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Coming from a senior Oculus lead, the most interesting thing about this write up for me, is what it lacks: it says almost nothing about the software stack / ope

• edvinbesic 3y ago
  I think that’s probably the reason for why they are not talking about it and focusing on specs instead, they know.
• jdprgm 3y ago
  This has been my main complaint with Oculus all the way since the Rift days. At that point I assumed it was forthcoming within a few years yet here we are 8 years later and somehow it's not all that different. I don't understand how Oculus/Meta isn't drastically ahead at this point on software.
  • IshKebab 3y ago
    They are drastically ahead. They have VR games, which are the only real reason to own a VR headset at the moment (and for at least 5 years).
    • averageRoyalty 3y ago
      They are drastically ahead in the VR gaming space. But the potential VR/AR market is hundreds fold bigger than that.
      • IshKebab 3y ago
        The potential market in 10 years. Apple has jumped the gun here. This is their Apple Newton moment for AR.
        • phatskat 3y ago
          I hope that seeing where the Newton could’ve gone gives them the confidence to continue with the AVP. A few iterations could really show a great product both in terms of quality and practicality. I had a Newton and loved it, and eventually tried a few Palm devices but nothing ever quite hit like the Newton for me, a real shame they dropped it imo.
        • averageRoyalty 3y ago
          That's probably a fair argument at the pace of innovation pre-AVP. Depending on how quickly they iterate in this (and as the article says, push developers), they may be a self-fulfilling prophecy to significantly reduce the time until this market exists.
    • crooked-v 3y ago
      There's a real chicken-and-egg recursion there: VR headsets are only good for VR games because the only thing made for VR headsets is VR games because VR headsets are only good for VR games because...
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • numpad0 3y ago
        But VR only needed DK1 to take off.
  • chaostheory 3y ago
    What’s more insulting after the announcement of the vaporware known as “infinite office” is meta’s total lack of attention on their PC software. The work related features of Quest are near non-existent if it weren’t for 3rd parties
    • parentheses 3y ago
      I totally agree. While Apple has a north star with this device (or looks like it does), Meta's endeavors always seemed like diversification. Meta seems to be looking for the north star. Apple just pointed it out, so now everyone is going to head that way.
  • brutus1213 3y ago
    Actually, MSFT made the same blunder when it came to HoloLens. Well .. they did start to build some of the core spatial context (and had a fabulous headstart). But somewhere along the way, they yielded to Unity/Unreal. This was mind boggling to me as giving away the keys to the platform to another party was literally the founding story of Microsoft (with IBM having made the blunder). I wonder if engineering leadership recalls history when making such strategic goofs.
    • yterdy 3y ago
      Layman's take: All of them are afraid of making the system that fulfills the promise nominally, but that lacks some key component or is on hardware that doesn't get adopted, only to have a competitor swoop in, clone that system with the necessary fixes, and essentially do what Apple did with MP3 players and smartphones. They're all trying to establish market dominance BEFORE giving us a reason to use the devices (bass ackwards) - and are even happy to see the market collapse, if it meant that, simply, no one cracked that particular nut. Apple, Meta, Microsoft like how things are right now. These pushes are much-hyped, but they're made less out of real passion for the promise and more desperation to avoid being left behind.
  • jayd16 3y ago
    Well it's easy to understand why. How could they build an MR ecosystem when their latest device is just barely MR? They can only just now move towards MR with the Quest 3 and really it'll need another generation to be MR native. They have a good relationship with developers and focused on what their current hardware is capable of, which is running one VR app. They spent the last 8 years on that use case and I think that was the right choice given the hardware realities at the time.
• ForHackernews 3y ago
  He talks about how "Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment" but... if that's really the case, then it's quite an indictment of the VR industry: > The hardware needed to track eyes and hands in VR has been around for over a decade, and it’s Apple unique ability to bring everything together in a magical way that makes this UI superpower the most important achievement of the entire Vision Pro product, without a shadow of doubt. So they had all the pieces, but only Apple put it together and realized that you'd need a VR equivalent of point-and-click? If that's actually true, it's sad.
  • crooked-v 3y ago
    It's almost exactly the same kind of conceptual transition that Apple made happen with keyboardless smartphones, too, which adds an extra sort of funny element to it.
  • sumedh 3y ago
    > So they had all the pieces, but only Apple put it together Its very difficult to change a mindset or culture in big companies. Existing VR companies were too invested in using a controller. Similarly back in the early smartphone days all the big companies thought that smartphones must have physical keyboard.
    • tpmoney 3y ago
      Sometimes you really have to decide to take the risk and ship without a standard controller before you can see if the new model will work. The iPhone was famously derided for a lack of stylus. Video game consoles for years have tried to incorporate motion controls in some form or another and realistically only the Wii succeeded in any measure because they ditched the classic controller instead of trying to shoehorn it in. Many times it doesn't work, but if you give developers and users an "easy escape hatch" to go back to what they're already comfortable with, so many of them will default to that no matter how much better your new option might be.
  • MBCook 3y ago
    On top of what the others said, there are two other closely related issues: If everything is designed for your controller, the eye interface may not work well due to lack of software optimization. Which means it’s just an expensive battery hogging extra weight you don’t need.
• didip 3y ago
  If what you said were true then this is a fatal strategic error on Meta's side. This entire time, they could have built a real OS, solidifying their first mover advantage.
  • barbacoa 3y ago
    Meta makes social media apps. Where as writing operating systems is Apple's core competency. Both companies are playing to their strengths.
    • MBCook 3y ago
      The problem is that by doing that they’ve limited their device’s usefulness severely. If some kind of killer AR app shows up on the Vision Pro, could it be put on the Quest? Let’s just assume it doesn’t need a level of processing power that the Quest can’t deliver. Would the software vendor just have to implement the entire interface from scratch or with Unity or something? Are there enough platform components on the Quest to be able to do the job? I don’t know the answer. But I did see a number of developers mentioning online over the last year just how incredibly easy it was to get started with the Vision Pro compared to the quest. If you have a Mac you sign up for the Developer program for $99 and you get an IDE, compiler, simulator, performance monitoring, full UI library plus documentation. It’s early days for some of that stuff, but all the batteries are included. From what they said it was far far easier to get to “hello world” than on Meta’s platform.
    • jandrese 3y ago
      The funny thing is that the social media app for Oculus (Horizon Worlds) is total dogshit. The third party VRChat is far more successful.
  • bushbaba 3y ago
    Apple leveraged their existing OSX OS stack, for Meta this would mean either heavily forking android OR starting their own OS. Both would take 5+ years to get meaningful traction. Remember google fuchsia, the code-repo was public in 2016, intial release was 2021, and it's still not anywhere near where it'd need to be for a VR headset.
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  > Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system I'm not sure what you mean precisely. Apple doesn't seem to have done more than windows with persistent positions. This isn't nothing, but it's also not something that has tremendous value for a headset that you only wear 30 or 45 minutes at a time. And they have little to no management of these floating windows. I'm really not holding my breath for Apple to come up with breakthrough windows management given what they've done for the past decade. If you don't think in term of potential and promises, but of actual value to the user right now, I'd understand why Meta hasn't the gimmick. Is this a big lead for Apple ? Perhaps, the world mapping could be something difficult to reproduce. Or Meta could be at roughly the same point but decided it not to go there.
  • zmmmmm 3y ago
    It's kind of fascinating, because as you say, many of the capabilities are barely surfaced in the user layer yet. But the fundamentals are there. Take a look at this Reddit post for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1ba5hbd/the_most_impressive_thing_ive_seen_from_avp_yet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1ba5hbd/the_most... The user is pointing out that that the real fridge behind them is reflected by the surface of the virtual object in front of them. And consider on top of that, the fridge is not visible to the headset at that moment. It is captured in the 3d spatial model that was created of the room. None of this is a pre-rendered or rigged or specifically engineered scenario. It's just what the operating system does by default. So one app that is totally unknown to another app can introduce reflections into the objects it displays. This is just so far beyond what can happen in the Quest platform by any means at all. And it can only happen because the 3d spatial modeling is integrated deeply into the native rendering stack - not just layered on the surface of each app.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      I'm with you on how incredible it is from a technical perspective. The most fascinating thing to me is how we've gone from Apple being the pragmatic and real world product focused company, moving slower but making sure what they ship has undeniable practical value, and not promising much beyond ("we don't talk about future products and roadmap"). Compared to the "wow look at that technical prowess, not much useful right now, but such potential !" that we're getting with this device. I don't see it completely fall flat, but it feels it's on the same course as the Apple Watch or the HomePod, to be the biggest in the niche category it defines (whatever it ends up be), and a smaller presence in the general space ("smart eyewear ?") with better fitted and more practical devices taking 70% of the market. The clunkier XReal probably keeping chugging along, being to the AVP what the Xiaomi or Huawei smart bands are to the Apple Watch. And Meta probably being the Samsung shooting at the target from 5 different angles.
• georgespencer 3y ago
  This is a keen insight I had not until now appreciated. Thank you.
• ramesh31 3y ago
  This was my immediate takeway from using Quest 3 as well. Zuck has stated forever that he wants a platform, yet when it comes time to do the hard work, we just end up with an Android distro running a React app.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    Could be part of Qualcomm too. I wonder if they're willing to release source code for their drivers if you want to get really low level.
  • cruffle_duffle 3y ago
    And how many billions did they spend on it?
• devit 3y ago
  To support copy&paste all you need is a common format for 3D objects, like HTML is for 2D documents; glTF might be a reasonable candidate. The problem with the Apple approach is that there are no apps and games, and there probably won't be many given it's a 3500$ device with few users that Apple exerts its tyrannical grip over (or if there will be, they will be ports of Unity/Unreal, PC or Android VR apps, not using any of the special features that the Apple OS may have).
  • kevindamm 3y ago
    Any scene description format would work (but please not obj or stl), it would be good to see a standard emerge for this, though. USD might be it.
    • chris37879 3y ago
      I really hope USD is not it. Having worked with it trying to build stuff for the vision pro, it's a massive software library pretending to be a file format. It is inexorably linked to the source code that processes it to the point that making a processor for the format is a non-starter, and that seems to be by design. The codebase is dense, hard to compile, using outdated dependencies, and doesn't play nice with anything else. Documentation is sparse, often incorrect, and severely lacking in anything like a new user guide. Everything assumes you work for Pixar already and know the ins and outs of their pipeline.
  • sunshinerag 3y ago
    Tyrannical grip on users who paid 3500$? That indicates no understanding of said users.
    • brookst 3y ago
      “This all inclusive resort has a tyrannical grip on all the poor visitors who spent $10k to travel and stay at an all-inclusive resort!”
  • TylerE 3y ago
    People have been trying to solve this problem since the VRML days in the '90s. I suspect you are underestimating the complexity of 3D data by a pretty huge extent. 3D is much, much, much more complicated than 2D, especially if you're trying to interchange between arbitrary applications that may have divergent needs. Start with this little thought experiment. What do you mean by 3d object? Do you mean a set of polygons, like in a traditional triangle mesh? A volume, like voxels? A set of 3d surfaces? Do you need to model interior details, or only the exterior envelope? Do you need to be able to split or explode it at some arbitrary level of detail? Do we need to encode sharp edges or creases in some way? etc, etc, etc This is before you have touched materials, texturing, lighting, any of that.
• zer0zzz 3y ago
  I worked on an oculus team for close to a team that was charged with building a platform. The trouble at oculus was that there were multiple waring platform efforts.
• dangus 3y ago
  I think you might be giving Apple too much credit for strapping the iPad OS on your face. Granted, an iPad is better than an app launcher, but so far I don’t think the software is really “killer” in any specific way. Most of the in depth reviews I’ve seen mostly praise the screen resolution and the movie experience.
• cruffle_duffle 3y ago
  Damn. Like I never thought of it that way. You need that OS layer. That should be metas core competency if they want to win. Games are something that runs on top of other people’s platform. I thought Zuckerberg did all this to stop being a layer on top of somebody else’s stack but all they did was the exact same thing with Oculus. That is what always bugged me about the pivot to “meta”. They never had to find product market fit to succeed. They were never hungry. They could just throw money until something clicked… but money alone doesn’t make a revolutionary product. You need somebody hungry enough to see the world in a different way and then execute the fuck out of it. Dunno how this relates to apple though. They have equal amounts of cash to throw at problems until they are “solved”. Perhaps the “operating system” is a solved problem already to some extent and maybe there isn’t anything truly new?
• gamblor956 3y ago
  Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system Said that out loud to a group of techies and they laughed so hard one of them fell out of their seat. Apple put the iPad on your face. And that's pretty much it. The few VP users that haven't returned the device don't use any of the "spatial" features like controlling the UI by pointing in space, since it's so inaccurate that it gives Swype a run for its money.
• tempodox 3y ago
  > between Android underneath and Unity/Unreal at the application layer. So they want to build a new kind of device and a new kind of experience, and they seriously think they can do that by just plugging together ready-made parts built by others? No wonder this is going nowhere.
• la_fayette 3y ago
  As a developer, I am acctually very happy that Meta went with Android. Reusing all the knowledge and tools is just great...
• archgoon 3y ago
  I'm kinda shocked that neither the Vision Pro or the Quest allow for actual AR development since the passthrough cameras aren't available to 3p devs.
• jolux 3y ago
  > Apple has had the advantage of green field engineering it exactly how they want it to be from the ground up. It's not quite green field on the software side, albeit mostly. Clearly they already have experiencing re-platforming a whole operating system multiple times. The underpinnings of macOS power everything from desktops to smartphones to watches to tablets already all with diverging user interfaces. They had a solid first-party foundation to build the interface they want; Facebook is ultimately a third-party to Android and is having to solve the same Android hardware integration problems as everyone else.
• in3d 3y ago
  None of this matters compared to the number of apps available. Given the high price of the Vision Pro and the resulting low sales, it would make little business sense for app developers to invest in creating apps for it instead of for the Quest 3.
  • thih9 3y ago
    Perhaps it matters because of apps. With OS that natively supports spatial features it could be easier to expand functionality of existing ios apps or interact with them in the ar/vr context.
  • InfiniteTitan 3y ago
    > Given the high price of the Vision Pro and the resulting low sales, it would make little business sense for app developers to invest in creating apps for it instead of for the Quest 3. For sure. That’s exactly how it’s played out in iOS vs Android. No developer makes anything for the higher priced, small market iOS, right?
  • zmmmmm 3y ago
    This is a really interesting point and plenty of products have died on the hill of not realising that "content is king". What makes it particularly interesting is that the VisionOS app store so far seems to have had quite an anemic reception from developers. Barely any novel non-toy apps have been released for it, with 8 months since devs got access last year and 2 months in the open dev ecosystem. It's possible the tsunami is just around the corner but it would have to be said that this seems to be diverging heavily at this point from the launch of the original iPhone app store. It was always going to be a question since the user base is miniscule compared to every other headset and iOS devs mostly have negligible experience in developing full scale VR / AR applications which is actually a very steep learning curve. So the barriers are high and the incentive relatively small. If Apple fails to attract devs to its store it will create a huge problem for them that they are pretty unused to having. I wonder how they will approach a situation like that, since their culture is not used to dealing with that as a problem these days.
  • Terretta 3y ago
    > None of this matters compared to the number of apps available. There's a reason that iPadOS launched multi-window mode of arbitrary curved corner sizes with the same curved handle bar on the curved corner, several iPadOS iterations back. Doing that ensured that VisionOS could launch opting all iPad apps in: most any iPad app respecting the ability to run in iPadOS's "stage manager" mode with multiple windows, works beautifully OOTB on VisionOS. In fact, any iPad app run on Vision OS, if you "pull" the app close to you iPad sized, you can touch it as if an iPad screen, and your fingers and touch work as if touching an iPad. The only apps that don't work as if native are those doing something special with multi-touch or touch gestures, but most apps "just work". It's pretty wild. Press keeps comparing Vision Pro to MacOS. No, the 2D pass-through mode is a room sized iPad stage manager, infinite iPads.
• atoav 3y ago
  And as an educator who thought an VR-development course at university for a few times since 2018 setting up and maintaining 15 Oculus Quest Mk I glasses was an absolute pain, with accounts that I have to setup, etc. Sure it worked somewhat like a android phone, but there was no real fast pass for users like me, a lot of the features and the UI changed over the time and it ultimately felt like the platform took itself too seriously and therefore had no problem wasting my time. When designing a concept the core difference is always whether your design respects the user or whether it does not and tries to make them do things, spend more time on the platform, spend more money on the platform, etc.
• jjfoooo4 3y ago
  To me the interesting bit is that an even a VR executive a decade plus into working in the field doesn’t find this device compelling enough to own it. I get that the thesis is that this version is the devkit etc, but viable consumer product status (read: enough adoption for the device to be profitable) seems very far away
  • GeekyBear 3y ago
    > viable consumer product status (read: enough adoption for the device to be profitable) seems very far away He mentions a few short term use cases for the current hardware. For example: Productivity on the go (A laptop with the headset for multiple virtual displays) and Live Sports. > Apple Immersive on Vision Pro is a transformative experience in terms of video quality and its ability to deliver a real sense of presence. Watching a game in high-resolution VR has the potential to be legitimately better than a regular 4K TV broadcast by enabling hardcore fans to feel much closer to the action
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • FireBeyond 3y ago
      > For example: Productivity on the go (A laptop with the headset for multiple virtual displays) and Live Sports. Except almost universally, people talk about the screen display being “not great” for extended use as a screen replacement with dramatically lower effective resolution and blurring…
      • GeekyBear 3y ago
        > people talk about the screen display being “not great” That's not what the reviews I have read had to say. > The Vision Pro can produce a virtual external display for any modern Mac... The virtual display feels responsive and works with connected keyboard or mouse peripherals. The text is highly readable. I don’t have any complaints about how the virtual display itself works—it’s great. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/i-worked-exclusively-in-vision-pro-for-a-week-heres-how-it-went https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/i-worked-exclusively...
• SergeAx 3y ago
  Oculus is a gaming device and doesn't have a "productivity" ambition. I believe it is because 3D glasses has very limited productivity application. But who knows, for people who think that 13" laptop is okay for work, Vision Pro may become something better for comparable price.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    So horizons workspace is for... ? Or the quest pro for that matter, even though it flopped.
    • SergeAx 3y ago
      Is for measuring the temperature in the ecosystem. It is very basic app produced by a skeleton team (by Meta measurements).
  • philwelch 3y ago
    > I believe it is because 3D glasses has very limited productivity application. AR has tremendous productivity applications if the device is small and wearable enough. Imagine being up in your attic running cables and seeing a projection of the floor plan of your house so you can see where the different rooms in your house are. Or driving a car, except all the blind spots disappear and are filled in with vehicle-mounted camera feeds, with unobtrusive overlays for navigation or to highlight potential safety hazards. Imagine assembling some IKEA furniture except instead of puzzling through the instruction book, you have an app that can recognize all the pieces using machine vision and simply show you what to do. Imagine never forgetting a name or a face, because every time you see even a distant acquaintance, your glasses can run facial recognition and make their name pop up by their face in real life. Imagine noticing a weird rash on your arm, but as soon as you look at it, your glasses immediately diagnose it as a potential MRSA infection and pop up a notification allowing you to call an urgent care clinic that’s open right this second.
    • amelius 3y ago
      > Imagine never forgetting a name or a face, because every time you see even a distant acquaintance, your glasses can run facial recognition and make their name pop up by their face in real life. This could work if they weren't wearing a VR helmet themselves.
• nntwozz 3y ago
  Software sells systems is the motto. Apple is enamored with vertical integration which gives them control on a whole other level compared to their competitors; feels like history repeating. What's different with AVP compared to previous products is that it starts off even better thanks to Apple's own custom chips. There's also the amazing network effects of their ever-growing ecosystem. Competitors don't have all this, so they will struggle to compete on the high-end. The intention of Apple is clearly indicated by the price of AVP, they want the profits at the top, let the rest fight over the scraps at the bottom with crummy privacy-invasive software and poor integration/interoperability.
  • Terretta 3y ago
    It also 'starts off better' because they refined its components throughout the rest of their ecosystem over the last half decade (or more?). If you look at a variety of unprovoked UI changes in iOS and tvOS, or hardware changes in iDevices, they now look like field tests at scale for learning, before bringing together these new, now proven, things. It's a way of development seen almost nowhere else. Or I'm giving them too much credit ... but I don't think so. I think it's evident they seeded hard parts throughout the rest to learn at massive scale.
• matwood 3y ago
  It goes back to what I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Apple always thinks product first. Hardware specs are only ever in service of the product Apple is trying to deliver. If they could never list specs, they wouldn't. The industry forces some capitulation which is why Apple ever talks about specs at all.
• amelius 3y ago
  Well, my desktop OS still treats my GPU as a second class citizen. In fact I'm not even sure if my OS has the concept of a GPU built in. So OS is probably not as important as you think.
  • ses1984 3y ago
    I think they mean OS in the broader sense than just the kernel.
• lynndotpy 3y ago
  For me personally, it's definitely the platform. Requiring a Meta / Facebook account for already-purchased Oculuses, retroactively bricking devices and deleting software which was bought before that requirement, has put Oculus firmly in the "hardware I will never consider in my life" camp. It's an incredible amount of goodwill to burn from a company with so little to spare, and I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet in this thread or in the blogpost. Meta has fundamental trustability issues.
  • cade 3y ago
    100% this. I paid the increasingly common "privacy and control premium" for a Valve Index (which I'm very happy with) to avoid the entanglements of borrowing a headset from Meta for a large, up front, non-refundable fee.
    • timschmidt 3y ago
      Valve makes great unlocked hardware. I don't see the same argument working with Apple, however. Can't even upgrade an SSD in a recent mac not to mention individually cryptographically signed components like cameras and touch pads which can't be replaced without a visit to an Apple-certified repair person. Renting hardware indeed.
  • mark_l_watson 3y ago
    Thanks for your comment. I love just a few things on my Quest 2, and several times a week I take ten minute breaks for ping pong, something meditative, tai chi, etc. You reminded me of the negative aspects of the Meta/Facebook corporate mass, and they should clean up their act in privacy, etc. for VR in the same way they have basically purchased good will in the AI community for releasing LLM model weights. Apologies for going off topic, but Apple similarly really needs to trade a little profit for buying themselves a better “look” because they are looking a little tarnished also.
  • Loggias 3y ago
    [dead]
  • 3y ago
• Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  I was saying the same thing back during the first five years of the iPhone. There were so many ostensibly serious people who thought that BlackBerry or Nokia would have an “iPhone killer” just around the corner, and it’s like… do you chumps have any idea how difficult it is to build an operating system?
  • pipeline_peak 3y ago
    Well BlackBerry eventually did acquire QNX. But this was in 2010 which was far too late…
• ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  I get what you are saying, but that is why the Vision Pro is still an over engineered dev kit for a half baked OS. At least the Meta Quest for example has a lot of content and VR games. The Vision Pro doesn't seem to have much use apart from it curiosity, because such system hasn't been fully built out. It seems like a device that isn't really ready for prime time for a couple of years yet.
  • bleepblop 3y ago
    Thinking about it. If apple had dropped their vision pro with something like you can play Half Life Alyx on it like they did with Death Stranding with the M2chip/M3? they might have had a larger buyer pool.
    • jwcooper 3y ago
      They would have needed controllers and actually cared enough to support steam on it. There is zero chance Valve would release HL:Alyx without full steam support on the device. That being said, I get what you're saying - that a killer game could have helped the value proposition. They clearly didn't design it for that though, even based on how much lower their refresh rate is for hand tracking. It feels like a consumption device like the iPad, with some productivity mixed in.
      • bleepblop 3y ago
        The irony is I can use steam link with an ipad. On top of that I can use it as a second monitor for when I am on the go among some other productivity. From what I saw with the vision pro, nothing compelled me in that department. And I have to agree with you, not having some sort of controller interface was an additional no go as well.
• alsetmusic 3y ago
  > Think about what has to exist, to say, intelligently copy and paste parts of a 3D object made by one application into a 3D object made by another, the same way you would copy a flat image from photoshop into a Word document. I own an AVP and this isn't something that can be done with it, to the best of my knowledge. Please explain how this is possible with the existing OS and apps.
  • ericmcer 3y ago
    I have seen people download 3d model file formats (stl) and position/scale them in front of them, and then walk around the 3d model. I am not sure if they added anything to the Vision Pro but it was pretty impressive. I would not be surprised if it can handle common 3d formats and render them straight to your AR environment out of the box.
  • dagmx 3y ago
    Possible with the existing OS? Definitely. It’s just clipboard data Possible with the current apps? None of them support a standard partial copy of 3D objects but they do allow copy pasting full objects between apps afaik. E.g I can drag a USDZ file from a message into keynote
• jayd16 3y ago
  I like that Apple is focusing on 3d widgets as an app primitive but is it really that hard to put that into Oculus/Android? Android actually does have widgets. What about the OS precludes it from what Apple has done? There's some hard decisions around forcing everyone into their custom material that Apple made so that they can handle the rendering more deeply....but is that really a core OS thing? Seems like it doesn't need a new kernel for that.
  • brookst 3y ago
    It’s not so much difficulty as system architecture. Oculus just doesn’t have an OS layer, at least not in the sense of a platform that helps applications share resources and interact with each other. The Oclulus platform is more like a classic video game console; there are system APIs, but they are designed to be used by single-tasking applications. And for the user, the Oculus system UI is really an app launcher /task switcher. It’s not better or worse, just a very different design philosophy.
    • jayd16 3y ago
      Huh? I'm very confused as to what you mean. It's a customized version of Android. All the Android multi-tasking and app pause and resume life-cycle stuff should still be in there. Most of their ecosystem is heavy duty games that use all the device's resources (kicking out other apps from the working set), but it's definitely a multi-tasking OS. I really do not think 3D widgets would require an entirely new OS. The main app switcher would need a revamp and they would need to re-purpose or build out some new app life-cycle callbacks to handle widget focus and interaction but it all seems very doable and not much harder than what they've already done.
      • Rapzid 3y ago
        Too me it sounds like what's being described is just a 3d desktop. But, in the walled garden world we live in most people just call the os/desktop combo the "OS" when it comes to android/ios.
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  it is high time to stop praising apple for their software ecosystem. i am still impressed by their level of engineering but it is not doing much in terms of real use-case since the ios days. case in point - the whole ipad and "what is a computer" campaign. it is hilarious when a half-baked mouse support is celebrated in a tablet. despite using similar hardware, apple refuses to treat their tablets up to their true potential. despite working on an RTOS for avp, there is no signs that the headset stack will be exploitable by professionals, like it used to for macs. for the coming future it will remain to be a good software demo built on top of nice displays.