17
votes
The Apple Vision Pro headset is a stupid product on the surface, but it is a calculated move that can bring Apple to the holy grail of computing: true augmented reality
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- Title
- The Most GENIUS Dumb Product Ever Built
- Authors
- Enrico Tartarotti
- Duration
- 12:39
- Published
- Jun 25 2023
This is an interesting take. The author seems very confident in his predictions about the future which I find slightly offputting.
But he seems highly focused on the augmented reality aspect of the Vision Pro, which is clearly not its sole intended purpose. The design Apple is releasing allows for fairly immersive virtual reality applications because of its shape which covers the eyes and ears. If Apple was only interested in AR I think the product would look very different. Perhaps more like Google Glass.
It remains to be seen whether this device and its successors will fulfill a role in gaming, entertainment, interaction with other people, content consumption, content creation, or other purposes entirely.
I won't give you specific predictions about which of these categories are going to succeed or fail, but I won't be surprised if AR isn't one of them. At least not by the video creator's own definition.
My impression from what I've read is that the augmented UI is to make up for the fact that you're putting a high-tech blindfold on your head, which is disorienting for you and a bit disturbing to anyone who sees you wearing them.
The apps you use might have little to do with the room around you, but you still want to be able to see enough to orient yourself and notice someone coming. Making them seem a bit more like goggles will make it more comfortable to talk to people while wearing them, though not as comfortable as taking them off.
Compare with "transparency mode" for earbuds, which makes up for basically wearing earplugs. You can talk to people without taking them out, but you still might want to take them out.
If it works out it will be another example of Apple design at its best, putting a lot of work into UI details that people might not realize they will want until they try it. (And then they use marketing to explain to you why you should want them.)
A lot of the cool ideas I've seen app developers looking at the SDK kicking around seem deeply connected to interacting with the physical world it sees. Neat examples include:
A lot of these are functions that already exist in MacOS and iOS as widgets or applications. But sticking them somewhere in the physical space of your room is a pretty big change to how you interact with them. Things like just having a calculator on your desk that you can turn and punch numbers into become possible, which is just kind of different in terms of how it builds into your flow and the interaction patterns you have. For example, MS Office apps have a lot of UI nested into a these ribbons and submenus. You can blow all of that apart. Instead of thinking in terms of menus and submenus, you start thinking in terms of where you direct your gaze.
The aspect of being essentially blind and deaf to the area around you is really what's kept me from diving deeper into VR. I'm married with 2 kids, and need to be available to people in the house, and I can't easily do that with a HMD and headphones on my head. Apple's solution might be able to alleviate that, but at the risk of reduced software and game availability.
Potentially the best thing to come out of Apple Vision Pro is that other companies may try to make knockoffs with more compatibility. Hopefully Microsoft continues with Hololens so that there is good competition.
There are two key things that appeal to me with the Vision Pro, and by extension the proliferation of similar devices we’re likely to see in the coming months and years (as with the iPod, iPhone, iPad etc):
I don’t be an early adopter, partly due to price and partly because I expect the tech to take several iterations to hit maturity. But I will be keeping a close eye on it.
virtual desktop and similar productivity apps in the VR space, not necessarily AR, are great for this, and could help save you a fortune vs an AR headset.
Interesting contextualization. I wonder why it isn’t simply that Apple wanted to enter the market for things like the Oculus, and put their usual “push things forward and charge a king’s ransom” twist on it.
Absolutely agree with all of this, with the added comment that the oculus mostly feels like a data harvesting device that also has games when I put it on. Now that the word “metaverse” exists, I think I’d feel that way regardless of the quality of games or hardware.
I think that perhaps "VR, but better" is a bit too niche for Apple's tastes. The only tiny niches they seem comfortable entering are those that involve the sort of high-end production hardware that companies might buy, which kind of makes sense when one considers how fickle general consumers are compared to businesses.
It'd also probably be difficult to compete with any VR headset with access to PC VR due to the existing library of PC VR games. On the other hand, with the approach they're taking with visionOS, they've got the entire library of iOS/iPadOS apps which can be turned native with a flip of a switch in Xcode, which is practically impossible for any other AR platform to compete with.
I never thought of ar/ vr as niche; I thought it was supposed to be the next step in computing (except, I guess, low adoption has made it de facto niche, so I see your point).
All the other Next Big Things have marketed themselves as letting you do something new and exciting and fundamentally different (whether it's actually new and/or exciting and/or desirable is beside the point; adoption is more about hype than merits). AI is viewed as a tool for automation and a step on the way to AGI. Blockchains have... all the things people tried to slap blockchains on, at least some of which were good ideas that would have been better without blockchains.
VR didn't make the same splash because it's ultimately just strapping a monitor to your face. There's an upper limit to how excited you can get people to be about that. People already had monitors, and monitors work great for all the things people would have done with VR.
(I think AR might eventually take off in the same quiet way smart watches have. Someone will have to make one that's not expensive and ugly. I'm nowhere near 100% certain in this prediction though.)
It's weird to me how many folks aren't interested in VR. I get the cost factor, but like... When you have tracking of the headset and controllers/hands, it's a lot more than just some screens strapped to your face (which, as the video mentions, more accurately describes Google glass).
But maybe the problem is that you have to experience it to fully get it. The immersion is something you can't easily describe to people, even through fancy rendered commercials like the ones for Vision Pro. Apparently the use of eye tracking in the UI is "like magic," according to folks who have tried it. But unlike scrolling a touchscreen on a new type of phone, that doesn't come across in a video.
I think part of the issue with VR is that people feel uneasy when they are not aware of their surroundings. There has to be some evolutionary mechanism that makes people feel anxious when they have their senses obscured.
I have a Meta Quest 2 and the VR experience is amazing and it's a nice device, but being completely taken out of reality with it on is hard to get past.
I think that's why apple focused so much on mixed reality passthrough with the vision pro. They didn't really touch on all the things it can do because they first need to make people comfortable with putting it on. They are trying to convince people that vision pro is not a blindfold, but an extension of the real world.
Interesting! I find that aspect pretty fun, rather than uneasy, but I guess that explains why people are so interested in mixed reality.
We only have a Quest 1, but I'm excited to get a Quest 3 when it comes out - hopefully the depth sensor and color pass-through will be similarly helpful with people becoming comfortable.
VR, at least in my experience with Quest, is very fatiguing. The games a novel, but I don't find them worth the extra effort. The quality video content is scarce compared to regular 2D, which is totally understandable because it is so much more work to make VR content.
While these are mostly product quality issues, ultimately I do not like the isolated feeling I get when using VR. Particularly if there are other people in the room. I don't like feeling detached from my reality. I don't even like how my phone makes me feel. I don't know how common that feeling is, but I've definitely talked with other people who share my feelings.
Makes sense- I haven't gotten into VR much yet, and that's because we only have one headset so far. Once we have two, my partner and I plan on using them for socializing with folks in VRChat.
I guess I simply like that feeling of being detached from reality. To me, it's super cool to load up a fantastical environment and wander around, watching floating whales or trying on different avatars with a mirror that move when you do.
I think my wife and I might use it more if we had two as well. I will also say playing Walkabout Mini Golf with a friend was absolutely the best remote hangout experience I had during covid!
I have tried it before (on a friend's Vive, a few years ago). It was cool. I had fun with it. If someone gave me one for free I'd probably play with it occasionally. But it wasn't world-changingly amazing.
I'm unsure whether this is "lots of people just legitimately aren't that impressed" or "the tech has improved a lot since people lost interest". I'm leaning far enough toward the former that it's not worth trying again, but I do recognize how self-biasing that side of the dichotomy is.
Fair enough! The first time I tried VR, it was very cool, but I didn't immediately go and buy a headset. It also took a while of learning what apps were out there and discovering how they might enrich my life (mainly things like Bigscreen and VRChat for watching movies and socializing COVID-free, respectively). Perhaps if I could go to concerts/movies in real life and socialize with people without worrying about becoming more disabled, I'd be less interested in VR.
At least part of the difference may be that I didn't do a whole lot of those things pre-COVID either. I'd be fine with watching a movie on a normal screen, and a very large portion of my social interaction is through text (and a large portion of what remains is video-less voice). Gaming really would be by far the primary use case for me, and it's not really compelling for that alone.
I can't decide how to feel about VR. Is it something that will change our future or just a gimmick?
Does it have any real utility? I remember how excited I was about that "rotating cube" 3D desktop that Linux used a while ago. I was able to come up with multiple responses when someone asked why is it better than 2D desktop... but I now know the real response was "it looks cool". I stopped using it after the novelty dissipated. And when I see some presentations with meetings in virtual reality - voice calls with desktop sharing already provide what I need. Why would I need avatars, virtual rooms etc.? The same with augmented reality - that overlay looks cool in demos... but what does it have that apps like voice navigation or maps do not provide?
I am sure this depends on what you want to do with it. Many people will play games in it and maybe that would be the killer app - flying in a fighter jet with really advanced VR could be great. I do not play games.
And I have to admit that a lot of the VR demos and presentations I have seen have something that really creeps me out. Like that dad recording his kids instead of being present in the moment, with them... I think we already have enough of that, and VR will exacerbate those uses of technology that make us detached from reality, lonely and depressed. Honestly, I do not have many good arguments, this is just a feeling, a visceral reaction that I have when I see those VR demos and feel suddenly sad for some reason.
Maybe I am just getting too old. But AI does make me excited so it is not just age and techno-optimism dissipating. Maybe it is just that VR is trying to solve the problem I do not have. Like 3D movies; I also consider them a gimmick. What makes me immersed in something is not the tech, it is the story and characters that make me feel something. A good old book on paper can do for me what no 3D movie could.
Just my view. I am not trying to change your view or anything. I am probably missing a lot of the things that make you excited.
That makes a lot of sense! I'll be honest, the Vision Pro video looked pretty boring (using it for work) or off-putting (the virtual avatars for facetime and that dad filming a birthday with it on). And the Meta Quest games are not really what exites me. So I'm with you on a lot of that.
Reading the response from you and others has made me realize that if I hadn't learned about VRChat from this People Make Games video, I'd probably feel the same way about VR. It's what opened my eyes to what's possible in VR beyond what corporations want us to use it for.
I'm still waiting on a second headset so my partner and I can dive in together, but in VRChat you can:
All the creativity on display is made by users - the worlds, the avatars, and the events. Everyone has legs (unlike Meta's metaverse), and the technology supports full body tracking and face/eye tracking (if you can afford it). It feels like you're present with other people.
So yeah, I think of VR as just another place to go to events and hang out with people. Or, for me as a disabled person still high risk for COVID, currently the only safe place for me to do that, outside something like Zoom.
I like this review a lot, but these reviews seem to gloss over the major fact that content is king
The thing that will make me want to buy AR or VR is having access to a lot of really cool 3D content.
But how do you get the content?
Well, you give content developers a tool to create cool content.
Like the Apple Vision Pro includes the ability to record video content in 3D. It also gives game developers a powerful platform to create games on.
And it has enough gizmos and ding dongs for other smart folks to figure out cool, hithertoo unthought of use cases. Like the Apple Watch unexpectedly ended up being a very successful health tracker.
Is it a stupid product on its surface? I'll admit the first commercial was a bit ridiculous in places (man filming his kids to watch them later after they died in a horrible accident) and the price is astronomical, but there's been rumors about this thing for years now, everybody knew it was coming. I think at this point it may actually be aimed more for business applications or rich first adopters, a more public, realistically priced option may still be a few more years off.
There's already quite a few AR apps already on the Apple Store, so I'm assuming it will be relatively easy for developers to make them work with the VisionPro, which means that coming into it, Apple will already have hundreds (if not thousands) of apps already out there for people to use, which was a problem for VR headsets up until recently. VR has really come into its own now, while it's still a niche product, there's quite a bit of content out there for people to use it for, so it's not a barren wasteland even now for VR.
"The most genius dumb product ever made" is a very clickbaity title, and doesn't encourage much in the way of discussion. Something like "Did Apple purposefully make the Vision Pro ridiculous?" would give a clearer sense of what the topic is.
I posted the link to the video that is not mine and I was not sure what the etiquette at Tildes prefers - respect the original author and keep the title or re-write the title? You are right that the title is clickbaity but the video itself seemed pretty interesting.
I think sticking with the original title is the best thing to do when you are not sure, but you can ping @cfabbro (who I think has title edit privs) and ask about an alternate less spammy title, such as "The Apple Reality Pro shows Apple's vision for the future"
Often with clickbaity headlines/titles there is usually a much better title to be found in the article lede (or sub-headline), or in the YouTube video description. E.g. I have edited the title to the first line from the video description, since I think it described the video better and is much less clickbaity.
cc: @mattgif, @honzabe (and thanks for the ping, PantsEnvy)
Thank you.
-Pants.
My username is @Algernon_Asimov (with the underscore).
Unlike cfabbro and others, I'm not really inviting people to ping me for title-editing duties.
Is there anyone else that can be pinged that you know of?
According to Bauke's user page, they're inviting people to ping them for changes.
Typically it’s best to use the original title unless it crosses a very high threshold for clickbait. If it’s not quite right for Tildes, someone with title edit perms will come in and adjust it :)
Eh.... I wouldn't say it's typically better to use the original title, since soooooo many titles are written as clickbait these days. And there also isn't really a high threshold for what is generally considered clickbait here either. So IMO if anyone feels the title they're about to submit is clickbaity, even slightly, I think they should feel free to try their best to make it less so. We're not super strict about using the original titles here like they are at Hacker News.