23 ms·

Apple is building the metaverse substrate

206 points by grork 5y ago

dangus 5y ago
Some of the ideas in the article make a lot of sense in the context of AR, specifically the parts about on-device Siri and Spatial Audio. However…I’m sorry, the article as a whole just leaves me with the taste of Apple butt-licking. So many of these parts of this “metaverse” are typical recurring revenue and ecosystem lock-in encouragements. Find My: Let’s sell some high profit margin trackers and keychains. SharePlay: let’s sell more TV+ subscriptions. Universal Control: platform lock-in: make you question using a Windows desktop instead of an iMac if you already own an iPad. Spatial Audio: sell more headphones Notes features: sell more News+ subscriptions, more vendor lock-in. ShazamKit: data mine advertising info. Yes, Apple has ad platforms, and with each passing day their business model creeps closer and closer to Google’s (e.g., When they inevitably drop Yelp in favor of their own review system, or if they launch their own search engine) (Apple can still mine data and use it to sell you things and understand what you’re likely to buy even if they “respect” your privacy and leave all the data on-device. They can still get you to click an affiliate link or buy an app without leaving the realm of on-device ML. And remember that Apple’s marketing is not the same as their documented privacy policy.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  This is the most biased take on useful platform differentiating features I’ve ever seen.
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    Meh, I think that's not out of line with how other vendors (e.g. Google) are treated here right now.
  - SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
    Indeed, it’s totally nuts to suggest that the world’s most capitalized company might be focused on revenue growth instead of the “metaverse substrate”.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Heh, I'd say at least Apple is differentiating... Google: GMail -> Let's sell some ads Android -> Let's sell some ads Android Auto -> How can we put ads in cars? YouTube -> How can we show people more video ads? Search -> Let's sell some ads. Google Music -> Did this sell enough ads? If not lets rebrand it and try to sell more ads. etc. Anyway, not a slight against Google, but you can do this with any large company probably. I'm not sure how meaningful it is.
- robertoandred 5y ago
  Oh please describe all of these Apple ad platforms.
  - dangus 5y ago
    Sure! https://searchads.apple.com/ https://searchads.apple.com/ https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-author-ex-facebook-antonio-garcia-martinez-2021-5?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-au... The App Store has sponsored apps. Apple News has ads in the app, before you click on any articles. Apple Music/iTunes Store/Books has promoted artists/albums/movies/TV. It’s unclear whether any of these are paid promotions by the content producer but they’re in a banner so I have to assume Apple gets something out of it. Apple Podcasts also has a featured section, likely paid ads. And, as I mentioned, it’s extremely likely that Apple is working on a replacement for Yelp for Apple Maps, which will potentially be a big source of revenue. And of course, there are ads for Apple’s own in-house TV+ content. Not an ad network, but if they know what you like they can better promote their TV shows. By default the TV app sends random push notifications. The more Apple gets into content the more knowing your personality and interests is important to their business model.
    - robertoandred 5y ago
      So… one search “platform”, which is just app ads in the store. Ok.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
This very light grey text on white background = almost unreadable. (Firefox 89 on linux) https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/
- piinbinary 5y ago
  Interestingly, the background is black for me in Chrome, and white in Firefox (both under macOS)
  - ezekg 5y ago
    Almost seems like Chrome has some default styles for dark mode, such as a black background on <body>. Edit: TIL about the color-scheme (draft) CSS property. FF doesn't support it.
  - 00jimbo 5y ago
    similarly, it renders light on black/dark grey for me in safari.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Reader mode to the rescue! It is almost the default way I consume most blogs and news sites, reading experience is so much better!
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    Same here. I use it on every other website and it's just great.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Something is screwy with the dark-mode CSS.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    Yep, it's fine unless you use a dark mode, in which case it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/7XwxrSb.png https://i.imgur.com/7XwxrSb.png If you're not using dark mode, it's #EBEBEB on #121212, which has plenty of contrast: https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23EBEBEB-on-%23121212 https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23EBEBEB-on-%23121212 If you're using dark mode, it doesn't simply do nothing, which would be the reasonable approach with those colors, it gives you that light gray text on #FFFFFF pure white background. It's basically the opposite of dark mode.
theonlybutlet 5y ago
The ramp up in the use of the term 'meta' for everything over the past few months makes me cringe.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Well, 'metaverse', here, comes from 1992's Snow Crash and has been in use for nearly 30 years. Not really just the past few months.
- Animats 5y ago
  If this is correct, Apple's vision is that in the future, all their customers will be glassholes. They could be right. I never expected people would walk around wearing iDweebs, those silly headphones.
Animats 5y ago
This is the feature set needed for Hyperreality.[1] Which is hell with interactive overlays. AppClips. Drive-by installs. What could possibly go wrong? [1] https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
- walterlb 5y ago
  Hell is exactly how I would describe this. Well-made, cool video though!
- asadlionpk 5y ago
  This is what Android equivalent would look like.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Fantastic video, thanks for linking it. And I'm in 100% agreement.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Something that's dawned on me for the last few years is that Microsoft basically settled on the idea that the modern operating system is effectively done, which I suppose is true, but then they stopped creating technologies to build on top of Windows all together. It was as if they said, OK, here's the supermarket, now vendors, create stuff and we'll stock the shelves. Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game developer is targeting the web. Which means the best software you're going to get for Windows that isn't long-lived incumbent software like Creative Cloud is going to be... over Google Chrome (or Microsoft Edge). OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great, integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great Windows is. But they don't. I have mixed feelings about this, because when Apple does it, they basically put people out of business. But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows. And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is going to be so much more. And they already are so much more. For those who haven't experienced it yet, or can't afford Apple products, they're missing something that just hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time I can immediately think of. Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so great. The lattermost is probably more likely.
- yellowfish 5y ago
  > Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so > great. The latter most is probably more likely. Isn't Microsoft already shipping AR headsets to the US Army? if anything they are the leaders in the space anyway, as far as "Metaverse" goes I'd argue we already have multiple and the presentation layer is just gradually changing
- nextstep 5y ago
  >> Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game developer is targeting the web. What? Even your example (Creative Cloud) has an iOS and iPadOS app.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Sorry, to clarify, anyone targetting Windows users, is probably only doing so by proxy, because there's no compelling reason to create a first-class Windows desktop application over just a web app.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
meh99 5y ago
Apple makes the idea of Plan9 viable using wireless technology and smart protocols.
Ankintol 5y ago
Slightly adjacent to the article, I don't think Apple cares all that much about the AR metaverse/ecosystem. My own prediction, using many of the same data points as the author, is that Apple is trying to create a suite of features that act as a sort of Software Personal Assistant. For years Apple has consistently put in better sensors and larger TPUs than strictly necessary for the expected lifetime of the device. We're already seeing some of the results of this with the Health app. Apple understands the profit potential of platforms, so they'll make some of the data that enables these features to App Developers and that in turn may enable AR, but I doubt any Apple executives are seriously focused on bringing AR capabilities to developers.
- dwhitney 5y ago
  I hope you're wrong. I understand that the technology for the dream that "Google Glasses" was selling isn't quite there, but I hope Apple has a research team moving closer and closer to it.
  - Ankintol 5y ago
    They may still make that, but I suspect developers will not have full access to the full power of the platform. A thought I should have fleshed out in the above post: the kind of sensor data that enables AR can also be used to deduce a great deal of personal information[0]. With Apple taking a strong position on privacy I suspect they will make only a limited subset of data available to developers. [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332386880_Privacy_Implications_of_Accelerometer_Data_A_Review_of_Possible_Inferences https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332386880_Privacy_I...
    - zepto 5y ago
      > I suspect they will err on the side of hiding this data from developers. More likely, they will allow developers some mechanisms for leveraging the data on device, without being able to exfiltrate it.
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
Is this just a fancy/confusing of way of saying “Apple is building an AR ecosystem”?
- SamBam 5y ago
  And is the "AR ecosystem" the "metaverse" or the "metaverse substrate?"
- ronyfadel 5y ago
  Yes. Apple could be building AR/VR hardware, but if you’re convinced they are, then you’ll start to mentally force everything they publish as a building block for said hardware.
- grork 5y ago
  It is a kinda fancy / highfalutin way of saying that. Partly because the article is intended to be somewhat pithy. But splitting it into layers (say, substrate) helped me think about the parts involved, how they needed to build upon the layer below, and work together to have a chance of pulling it off.
rektide 5y ago
Apple's Bluetooth-LE tags don't seem to be mentioned but to me this is one of the most notable beachheads for Apple to mix the metaverse with physical reality. we still don't see a ton of uses, but there's something super enticing about being able to casually discover digital things amid the physical. I'm not surprised good adoption has been slow, that we don't have a ton of neat use cases to wow people, but also: I was shocked as heck to see Google retreat from their open standards competitor, Physical Web/Eddystone. Apple also makes good use of Bluetooth for airdrop & wifi password sharing, something else google is light-years behind in. Good writeup, interesting, even if it seems a bit (quite) oversold to me. Makes me think of Benjamin Bratton's The Stack, the many tiers that compose the digital.
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  That was touched on in the "Find My" section.
  - rektide 5y ago
    > “Find My”-style devices will help tighten up the mapping of the physical world to enable augmentation — really this is part of the platform substrate, but the same tech underlies a key bridge between physical and virtual. The section has good stuff in it, but to me it came off as me-centric, as about high end experiences like VR, accurate spatial systems. And that feels like it's a very different piece of the platform than what I was talking about, which is beacons that we can leave for each other. Getting to a bar & having the menu advertise itself. Art installs that come with interesting mini-sites on the browser, or which are cross-media. QR codes are the closest thing we have today, but QR codes require very explicit intent to use, and I've long been interested in the promise of more ambient computing, of seeing the numerous micro- / edge- clouds about me, & seeing what they might offer. I didn't get any of that from the Find My. I'm looking for Find Your, I guess. Or Share Mine. Which Physical Web did, which Apple's iBeacons continue to do.
jccalhoun 5y ago
Apple keeps trying to make AR a thing. Bless their heart...
- SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
  Bless their heart, and their $204b in cash, and their team of 1000+ engineers dedicated to AR.
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - shirhan 5y ago
    I learned Apple keeps trying to make AR a thing, but it's not a thing.
tomc1985 5y ago
Can someone please define 'metaverse' in the context of... whatever this article is about? Like jfc people, 'End users will experience the metaverse through the default device delivered experience.' sounds like the most doublespeakiest doublespeak ever to have been written. I love tech and this lofty shit makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Speak plainly and simply, folks.
- slver 5y ago
  Basically bunch of wanking about futuristic AR sci-fi technology that the author has decided to accept as proven to be coming, but actually isn't. See flying cars 20 years ago.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I assume it's a reference, at least in part, to the virtual reality world in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
  - OedipusRex 5y ago
    Which is where this falls apart. In the book the Metaverse is basically a completely novel location in “VR”. If we’re pursuing a Metaverse, VR Chat is closer to a Metaverse than Apple.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  It's right there in the first paragraph: "I’ve been less sure they understood the full scope needed to build a compelling AR ecosystem – a metaverse."
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    I saw that, and the definition still says nothing. Ok, so a metaverse is somehow the realization of the "full scope" needed for a compelling AR ecosystem? And what exactly does that mean, and how does that define this particular usage of the (heavily overloaded) term 'metaverse'? Meta meaning 'about', so a universe about a universe? edit/ugh: googling the term says 'a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.' Like wtf does that have to do with the meta root word here? There is far too much abstraction in this vocabulary defining a thing that is very real.
vincent-toups 5y ago
I'm really looking forward to not engaging with any of this stuff at all!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
th3h4mm3r 5y ago
Marketing buzzwords.
streamofdigits 5y ago
The curious thing about the past, present and future of AR... if there was low hanging fruit (in terms of irresistible applications) that people must absolutely have, love at first "sight" experiences, wouldn't it have happened already? with whatever crude software and hardware? Not as a gimmick but as persistent interest and investment[0]. People got busy with computers when computers were the size of houses. They carried mobile phones when phones were the size of suitcases. Is the proto-AR revolution happening somewhere out there without anybody noticing? Its possible that there is no low hanging AR fruit. That somebody has to do the difficult job of climbing up the AR tree so to speak (refine the technology until it feels like magic). It just seems that this would be an exception in how things played out so far in the "digital transformation" journey. Its the nature of the human brain to fill-in the gaps and overlook the rough edges when it really has an incentive to do so. [0] investment in the sense of personal time by users, creators, business people etc to really learn and use the technology to scratch whatever itch they found it is scratching...
- greggman3 5y ago
  there is no low hanging fruit. For AR to really work so many things need to happen. For one, it arguably requires even more CPU/GPU than VR because unlike current phones and current VR you really want ALL the apps to run concurrently in AR. You want your social media app to show the names and or interests of the people around you. You want your mapping app to show you directions. You want your restaurant app to point out which restaurants have seats available or a low waiting time and price / cuisine / style. You want your virtual pet to run around your feet and body, you want to see each person's virtual fashion, you want your virtual monitors showing your older 2d apps running, you want your virtual cooking instructions and while sometimes you'll want to turn down one app over another, usually you'll want many running at the same time highlighting different things. You can even argue you want the various apps to share 3d spacial data (sans privacy issues) so your virtual pet can interact with your friend's virtual pet and the virtual furniture they have placed in their house via some furniture app. one app at a time is just not good enough for the general population to get iPhone level interested in AR. Getting full view glasses with fast enough depth sensing so things can be correctly occluded and run all apps simalutainiously and have the batteries last all day seems many years away
kyle-rb 5y ago
Some of this stuff is cool, and I can see how it might fit together (although I doubt half of it will pan out). But some of it just seems like nothing. The Shazam stuff seems very limited in use case, and I'm annoyed at "AppClips" because they should just be websites. Notes+Spotlight+Shared with you all seem like they're inventing new paradigms to avoid ever adding a user file system on iOS, since Apple is opposed to that. It's possible that those new paradigms will be great, but I think they'd be better if Apple gave up a little control.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files_(Apple) That's existed for 4 years. A user file system is effectively available on iOS, even if it's not exactly what you might expect coming from a desktop OS.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  AppClips and AR actually fit together really well. If a museum, theatre or other space has an AR app, it’ll be a lot smoother to get people to use it if they just have to tap their phone on a thing and then hit “OK”. Then when they leave the venue and no longer need it it’s gone.
lazyfuture 5y ago
Are you out of your ducking mind? Sent from my iPhone
mncharity 5y ago
> SwiftUI [...] doesn’t feel like an AR platform component (Where’s the third dimension?). I'm unfamiliar with SwiftUI, but fwiw, I found the extensions needed for CSS3D to support AR to be surprisingly small. A few years back, having a custom browser-based VR stack with passthrough AR, I sketched a talk for the BostonVR meetup, to give around April Fools. It would have purported to be an introductory onboarding demo, of newly available CSS3D extensions for AR. With support for placement in realspace, billboards, HUD overlays, integrated multiple displays, position aware and 3D displays. The extension needed was surprisingly minor. The talk would have been basically "introductory CSS positioning, in a slightly enriched context", which I expected to be quite believable, followed by a "surprise! - the making of the demo spike". I don't quite remember why it didn't happen. > 2(.5)D experiences Shallow-3D UIs seemingly have a lot of potential, but don't get much discussion. Meta: I wish HN discussions around AR were of higher quality. It's be clear for years that Apple was pursing this. Being unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, I'd have liked to see more discussion of what those pieces and their characteristics might suggest about the future. Or for instance, of whether Apple is doing any CEP complex event processing, or retraction of app state changes, to support input with diverse latencies.
- grork 5y ago
  Shallow 3D definitely has a lot of potential. Not everything needs to be ILM effects - even in the long term. Sometimes buttons & text are all you need.
  - mncharity 5y ago
    > Sometimes buttons & text are all you need. And most displays have some privileged focus depth(s). Vergence-accommodation conflict, and eye strain from long use, can be reduced by staying close to that. Ahem, and as my eyes have grown old, the annulus where I can focus well has narrowed. And maybe, it might be possible to have text in layers, close enough to avoid vergence-accommodation conflict eye strain, but far enough to be tolerably readable, and ideally to allow eye tracking to determine which layer is being read. I was layering a keyboard-cam-with-annotations over desktop for a bit, to see the kbd in an HMD, but also to explore "graphic artist looking at screen containing processed view of tablet input"-like UX for software dev. The layered clutter was somewhat annoying, so I'm unclear on viability, but it did seem intriguing. Also, "shallow" still permits some depth. A cm or few at 50 cm (laptop screen) seemed comfortable for me (for some limited frequency of focus switching, and I've only a little experience, and ymmv). That's depth enough for more than buttons and text, but still a very different design regime than "fill the room with XR UI". ILM effects, hmm... someday I'd like to find a stereo drone straight-down view of beach surf, shallow but 3D, to use as desktop background. :) Maybe.
narrator 5y ago
The funny thing about Apple is how people confabulate mythical powers to it. I can't wait for Apple iTulpa[1]. Jokes aside. What is the mission statement here, what is the dream? Make you never want to interact with the real world again? Help you manage your to do list better? I feel there was much more of a mission statement for mobile back when everyone was stuck on public transit and at the office for hours every day. You could finally make your life on transit and at the office more meaningful by integrating your personal life with that through your phone. What's the dream now? I don't get where all this is going unless it's like you're never going to leave your house again, so escape into VR. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
- nexuist 5y ago
  At least for me the dream is not having to have information gatekept by the location and size of a screen. With glasses apps can be as tall and as wide as you want them to be, and many apps won't need traditional UI at all because they can just overlay their information over real world objects. Anything that currently has a paper label or barcode in the real world, could be a candidate for an AR app that helps users find stuff quicker. And rather than having to look through aisles or buildings to get to what you want, you could just use a search bar or virtual assistant to look up the thing you want and get a persistent marker to its exact location. Basically just imagine the kind of UI a video game presents to a player, and how a well executed UI blends in subconsciously to the point that you can navigate menus and issue commands without having to think of it. Now imagine that experience but overlayed over real life, where an app can help you remember someone's name or birthday as they approach and you can take a note with your location and current view attached to it. Something as silly as "funny car" while looking at the funny car, or as serious as telling the nurse after your shift where the patient's pain point is.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
>> SwiftUI is getting more capable with every release, and appears to be the long-term UI platform for apple. It also isn’t just about ‘below the glass’ experiences. SwiftUI 2 is so much better. I am taking a 50 hour course, and spent a few hours hacking this morning. So much better than when I tried it 14 months ago. Spacial Audio works really well. They are probably using something called Head Related Transfer Functions, which I used at my company’s VR lab in the mid-1990s. The example AR Swift Playgrounds examples are also pretty cool. I agree with the general premise of the article!
nottorp 5y ago
Technobabble aside, I'm betting the battery life on the Apple Glasses will be as bad as on the Apple Watch or worse. And people with prescription glasses won't be able to afford the Apple Prescription(tm) anyway.
titanomachy 5y ago
> Device-local speech recognition is fundamental to AR — we can’t tap our feet & twiddle our thumbs while we wait for a round-trip to the cloud to conclude how to handle “Group these five items, and remember them for next week when I’m at the office” I'm not convinced that this is true. Round-trip latency has gotten a lot lower, especially if you take edge computing into account. 20-30ms round-trip is not unusual. If your mic feed is being streamed in real-time, and the program is able to achieve a high-confidence prediction at (or before) the moment you finish speaking, I think it should be possible to deliver an experience that feels instantaneous, at least for users with cutting-edge connectivity. For visual interactions, 100ms feels instantaneous; I bet tolerance for spoken interactions is even higher.
zelon88 5y ago
This guy is way too excited. He's thinking he's gonna get Cyberpunk 2077 but in reality he's getting a combo of Wall-E and The Final Cut.
- grork 5y ago
  I both welcome, and fear, my floating armchair to take me on my doomed Buy-n-Large interstellar mission! I wouldn’t say /too/ excited. Maybe ‘had his brain pulling a Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia with that Pepe Silvia meme thing’.
ryanmarsh 5y ago
The conclusion almost followed the points except for one major failure of imagination: VR. Apple will release a VR product but it can only do so after the migration to Apple Silicon. Anyone familiar with M1 performance and VR games on Intel will immediately see why. Did anyone else notice/remember what specific use case Apple touted for the the newest generation of Mac Pro? VR content creation. Very resource hungry. Apple can't release the VR device we know they could, without giving content creators the tools. What makes VR more than just a gaming product? Giving everyone with an Apple laptop the ability to create content for a meta verse. You might be thinking Ready Player One, I'm thinking more like a better Roblox. There's massive ARR potential in a VR metaverse ecosystem where everyone can be a content creator / inhabitant. Apple is the only company that could put it all together and make it work from soup to nuts.
chrismsimpson 5y ago
Interesting take, but SwiftUI and Combine are really bad. They claim ‘functional programming’, but there’s so much (leaky) magic involved. The sub par automatic code generation yields slow and laggy experiences. I don’t think Apple has any plan to improve this beyond ironing out obvious bugs and waiting for natural performance yields to kick in. It is bad enough that it reminds me of Carbon and the related legion of missteps that hurt Apple badly some 20 years ago and pissed off a lot of loyal developers. Honestly, SwiftUI combined with Apples now complete market dominance is enough to make me reconsider my career path. Just because they’re so big doesn’t mean they can do no wrong and several of their recent technologies have been regressive.
- nexuist 5y ago
  I am curious why you have such a low opinion of SwiftUI, most third party developers I have heard from are eager to drop Storyboards and switch immediately. The magic involved is not really magic at all, just Swift syntax sugar. Nothing about SwiftUI is proprietary, you can make your own SwiftUI variant by copy and pasting its code. It's just another library after all. Granted, some Swift features do seem like they were explicitly granted to make SwiftUI prettier, but it's not like you can't use those features in your own code or libraries too.
  - chrismsimpson 5y ago
    It’s not just syntax sugar. There is a lot of compile time code generation running behind the scenes. It also means there’s a lot of hidden determinism where there didn’t used to be. Storyboards were rubbish, I agree, but SwiftUI is more fundamental. Apple is abandoning the PostScript model which permeates every graphical computing paradigm (WinForms, GTK, Qt etc.), and if you don’t like programming with cotton gloves on, you’re basically not welcome. All very much a shame from my point of view, because UIKit is easily the most powerful UI toolkit around. It’ll be interesting to see how long third parties will continue to be able link against it directly.
dng88 5y ago
Guess the mindful Apple Watch is another direction
Ono-Sendai 5y ago
Author seems confused about what a metaverse is. Here's my attempt at actually building a metaverse substrate: https://substrata.info/ https://substrata.info/
germinalphrase 5y ago
Anyone aware of any good podcasts about AR/VR?

206 points by grork 5y ago

Some of the ideas in the article make a lot of sense in the context of AR, specifically the parts about on-device Siri and Spatial Audio. However…I’m sorry, the article as a whole just leaves me with the taste of Apple butt-licking. So many of these parts of this “metaverse” are typical recurring revenue and ecosystem lock-in encouragements. Find My: Let’s sell some high profit margin trackers and keychains. SharePlay: let’s sell more TV+ subscriptions. Universal Control: platform lock-in: make you question using a Windows desktop instead of an iMac if you already own an iPad. Spatial Audio: sell more headphones Notes features: sell more News+ subscriptions, more vendor lock-in. ShazamKit: data mine advertising info. Yes, Apple has ad platforms, and with each passing day their business model creeps closer and closer to Google’s (e.g., When they inevitably drop Yelp in favor of their own review system, or if they launch their own search engine) (Apple can still mine data and use it to sell you things and understand what you’re likely to buy even if they “respect” your privacy and leave all the data on-device. They can still get you to click an affiliate link or buy an app without leaving the realm of on-device ML. And remember that Apple’s marketing is not the same as their documented privacy policy.

imwillofficial 5y ago
This is the most biased take on useful platform differentiating features I’ve ever seen.
- lallysingh 5y ago
  Meh, I think that's not out of line with how other vendors (e.g. Google) are treated here right now.
- SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
  Indeed, it’s totally nuts to suggest that the world’s most capitalized company might be focused on revenue growth instead of the “metaverse substrate”.
ericmay 5y ago
Heh, I'd say at least Apple is differentiating... Google: GMail -> Let's sell some ads Android -> Let's sell some ads Android Auto -> How can we put ads in cars? YouTube -> How can we show people more video ads? Search -> Let's sell some ads. Google Music -> Did this sell enough ads? If not lets rebrand it and try to sell more ads. etc. Anyway, not a slight against Google, but you can do this with any large company probably. I'm not sure how meaningful it is.
robertoandred 5y ago
Oh please describe all of these Apple ad platforms.
- dangus 5y ago
  Sure! https://searchads.apple.com/ https://searchads.apple.com/ https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-author-ex-facebook-antonio-garcia-martinez-2021-5?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-au... The App Store has sponsored apps. Apple News has ads in the app, before you click on any articles. Apple Music/iTunes Store/Books has promoted artists/albums/movies/TV. It’s unclear whether any of these are paid promotions by the content producer but they’re in a banner so I have to assume Apple gets something out of it. Apple Podcasts also has a featured section, likely paid ads. And, as I mentioned, it’s extremely likely that Apple is working on a replacement for Yelp for Apple Maps, which will potentially be a big source of revenue. And of course, there are ads for Apple’s own in-house TV+ content. Not an ad network, but if they know what you like they can better promote their TV shows. By default the TV app sends random push notifications. The more Apple gets into content the more knowing your personality and interests is important to their business model.
  - robertoandred 5y ago
    So… one search “platform”, which is just app ads in the store. Ok.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

This very light grey text on white background = almost unreadable. (Firefox 89 on linux) https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/

piinbinary 5y ago
Interestingly, the background is black for me in Chrome, and white in Firefox (both under macOS)
- ezekg 5y ago
  Almost seems like Chrome has some default styles for dark mode, such as a black background on <body>. Edit: TIL about the color-scheme (draft) CSS property. FF doesn't support it.
- 00jimbo 5y ago
  similarly, it renders light on black/dark grey for me in safari.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Reader mode to the rescue! It is almost the default way I consume most blogs and news sites, reading experience is so much better!
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Same here. I use it on every other website and it's just great.
Freak_NL 5y ago
Something is screwy with the dark-mode CSS.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  Yep, it's fine unless you use a dark mode, in which case it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/7XwxrSb.png https://i.imgur.com/7XwxrSb.png If you're not using dark mode, it's #EBEBEB on #121212, which has plenty of contrast: https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23EBEBEB-on-%23121212 https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23EBEBEB-on-%23121212 If you're using dark mode, it doesn't simply do nothing, which would be the reasonable approach with those colors, it gives you that light gray text on #FFFFFF pure white background. It's basically the opposite of dark mode.

theonlybutlet 5y ago

The ramp up in the use of the term 'meta' for everything over the past few months makes me cringe.

Jtsummers 5y ago
Well, 'metaverse', here, comes from 1992's Snow Crash and has been in use for nearly 30 years. Not really just the past few months.
Animats 5y ago
If this is correct, Apple's vision is that in the future, all their customers will be glassholes. They could be right. I never expected people would walk around wearing iDweebs, those silly headphones.

Animats 5y ago

This is the feature set needed for Hyperreality.[1] Which is hell with interactive overlays. AppClips. Drive-by installs. What could possibly go wrong? [1] https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs

walterlb 5y ago
Hell is exactly how I would describe this. Well-made, cool video though!
asadlionpk 5y ago
This is what Android equivalent would look like.
npteljes 5y ago
Fantastic video, thanks for linking it. And I'm in 100% agreement.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Something that's dawned on me for the last few years is that Microsoft basically settled on the idea that the modern operating system is effectively done, which I suppose is true, but then they stopped creating technologies to build on top of Windows all together. It was as if they said, OK, here's the supermarket, now vendors, create stuff and we'll stock the shelves. Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game developer is targeting the web. Which means the best software you're going to get for Windows that isn't long-lived incumbent software like Creative Cloud is going to be... over Google Chrome (or Microsoft Edge). OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great, integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great Windows is. But they don't. I have mixed feelings about this, because when Apple does it, they basically put people out of business. But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows. And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is going to be so much more. And they already are so much more. For those who haven't experienced it yet, or can't afford Apple products, they're missing something that just hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time I can immediately think of. Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so great. The lattermost is probably more likely.

yellowfish 5y ago
> Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so > great. The latter most is probably more likely. Isn't Microsoft already shipping AR headsets to the US Army? if anything they are the leaders in the space anyway, as far as "Metaverse" goes I'd argue we already have multiple and the presentation layer is just gradually changing
nextstep 5y ago
>> Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game developer is targeting the web. What? Even your example (Creative Cloud) has an iOS and iPadOS app.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Sorry, to clarify, anyone targetting Windows users, is probably only doing so by proxy, because there's no compelling reason to create a first-class Windows desktop application over just a web app.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

meh99 5y ago

Apple makes the idea of Plan9 viable using wireless technology and smart protocols.

Ankintol 5y ago

Slightly adjacent to the article, I don't think Apple cares all that much about the AR metaverse/ecosystem. My own prediction, using many of the same data points as the author, is that Apple is trying to create a suite of features that act as a sort of Software Personal Assistant. For years Apple has consistently put in better sensors and larger TPUs than strictly necessary for the expected lifetime of the device. We're already seeing some of the results of this with the Health app. Apple understands the profit potential of platforms, so they'll make some of the data that enables these features to App Developers and that in turn may enable AR, but I doubt any Apple executives are seriously focused on bringing AR capabilities to developers.

dwhitney 5y ago
I hope you're wrong. I understand that the technology for the dream that "Google Glasses" was selling isn't quite there, but I hope Apple has a research team moving closer and closer to it.
- Ankintol 5y ago
  They may still make that, but I suspect developers will not have full access to the full power of the platform. A thought I should have fleshed out in the above post: the kind of sensor data that enables AR can also be used to deduce a great deal of personal information[0]. With Apple taking a strong position on privacy I suspect they will make only a limited subset of data available to developers. [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332386880_Privacy_Implications_of_Accelerometer_Data_A_Review_of_Possible_Inferences https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332386880_Privacy_I...
  - zepto 5y ago
    > I suspect they will err on the side of hiding this data from developers. More likely, they will allow developers some mechanisms for leveraging the data on device, without being able to exfiltrate it.
- dodobirdlord 5y ago

SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago

Is this just a fancy/confusing of way of saying “Apple is building an AR ecosystem”?

SamBam 5y ago
And is the "AR ecosystem" the "metaverse" or the "metaverse substrate?"
ronyfadel 5y ago
Yes. Apple could be building AR/VR hardware, but if you’re convinced they are, then you’ll start to mentally force everything they publish as a building block for said hardware.
grork 5y ago
It is a kinda fancy / highfalutin way of saying that. Partly because the article is intended to be somewhat pithy. But splitting it into layers (say, substrate) helped me think about the parts involved, how they needed to build upon the layer below, and work together to have a chance of pulling it off.

rektide 5y ago

Apple's Bluetooth-LE tags don't seem to be mentioned but to me this is one of the most notable beachheads for Apple to mix the metaverse with physical reality. we still don't see a ton of uses, but there's something super enticing about being able to casually discover digital things amid the physical. I'm not surprised good adoption has been slow, that we don't have a ton of neat use cases to wow people, but also: I was shocked as heck to see Google retreat from their open standards competitor, Physical Web/Eddystone. Apple also makes good use of Bluetooth for airdrop & wifi password sharing, something else google is light-years behind in. Good writeup, interesting, even if it seems a bit (quite) oversold to me. Makes me think of Benjamin Bratton's The Stack, the many tiers that compose the digital.

RandallBrown 5y ago
That was touched on in the "Find My" section.
- rektide 5y ago
  > “Find My”-style devices will help tighten up the mapping of the physical world to enable augmentation — really this is part of the platform substrate, but the same tech underlies a key bridge between physical and virtual. The section has good stuff in it, but to me it came off as me-centric, as about high end experiences like VR, accurate spatial systems. And that feels like it's a very different piece of the platform than what I was talking about, which is beacons that we can leave for each other. Getting to a bar & having the menu advertise itself. Art installs that come with interesting mini-sites on the browser, or which are cross-media. QR codes are the closest thing we have today, but QR codes require very explicit intent to use, and I've long been interested in the promise of more ambient computing, of seeing the numerous micro- / edge- clouds about me, & seeing what they might offer. I didn't get any of that from the Find My. I'm looking for Find Your, I guess. Or Share Mine. Which Physical Web did, which Apple's iBeacons continue to do.

jccalhoun 5y ago

Apple keeps trying to make AR a thing. Bless their heart...

SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
Bless their heart, and their $204b in cash, and their team of 1000+ engineers dedicated to AR.
dang 5y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- shirhan 5y ago
  I learned Apple keeps trying to make AR a thing, but it's not a thing.

tomc1985 5y ago

Can someone please define 'metaverse' in the context of... whatever this article is about? Like jfc people, 'End users will experience the metaverse through the default device delivered experience.' sounds like the most doublespeakiest doublespeak ever to have been written. I love tech and this lofty shit makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Speak plainly and simply, folks.

slver 5y ago
Basically bunch of wanking about futuristic AR sci-fi technology that the author has decided to accept as proven to be coming, but actually isn't. See flying cars 20 years ago.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
I assume it's a reference, at least in part, to the virtual reality world in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
- OedipusRex 5y ago
  Which is where this falls apart. In the book the Metaverse is basically a completely novel location in “VR”. If we’re pursuing a Metaverse, VR Chat is closer to a Metaverse than Apple.
mikepurvis 5y ago
It's right there in the first paragraph: "I’ve been less sure they understood the full scope needed to build a compelling AR ecosystem – a metaverse."
- tomc1985 5y ago
  I saw that, and the definition still says nothing. Ok, so a metaverse is somehow the realization of the "full scope" needed for a compelling AR ecosystem? And what exactly does that mean, and how does that define this particular usage of the (heavily overloaded) term 'metaverse'? Meta meaning 'about', so a universe about a universe? edit/ugh: googling the term says 'a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.' Like wtf does that have to do with the meta root word here? There is far too much abstraction in this vocabulary defining a thing that is very real.

vincent-toups 5y ago

I'm really looking forward to not engaging with any of this stuff at all!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

th3h4mm3r 5y ago

Marketing buzzwords.

streamofdigits 5y ago

The curious thing about the past, present and future of AR... if there was low hanging fruit (in terms of irresistible applications) that people must absolutely have, love at first "sight" experiences, wouldn't it have happened already? with whatever crude software and hardware? Not as a gimmick but as persistent interest and investment[0]. People got busy with computers when computers were the size of houses. They carried mobile phones when phones were the size of suitcases. Is the proto-AR revolution happening somewhere out there without anybody noticing? Its possible that there is no low hanging AR fruit. That somebody has to do the difficult job of climbing up the AR tree so to speak (refine the technology until it feels like magic). It just seems that this would be an exception in how things played out so far in the "digital transformation" journey. Its the nature of the human brain to fill-in the gaps and overlook the rough edges when it really has an incentive to do so. [0] investment in the sense of personal time by users, creators, business people etc to really learn and use the technology to scratch whatever itch they found it is scratching...

greggman3 5y ago
there is no low hanging fruit. For AR to really work so many things need to happen. For one, it arguably requires even more CPU/GPU than VR because unlike current phones and current VR you really want ALL the apps to run concurrently in AR. You want your social media app to show the names and or interests of the people around you. You want your mapping app to show you directions. You want your restaurant app to point out which restaurants have seats available or a low waiting time and price / cuisine / style. You want your virtual pet to run around your feet and body, you want to see each person's virtual fashion, you want your virtual monitors showing your older 2d apps running, you want your virtual cooking instructions and while sometimes you'll want to turn down one app over another, usually you'll want many running at the same time highlighting different things. You can even argue you want the various apps to share 3d spacial data (sans privacy issues) so your virtual pet can interact with your friend's virtual pet and the virtual furniture they have placed in their house via some furniture app. one app at a time is just not good enough for the general population to get iPhone level interested in AR. Getting full view glasses with fast enough depth sensing so things can be correctly occluded and run all apps simalutainiously and have the batteries last all day seems many years away

kyle-rb 5y ago

Some of this stuff is cool, and I can see how it might fit together (although I doubt half of it will pan out). But some of it just seems like nothing. The Shazam stuff seems very limited in use case, and I'm annoyed at "AppClips" because they should just be websites. Notes+Spotlight+Shared with you all seem like they're inventing new paradigms to avoid ever adding a user file system on iOS, since Apple is opposed to that. It's possible that those new paradigms will be great, but I think they'd be better if Apple gave up a little control.

Jtsummers 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files_(Apple) That's existed for 4 years. A user file system is effectively available on iOS, even if it's not exactly what you might expect coming from a desktop OS.
Uehreka 5y ago
AppClips and AR actually fit together really well. If a museum, theatre or other space has an AR app, it’ll be a lot smoother to get people to use it if they just have to tap their phone on a thing and then hit “OK”. Then when they leave the venue and no longer need it it’s gone.

lazyfuture 5y ago

Are you out of your ducking mind? Sent from my iPhone

mncharity 5y ago

> SwiftUI [...] doesn’t feel like an AR platform component (Where’s the third dimension?). I'm unfamiliar with SwiftUI, but fwiw, I found the extensions needed for CSS3D to support AR to be surprisingly small. A few years back, having a custom browser-based VR stack with passthrough AR, I sketched a talk for the BostonVR meetup, to give around April Fools. It would have purported to be an introductory onboarding demo, of newly available CSS3D extensions for AR. With support for placement in realspace, billboards, HUD overlays, integrated multiple displays, position aware and 3D displays. The extension needed was surprisingly minor. The talk would have been basically "introductory CSS positioning, in a slightly enriched context", which I expected to be quite believable, followed by a "surprise! - the making of the demo spike". I don't quite remember why it didn't happen. > 2(.5)D experiences Shallow-3D UIs seemingly have a lot of potential, but don't get much discussion. Meta: I wish HN discussions around AR were of higher quality. It's be clear for years that Apple was pursing this. Being unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, I'd have liked to see more discussion of what those pieces and their characteristics might suggest about the future. Or for instance, of whether Apple is doing any CEP complex event processing, or retraction of app state changes, to support input with diverse latencies.

grork 5y ago
Shallow 3D definitely has a lot of potential. Not everything needs to be ILM effects - even in the long term. Sometimes buttons & text are all you need.
- mncharity 5y ago
  > Sometimes buttons & text are all you need. And most displays have some privileged focus depth(s). Vergence-accommodation conflict, and eye strain from long use, can be reduced by staying close to that. Ahem, and as my eyes have grown old, the annulus where I can focus well has narrowed. And maybe, it might be possible to have text in layers, close enough to avoid vergence-accommodation conflict eye strain, but far enough to be tolerably readable, and ideally to allow eye tracking to determine which layer is being read. I was layering a keyboard-cam-with-annotations over desktop for a bit, to see the kbd in an HMD, but also to explore "graphic artist looking at screen containing processed view of tablet input"-like UX for software dev. The layered clutter was somewhat annoying, so I'm unclear on viability, but it did seem intriguing. Also, "shallow" still permits some depth. A cm or few at 50 cm (laptop screen) seemed comfortable for me (for some limited frequency of focus switching, and I've only a little experience, and ymmv). That's depth enough for more than buttons and text, but still a very different design regime than "fill the room with XR UI". ILM effects, hmm... someday I'd like to find a stereo drone straight-down view of beach surf, shallow but 3D, to use as desktop background. :) Maybe.

narrator 5y ago

The funny thing about Apple is how people confabulate mythical powers to it. I can't wait for Apple iTulpa[1]. Jokes aside. What is the mission statement here, what is the dream? Make you never want to interact with the real world again? Help you manage your to do list better? I feel there was much more of a mission statement for mobile back when everyone was stuck on public transit and at the office for hours every day. You could finally make your life on transit and at the office more meaningful by integrating your personal life with that through your phone. What's the dream now? I don't get where all this is going unless it's like you're never going to leave your house again, so escape into VR. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa

nexuist 5y ago
At least for me the dream is not having to have information gatekept by the location and size of a screen. With glasses apps can be as tall and as wide as you want them to be, and many apps won't need traditional UI at all because they can just overlay their information over real world objects. Anything that currently has a paper label or barcode in the real world, could be a candidate for an AR app that helps users find stuff quicker. And rather than having to look through aisles or buildings to get to what you want, you could just use a search bar or virtual assistant to look up the thing you want and get a persistent marker to its exact location. Basically just imagine the kind of UI a video game presents to a player, and how a well executed UI blends in subconsciously to the point that you can navigate menus and issue commands without having to think of it. Now imagine that experience but overlayed over real life, where an app can help you remember someone's name or birthday as they approach and you can take a note with your location and current view attached to it. Something as silly as "funny car" while looking at the funny car, or as serious as telling the nurse after your shift where the patient's pain point is.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

>> SwiftUI is getting more capable with every release, and appears to be the long-term UI platform for apple. It also isn’t just about ‘below the glass’ experiences. SwiftUI 2 is so much better. I am taking a 50 hour course, and spent a few hours hacking this morning. So much better than when I tried it 14 months ago. Spacial Audio works really well. They are probably using something called Head Related Transfer Functions, which I used at my company’s VR lab in the mid-1990s. The example AR Swift Playgrounds examples are also pretty cool. I agree with the general premise of the article!

nottorp 5y ago

Technobabble aside, I'm betting the battery life on the Apple Glasses will be as bad as on the Apple Watch or worse. And people with prescription glasses won't be able to afford the Apple Prescription(tm) anyway.

titanomachy 5y ago

> Device-local speech recognition is fundamental to AR — we can’t tap our feet & twiddle our thumbs while we wait for a round-trip to the cloud to conclude how to handle “Group these five items, and remember them for next week when I’m at the office” I'm not convinced that this is true. Round-trip latency has gotten a lot lower, especially if you take edge computing into account. 20-30ms round-trip is not unusual. If your mic feed is being streamed in real-time, and the program is able to achieve a high-confidence prediction at (or before) the moment you finish speaking, I think it should be possible to deliver an experience that feels instantaneous, at least for users with cutting-edge connectivity. For visual interactions, 100ms feels instantaneous; I bet tolerance for spoken interactions is even higher.

zelon88 5y ago

This guy is way too excited. He's thinking he's gonna get Cyberpunk 2077 but in reality he's getting a combo of Wall-E and The Final Cut.

grork 5y ago
I both welcome, and fear, my floating armchair to take me on my doomed Buy-n-Large interstellar mission! I wouldn’t say /too/ excited. Maybe ‘had his brain pulling a Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia with that Pepe Silvia meme thing’.

ryanmarsh 5y ago

The conclusion almost followed the points except for one major failure of imagination: VR. Apple will release a VR product but it can only do so after the migration to Apple Silicon. Anyone familiar with M1 performance and VR games on Intel will immediately see why. Did anyone else notice/remember what specific use case Apple touted for the the newest generation of Mac Pro? VR content creation. Very resource hungry. Apple can't release the VR device we know they could, without giving content creators the tools. What makes VR more than just a gaming product? Giving everyone with an Apple laptop the ability to create content for a meta verse. You might be thinking Ready Player One, I'm thinking more like a better Roblox. There's massive ARR potential in a VR metaverse ecosystem where everyone can be a content creator / inhabitant. Apple is the only company that could put it all together and make it work from soup to nuts.

chrismsimpson 5y ago

Interesting take, but SwiftUI and Combine are really bad. They claim ‘functional programming’, but there’s so much (leaky) magic involved. The sub par automatic code generation yields slow and laggy experiences. I don’t think Apple has any plan to improve this beyond ironing out obvious bugs and waiting for natural performance yields to kick in. It is bad enough that it reminds me of Carbon and the related legion of missteps that hurt Apple badly some 20 years ago and pissed off a lot of loyal developers. Honestly, SwiftUI combined with Apples now complete market dominance is enough to make me reconsider my career path. Just because they’re so big doesn’t mean they can do no wrong and several of their recent technologies have been regressive.

nexuist 5y ago
I am curious why you have such a low opinion of SwiftUI, most third party developers I have heard from are eager to drop Storyboards and switch immediately. The magic involved is not really magic at all, just Swift syntax sugar. Nothing about SwiftUI is proprietary, you can make your own SwiftUI variant by copy and pasting its code. It's just another library after all. Granted, some Swift features do seem like they were explicitly granted to make SwiftUI prettier, but it's not like you can't use those features in your own code or libraries too.
- chrismsimpson 5y ago
  It’s not just syntax sugar. There is a lot of compile time code generation running behind the scenes. It also means there’s a lot of hidden determinism where there didn’t used to be. Storyboards were rubbish, I agree, but SwiftUI is more fundamental. Apple is abandoning the PostScript model which permeates every graphical computing paradigm (WinForms, GTK, Qt etc.), and if you don’t like programming with cotton gloves on, you’re basically not welcome. All very much a shame from my point of view, because UIKit is easily the most powerful UI toolkit around. It’ll be interesting to see how long third parties will continue to be able link against it directly.

dng88 5y ago

Guess the mindful Apple Watch is another direction

Ono-Sendai 5y ago

Author seems confused about what a metaverse is. Here's my attempt at actually building a metaverse substrate: https://substrata.info/ https://substrata.info/

germinalphrase 5y ago

Anyone aware of any good podcasts about AR/VR?