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I'm very confused by Apple's strategy. As an owner of the original HTC Vive headset, its word-of-mouth power was off the charts. It was a blast at parties, and
by BoppreH 3y ago
I'm very confused by Apple's strategy. As an owner of the original HTC Vive headset, its word-of-mouth power was off the charts. It was a blast at parties, and many of my friends bought their own $700+ devices after trying it.
Here's what won them over:
- Being able to try it themselves with little preparation ("put this on your head, tighten it here, and click these buttons on the controller"). You could even use it over glasses.
- Games that you play by grabbing things with your hands. The heavy hitters are Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx, but Climbey and UltraWings also got fans, and all the combat games where you punch cartoons or reload guns realistically.
(seriously, if you've never tried, the jump from mouse+keyboard to hand tracking is like going from arrow keys to mouse+keyboard)
Meanwhile, here's what Apple seems to be doing:
- Customized accessories, to the point that you need a face-scan and to send them your glasses prescriptions.
- Eyetracking and gesture-only interactions. I haven't seen a single demo where somebody picks a virtual object up.
How is that going to work? Do they expect to make up for all the lost word-of-mouth with marketing campaigns? Also, did they give up on VR games?
- post-it 3y agoThey're going for the same approach they always do. You don't need word-of-mouth if you have every product placement slot. People won't get hyped on the Vision Pro by their best friend, they'll get hyped on it by their favourite YouTuber.
- stouset 3y agoAfter decades of hearing about Apple only being kept afloat by their indoctrinated, rabid fan base (whose numbers curiously appeared to grow exponentially with each passing year), Apple “always” making sales only by ad spots and not word of mouth is certainly a hot take.
- post-it 3y agoThe ad spots are how they get new customers, the product quality is how they keep existing ones.
- bstar77 3y agoApple probably wants to tap into the "Apple Watch Edition" crowd that will spend absurd money for the exclusivity and not complain much.
- scarface_74 3y agoThere was no “crowd”. If there were, the $10K watch wouldn’t have been cancelled after tte first generation
- nomel 3y agoI saw exactly one person in the wild wearing one: a store manager at pizza chain. It was completely obsolete at that point.
- layer8 3y agoThat “crowd” will buy this version instead: https://caviar.global/catalog/virtual-reality https://caviar.global/catalog/virtual-reality
- Jarmsy 3y agoAll I've seen so far suggests they're almost entirely focused on virtual 2d screens floating in 3d space, and not other virtual 3d objects at all.
- dev_tty01 3y agoNot true at all. https://developer.apple.com/visionos/ https://developer.apple.com/visionos/
- wccrawford 3y agoWhy would you think that URL would prove them wrong, when the only image it has on that page is of 2d screens floating in 3d space?
- dev_tty01 3y agoThere are numerous quotes in the text describing the 3D API for creating and manipulating 3D content. For example: "Present 3D content, animations, and visual effects in your app with RealityKit, Apple’s 3D rendering engine."
- threeseed 3y agoThey had many WWDC sessions covering 3D objects especially with the Unity integration [1] and their Reality Composer Pro [2] tool. Both were covered during the keynote. And if you look on Youtube there are countless videos of third party developers developing 3D apps. It's just that they are positioning the device as a spatial computer i.e. something you use to get real work done. And right now for 99% of people that involves 2D windows. [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10088/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10088/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10083/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10083/
- nomel 3y agoI take their point as a problem of control. Picking up objects with hand tracking is, in my experience, much less deterministic, and much less useful, compared to picking them up with a button and haptics.
- tudorw 3y agoI don't think this designed to sell in numbers, it exists as a placeholder for them, in case m$ or Pico start drawing too much attention, the old 'what we have is better, you just can't have it yet' routine. I will be interested to see what they spend on content and how they approach webXR, I'm not sure a market for walled garden devices in 2024 will be there, hopefully not :)
- bee_rider 3y agoI had a blast showing my Rift CV1 to friends, but only one person I showed it off to got a VR headset, and both mine and his seem to be gathering dust at the moment. It seems to me that Apple is very worried about their device getting slotted into the “fun expensive limited use toy” niche.
- soligern 3y agoIt’s like getting a pair of glasses. They’re customized to your eyes and fit to your face.
- ghaff 3y agoOne area of friction that hasn’t been mentioned but is out of Apples control is that in some states like MA prescription eyewear requires a current, within one year, prescription.
- zinodaur 3y agoI bet they need time to ramp up their manufacturing. In the meantime - they can either artificially restrict the purchase of these things (what they are doing now), or have scalpers camp outside the stores and resell for 2-3x what apple are selling them for. If they can actually deliver on their promises - they will fucking sweep the VR market. Current VR headsets blow chunks. If the meta quest cost 10$ - people would still not use it for normal things, because it unpleasant to interact with.
- smoldesu 3y agoHard disagree. Current headsets are perfectly fine for the well established use-cases like gaming and stereo/3D video. The problem is, as always, going to be shoehorning real features into a goofy form-factor. We've been down this avenue before with Hololens and it was very clear that enterprise customers aren't really interested in developing bespoke AR workflows. Even with perfect passthrough vision there wasn't any tangible benefit to the tech outside very narrow military applications (and who knows where those contracts went). So now we're here. If Apple delivers on their promise of a very nice Oculus Quest sorta thing with iPhone apps and AppleTV+, I can't imagine people using it more than their Oculus Quest, iPhone or AppleTV.
- Vecr 3y agoThey still exist[0], but they leak light and apparently cause nausea and that sort of thing. [0]: https://taskandpurpose.com/uploads/2023/01/24/army-IVAS-2022-testing-assesment.jpeg https://taskandpurpose.com/uploads/2023/01/24/army-IVAS-2022...
- charcircuit 3y agoIf the vision pro were free people wouldn't use it for normal things either because it is unpleasant compared to using a phone, monitor, macbook, tv.
- mwint 3y agoThis is a very strong statement about an unreleased product in a nascent field. What are you basing it on?
- cm2187 3y agoMy experience of the same has been the opposite. Friends I showed it to telling me "interesting" then moving on and never mentioning it again. And I felt the same. It went to storage less than a month after I received it.
- dahwolf 3y agoSame here. I organized a trip to a VR center for the entire team at work. Everybody had fun, but more like going to a theme park. Nobody ever talked about it again or bought one, just zero interest. And these are tech people.
- rubicon33 3y agoMany people even by their mid 20s begin to lose the ability to embrace or even enjoy paradigm shifts. Moving from flat gaming to fully immersive 3D gaming just doesn't do enough to budge the hardened neural pathways that have embraced 2D gaming over the years. It's a frankly common case of being "stuck in ones way". Will VR and AR be the future? Absolutely, and a large part of the current population will be left behind. Happens with every new technology.
- p1esk 3y agoWill VR and AR be the future? No one doubts that. The question is whether this particular product will be successful. That’s not clear yet.
- simiones 3y agoMany people absolutely doubt that. There is absolutely no reason to believe it so far - from all of my experience, both VR and AR are technically inferior to a screen in almost every way that actually matters, except for a short demo.
- p1esk 3y agofrom all of my experience We are talking about the future.
- unreal37 3y agoIt's not a gaming device. It's two tiny iPads that you can put right up to your eyes and use hand movements to control.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Teever 3y agoGaming is a pretty popular activity on the iPad.
- pornel 3y ago$3500 device for $0.99 games seems like a waste. Hopefully the release of the game porting toolkit is a sign they're thinking of gaming beyond the toddler casinos they have on iOS.
- dev_tty01 3y agoHmm. Are you aware that mobile gaming revenue is larger than console and PC and that the majority of mobile gaming revenue comes from iOS (iPad and iPhone)? https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/
- Gigachad 3y agoIt's gaming in the same way that a slot machine is "gaming" or how Android is Linux. True in some sense but still not at all in line with the general usage of the word.
- as_bntd 3y agoMost of my gaming this year has been on my iPad. There are a lot of enjoyable “real” games… Just to give some examples: Total War, Six Ages, Slay the Spire, FM23, Kingdoms Two Crowns, Vampire Survivors, and I’ve played many more. Not sure what is fake about them.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt doesn’t sound like a gaming play, rather a productivity/media consumption play. I really wish Meta or someone else would focus on fitness more. Augmented fitness (not normal gaming) seems to be an area ripe for viral adoption. Without any haptic feedback, VisionPro is less suitable than the Quest.
- zmmmmm 3y agoit's a totally different model of generating demand. They don't need marketing, because they have a completely captive audience of loyal apple fans who will easily saturate the first year (or even two years) of supply for this product. They are following Palmer Luckey's "Make people want it first model". Being supply limited, traditional marketing would only generate demand they can't satisfy. What they actually have to do is make sure every person who gets one has the most perfect experience possible.
- crooked-v 3y ago> What they actually have to do is make sure every person who gets one has the most perfect experience possible. This is particularly important when it comes to a VR headset, where it's very easy for bad initial experiences to literally physically condition the user into getting sick every time they put on a VR headset. Stepping the most diehard fans through how to metaphorically "hold it right" also gives them a built-in backstop of support when it comes to preventing those issues with future consumers once they eventually hit the point of proper mass market production.
- jimbob45 3y agoHas this ever worked for a company where there were genuinely equal options available? Because you could say GMail but GMail was a better experience than literally every other provider at the time.
- jolux 3y agoEveryone seems to say Vision Pro is better than everything else.
- mrguyorama 3y agoEveryone I have seen with actual experience USING VR and AR say it is not even evolutionary, let alone revolutionary.
- 3y ago
- madeofpalk 3y agoI don't think they expect to sell many of these. I don't think this is some hype campaign, I think they just think/know the market for this is very limited.
- Brendinooo 3y agoThere’s a rumor that the supply chain is constrained by the displays, something like 1 million units max? If true, no need to push hard to sell these this year.
- fastball 3y ago"Why isn't Apple approaching their device in the same way this other company approached their device? A device which, incidentally, nobody really cares about anymore after some initial." Apple doesn't want their market to be the same as the market for the HTC Vive, which isn't exactly a successful product (at least by Apple standards). They also don't want the market to be defined by their competitors, so they're approaching the market in a very different way. An example of this is how, in the keynote where they announced their new VR headset, they didn't say the words "Virtual Reality" once.
- basisword 3y ago>> I haven't seen a single demo where somebody picks a virtual object up. Why do I need to do that? It’s a great demo but it’s not something I need to be able to do day to day. And that seems to be the strategy from Apple. Make it a useful device for daily tasks rather than a gaming specific device or a device for doing something “new”. If you’re paying $3500 it needs to be immediately useful. Think about it, you’re trying to tell me Vive is great and their marketing strategy (word of mouth) was a huge success…I have never seen one in the wild and Occulus seems to be much more popular. In other words their strategy hasn’t worked so probably not a great idea for Apple to copy it.
- joshstrange 3y ago> seriously, if you've never tried, the jump from mouse+keyboard to hand tracking is like going from arrow keys to mouse+keyboard Totally different experience here. It's interesting but the mouse still blows away anything VR has offered thus far. Games like Beat Saber /are/ a ton of fun and cool input method but but the novelty wears off fast. A majority of my friend group all bought VR headsets together and after 1-2 months of playing (often together) our usage has fallen off a cliff. I can't remember the last time I picked up my headset and I even bought lenses a couple months ago to try and reinvigorate my interest (I wear glasses/contacts but glasses always fog so I'd have to put in my contacts to play which was an annoying barrier) but I literally played it 1-2 more times before getting bored and moving on. Current VR headsets are only good for gaming (yes, even the Meta Pro, it's resolution is joke for real productivity) and I have a limited interest in that method of gaming. I still play my Xbox, I still play games on my computer, I still play games on my phone but VR gaming isn't as interesting to me. It's novel but it wears off and the motion sickness is really annoying in certain types of games. All that coupled with absolute shit hand tracking (it's cool when it works but it fails too often), lackluster controllers (I can only take my sabers going wild when that's not what my hands are doing so many times), and poor graphics makes my headset a toy and not a particular good one. We will see if Apple is able to improve on what's currently available and their track record has me hoping they succeed. Their vision, no pun intended, of AR/VR is much more in line with what I have been dreaming of for decades.