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This is a bit of a rant, but I bought a Quest Pro last year, and I feel it was a total waste of money. It's actually embarrassing how much of an unpolished piec

by dvt 3y ago

This is a bit of a rant, but I bought a Quest Pro last year, and I feel it was a total waste of money. It's actually embarrassing how much of an unpolished piece of garbage it feels like. Sure, it's fun as a PCVR headset, but as a productivity tool or as a multimedia consuming device, or as a social tool, it completely misses the mark. And I'd say that 80% of its failure can be attributed to bad software. It's buggy, I constantly have to re-calibrate my work/play area, the hand tracking is janky, and even though it supports (incredible) eye tracking, almost nothing takes actual advantage of the hardware. It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash. Do they seriously expect VR enthusiasts to build an entire operating system for them? Much like the reports we're getting about the Vision Pro, the eye tracking in the Quest Pro feels like magic, but nothing uses it—basically it's irrelevant to navigating the operating system and barely any games use foveated rendering. It's infuriating. If I was Zuck, I'd fire all my product managers. I say good for Apple. I'll probably be selling my Quest Pro and buying the Vision Pro.

balaji1 3y ago
Fitness and gaming wasn't demoed much yesterday, but are going to be insane on the Vision Pro - so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. But how big of a deal is the M2+R1? Anyway the metaverse was already being retracted, else this Vision Pro could have hammered Meta. Clearly Occulus has to evolve to match VisionPro. Controller has to be optional. It has to have better AR. Meta has to be the more "open" alternative to Apple's ecosystem barriers.
- dvt 3y ago
  > Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. This was Microsoft's warcry for years: who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware. Well guess what, software matters and it matters more than hardware. If you have both, you have literally a generationally-defining product (e.g. the iPhone), but even if you just have the software, you'll still eat your competitor's lunch. Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware. Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.
  - leviathant 3y ago
    >Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware. Oh, I don't know about that. Admittedly there were some awful choices made between 2015 and the emergence of M1 architecture, but Apple's reputation for making well engineered hardware goes at least as far back as to when they started milling Macs out of aluminum. I'm thinking back specifically to the PowerMac G5 in 2006. It was designed well, felt solid, and when you opened it up, it continued to look well made. I recently popped open my 2015 Macbook Pro because I'm finally having hard drive issues, and for as much as I have railed against Apple fanboyism over the decades, it looked so nice inside I wanted to take a picture. (Why?! Who cares!? What would I even do with that picture?) I got tons of mileage out of various Dell desktops and self-built machines over the last couple of decades. It was better bang for the buck, I didn't have to fuss over proprietary connectors and a locked down operating system. When the company I worked for made a big shift away from (it's okay to chuckle) Coldfusion and MS SQL Server to Ruby on Rails and MongoDB in 2013, though they offered to let me continue running on Windows, I asked for a Macbook because that's what everyone else was using. Might as well learn. Didn't much like OSX but the hardware was better than any Windows laptop I'd used. Later I bumped up to a 2015 MBP, which I only just retired this year. While I was Windows at home and MacOS at work, last month I snagged a Macbook Pro w/ 64gb of RAM from B&H for $2400 - the first Apple computer I've ever paid for myself - and it's replaced my Dell desktop and that 2015 Macbook that my old job let me keep. I effectively skipped the bad Macbooks, so my perspective is tinted by that. But even during the bad years, even my friends who continued to operate in the MS domain were buying Macbooks and dual booting them into Windows. I had access to a Surface tablet through work early on. It was really nice! Just like a Zune. The Surface Pros looked pretty great too, but anecdotally, I never saw them outside the context of visiting a business that was a strictly MS shop. I still like Windows as an OS better. But Apple's new architecture (which importantly doesn't have me carrying dongles around, or even needing them at home) was compelling enough for me to take the plunge.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      I haven't liked the usability of the entire Macbook line though, and It's very upsetting that so many laptop makers have decided to just copy it. There's lots of little details which are well made, but bad decisions: the screen hinges tend to be a little too floppy, the trackpad is oversized, removing the physical buttons makes it hard to use, moving the power button from a separate area to the "eject" button location on the keyboard (and making it look like a regular key), everything they've done with keyboards (flat, overlay spaced keys with no surface indentation and less and less travel). The ridiculously sharp edges of the body chassis which cut into your when you rest your hands there (seen at least one video of someone just filing a bevel into the machine to fix it). They look great, but that's all they've ever seemed to me: in usability details they've always felt terrible (even MagSafe, which seems like it should be great, feels great, and yet has seemed pretty lacklustre when I've had to use it with a work machine).
- mikenew 3y ago
  > I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? Gaming can't be good, because there's no controllers. Even if the hand and eye tracking is absolutely S-tier, you're never getting something like button input from swinging your empty hands around, twitching your fingers. Just the occlusion from the back of your hand would be enough enough for that to be impossible. Fitness might be more doable, but even then I think you're going to be very limited with hand tracking only. I think there's a reason why Apple skipped over those segments almost entirely. EDIT: I meant "VR" controllers, as in things that are tracked in 3d space. Of course you can use a game pad or MKB, but that kinda misses the point of being in VR in the first place.
  - glhaynes 3y ago
    They talked about and briefly showed using game controllers and keyboards/pointing devices with it.
    - mikenew 3y ago
      I saw a traditional gaming controller and a keyboard. Was there some kind of tracked-in-3d-space pointing device that I missed?
      - glhaynes 3y ago
        At 1:31:50 in the Keynote video they mention “Bluetooth accessories like Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard” and show those on a table and a person typing on the keyboard. I don’t believe the cursor of the trackpad is shown (but I’m on my phone and my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be!). I bet it’ll work like on iPadOS. There are a LOT of WWDC sessions on visionOS; hopefully it’s shown off in one of them. EDIT: Trackpad usage shown here https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076?time=914 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076?time=914
  - andyferris 3y ago
    Why do you say there are no controllers? I was reading about bluetooth keyboards and interacting with a laptop, so why wouldn't a bluetooth controller be feasible (say, before launch)?
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  I for one will be sticking to controllers and forgoing eye tracking. Hand input is irritating and limited, I hate using pinch gestures to click on things and the article makes a solid point that the lack of haptic feedback just makes it feel like you're flailing around (which you are). Eye tracking is nice to have in social interactions but I don't see the point otherwise.
- morisy 3y ago
  > so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? I certainly don't think so? My guess going in was that fitness would be one of the main plugs — especially because high-end fitness devices already cost a fair amount, and that would have made their tail end, "How much would a computer plus a screen plus umm... it's $3,5000!" go a lot more smoothly. I do think that's likely high on the road map, particularly given such a large investment in Fitness+, but also can see them being very wary about encouraging any high-energy movements with a $3,500 device. I think it's the pricing and dev-kit-ish nature of the v1 more than too obvious. But Vision Pro does seem to imply a future Vision Sport.
- prawn 3y ago
  Could be that they're leaving it (and gaming/etc) for developers. They largely showed core stuff only at this point. The platform launch was very locked down. For incremental hardware upgrades, they put hardware in the hands of devs by either shipping out early or bringing devs to their offices to work on prototypes in a secure environment.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  Sweating profusely in an electronics device... I've ruined ski goggles just sweating in them and they're meant for that. Also just stumbling with these on or slipping and there you go cracked $3500 screen.
  - wilg 3y ago
    Worse, if you run into a wall at high speed the screen probably ends up in your eyes.
  - silok 3y ago
    Honestly, how often do you bang your head hard into a wall/floor? Sure, I'm a tall guy, roughly 200cm, and I sometimes bang my head in a overhead doorstock. But that is typically some old cottage or similar, where I would probably not bring a XR headset anyway.
    - grogenaut 3y ago
      I was taking while being tired from exercise. While skiing biking etc often. While doing vr, I've broken a monitor and gone through a wall and broken several controllers. While just waking around I forgot my shed had a low door and clipped my head last week first time in years. That's why I wear a effing helmet. You're blind on your stationary bike and pop off wrong. Done. Foot stays clipped in, faceplant.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        >While doing vr, I've broken a monitor and gone through a wall and broken several controllers. Jesus set up the room boundaries, it's really not that hard.
        grogenaut 3y ago
        They don't always work
dilap 3y ago
tracks with what carmack said when he left. what a shame!
cubefox 3y ago
The Quest Pro has actual VR games and proper VR controllers though. I doubt that such games are possible or probable with eye pointing and finger clicking alone. Apple also didn't include any VR games into their presentation.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. Apple is right to ignore it.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    People generally agree that VR games are miles ahead of ordinary games in terms of immersion. The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games. The Meta Quest comes close to a decent price point, but there aren't many publishers making elaborate games for it. A chicken/egg situation with regards to adoption and game investment. Basically, a Game Boy or Switch for VR.
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      They are immersive, 100%. But also nauseating and forehead heating.
      - cubefox 3y ago
        A reviewer on YouTube said the Apple Vision is a bit heavy because they used a metal frame for some reason. (No comment about foreheads)
        acdha 3y ago
        You can safely treat “reviewer on YouTube” as “stranger at a bar” in terms of accuracy. They get paid to get clicks, not to deliver accurate or expert advice, and that heavily favors “why don’t they just…?” comments glossing over challenging engineering decisions.
sangnoir 3y ago
> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash. Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?
- dvt 3y ago
  If you have a product that's 5x as good, but 2x as expensive, literally everyone will buy it. The iPhone is the perfect case study.
  - ojbyrne 3y ago
    If you’re comparing the Quest 2 to the Vision Pro, it seems more like 2x as good for 5x the price.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Based on the hands-on impressions I’ve read it sounds significantly more than twice as good. Five times the price, yeah. Today. This really feels like a product aimed at developers right now not the mass market yet. Which fits. The iPhone took a few years to really take off. The Apple Watch took a few years to really takeoff.
      - ukuina 3y ago
        Has Apple ever released a Developer Edition product before?
        esskay 3y ago
        They've had developer units but not a publicly released one as far as I know. When Apple TV was being developed they were handing them out to devs for free like they had millions they were trying to get rid of. I was a lowly single app creator and they happily sent me one. For the Intel to M1 migration they did something similar but required them to be returned this time, and limited which devs they sent them out to.
cascades42 3y ago
I'm with you. Had the same exact problems, and I returned mine. Interestingly, the Quest 2 seemed less buggy when I had one.
wahahah 3y ago
I found it notable Apple has this to say about eye tracking under the "Learn more about privacy and security" section: >Eye input is not shared with Apple, third-party apps, or websites. Only your final selections are transmitted when you tap your fingers together. Along with this small video: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e268c13-eb22-493d-a860-f0637bacb569/anim/drawer-privacy-eye-input/large.mp4 https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e2... Which is great and important for me to see, but I'm unsure how that jives with features such as foveated rendering.
- reaperman 3y ago
  You can get a surprising amount of information about cognitive processes from eye tracking. I worked on the industrial version of HP Reverb G2 which included a PPG sensor and Tobii eye tracking. Was really an amazing product which suffered from having to use third party platforms like Windows Mixed Reality and OpenXR which didn’t have first class support for what was possible. One notable takeaway is that eye tracking of saccades is loosely correlated with cognitive load. In fact, “cognitive load” was a product that would be licensed to developers to use in their apps so that difficulty levels could be dynamically adjusted to keep users in a sweet spot for learning. Especially when combined with a PPG sensor which can in theory detect if a man gets aroused (HP never investigated developing a model for that, but some comments from friends who were DoD-aligned contractors expressed alternating concern or interest in it, because they knew from their own career and independent research what applications might be possible with those technologies) …it could be used to infer things which someone might prefer to keep private (I.e. which categories of things they have an emotional response to). Apple definitely is aware of this and is heading off potential issues by not only not providing that data to third party app developers but also even to Apple itself. Apple does have a strong pre-existing framework for dealing with sensitive health data, so they could have decided to capture similar data and treat it the same way they deal with ECG data. HP did not have a HIPAA compatible framework so they threw away 99% of the PPG data and distilled it down to just “heart rate” which was the only data source available to app developers from the PPG sensor.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I imagine there will be some developers that try to have analytics fire when certain events happen, correlated with eye-hovering. Hopefully Apple will catch these tricks before they can go live. The potential value of knowing where someone's eyes are (whether they saw an advertisement, for example) could be very high, so I envision a cat-and-mouse game.
TuringNYC 3y ago
I got one last year also, but was disappointed by software selection. My children loved the hardware but wanted more software. At their behest, I tried to write my own software for it, but went in circles trying to figure out what SDK to use. I wish someone on the SDK team there could observe me as I tried to search for this information and failed because it would be super-informative on how to (and how not to) succeed on creating a wider community of apps...by making SDKs easily available. <All opinions are completely my own personal opinions>
bluSCALE4 3y ago
This is on brand for meta. Look at fb. It didn't come with instructions, but that didn't stop Cambridge Analytica from happening. Look at React. It didn't have instructions and yet it blew up. I bet Meta expected people to pick up the slack, that the best of what was there while they killed time polishing it. Zuck was probably part of the problem... a room full of POs pushing for stupid shit while building on a rocky foundation.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
It’s kind of funny that meta stock didn’t drop on the vision pro announcement. What does that say about the market’s assessment of meta’s vr/ar prospects?
- pharmakom 3y ago
  maybe the odds of meta dropping the whole vr thing have increased? then they can stop lighting piles of money on fire because zuck read snow crash as a teenager? OTOH, maybe apple will show meta how a headset can actually be done and they can mimic their way to product market fit?
  - zaptrem 3y ago
    I much prefer Meta dumping billions into VR rather than targeting ads and worsening teens' depression.
- ulfw 3y ago
  The market is hedging it's bets. If Vision Pro will succeed Meta could be seen as the cheap-ass alternative. 3500USD vs 500USD is like Ferrari vs. Kia. Not everyone can afford the former. If Vision Pro doesn't succeed, the market will likely move on from VR completely, leaving Apple and Meta in the same place. Money spent, product introduced, tried, didn't work. Move on.
  - zaptrem 3y ago
    Apple has the stubbornness and funds to drive this for a decade, and they will. Apple Vision Air AR glasses are coming even if they don't sell a single Pro unit for five years.
- albert_e 3y ago
  I actually expected the opposite TBH. Not because Meta had a better product, but Apple putting its might into this product category means that "Meta" is vindicated in investing here -- that there exists / will exist a viable market for this technology in coming years. All the damage done by the poor quality 3D renders of AR/VR worlds from Metaverse -- that made a layperson laugh at the concept of AR/VR -- is probably partly offset by the positive press and marketing budgets that Apple will bring to the table.
01100011 3y ago
> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash Let's be real. You can have all the money in the world, but that doesn't guarantee you access to talent. It doesn't guarantee that you made insightful technical decisions that hamstring you later in the product cycle. It doesn't free you from short-sighted managers or employees who just care about making it to the next vesting cycle. When you're a billion-dollar(haha, not so significant these days) company, you have a tremendous pressure to show results. You have tremendous pressure to show innovation and be first to market. It has no bearing on the quality of the products you release in the short-to-medium term.
- zaptrem 3y ago
  John Carmack led them to a very strong technical base. Based on his testimony they squandered it.
pavlov 3y ago
It’s a long game. In both desktop and mobile, a viable and commercially successful alternative emerged even though Apple had the edge in sophistication and innovation. A lot of people probably don’t remember what Android looked like in 2007. Using the Android pre-release SDK next to an iPhone, you’d come to a similar conclusion as yours: how does Google release a mobile OS so behind the curve? Should they fire all their product managers? Same story with Windows in 1986. It was difficult to see how the graceless file manager from Microsoft could compete with Apple’s holistic GUI. Give it four years. I think Meta intends to be the Windows and Android of this third wave of UIs. Validation of the market by Apple is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.
penjelly 3y ago
i dont understand this mentality, obviously the intent is to improve the experience over time, creating a VR platform itself is an ambitious task. Are there no happy customers of the Quest? metas strategy is to release a cheaper consumer product and improve it iteratively. Hate to break it to you but day1 apple vision pro will have software bugs too.

by dvt 3y ago

balaji1 3y ago

Fitness and gaming wasn't demoed much yesterday, but are going to be insane on the Vision Pro - so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. But how big of a deal is the M2+R1? Anyway the metaverse was already being retracted, else this Vision Pro could have hammered Meta. Clearly Occulus has to evolve to match VisionPro. Controller has to be optional. It has to have better AR. Meta has to be the more "open" alternative to Apple's ecosystem barriers.

dvt 3y ago
> Also Meta could catch up if it was just software. This was Microsoft's warcry for years: who cares if Apple has better software? We have better hardware. Well guess what, software matters and it matters more than hardware. If you have both, you have literally a generationally-defining product (e.g. the iPhone), but even if you just have the software, you'll still eat your competitor's lunch. Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware. Meta's about to get a rude awakening because "we can fix the software later." As if technical debt doesn't exist and as if you can so easily get engineers that eagerly want to clean up someone else's mess.
- leviathant 3y ago
  >Why does everyone have MacBook Pros these days? Prior to Apple Silicon, it certainly wasn't the hardware. Oh, I don't know about that. Admittedly there were some awful choices made between 2015 and the emergence of M1 architecture, but Apple's reputation for making well engineered hardware goes at least as far back as to when they started milling Macs out of aluminum. I'm thinking back specifically to the PowerMac G5 in 2006. It was designed well, felt solid, and when you opened it up, it continued to look well made. I recently popped open my 2015 Macbook Pro because I'm finally having hard drive issues, and for as much as I have railed against Apple fanboyism over the decades, it looked so nice inside I wanted to take a picture. (Why?! Who cares!? What would I even do with that picture?) I got tons of mileage out of various Dell desktops and self-built machines over the last couple of decades. It was better bang for the buck, I didn't have to fuss over proprietary connectors and a locked down operating system. When the company I worked for made a big shift away from (it's okay to chuckle) Coldfusion and MS SQL Server to Ruby on Rails and MongoDB in 2013, though they offered to let me continue running on Windows, I asked for a Macbook because that's what everyone else was using. Might as well learn. Didn't much like OSX but the hardware was better than any Windows laptop I'd used. Later I bumped up to a 2015 MBP, which I only just retired this year. While I was Windows at home and MacOS at work, last month I snagged a Macbook Pro w/ 64gb of RAM from B&H for $2400 - the first Apple computer I've ever paid for myself - and it's replaced my Dell desktop and that 2015 Macbook that my old job let me keep. I effectively skipped the bad Macbooks, so my perspective is tinted by that. But even during the bad years, even my friends who continued to operate in the MS domain were buying Macbooks and dual booting them into Windows. I had access to a Surface tablet through work early on. It was really nice! Just like a Zune. The Surface Pros looked pretty great too, but anecdotally, I never saw them outside the context of visiting a business that was a strictly MS shop. I still like Windows as an OS better. But Apple's new architecture (which importantly doesn't have me carrying dongles around, or even needing them at home) was compelling enough for me to take the plunge.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    I haven't liked the usability of the entire Macbook line though, and It's very upsetting that so many laptop makers have decided to just copy it. There's lots of little details which are well made, but bad decisions: the screen hinges tend to be a little too floppy, the trackpad is oversized, removing the physical buttons makes it hard to use, moving the power button from a separate area to the "eject" button location on the keyboard (and making it look like a regular key), everything they've done with keyboards (flat, overlay spaced keys with no surface indentation and less and less travel). The ridiculously sharp edges of the body chassis which cut into your when you rest your hands there (seen at least one video of someone just filing a bevel into the machine to fix it). They look great, but that's all they've ever seemed to me: in usability details they've always felt terrible (even MagSafe, which seems like it should be great, feels great, and yet has seemed pretty lacklustre when I've had to use it with a work machine).
mikenew 3y ago
> I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? Gaming can't be good, because there's no controllers. Even if the hand and eye tracking is absolutely S-tier, you're never getting something like button input from swinging your empty hands around, twitching your fingers. Just the occlusion from the back of your hand would be enough enough for that to be impossible. Fitness might be more doable, but even then I think you're going to be very limited with hand tracking only. I think there's a reason why Apple skipped over those segments almost entirely. EDIT: I meant "VR" controllers, as in things that are tracked in 3d space. Of course you can use a game pad or MKB, but that kinda misses the point of being in VR in the first place.
- glhaynes 3y ago
  They talked about and briefly showed using game controllers and keyboards/pointing devices with it.
  - mikenew 3y ago
    I saw a traditional gaming controller and a keyboard. Was there some kind of tracked-in-3d-space pointing device that I missed?
    - glhaynes 3y ago
      At 1:31:50 in the Keynote video they mention “Bluetooth accessories like Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard” and show those on a table and a person typing on the keyboard. I don’t believe the cursor of the trackpad is shown (but I’m on my phone and my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be!). I bet it’ll work like on iPadOS. There are a LOT of WWDC sessions on visionOS; hopefully it’s shown off in one of them. EDIT: Trackpad usage shown here https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076?time=914 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10076?time=914
- andyferris 3y ago
  Why do you say there are no controllers? I was reading about bluetooth keyboards and interacting with a laptop, so why wouldn't a bluetooth controller be feasible (say, before launch)?
throwaway4aday 3y ago
I for one will be sticking to controllers and forgoing eye tracking. Hand input is irritating and limited, I hate using pinch gestures to click on things and the article makes a solid point that the lack of haptic feedback just makes it feel like you're flailing around (which you are). Eye tracking is nice to have in social interactions but I don't see the point otherwise.
morisy 3y ago
> so I guess it was just too obvious to demo. Or is it? I certainly don't think so? My guess going in was that fitness would be one of the main plugs — especially because high-end fitness devices already cost a fair amount, and that would have made their tail end, "How much would a computer plus a screen plus umm... it's $3,5000!" go a lot more smoothly. I do think that's likely high on the road map, particularly given such a large investment in Fitness+, but also can see them being very wary about encouraging any high-energy movements with a $3,500 device. I think it's the pricing and dev-kit-ish nature of the v1 more than too obvious. But Vision Pro does seem to imply a future Vision Sport.
prawn 3y ago
Could be that they're leaving it (and gaming/etc) for developers. They largely showed core stuff only at this point. The platform launch was very locked down. For incremental hardware upgrades, they put hardware in the hands of devs by either shipping out early or bringing devs to their offices to work on prototypes in a secure environment.
grogenaut 3y ago
Sweating profusely in an electronics device... I've ruined ski goggles just sweating in them and they're meant for that. Also just stumbling with these on or slipping and there you go cracked $3500 screen.
- wilg 3y ago
  Worse, if you run into a wall at high speed the screen probably ends up in your eyes.
- silok 3y ago
  Honestly, how often do you bang your head hard into a wall/floor? Sure, I'm a tall guy, roughly 200cm, and I sometimes bang my head in a overhead doorstock. But that is typically some old cottage or similar, where I would probably not bring a XR headset anyway.
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    I was taking while being tired from exercise. While skiing biking etc often. While doing vr, I've broken a monitor and gone through a wall and broken several controllers. While just waking around I forgot my shed had a low door and clipped my head last week first time in years. That's why I wear a effing helmet. You're blind on your stationary bike and pop off wrong. Done. Foot stays clipped in, faceplant.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      >While doing vr, I've broken a monitor and gone through a wall and broken several controllers. Jesus set up the room boundaries, it's really not that hard.
      - grogenaut 3y ago
        They don't always work

dilap 3y ago

tracks with what carmack said when he left. what a shame!

cubefox 3y ago

The Quest Pro has actual VR games and proper VR controllers though. I doubt that such games are possible or probable with eye pointing and finger clicking alone. Apple also didn't include any VR games into their presentation.

kalleboo 3y ago
VR gaming is a flop. Lots of people bought headsets, played with them for a day and now they're all gathering dust. Apple is right to ignore it.
- cubefox 3y ago
  People generally agree that VR games are miles ahead of ordinary games in terms of immersion. The adoption problem seems to be that there is no affordable VR console with a lot of big exclusive games. The Meta Quest comes close to a decent price point, but there aren't many publishers making elaborate games for it. A chicken/egg situation with regards to adoption and game investment. Basically, a Game Boy or Switch for VR.
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    They are immersive, 100%. But also nauseating and forehead heating.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      A reviewer on YouTube said the Apple Vision is a bit heavy because they used a metal frame for some reason. (No comment about foreheads)
      - acdha 3y ago
        You can safely treat “reviewer on YouTube” as “stranger at a bar” in terms of accuracy. They get paid to get clicks, not to deliver accurate or expert advice, and that heavily favors “why don’t they just…?” comments glossing over challenging engineering decisions.

sangnoir 3y ago

> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash. Can you name a better product in the price-bracket?

dvt 3y ago
If you have a product that's 5x as good, but 2x as expensive, literally everyone will buy it. The iPhone is the perfect case study.
- ojbyrne 3y ago
  If you’re comparing the Quest 2 to the Vision Pro, it seems more like 2x as good for 5x the price.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Based on the hands-on impressions I’ve read it sounds significantly more than twice as good. Five times the price, yeah. Today. This really feels like a product aimed at developers right now not the mass market yet. Which fits. The iPhone took a few years to really take off. The Apple Watch took a few years to really takeoff.
    - ukuina 3y ago
      Has Apple ever released a Developer Edition product before?
      - esskay 3y ago
        They've had developer units but not a publicly released one as far as I know. When Apple TV was being developed they were handing them out to devs for free like they had millions they were trying to get rid of. I was a lowly single app creator and they happily sent me one. For the Intel to M1 migration they did something similar but required them to be returned this time, and limited which devs they sent them out to.

cascades42 3y ago

I'm with you. Had the same exact problems, and I returned mine. Interestingly, the Quest 2 seemed less buggy when I had one.

wahahah 3y ago

I found it notable Apple has this to say about eye tracking under the "Learn more about privacy and security" section: >Eye input is not shared with Apple, third-party apps, or websites. Only your final selections are transmitted when you tap your fingers together. Along with this small video: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e268c13-eb22-493d-a860-f0637bacb569/anim/drawer-privacy-eye-input/large.mp4 https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-vision-pro/2023/7e2... Which is great and important for me to see, but I'm unsure how that jives with features such as foveated rendering.

reaperman 3y ago
You can get a surprising amount of information about cognitive processes from eye tracking. I worked on the industrial version of HP Reverb G2 which included a PPG sensor and Tobii eye tracking. Was really an amazing product which suffered from having to use third party platforms like Windows Mixed Reality and OpenXR which didn’t have first class support for what was possible. One notable takeaway is that eye tracking of saccades is loosely correlated with cognitive load. In fact, “cognitive load” was a product that would be licensed to developers to use in their apps so that difficulty levels could be dynamically adjusted to keep users in a sweet spot for learning. Especially when combined with a PPG sensor which can in theory detect if a man gets aroused (HP never investigated developing a model for that, but some comments from friends who were DoD-aligned contractors expressed alternating concern or interest in it, because they knew from their own career and independent research what applications might be possible with those technologies) …it could be used to infer things which someone might prefer to keep private (I.e. which categories of things they have an emotional response to). Apple definitely is aware of this and is heading off potential issues by not only not providing that data to third party app developers but also even to Apple itself. Apple does have a strong pre-existing framework for dealing with sensitive health data, so they could have decided to capture similar data and treat it the same way they deal with ECG data. HP did not have a HIPAA compatible framework so they threw away 99% of the PPG data and distilled it down to just “heart rate” which was the only data source available to app developers from the PPG sensor.
gnicholas 3y ago
I imagine there will be some developers that try to have analytics fire when certain events happen, correlated with eye-hovering. Hopefully Apple will catch these tricks before they can go live. The potential value of knowing where someone's eyes are (whether they saw an advertisement, for example) could be very high, so I envision a cat-and-mouse game.

TuringNYC 3y ago

I got one last year also, but was disappointed by software selection. My children loved the hardware but wanted more software. At their behest, I tried to write my own software for it, but went in circles trying to figure out what SDK to use. I wish someone on the SDK team there could observe me as I tried to search for this information and failed because it would be super-informative on how to (and how not to) succeed on creating a wider community of apps...by making SDKs easily available. <All opinions are completely my own personal opinions>

bluSCALE4 3y ago

This is on brand for meta. Look at fb. It didn't come with instructions, but that didn't stop Cambridge Analytica from happening. Look at React. It didn't have instructions and yet it blew up. I bet Meta expected people to pick up the slack, that the best of what was there while they killed time polishing it. Zuck was probably part of the problem... a room full of POs pushing for stupid shit while building on a rocky foundation.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

It’s kind of funny that meta stock didn’t drop on the vision pro announcement. What does that say about the market’s assessment of meta’s vr/ar prospects?

pharmakom 3y ago
maybe the odds of meta dropping the whole vr thing have increased? then they can stop lighting piles of money on fire because zuck read snow crash as a teenager? OTOH, maybe apple will show meta how a headset can actually be done and they can mimic their way to product market fit?
- zaptrem 3y ago
  I much prefer Meta dumping billions into VR rather than targeting ads and worsening teens' depression.
ulfw 3y ago
The market is hedging it's bets. If Vision Pro will succeed Meta could be seen as the cheap-ass alternative. 3500USD vs 500USD is like Ferrari vs. Kia. Not everyone can afford the former. If Vision Pro doesn't succeed, the market will likely move on from VR completely, leaving Apple and Meta in the same place. Money spent, product introduced, tried, didn't work. Move on.
- zaptrem 3y ago
  Apple has the stubbornness and funds to drive this for a decade, and they will. Apple Vision Air AR glasses are coming even if they don't sell a single Pro unit for five years.
albert_e 3y ago
I actually expected the opposite TBH. Not because Meta had a better product, but Apple putting its might into this product category means that "Meta" is vindicated in investing here -- that there exists / will exist a viable market for this technology in coming years. All the damage done by the poor quality 3D renders of AR/VR worlds from Metaverse -- that made a layperson laugh at the concept of AR/VR -- is probably partly offset by the positive press and marketing budgets that Apple will bring to the table.

01100011 3y ago

> It's insane that a billion-dollar company like Meta actually felt proud to release such a steaming pile of trash Let's be real. You can have all the money in the world, but that doesn't guarantee you access to talent. It doesn't guarantee that you made insightful technical decisions that hamstring you later in the product cycle. It doesn't free you from short-sighted managers or employees who just care about making it to the next vesting cycle. When you're a billion-dollar(haha, not so significant these days) company, you have a tremendous pressure to show results. You have tremendous pressure to show innovation and be first to market. It has no bearing on the quality of the products you release in the short-to-medium term.

zaptrem 3y ago
John Carmack led them to a very strong technical base. Based on his testimony they squandered it.

pavlov 3y ago

It’s a long game. In both desktop and mobile, a viable and commercially successful alternative emerged even though Apple had the edge in sophistication and innovation. A lot of people probably don’t remember what Android looked like in 2007. Using the Android pre-release SDK next to an iPhone, you’d come to a similar conclusion as yours: how does Google release a mobile OS so behind the curve? Should they fire all their product managers? Same story with Windows in 1986. It was difficult to see how the graceless file manager from Microsoft could compete with Apple’s holistic GUI. Give it four years. I think Meta intends to be the Windows and Android of this third wave of UIs. Validation of the market by Apple is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

penjelly 3y ago

i dont understand this mentality, obviously the intent is to improve the experience over time, creating a VR platform itself is an ambitious task. Are there no happy customers of the Quest? metas strategy is to release a cheaper consumer product and improve it iteratively. Hate to break it to you but day1 apple vision pro will have software bugs too.