of glasses…

Recent rumors point to Apple unveiling a cheaper variant for the second gen.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/23/apple-headset-cheaper-second-...

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#364

Post by mellosouls »

o1y32 wrote: post #263
mellosouls wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already available on other platforms like Quest via apps like PianoVisiom. https://youtu.be/kLQsUIS01nM

This looks horrible to anyone who had some formal training in (any) music instrument. And no serious teacher will look at this thing, at all.

Well, the point was the suggested software already exists, not that it would get the approval of everybody.

I agree that formal training and teaching with a quality provider is likely to be optimal but any tool that adds to the available options for training is worth exploring, especially if somebody already has access to the platform the software is available for - paid instruction is not always an option for many.

We also need to be careful not to gatekeep music by demanding instrument players go a formal route of instruction.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#365

Post by brandall10 »

lolinder wrote: post #277
woeirua wrote: post #95

I think it's very important for people to get out of the HN bubble when discussing this. $3500 is just way too expensive for mass customer adoption. Meta is struggling to get customers to adopt the Oculus hardware when its an order of magnitude less expensive. I can't see why _any_ developer would sink tons of money into building custom apps on this platform when there will be less than a few hundred thousand users n…

I'm an AR skeptic but I appreciated Benedict Evans's take on Apple's strategy here: > Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware — Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price. So the Vision i…

To be fair, the original iPhone was like this as well - expensive and unsubsidized, locked to a specific carrier, small production, took many years to develop, was very much a future shock device upon its unveiling, etc. The 3g was the one for the masses.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#366

Post by atchoo »

_Tomas wrote: post #303
NovaDudely wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere - sometimes simply due to being out maneuvered business wise. Bill Gates once said that in some ways Microsoft was lucky to be as succesful as they where, tha…

>This is all true but it can be a little bit of survivor ship bias at play. Look at all the technology conferences over the last 40 years and for the most part you will see a grave yard of tens of thousand of ideas that looks promising but ended up going nowhere Survivor bias is real, but the interesting failures (in comparison to VR) are things like 3D TV. 3D TV has a very weak effect, the 3D effect is basically dis…

> On the other hand, because VR is so immersive... tricks your brain completely

I find there is a similar acclimitisation effect to 3DTVs. Do a repetitive task in VR and it doesn't take long for VR to not matter. If you use VR everyday the wow disappears and desktop gaming can be a refreshing change. Only after a decent refractory period might you put on a headset and get some sense of magic again.

> takes 5 minutes ... no way to do what we do with a phone app or even a 3DTV, it requires VR.

Oh, you are snakeoil salesman. I regret responding.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#367

Post by saagarjha »

threeseed wrote: post #113
furyofantares wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully it's as open as macOS, or at least much, much closer to it than iOS. Otherwise the options for exploration are limited by Apple.

New opportunities for abuse do exist with Vision Pro. If you allowed free reign access to the sensors people could record the inside of your house/work, capture your face, fingerprints, retinal pattern etc. And again with Objective-C it's impossible to prevent private API usage unless you have some sort of App Store model which can inspect the binaries and prevent abuse. So it's ultimately going to be the same as iOS…

Private API is not a security boundary. The platform sandbox is.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#368

Post by drawkbox »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #361

It's weird how on one hand, Apple is pushing the envelope with graphics rendering, but they have been funneling absolutely everyone into Swift for years. They recently released metal-cpp to help developers that have existing C++ codebases bring them to apple by dropping in header files that bridge to Objective-C, it's hacky and unwieldly but kind of works I guess. It's especially weird to me considering how nice Meta…

Apple merely added these libraries to an already existing system to better link Swift to C++/Objective-C++. Objective-C/C++ and C/C++ work well together and always have, it is pretty much required as nearly all game engines (even Unity/Unreal) are C++ underneath just like all apps.

Apple did recently add better support for mixing Objective-C++/C++ to Swift which was more difficult before. [1][2][3] Swift to C++ had more leaps prior to recent updates though it was still possible. Really it just handles the Swift to Objective-C++ to C++ link better.

Objective-C++ has been used since iOS inception to link C++ game engines to Objective-C. All you have to do is compile with g++ or other and typically files with .m are Objective-C only and files with .mm are Objective-C++. Objective-C/C++ and interop with C/C++ actually works really well and every single game engine on the store (pretty much ever game) uses Objective-C++ to link them at a minimum.

We used lots of C++, Objective-C and even Objective C++ (g++ mixing Objective-C + C++, connecting to C++ engine) in a custom game engine that worked on mobile for lots of shipped titles. It is powerful and fun. People have been mixing assembly, C/C++, Objective-C/C++ since the 80s. These technologies so close to the metal and machine code actually work better together than most "modern" frameworks/systems.

A sample of early game engines using this link is Oolong from 2008ish, that was used on an early Quake port and many game studios had something like this for custom engines to get them to the iPhone/iPad/etc. [4]

Fun fact: Objective-C was created before C++. Objective-C all they way back to 1981 but officially 1984. [5] C++ all the way back to 1982 but officially 1985. [6]

[1] https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/

[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Swift/UsingC++APIs...

[3] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10172/

[4] https://code.google.com/archive/p/oolongengine/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#History

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C++#History

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#369

Post by winterismute »

BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #361

It's weird how on one hand, Apple is pushing the envelope with graphics rendering, but they have been funneling absolutely everyone into Swift for years. They recently released metal-cpp to help developers that have existing C++ codebases bring them to apple by dropping in header files that bridge to Objective-C, it's hacky and unwieldly but kind of works I guess. It's especially weird to me considering how nice Meta…

Metal is a modern - and under many points of view, pretty good - rendering API that allows you, for example, to declare the rendering pipelines/dispatches fully without you having to call multiple "change_state" in your CPU code (similar to DX12, Vulkan etc). This means the GPU can run "flat out" and that a driver can be pretty lean and introduce little overhead (if done well enough).

In more advanced cases when many API commands need to be encoded depending on users' input, and if batching is not enough, you can use things like "MTLParallelRenderCommandEncoder" and multiple queues to take adavantage of multiple threads submitting such commands.

This all means that "pushing the envelope" in terms of rendering is absolutely possible despite the possibly small overhead added by Obj-C - which however also brings some advantages as it often avoids having to call "free" on GPU memory since the MTLBuffers are reference-counted.

Re: Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro

#370

Post by PartiallyTyped »

pohl wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the users that will find the real use.

So — pornography, then.

“Why is it every time a new thing is invented, humans immediately try to use for it porn?”

- Janet, the Good Place

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