Someone at Apple had to design the watch to detect certain hand motions and purposely ignore them . That's a thing that someone had to do, otherwise false positives would be embarrassingly pasted across the Internet for to be laughed at.
No, it’s all ML models. It is very unlikely that an ML model trained on wrist motions for walking and running would falsely report steps for… other activities.
They possibly had to include training data tagged with "inactive" though, including that.
Pains me to think about what this sucker would cost with controllers (which I agree are needed for many VR experiences).
Who knows what Apple would charge but the BOM for a bluetooth controller with LEDs is not a lot when they already have good-enough hand tracking.
Yeah, the way the non-Pro Quest controllers are implemented isn't expensive at all. The tracking hardware is just commodity accelerometers/gyroscopes for high resolution (albeit only relative) motion sensing, and a constellation of IR LEDs to give a clear reference point for the headset cameras to follow in absolute space and correct the IMU drift.
Knowing Apple they would more likely follow the lead of the Quest Pro controllers though, which have their own set of cameras and perform their own inside-out tracking independently of the headset. It's expensive and power hungry but more robust since they work just as well when the headset can't see the controllers.
When all plane seats seem to have power these days, is the battery in a plane really a limitation? Can’t it charge while being used?
Doesn’t it have some weird and Very Apple design flaw where it’s hard to charge and use at the same time?
The battery is external, i.e. already next to you anyway, so plugging in power is rather simple. You could also have multiple batteries with you, though I don't know the price of an additional battery.
This is a very in-depth, informative and factual review. My hats off to the Verge; great job. I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3, so to say that I am a big proponent of the ideas that Apple is trying to advance would be an understatement. This makes me all the more disheartened to read that, for all their efforts, this release is mired by the same drawbacks that I have en…
Sorry for the slight tangent, but: What's the current state of VR&AR Headset friction / boot time? This is what I expected Apple to solve first. With VR/AR headsets, the friction to 'boot in' seems to be one of the biggest problems in adoption, and one that I feel Meta et al don't openly talk about. (Note, I am ignorant of this field in general). How close are we to seamless, quick boot, such that one puts on a heads…
boot time is not nearly as relevant as with a phone where you're constantly turning it off.
This is a very in-depth, informative and factual review. My hats off to the Verge; great job. I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3, so to say that I am a big proponent of the ideas that Apple is trying to advance would be an understatement. This makes me all the more disheartened to read that, for all their efforts, this release is mired by the same drawbacks that I have en…
Never buy version 1 I guess (unless the company is fighting for survival and has to deliver, with 100% focus).
The whole thing feels very ... "original xbox" to me. Hear me out. It was argued that a big part of the original xbox for Microsoft was making sure they had a toehold in the gaming console market because that market had a change of disrupting the personal computer - and if that happened, they wanted to be there for it and have something ready to go. They did something similar with phones, and we can see how it specta…
No way will this tech destroy phones as you know them today. What is going to destroy phones is natural language. Maybe, maybe in the distant future this tech will be mature enough to provide the visual support to a natural language first device. xBox addressed a very well defined product sector with a couple of big players doing stuff that is well understood. xBox wasn't a toe in the water, they planned a whole stra…
Making interfaces natural language is like making all buttons touch screen. Versatile, yea, but in practice it can be less efficient than dedicated controls or more tactile interfaces.
This is a very in-depth, informative and factual review. My hats off to the Verge; great job. I have racked up hours upon hours of actual, productive work in my Quest 2 and 3, so to say that I am a big proponent of the ideas that Apple is trying to advance would be an understatement. This makes me all the more disheartened to read that, for all their efforts, this release is mired by the same drawbacks that I have en…
Sorry for the slight tangent, but: What's the current state of VR&AR Headset friction / boot time? This is what I expected Apple to solve first. With VR/AR headsets, the friction to 'boot in' seems to be one of the biggest problems in adoption, and one that I feel Meta et al don't openly talk about. (Note, I am ignorant of this field in general). How close are we to seamless, quick boot, such that one puts on a heads…
Cold boot time on a Quest is roughly half a minute, though most of the time, you'll just wake it up from standby. For testing, I just put my Quest 3 on my head, and without pressing the power button, I counted five mississippis (seconds) before I was fully in their heavily customized version of Android with hand tracking recognizing my digits.
Why? (I switch wrists every six weeks ago because I think the tan line starts to look weird, it's similar usable from either)
Because it allows you to use your dominant hand to control it, and also your non-dominant hand is more often free than your dominant hand, so it's free to swing around when you walk and better count your steps.
> Apple is so incredibly capable, stocked with talent, and loaded with resources that the company simply went out and engineered the hell out of the hardest problems it could think of in order to find a challenge. That’s good! I think they knew before halfway through that it was not possible to build a practical product, but Apple thinks it's important to stay relevant and appear innovative, so they went along and bu…
Yeah it's interesting how the Quest seems like a less-creepy product by just owning the fact that users will be isolated.
Many HN'ers are probably like me, in that hearing about its imperfections is kind of a relief. If it really DID mean a new era of tech, well then frick I need to learn some new skills to keep up, have to buy one for myself, etc. etc. That being said, it feels like a few small things would make a consumer version of this really take off: - Cut the weight in half (i.e., use plastic). - Drop the gimmicky eye TV (save we…