24 ms·

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and d

by zmmmmm 3y ago

Lots of surprises on the downside from all the reviews. Pass through much more limited in quality with motion blur, pixelation, distortions, limited color and dynamic range. The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. Personas straight up aren't ready. The lack of AR features is the biggest surprise. They tried hard to avoid it being a VR device but all the actual high quality experiences, especially the ones people are impressed by are the VR ones. For me the biggest issue though is that it can't fulfil it's primary use cases: Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors. Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together. All up, it all seems far more immature and dev-kit stage than I was expecting.

crooked-v 3y ago
> I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together. The reviews haven't mentioned it, but SharePlay [1] is OS-level functionality and the press releases mention using it with movies, music, and games. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
I wonder given all this... what the expectations are at Apple from a higher up/board/executive standpoint are Most of Apple offerings are good: Watch iPad Mac iPhone services Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Tim Apple reportedly overrode the design team on launching it prematurely relative to their typical standards in order to enter the market and begin iterating before waiting too long. It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context. Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)
  - Wingy 3y ago
    The watch is a new product category under his leadership isn't it?
    - BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y ago
      Watch still under Steve, put it in other way, it's last product under his supervision.
      - george_perez 3y ago
        Doesn’t look like it. > Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/
        wahnfrieden 3y ago
        That is incorrect, or rather, misleading - maybe Ive didn't join the project until 2011, sure, but it began in 2010. Ive didn't lead all design work yet in 2011, he was still just a VP.
    - pulisse 3y ago
      AirPods, too.
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
        AirPods weren't a new product category, they were an iteration of the Apple EarPods which looked the same, had the same remote features, etc.
        kstrauser 3y ago
        I highly disagree about that, especially for the Pros with ANC and spatial audio. EarPods were nice wired earphones. AirPods seem like way more of a leap than just EarPods-but-wireless.
- epolanski 3y ago
  The first two iWatches were borderline pointless/bad. The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration. I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.
  - checkyoursudo 3y ago
    Are current watches good? I genuinely don't know and am interested. I hadn't gotten one because I was an early iPhone adopter (Gen 1), but haven't been willing to be an early adopter since then. But I would like a watch, if they are good now.
    - freeone3000 3y ago
      If you want a very small cell phone on your wrist, they are good at that. I’m nit sure what they’re good for , but they can be that.
    - kaonwarb 3y ago
      I find them exceptional for a somewhat narrow range of activities (I love going on a run or hike navigating by my Apple Watch while streaming whatever music I want in the world to my AirPods - no phone, nothing to carry), and only slightly useful for a broad range of other things (notifications, weather, etc - conveniences).
      - Thlom 3y ago
        What I love best with my Apple Watch is that I can respond to Duo/Okta/BankId directly from my watch and don't have to look for my phone or pull it out of my pocket.
    - sarlalian 3y ago
      I'm sure the later ones are also great, but as of Apple Watch 4, they are quite compelling depending on what your needs are. From a fitness / voice assistant button on the wrist, getting notifications without pulling your phone out standpoint the Series 4 and later are all fantastic.
- electroly 3y ago
  Apple Maps falls in that category. Maps was bad when it came out but after years of effort (and a lot of money), it's pretty good now. That was no small feat given how good Google Maps already was when Apple Maps started.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    In my area (Long Island), Apple Maps works great (better than Google Maps). I hear that it falls down, in rural areas, though. [edit] Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that… I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts. Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to their products, and their vision (although I have no opinion, –yet– on their Vision), and have every right to be critical. Those of us that have been on the ride for that long, have seen a very bumpy road.
    - Fomite 3y ago
      In my particular rural area, Apple Maps knows the street I live on exists. Google Maps still needs a call to delivery people to explain to them that their map is lying to them.
    - YoumuChan 3y ago
      I gave Apple Map a second chance after hearing good things about it recently. But it gave me a route where I need to turn left right after taking a right-turn ramp, except that the left turning line are separated by road dividers before the exit of the ramp. So I would need to either go wrong direction and do a 180, or bulldoze the dividers. As a comparison, Google Map never gave me that route in the past. This happened in a moderately sized town so I guess I will still stick to Google Map for now.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      I just checked my area in Apple Maps out of interest and my own house, which I've lived in for longer than Apple Maps has existed, is listed as belonging to a business I've never heard of. The only actually existing business I can find with that name is at the opposite side of the country. Not a great first impression. Also while I can view Apple Maps via a third party like DuckDuckGo, you can only report a map issue through an Apple device, so I guess it's staying wrong.
- Twisell 3y ago
  The watch first 1-3 generations were clearly "so so".
- outofpaper 3y ago
  Newton and to a much much lesser extent the first iPod and iPhone. But really the Newton while a product that I love and a super profitable line was the last time Apple created something that had so many rough edges.
- lambdasquirrel 3y ago
  So-so in what way? This product is clearly a toy. Which is to say that it is genuinely new. Maybe like how the Apple II was when it first came out. PCs were quite expensive back then too, if I remember correctly. This really will take time. All the important technological things were toys before they became tools.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  The first iPhone was pretty terrible. I couldn't get my Marketing peers to take it seriously (which they came to regret). The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8. Don't get me started on the first Mac...
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > The first iPhone was pretty terrible. I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.
    - herval 3y ago
      It was usable on any other network, I had one and it wasn’t AT&T locked Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/10/apple_att_originally_agreed_to_iphone_exclusivity_until_2012 https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/10/apple_att_origina... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone > When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.
        makeitdouble 3y ago
        A few people had it in Japan connected to docomo as a GSM phone. I suppose there were workarounds for other carriers as well. I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?
- jedberg 3y ago
  > When is the last time they launched a "so so" product? All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods... They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.
  - jamespo 3y ago
    First iPod and iPad were fine.
    - homefree 3y ago
      The first iPod had a wheel that physically moved and would get dirt and stuff stuck in it/have issues. The HDD would also freeze up. It was better than alternatives at the time, but it wasn't really until the click wheel it got really refined. The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.
      - jamespo 3y ago
        They were both significantly better than alternatives and didn't cost 7x as much as this does vs meta quest 3.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      The first iPod's wheel would break and skip all the time. And so would the hard drive. And the OS was really simple, and the syncing was terrible. The first iPad was ok only because it truly was "just a bigger iPhone". But they didn't really make features that were unique to the iPad and took advantage of its bigger screen for a few versions afterwards.
      - jamespo 3y ago
        The os was simple, it played music, that's it?
        3y ago
- leoc 3y ago
  Watch was cute but fussy and a little pointless when it first came out, and only gradually became really compelling.
JacobThreeThree 3y ago
>The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.
- askonomm 3y ago
  I was curious about this so I tried surfing the web and seeing how I click on things. I am literally unable to click on buttons or text inputs without actually looking at them. If I try to only use a corner of my eye, I miss the buttons 90% of the time. How do people not look at what they are clicking?
  - hamburglar 3y ago
    My guess is that people actually do look in order to aim their mouse but by the time they click, their eyes have already moved onto wherever they’re looking next.
    - zmmmmm 3y ago
      yep this is it one reviewer said they kept hitting "No" and "cancel" when they meant "Yes" because their natural progression was to look at the buttons in order, pick out the one they want to press but actually click it after they finish scanning all of them with their "mouse" paused on the one they want to hit. It's kind of fascinating that the VisionPro's input method works so well when it does work that it tricks people into doing this, because they really do just expect it to work like magic.
    - huytersd 3y ago
      Yep, focused on the play button on a YouTube video to get my mouse there and then my eyes immediately went back to the center of the video a fraction before I clicked the mouse button.
      - 3y ago
deadbabe 3y ago
It’s my understanding that eye tracking isn’t great as an input method, it should be used more for stuff like rendering or NPC interactions.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  It's going to be a great, sneaky way of installing an ad blocker onto wetware - users will train themselves to not even gaze at anything resembling an ad, lest they look at it long enough for the headset to register it as a click.
  - dieortin 3y ago
    Apps are not able to register where you’re looking. Only the headset itself does.
    - adkaplan 3y ago
      Does ios not rely on hovering/mouse over for alt text or similar? Im mostly on windows but i wonder if theyll eventually concede a second gesture for "put cursor here"
      - saagarjha 3y ago
        On visionOS the APIs essentially ask all UI elements for "alt text" and the system display is it when appropriate.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Sure, but the proof of looking is in the clicking. The threat scenario I'm describing here is "looked at the ad long enough for the headset to interpret it as wanting to click on it".
- Findecanor 3y ago
  I think that eye tracking perhaps could be used to enhance gesture-based input methods though. It could provide a hint at which object a gesture is directed at in cases where that would be ambiguous. I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.
coconut08 3y ago
i generally agree with the sentiment of this post. it does appear to be a beta/dev kit. i will say that the productivity criticism is a BIT unfair. It may be the case that you can only have 1 MACOS display, but you can have many non macos apps running right alongside the 1 macos display. You could have your macos display doing things that only macos can do, and then run the vision pro version of discord or teams or safari or whatever else you would use that has an ipad/vision version as floating windows separate from the macos display.
- zmmmmm 3y ago
  yes true - a lot depends on the integration in that scenario though. Can I seamlessly copy and paste rich content between the, drag and drop, does the mouse seamlessly move from my Mac desktop to the safari window next to it, etc. At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  iOS/visionOS lacks good window management tools for this though and since macOS Apple has not demonstrated they can build them for new platforms. Maybe visionOS will motivate them to actually get it right, but that hasn't been shown off yet. I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic. I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.
NoPedantsThanks 3y ago
[dead]
mikenew 3y ago
My launch day Apple Watch was unbelievably bad. Not even good for telling time as the raise-to-wake feature was so flaky. So by the sound of it, the Vision Pro might be starting in a better position than the watch.
- herval 3y ago
  Watch v1 was just awful. Those laptops with butterfly keyboards and the first gen Air were also completely broken in their own ways. If Apple manages to keep iterating on this device, they might eventually have a winner Or maybe it’ll be another homepod
- raydev 3y ago
  My job at the time gave me a brand new Series 2 and it was annoying to interact with... when it was new. Dropped frames, missed touches, etc. There was still a little bit of lingering hope there would be "killer apps" outside notifications and exercise. But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).
  - dieortin 3y ago
    As a counterpoint, I had a Series 2 for years and it worked really well. It was slow, so third party apps were not really usable, but the core functionality of the watch was perfectly fine. That is, until an unfortunate incident broke its screen while in the sea.
  - mikenew 3y ago
    I had the watch they launched with, which Apple pretends didn't exist as they named the next model the Series 1 and this model never got a name. The watch improved considerably in the next generations, so you can do the math back from your Series 2 to get a sense of how truly bad it was.
marricks 3y ago
Every hit from Apple had lots of initial (VALID) gripes, but the experience was worth it to advance the core product and eventually eliminate or accept those limitations. iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough. iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough. That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had. Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.
abaymado 3y ago
"Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together." This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music. I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-listen-play-iphb657eb791/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-liste...
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  I think OP meant you can't include other people _in the same room_. If I want to watch Netflix (well, Apple TV, since Netflix doesn't have an app yet), my partner is completely out of luck if I do it on an Apple Vision. Unless he too has the money for one and we FaceTime each other to sync up our watching experience.
  - bigiain 3y ago
    That seems to be an odd requirement/desire to have a head mounted display do?
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      That's the point. Watching TV with other people is a thing that most folks do. At least in my house, it's nice to walk into the room to see what someone else is watching and join. Unless they become comfortable and universally ubiquitous, watching media isn't something Apple Vision is going to be particularly good for.
  - abaymado 3y ago
    I once had a roommate who stopped playing video games a decade ago. We bought a PS5, and he kept trying to find games like 'Gears of War' and 'Lord of the Rings' with a multiplayer split-screen campaign in the same room. Aside from classic 1v1 fighting and sports games, the new games being released did not offer that. They were all built for high-quality solo gaming or optimized online gaming. Expecting a VisionOS experience with people in the same room reminds me of that. I'm not saying there won't be apps for it, but it would be niche.
Johnie 3y ago
Reminds me of iPhone 1. Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.
- nylonstrung 3y ago
  iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark
  - HatchedLake721 3y ago
    > iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone ... no? Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Maemo?
  - serf 3y ago
    first mass-market smartphone with mass appeal maybe, but it wasn't the first mass-market smartphone by a long shot.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Or the first Newton.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  the price is quite different though
- nightski 3y ago
  The iPhone was subsidized by mobile carriers and/or interest free payment plans. I don't see that same path for this VR device, but maybe I am missing something.
  - mbreese 3y ago
    The original iPhone wasn’t subsidized… it was bought outright. It was only after Apple proved the potential of the iPhone did the carriers get on board (and even then, it was limited support for quite a while).
posix86 3y ago
What do you mean, it can't run multiple monitors? I thought it lets you pop out windows free standing, no concept of monitor at all.
- valgaze 3y ago
  This tool evidently overcomes the display limitation: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble "Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  It does for apps running on the goggles themselves, but the Mac integration feature just shows the Mac's screen as one window, kinda like Remote Desktop on Windows. And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.
russellbeattie 3y ago
> The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
oomun 3y ago
genuine curiosity, how often are you clicking something without looking at it at least for a moment? or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it? im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens
- penneyd 3y ago
  Often times I'll look to position the mouse and then look at something else when I actually hit the button.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  A lot. I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are: - checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click. - focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away. - scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another. I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.
  - oomun 3y ago
    your first example is p solid, i agree there will be a micro-tedium related to re-focusing on a confirmation button in that type of scenario assuming that, in the AVP UX, the user could not linger hand-gesture focus on the button then immediately click after verifying whatever info they are reading as they will have to move the eyes up (to read lol) then back down to focus the hand-gesture control back onto the button
  - oomun 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/dtp6b76pMak?si=WIfkMdrsffMXwEvh&t=543 https://youtu.be/dtp6b76pMak?si=WIfkMdrsffMXwEvh&t=543 timestamp where reviewer discusses this idea
ls612 3y ago
This was always going to happen. The human eye has a field of view and dynamic range no display technology can hope to match anytime soon. The future of AR is not reprojecting the outside world on a screen; it is screens which can become transparent.
- __m 3y ago
  For that to happen we would need a transparent display that can block light. Seeing content on an additive display will always look somewhat transparent, with no hope of displaying blacks. The augmentation on the vision pro look so much better than on a HoloLens2, it's like looking at 3d printed objects.
  - ls612 3y ago
    My impression is that this is known to be possible and it’s mainly an engineering challenge to get good yields cheaply.
- singularity2001 3y ago
  Dynamic transparency is the path to the future, and it's physically perfectly doable. Any news from the ray ben smart glasses?
naravara 3y ago
> Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors. I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.
- zecg 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion: multiple monitors are a meme for most uses and almost everyone is better off having a single screen and using their fingers to move the viewport accross virtual desktop spaces.
  - whynotminot 3y ago
    Not just an unpopular opinion, it’s also not supported by data. There are a decent number of studies that show that multiple monitors increases productivity. Iirc though, there are diminishing returns fairly quickly beyond dual monitors. Me personally, the sweet spot is three total screens.
  - Sateeshm 3y ago
    Yes. I'd rather press a button than turn my neck.
mbreese 3y ago
> Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).
- thuuuomas 3y ago
  What does disingenuous mean
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  And yet you literally have early access reviewers regurgitating talking points about how this will redefine the television-watching and movie-going experience.
anonymouse008 3y ago
We just got the 'larger iPod' version of Spatial Computing. If your primary interface is a screen, it's still screen computing, not spatial computing. They literally had everything teed up to do some wild proximity things (AirTags, Homepods, etc) - and they gave us a strap on iPad. Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  “ok zoomer” - your old “friend” next month as you pay for your subscriptions through their payment processing.
al_borland 3y ago
The biggest thing for me, from the Verge review, was the limited field of view. Apple sold it as filling the users entire field of view and it sounds like that isn’t the case. When I first saw the reality of the Microsoft HoloLens, that was my disappointment there as well… Google Glass as well. I don’t want to feel like I’m wearing an AR device, as so far, that’s what everything has looked like. Limits of the technology, sure, but until that is solved I’ll have a lot of trouble throwing money at it. I still plan to head to an Apple Store at some point to try it out for myself. As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.
- Civitello 3y ago
  > field of view...Limits of the technology It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now and antagonistic to one another feature wise. There’s also display brightness which is an issue and I’m not sure how that fits in to the FOV/density spectrum. And then more pixels means more compute… That prototypes exist doesn’t necessarily mean much in a space that is full of prototypes showing off one particular feature. The very hard thing is to combine all of the desired features in to one consumer ready headset.
    - Roark66 3y ago
      >Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now. Exactly. You know what is the best "goggle" type display I ever saw (and I tried quite a few)? Recent FPV goggles (hdzero) that have 1930*1080 OLED displays at approximately 46 degrees fov. I'm very glad the manufacturer decided to use the his low fov instead of increasing it to 55deg and more like others. The picture is insanely crisp, and looks better than looking at a 4k display. Another huge benefit is that entire picture fits within your "focus cone" so there is no need to gaze around. It is not a VR display, it's purpose is different, but it shows us what visual quality is possible. I'd love if manufacturers, if they can't make 16k displays that fill the entire fov, create variable pixel density displays. Best quality in the center. Deteriorating towards the edges. That would be much cheaper, but then for good illusion one would need eye tracking and motorised optics which would probably be more expensive in the end... Oh, well, I'm pretty happy with my fpv goggles (for fpv) I just wish there was a way for them to display different picture for each eye. They already have head tracking, I wonder what VR would be like with this huge ppi narrow fov goggles. Would it be more or less immersive?
XorNot 3y ago
The eye-tracking thing doesn't surprise me at all, but I am surprised anyone thought this was a holy-grail sort of interface, in particular that Apple didn't rule it out themselves fairly quickly. Eye-tracking data is always a gigantic mess - it's why it's presented as gaze averages rather then direct replays.
ravenstine 3y ago
Wow, I remember when it was announced, to press materials gave the impression that it would be closely integrable with macOS. I was picturing using VS Code from within it. Which I guess I could do if I set up VNC... but I'm not paying thousands for that. Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Yeah I’d love to use one for PCB design at a cafe, but I don’t even own a Mac. I’m not going to drop $5k for an experience I can already do with my old laptop just a little bit fancier.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  It does Airplay from a Mac to the headset. You look at the Mac and then tap the "connect" button that appears in mid air above it. Apparently it's very seamless and has good latency. What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    Yeah, that's not great. I guess that's slightly useful, but what I'm looking for is the ability is more like virtual desktops but being able to place each desktop into physical space. Being able to do that with individual windows would be even better, but I'd be fine with the virtual desktops. If Vision Pro can do Airplay, then I don't know why Apple decided not to do an integration with virtual desktops from macOS. Maybe they will, but not having that at day one is puzzling to me. Without that, it seems we've got yet another AR/VR device that is a glorified tech demo. I really hope that it gets better (and less expensive) than what we are currently seeing.
    - 3y ago
landswipe 3y ago
Expecting the same, this is going to be a MASSIVE flop. VR is not for the masses until the goggles go away.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I think this product will be a slow burn. They are getting developers engaged now and subsequent generations will bring broader appeal while the software will get more refined and apps will expand in availability. I don’t think it will be a flop it will just take a while to get going. And they must absolutely know this given the current pricing.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Its not gonna flop, for the same reason that Apple desktops dont flop. Anyone educated in basic modern technology can easily see that for the price, you can build a custom desktop that blows any Mac one out the water, but people still buy them because of 2 things: styling and ecosystem. Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.
ethbr1 3y ago
To me, 3D home recording playback is a huge use case. Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way. But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone! That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings. And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you. >> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.
steveBK123 3y ago
> if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ). Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Keep an eye on Immersed.com, they have an app that does this with a slew of VR devices, and I expect they will support Vision Pro if they can. They also have the Visor.com that is supposed to release later this year
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Instead of having multiple virtual screens I would prefer a lot more if I could simply spread individual Mac windows around my virtual space. In mixed reality the whole concept of a virtual monitor makes no sense, it's just an unnecessarily limiting abstraction you could easily do without. The whole room is your "desktop". It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.
  - slg 3y ago
    But what is your actual physical work environment like then? Are you standing in the middle of the room and typing into air? I always imagined productivity minded people would still at least use a physical keyboard which limits mobility.
    - SirHound 3y ago
      No you’d be sitting at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, like today
      - 3y ago
stevage 3y ago
> Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together. No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.
chii 3y ago
> people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them may be apple expect every person to buy one. Didn't facebook recently try something similar?
kj99 3y ago
[flagged]
youssefabdelm 3y ago
> people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them Eh... I prefer empty cinemas No loud babies, no popcorn sounds, no people explaining the plot to people not paying attention, just me and the world of the film. Bliss.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I can’t get over how goofy and stupid it looks, and how awkward those gestures are. There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta. It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.
- habitue 3y ago
  I'm not really an Apple fan nor am I going to buy this thing, but this seems like a criticism that goes away as soon as everyone does it. We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it
  - theK 3y ago
    Yeah, new things will look weird until culturally appropriated. Two things that seem to differentiate AR/VR stuff from previous tech 1. They are more "worn" than "used" 2. They conceal your face while wearing So maybe cultural acceptance might take a while... EDIT: typos
  - sumedh 3y ago
    > We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles Do we really though? Reading a newspaper or book would be stupid as well
  - Thlom 3y ago
    People said this about voice assistants as well, we would get used to talking to them in public after a little while. I've still not seen anyone speaking to Siri or Google in public. The only thing most people use them for is setting timers when cooking ...
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    The black rectangle form factor is the same as a notepad. Nothing about it screams "I'm completely out of touch with my reality"
ugh123 3y ago
>Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors. Do you mean a Mac's external monitor visible through the vision pro AR view?
brtkdotse 3y ago
> The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.
- mcny 3y ago
  > This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem. I wanted to see how it is possible but sure enough, I found a paper from 1995 that cited even older research about this. https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf
  - fouc 3y ago
    from the paper, the definition of The Midas Touch problem is: > They expect to be able to look at an item without having the look cause an action to occur. So this doesn't seem to be a problem that Vision Pro has?
    - Geee 3y ago
      "At first it is helpful to be able simply to look at what you want and have it occur without further action; soon, though, it becomes like the Midas Touch. Everywhere you look, another command is activated; you cannot look anywhere without issuing a command." Yeah, Apple Vision doesn't have this problem, because eye tracking is used just for pointing; not for clicking on items.
      - svnt 3y ago
        Whether it has this problem or not seems to really depend on how they use “OnEyesOver” events in practice.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      Vision Pro pinch-touch is essentially the same as this paper's > some form of ‘‘clutch’’ to engage and disengage the monitoring The paper does talk about other challenges with look-to-select, even if it is biased by the thinking of back in the day: > Unlike a mouse, it is relatively difficult to control eye position consciously and precisely at all times. You have to remember that the historical setting for much of this research was to help paralyzed people to communicate, and pushing a button or the modern pinch-touch was not really always an option.
derefr 3y ago
> Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Not on a plane they don’t. Not in a hotel room on a business trip. IMHo, the Vision Pro is for being somewhere when you’re nowhere; not for being somewhere when you’re already somewhere.
- fouc 3y ago
  a hotel room on a business trip is pretty much "nowhere", so absolutely yes.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  I want to watch stuff or collaborate on projects with my wife on a plane or in a hotel, you just haven’t seen these use cases from Apple yet because the product lacks it in 1.0
  - derefr 3y ago
    I think you're conflating two things. The hypothetical use-case that the GP is talking about here, is AR -facilitated collaboration — people in your "see-through" view of the world being able to interact with the AR objects in your field of view, or vice-versa. Being able to AirDrop something to someone's iPhone by dragging a file from a window over to their body that you can see through the lens. You and your SO on the same flight, next to each-other and both wearing headsets, able to see the same set of shared/synced AR objects, and therefore watch the same movie. That kind of thing. While this is an intended use-case for the Vision "platform" as a whole — it's an implicit promise of the whole "spatial computing paradigm" phrasing — I don't think this kind of AR-facilitated collaboration was ever intended to ship with the Vision Pro. Why? Because, nobody in the Vision Pro's target market — at least as Apple would have it — wants or cares about AR-facilitated collaboration. I'll get to why in a moment, but in short — it's because it's the Vision Pro. And like Apple's other Pro products, it's mostly intended to be something possessed by an individual but owned and managed by their employer. Now, Apple clearly intends to build VR -facilitated collaboration — but hasn't yet. That's what all the reviews mean when they say "the collaboration" is half-baked in the Vision Pro. The people in Apple's target market for this thing, expected VR collaboration, and it's not there. But that's an entirely different thing from AR-facilitated collaboration. The Vision Pro as a specific product offering, almost certainly came out of Apple employees doing pandemic WFH, and realizing that all current "remoting" solutions sucked. Especially if you're a hardware engineer and trying to get a good look at a 3D real-world prototype of a thing. The people who are actually there in the office could just come in and stare at a real 3D-printed prototype. But the WFH people had to settle for looking at a 3D model on a screen... or maybe setting up a Windows machine, connected to an Oculus Quest, and using special compatible CAD software, in order to be able to do a walkaround. And that CAD software definitely didn't let them just paw at the 3D object with their hands. The Vision Pro is clearly aimed at the "high-fidelity sensory feedback" half of the remoting problem. It's thus the complement to the companies who build telepresence robots — those robots solve the high-fidelity presence and interaction half of the remoting problem. (And you could really do some clever things by combining them!) But note what else Apple released during the pandemic: Freeform, a piece of collaboration software. In fact, Apple added collaboration features to many of their first-party software offerings during the pandemic. Apple never thought they'd extract their best work from their WFH (or now, travelling) employees by having them "show up to the office" with a telepresence robot. They rather expect that the best platform for all their engineers — in-office or otherwise — will be a digital office: one made of collaborative apps. And specifically, "level-of-immersion responsive" collaborative apps — apps that can switch between (or be compiled for) both lower-fidelity 2D screen-based UX, and higher-fidelity 3D spatial UX, on the same codebase. It's this sort of 3D spatial collaboration-app UI experiences that the Vision Pro lacks in 1.0 but will clearly add later. (Which is why Apple cancelled WFH as soon as they could: their "solution to the remoting problem" isn't baked enough for them to usefully dogfood yet!) But this is effectively VR-facilitated collaboration — working with other people who could be in arbitrary places, in VR or just interacting through a screen, where you see their VR avatars (personas) instead of seeing them. It's "Metaverse stuff" — but don't let Tim Cook catch you calling it that. But AR-facilitated collaboration — i.e. having other people who are part of your work, present in the room with you, with some or all people in the room wearing Vision headsets with the see-through turned up, and where people wearing the headsets are interacting both with shared AR objects and with others present in physical space (rather than their VR simulacras in VR space)... this all has zero relevance to the remoting use-case. If you're in the office, then you're not going to be wearing a Vision Pro... because you can collaborate by just getting people in a room, and using various screens (AirPlay on an AppleTV display for shared viewing; your Macbooks for running collaboration tools; etc.) Now, AR-facilitated collaboration is likely a use-case for the "Vision platform" as a whole. (Otherwise, why bother with the AR OS features?) AR-facilitated collaboration, is what a self-employed / freelance creative professional — someone who isn't remoting into some [idea of an] office, but who does have people [e.g. clients] physically present around them who they need to interact with them and with their work — would want. AR-facilitated collaboration would therefore be the defining use-case for a later "Vision Studio": a "prosumer" model targeted at such creative professionals — the same sort of people who buy themselves a Mac Studio. It would match the Vision Pro's targeting (which, if you haven't considered it, will almost certainly end up squarely on "businesses buying these for their remoting employees" — even if the early adopters are individual tech nerds.)
whiteboardr 3y ago
No surprise at all i’d say - as Nilay Patel on the Verge review put it correctly: > cameras are still cameras, and displays are still displays. Anyone remotely familiar with the state of development in those areas would be aware that “even Apple” can’t cheat Reality (punintentionally). Those left still raving about and/or hoping for a game changer will be greatly dissapointed - or only in it for the line go up. The whole concept will be a niche product for many years to come and will stay an isolating experience.
j45 3y ago
It’s first generation First Gen is usually awful This is not awful and maybe even closer to 2nd gen Everything starts somewhere Most things are ready for the masses by the 3rd or 4th gen.
Damogran6 3y ago
AR Passthrough is the big v 1.0 feature for this generation of headsets...I'm sure Apple and Meta were developing in tandem without knowing what the competition was doing. It's a really need addition that brings significant improvements...and I could see Apple developing it as 'this is streets ahead' where Meta was just improving tech they already had. At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.
FloatArtifact 3y ago
Eye tracking would be so bad if you wink one eye to lock on to manipulate a certain section of the UI and ignore the rest.

by zmmmmm 3y ago

crooked-v 3y ago

> I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together. The reviews haven't mentioned it, but SharePlay [1] is OS-level functionality and the press releases mention using it with movies, music, and games. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10087/

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

I wonder given all this... what the expectations are at Apple from a higher up/board/executive standpoint are Most of Apple offerings are good: Watch iPad Mac iPhone services Are they really expecting this to just be a hard problem initially that they get better at over time? When is the last time they launched a "so so" product?

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Tim Apple reportedly overrode the design team on launching it prematurely relative to their typical standards in order to enter the market and begin iterating before waiting too long. It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context. Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)
- Wingy 3y ago
  The watch is a new product category under his leadership isn't it?
  - BOOSTERHIDROGEN 3y ago
    Watch still under Steve, put it in other way, it's last product under his supervision.
    - george_perez 3y ago
      Doesn’t look like it. > Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
        That is incorrect, or rather, misleading - maybe Ive didn't join the project until 2011, sure, but it began in 2010. Ive didn't lead all design work yet in 2011, he was still just a VP.
  - pulisse 3y ago
    AirPods, too.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      AirPods weren't a new product category, they were an iteration of the Apple EarPods which looked the same, had the same remote features, etc.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        I highly disagree about that, especially for the Pros with ANC and spatial audio. EarPods were nice wired earphones. AirPods seem like way more of a leap than just EarPods-but-wireless.
epolanski 3y ago
The first two iWatches were borderline pointless/bad. The first two iPhones weren't as innovative as they make them,just more polished than other symbians with cameras and internet, it took off with apps really in third iteration. I think visionpro has lots of opportunities in the next iterations, early users will provide feedback this gen.
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  Are current watches good? I genuinely don't know and am interested. I hadn't gotten one because I was an early iPhone adopter (Gen 1), but haven't been willing to be an early adopter since then. But I would like a watch, if they are good now.
  - freeone3000 3y ago
    If you want a very small cell phone on your wrist, they are good at that. I’m nit sure what they’re good for , but they can be that.
  - kaonwarb 3y ago
    I find them exceptional for a somewhat narrow range of activities (I love going on a run or hike navigating by my Apple Watch while streaming whatever music I want in the world to my AirPods - no phone, nothing to carry), and only slightly useful for a broad range of other things (notifications, weather, etc - conveniences).
    - Thlom 3y ago
      What I love best with my Apple Watch is that I can respond to Duo/Okta/BankId directly from my watch and don't have to look for my phone or pull it out of my pocket.
  - sarlalian 3y ago
    I'm sure the later ones are also great, but as of Apple Watch 4, they are quite compelling depending on what your needs are. From a fitness / voice assistant button on the wrist, getting notifications without pulling your phone out standpoint the Series 4 and later are all fantastic.
electroly 3y ago
Apple Maps falls in that category. Maps was bad when it came out but after years of effort (and a lot of money), it's pretty good now. That was no small feat given how good Google Maps already was when Apple Maps started.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  In my area (Long Island), Apple Maps works great (better than Google Maps). I hear that it falls down, in rural areas, though. [edit] Looks like I pissed in someone’s cereal. Didn’t mean to, but different strokes, and all that… I was just recounting actual personal experience, which, I suppose, isn’t popular, hereabouts. Just for context, I have been writing Apple programs, since 1986. I am totally committed to their products, and their vision (although I have no opinion, –yet– on their Vision), and have every right to be critical. Those of us that have been on the ride for that long, have seen a very bumpy road.
  - Fomite 3y ago
    In my particular rural area, Apple Maps knows the street I live on exists. Google Maps still needs a call to delivery people to explain to them that their map is lying to them.
  - YoumuChan 3y ago
    I gave Apple Map a second chance after hearing good things about it recently. But it gave me a route where I need to turn left right after taking a right-turn ramp, except that the left turning line are separated by road dividers before the exit of the ramp. So I would need to either go wrong direction and do a 180, or bulldoze the dividers. As a comparison, Google Map never gave me that route in the past. This happened in a moderately sized town so I guess I will still stick to Google Map for now.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    I just checked my area in Apple Maps out of interest and my own house, which I've lived in for longer than Apple Maps has existed, is listed as belonging to a business I've never heard of. The only actually existing business I can find with that name is at the opposite side of the country. Not a great first impression. Also while I can view Apple Maps via a third party like DuckDuckGo, you can only report a map issue through an Apple device, so I guess it's staying wrong.
Twisell 3y ago
The watch first 1-3 generations were clearly "so so".
outofpaper 3y ago
Newton and to a much much lesser extent the first iPod and iPhone. But really the Newton while a product that I love and a super profitable line was the last time Apple created something that had so many rough edges.
lambdasquirrel 3y ago
So-so in what way? This product is clearly a toy. Which is to say that it is genuinely new. Maybe like how the Apple II was when it first came out. PCs were quite expensive back then too, if I remember correctly. This really will take time. All the important technological things were toys before they became tools.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
The first iPhone was pretty terrible. I couldn't get my Marketing peers to take it seriously (which they came to regret). The first Watch was awful. I love my Series 8. Don't get me started on the first Mac...
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > The first iPhone was pretty terrible. I definitely do not think that opinion was widespread. If anything I think that the biggest discussed shortcoming of the first iPhone was that it was only available on AT&T.
  - herval 3y ago
    It was usable on any other network, I had one and it wasn’t AT&T locked Compared to all the smartphones of the time, it was a slow toy with no apps and a 2G connection that was completely worthless It looked nice though, and eventually it got an app store (unnoficially first), and the overall UX was a clear winner (nobody believed touch screens would ever replace blackberry style devices!)
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/10/apple_att_originally_agreed_to_iphone_exclusivity_until_2012 https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/10/apple_att_origina... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone > When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007,[38] it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States.[32] After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T[39] to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.
      - makeitdouble 3y ago
        A few people had it in Japan connected to docomo as a GSM phone. I suppose there were workarounds for other carriers as well. I don't know how they did it, but "life finds a way" ?
jedberg 3y ago
> When is the last time they launched a "so so" product? All of them! The first version of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, watch, AirPods... They all had similar reviews. "Seems like a tech preview, not really ready for general use, too expensive", etc.
- jamespo 3y ago
  First iPod and iPad were fine.
  - homefree 3y ago
    The first iPod had a wheel that physically moved and would get dirt and stuff stuck in it/have issues. The HDD would also freeze up. It was better than alternatives at the time, but it wasn't really until the click wheel it got really refined. The first iPad was similarly expensive, thick and underpowered. It wasn't until a couple generations in that it was good.
    - jamespo 3y ago
      They were both significantly better than alternatives and didn't cost 7x as much as this does vs meta quest 3.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    The first iPod's wheel would break and skip all the time. And so would the hard drive. And the OS was really simple, and the syncing was terrible. The first iPad was ok only because it truly was "just a bigger iPhone". But they didn't really make features that were unique to the iPad and took advantage of its bigger screen for a few versions afterwards.
    - jamespo 3y ago
      The os was simple, it played music, that's it?
      - 3y ago
leoc 3y ago
Watch was cute but fussy and a little pointless when it first came out, and only gradually became really compelling.

JacobThreeThree 3y ago

>The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. This has always been the case and this technology has been around for a while. I'm surprised Apple would have chosen to use it for user input.

askonomm 3y ago
I was curious about this so I tried surfing the web and seeing how I click on things. I am literally unable to click on buttons or text inputs without actually looking at them. If I try to only use a corner of my eye, I miss the buttons 90% of the time. How do people not look at what they are clicking?
- hamburglar 3y ago
  My guess is that people actually do look in order to aim their mouse but by the time they click, their eyes have already moved onto wherever they’re looking next.
  - zmmmmm 3y ago
    yep this is it one reviewer said they kept hitting "No" and "cancel" when they meant "Yes" because their natural progression was to look at the buttons in order, pick out the one they want to press but actually click it after they finish scanning all of them with their "mouse" paused on the one they want to hit. It's kind of fascinating that the VisionPro's input method works so well when it does work that it tricks people into doing this, because they really do just expect it to work like magic.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    Yep, focused on the play button on a YouTube video to get my mouse there and then my eyes immediately went back to the center of the video a fraction before I clicked the mouse button.
    - 3y ago

deadbabe 3y ago

It’s my understanding that eye tracking isn’t great as an input method, it should be used more for stuff like rendering or NPC interactions.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
It's going to be a great, sneaky way of installing an ad blocker onto wetware - users will train themselves to not even gaze at anything resembling an ad, lest they look at it long enough for the headset to register it as a click.
- dieortin 3y ago
  Apps are not able to register where you’re looking. Only the headset itself does.
  - adkaplan 3y ago
    Does ios not rely on hovering/mouse over for alt text or similar? Im mostly on windows but i wonder if theyll eventually concede a second gesture for "put cursor here"
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      On visionOS the APIs essentially ask all UI elements for "alt text" and the system display is it when appropriate.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Sure, but the proof of looking is in the clicking. The threat scenario I'm describing here is "looked at the ad long enough for the headset to interpret it as wanting to click on it".
Findecanor 3y ago
I think that eye tracking perhaps could be used to enhance gesture-based input methods though. It could provide a hint at which object a gesture is directed at in cases where that would be ambiguous. I have tried eye tracking as primary input method some years ago in another setting, and I very much did not like the experience.

coconut08 3y ago

i generally agree with the sentiment of this post. it does appear to be a beta/dev kit. i will say that the productivity criticism is a BIT unfair. It may be the case that you can only have 1 MACOS display, but you can have many non macos apps running right alongside the 1 macos display. You could have your macos display doing things that only macos can do, and then run the vision pro version of discord or teams or safari or whatever else you would use that has an ipad/vision version as floating windows separate from the macos display.

zmmmmm 3y ago
yes true - a lot depends on the integration in that scenario though. Can I seamlessly copy and paste rich content between the, drag and drop, does the mouse seamlessly move from my Mac desktop to the safari window next to it, etc. At a deeper level it depends a lot on the question of does Apple want this? If they do then all these will be solved over time. But if they actually see MacOS as a legacy integration then they simply aren't going to invest in encouraging people to use it. I'm waiting to see indications on which way they are going to play it.
madeofpalk 3y ago
iOS/visionOS lacks good window management tools for this though and since macOS Apple has not demonstrated they can build them for new platforms. Maybe visionOS will motivate them to actually get it right, but that hasn't been shown off yet. I think about all the apps I'm running and switching between on my computer now, using shortcuts and toolbars and docks to arrange, hide, and switch between them. Everyone using multiple apps on visionOS just looks chaotic. I once had a second portrait monitor next to my ultrawide. I had to get rid of it because it was just too tiring to be constantly turning my head so far to look at it. It didn't work out. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it would be if each app needed to be in a different physical space that required turning my head to use. Painful.

NoPedantsThanks 3y ago

[dead]

mikenew 3y ago

My launch day Apple Watch was unbelievably bad. Not even good for telling time as the raise-to-wake feature was so flaky. So by the sound of it, the Vision Pro might be starting in a better position than the watch.

herval 3y ago
Watch v1 was just awful. Those laptops with butterfly keyboards and the first gen Air were also completely broken in their own ways. If Apple manages to keep iterating on this device, they might eventually have a winner Or maybe it’ll be another homepod
raydev 3y ago
My job at the time gave me a brand new Series 2 and it was annoying to interact with... when it was new. Dropped frames, missed touches, etc. There was still a little bit of lingering hope there would be "killer apps" outside notifications and exercise. But nope, nothing more interesting came, and OS updates ruined performance so badly that I happily returned it to my employer 2 years later and opted not to buy my own until 2021 (for exercise and notifications only).
- dieortin 3y ago
  As a counterpoint, I had a Series 2 for years and it worked really well. It was slow, so third party apps were not really usable, but the core functionality of the watch was perfectly fine. That is, until an unfortunate incident broke its screen while in the sea.
- mikenew 3y ago
  I had the watch they launched with, which Apple pretends didn't exist as they named the next model the Series 1 and this model never got a name. The watch improved considerably in the next generations, so you can do the math back from your Series 2 to get a sense of how truly bad it was.

marricks 3y ago

Every hit from Apple had lots of initial (VALID) gripes, but the experience was worth it to advance the core product and eventually eliminate or accept those limitations. iPod was the size of a beefy wallet, but was good enough. iPhone was glorified plastic and websites looked like crap, no app store. But hey, it worked well enough. That said... this isn't accessibly priced and what's the hook? Like if this launched the same time as Pokemon Go or WoW were taking off alongside it it'd get the social momentum all the other options had. Also it's better than the competition in key was, but differentiable ways...? AR/VR could very well take off but it's not this year.

abaymado 3y ago

"Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together." This is not accurate, FaceTime has Share Play. Any app that leverages it can build a synced entertainment. Example out of the box, Apple TV, Freeform, Apple Music. I wish the SDK for Share Play was not tied with FaceTime, since it limits you to only people you have their iCloud email or phone number to. Big Screen on Quest was a great app that leveraged the idea of multiple users in the same VR session, based on interest, Quest just lacked the quality. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-listen-play-iphb657eb791/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/shareplay-watch-liste...

bastawhiz 3y ago
I think OP meant you can't include other people _in the same room_. If I want to watch Netflix (well, Apple TV, since Netflix doesn't have an app yet), my partner is completely out of luck if I do it on an Apple Vision. Unless he too has the money for one and we FaceTime each other to sync up our watching experience.
- bigiain 3y ago
  That seems to be an odd requirement/desire to have a head mounted display do?
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    That's the point. Watching TV with other people is a thing that most folks do. At least in my house, it's nice to walk into the room to see what someone else is watching and join. Unless they become comfortable and universally ubiquitous, watching media isn't something Apple Vision is going to be particularly good for.
- abaymado 3y ago
  I once had a roommate who stopped playing video games a decade ago. We bought a PS5, and he kept trying to find games like 'Gears of War' and 'Lord of the Rings' with a multiplayer split-screen campaign in the same room. Aside from classic 1v1 fighting and sports games, the new games being released did not offer that. They were all built for high-quality solo gaming or optimized online gaming. Expecting a VisionOS experience with people in the same room reminds me of that. I'm not saying there won't be apps for it, but it would be niche.

Johnie 3y ago

Reminds me of iPhone 1. Everything you've said is reminiscent of the reviews of the first iPhone.

nylonstrung 3y ago
iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone This however is coming after a decade of existing AR/VR consumer electronics and still misses the mark
- HatchedLake721 3y ago
  > iPhone 1 was the effectively the first mass market smartphone ... no? Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, Symbian, Maemo?
- serf 3y ago
  first mass-market smartphone with mass appeal maybe, but it wasn't the first mass-market smartphone by a long shot.
deleted 3y ago
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JKCalhoun 3y ago
Or the first Newton.
ekianjo 3y ago
the price is quite different though
nightski 3y ago
The iPhone was subsidized by mobile carriers and/or interest free payment plans. I don't see that same path for this VR device, but maybe I am missing something.
- mbreese 3y ago
  The original iPhone wasn’t subsidized… it was bought outright. It was only after Apple proved the potential of the iPhone did the carriers get on board (and even then, it was limited support for quite a while).

posix86 3y ago

What do you mean, it can't run multiple monitors? I thought it lets you pop out windows free standing, no concept of monitor at all.

valgaze 3y ago
This tool evidently overcomes the display limitation: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble "Ensemble (formerly MacCast, before the lawyers had something to say about it) bridges windows from your Mac directly into visionOS, letting you move, resize, and interact with them just like you would with any other native app. It's wireless, like Mac Virtual Display, but without the limitations of resolution or working in a flat plane."
tsimionescu 3y ago
It does for apps running on the goggles themselves, but the Mac integration feature just shows the Mac's screen as one window, kinda like Remote Desktop on Windows. And this is a quite hard limitation, since the Mac has to actually render those windows and then stream them to the goggles over radio. So, without quite a bit of magic, you have a limited amount of pixels the Mac can draw and send.

russellbeattie 3y ago

> The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. I wrote a long comment [1] months ago when the Vision was first announced expressing my skepticism about the use of eye tracking based on my person experience with the tech. At the end I said, "maybe I'm wrong." Turns out I wasn't. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36220097

deleted 3y ago
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oomun 3y ago

genuine curiosity, how often are you clicking something without looking at it at least for a moment? or, how often do we believe other people are clicking something with out looking at it? im examining this for myself...hard to feel organic while im actively focusing on it, but i at least glance at my mouse pointer target while traversing the pointer towards the target across my screens

penneyd 3y ago
Often times I'll look to position the mouse and then look at something else when I actually hit the button.
makeitdouble 3y ago
A lot. I also started thinking about it reading the reviews, and the main cases to me are: - checking something before commiting an action: for instance reread the product name before pushing the purchase button. The pointer is already on the button, I keep it there while checking the order, so I just need to click. - focus switch: pushing another window to the forefront doesn't need a super accurate click. I assume most people eye ball it like me and will click on a emptyish part of the window from the corner of their eye. Same for moving the focus away. - scroll and type like situation: mostly when using a document on the side while taking notes. My eyes and focus will be primarily on one side (with quick glances on the other), while the mouse/trackpad movement will be on another. I think we'll discover a lot more instances of this.
- oomun 3y ago
  your first example is p solid, i agree there will be a micro-tedium related to re-focusing on a confirmation button in that type of scenario assuming that, in the AVP UX, the user could not linger hand-gesture focus on the button then immediately click after verifying whatever info they are reading as they will have to move the eyes up (to read lol) then back down to focus the hand-gesture control back onto the button
- oomun 3y ago
  https://youtu.be/dtp6b76pMak?si=WIfkMdrsffMXwEvh&t=543 https://youtu.be/dtp6b76pMak?si=WIfkMdrsffMXwEvh&t=543 timestamp where reviewer discusses this idea

ls612 3y ago

This was always going to happen. The human eye has a field of view and dynamic range no display technology can hope to match anytime soon. The future of AR is not reprojecting the outside world on a screen; it is screens which can become transparent.

__m 3y ago
For that to happen we would need a transparent display that can block light. Seeing content on an additive display will always look somewhat transparent, with no hope of displaying blacks. The augmentation on the vision pro look so much better than on a HoloLens2, it's like looking at 3d printed objects.
- ls612 3y ago
  My impression is that this is known to be possible and it’s mainly an engineering challenge to get good yields cheaply.
singularity2001 3y ago
Dynamic transparency is the path to the future, and it's physically perfectly doable. Any news from the ray ben smart glasses?

naravara 3y ago

> Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors. I don’t know why, but while I feel multiple monitors helps my productivity a lot in Windows and Linux I find myself not caring as much in MacOS as long as the screen is big enough. I think it has to do with my habits around how I use the windowing in each. I tend to teasselate and arrange them in MacOS while I tend to maximize or lock to screed edges in Windows.

zecg 3y ago
Unpopular opinion: multiple monitors are a meme for most uses and almost everyone is better off having a single screen and using their fingers to move the viewport accross virtual desktop spaces.
- whynotminot 3y ago
  Not just an unpopular opinion, it’s also not supported by data. There are a decent number of studies that show that multiple monitors increases productivity. Iirc though, there are diminishing returns fairly quickly beyond dual monitors. Me personally, the sweet spot is three total screens.
- Sateeshm 3y ago
  Yes. I'd rather press a button than turn my neck.

mbreese 3y ago

> Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them This is a disingenuous argument. Your other points are much more valid than this one. You don’t have a VR headset to interact with other people in the same room. If you want to watch a movie with other people around you, there are many other (cheaper) ways to do that (and Apple can sell you a nice AppleTV to do it).

thuuuomas 3y ago
What does disingenuous mean
FireBeyond 3y ago
And yet you literally have early access reviewers regurgitating talking points about how this will redefine the television-watching and movie-going experience.

anonymouse008 3y ago

We just got the 'larger iPod' version of Spatial Computing. If your primary interface is a screen, it's still screen computing, not spatial computing. They literally had everything teed up to do some wild proximity things (AirTags, Homepods, etc) - and they gave us a strap on iPad. Whatever, it at least gives a startup an opportunity to build something unique - it's just sad to see your old friend start going senile.

catchnear4321 3y ago
“ok zoomer” - your old “friend” next month as you pay for your subscriptions through their payment processing.

al_borland 3y ago

The biggest thing for me, from the Verge review, was the limited field of view. Apple sold it as filling the users entire field of view and it sounds like that isn’t the case. When I first saw the reality of the Microsoft HoloLens, that was my disappointment there as well… Google Glass as well. I don’t want to feel like I’m wearing an AR device, as so far, that’s what everything has looked like. Limits of the technology, sure, but until that is solved I’ll have a lot of trouble throwing money at it. I still plan to head to an Apple Store at some point to try it out for myself. As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. They have the theaters, they have Personas, they have spacial audio, and other Apple devices have features for watching content together with friends. Put them all together and it seems like if several friends had Vision Pro they could feel like they were sitting in a theater room together while watching a movie. I’m not saying this will be easy, but it seems like all the building blocks are there. The Personas are probably the big weak point, especially looking at someone next to you, but with the focus on the movie, I that’s probably the least important part.

Civitello 3y ago
> field of view...Limits of the technology It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now and antagonistic to one another feature wise. There’s also display brightness which is an issue and I’m not sure how that fits in to the FOV/density spectrum. And then more pixels means more compute… That prototypes exist doesn’t necessarily mean much in a space that is full of prototypes showing off one particular feature. The very hard thing is to combine all of the desired features in to one consumer ready headset.
  - Roark66 3y ago
    >Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now. Exactly. You know what is the best "goggle" type display I ever saw (and I tried quite a few)? Recent FPV goggles (hdzero) that have 1930*1080 OLED displays at approximately 46 degrees fov. I'm very glad the manufacturer decided to use the his low fov instead of increasing it to 55deg and more like others. The picture is insanely crisp, and looks better than looking at a 4k display. Another huge benefit is that entire picture fits within your "focus cone" so there is no need to gaze around. It is not a VR display, it's purpose is different, but it shows us what visual quality is possible. I'd love if manufacturers, if they can't make 16k displays that fill the entire fov, create variable pixel density displays. Best quality in the center. Deteriorating towards the edges. That would be much cheaper, but then for good illusion one would need eye tracking and motorised optics which would probably be more expensive in the end... Oh, well, I'm pretty happy with my fpv goggles (for fpv) I just wish there was a way for them to display different picture for each eye. They already have head tracking, I wonder what VR would be like with this huge ppi narrow fov goggles. Would it be more or less immersive?

XorNot 3y ago

The eye-tracking thing doesn't surprise me at all, but I am surprised anyone thought this was a holy-grail sort of interface, in particular that Apple didn't rule it out themselves fairly quickly. Eye-tracking data is always a gigantic mess - it's why it's presented as gaze averages rather then direct replays.

ravenstine 3y ago

Wow, I remember when it was announced, to press materials gave the impression that it would be closely integrable with macOS. I was picturing using VS Code from within it. Which I guess I could do if I set up VNC... but I'm not paying thousands for that. Is an AR productivity tool really so hard? Apple owns the whole stack here. Nintendo can do Mario Kart AR in your living room with an RC car, but I can't get unlimited AR desktops for software development etc?

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Yeah I’d love to use one for PCB design at a cafe, but I don’t even own a Mac. I’m not going to drop $5k for an experience I can already do with my old laptop just a little bit fancier.
danpalmer 3y ago
It does Airplay from a Mac to the headset. You look at the Mac and then tap the "connect" button that appears in mid air above it. Apparently it's very seamless and has good latency. What you don't get is Mac windows intermingled with AVP windows, it's just your Mac screen as one window that you can move about. It sounds good though, and there has been a fair amount of movement in screen sharing over the last few macOS releases which suggests more could be coming here (like multi-screen support).
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Yeah, that's not great. I guess that's slightly useful, but what I'm looking for is the ability is more like virtual desktops but being able to place each desktop into physical space. Being able to do that with individual windows would be even better, but I'd be fine with the virtual desktops. If Vision Pro can do Airplay, then I don't know why Apple decided not to do an integration with virtual desktops from macOS. Maybe they will, but not having that at day one is puzzling to me. Without that, it seems we've got yet another AR/VR device that is a glorified tech demo. I really hope that it gets better (and less expensive) than what we are currently seeing.
  - 3y ago

landswipe 3y ago

Expecting the same, this is going to be a MASSIVE flop. VR is not for the masses until the goggles go away.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I think this product will be a slow burn. They are getting developers engaged now and subsequent generations will bring broader appeal while the software will get more refined and apps will expand in availability. I don’t think it will be a flop it will just take a while to get going. And they must absolutely know this given the current pricing.
ActorNightly 3y ago
Its not gonna flop, for the same reason that Apple desktops dont flop. Anyone educated in basic modern technology can easily see that for the price, you can build a custom desktop that blows any Mac one out the water, but people still buy them because of 2 things: styling and ecosystem. Vision has both of those. People will conveniently ignore all the downsides of it, like they do with current Apple products.

ethbr1 3y ago

To me, 3D home recording playback is a huge use case. Why would you want presence in an action movie? Cool, in an exciting sort of way. But presence in recording of your family? That's powerful stuff, for everyone! That feels like the long-term hook. iCloud to handle obscene storage amounts as a service. iPhone to generate new recordings. Vision to play back recordings. And the dastardly brilliant part is... the more 3D video you record... the more valuable a Vision is to you. >> Capturing -- One of the more remarkable things to watch? Your own home 3-D movies. Apple introduced “spatial video” for the iPhone 15 Pro a few months ago, and I started recording my sons with it. Watching the videos in 3-D in the headset now is almost like reliving the moment. The Vision Pro also captures these videos and photos—you just hold down a button on the top left.

steveBK123 3y ago

> if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors lol, literally the only use case I could convince myself to spend this money on (hey its cheaper than an XDR ). Even then I was having trouble convincing myself since.. all indications were you wouldn't want to wear this more than a few hours at a time, so ultimately you still need the real physical monitors for the other 80% of your workday.

verdverm 3y ago
Keep an eye on Immersed.com, they have an app that does this with a slew of VR devices, and I expect they will support Vision Pro if they can. They also have the Visor.com that is supposed to release later this year
wkat4242 3y ago
Instead of having multiple virtual screens I would prefer a lot more if I could simply spread individual Mac windows around my virtual space. In mixed reality the whole concept of a virtual monitor makes no sense, it's just an unnecessarily limiting abstraction you could easily do without. The whole room is your "desktop". It's basically what the SimulaVR guys are aiming at, and I'm surprised Apple didn't go this way with their Mac integration. Especially because the native visionOS apps do seem to behave just that way.
- slg 3y ago
  But what is your actual physical work environment like then? Are you standing in the middle of the room and typing into air? I always imagined productivity minded people would still at least use a physical keyboard which limits mobility.
  - SirHound 3y ago
    No you’d be sitting at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, like today
    - 3y ago

stevage 3y ago

> Even if they have a Vision Pro, I haven't yet seen any sign of ability for multiple people to do these things together. No idea if it does this, but the obvious use case is for people who aren't physically present - but letting them somehow share a physical space. It could potentially be awesome for friends/partners who live far apart.

chii 3y ago

> people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them may be apple expect every person to buy one. Didn't facebook recently try something similar?

kj99 3y ago

[flagged]

youssefabdelm 3y ago

> people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them Eh... I prefer empty cinemas No loud babies, no popcorn sounds, no people explaining the plot to people not paying attention, just me and the world of the film. Bliss.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

I can’t get over how goofy and stupid it looks, and how awkward those gestures are. There’s a video circulating of someone cooking while wearing it and gingerly pinching a virtual timer and placing it on a pot of boiling pasta. It looks so stupid that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Maybe younger people might think differently but for me, this stuff is dead on arrival because of simply how uncool and stupid it makes you look when you use it.

habitue 3y ago
I'm not really an Apple fan nor am I going to buy this thing, but this seems like a criticism that goes away as soon as everyone does it. We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles, with notches at the top, with little headphone stems sticking out of our ears. It looks stupid at first and then you get over it
- theK 3y ago
  Yeah, new things will look weird until culturally appropriated. Two things that seem to differentiate AR/VR stuff from previous tech 1. They are more "worn" than "used" 2. They conceal your face while wearing So maybe cultural acceptance might take a while... EDIT: typos
- sumedh 3y ago
  > We all look stupid staring at our black rectangles Do we really though? Reading a newspaper or book would be stupid as well
- Thlom 3y ago
  People said this about voice assistants as well, we would get used to talking to them in public after a little while. I've still not seen anyone speaking to Siri or Google in public. The only thing most people use them for is setting timers when cooking ...
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  The black rectangle form factor is the same as a notepad. Nothing about it screams "I'm completely out of touch with my reality"

ugh123 3y ago

>Want it for productivity? it can't run MacOS applications and if you want to use your actual Mac it can't do multiple monitors. Do you mean a Mac's external monitor visible through the vision pro AR view?

brtkdotse 3y ago

> The eye tracking driven input method which was seen as holy grail turns out to be annoying after a while because people don't naturally always look at what they want to click on. This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem.

mcny 3y ago
> This has been know for at least 30 years in the eye tracking business and it even has a name - The Midas Touch problem. I wanted to see how it is possible but sure enough, I found a paper from 1995 that cited even older research about this. https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf
- fouc 3y ago
  from the paper, the definition of The Midas Touch problem is: > They expect to be able to look at an item without having the look cause an action to occur. So this doesn't seem to be a problem that Vision Pro has?
  - Geee 3y ago
    "At first it is helpful to be able simply to look at what you want and have it occur without further action; soon, though, it becomes like the Midas Touch. Everywhere you look, another command is activated; you cannot look anywhere without issuing a command." Yeah, Apple Vision doesn't have this problem, because eye tracking is used just for pointing; not for clicking on items.
    - svnt 3y ago
      Whether it has this problem or not seems to really depend on how they use “OnEyesOver” events in practice.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    Vision Pro pinch-touch is essentially the same as this paper's > some form of ‘‘clutch’’ to engage and disengage the monitoring The paper does talk about other challenges with look-to-select, even if it is biased by the thinking of back in the day: > Unlike a mouse, it is relatively difficult to control eye position consciously and precisely at all times. You have to remember that the historical setting for much of this research was to help paralyzed people to communicate, and pushing a button or the modern pinch-touch was not really always an option.

derefr 3y ago

> Want it for entertainment? people want to enjoy photos, videos, movies with other people and it can't include them. Not on a plane they don’t. Not in a hotel room on a business trip. IMHo, the Vision Pro is for being somewhere when you’re nowhere; not for being somewhere when you’re already somewhere.

fouc 3y ago
a hotel room on a business trip is pretty much "nowhere", so absolutely yes.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
I want to watch stuff or collaborate on projects with my wife on a plane or in a hotel, you just haven’t seen these use cases from Apple yet because the product lacks it in 1.0
- derefr 3y ago
  I think you're conflating two things. The hypothetical use-case that the GP is talking about here, is AR -facilitated collaboration — people in your "see-through" view of the world being able to interact with the AR objects in your field of view, or vice-versa. Being able to AirDrop something to someone's iPhone by dragging a file from a window over to their body that you can see through the lens. You and your SO on the same flight, next to each-other and both wearing headsets, able to see the same set of shared/synced AR objects, and therefore watch the same movie. That kind of thing. While this is an intended use-case for the Vision "platform" as a whole — it's an implicit promise of the whole "spatial computing paradigm" phrasing — I don't think this kind of AR-facilitated collaboration was ever intended to ship with the Vision Pro. Why? Because, nobody in the Vision Pro's target market — at least as Apple would have it — wants or cares about AR-facilitated collaboration. I'll get to why in a moment, but in short — it's because it's the Vision Pro. And like Apple's other Pro products, it's mostly intended to be something possessed by an individual but owned and managed by their employer. Now, Apple clearly intends to build VR -facilitated collaboration — but hasn't yet. That's what all the reviews mean when they say "the collaboration" is half-baked in the Vision Pro. The people in Apple's target market for this thing, expected VR collaboration, and it's not there. But that's an entirely different thing from AR-facilitated collaboration. The Vision Pro as a specific product offering, almost certainly came out of Apple employees doing pandemic WFH, and realizing that all current "remoting" solutions sucked. Especially if you're a hardware engineer and trying to get a good look at a 3D real-world prototype of a thing. The people who are actually there in the office could just come in and stare at a real 3D-printed prototype. But the WFH people had to settle for looking at a 3D model on a screen... or maybe setting up a Windows machine, connected to an Oculus Quest, and using special compatible CAD software, in order to be able to do a walkaround. And that CAD software definitely didn't let them just paw at the 3D object with their hands. The Vision Pro is clearly aimed at the "high-fidelity sensory feedback" half of the remoting problem. It's thus the complement to the companies who build telepresence robots — those robots solve the high-fidelity presence and interaction half of the remoting problem. (And you could really do some clever things by combining them!) But note what else Apple released during the pandemic: Freeform, a piece of collaboration software. In fact, Apple added collaboration features to many of their first-party software offerings during the pandemic. Apple never thought they'd extract their best work from their WFH (or now, travelling) employees by having them "show up to the office" with a telepresence robot. They rather expect that the best platform for all their engineers — in-office or otherwise — will be a digital office: one made of collaborative apps. And specifically, "level-of-immersion responsive" collaborative apps — apps that can switch between (or be compiled for) both lower-fidelity 2D screen-based UX, and higher-fidelity 3D spatial UX, on the same codebase. It's this sort of 3D spatial collaboration-app UI experiences that the Vision Pro lacks in 1.0 but will clearly add later. (Which is why Apple cancelled WFH as soon as they could: their "solution to the remoting problem" isn't baked enough for them to usefully dogfood yet!) But this is effectively VR-facilitated collaboration — working with other people who could be in arbitrary places, in VR or just interacting through a screen, where you see their VR avatars (personas) instead of seeing them. It's "Metaverse stuff" — but don't let Tim Cook catch you calling it that. But AR-facilitated collaboration — i.e. having other people who are part of your work, present in the room with you, with some or all people in the room wearing Vision headsets with the see-through turned up, and where people wearing the headsets are interacting both with shared AR objects and with others present in physical space (rather than their VR simulacras in VR space)... this all has zero relevance to the remoting use-case. If you're in the office, then you're not going to be wearing a Vision Pro... because you can collaborate by just getting people in a room, and using various screens (AirPlay on an AppleTV display for shared viewing; your Macbooks for running collaboration tools; etc.) Now, AR-facilitated collaboration is likely a use-case for the "Vision platform" as a whole. (Otherwise, why bother with the AR OS features?) AR-facilitated collaboration, is what a self-employed / freelance creative professional — someone who isn't remoting into some [idea of an] office, but who does have people [e.g. clients] physically present around them who they need to interact with them and with their work — would want. AR-facilitated collaboration would therefore be the defining use-case for a later "Vision Studio": a "prosumer" model targeted at such creative professionals — the same sort of people who buy themselves a Mac Studio. It would match the Vision Pro's targeting (which, if you haven't considered it, will almost certainly end up squarely on "businesses buying these for their remoting employees" — even if the early adopters are individual tech nerds.)

whiteboardr 3y ago

No surprise at all i’d say - as Nilay Patel on the Verge review put it correctly: > cameras are still cameras, and displays are still displays. Anyone remotely familiar with the state of development in those areas would be aware that “even Apple” can’t cheat Reality (punintentionally). Those left still raving about and/or hoping for a game changer will be greatly dissapointed - or only in it for the line go up. The whole concept will be a niche product for many years to come and will stay an isolating experience.

j45 3y ago

It’s first generation First Gen is usually awful This is not awful and maybe even closer to 2nd gen Everything starts somewhere Most things are ready for the masses by the 3rd or 4th gen.

Damogran6 3y ago

AR Passthrough is the big v 1.0 feature for this generation of headsets...I'm sure Apple and Meta were developing in tandem without knowing what the competition was doing. It's a really need addition that brings significant improvements...and I could see Apple developing it as 'this is streets ahead' where Meta was just improving tech they already had. At the end of the day, this is Apple testing the waters and trying to get a positive cash flow to help offset significant R&D...what they're showing is pretty impressive in a number of ways, even as it's lacking in others.

FloatArtifact 3y ago

Eye tracking would be so bad if you wink one eye to lock on to manipulate a certain section of the UI and ignore the rest.