I felt like I was committing heresy when I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally. I'm sure it will pick up some niches just like the meta headset.
The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over. Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing. I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie. They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.
There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology, and focus on fitness. I think that's why the apple watch is doing so well. I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR. But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.
Idk. I own a Meta Quest 3 and this thing is one of the most impressive tech I saw in the last decade. AR on this $500 headset is incredible.
While I’m amazed by the hardware, the thing is totally limited by the software. I mean, the OS is technically pretty good, you are really tricked into thinking the windows are floating in your room and interacting with it is really natural. But you just can’t do shit with it because Meta decided it.
I’m really waiting for something more with the already existing technology, because before I tried it, I didn’t knew it was that advanced and I can see myself be pretty productive with it.
One major problem with the Vision Pro as a devkit is it's extremely locked down. The only significant AR experiences you can create are those already anticipated by Apple and compatible with their privacy expectations.
IMO this was a huge mistake. This is a completely new form factor, not an established market. You need people doing significant experimentation, and to be able to create compelling new experiences that your in-house staff haven't even dreamed of. It's fine if you have a user-friendly default, but there should be some way to opt into a professional mode that opens up more possibilities for novel experiences.
Then maybe you shouldn't make assumptions about what is and isn't possible with VR and AR. OpenXR is literally ground-floor level stuff, if you follow VR in any capacity outside Apple marketing. Apple can cover stuff like this while also supporting unique features; they literally just did it with WebXR.
This makes me laugh. Clearly, you know nothing about me to suggest I know nothing other than Apple's propaganda about VR. But you go ahead and keep making assumptions about people. The connections you miss because you assumed wrong will be on you
That's like saying someone that doesn't use React doesn't know shit about UI/UX. React is just a tool to use, but it's not the only tool. To assume someone not using OpenXR doesn't know anything about VR/AR is myopic at best
I'm not talking about VisionPro supporting OpenXR. I'm talking about OpenXR having the support for the sensors. If it has it, that's impressive since no other headset has the same sensors to the level of the VisionPro
OpenXR supports cameras, IR, LiDAR, and LED sensors - everything that the VisionPro has. Whether or not it supports the specific sensors Apple chose is entirely up to Apple.
Great, where's your OpenXR app that takes advantage of the VisionPro's sensors to make a great example of how amazing OpenXR truly is? No? Where's anyone else's?
Open XR supports sensors like the apple vision pro has. They never said the vision pro supports it.
I don't own one so I can't verify, but the linked Wikipedia article already makes me doubt it can, as safari isn't based on chromium.
I.e YouTube let's you watch immersive 3d 180° videos right in the browser (though very few are available on the platform, as almost nobody got VR headsets). There are also other smaller indie games.
Google Glasses were significantly lighter and cheaper since they had the same form factor as regular glasses people wear, not some heavy Robocop headset tethered to a brick in your pocket.
How Apple imagined that clunky form factor would be appealing to general consumers outside the most avid afluent fans is beyond me. If they wanted it to be a devkit they should have just market it and sold it at a masive discount directly to app developers unlocked with no strictions so they can experiment in finding that "killer app". Unfortunately Apple's way too corporate, proud and stuck up to think liberally like that.
Google didn't hide the fat that Glasses was mostly a devkit for tinkerers and pretend it was a ready-to-market product, and it served that purpose for that niche.
Hololens 2 was the best experience of all of them, also shut down
The issue is a hardware miniaturization one, I used think whoever creates the first real smart glasses is in an advantageous position, but the likes of Apple and Google can likely roll their own quickly once that time draws near. They already own the software stacks, which is really what you want to own. AR glasses will have dozens of comparable vendors when they break the wall down
Regardless of locked-down-ness, I think Google Glass—and if it had seen continued development, real spectacles with some sort of miniaturised electronics and a HUD on the lenses—would've been so much more useful than any giant, heavy VR headset.
In that case they should send some free dev kits to developers, because most are not going to be interested in spending $3500 on top of their paid Apple developer license for the privilege of feathering Apple's gilded moat.
AVP is not a general purpose device in the way the iPhone was. The viability of apps for this market is nowhere near proven.
It's unclear whether you are misusing Vision Pro to mean the entire category of AR/VR headsets, or the specific model Apple launched this year.
> unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally
I think by success you mean "be a $10bn business" (a quarter as big as Apple's wearables business today), and for Apple, success might mean something very different.
> The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over.
What do you mean by this? Certainly you can't mean that Apple mistakenly designed this product for the COVID era, given its history?
Apple acquired Peter Meier's AR company in 2015, and recruited Mike Rockwell from Dolby in the same year to lead the group working on the headset.[^1] In 2017 they recruited the head of AR from NASA's Jet Propulsion lab.[^2]
Apple in fact appears to have delayed the project in 2019[^3] because Jony Ive pushed Rockwell and his team to build a standalone device, not one with compute offloaded to an external processing unit.
This product had been under active development for nearly three years by the time COVID hit (Fletcher Rothkopf appears to have started on the project in January 2016 according to his LinkedIn), so what functionality do you think is linked to COVID? Literally everything shipping in VisionOS is standard ecosystem stuff for Apple.
> Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing.
You mean this specific device? Or the category in general?
> I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie.
Laaaadiesssss annddddd gentleeeeeemennnnnnnn
In the red corner, doing what they do best… Apple Inc.! Hits selected from their homepage's top-level navigation… Macintosh ($bn business)! iPad ($bn business)! iPhone ($bn business)! Watch ($bn business)! AirPods ($bn business)! TV & Home ($bn business)!
And in the blue corner, enabling a hasty generalization about the future of a product category based on usage of present day technology … "everyone cglan knows!" Track record of predicting $bn businesses through word or deed… [TBD]!
> They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.
Literally none of this is grounds to dismiss an entire product category (especially given that Apple has largely solved the "glasses" edge case).
> There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology
I must not have noticed that trend in the quarterly results of any consumer electronics company I track. (I did, however, notice the screenless Humane Pin thing self-destruct.) Do you believe that this trend you have noticed is a) likely to constrain the sales of a $3,500 "Pro" device, b) likely to overall dampen enthusiasm for the category over the course of the next decade, and finally c) any more worthwhile to talk about than the inane claptrap about your friends and family being oracles of a new market?
> I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR.
Wait so you are dismissing the entire category based on your friends not using AR/VR? Christ. Good thing Apple, Meta, Sony, and the other manufacturers shipping millions of a nascent product category can just copy your winning combination of "something like the ray ban meta glasses" with "an enhanced siri" (?) and "some AR" (???). Coming right up!
> But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.
I have used a lot of AR and VR devices, including Vision Pro. I do not use any devices regularly (more than once per month), but it is completely self-evident that such devices have the potential to be UX breakthroughs of similar ilk to modern smartphone / tablets.
I would be betting on Apple, Meta, and all the other hardware manufacturers here – not your friends.
I know if I like the taste of a new dish without being a great chef. And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
> And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
This is not the claim being made by the parent I responded to. Right out of the gate, OP said:
> I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally.
I.e. OP is specifically making a general claim about this product category, based on the usage habits of friends who are all - I would wager - using hokey Oculus/Vive-type hardware, and not Vision Pro.
It's the same rhetoric people were probably saying on alt.hackers in 1995 about paper film vs. digital cameras, and it's specious reasoning.
Happy to skinny my reply down to simpler words for you, just in case you're genuinely here to join substantive discussion of technical topics, and simply suck at it:
1. Why do you think Vision Pro is a COVID product?
2. Why do you think your friends' usage patterns for legacy AR/VR devices is a useful indicator of the eventual popularity of this product category?
3. Do you have any data to substantiate your claim that people are cutting down on screen time to the detriment of shipping hardware SKUs?
> I felt like I was committing heresy when I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally.
I'm an Apple-hater but I'd like VR to become a thing. I work remotely and could imagine being sent a keyboard, mouse, and company VR headset that transports me to the office.
The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over. Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing. I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie. They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.
There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology, and focus on fitness. I think that's why the apple watch is doing so well. I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR. But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.