That honestly sounds like almost everything out of Silicon Valley for the past decade or more…
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I don’t know. I’m not seeing my company shelling out the money for the headset, much less a computer that could drive enough frame rate when spinning a CAD model that wouldn’t make you feel disoriented (since that’s all your are seeing).
In another 10 years, maybe? It would be amazing to use CAD in some VR environment and a set of power gloves to interact with everything. Minority Report meets Star Trek astrometrics / holodeck with a dose of Johnny Mnemonic.
I’m not sure which is/would be worse. People IRL interrupting me while I have my ear buds in jamming while working, or having a pop up for a “call” while in my VR world. I’m getting flashbacks to telemarketers calling during dinner time in the 90’s.
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Why does Apple hate kids actually going outside to play?
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Soon we’ll be able to tell who’s been gaming too long via goggle face (grab that domain name!) rather than just ‘gamers thumb’
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Or Half-Life: Alyx. A mind-blowing VR experience.
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Because they haven’t figured out how to monetize hopscotch yet…
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There are some very compelling use cases for AR/VR but they are generally for specialized applications. For example, a technician that comes to a customer site to fix an expensive machine that has jammed, and the AR goggles highlight relevant parts on the actual machine, and arrows show how to remove them, and where the potential problem might be.
Or architectural designers walking around in a space before it’s been built and seeing how it would look. Or sound designers visualizing acoustic waves propagating around an actual auditorium.
But for the average home consumer, it’s still basically games.
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oh, I use a modified gear vr (10 bucks @ ebay, brandnew) with an old galaxy s6 (still one of the best when it comes to screen resolution) to get me trough winter; made some 3d-180 degree videos and photos (photos sometimes 360) with my selfmade rig in spring and summertime of my favorite green places. helps me a lot from a mental standpoint.
and 3d movies are also nice with this simple but effective setup.
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$10 says a business would build to accommodate customers wearing these, but not give a shit about folks with actual sensory disabilities.
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I think Charlie Stross (Halting State / Rule 34) and WIlliam Gibson (Pattern Recognition / Spook Country / Zero History) had interesting visions of what AR could be used for, but both also highlighted how dystopian such devices could be, and relied on sets being indistinguishable from eye glasses.
I think the Vision Pro is a rare example, much like the Newton, of Apple deciding to follow the zeitgeist, then releasing a solution just as interest is waning.
Zuck’s MetaVerse is dead in the water, and VR headsets have struggled to stretch beyond the gaming niche they’ve dug for themselves.
Worse, the latest wave of headsets, which are all a LOT cheaper than the Vision Pro may not have a lot of the high end specs, but do a lot of the same things, often better (FOV on Meta Quest 3 for example).
My Pico 4 is standalone, but will also tether either wirelessly or via cable to my gaming PC. and has live colour video passthrough, and cost me a smidge over £300.
I’ll give this to Apple mind you: that bit in The Verge about it having in-vision DRM is even more dystopian than Stross or Gibson ever imagined.
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Is it? If I’m watching Hulu on my iphone and take a screenshot, it blacks it out. Sure, I can technically get around that if I use a camera to take a picture of the screen, but that means I either need a camera or a second phone. If I’m watching Hulu on the Vision Pro and I take a screenshot, it blacks it out. That’s not really “DRM for your eyes”, any more than it is if I’m doing the same thing on an iphone that I’m displaying on a VR headset.
Now, in a hypothetical situation where I am wearing this thing at a friend’s house, and they pull up something on their Apple TV, and the Vision Pro queries the Apple TV, determines that I don’t have the rights to watch something, and blacks out an object in reality? That’s pretty fucking dystopian. If it’s scanning everything the exterior cameras see, running stuff through ContentID and blacking out ANY screen displaying something it thinks I don’t have the rights to watch? That’s a pure dystopian hellscape.
But not being able to take screenshots of stuff on-device sounds like a problem for tech reviewers and nobody else.
ETA: I think it’s bullshit that those apps black out on screenshots, since there are plenty of fair-use cases where it should be allowed. But I don’t see blackout-on-screenshot for a VR/AR headset to be any more dystopian than the current status quo just because you’re wearing the screen.
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I got a Quest 2 for work-related reasons, and because Meta lose money on every one they sell. It’s far too uncomfortable, and still impractical, and most of the stuff VR fans persist in imagining is obviously never going to work. But to my surprise, I think there actually is something there, and in some ways Apple obviously gets it.
Doing stuff in VR worlds sucks, and it always will. The nausea alone is a dead end, but even apart from that, the more you try to pretend you’re “in” a FPS or whatever, the more restricted you feel by the lack of touch, limited field of view etc. Just sit too close to a low-res 14” monitor next to an open bucket of paint thinner while duct-taped to a metal chair, it’s cheaper.
Simillarly, walking around in “AR” will suck until it works through regular transparent glasses, i.e. never.
But the menu screens of VR applications are low-key awesome. Arranging windows in a room-sized space, while surrounded by a mountain vista or Tron cyb3rscape, absolutely feels like a much better replacement for sitting in front of a screen. Which is clearly 100% what Apple has in mind. I can totally see it as a competitor to $3,500 monitor setups, though it would be more relevant if I was comparing it to $500 setups.
The really vexing part is that external display. Everyone predicted this would suck years ago, and suck it does, even going by Apple’s own videos. It’s mind-blowing. An LED could do the job better, and you’re paying extra for this, and adding weight, in a device that desperately needs to be cheaper and lighter.
It’s just like with the Airpods Max, which are uncomfortably heavy because Apple had to use metal instead of plastic like in the much cheaper, very competitive Sony MX5s.
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I remember booting up the Star Wars game for the first time. Standing over the cliff with porgs wandering around. It was impressive, and a little vertigo inducing.
Consider this the Model T of VR headsets. Imagine how great it’s going to be once all the kinks get ironed out!
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I read the Verge piece yesterday and thought it was really solid - recommended even if (like me) VR/AR isn’t a big interest for you.
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As fun as imagining what the furture holds may be, I do appreciate when tech reviewers don’t get carried away, and instead focus on what the actual, currently-available product does:
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What if you use bifocals?
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the actual focal distance is all at one spot: the screen. so i think you wouldn’t need them. just guessing though
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