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"The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would

by pavlov 3y ago

"The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that’s a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing." The author was shown a 10-second clip and is ready to hand over thousands of dollars. A few paragraphs later he acknowledges that it was just a 10-second clip, but there was also another clip, so a total of 20 seconds - surely enough to write an opinion piece of thousands of words. The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable. I'm an XR believer too and I'm very happy that Apple is entering the market with a high-end device that's not for gaming. At the same time, we have to recognize that the history of this form factor is littered with amazing 10-second demos that failed to deliver actual user value, from recent failures like Magic Leap going all the way back to the late 1980s and Jaron Lanier's VPL Research.

intev 3y ago
> demos that failed to deliver actual user value Does Apple have a a history of doing this? I think that's why people are excited.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype. On the software side there are more misses, but also the stakes are lower. It's a great track record for thirty years, of course. All the other big tech companies have graveyards full of half-assed product launches.
  - intev 3y ago
    Other than the watch, all the products you mentioned are before 2002. Anything in the past 20 years that have been huge misses in delivering up to expectation? Also how is the 1st gen watch a failure? It sold millions immediately, and was a huge commercial success. It pretty much started a gold rush for digital watches again. I think it's fair to say the new "Apple" (last 15 years or so), has been pretty good with exceeding expectations and breaking through barriers that other companies just couldn't.
  - thomas_ma 3y ago
    In what sense did the iMac G4 fail to live up to the hype? That was my first Mac, I still have it. Thought it was an incredible computer for the time--the iMac + OS X 10.1 Puma was absolutely magical coming from Windows 98 on a beige Dell. The design still looks incredible too, 20+ years later. I will grant that the Newton failed. In the Apple hardware category, I'd also add the iPod Hi-Fi, the butterfly keyboard, and the touch bar. That said, Apple's failures are rare and their multi-decade track record of delivering on hype is unsurpassed.
    - pavlov 3y ago
      The sales of iMac G4 failed so badly that there was a three-month period in 2004 when it was simply unavailable. It was discontinued without a successor on store shelves. It was too expensive to manufacture and Apple wasn't sure they could sell it, so they just didn't make any. Hard to believe that could happen to a Mac model today.
  - Jakob 3y ago
    Except for the Apple Watch I had all these products. They were some of the best of their time and even hold up today in terms of design and usability. Your definition of success seems extraordinarily high, if these products were failures. Maybe measured by items sold. But then each of them stands in nearly every single design museum like MoMA, history books, and were clear stepping stones to the Mac mini (cube, sunflower without display), and ipod/phone (newton). So bottom line they were a clear success to Apple’s enormous brand value.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      The NeXT Cube was considered a failure. ... except ... when I write iOS software (for the most successful product of all time), I am frequently using types that have "NS" prefixes. I wonder where they came from?
      - l33tman 3y ago
        IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job, to get a new OS base. As NeXT was his company, I'm pretty sure it was a decision based on bias and urgency and not because NextStep was the best there was. But yeah it's an interesting legacy for sure :)
        hencq 3y ago
        You recall that incorrectly :) The NeXT purchase came first, Jobs as CEO came after that. But yeah, it was a bit of a reverse takeover in a way.
        pflats 3y ago
        More specifically, Steve Jobs founded NeXT after Apple pushed him out in the late 80s. A decade or so later, Apple was on the tail end of a long, slow, downward slide. The team wasn't happy with the current state of their Mac operating system, and bought out NeXT to use their software as the basis of its replacement (Mac OS X). Jobs, as CEO of NeXT, came back to Apple as a consultant, but was CEO again in a matter of years.
  - mcphage 3y ago
    > iMac G4 "Sunflower" What was a failure about that? It looked good and worked well. > solid gold first-gen Apple Watch In what way did the gold watch fail? It was the first gen watch, the same hardware as the rest, just made of gold for rich people. It didn’t fail any more than any other color did.
    - pavlov 3y ago
      Both failed badly to live up to Apple's sales expectations. The Sunflower iMac was discontinued even before its successor shipped. The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.
      - matwood 3y ago
        The AWE strategy failed, yet now the AW (like the iPad) define the category they are in. AV could be similar. Apple doesn't know which use case will take off, but it has to get it out there to find out. Leading with the best hardware they have right now lets developers go wild.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Have you looked at the revenue from their wearables category? If the Watch is a failure then the Mac is an abject failure.
        mynameisvlad 3y ago
        You need to seriously read what you’re actually replying to instead of what you think you are because you keep bringing up that the AW is not a failure when nobody said it was.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        > Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype. No one seriously thought that the Apple Watch was going to be an iPhone size hit. It’s a complete straw man argument.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    The Apple Watch is not a failure by any objective measure. It’s very profitable and by far the biggest in the industry. Everything else you name was pre-iPhone.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      They didn’t say the AW was a failure and your obvious cherry-picking of the comment is showing.
- Jasper_ 3y ago
  More recently, the TouchBar and 3D Touch are both pretty massive market failures for Apple despite being engineered to perfection. I think the killer was that in the Platforms State of the Union, they didn't show anybody wearing the thing, even while saying "and I can send it to the device and look at it there". Almost like they were embarrassed by it, or something...
shanusmagnus 3y ago
The fact that "the author" is Ben Thompson is worth something.
flappyeagle 3y ago
It’s obvious how a 10 second clip scales to 10 minutes or 10 hours or 10 days. You don’t need that much imagination or even a leap of faith. A court side seat to an NBA game is north of $1000. If this creates 20% of the experience it will easily pay for itself in 1 season.
- pavlov 3y ago
  You're certain you would wear a headset for 10 days based on a 10-second experience? That doesn't make any sense.
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    I wear glasses daily. When I go on scuba or ski trips I wear heavy eyewear in tough conditions for multiple hours on end over several days. The form factor is not the problem, and it’s never been. It’s always been about the quality of the experience.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- silvestrov 3y ago
  Why would NBA allow for this as they would lose an extreme amount of money if people can get the same experience at home? That would be economic suicide for them. They need to keep the seats being a special experience.
  - shen 3y ago
    The people who are paying for those seats will still pay for those seats. The people paying for the headset experience would’ve never paid for the seats. Different audience.
  - nkingsy 3y ago
    It may look and sound the same, but no one is accidentally spilling beer in merriment or telling their friends they were there. It builds the brand. Watching the game on tv is already a far superior way to actually see what’s happening. No different from any other live event, it’s a social experience.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
Can’t such recordings already be done with a special camera and be viewed with a VR headset? Yet afaik there is no such market.
wukerplank 3y ago
I'm on the fence about XR and I for sure won't buy a "Pro" grade device. But regarding your point about reality shaping: Sometimes it's just obvious. When I saw the presentation for the iPhone, I know this was the first phone I really really wanted - everything about it was compelling. I guess this what some XR enthusiasts feel about this device.
parthdesai 3y ago
MKBHD mentioned the same use case in his video and how he would pay good money to NBA for it. And he used the headset for a good 30 minutes. Maybe it's a valid use case? Have you personally tried the headset to flat out dismiss it?
- pavlov 3y ago
  I'm not dismissing it. I'm actually considering shelling out the money for this Apple headset. I've just become wary of exuberant initial reports based on 10-second exposures to completely scripted demo apps. These journalists who get this launch-day experience were selected for their history of writing nice things about Apple. They're being shown the device in ideal conditions under the watchful eye of Apple's world-leading PR team, and they've been primed for years to expect something amazing from the Next Big Apple Product. There isn't a tremendous amount of objectivity in these circumstances.
  - monkbent 3y ago
    I have been exceptionally critical of Apple, particularly in terms of ATT.
_gabe_ 3y ago
Thank you, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or something. I have no idea how much of the footage in the long advertisements are actual in-headset recording vs highly editorialized made up aspirational CG. Additionally, I really don't think all the people here singing the praises of Apple's currently nonexistent headset (for actual customer use at least until 2024 or something) have ever used a headset. Headsets give me: * Headaches * Nausea * Eye Strain * Neck Pain * Acne (from sitting on the same parts of your face all the time) Etc. Also, reading text is incredibly difficult and exasperating which is this things whole value prop since it's targeting office work. Until anyone can actually try this and ensure that these are all non-issues, all the speculation is a weird cultic worship of Apple. Just in case people forget, here's some misleading advertisements for Google Glass that didn't quite live up to the hype[0][1]. And some misleading advertisements about holo lense that didn't quite live up to the hype[2]. Full disclaimer, I have a valve index but haven't tried holo lens or Google Glass, but the fact that they're not ubiquitous today says something. It's especially funny that the holo lens looks very similar to Apple Vision, and then Apple makes these ridiculous claims about innovativing where no one else has. I swear I must be taking crazy pills or something. [0]: https://youtu.be/4EvNxWhskf8 https://youtu.be/4EvNxWhskf8 [1]: https://youtu.be/5R1snVxGNVs https://youtu.be/5R1snVxGNVs [2]: https://youtu.be/eqFqtAJMtYE https://youtu.be/eqFqtAJMtYE
- xrisk 3y ago
  This TechCrunch review where the reviewer had access to them says that the issues with headaches/nausea don’t happen: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-apple-vision-pro-works-and-yes-its-good/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-appl...
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Most of the nausea issues in VR stem from the disconnect between moving in virtual space without moving in the real world, and Apple seems to be focusing on applications which maintain a 1:1 mapping between real and virtual movement. Games are where that's most likely to be an issue and they're very much not focusing on actual VR gaming, only playing non-VR games in VR on a virtual screen.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
The Quest has live VR NBA games, and it's not selling a ton of $500 headsets for that use case, so I somehow doubt that it's going to move a lot of $3500 headsets. https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/nba-games-in-vr-on-quest/ https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/nba-games-in-vr-on-quest/
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  180 degree VR. This is not the same thing.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    How much do you look behind you at an NBA game? 180 degrees is fully immersive in my experience.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > Five games will feature celebrity broadcasters and be shown in 180-degree immersive VR, and WNBA games, NBA G League games and NBA 2K League games will be available to watch as well. There's a big difference between just five games and all the games in a season. I could totally see it moving $3500 headsets if it were actually all games. Also 180° is good enough for a lot of things but for this you'd want 360°.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    Eh, obviously all else being the same 360 would be better - but it’s a lot easier to make 3D camera rigs and streams that at 180 degrees. People also probably don’t realize just how much bandwidth this takes. You need enough to stream to both 4K eyes along with enough buffer space wherever the head can turn so that there isn’t a delay when you move your head. A good portion of the world doesn’t have fast enough internet for that.
interpol_p 3y ago
> The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable. It really isn't just the demos that wow us, and it isn't just the high-end device. The device is packed with tech, for sure. But 80% of the story here is Apple's strong design choices: "Here's how you will interact with the world. Here's how other people fit in. This is how UI is going to display. We rewrote our entire UI stack on top of a physically based renderer so developers can comfortably recompile their millions of existing apps. Here's how we process-isolated the gaze tracking so no third-party app will be able to data-mine it for personalised Ads" They didn't just build a headset and call it a day. They didn't show useless, aspirational demos (though during the keynote, Disney certainly showed a whole lot of rubbish). They developed the UI paradigms, human interface guidelines, put huge thought towards accessibility. Those of us impressed with this are not wowed by just hardware, we're amazed by the amount and strength of design thought put into every aspect of your interaction with this computer. There's so much _opinion_ about what this computer should be, and how we should use it, that's the exciting thing Their opinions may not pan out in the future. But I'm so glad _someone_ is having strong opinions about human computer interaction in the AR/VR space, because Meta and the rest certainly don't
- taeric 3y ago
  Pretty sure if I have my headset on and I'm in the middle of the room with my kids, I'm not a "hip father" doing cool shit with my kids. Consider if this was someone on a phone in the kitchen discussing something. We wouldn't think, "how progressive this person is to have work conversations while mostly ignoring his kids." Granted, as a parent, the scene of the airline person upset that there is a kid on the flight is... off putting. To the extreme. Especially when the response is "ugh, thank goodness I can turn off all visual senses around me." SMH And I am struggling to see any UI design/consideration that was new in this clip. Do you have a rundown on exactly what was amazing?
  - interpol_p 3y ago
    Oh I totally agree. The scenes with parents/kids were so off, and felt emotionally jarring > And I am struggling to see any UI design/consideration that was new in this clip. Do you have a rundown on exactly what was amazing? The State of the Union video has more detail. All of SwiftUI and UIKit now sits on top of their material-based renderer. You can now render a Metal Shader on a SwiftUI view in one line of code. They have consistent and detailed paradigms for how menus, toolbars, productivity apps etc should work on this platform (likely from porting all of their own). 3D models fit seamlessly into the UI view hierarchy. They have detailed design and interaction constraints for all new types of spatial windows, as well as legacy apps. All of this even goes back to their Objective-C APIs, which are updated appropriately Then they've implemented things like process isolation for eye-gaze tracking. Simply so apps can't read your gaze and abuse that data. No one else makes decisions like this in a v1 product. It probably required a whole team of people to get right, considering that gaze is the primary interaction method a user will be using with your app It's hard to explain just how much depth of thought has been put into this platform. They have addressed a lot of hard questions with some very good design, and above all, they are opinionated about their platform. In every corner and detail there is a strong design choice about the right way to design and implement that interaction. That opinionated design is why people get so excited, and it can be so jarring when they get it wrong
scarface_74 3y ago
The author was shown far more than a 10 second clip. He along with John Gruber got to do a full hands on demo. They talk more about it in their (paid) Dithering podcast.
notacoward 3y ago
Apple benefits greatly from the fact that "journalists" are some of their most devoted fans. That gets them free coverage that's wildly disproportionate in both volume and positivity. Not to say they don't make good products - I have to admit that they do - but they escape a lot of harsh scrutiny that other companies have to deal with. Terminally online techies are another core demographic, resulting in a similar skew on social media sites like ... <looks around> ... um, Reddit.
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
> The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable I like the Marques Brownlee takes, he's one of the "30 minutes hands on" guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI He seems fairly well impressed, at least in the first half of the video ...
scarface_74 3y ago
He went into more details on the Dithering podcast. He was able to have a much fuller demo than a few clips.
Mindwipe 3y ago
Not least because we have been doing the courtside view of sports events for what... nearly a decade now? And it's not very compelling compared to proper coverage with camera angles.
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
<< The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable. One of the things we have dissected in our MBA class was Apple's Iphone reveal and how carefully choreographed[1] it was ( I am being very generous given my anti-Apple bias ). You could argue that Apple was simply lying since the product was not ready, but looking back, they were able to deliver on the promise of that reveal. Oddly, it makes me somewhat hopeful that this product will work as well. I am not ready to shell out that cash on it just yet, but I will be looking at SDK as soon as they actually release it. Heavens protect me; I want to play with that toy. [1]https://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/04/former-apple-engineer-gives-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-original-iphone-introduction/ https://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/04/former-apple-engineer-g...

by pavlov 3y ago

intev 3y ago

> demos that failed to deliver actual user value Does Apple have a a history of doing this? I think that's why people are excited.

pavlov 3y ago
Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype. On the software side there are more misses, but also the stakes are lower. It's a great track record for thirty years, of course. All the other big tech companies have graveyards full of half-assed product launches.
- intev 3y ago
  Other than the watch, all the products you mentioned are before 2002. Anything in the past 20 years that have been huge misses in delivering up to expectation? Also how is the 1st gen watch a failure? It sold millions immediately, and was a huge commercial success. It pretty much started a gold rush for digital watches again. I think it's fair to say the new "Apple" (last 15 years or so), has been pretty good with exceeding expectations and breaking through barriers that other companies just couldn't.
- thomas_ma 3y ago
  In what sense did the iMac G4 fail to live up to the hype? That was my first Mac, I still have it. Thought it was an incredible computer for the time--the iMac + OS X 10.1 Puma was absolutely magical coming from Windows 98 on a beige Dell. The design still looks incredible too, 20+ years later. I will grant that the Newton failed. In the Apple hardware category, I'd also add the iPod Hi-Fi, the butterfly keyboard, and the touch bar. That said, Apple's failures are rare and their multi-decade track record of delivering on hype is unsurpassed.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    The sales of iMac G4 failed so badly that there was a three-month period in 2004 when it was simply unavailable. It was discontinued without a successor on store shelves. It was too expensive to manufacture and Apple wasn't sure they could sell it, so they just didn't make any. Hard to believe that could happen to a Mac model today.
- Jakob 3y ago
  Except for the Apple Watch I had all these products. They were some of the best of their time and even hold up today in terms of design and usability. Your definition of success seems extraordinarily high, if these products were failures. Maybe measured by items sold. But then each of them stands in nearly every single design museum like MoMA, history books, and were clear stepping stones to the Mac mini (cube, sunflower without display), and ipod/phone (newton). So bottom line they were a clear success to Apple’s enormous brand value.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    The NeXT Cube was considered a failure. ... except ... when I write iOS software (for the most successful product of all time), I am frequently using types that have "NS" prefixes. I wonder where they came from?
    - l33tman 3y ago
      IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job, to get a new OS base. As NeXT was his company, I'm pretty sure it was a decision based on bias and urgency and not because NextStep was the best there was. But yeah it's an interesting legacy for sure :)
      - hencq 3y ago
        You recall that incorrectly :) The NeXT purchase came first, Jobs as CEO came after that. But yeah, it was a bit of a reverse takeover in a way.
        pflats 3y ago
        More specifically, Steve Jobs founded NeXT after Apple pushed him out in the late 80s. A decade or so later, Apple was on the tail end of a long, slow, downward slide. The team wasn't happy with the current state of their Mac operating system, and bought out NeXT to use their software as the basis of its replacement (Mac OS X). Jobs, as CEO of NeXT, came back to Apple as a consultant, but was CEO again in a matter of years.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > iMac G4 "Sunflower" What was a failure about that? It looked good and worked well. > solid gold first-gen Apple Watch In what way did the gold watch fail? It was the first gen watch, the same hardware as the rest, just made of gold for rich people. It didn’t fail any more than any other color did.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Both failed badly to live up to Apple's sales expectations. The Sunflower iMac was discontinued even before its successor shipped. The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.
    - matwood 3y ago
      The AWE strategy failed, yet now the AW (like the iPad) define the category they are in. AV could be similar. Apple doesn't know which use case will take off, but it has to get it out there to find out. Leading with the best hardware they have right now lets developers go wild.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Have you looked at the revenue from their wearables category? If the Watch is a failure then the Mac is an abject failure.
      - mynameisvlad 3y ago
        You need to seriously read what you’re actually replying to instead of what you think you are because you keep bringing up that the AW is not a failure when nobody said it was.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        > Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype. No one seriously thought that the Apple Watch was going to be an iPhone size hit. It’s a complete straw man argument.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  The Apple Watch is not a failure by any objective measure. It’s very profitable and by far the biggest in the industry. Everything else you name was pre-iPhone.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    They didn’t say the AW was a failure and your obvious cherry-picking of the comment is showing.
Jasper_ 3y ago
More recently, the TouchBar and 3D Touch are both pretty massive market failures for Apple despite being engineered to perfection. I think the killer was that in the Platforms State of the Union, they didn't show anybody wearing the thing, even while saying "and I can send it to the device and look at it there". Almost like they were embarrassed by it, or something...

shanusmagnus 3y ago

The fact that "the author" is Ben Thompson is worth something.

flappyeagle 3y ago

It’s obvious how a 10 second clip scales to 10 minutes or 10 hours or 10 days. You don’t need that much imagination or even a leap of faith. A court side seat to an NBA game is north of $1000. If this creates 20% of the experience it will easily pay for itself in 1 season.

pavlov 3y ago
You're certain you would wear a headset for 10 days based on a 10-second experience? That doesn't make any sense.
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  I wear glasses daily. When I go on scuba or ski trips I wear heavy eyewear in tough conditions for multiple hours on end over several days. The form factor is not the problem, and it’s never been. It’s always been about the quality of the experience.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
silvestrov 3y ago
Why would NBA allow for this as they would lose an extreme amount of money if people can get the same experience at home? That would be economic suicide for them. They need to keep the seats being a special experience.
- shen 3y ago
  The people who are paying for those seats will still pay for those seats. The people paying for the headset experience would’ve never paid for the seats. Different audience.
- nkingsy 3y ago
  It may look and sound the same, but no one is accidentally spilling beer in merriment or telling their friends they were there. It builds the brand. Watching the game on tv is already a far superior way to actually see what’s happening. No different from any other live event, it’s a social experience.

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

Can’t such recordings already be done with a special camera and be viewed with a VR headset? Yet afaik there is no such market.

wukerplank 3y ago

I'm on the fence about XR and I for sure won't buy a "Pro" grade device. But regarding your point about reality shaping: Sometimes it's just obvious. When I saw the presentation for the iPhone, I know this was the first phone I really really wanted - everything about it was compelling. I guess this what some XR enthusiasts feel about this device.

parthdesai 3y ago

MKBHD mentioned the same use case in his video and how he would pay good money to NBA for it. And he used the headset for a good 30 minutes. Maybe it's a valid use case? Have you personally tried the headset to flat out dismiss it?

pavlov 3y ago
I'm not dismissing it. I'm actually considering shelling out the money for this Apple headset. I've just become wary of exuberant initial reports based on 10-second exposures to completely scripted demo apps. These journalists who get this launch-day experience were selected for their history of writing nice things about Apple. They're being shown the device in ideal conditions under the watchful eye of Apple's world-leading PR team, and they've been primed for years to expect something amazing from the Next Big Apple Product. There isn't a tremendous amount of objectivity in these circumstances.
- monkbent 3y ago
  I have been exceptionally critical of Apple, particularly in terms of ATT.

_gabe_ 3y ago

Thank you, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills or something. I have no idea how much of the footage in the long advertisements are actual in-headset recording vs highly editorialized made up aspirational CG. Additionally, I really don't think all the people here singing the praises of Apple's currently nonexistent headset (for actual customer use at least until 2024 or something) have ever used a headset. Headsets give me: * Headaches * Nausea * Eye Strain * Neck Pain * Acne (from sitting on the same parts of your face all the time) Etc. Also, reading text is incredibly difficult and exasperating which is this things whole value prop since it's targeting office work. Until anyone can actually try this and ensure that these are all non-issues, all the speculation is a weird cultic worship of Apple. Just in case people forget, here's some misleading advertisements for Google Glass that didn't quite live up to the hype[0][1]. And some misleading advertisements about holo lense that didn't quite live up to the hype[2]. Full disclaimer, I have a valve index but haven't tried holo lens or Google Glass, but the fact that they're not ubiquitous today says something. It's especially funny that the holo lens looks very similar to Apple Vision, and then Apple makes these ridiculous claims about innovativing where no one else has. I swear I must be taking crazy pills or something. [0]: https://youtu.be/4EvNxWhskf8 https://youtu.be/4EvNxWhskf8 [1]: https://youtu.be/5R1snVxGNVs https://youtu.be/5R1snVxGNVs [2]: https://youtu.be/eqFqtAJMtYE https://youtu.be/eqFqtAJMtYE

xrisk 3y ago
This TechCrunch review where the reviewer had access to them says that the issues with headaches/nausea don’t happen: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-apple-vision-pro-works-and-yes-its-good/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/first-impressions-yes-appl...
- jsheard 3y ago
  Most of the nausea issues in VR stem from the disconnect between moving in virtual space without moving in the real world, and Apple seems to be focusing on applications which maintain a 1:1 mapping between real and virtual movement. Games are where that's most likely to be an issue and they're very much not focusing on actual VR gaming, only playing non-VR games in VR on a virtual screen.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

The Quest has live VR NBA games, and it's not selling a ton of $500 headsets for that use case, so I somehow doubt that it's going to move a lot of $3500 headsets. https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/nba-games-in-vr-on-quest/ https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/nba-games-in-vr-on-quest/

flappyeagle 3y ago
180 degree VR. This is not the same thing.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  How much do you look behind you at an NBA game? 180 degrees is fully immersive in my experience.
crazygringo 3y ago
> Five games will feature celebrity broadcasters and be shown in 180-degree immersive VR, and WNBA games, NBA G League games and NBA 2K League games will be available to watch as well. There's a big difference between just five games and all the games in a season. I could totally see it moving $3500 headsets if it were actually all games. Also 180° is good enough for a lot of things but for this you'd want 360°.
- Auracle 3y ago
  Eh, obviously all else being the same 360 would be better - but it’s a lot easier to make 3D camera rigs and streams that at 180 degrees. People also probably don’t realize just how much bandwidth this takes. You need enough to stream to both 4K eyes along with enough buffer space wherever the head can turn so that there isn’t a delay when you move your head. A good portion of the world doesn’t have fast enough internet for that.

interpol_p 3y ago

> The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable. It really isn't just the demos that wow us, and it isn't just the high-end device. The device is packed with tech, for sure. But 80% of the story here is Apple's strong design choices: "Here's how you will interact with the world. Here's how other people fit in. This is how UI is going to display. We rewrote our entire UI stack on top of a physically based renderer so developers can comfortably recompile their millions of existing apps. Here's how we process-isolated the gaze tracking so no third-party app will be able to data-mine it for personalised Ads" They didn't just build a headset and call it a day. They didn't show useless, aspirational demos (though during the keynote, Disney certainly showed a whole lot of rubbish). They developed the UI paradigms, human interface guidelines, put huge thought towards accessibility. Those of us impressed with this are not wowed by just hardware, we're amazed by the amount and strength of design thought put into every aspect of your interaction with this computer. There's so much _opinion_ about what this computer should be, and how we should use it, that's the exciting thing Their opinions may not pan out in the future. But I'm so glad _someone_ is having strong opinions about human computer interaction in the AR/VR space, because Meta and the rest certainly don't

taeric 3y ago
Pretty sure if I have my headset on and I'm in the middle of the room with my kids, I'm not a "hip father" doing cool shit with my kids. Consider if this was someone on a phone in the kitchen discussing something. We wouldn't think, "how progressive this person is to have work conversations while mostly ignoring his kids." Granted, as a parent, the scene of the airline person upset that there is a kid on the flight is... off putting. To the extreme. Especially when the response is "ugh, thank goodness I can turn off all visual senses around me." SMH And I am struggling to see any UI design/consideration that was new in this clip. Do you have a rundown on exactly what was amazing?
- interpol_p 3y ago
  Oh I totally agree. The scenes with parents/kids were so off, and felt emotionally jarring > And I am struggling to see any UI design/consideration that was new in this clip. Do you have a rundown on exactly what was amazing? The State of the Union video has more detail. All of SwiftUI and UIKit now sits on top of their material-based renderer. You can now render a Metal Shader on a SwiftUI view in one line of code. They have consistent and detailed paradigms for how menus, toolbars, productivity apps etc should work on this platform (likely from porting all of their own). 3D models fit seamlessly into the UI view hierarchy. They have detailed design and interaction constraints for all new types of spatial windows, as well as legacy apps. All of this even goes back to their Objective-C APIs, which are updated appropriately Then they've implemented things like process isolation for eye-gaze tracking. Simply so apps can't read your gaze and abuse that data. No one else makes decisions like this in a v1 product. It probably required a whole team of people to get right, considering that gaze is the primary interaction method a user will be using with your app It's hard to explain just how much depth of thought has been put into this platform. They have addressed a lot of hard questions with some very good design, and above all, they are opinionated about their platform. In every corner and detail there is a strong design choice about the right way to design and implement that interaction. That opinionated design is why people get so excited, and it can be so jarring when they get it wrong

scarface_74 3y ago

The author was shown far more than a 10 second clip. He along with John Gruber got to do a full hands on demo. They talk more about it in their (paid) Dithering podcast.

notacoward 3y ago

Apple benefits greatly from the fact that "journalists" are some of their most devoted fans. That gets them free coverage that's wildly disproportionate in both volume and positivity. Not to say they don't make good products - I have to admit that they do - but they escape a lot of harsh scrutiny that other companies have to deal with. Terminally online techies are another core demographic, resulting in a similar skew on social media sites like ... <looks around> ... um, Reddit.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

> The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable I like the Marques Brownlee takes, he's one of the "30 minutes hands on" guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI He seems fairly well impressed, at least in the first half of the video ...

scarface_74 3y ago

He went into more details on the Dithering podcast. He was able to have a much fuller demo than a few clips.

Mindwipe 3y ago

Not least because we have been doing the courtside view of sports events for what... nearly a decade now? And it's not very compelling compared to proper coverage with camera angles.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

<< The reality-shaping power of Apple's demo maestros is truly admirable. One of the things we have dissected in our MBA class was Apple's Iphone reveal and how carefully choreographed[1] it was ( I am being very generous given my anti-Apple bias ). You could argue that Apple was simply lying since the product was not ready, but looking back, they were able to deliver on the promise of that reveal. Oddly, it makes me somewhat hopeful that this product will work as well. I am not ready to shell out that cash on it just yet, but I will be looking at SDK as soon as they actually release it. Heavens protect me; I want to play with that toy. [1]https://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/04/former-apple-engineer-gives-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-original-iphone-introduction/ https://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/04/former-apple-engineer-g...