@gruber Do you have any thoughts on who will record these to-be Apple Vision Pro sports events? Will Apple provide the crew and rigs to broadcast the games?
@gruber have you experienced VR sickness orneye strain before and how did this compare. My first 5min in the original Rift was nothing short of magical. It's subsequent experienced that were longer where I developed headaches and dizziness.
When looking at a virtual monitor (i.e. a floating app window) and moving your head about, as one does in the real world, is the tracking good enough that the monitor truly remains in a static space as if it were a real monitor?
I'm just concerned that the head tracking and AR placement is just off enough that one might feel that one has to stay stock-still to e.g. code on a floating Xcode window.
@gruber@asymco Yea, well I thought strong about not saying anything but thought you deserved the honest feedback. You’ve been a hero for a lot of years.
Thought it was perhaps inappropriate and self-serving. Still do.
Thanks for taking the time to reply though.
We’ve corresponded before, some years ago, not much; I’m sure you’ve forgotten.
@gruber I read your article. It sounds kike you discribe Vision Pro with 3 tent poles: fully immersive computing, content consumption and computing. In other words: A headset, a widescreen iPod and an internet communication. 🤔
@gruber I’ll say it: sorry, Vision Pro is a commercial failure. It’s a product with no reason to exist, particularly at this price point. But even at $500, it still wouldn’t sell, as there’s no killer app.
@macsimcon I don't know how you could watch the keynote and come away with that conclusion. It’s obviously useful as a personal entertainment device. It seems like it will obviously be useful as a display for work. Plus who knows what else.
@gruber Well, Apple’s greatest commercial successes like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch could be had for less than $500. And sure, there are $3,000 huge TVs which are great for entertainment, but few people buy them. And when I spent years working in offices, I had to frequently interact with other people, but I couldn’t be wearing isolation ski goggles while doing so, it would have been off-putting. Still, Apple had at least five years to come up with a killer app for this product. When they couldn’t, they manufactured it anyway, relying on developers to come up with a raison d’être. That way, Apple can Sherlock those developers at a later date…it’s great having someone else do your R&D unwittingly. But seriously, do you truly believe you can be objective about Vision Pro? Your entire livelihood depends upon good relationships with Apple. We all saw what happened when Leo Laporte crossed Apple. He and his people still can’t get inside access, and it’s been more than a decade.
@macsimcon You’re completely forgetting that the $400 iPod was selling next to $80 MP3 players. $600 iPhone was sold next to subsidized $50 phones. Both were considered very expensive. 1984 Macintosh cost $2500 = $7000 inflation adjusted. The Mac turned out OK.
@gruber I’m really not. The Mac is less than 20% of the desktop market after nearly 40 years, and Vision Pro won’t even do that well. VP isn’t competing against Oculus and the other failed headsets, it’s competing against Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Those devices are versatile, enabling content creation and consumption. Why would someone buy a VP instead of those products? If I need to have a Bluetooth keyboard for fast data input or command shortcuts, VP has just lost most of its interface strengths. Will people dictate their data? Use Siri for input? Those technologies already exist, but users favor keyboards instead. Increased UI efficiency was claimed for touch, but most people didn’t replace their Macs and PCs with iPads. A touch interface is less efficient than a desktop GUI, and VP’s OS is even less so, despite the speed with which one can select an object by looking at it. Port Photoshop or Office, with menus, to VP and see if people adopt them over the Windows and Mac versions.
@macsimcon My livelihood doesn’t depend on Apple at all. They don’t advertise with me. I don’t need review units to review hardware; I could buy them. My reviews are almost always late anyway.
Once a year I do get to interview execs at my live show, but that show sold out every year before my guests were from Apple. And: that live show is not a big moneymaker. This year’s show was no more profitable than a regular episode of my podcast, in fact, maybe less.
@gruber You could buy them, but that’s unnecessary because you’re provided access to review products and services in advance. You’ve traveled to other locations to see stuff before it’s publicly available, and your generally positive reviews of Apple’s goods are a big reason for that. Those who are consistently critical of Apple don’t get that access. Again, see Leo Laporte. I read DF every day, but I don’t expect you to be purely objective. I don’t know that someone with your access could ever be completely objective, and I think that’s Apple’s intent. It’s clear that your aim is to be objective, but as amazing as VP is, I don’t see it eventually dropping to $500. Even at that price, people still won’t want it, as it’s an impediment to in-person interaction.
@gruber This is what was missing from the Meta Quest and why after testing it I sold it for half price to a college. "just painted on a virtual circular wall around you"
Nailed it. It was a cheat and a poor one. This sounds like the real sci-fi tele presence idea.
>This is nothing at all like 2D footage extrapolated into 3D, or just painted on a virtual circular wall around you. It looks real. It seems as profoundly different from watching regular TV
@gruber What if you're watching content that's so moving that you end up crying? Is the seal so tight around the eyes that you'd need to interupt the experience for a few seconds to wipe your eyes?
@jkronborg It doesn't need to emulate that. It's like your natural vision. What you look at is in focus. What you're not looking at, you can't tell if it's in focus, because by definition you're not looking at it. Foveated rendering means it doesn't make sense to worry about the detail or "focus" of anything other than exactly what you're looking at. The rest is periphery.
@gruber Filmmaker here. Please describe to me, if you can, the prospect of watching your favorite #StopMotion#Animation film that feels like you could not only reach out and touch stuff you shouldn't be touching, but you could also influence some outcomes.
@gruber might not affect you if you don’t wear glasses, but do real world limits on how well you can see apply to virtual objects? For example, I need different prescriptions to view a computer screen from navigating the wider world, and vision is blurred if I try to use one prescription when the other is needed. Do you virtual objects get blurry if you bring them to close or too far?
@robertstainsby I can't answer that from my memory, alas. I didn't try bringing a window super close. But in the spatial video example with kids and a birthday cake, I got very close to the cake, close enough to "touch" it, and it was crisp. Same with the dinosaur, which I seemingly got within 12-18 inches of.
@robertstainsby I can read a computer screen using my main eyeglasses, but I do wear a second pair of glasses optimized for computer screen distance in real life.
@gruber Really liked this write up. It captured exactly why all of us VR enthusiast have been “touting” VR for the past few years. Once you put on a valve index and step into valves “the lab” you get it. It’s really life changing. But that kind of content has been few and far between. I hope Apple can push it forward. Vision Pro sounds incredible. Can’t wait to buy one.
@gruber Do you know if developers will be able to take advantage of the outward facing screen? For example, put some graphics on there when using an app.
@gruber "I’m curious how well I might see using Vision Pro without corrective lenses." --Not well if you can't read text at 1.3 meters without correction. If the Vision Pro has a similar focal distance to the Meta Quest, then every pixel in that headset is likely optically at 1.3m (or whatever distance Apple decided upon) as far as your eyes are concerned. Until multifocal optics step out of the research lab, all VR headsets use a fixed focal distance.
@gruber The sports 180-degree videos would be from NextVR, which Apple acquired in 2020. The closer to the action the better, so basketball is very good, baseball and football are usually too far away, and the best (even though I’m not particularly a fan) is something like boxing or wrestling.
@gruber Beyond the giveaways (Safari, Apple-Watch-like charger), if you were seeing and using this product for the first time and were given no knowledge as to who had made, which company would have been your guess? I get some of the aspirational vibes that I do from some of Microsoft's products (like their Surface desktop). It does remind me in appearance a bit of the Apple Studio Display CRT 17" (the completely transparent one) when you look through the glass at the sensors. Also the edges of the glass look a bit like the Apple Watch. Otherwise both in design and being a cohesive product, it seems a bit sprawling and generic. I actually even forgot the name! I was accidentally calling it the Reality One (one of the rumored names).
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