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I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be

I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.

Cacti 3y ago
well, ar is going to be the real money maker by probably several factors.
MBCook 3y ago
> AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now. I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers. On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more). I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.” Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. These, at least, had legit keyboards.
  - halostatue 3y ago
    Yet were nigh unusable.
    - dboreham 3y ago
      How memory fades. People used smartphones for years, in large numbers, prior to the iPhone. Nokia, Blackberry were the market leaders. Also Palm and MS and probably others I've forgotten. Sony...
      - halostatue 3y ago
        I wasn't talking about anything except Windows CE phones (I had a Palm-based Treo phone at one point, but it was not really a very good phone or palm pilot.) WinCE phones were barely usable for their primary task, and were almost completely unusable for anything else because of the limitations inherent in WinCE and Microsoft's insistence on trying to replicate the Windows UI on something that was fundamentally unsuited for it. Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything. I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007). The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      They were quite useful! Just not for rewarding impulse buying.
      - halostatue 3y ago
        WinCE phones? No, they mostly weren't. When they weren't crashing, they were only really accessible with a stylus and often not well built. Microsoft didn't get mobile UI and stability correct until Windows Mobile, and by then it was too late for Microsoft to be a major factor.
- roland35 3y ago
  Meta likes to call quest 3 "mixed reality" since AR is generally defined as adding images to the existing light going into your eyes. I just feel like the technical challenges of AR are much larger than people give it credit for - even just dealing with "how to project an image" before even trying to miniaturize it is really hard!
- realusername 3y ago
  I can see the reasoning yeah, for now it seem to be treated similarly though. Maybe a v2 could help like it did with the iPhone, after all the first model also had a lot of trouble to find its place.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    It always does. First gen Apple stuff is often really pushing the limits. Then v2 is way better. Phone, watch, iPad. Plus they don’t appear to know what its real use case is yet. But they don’t want to be a $3500 thing to play ports of Quest VR games from 4 years ago.
    - realusername 3y ago
      I do agree with them on that, that's for sure. The VR market is minuscule and even the "market leaders" get chump change compared to smartphones and laptops, the market penetration is very low and worse than that, is looking like a flat curve now. I don't know what will work to commodities VR but the current platforms just ain't going to cut it.
      - MBCook 3y ago
        In my mind the big problems are a killer app and nausea. Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that. And enough people have nausea issues that it can’t be ignored. Higher frame rates will help. But a lot of software either ignores the issue or does half measures. The instant something screws up and gives you a huge lurch in your stomach the fun stops. “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
        buffington 3y ago
        > “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough. I hate hearing this. I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick. Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable. My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.
- surfingdino 3y ago
  AR and VR is a wasteland where money gets burned on ideas that have not advanced much since 1990s and the first Virtuality devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) in terms of being more useful than an Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a laptop for pretty much anything. A computer does not get better when you wear it. Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head. AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Nobody needs any new ideas for urban planning. Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried, so what's needed is ideas for how to make the planners go away. I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
      > Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.
      - astrange 3y ago
        No, it's even worse in other Anglo countries, and China, Brazil, etc. (not sure of the details of the last one, just remember something about planned cities not working) The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.
dwaite 3y ago
If they had 100% capture of the current consumer VR/AR market it would still have a tiny impact on their overall numbers. They use a new term because they feel the only way to succeed is to create a new product category. And that is part of why it is confusing - it doesn't feel like they could create a large enough market to matter for any device in the current VR/AR form factor, or even the idealized version of the current form.
chaostheory 3y ago
Totally disagree. Most people have such a low view of VR and by extension AR that Apple wants to avoid any association with it.
wilsonnb3 3y ago
this is just standard Apple operating procedure, they love slapping a new name on an existing technology for marketing purposes. retina display, pro-motion, touch ID, etc

Cacti 3y ago

well, ar is going to be the real money maker by probably several factors.

MBCook 3y ago

> AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now. I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers. On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more). I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.” Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.

mschuster91 3y ago
> iPhone vs early Windows CE phones. These, at least, had legit keyboards.
- halostatue 3y ago
  Yet were nigh unusable.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    How memory fades. People used smartphones for years, in large numbers, prior to the iPhone. Nokia, Blackberry were the market leaders. Also Palm and MS and probably others I've forgotten. Sony...
    - halostatue 3y ago
      I wasn't talking about anything except Windows CE phones (I had a Palm-based Treo phone at one point, but it was not really a very good phone or palm pilot.) WinCE phones were barely usable for their primary task, and were almost completely unusable for anything else because of the limitations inherent in WinCE and Microsoft's insistence on trying to replicate the Windows UI on something that was fundamentally unsuited for it. Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything. I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007). The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    They were quite useful! Just not for rewarding impulse buying.
    - halostatue 3y ago
      WinCE phones? No, they mostly weren't. When they weren't crashing, they were only really accessible with a stylus and often not well built. Microsoft didn't get mobile UI and stability correct until Windows Mobile, and by then it was too late for Microsoft to be a major factor.
roland35 3y ago
Meta likes to call quest 3 "mixed reality" since AR is generally defined as adding images to the existing light going into your eyes. I just feel like the technical challenges of AR are much larger than people give it credit for - even just dealing with "how to project an image" before even trying to miniaturize it is really hard!
realusername 3y ago
I can see the reasoning yeah, for now it seem to be treated similarly though. Maybe a v2 could help like it did with the iPhone, after all the first model also had a lot of trouble to find its place.
- MBCook 3y ago
  It always does. First gen Apple stuff is often really pushing the limits. Then v2 is way better. Phone, watch, iPad. Plus they don’t appear to know what its real use case is yet. But they don’t want to be a $3500 thing to play ports of Quest VR games from 4 years ago.
  - realusername 3y ago
    I do agree with them on that, that's for sure. The VR market is minuscule and even the "market leaders" get chump change compared to smartphones and laptops, the market penetration is very low and worse than that, is looking like a flat curve now. I don't know what will work to commodities VR but the current platforms just ain't going to cut it.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      In my mind the big problems are a killer app and nausea. Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that. And enough people have nausea issues that it can’t be ignored. Higher frame rates will help. But a lot of software either ignores the issue or does half measures. The instant something screws up and gives you a huge lurch in your stomach the fun stops. “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
      - buffington 3y ago
        > “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough. I hate hearing this. I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick. Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable. My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.
surfingdino 3y ago
AR and VR is a wasteland where money gets burned on ideas that have not advanced much since 1990s and the first Virtuality devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) in terms of being more useful than an Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a laptop for pretty much anything. A computer does not get better when you wear it. Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head. AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.
- astrange 3y ago
  Nobody needs any new ideas for urban planning. Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried, so what's needed is ideas for how to make the planners go away. I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
    > Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.
    - astrange 3y ago
      No, it's even worse in other Anglo countries, and China, Brazil, etc. (not sure of the details of the last one, just remember something about planned cities not working) The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.

dwaite 3y ago

If they had 100% capture of the current consumer VR/AR market it would still have a tiny impact on their overall numbers. They use a new term because they feel the only way to succeed is to create a new product category. And that is part of why it is confusing - it doesn't feel like they could create a large enough market to matter for any device in the current VR/AR form factor, or even the idealized version of the current form.

chaostheory 3y ago

Totally disagree. Most people have such a low view of VR and by extension AR that Apple wants to avoid any association with it.

wilsonnb3 3y ago

this is just standard Apple operating procedure, they love slapping a new name on an existing technology for marketing purposes. retina display, pro-motion, touch ID, etc