Obviously I don't buy every product Apple launches but up to now I could see me using every one of their products, even if I don't think it would make sense buying one because it's too expensive or I don't need it. The Vision Pro however is something I have doubts could be useful even if it works perfectly and despite its price tag.
I got a Valve Index 2 months ago for VRChat. Turns out there's a huge music and dance community on VRC that spends a rediculous amount of money on various things to make it more usable.
The Index is $1000. Then some people get extra base stations which are $200 a pop. Then if you dance with full body tracking most people get Vive Tracker 3.0 which you need 3 for feet and waist. Add the $2000 gaming desktop I use for powering it and you're already at the price of the Vision Pro.
Except the Vision Pro is stand alone and has some really nice quality of life hacks that I haven't seen before in the VR space.
Also dancing in a VR rave is a pretty good workout and you get to meet tons of cool people. It sort of self selects for cool tech nerds. So far I've met a ton of amazing people through it.
There's a bit of irony there though, in that the most compelling things in VR are from gamers creating awesome things (VR Chat, modding in Beat Saber, etc), and emphatically not from giant companies providing these "experiences" that they're positive everyone will love.
As incredible as Apple's hardware looks, you are absolutely not going to have the kind of freedom you have with a piece of Valve hardware connected to your own PC. We'll be lucky if they even allow VR Chat on the platform.
They spared couple minutes on specifically Unity compatibility. That's definitely a codeword for VRChat, Virtual Desktop for SteamVR compatibility, and accommodations for local development for VRChat contents.
Some of the most intense users of the VRC platform are hacker furries so I have zero doubt that someone will figure out how to get it going. They said they are working with Unity in the keynote.
It would be weird if they totally blocked VRChat cause it's the top VR app on Steam.
The VR ecosystem feel feels a lot like the early 90s all over again. FPS mods, small community on fanatics, 90s wild west internet... Just saying, a lot of the comments here are coming from people who have never used VR. It's the obsessive kids right now that will drive the next 10-20 years, like I bet, a lot of what we do now was driven by 90s kids.
Im extremely skeptical that Apple will let this be used with VRC via PCVR. It would need to be a new build for the device with support for tracking. Plus those body trackers don’t suffer from occlusion.
The price endangers it the same way the high price killed the Star Wars Starcruiser at Disneyland. Most of the people who want it won't be able to afford it, the people who can afford it mostly won't want it.
On the other hand Vision Pro's price will go down and quality will go up. Apple has the deep pockets to continue to invest until the technology really delivers at a mass market price. This wasn't really there for the labor intensive high-touch Starcruiser experience.
I think it kinda goes back to "I'll ignore it for now and wait a few years if it's still around with a reasonable value proposition"
And I mean it in the most positive way: if it ever works out Apple will come out with a better headset year over year, and build a community around it, XR will have made it to the mainstream. If it doesn't pan out will have a data point on what fails, and get other products that skirt around these issues while providing compelling features on the parts that matter, we have enough competition to have the concept survive.
Either way it's a win, and I salute Apple for jumping in the pool.
Even so I am not sure if we will see electronic prices dropping over time the way they have in the past. Probably the most important scaling in semiconductors was the price coming down from shrink to shrink and that seems to be over. That’s why the 40-series cards from NVIDIA don’t improve on the 30-series for performance per dollar.
Apple leads the world in powerful ARM SoC but they make high end parts that sell at high end prices and compete with Meta who is very concerned about selling price and sometimes willing to subsidize hardware in the hope they make it back on services.
The only feature I want in an AR headset is for it to tell me the name of the person I'm talking to. I always forget. But I know the facial recognition database is a huge privacy liability, so it will never happen. As a result, I'm also underwhelmed.
I suppose this is good for those people you see walking around texting as they wander into traffic. They might be able to like some Instagram posts AND look both ways before crossing the street. A $3500 headset is cheaper than a $100k spine replacement or whatever. (I just ... stop if I need to text someone while I'm out walking, and do my Internet shitposting when I'm not out and about. But I guess that's only me.)
> But I know the facial recognition database is a huge privacy liability, so it will never happen.
That's fairly easily overcome—you just need to have a local facial recognition database, specific to your contacts, rather than querying some centralized one.
I'm skeptical as well... all this VR/AR hype has yet to deliver something... anything... anything at all... It's been years since I trying a VR headset at a friend's place and I distinctively remember thinking "this is useless... cool, but useless". I have yet to walk into someones place and not see one of these things gathering dust in a corner...
Perhaps the only time I actually felt like getting one was when I got hooked into Elite Dangerous, but these days I don't have time for it anyway... so, yeah.
My experience is very similar, even still (boot from linux into windows, have updates shoved down my throat, some random thing doesn't work because reasons, etc.)
Most of it really feels like unforced errors though. As much as I am not at all excited about a $3500 device that's completely locked into Apple's restricted ecosystem, they are the kind of company to actually pay attention to those things and smooth out all the rough edges.
I'm really just hoping it brings more attention and effort into the wider VR ecosystem and we start getting better products and software support.
Had a similar experience with the Rift and it made me buy a different VR headset.
The software stack is critical to these devices not being painful or pleasant.
Devices that are steamvr native have been so much nicer to use, just plug&pay.
I'm assuming Apple isn't going to make their headset SteamVR compatible so I wonder how things will shake out a few years from now - is Apple going to be in their own little world or will existing software really support it?
I have/had OG Vive. It was like, double click the headset button, point and call Lighthouse spinups, put on headset, long press menu buttons on controllers, take a deep sigh for not much reason and I was in VR.
imo it’s years past the point there got to be a head tracked goggle emulator, for “experts”. there are occasional moments I’d want to go back just for few minutes, or finally try VRC(haven’t), and while I’m aware that first impression of VR has to be perfect, the full gear seems like an overkill for those occasions.
> all this VR/AR hype has yet to deliver something... anything... anything at all
…in the consumer space. There have been some really incredible tools I've seen in industrial or medical spaces, and I think that's unlikely to change in the near term.
I’ve seen cool demos and proof of concept of professional tools but don’t know of any that have traction and good retention. Do you have examples of tools with significant adoption?
I'm not sure breadth of adoption and retention are the right metrics here — the use cases I've heard about are highly specialized, so I wouldn't expect it to be massively and quickly adopted, the same way it took a long time for robotic surgery tools or CAD to become widely used.
I've heard of it used in e.g. surgeries, for visualizing data like MRI scans, or building schematics for electrical/steam/wastewater/etc but don't know of specific instances where products are used.
I’m probably in the smaller majority of people who are very excited about it, but still expect it to flop (or at least flounder for a while).
I used a Quest 2 as virtual monitors for a week or so of real work and it was uncomfortable and sweaty and I was isolated and had to keyboard and mouse by touch, but the viewing experience was amazing. And I do use my Quest 2 frequently for games and “workouts” and entertainment. So I’m solidly in the market for this.
But the main thing is that I want to try it, mostly for the AR. I’ll reserve any fanboy comments until I’ve tried it.
Someday, someone is going to get AR/VR right. This isn’t it, but it seems to be moving in the right direction.
I don’t have high hopes for free space holographic displays, a la Star Wars or Minority Report, but augmented reality fills the same niche (with many of the same drawbacks and benefits).
Vision Pro wearers don't show up in FaceTime as wearing goggles though: they show a simulated face that responds to facial gestures (basically a high-res Memoji)
It feels like the initial launch of the Apple Watch as a luxury fashion accessory. Good thing they were able to pivot that to a Fitbit competitor. Will they do the same here?
What would they pivot to? I'd love to have a normal glasses style device with some cameras and sensors to give me Iron Man/Cyberpunk-style HUD for notifications and calls, etc.. I just... don't understand what they could pivot to.
Exactly that, I think. My prediction is we'll get a 'Vision Air' which is AR-only, like HoloLens, and priced more competitively. But unlike HoloLens you won't look like a dweeb wearing this at home or around the office. Combined with some sort of killer app for the magic leap style gesture recognition this thing seems to have, and you could have a whole new human-computer interface.
Or maybe it dies an early death, like the Apple Newton. :shrug:
I'll give it a few years/generations but doing nothing for me.
Loving pretty much everything else Apple currently.