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I hope that they keep pushing for self contained independent devices. My wife and I love our Apple Watches and not needing an iPhone (assuming your watch has a

I hope that they keep pushing for self contained independent devices. My wife and I love our Apple Watches and not needing an iPhone (assuming your watch has a data plan) is a game changer, The Oculus Quest is self contained, a great product, but a bit heavy. I expect an AR headset would also work in VR mode and I hope Apple makes it light and comfortable. It is amazing what functionality is packed into the Apple Watch and AirPods and I have confidence Apple will get it right with a headset. Then the question is, will people want them.

ghaff 7y ago
A lot depends on use cases. I, on the other hand, got an Apple Watch with a data plan and I canceled the plan because I never used it outside of my phone's range. That said, there's a lot of potential for comfortable wearables replacing a phone in your pocket for many purposes. We tolerate carrying wallets everywhere just as we tolerated carrying wallets and keys everywhere because that's just the way things are. But it doesn't need to be that way forever. I have a lot of questions about how AR will progress. I can imagine having essentially a high fidelity HUD but I'm not sure either how close we are to enabling something like that technically and how hard it will be to get mainstream consumers over the Glasshole effect of having omnipresent connected video (or maybe even if they should get over it).
CrackerNews 7y ago
Like AR, the future of VR mainstream adoption is in self-contained standalone independent devices. John Carmack of Oculus mentioned that user retention for the mobile snapon Gear VR was only one or two uses before never using again. There's too much friction for the common masses to get into VR that way. Hence the Note 10 dropping support for Gear VR and Carmack giving a "eulogy" for the device and Oculus focusing on the Go and Quest (with the Rift remaining for enthusiasts). The Quest has been far more successful than the Rift ever was due to its standalone nature for compelling VR experiences. (game developers could have made up to 3-4x more sales on Quest compared to the Rift) Apple has to make AR standalone. Smartwatches faced flack for not initially being standalone for being so expensive. While it did become more and more standalone, it still isn't a compelling use scenario for the masses to go out and spend that money. AR could have more promise than what Google Glass had, but it would have to be far more compelling than what the masses can already get from their iPhones. As a point of comparison, VR right now is within 1% of the entire Steam population, which is then a fraction of the world's masses. There's interest but people at large aren't biting yet for various reasons. Apple's AR could end up in a similar situation where it would be nice to have but remains out of reach.

ghaff 7y ago

A lot depends on use cases. I, on the other hand, got an Apple Watch with a data plan and I canceled the plan because I never used it outside of my phone's range. That said, there's a lot of potential for comfortable wearables replacing a phone in your pocket for many purposes. We tolerate carrying wallets everywhere just as we tolerated carrying wallets and keys everywhere because that's just the way things are. But it doesn't need to be that way forever. I have a lot of questions about how AR will progress. I can imagine having essentially a high fidelity HUD but I'm not sure either how close we are to enabling something like that technically and how hard it will be to get mainstream consumers over the Glasshole effect of having omnipresent connected video (or maybe even if they should get over it).

CrackerNews 7y ago

Like AR, the future of VR mainstream adoption is in self-contained standalone independent devices. John Carmack of Oculus mentioned that user retention for the mobile snapon Gear VR was only one or two uses before never using again. There's too much friction for the common masses to get into VR that way. Hence the Note 10 dropping support for Gear VR and Carmack giving a "eulogy" for the device and Oculus focusing on the Go and Quest (with the Rift remaining for enthusiasts). The Quest has been far more successful than the Rift ever was due to its standalone nature for compelling VR experiences. (game developers could have made up to 3-4x more sales on Quest compared to the Rift) Apple has to make AR standalone. Smartwatches faced flack for not initially being standalone for being so expensive. While it did become more and more standalone, it still isn't a compelling use scenario for the masses to go out and spend that money. AR could have more promise than what Google Glass had, but it would have to be far more compelling than what the masses can already get from their iPhones. As a point of comparison, VR right now is within 1% of the entire Steam population, which is then a fraction of the world's masses. There's interest but people at large aren't biting yet for various reasons. Apple's AR could end up in a similar situation where it would be nice to have but remains out of reach.