this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Apple
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You're correct that the target audience will be media consumption; the miss - if I'm reading the GP correct (and, for the record, I tend to agree) - is that the majority of VR focused activities are game-based. There is certainly a contingent of health/fitness apps out there, but that market and content is trivially small by comparison. Could Apple come out with some really killer app? Sure - there's always the possibility of a twist. Looking at the intersection of user input and iOS-style apps, you're back to (mostly) passive consumption. I'm a huge believer that VR/AR is the future, but I'm struggling to see how these are going to function as an iPad replacement, second screen (primary screen, like Immersed, in special cases I can see), and productivity are going to find a foothold, given the limitations of the OS and lack of connectivity outside of the ecosystem.
They're literally not even calling it VR. The focus is all about AR (labeled spatial computing), which is a space that basically doesn't exist because nothing on the market can handle it without massive deal breaking compromise. The goal is the same as the iPhone, though, democratizing app development. Their AR tools on phone lower the barrier to entry enough that solo developers can make and ship AR-capable apps far more easily than they could otherwise, and that's what they're leaning on.
The Vision Pro isn't the mass market device. It's an enthusiast product/devkit. But there's nothing comparable to put it up against. The space can't develop with insufficient hardware, because low resolution in the display or any meaningful latency or quality drop to the passthrough are showstopper flaws to anything but games and movies.
What they call it is irrelevant. Removing the 1/8 jack was "brave". Faulty antenna design was "holding it wrong". An incomplete area of screen pixels is a "notification island."
Lots of headsets already have AR. Is it primary? No. Is it underdeveloped. Yes. Is apples implementation of pass through /overlay vision going to bring vr/AR into the mainstream? Well certainly not at $3500 a pop. What will matter is what useful, life changing or must have applications arrive. The simplicity of mobile app development didn't bring us full blown CAD or CFD or Desktop-level Photo, Audio, and Video production on our phones. It ushered in 100 fart sound apps and bunny ear filters. Even today the PS and other creative apps on phone and tablet suck compared to their companion desktop apps because, even with desktop level processors like the M2, complex manipulation of data is still hindered by the interface.
As I said, I HOPE this will find the next big thing. And maybe a $3500 3D viewer for 100 new fart apps is the path. But (IMHO, of Course) they're leaving a lot of users - the vat majority - on the sidelines with their target audience.
What they call it is critical. It speaks to their vision for the product, and Apple does an exceptional job at having their vision stick. Removing the headphone jack launched wireless headphones to the moon.
Zero headsets are meaningfully capable of AR. "We'll show you a high latency low quality poor color passthrough so you can sort of move around the room without removing your headset" isn't AR. Projecting an absurdly low quality image onto glasses that show the world without doing any processing on it isn't AR. Nobody is going to develop AR apps for either of those types of hardware because neither of those are useful. Phones are capable of limited AR, and those are used to the extent a phone is capable of, which is putting objects into your room to visualize them.
The Vision Pro is the first product out there that has the bare minimum hardware to even approach AR. Without Apple's weight behind it, it would still be in a great position purely on the strength of its capability. With Apple and their software (including the already very rich and accessible AR libraries they've had in developer's hands for iPhones for a while now), it's almost impossible for it to fail.
$3,500 is expensive, but it's absurdly cheap for the capability compared to the VR market. Without the passthrough and without the full computer, just the resolution of the display is already in the multiple thousand price bucket at a bare minimum. If they priced it at $10,000, it would still be completely unmatched for what it offers. The $3,500 price point is insanely aggressive.
You apple fanboys are just so cute. The AR in Apple's headset will be laughably pathetic in 5 years. Their internal panel resolution is 1/4 of that already in testing by Meta and others - and even those advanced panels are barely at the resolution of the human eye. Vision pro is DVD quality to Full HD resolution on the human scale of acuity - passable but not great. They've included a 20W processor - a good one - in a headset that resolution that will get choppy and low texture on a dedicated 500W RTX4090 card (I'm curious how the advanced M2 handles the 6K/120Hz when the M3 can't even hold 30Hz on a similar pixel/clock count on the desktop with full cooling). By the same toke, saying that the existing quality is unusable is laughable. Will the VisionPro be better? I have no doubt. For $3500 it had better be. It's going to be a solid $1200 headset, I'd say, if it gets to that price by the beginning of 2025. If its 2026 before a real succssor...well, maybe it can come out at the same time as the "revolutionary" foldable screen Apple is "inventing" for their phones.
It's cool kit, but it's not revolutionary. It's just one more step which is in danger of failing because of the size of the potential userbase. And that potential failure actually makes me sad because I think it could be much more.
I totally agree that relying on in-headset processing and not being able to hook up to a computer is a massive mistake for any headset and will relegate them to being stuttery paper weights in a shorter time than you'd think (look at the processors in "smart" TV's for a similar situation to reference.)
Of course there will be better. That's irrelevant. The only thing relevant is that it's unconditionally impossible for worse to be functional. My argument wasn't that Apple would be the only AR headset that will ever exist. It's that it's the first where AR isn't a lie. It's the first that a developer with a brain would consider making software for.
The idea that photorealistic rendering is required for AR to be useful is moronic. So is the idea that rendering at full resolution is needed. The resolution is mandatory so your eyes aren't bleeding 10 seconds into looking at text, because you could be blind as a bat and see the giant pixels if you step down much. Nothing more, nothing less.
Existing quality does not exist. There is nothing on the market that passes through the real world with low enough latency to use for literally anything that isn't very slowly repositioning yourself in a room. There are options that are transparent and can kind of sort of do really rough shapes and have them be visible, but that's it.
You're patently wrong, have you even used passthrough on other headsets? Apple as usually loves to market things as if they're the first to do it, but like usual they're just iterating on what others have done (and to be fair, usually doing a good job of polishing it up), but to say that passthrough on other headsets can't be used for "literally anything that isn't very slowly repositioning yourself in a room" is wildly wildly false. Other headsets do this pretty competently.
Yes. They're dogshit. Not mediocre, not bad. Complete and utter unusable dogshit without a single redeeming quality. The fact that even mediocre passthrough doesn't exist is the entire reason there are no AR apps.
There's a reason every YouTube tech enthusiast in the space, who routinely experiment with all of them, had their minds blown by the Vision Pro, and it's because there's literally nothing on the market that resembles actual AR regardless of price point.