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Thoughts on Vision Pro

andrewhart.me

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Re: Thoughts on Vision Pro

#5
post #3

U+F8FF is private use and will only display on Apple devices, FYI.

On Macs (and presumably iOS devices with a keyboard hooked up) it can be produced by pressing ⌥⇧K and will render so long as the receiving text field can render a system font that contains the symbol.

Re: Thoughts on Vision Pro

#6
>But using without the Light Seal is a massive improvement. You’re closer to the screen, so it reduces the tunnel vision and expands the effective field-of-view. And rather than a black edge, you have a frame, with outside visibility.

Same thoughts for Quest 3. I use mine exclusively without the light seal now. It is a huge improvement in the ability to just casually use the thing among friends and not seem like a weirdo, and having your peripheral vision massively adds to the overall comfort of the experience. I've found paradoxically that it increases the feeling of presence for passthrough when it feels like you're just looking through a pair of glasses instead of something suction-cupped to your face. This whole idea of "locking in" to VR and closing out the outside world needs to go away. True AR that doesn't remove you from the world is the only future for these devices.

This goes ditto for controllers. The vast majority of people have never held a game controller in their lives. We (as gamers and nerds) take it as second nature, but I've seen it as the single biggest barrier to entry with demoing VR to random folks. Sticking with hand/finger based gesture tracking and rejecting controllers was the absolute best decision Apple made for Vision Pro.

Re: Thoughts on Vision Pro

#7
> The biggest innovation with Vision Pro is visionOS. visionOS provides native app frameworks, so developers can build apps for it. That sounds ridiculously obvious, and yet its something Meta have failed to offer for years. Every app on Quest has to reinvent how buttons work, how a scroll view works, how far away from the user the content should be etc.. and every app works differently. On visionOS, all of this is handled by Apple, and every app looks and feels the same.

Meta does have standardized utilities for translating movement to touch/drag/etc. interactions on arbitrary virtual surfaces:

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2022/11/22/buildin...

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-isdk-...

But it doesn't seem (AFAIK) to answer the other side of this, which is the UI design system so apps have a consistent look and feel. Which is perhaps more common coming from a game development perspective, but ever since the Mac OS shareware days, Apple's understood that it's empowering to a certain kind of developer if you make it easy/the default path for them to build experiences that match a standardized look and feel. I'm honestly surprised that Meta didn't at least make an optional SDK for this.

Re: Thoughts on Vision Pro

#8
+1 on guest mode. Handing the headset to someone else is a high-friction point with the calibration that needs to be done on every swap. Oftentimes I want to show someone the current experience without needing to setup a mirror and handing over the headset is the most intuitive way to do so.

Re: Thoughts on Vision Pro

#9
The pervasive blocking of copyrighted content in screenshots and screen sharing sounds mildly dystopian. The article lists several examples where this actually hurts the Vision Pro (in terms of ability to share cool moments or being able to demo it), so I wonder why the feature made it in? Is it a move by Apple to make sure immersive videos don't get pirated and made available to Quest and Vive users, or is there external pressure from studios?

Re: Thoughts on Vision Pro

#10
post #9

The pervasive blocking of copyrighted content in screenshots and screen sharing sounds mildly dystopian. The article lists several examples where this actually hurts the Vision Pro (in terms of ability to share cool moments or being able to demo it), so I wonder why the feature made it in? Is it a move by Apple to make sure immersive videos don't get pirated and made available to Quest and Vive users, or is there ext…

This also doesn't make sense for the copyright owner interests. Don't you want people to share screenshots of your movies and shows?
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