Designers, like Ive, should not be left unchecked. As part of an overall team they have value, but they should never be given carte-blanche as Ive had.
I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the point of view ascribed to Ive.
My takeaway though is that the device itself and how it should look/work is not obvious, and that is a bad thing.
For a device like the iPhone, iPod a few people kicking around ideas over sushi could very quickly (and with wild enthusiasm, no doubt) come to agree on the basic form, basic functionality.
If our VR-future has to be shoe-horned into existence, maybe it was not to be.
If anything, I want to see "the cyber" go away, not become more pervasive.
On the other hand, no one has released a VR system with mass market appeal. I have and enjoy a Valve Index, but it’s stayed in the box for more than a year because I can’t figure out a socially viable spot for it in my new house. Maybe Ive’s influence on this product will make a big difference.
VR seems to have an insurmountable motion sickness problem. I tried the Quest with a dozen friends and half of them felt sick enough within minutes to never try it again.
That's cool but try jumping in to Pavlov or VRChat on a Friday night and then tell me there isn't a thriving community. It's not mainstream but it definitely isn't dead.
You're trying to compare Apples to Oranges here, VR is still pretty early on in its development. Like Motorola DynaTAC[0] early. The iPhone of VR is probably still 2 decades out. We're still figuring out our UI metaphors and trying to reach a critical mass of competent users where it's possible to just "call" someone up in VR without first asking if they have a headset, asking if they know how X app works, figure out where to meet etc. It's like trying to get someone to email you in the early 90s.
Trying to compare this nascent technology to the iPhone is really disingenuous, there are probably a billion iPhone users worldwide. I'd struggle to count on one hand branded devices that have the same number of users.
Man, if it really was that amazing, you'd see it in the numbers. Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014. Its still a rounding error in terms of revenue in their annual reports.
Personally, I just felt it was gimmicky - try it once or twice for curiosity's sake, then forget about it.
Nothing on VR enthusiasts - I'm sure you have reasons to love it. But as a piece of tech, unless there are drastic improvements, I just don't see it gaining mass adoption.
There have been steady improvements but it is still very early on in the development of the technology. Michael Abrash gave a talk at OC6[0] that centered around the idea that we are currently somewhere around the 1980s level when compared to the development of the PC. This is very much the beginning of the next major platform, comparatively few people have these systems and fewer still use them for more than just fun or basic utility. There is a fledgling social scene but it is still very underground to the point where most people have never heard of it. I'll fully admit there's a long way to go before it really breaks out but it's not going away. I'm diving into it now because it feels like this is the next wave and I'd rather ride it than just wait for it to wash over me.
What would you recommend as the best first step to introduce someone to VR? I have an Oculus Quest but always felt that the hardware was insufficient. Would you recommend upgrading to a newer Oculus? And what would be your "safest" recommendation for a first VR game/experience?
If you already have an Oculus Quest you should try hooking it up to your PC using Airlink or the link cable first. This allows you to use it with Steam VR or the desktop Oculus apps. As long as your PC can handle VR, you'll get better graphics and access to more VR titles. If you use Airlink you'll still have a completely wireless headset, a trick to reducing latency and avoiding problems with traffic spikes on your network is to get a wifi card for your PC and set it up as a hotspot so you can connect your Quest directly to the PC without going through the router.
Some good first time experiences for people are Space Pirate Trainer if they like shooters or I Expect You To Die if they're more of a puzzle game type and Beat Saber if they like rhythm games. These games don't involve thumbstick based movement so they probably won't make you feel sick. If you want something that's really chill and is just kind of pretty to look at and walk through then Walkabout Mini Golf is pretty good, it's not the most exciting game but it does have multiplayer and it's pretty relaxing to play a round and just admire the work they put into the courses.
I've heard that setting up a fan so it's blowing on you while you're playing VR is a good way to prevent motion sickness. I don't really get very motion sick though so I haven't had to try it.
Some very good games that will definitely make you motion sick are Pavlov and Bone Works. You will feel queasy after playing these for the first few times, have some Gravol on hand just in case.
For better screen quality you can either use a Quest 2 or the Valve Index, you'll be tethered to the PC with the Index though which for me is a deal breaker.
This might be especially true if they're prioritizing aesthetic concerns over performance: per OP, they axed the compute-heavy base station. Carmak talks about increasing frame rate and increasing depth calculation as mitigators against sickness. BTW I feel sick merely playing Quake 1 at arm's length from a small monitor.
May I ask, what kind of experiences did they try on the device?
It seems well-accepted hypothesis that having artificial locomotion in VR can induce motion sickness (cases where the VR body moves but your own body doesn't), whereas with "sit", "stay still" or "walk around IRL" (and even "teleport around") scenarios are highly unlikely to cause it.
There is a still a lot of experiences left in the latter scenario, though it does exclude driving games (in particular if you don't see the cockpit) or first-person shooting-and-moving-around games.
And then the worst thing to do with newcomers is to put them down for a ride in a VR rollercoaster.
It's only insurmountable if you never try it again. There is a learning curve where some people feal quite sick at first and then slowly get used to it. You can mitigate this with "training wheels" settings in the experience like blinkers, cages, hiding the VR body, and alternate locomotion schemes like teleporting. Some people even swear by just setting up a fan to blow air on them while they're using VR.
I've probably shown mine to ~30 people and not a single one had motion sickness with any of the "safe" experiences, assuming the device is adjusted properly (IPD). If you stick them on a roller-coaster or a super laggy app as their first experience then yeah that's going to be a problem. But for safe experiences - I think there is a percentage of people who experience disorientation or nausea but it's certainly not half (maybe 10% or so).
I got nauseous after a few hours of Half Life Alyx. Until then my test was going smoothly. I would imagine most games where you can move freely would be fairly bad for me. I even took a Dramamine to try to play some more which worked but wasn’t something I’d want to do often
Half-life Alyx is pretty bad actually. Even I as a veteran get a tiny bit queasy with that occasionally - definitely wouldn't class it as one of my "safe" experiences. But even then "after a few hours" is pretty long really. Most people wouldn't stay in VR that long anyway.
Native Quest games are the best as they are entirely on-device with no latency anywhere.
I have both Quest models. They were fun for about a week and now they just collect dust. I've forgotten I own them.
Part of my problem with Quest is the "ick" factor of knowing that FB is looking over my shoulder whenever I turn the thing on. Giving up your privacy seems to be the price of just about every cool technology nowadays, and it means the tech has to be absolutely spectacular to make me pay that privacy price. My Tesla is sufficiently spectacular. Quest is not.
Quest 2 has impressive sales figures – 8 million in 2021, which is a quarter of Apple Watch at 32 million the same year. But the market for Quest 2 is very much games – I don't see much application outside that area, nor have I heard of break-through must-have or games.
The Oculus quest 2 definitely has fit that bill. It has game console level sales. How truly useful and confirtable it is may be questionable, but it certainly supports a market.
But not game console level software sales. Xbox has 1) recurring revenue from online subscriptions 2) recurring GamePass revenue 3) a huge library of games and gamers who tend to buy many games often. Average software spend for Quest 2 is estimated at $125/user [1], which is a mere 2 games without DLC on Xbox. By contrast I'd be willing to bet software revenue/user for Xbox is well in the hundreds.
Quest games are also fairly cheap compared to console games as a whole, so they might be somewhat equivalent in overall software purchased. Also, a lot of people are still hopping on the Quest/VR train so I would expect that number to go up.
Nerd dads are famous for buying anything that might run an NES emulator, then not using it after it turns out their kids have better things to do than listen to square waves.
Indeed, it's clear that Ive hasn't been a positive force on Apple's products for a while. His pathological fetish for thinness at all costs resulted in objectively inferior products.
Apple can and does make mistakes, for example the touch bar, and the MacBook keyboard.
If Ive is involved I predict that this product will experience a brief but intense surge in popularity based primarily on the novelty factor and social media influencers followed by a rapid decline into irrelevance.
Even the saga term is a strong term. At the end of the day Apple did the right call so far, not launch a crappy product. They didn't go the Google way of having to launch and then discontinue it. I'd rather have them spend years figuring it out instead of launching a product with no clear goal without any problem to solve.
How can we say "Apple did the right call" without knowing what their call was, knowing if this article is true, knowing what the product even looks like, or even knowing how successful the product was relative to the rest of their lineup? For all we know, this project is scrapped and dead.
Sounds like a good solution for a low probability situation. Eye visibility for normal humans is much more practical than issuing every human a VR system and requiring they wear it at all times to maintain the illusion.
AR simply has no known value to users, the best SciFi has to offer is sex ads while walking down the street.
AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.
All these companies are lying and faking and delaying to collect $ while people like HN are stupid enough to believe in them.
Zuckerberg's latest video blanked out the "AR" glasses. Google also lied and used fake demos glasses in theirs. Magic Leap = lol
The far easier and probably useful VR has gigantuous issues to move forward. For instance there's no way to create content. $100 million games go to half a billion dollar games. People don't want to move their heads when relaxing. At best it might be useful at work where people are forced to do things but that's also contentious, most people don't even want to turn the Zoom camera on.
All of your recent posts showed as dead, but I vouched for this one so I can reply as I very much disagree with one part.
> AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.
This is simply not true, there’s been numerous AR products built (just not runaway success stories). IMHO, it’s not “technically impossible”, it’s “prohibitively expensive” generally to get the experience that’s been hyped.
F-35 pilots would also tend to disagree, sure, their helmets have been through a lot of revision and development, but they do provide (apparently) good enhancements for pilots coming from more conventional (eg HUD) environments.
I've used the current market leading products and they suck. If you understand the tech you know how far it's come and how sophisticated they are but they are still decades away from famous Magic Leap teaser level of vividness.
The only real application I can see of AR is to have face recognition that would show a person's real name and other information about them as you see them.
Privacy aside, I don't think that would really take off either as I just don't think most people are that interested in people they don't know.
Text, as opposed to audio, doesn't really change the personality of the person you are speaking to, plus using your ears to listen directly to the person might create better immersion.
AR for museum guides? For tourism? New sports? Not to mention all the business, industrial, and other applications. Medical AR, overlaying imaging during surgery, or visualizing heart rates, electrical activity, O2 concentration, etc.
The uses of AR are endless and much more than just Minority Report type stuff.
And then as the controllers get better and more integrated, you get the sort of thing that currently only pilots of an F35 get, in terms of being aware of their environment.
Unless everyone can use it, its not going to work in an office setting. A single person in a team of six who gets motion sickness with VR (very common) makes it nonviable for the entire team.
I work in medical surgical simulation and there are incredible uses for something like AR/VR for training and tele-mentoring. Not difficult to imagine countless others.
The entertainment/gaming market is overrated - when it finally shows up, AR/VR will be all about work, productivity and interfacing. But I agree it's probably going to take a long time and I don't think it's going to be the hyped revolution everyone would like it to be.
If we can play scifi, it's trivial to imagine benefits to lightweight unobtrusive AR glasses. And, yes, targeted commercial uses are probably the low hanging fruit.
It's also probably quite a ways off for mainstream adoption because the hardware and software isn't there and won't be for a while unless you're talking narrow use cases where compromises are fine.
I was most surprised to find out that wearable displays haven't been a top front and center strategic priority from day 1, and instead they were thinking about the stupid ass car thing:
>Apple CEO Tim Cook has been relatively hands-off from the product compared to others like the iPhone... The Information's sources say that Apple's mixed reality efforts began almost accidentally when the company purchased a German AR startup called Metaio to use some of its technology on Project Titan, its self-driving car project.
Which is just wild and highly contrary to my expectations. It's been obvious for ages that, while quite a ways from hitting the tipping point, wearable displays are the natural next big disruption in the personal electronics space following in the steps of the PC, notebooks, smartphones and tablets. A retinal scanning display will be able to hit the limits of human visual acuity while also being portable, which completely obsoletes every single other display we use and has massive implications for a lot of our basic modes of interaction. Suddenly there is no connection between "screen size" and device, where you are etc, it's just a matter of tradeoffs with how much power is behind it. With an industry standard even embedded devices could have virtual "displays" with lots of info. If you think about the form factor of nearly everything portable we use, it's "a display, with stuff attached to it" (either attached to the back in the case of phones/tablets or on a hinge to a rectangle that otherwise matches the screen in the case of notebooks). The display bit almost completely defines the basics of how portable it is, how it's used, and the limits on thermal dissipation and roughly how much energy it can have. But a wearable display once again abstracts the human-computer visual interface part from everything else, which means single rectangles are no longer required. Belts, smoother ovoids that can be more easily pocketed, and who knows what else all become possible ways to hold enhanced computation/storage beyond what the wearable itself can do. And as someone enters LAN range (or sits down and plugs in even) of more computation power (in the form of a desktop computer say, or networked computers) there could be seamless switchover. And it's not as if this is 50 years in the future either, the pieces have been steadily coming together. Products like the RETISSA [0] demonstrate the potential that a company with Apple's resources could get to work polishing. The opening up of 6 GHz spectrum and WiFi 7+ along with a long awaited new shift in networking means LAN data rates are there too.
To say there are implications for, oh, products like the iPhone, iPad, and Macbooks (or even iMacs) is a bit of an understatement. With enormous irony if anything Apple's heavily neglected desktop section might be one of the ones that'd best survive. But whomever gets it right and gets the ecosystem going has the potential to really mess up established players. Given how Apple accomplished multiple disruptions and has repeatedly stated they're alert to it and the importance of being willing to go after their own cash cows early before someone else does it, I'd sort of assumed in the background this was one of their key strategic projects even if it was like a 10 year one. It's fascinating to find that no, actually not!
And Ive's influence without the leash of Jobs to make sure form and function stayed linked really seems to have been pretty toxic. Whatever Cooks' other strengths keeping that reigned in doesn't seem to have been one of them. I guess the forces of organizational inertia are always incredibly powerful.
We're already basically at the limits of physics for making CPUs faster and heat dissipation is a huge issue even for products that you don't have pressed against your face and eyes all the time.
Humans interact chiefly via sight.
But it has still been "obvious for ages" that wearable displays are going to be some big inevitable hit? No it hasn't.
And why on earth would Apple have made this tech a priority ten years before it was viable as a consumer product?
P.S. No, Apple's desktop computer operation has not been "neglected" lately; they actually have been giving the Mac a lot of care and feeding, as evidenced by the really nice new MacBook Pro re-design, and the Mac Studio. The opposite of what you said is true.
??? I do too. What does this have to do with anything? The lens is irrelevant for something that projects right onto the retina (trivial to correct for). Hell, I'd love it for that reason alone, would be a huge improvement for my computer usage.
>We're already basically at the limits of physics for making CPUs faster and heat dissipation is a huge issue even for products that you don't have pressed against your face and eyes all the time.
Lol? Also that you think this is relevant either is kind of confusing.
>Humans interact chiefly via sight.
Yes, hence why wearable AR/VR displays are obvious.
>But it has still been "obvious for ages" that wearable displays are going to be some big inevitable hit? No it hasn't.
Yes, it has.
>And why on earth would Apple have made this tech a priority ten years before it was viable as a consumer product?
For the same reason they were thinking about the "iPad" and then "iPhone" (tablet consideration actually came first internally even though in 2004 it was redirected toward the phone first) long, long before it "viable as a consumer product" duh. You don't get out ahead of things by waiting until after your competitors do it to get started, you make it happen early with your own R&D.
>No, Apple's desktop computer operation has not been "neglected" lately; they actually have been giving the Mac a lot of care and feeding, as evidenced by the really nice new MacBook Pro re-design, and the Mac Studio.
This is just pathetic. You cite the MacBook Pro as support for desktop computers and consider just this last year as a trend. I've been using Apple systems since the late 80s. Desktop systems have absolutely been massively neglected in the last decade. The Mac Pro got updated TWICE in TWELVE YEARS (the first of which was total shit), and that was after Apple pushed it massively up market vs their reliable good tower. The Mac Mini also had multiple years of just being left to sit there. There was zero in between them except the AIOs. And we're not talking about big redesigns but just basic normal CPU updates and the like that every single other computer manufacturer on the planet does like clockwork as a matter of course.
They might, maybe, be turning that around now but a single release does not make a trend. And that desktop systems were a distant last place in Apple's priorities vs iDevices or notebooks has been extremely obvious and is utterly uncontroversial since the 00s. That's just a statement of fact. In terms of raw income the balance shifted dramatically mid 2000s in favor of notebooks, and then of course later to iDevices. The Intel transition was driven primarily by the needs of the notebooks, not that everything else didn't come along for the ride. And Apple's corporate structure doesn't do multitasking boring stuff that well in exchange for doing single stuff incredibly well.
>For the same reason they were thinking about the "iPad" and then "iPhone" (tablet consideration actually came first internally even though in 2004 it was redirected toward the phone first) long, long before it "viable as a consumer product" duh. You don't get out ahead of things by waiting until after your competitors do it to get started, you make it happen early with your own R&D.
But that's exactly what happened with the iPad though. Apple's competitors had already released tablet-type devices for years, they just weren't really ready as consumer products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC
I can't tell if you're trying to be serious or are being sarcastic. Like, Apple started work on the Newton in the late 80s and released the first one in 1993 too. So what? Viable consumer product for these things involved innovations in tech like multitouch capacitance vs resistance displays, a critical tipping point of processor, battery, wireless and display tech, the right UX and stack behind it, etc. But Apple didn't get there in 6 months, they did it on the back of years and years of R&D ahead of time. Same with stuff like their own chips, the PA Semi acquisition was in 2008, and the first real fruit (actual custom Apple core) was the A6 in 2012. Bringing it all the way back to notebook form factors took until the M1 (where PA Semi actually was aiming at with the 7W PWRficient), 12 years later. I'm genuinely befuddled that the idea of "get started years early" is a radical proposition to some people on HN. You also don't get useful patents in a field (critical nowadays in tech) without being way out in front. Even if the vast majority of R&D ends up leading to dead ends it's still worth it when it's important enough and gets close enough.
Identifying the likely optimal display mechanism has been primarily a matter of physics and biology. Without implants, can't do better than photons directly onto retina which also easily deals with lens/focus issues. There's never been anything to indicate that's physically impossible either. So "just" a matter of lots of hard work, but Apple has the kind of profit and strategic outlook to justify that. They've done so repeatedly. And this is central to their core business and talents as well. That other lesser tech might be of use in niches that aren't of interest to Apple, or that earlier efforts can't hit the strict superset tipping point, misses the forest for the trees.
Eyeglasses are relevant because you're talking about "wearable" devices that are worn in a place where most of us are already wearing something. The fact that this isn't obvious helps explain all your other blind spots on this issue.
If you can't figure out why wearing hot things on your face is a problem, you are not even thinking at all about product design.
I meant that humans interact WITH EACH OTHER via sight. Again, the fact that this does not even seem to occur to you as an issue says a lot.
The Mac Mini has of course been updated recently; you seem to be talking about the past. The Mac Studio, you failed to even mention, as if it does not exist, for some weird reason.
The working assumption with AR wearables however is that, for a variety of reasons, they're going to have to look and feel a lot more like a pair of eyeglasses or sunglasses than a VR headset.
You can get prescription lenses for VR headsets, I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to do the same for AR headsets. AR is most likely going to be done via passthrough anyways so it's not like the lenses have to be some kind of special integrated device, just a lens that can be whatever prescription you need.
People wearing glasses is exactly why AR is primed to succeed. If AR glasses can be made to not burn everyone with glasses will replace them with the AR ones.
I see the main problem with wearables in the type of media we like to consume. Text and images are almost always rectangular and 2D. It makes a lot more sense to present that on rectangular devices which you can touch (key to the success of the iphone). Wearable glasses have advantanges for 3d media but those really just make up for a fraction of the media consumed.
What? A wearable display with a basic liquid crystal as well to control opacity can trivially do a normal rectangle too, anywhere you want. It's a complete superset of all current displays, that's the most basic use of it. Doing 3D stuff or whatever if anything strikes me as by far the least important, at least for quite a while after intro most of its use would be simple HUD or just using what we've got except wherever. Right now as I type this I'm sitting at a desk in front of a 5k 27" rectangle. With refined retinal scanning display glasses, I could be sitting on a couch or somewhere else, and still have a 27" 5k equivalent rectangle to pull up (or 36" 8k or whatever I wanted) rather then a 6-7" display (phone) or 14-16" (notebook) at much lower resolution. Decent wireless keyboards and mice exist and could be further improved on.
Can you explain why people think "3D" is an important aspect of these? AR/VR would already pay for itself just by being able to bring up my desktop (or smaller individual windows or anything) anywhere, more efficiently.
Wearable displays can do that but they were not designed to do that. Its called „augmented“ or „virtual“ REALITY for a reason.
Focus is an issue in regard to legibility even if you dont use the 3d space. If you do you get even more issues with tracking, stabilizing, more focus issues as you generate defocus, filtering, occlusion limited fov and more.
These devices are designed for rendering believable dinosaurs into natural environments. It will take a while until they deliver on the promise.
I have no problem using the desktop display mode on my Oculus Quest 1, it's sharp enough that I can comfortably browse the web or use other apps. It's not as clear as my main physical display so I don't use it exclusively. The displays on the Quest 2 are better and many people use Virtual Desktop with their Quest. I'm expecting Cambria to be yet another notch above that and if it's good enough and if they've really nailed the comfort and weight I'm going to ditch my monitor and switch over to Cambria + Airlink to my desktop. My point is, we're already there and companies like Meta are already targeting these devices as display killers and the next iteration of productivity platforms.
I had a low tech cyberpunk rig set up (Sony noise cancelling headphones + 4K screen on a laptop rather than an expensive, large tv and fancy speakers)
I am not sold at all on "VR". It's one of those things, like "Firefox OS", that drained Mozilla's coffers when they should have focused on designing their own Android build the way we went from Knoppix[1] to Kali[2] in a very short time.
(I wish I could have stayed, but my Chrome loving supervisor who told me he doesn't even use the browser decided I didn't do enough work to be hired on full time before he moved from Brooklyn to Switzerland)
It will take a loooong time to drain Apple's money vault, though. They can keep spending stupid money on bullshit projects for years before anyone even notices.
The cost of the external eye displays seem absolutely crazy.
Two extra external displays in raw hardware. But worse, they are on the front in exactly the place you want to place the passthrough cameras, so now you have to do extra image processing to virtually reposition the input as if it were on the eyes. So it makes passthrough dev more difficult.
It must be extremely compelling to see those eye screens in action. It must be selling onlookers on the device. That's the only that could justify that much effort?
I had assumed a single oval-shaped display and headset, along with notches for cameras. I also don’t see slightly displaced cameras as causing a significant problem. Brains are pretty adaptable to vision changes.
Productivity is correlated with display size, and VR should be the next step in productivity, because it allows your whole space to become a display and an interface. When paired with powerful hardware and innovative software it should be the next step in computing.
Therefore, VR should be a replacement for large displays in productive work, not a device that everyone is wearing outside or casually watching videos with. The use cases are professional; such as programming, CAD, design etc. I believe that properly implemented VR would allow utilizing full visual-spatial capabilities of our brains, totally eliminating the process of hunting for files and switching windows.
It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.
I wish they'd explore this area, rather than go for a mass market appeal. What kind of software is possible, and how much productivity can be increased with maxed out hardware with high resolution VR? I'm not sure if 4K resolution with a M2 chip is powerful enough for a truly innovative product. Maybe it is, but there's still room for a "pro" product.
I don't think there's a use case for glasses-type product, with a watch-like functionality and environmental AR which would show information pop-ups everywhere. We already have information overload, and we don't need any more of that.
Perhaps, in a lab setting, doing straightforward, focused tasks like the ones they use in these productivity studies, I could sustain a productivity boost long enough for the researcher to get a two-tailed p<0.05.
Make me do it in real life, though, 40 hours a week, week after week after week, and I expect I would burn out very quickly. I like my work well enough, but I don't think I want to actually stick my whole head inside of it.
Maybe not all the time, but it would be great for me to be able to travel and not have to worry about taking a huge productivity hit without my desk and monitors.
I'd counter that with, why are you worried about computer-time productivity when traveling?
If it's for vacation, just unplug. Mixing work and vacation makes both worse.
If it's for business, your attention should be on whatever it is that prompted you to travel. Presumably that's face time with people, not grinding away in front of a computer.
Because I'm not talking about vacation, I'm talking about the ability to travel and see family or go somewhere new at any point during the year without needing to take time off to do so. My work is programming, and travel has never been a part of the work equation for me. If workspace arrangements weren't an issue, I could go visit my friends from college this very weekend.
Meh, this is mainly a bad excuse. Even when I'm doing CAD or manipulating large 3D datasets, I can get my work done with just a 14" laptop and a good trackball. There is some reduction in efficiency, but mainly due to scp'ing large files or waiting for the slower CPU. For coding it's not an issue at all, as long as you have your toolchain set up properly.
I find that the high DPI trend has a tendency to limit us unneccesarily more than actually fix anything. It is still common to say max 80 characters per line. In the olden days where that comes from, it would require 640 pixels horizontally. So at 100% scaling you can fit 3 standard terminals side-by-side and fit 60+ lines vertically, what more do you need when you also have multiple workspaces to tab across?
Both Meta and Microsoft are exploring AR/VR in the workplace (Microsoft pretty much entirely). I’m not sure why you’re suggesting they’re not exploring this area.
Can you explain what you mean? The Quest2 is easily the best stand alone headset and the hololens has the best world sensing. How can you say it's generally crappy? I consider it industry leading unless you get some niche devices that push up the spec sheet but are generally uninteresting.
That's a dubious statement. Filling the binocular field of view is fine; it's about 120° horizontally, give or take. But past that it starts to be a problem. Generally, if you look at the screen and any edge is blocked by your nose without turning your head, it's likely too large to work comfortably on. (but still fine for immersive content like games or movies)
You can turn also turn your head and move around in your room, i.e. your whole room could be full of separate displays, or just pieces of code floating in space. It's not just how much you see at a time, but how easily you can switch context.
Move around a room? I'd compare it to eye motion of 30-60deg, that's a saccade of about 30-40ms. I don't think most fingers can move that fast from the home row, probably more comparable to head motion
The parent was talking about moving around in a room filled with virtual displays. Regarding eye motion, I already use a screen filling my non-peripheral field-of-view (~120°), so any additional screen would require significant head movement.
You sit with your eyes closer than half the width of your screen? That is either a HUGE screen and/or you sit with eyes less than 14" away, which is at least novel?
Of course you need two of those screens to fill your field of view, unless you have a square screen that goes below your desk, but I'm sure that's available somewhere.
I’m near-sighted, and checking now it’s really more like 90-100° horizontally, but moving my eyes outside of that range without moving my head is actually not comfortable.
My subjective impression is that the nonperipheral visual field isn’t square. I would find 3:2 displays optimal, or maybe rather 16:11. While a 16:9 or 16:10 display could be extended vertically to fill more of the visual field, that extended portion is not large enough to usefully fit a second monitor there (without head movement).
Eyes (lenses/retina) are spherical with roughly (slightly more than) 100deg field of view each and a little more than 20deg left/right overlap at the nose. That gives a total range of almost 180deg horizontal-yaw and 100deg vertical-pitch. You don't even notice most eye motion... if you did then every time you moved 2.5deg you'ld think about it. Apparent field of view is made up of many saccades that allow your much higher high resolution fovea to cover the interesting parts as it moves/scans/jumps around. By the time you're +/- 10deg from center, you've lost 5x in resolution.
If you're like most people and the horizontal field is close to max, you'll do better stacking monitors than putting them side/side. Inter pupillary distance is a bit over 2in (~65mm), but that's usually small compared to screen distance, which is why I say roughly square (~16:14).
It's not about switching time, it's about cognitive load. If any dense information creeps into your far peripheral vision, it might as well not exist because you have to locate it. During any concentrated work, only something you can fit in the center of your binocular field of vision (roughly speaking) doesn't cause severe mental context switching.
I tried to work on three 16:9 displays for some time, and found it exhausting. The cognitive overload isn't worth it, workspace switching with a hotkey turned out to be far easier for me. That's not even mentioning constant neck movement.
Maybe it's just me though, I can't speak for different people; but I strongly suspect it's the same for many.
I'd imagine it changing the way I work to be closer to what I do when working on a physical project. Like when building a book case I have various pieces laid out in different stages of completion. My context switching involves moving physically from one to the other which provides a physical reinforcement to the mental change I have to make. Just like I have all the shelves on one bench ready to be sanded and the trim on another being cut to length I could have my server side code on one wall and the client code on another. It'd probably be a lot better for my posture and fitness to physically move from one to the other rather than be glued to a chair for 8 hours.
> During any concentrated work, only something you can fit in the center of your binocular field of vision (roughly speaking) doesn't cause severe mental context switching.
I mean this doesn't seem to be true for anyone working in the trades. "Mise-en-place" allowed me to tend a 24-foot-long bar by myself with 60+ customers. At the time, I was essentially a highly trained, top performing athlete. Just because I can't see the cash register / margarita machine / well drinks / etc... it doesn't mean it's not an extension of my body.
It is possible for your entire workshop to become a second-nature extension of self, not just the desk in front of your face.
I think part of this discussion is: "What can be part of a singular focused task vs. what requires some amount of 'context switching'?" And its not always super obvious. Practicing a workflow can integrate context-switches so that it becomes one singular focused task.
But VR/AR can also assist with neurological training by allowing you to switch environments when you switch contexts. For someone who is WFH in a studio apartment it can separate their "gaming desk" from their "work desk" from their "hobby desk" ... or even their "React desk" from their "Concurrency-wrangling desk" from their "Email/Communications battlestation". This could enable much faster context switching -- meeting in 30 seconds? pop over to your "Virtual Conferencing Room". Then come back to your sanctum of concurrency troubleshooting.
Allow me to summarize this perspective as the future of "cognitive ergonomics" of sorts and second entirely the idea that it's the biggest promise of VR from an experience standpoint. Literally immersion in a wider context, not deliberate focus that by very definition a narrow viewport already covers quite well. Conversely to physical displays, contextual ergonomics is where VR must shine.
The way you expressed it actually reminds me of Iain McGilchrist's "left brain" versus "right brain" thinking model, wherein the narrow-ish "task-focused" approach is typical left-brain concern (essentialist, to a fault), whereas the wider "contextual" approach is typical right-brain associative concerns ("everything is complex/connected"). I'd never noticed this ergonomics question (should I say dichotomy) could be neurologically framed that way, thanks for the insight.
It really isn't because you can't see everything at once. And I'm sure VR/AR will provide equally fast shortcuts for moving between anchor spaces.
I have three monitors, and it's still not enough. I would be thrilled if each of my monitors had four times the apparent area in a 3D space that layered applications and documents behind each other in some approximately intuitive way.
You also can’t see everything at once with VR or with multiple monitors. You have to shift your focus and move your eyes/your head. It is though probably a matter of preference whether you want to have your windows etc. layed out in 2D or 3D space that you have to move around in, or whether you want buttons you can blindly press to have the desired window pop up immediately right in front of you where you’re currently looking at.
Typical large (32") monitor with normal spacing is about 30-35deg vertical and 60-70deg horizontal and 27" is usually less. If your eyes are 20" from the screen, it's probably not healthy. Binocular field of view (without head motion) of VR systems is usually 100deg in both dimensions (20deg overlap in the middle). I'd expect Apple VR to be "retina".
Just common sense. Watch -> Phone -> Tablet -> Laptop -> Desktop. You'd be least productive on a watch and most productive on a desktop, and adding extra displays would make you even more productive. Each of them has an interface that's designed to max out productivity on that particular display size. We don't yet have an interface that maxes out productivity on a VR device.
Space isn't a constraint in VR, you could have an infinite number of displays that you could teleport between as quickly as your interface allows. The limiter on productivity increase probably has more to do with your ability to remember what each display is for and the ease of locating and switching to them.
I can get behind this. I always though VR was a gimmick but I got an oculus ~2016 and was honestly blown away. However, the #1 thing that turns me off to VR is that it's uncomfortable. That's ok though as long as the experience is worth it.
I truly believe that VR is perfect for training/sim type games. Actual games.. Could really only count on one hand the games I feel are worth diving into VR for.
I'm bullish on VR but I think the "many floating monitors around a desk" is a bad use case. I mean, you can just alt-tab through windows or desktops as it is.
In my mind the real power comes from spatial hand tracking as a new UX paradigm(seeing an interacting with objects in 3d space) and possibly the addition of large displays anywhere a monitor couldn't have feasibly been, (eg, floating in the server room in a cramped space when needed).
I don't think working on code will be all that different. There isn't any physical spatial interaction with text on paper that the current editors are missing.
People do it now, if we're talking about CAD software of an engine model. I'm not sure they're clamoring for more 2d monitors. I think being able to reach into the model in 3d space is probably more natural than mouse clicks and manually moving viewports around.
As someone who has been getting into CAD lately and has several years of experience working on 3D models in Blender, I would very much prefer to be able to walk around the model and make adjustments here and there rather than using keyboard shortcuts and the mouse. More display space in VR should have an emphasis on "space" rather than "display".
If we're talking about programming instead, an intuitive way to switch between modules when working on a large project would be to have their windows laid out before you on a virtual desk and you could switch between the active one displayed on a central virtual monitor by making a gesture (probably something like the Oculus pinch) towards the window you want to switch to. This would allow you to use your spatial reasoning to remember which windows you have open and would also allow you to group related windows. Additional displays could show console output from your development server, the GUI part of the app you're working on, a test runner, etc. positioned where you can glance at them easily.
That being said, I think the real killer app for the new "facetop" computing devices that are around the corner will be physical fitness and social interaction. If you think a standing desk was a big improvement for your health then you'll love being able to freely walk around your office and work from any position whether it's standing, sitting at a desk, perched by the window, lounging on the sofa, or even crouching while giving those legs a stretch. You can also kiss zoom meetings goodbye with the unnatural wall of faces almost but not quite making eye contact with you. You'll talk to an avatar, realistic or not, that has full eye, face and body tracking allowing you to tell if your interlocutor is paying attention or thinking about how long it is until lunch while checking the wait time at the nearest restaurants. It actually does feel like you're in the presence of another person and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain.
I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.
>I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.
We might end up with a phone as the go-to XR keyboard. Would be pretty funny if that evolves into everyone wearing AR glasses with a 90s Nokia sized blackberry keyboard in their pocket.
> and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain
I'd love to know if this is true. I've heard that in a VR headset, your eyes are always focused at the exact same distance, even if it appears like something is far off in the distance. And that this can lead to eyestrain. Can anybody here speak to that?
I only see this as a supplemental feature for certain use cases (coarse-grained 3D operations). In general nothing beats the efficiency of working with a keyboard for navigating application functions, or (at least with current technology) the mouse for precision 2D navigation/selection. Their advantage being precise and definite/discrete input.
For actual work, even with a VR headset I see myself still mostly using keyboard and mouse.
Agree that keyboard shortcuts can't be topped for speed but a keyboard doesn't need to be a flat thing you keep on a desk. Mice on the other hand stand a good chance of being replaced by virtual laser pointers combined with a shift in how we do GUI layouts.
I agree that "floating virtual monitors" isn't much of an improvement over real monitors - but it's an transitional step that you take to experiment with building a UI that's not possible with traditional physical interfaces.
Don't forget even the home use case where you're much less likely to have a pair of 30" monitors or even the space to put them... nor the IP concerns of the company, if you did have them in your living room. I agree, for apple this is most likely to be a creative/productivity play at high dollar. The challenge will be pricing and multi-hour usability (weight/watts/weariness).
You get retina resolution, high refresh rate, HDR, and 2Factor authentication (Biometric+Goggles)/information security in one package. Of course you'll still likely want to have a laptop to drive it (untethered) except for the simplest mobile games.
I agree that VR/AR is the future of productivity computing, but I think we are a bit far off still, half a decade at least. I have played around with remote desktop apps on the Meta Quest 2 and these are the main challenges I see:
- 4k is not nearly enough. I think we will likely need 8k screens.
- The headsets are not light enough. You need something with all day comfort for work.
- There is still too much eye-strain from the quality of the lenses and the fixed focus.
- Input is still not natural and precise enough. We would need to be able to see our own hands and type with zero latency. Hand-tracked pointing needs to be able to pick up on small subtle finger motion like a mouse or trackpad can
> Therefore, VR should be a replacement for large displays in productive work, not a device that everyone is wearing outside or casually watching videos with. The use cases are professional
I hope you’re wrong about this.
I hope there will be a great personal (non-work) use case for the next generation of VR/AR. Something like gaming, watching sports (always have awesome “seats”), movies with friends, maybe map/gps/etc. for when I’m running.
I know there are options for this already. But honestly, I haven’t seen anyone who’s not a dork using VR/AR. I want the version the average person is excited about. I’m ready to plunk down any amount of money Apple wants from me.
If it’s VR/AR for work, count me out. I don’t have any interest in increasing my work productivity lol.
Social experiences are the use case you're looking for. Multiplayer gaming is a lot more fun in VR, watching video together with people is great, even just hanging out and socializing is great and it beats video or voice hands down. You're right that it's currently in the dork stage of development, the internet went through that period as well. I'd enjoy it while it lasts though, I dread the day when it's fully monetized and mainstream.
The internet is much improved since the end of the dork stage of development. Don’t know why HN romanticizes slow connections and a few text websites made by obsessives. Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. are leaps and bounds better than anything I saw online pre-1999.
I can’t wait for VR/AR to be fully monetized and mainstream. I’m sick of speculative VC-funded crap that I can’t pay for because they’re in “growth mode.” When something’s monetized at least then I have some faith that it’ll be around for awhile.
We're hordes waiting for a usable product, but that iconic/pop moment isn't about to come, the tech just isn't there yet.
Think late 2020s at best, and probably well into the 30s for the kind of refined VR we all know possible. It's like we had nice and functional pocket computers since the 1990s (PDAs etc), but it would take a solid decade for the iPhone to be made under the vision of a statistically rare product genius (means we can wait ±5~10 yrs for things to emerge as commercially successful tech). Or how video games took about 20 years to move from whatever came before the current "modern" era/paradigm (say late 1990s) that lives on to this day in terms of UI/UX. Same with the "desktop" metaphor for PCs, etc.
We have yet to nail the hardware for VR, let alone the OS code (core libs etc) whose precision and intuitiveness will feel tremendously "corporeal" in the case of VR, visceral, much more than any TV/monitor + vibrating thing could ever do (let alone keyboard/mouse). If you've ever did the timing for an action-paced fast video game, you know the kind of intricate subtleties I'm talking about, where one frame can make or break some experiences.
Then will come the time to nail killer metaphors, high-level GUI/GUX, killer apps.
> It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.
This is such an Engelbart-esque statement. Bravo! I'd love for AR to go there too :)
Same. I tried the “dual monitor” setup for a couple years and just went back to one. The second was just causing distractions and context switching. It’s easier to focus on what’s right in front of you than look around for stuff.
Andrews, C., Endert, A. and North, C., 2010, April. Space to think: large high-resolution displays for sensemaking. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 55-64):
There’s much more. Search “sensemaking” or “immersive analytics” on Scholar. Depth and width of field, achieved via stereoscopy and tracking, is well documented as a performance enhancer when it comes to generalizeable task completion in VR.
That seems to be describing a single type of task which is not what 95% of time is spent on by professionals in a work environment. This seems akin to a whiteboard session which traditionally is solved by just grabbing a whiteboard for an hour. But then you're not comparing VR to a monitor but VR to a physical whiteboard.
And my work involves working with 2-4 ‘documents’ at once, analyzing, comparing, and summarizing them. My focus space is a little larger than one window.
It seems to me if there was even a correlation, which I'm not sure, it would have more to do with resolution, since same resolution but bigger display doesn't actually show more information.
In the extreme, yes, and low resolution on large screens are also difficult to read. Viewing distance is also a factor. You always need to find a balance.
you just have to ignore that at the extremes it's probably negatively correlated, and there's a significant non-zero possibility that at least in the short term, that possibility of negative correlation applies to the area VR is interested in as well.
It’s a popular myth propagated by American public. Funnily enough, in many European and Asian countries the opposite is deemed to be true.
The truth is that there has never been any conclusive evidence one way or the other.
“The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study of 1679 decreased men and women from the general American population supported these findings.
In the present study data on the height, weight, and age at death of 373 men were obtained from records at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Men of height 175.3 cm or less lived an average of 4.95 years longer than those of height over 175.3 cm, while men of height 170.2 cm or less lived 7.46 years longer than those of at least 182.9 cm. An analysis by weight difference revealed a 7.72-year greater longevity for men of weight 63.6 kg or less compared with those of 90.9 kg or more. This corroborates earlier evidence and contradicts the popular notion that taller people are healthier.” [0]
It definitely does not scale linearly. A second monitor is a big advantage. A third less so. Infinite visual space would be barely more valuable than that. And really just having all that screen real estate isn't useful unless it's matched by extremely high resolution, frame rate and field of vision. I can flick my eyes between two monitors but any headset on the market is going to make me turn my head while squeezing my temples.
It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.
People can learn 3D environments by viewing them in a 2D screen very happily, and millions of gamers do exactly that every day. I can still remember my way around the map in GTA 3 about 20 years after I first played it...
Gaming environments are more like 2.5D. There aren't many games which are fully open in 3D, because the world isn't, and humans can't fly.
The "flight" in GTA is more like a moving viewpoint than a space full of 3D objects and affordances.
Full immersive 3D navigation through code and file systems would be an interesting experiment. I suspect we'd get used to it very quickly, and we'd then wonder why we spent so long tied down by virtual paper metaphors. (I could be wrong, of course.)
I had a Quest 2 and honestly thought it was at it best when I was lying down and watching videos in bed on a huge screen. All the other use cases I just didn’t have a good space for
In case VR you are right, but AR, with current state of software might be good for navigation only. Later on, every physical thing can have its own augmentation, GUI, either by something like QR code or Bluetooth. In a bus stop you could buy a ticket not by using dedicated point of sale device but by using augmentation software in glasses. Posters could change into trailers etc.
Have to say I agree with Jony Ive on all of these points.
The idea of an AR wearable that is tethered to a fixed base station is so very lame. Why even bother with AR when you can only augment the reality that is in your office or bedroom?
Also the eye-view outer display is essential for situations where one person is using the goggles but others aren’t. How unsettling would it be for someone to look at you, be able to see you, but for their upper face to completely obscured by goggles? How could you have an in person face-to-face conversation with someone like that?
The fixed base station is a fundamentally different tradeoff for AR vs VR.
Base station for AR would be detrimental, as you inherently want to explore and interact with the world around you.
For most VR use cases that is not the case, and I can see the argument for the benefits of a base station (higher performance) outweighing the costs (limited movement).
One solution to this for AR is using "fog computing", where your AR device may offload its computation to a node on the local network that's more powerful but also not as far away (in terms of latency) as a cloud server. Perhaps with the continued adoption of UWB 5G, those AR basestations could exist at cell towers or in local establishments - think about a clothing store running fog nodes to allow AR users to visualize wearing different clothes as they see them in the store.
I haven't read more than the abstract, but it seems there is some good research going into this. It must be years off however, as we barely have LTE networks in some locations, let-alone UWB 5G to even begin supporting this type of architecture.
This kind of throughput is quite achievable if you get a high quality 6E router. Of course you need compatible client devices too, which is a bit of a challenge right now.
Apple won’t release this product unless it is mind blowing. If Bloomberg’s reporting is true, then we should all be looking forward to a very cool demo at WWDC and an incredible product some time in 2023.
Very few people predicted the iPhone accurately before its launch. And it’s reasonable to say the iPhone blew minds because Apple figured out multitouch AND reduced the latency of the interface to the extend required so that it felt natural to use. If they mail AR in the same way, they will have the next iPhone.
I'm not so sure. I think they will deliver something but I have a feeling that Meta is going to beat them to the punch as far as a productivity focused device is concerned. Meta might wind up with most of the market share while Apple trails them although I'm sure that most people who own a MacBook Pro will buy an Apple headset as well. I think this is more of a PC vs Mac situation than it is Android vs iPhone.
I would be shocked if Meta can convince the masses to buy their headset over Apple's. If Meta tries to beat Apple on price, their headset won't be very capable and won't be much different than what is already out there (which the masses aren't interested in). If they try to compete with Apple by releasing a similarly priced and similarly capable headset, Apple wins every time. I think you're underestimating how much people dislike Meta/Facebook/Zuck. And I'm not just referring to techies either. "Normal" people hate them too.
meta has the head start, but never bet against apple for revenue. VR is still new for casuals. if apple releases new hardware people will buy it and you'll see an explosion of devs creating apps for it.
I think the iPhone isn't the only possible comparison here. Sure, the iPhone blew minds, but what about the iPad? Apple Watch? Airpods? Apple TV? None of these are bad devices (in fact, they're all pretty solid) - they're just niche devices and limited in the way the iPhone wasn't/isn't. I'd expect the headset to be similar.
I feel the same way but it’s also worth remembering that while the first iPhone was a hit amongst early adopters, it didn’t really become ubiquitous until the 4 or 4S, which were also vastly superior devices which had a few years of iterations based on experience of early adopters. The same is true of the Apple Watch, which also blew away the competition on first release, and was still called a failure but was a sleeper hit, by itself a larger business than most of Apple’s competitors.
I expect Apple’s AR product to be functional, and dubbed a niche failure by the tech commentariat, but by 2026 really start to eat into the smartphone market.
Meta and Google are just less capable of making humane software, and while they may release slightly better devices from a technical perspective they’ll miss out on the light touch that such an immersive experience will require for normal people to feel comfortable with it.
I am eternally surprised that Boeing has not developed augmented reality headsets for its maintenance crew. Overlaying specs and instructions onto the components being serviced would be a godsend for productivity, compliance, and personal safety.
Edit: ditto for automotive assembly/repair. Power plant maintenance. Basically all complicated engineering fields could make excellent use of AR.
Boeing was involved with industrial version of Google Glass, Microsoft is pushing Hololens heavily in that space as well - in fact you can buy Hololens integrated with safety hat - and there's explicit stuff to integrate with MS ERP stuff. Uptake seems to be mainly in high end civil engineering so far, but a lot of those solutions are things you are not going to read about outside a niche press.
I'll never be able to find a reference to it, but I distinctly remember AR goggles being used for aircraft maintenance 10-15 years ago, if not farther back than that. It's a very obvious application, and not a new one at all.
It’s so telling how much WWDC has been dedicated to ARKit over the past many years yet not a single viable use has been shipped.
AR through a phone or iPad is lame and close to useless. Only looks good in video demos till you use it yourself and see how clumsy it is interacting through a tiny window.
Very clear they have a headset in mind for all this but are struggling to ship.
I'm excited overall about these 'leaks' and details surfacing from Apple and Meta. I'm optimistic the AR side will win (versus VR only), but overall, by being shepherded by these big orgs, I expect hardware costs to reduce dramatically for end users. Lower costs will pull in more users and allow us to really design experiences for a wider AR audience.
> an outward-facing screen on the front of the headset that showed images of the wearer's facial expressions and eyes to people around them
Quite a juicy tidbit, this is not something I had even contemplated as a possibility. I struggle to imagine how this will work without looking bizarre. And the effect on battery life of doubling the screens would have to be significant.
If it was a full mask like that clunky iRobot film it would be interesting, but I can't see it working for a half mask with just eye displays. Eye tracking is notoriously hard to de-glitch but they could be using some fancy ML to make it better.
The only way AR truly succeeds is when we figure out how to fit all the tech inside a transparent contact lens. Wearing some headset and looking at a screen inches from your eyes is never going to cut it.
I wonder what this could be that Apple feels it is close to consumer ready. Apple targets the premium mass market. They do not release products that sell a few million; they release products that sell 10 million or more a year. Anything less is a failure.
So either Apple has figured out something really compelling in AR/VR that everyone--not just gamers and nerds--will want, or they are reaching.
200 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadMy takeaway though is that the device itself and how it should look/work is not obvious, and that is a bad thing.
For a device like the iPhone, iPod a few people kicking around ideas over sushi could very quickly (and with wild enthusiasm, no doubt) come to agree on the basic form, basic functionality.
If our VR-future has to be shoe-horned into existence, maybe it was not to be.
If anything, I want to see "the cyber" go away, not become more pervasive.
Why would you persist with something that makes you sick even when the enthusiasts admit they use it once or twice a month?
I only know one person who used bis VR set extensively like for 2-3 month and then falled back to play egoshooters.
'a lot of people' != Not market relevant
Trying to compare this nascent technology to the iPhone is really disingenuous, there are probably a billion iPhone users worldwide. I'd struggle to count on one hand branded devices that have the same number of users.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC
Personally, I just felt it was gimmicky - try it once or twice for curiosity's sake, then forget about it.
Nothing on VR enthusiasts - I'm sure you have reasons to love it. But as a piece of tech, unless there are drastic improvements, I just don't see it gaining mass adoption.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YIGT13bdXw
Some good first time experiences for people are Space Pirate Trainer if they like shooters or I Expect You To Die if they're more of a puzzle game type and Beat Saber if they like rhythm games. These games don't involve thumbstick based movement so they probably won't make you feel sick. If you want something that's really chill and is just kind of pretty to look at and walk through then Walkabout Mini Golf is pretty good, it's not the most exciting game but it does have multiplayer and it's pretty relaxing to play a round and just admire the work they put into the courses.
I've heard that setting up a fan so it's blowing on you while you're playing VR is a good way to prevent motion sickness. I don't really get very motion sick though so I haven't had to try it.
Some very good games that will definitely make you motion sick are Pavlov and Bone Works. You will feel queasy after playing these for the first few times, have some Gravol on hand just in case.
For better screen quality you can either use a Quest 2 or the Valve Index, you'll be tethered to the PC with the Index though which for me is a deal breaker.
https://www.techradar.com/news/oculus-might-have-a-fix-to-en...
https://www.lifewire.com/how-new-tech-could-prevent-vr-motio...
It seems well-accepted hypothesis that having artificial locomotion in VR can induce motion sickness (cases where the VR body moves but your own body doesn't), whereas with "sit", "stay still" or "walk around IRL" (and even "teleport around") scenarios are highly unlikely to cause it.
There is a still a lot of experiences left in the latter scenario, though it does exclude driving games (in particular if you don't see the cockpit) or first-person shooting-and-moving-around games.
And then the worst thing to do with newcomers is to put them down for a ride in a VR rollercoaster.
I've probably shown mine to ~30 people and not a single one had motion sickness with any of the "safe" experiences, assuming the device is adjusted properly (IPD). If you stick them on a roller-coaster or a super laggy app as their first experience then yeah that's going to be a problem. But for safe experiences - I think there is a percentage of people who experience disorientation or nausea but it's certainly not half (maybe 10% or so).
Native Quest games are the best as they are entirely on-device with no latency anywhere.
Quest 2 would like a word with you?
Part of my problem with Quest is the "ick" factor of knowing that FB is looking over my shoulder whenever I turn the thing on. Giving up your privacy seems to be the price of just about every cool technology nowadays, and it means the tech has to be absolutely spectacular to make me pay that privacy price. My Tesla is sufficiently spectacular. Quest is not.
[1] https://arinsider.co/2021/08/02/how-many-quest-2s-sold-in-q2...
Nerd dads are famous for buying anything that might run an NES emulator, then not using it after it turns out their kids have better things to do than listen to square waves.
I did that to play around as I was playing with 3d programming and I'm a nerd.
And while friends and family know that and a few tried it out for a little bit and liked it, no one cares.
Which is fine but it is a gimmick.
I was hoping it would get more traction with real life training like how to use a lathe but nothing really came out or is in some internal companies.
Apple can and does make mistakes, for example the touch bar, and the MacBook keyboard.
If Ive is involved I predict that this product will experience a brief but intense surge in popularity based primarily on the novelty factor and social media influencers followed by a rapid decline into irrelevance.
That way, as long as everyone is wearing a helmet, it looks like no one is wearing a helmet.
Sounds like a good solution for a low probability situation. Eye visibility for normal humans is much more practical than issuing every human a VR system and requiring they wear it at all times to maintain the illusion.
It's gimmicky?
I'm really curios of Fashion conces people really like avatars. I don't think so and I also don't think that the apple brand is a good fit for it.
Real life Avatars with light enhancements will also be weird I think
Let's see.
AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.
All these companies are lying and faking and delaying to collect $ while people like HN are stupid enough to believe in them.
Zuckerberg's latest video blanked out the "AR" glasses. Google also lied and used fake demos glasses in theirs. Magic Leap = lol
The far easier and probably useful VR has gigantuous issues to move forward. For instance there's no way to create content. $100 million games go to half a billion dollar games. People don't want to move their heads when relaxing. At best it might be useful at work where people are forced to do things but that's also contentious, most people don't even want to turn the Zoom camera on.
Like you though, both figuratively and literally, I'm not buying VR.
> AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.
This is simply not true, there’s been numerous AR products built (just not runaway success stories). IMHO, it’s not “technically impossible”, it’s “prohibitively expensive” generally to get the experience that’s been hyped.
Privacy aside, I don't think that would really take off either as I just don't think most people are that interested in people they don't know.
Text, as opposed to audio, doesn't really change the personality of the person you are speaking to, plus using your ears to listen directly to the person might create better immersion.
The uses of AR are endless and much more than just Minority Report type stuff.
And then as the controllers get better and more integrated, you get the sort of thing that currently only pilots of an F35 get, in terms of being aware of their environment.
AR is already proven tech in industry. I don't know what entertainment purposes it might serve but real world use is already benefitting from it.
Building and construction has tons of AR offerings in production. See for example Trimble's SiteVision.
Unless everyone can use it, its not going to work in an office setting. A single person in a team of six who gets motion sickness with VR (very common) makes it nonviable for the entire team.
The entertainment/gaming market is overrated - when it finally shows up, AR/VR will be all about work, productivity and interfacing. But I agree it's probably going to take a long time and I don't think it's going to be the hyped revolution everyone would like it to be.
It's also probably quite a ways off for mainstream adoption because the hardware and software isn't there and won't be for a while unless you're talking narrow use cases where compromises are fine.
>Apple CEO Tim Cook has been relatively hands-off from the product compared to others like the iPhone... The Information's sources say that Apple's mixed reality efforts began almost accidentally when the company purchased a German AR startup called Metaio to use some of its technology on Project Titan, its self-driving car project.
Which is just wild and highly contrary to my expectations. It's been obvious for ages that, while quite a ways from hitting the tipping point, wearable displays are the natural next big disruption in the personal electronics space following in the steps of the PC, notebooks, smartphones and tablets. A retinal scanning display will be able to hit the limits of human visual acuity while also being portable, which completely obsoletes every single other display we use and has massive implications for a lot of our basic modes of interaction. Suddenly there is no connection between "screen size" and device, where you are etc, it's just a matter of tradeoffs with how much power is behind it. With an industry standard even embedded devices could have virtual "displays" with lots of info. If you think about the form factor of nearly everything portable we use, it's "a display, with stuff attached to it" (either attached to the back in the case of phones/tablets or on a hinge to a rectangle that otherwise matches the screen in the case of notebooks). The display bit almost completely defines the basics of how portable it is, how it's used, and the limits on thermal dissipation and roughly how much energy it can have. But a wearable display once again abstracts the human-computer visual interface part from everything else, which means single rectangles are no longer required. Belts, smoother ovoids that can be more easily pocketed, and who knows what else all become possible ways to hold enhanced computation/storage beyond what the wearable itself can do. And as someone enters LAN range (or sits down and plugs in even) of more computation power (in the form of a desktop computer say, or networked computers) there could be seamless switchover. And it's not as if this is 50 years in the future either, the pieces have been steadily coming together. Products like the RETISSA [0] demonstrate the potential that a company with Apple's resources could get to work polishing. The opening up of 6 GHz spectrum and WiFi 7+ along with a long awaited new shift in networking means LAN data rates are there too.
To say there are implications for, oh, products like the iPhone, iPad, and Macbooks (or even iMacs) is a bit of an understatement. With enormous irony if anything Apple's heavily neglected desktop section might be one of the ones that'd best survive. But whomever gets it right and gets the ecosystem going has the potential to really mess up established players. Given how Apple accomplished multiple disruptions and has repeatedly stated they're alert to it and the importance of being willing to go after their own cash cows early before someone else does it, I'd sort of assumed in the background this was one of their key strategic projects even if it was like a 10 year one. It's fascinating to find that no, actually not!
And Ive's influence without the leash of Jobs to make sure form and function stayed linked really seems to have been pretty toxic. Whatever Cooks' other strengths keeping that reigned in doesn't seem to have been one of them. I guess the forces of organizational inertia are always incredibly powerful.
----
0: https://en.retissa.biz/
Heat exists.
We're already basically at the limits of physics for making CPUs faster and heat dissipation is a huge issue even for products that you don't have pressed against your face and eyes all the time.
Humans interact chiefly via sight.
But it has still been "obvious for ages" that wearable displays are going to be some big inevitable hit? No it hasn't.
And why on earth would Apple have made this tech a priority ten years before it was viable as a consumer product?
P.S. No, Apple's desktop computer operation has not been "neglected" lately; they actually have been giving the Mac a lot of care and feeding, as evidenced by the really nice new MacBook Pro re-design, and the Mac Studio. The opposite of what you said is true.
??? I do too. What does this have to do with anything? The lens is irrelevant for something that projects right onto the retina (trivial to correct for). Hell, I'd love it for that reason alone, would be a huge improvement for my computer usage.
>We're already basically at the limits of physics for making CPUs faster and heat dissipation is a huge issue even for products that you don't have pressed against your face and eyes all the time.
Lol? Also that you think this is relevant either is kind of confusing.
>Humans interact chiefly via sight.
Yes, hence why wearable AR/VR displays are obvious.
>But it has still been "obvious for ages" that wearable displays are going to be some big inevitable hit? No it hasn't.
Yes, it has.
>And why on earth would Apple have made this tech a priority ten years before it was viable as a consumer product?
For the same reason they were thinking about the "iPad" and then "iPhone" (tablet consideration actually came first internally even though in 2004 it was redirected toward the phone first) long, long before it "viable as a consumer product" duh. You don't get out ahead of things by waiting until after your competitors do it to get started, you make it happen early with your own R&D.
>No, Apple's desktop computer operation has not been "neglected" lately; they actually have been giving the Mac a lot of care and feeding, as evidenced by the really nice new MacBook Pro re-design, and the Mac Studio.
This is just pathetic. You cite the MacBook Pro as support for desktop computers and consider just this last year as a trend. I've been using Apple systems since the late 80s. Desktop systems have absolutely been massively neglected in the last decade. The Mac Pro got updated TWICE in TWELVE YEARS (the first of which was total shit), and that was after Apple pushed it massively up market vs their reliable good tower. The Mac Mini also had multiple years of just being left to sit there. There was zero in between them except the AIOs. And we're not talking about big redesigns but just basic normal CPU updates and the like that every single other computer manufacturer on the planet does like clockwork as a matter of course.
They might, maybe, be turning that around now but a single release does not make a trend. And that desktop systems were a distant last place in Apple's priorities vs iDevices or notebooks has been extremely obvious and is utterly uncontroversial since the 00s. That's just a statement of fact. In terms of raw income the balance shifted dramatically mid 2000s in favor of notebooks, and then of course later to iDevices. The Intel transition was driven primarily by the needs of the notebooks, not that everything else didn't come along for the ride. And Apple's corporate structure doesn't do multitasking boring stuff that well in exchange for doing single stuff incredibly well.
But that's exactly what happened with the iPad though. Apple's competitors had already released tablet-type devices for years, they just weren't really ready as consumer products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC
Identifying the likely optimal display mechanism has been primarily a matter of physics and biology. Without implants, can't do better than photons directly onto retina which also easily deals with lens/focus issues. There's never been anything to indicate that's physically impossible either. So "just" a matter of lots of hard work, but Apple has the kind of profit and strategic outlook to justify that. They've done so repeatedly. And this is central to their core business and talents as well. That other lesser tech might be of use in niches that aren't of interest to Apple, or that earlier efforts can't hit the strict superset tipping point, misses the forest for the trees.
If you can't figure out why wearing hot things on your face is a problem, you are not even thinking at all about product design.
I meant that humans interact WITH EACH OTHER via sight. Again, the fact that this does not even seem to occur to you as an issue says a lot.
The Mac Mini has of course been updated recently; you seem to be talking about the past. The Mac Studio, you failed to even mention, as if it does not exist, for some weird reason.
Can you explain why people think "3D" is an important aspect of these? AR/VR would already pay for itself just by being able to bring up my desktop (or smaller individual windows or anything) anywhere, more efficiently.
I am not sold at all on "VR". It's one of those things, like "Firefox OS", that drained Mozilla's coffers when they should have focused on designing their own Android build the way we went from Knoppix[1] to Kali[2] in a very short time.
(I wish I could have stayed, but my Chrome loving supervisor who told me he doesn't even use the browser decided I didn't do enough work to be hired on full time before he moved from Brooklyn to Switzerland)
[1] https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=knoppix
[2] https://www.kali.org/get-kali/
It will take a loooong time to drain Apple's money vault, though. They can keep spending stupid money on bullshit projects for years before anyone even notices.
Two extra external displays in raw hardware. But worse, they are on the front in exactly the place you want to place the passthrough cameras, so now you have to do extra image processing to virtually reposition the input as if it were on the eyes. So it makes passthrough dev more difficult.
It must be extremely compelling to see those eye screens in action. It must be selling onlookers on the device. That's the only that could justify that much effort?
Therefore, VR should be a replacement for large displays in productive work, not a device that everyone is wearing outside or casually watching videos with. The use cases are professional; such as programming, CAD, design etc. I believe that properly implemented VR would allow utilizing full visual-spatial capabilities of our brains, totally eliminating the process of hunting for files and switching windows.
It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.
I wish they'd explore this area, rather than go for a mass market appeal. What kind of software is possible, and how much productivity can be increased with maxed out hardware with high resolution VR? I'm not sure if 4K resolution with a M2 chip is powerful enough for a truly innovative product. Maybe it is, but there's still room for a "pro" product.
I don't think there's a use case for glasses-type product, with a watch-like functionality and environmental AR which would show information pop-ups everywhere. We already have information overload, and we don't need any more of that.
Perhaps, in a lab setting, doing straightforward, focused tasks like the ones they use in these productivity studies, I could sustain a productivity boost long enough for the researcher to get a two-tailed p<0.05.
Make me do it in real life, though, 40 hours a week, week after week after week, and I expect I would burn out very quickly. I like my work well enough, but I don't think I want to actually stick my whole head inside of it.
If it's for vacation, just unplug. Mixing work and vacation makes both worse.
If it's for business, your attention should be on whatever it is that prompted you to travel. Presumably that's face time with people, not grinding away in front of a computer.
I find that the high DPI trend has a tendency to limit us unneccesarily more than actually fix anything. It is still common to say max 80 characters per line. In the olden days where that comes from, it would require 640 pixels horizontally. So at 100% scaling you can fit 3 standard terminals side-by-side and fit 60+ lines vertically, what more do you need when you also have multiple workspaces to tab across?
It's way better than I would have expected. It's still not good enough to make me want to use it daily (even for just an hour or so)
Their hardware like the Xbox or surface are not crappy.
Is this just trolling?
That's a dubious statement. Filling the binocular field of view is fine; it's about 120° horizontally, give or take. But past that it starts to be a problem. Generally, if you look at the screen and any edge is blocked by your nose without turning your head, it's likely too large to work comfortably on. (but still fine for immersive content like games or movies)
Of course you need two of those screens to fill your field of view, unless you have a square screen that goes below your desk, but I'm sure that's available somewhere.
My subjective impression is that the nonperipheral visual field isn’t square. I would find 3:2 displays optimal, or maybe rather 16:11. While a 16:9 or 16:10 display could be extended vertically to fill more of the visual field, that extended portion is not large enough to usefully fit a second monitor there (without head movement).
If you're like most people and the horizontal field is close to max, you'll do better stacking monitors than putting them side/side. Inter pupillary distance is a bit over 2in (~65mm), but that's usually small compared to screen distance, which is why I say roughly square (~16:14).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis
I tried to work on three 16:9 displays for some time, and found it exhausting. The cognitive overload isn't worth it, workspace switching with a hotkey turned out to be far easier for me. That's not even mentioning constant neck movement.
Maybe it's just me though, I can't speak for different people; but I strongly suspect it's the same for many.
I mean this doesn't seem to be true for anyone working in the trades. "Mise-en-place" allowed me to tend a 24-foot-long bar by myself with 60+ customers. At the time, I was essentially a highly trained, top performing athlete. Just because I can't see the cash register / margarita machine / well drinks / etc... it doesn't mean it's not an extension of my body.
It is possible for your entire workshop to become a second-nature extension of self, not just the desk in front of your face.
I think part of this discussion is: "What can be part of a singular focused task vs. what requires some amount of 'context switching'?" And its not always super obvious. Practicing a workflow can integrate context-switches so that it becomes one singular focused task.
But VR/AR can also assist with neurological training by allowing you to switch environments when you switch contexts. For someone who is WFH in a studio apartment it can separate their "gaming desk" from their "work desk" from their "hobby desk" ... or even their "React desk" from their "Concurrency-wrangling desk" from their "Email/Communications battlestation". This could enable much faster context switching -- meeting in 30 seconds? pop over to your "Virtual Conferencing Room". Then come back to your sanctum of concurrency troubleshooting.
The way you expressed it actually reminds me of Iain McGilchrist's "left brain" versus "right brain" thinking model, wherein the narrow-ish "task-focused" approach is typical left-brain concern (essentialist, to a fault), whereas the wider "contextual" approach is typical right-brain associative concerns ("everything is complex/connected"). I'd never noticed this ergonomics question (should I say dichotomy) could be neurologically framed that way, thanks for the insight.
I have three monitors, and it's still not enough. I would be thrilled if each of my monitors had four times the apparent area in a 3D space that layered applications and documents behind each other in some approximately intuitive way.
You can throw a grain of sand only so fra, a pebnle somewhat more, a baseball probably very far… And you stop there, more or less.
I truly believe that VR is perfect for training/sim type games. Actual games.. Could really only count on one hand the games I feel are worth diving into VR for.
- OLED panels could provide much darker screens and cause less eye strain.
- Eye tracking with higher resolution where they only have to render properly where you are looking at
- I think the headset would be much lighter and comfortable.
I don't think VR headsets will not take off as display alternatives.
People don't even care about highdpi.
In my mind the real power comes from spatial hand tracking as a new UX paradigm(seeing an interacting with objects in 3d space) and possibly the addition of large displays anywhere a monitor couldn't have feasibly been, (eg, floating in the server room in a cramped space when needed).
I don't think working on code will be all that different. There isn't any physical spatial interaction with text on paper that the current editors are missing.
If we're talking about programming instead, an intuitive way to switch between modules when working on a large project would be to have their windows laid out before you on a virtual desk and you could switch between the active one displayed on a central virtual monitor by making a gesture (probably something like the Oculus pinch) towards the window you want to switch to. This would allow you to use your spatial reasoning to remember which windows you have open and would also allow you to group related windows. Additional displays could show console output from your development server, the GUI part of the app you're working on, a test runner, etc. positioned where you can glance at them easily.
That being said, I think the real killer app for the new "facetop" computing devices that are around the corner will be physical fitness and social interaction. If you think a standing desk was a big improvement for your health then you'll love being able to freely walk around your office and work from any position whether it's standing, sitting at a desk, perched by the window, lounging on the sofa, or even crouching while giving those legs a stretch. You can also kiss zoom meetings goodbye with the unnatural wall of faces almost but not quite making eye contact with you. You'll talk to an avatar, realistic or not, that has full eye, face and body tracking allowing you to tell if your interlocutor is paying attention or thinking about how long it is until lunch while checking the wait time at the nearest restaurants. It actually does feel like you're in the presence of another person and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain.
I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.
If you have a good idea, you should prototype it and get it out there (and maybe get a nice buyout in the process..)
We might end up with a phone as the go-to XR keyboard. Would be pretty funny if that evolves into everyone wearing AR glasses with a 90s Nokia sized blackberry keyboard in their pocket.
I'd love to know if this is true. I've heard that in a VR headset, your eyes are always focused at the exact same distance, even if it appears like something is far off in the distance. And that this can lead to eyestrain. Can anybody here speak to that?
Your shortcuts are your bread and butter and you are super fast.
Perhaps for sculpting.
When I work on a laptop I also keep one app or one tab in focus most of the time.
Counter example, imagine fixing your car engine and having 100 tabs open everywhere.
I only see this as a supplemental feature for certain use cases (coarse-grained 3D operations). In general nothing beats the efficiency of working with a keyboard for navigating application functions, or (at least with current technology) the mouse for precision 2D navigation/selection. Their advantage being precise and definite/discrete input.
For actual work, even with a VR headset I see myself still mostly using keyboard and mouse.
Is it a bad relapse of LOC metrics? ツ
You get retina resolution, high refresh rate, HDR, and 2Factor authentication (Biometric+Goggles)/information security in one package. Of course you'll still likely want to have a laptop to drive it (untethered) except for the simplest mobile games.
- 4k is not nearly enough. I think we will likely need 8k screens.
- The headsets are not light enough. You need something with all day comfort for work.
- There is still too much eye-strain from the quality of the lenses and the fixed focus.
- Input is still not natural and precise enough. We would need to be able to see our own hands and type with zero latency. Hand-tracked pointing needs to be able to pick up on small subtle finger motion like a mouse or trackpad can
I hope you’re wrong about this.
I hope there will be a great personal (non-work) use case for the next generation of VR/AR. Something like gaming, watching sports (always have awesome “seats”), movies with friends, maybe map/gps/etc. for when I’m running.
I know there are options for this already. But honestly, I haven’t seen anyone who’s not a dork using VR/AR. I want the version the average person is excited about. I’m ready to plunk down any amount of money Apple wants from me.
If it’s VR/AR for work, count me out. I don’t have any interest in increasing my work productivity lol.
I can’t wait for VR/AR to be fully monetized and mainstream. I’m sick of speculative VC-funded crap that I can’t pay for because they’re in “growth mode.” When something’s monetized at least then I have some faith that it’ll be around for awhile.
Think late 2020s at best, and probably well into the 30s for the kind of refined VR we all know possible. It's like we had nice and functional pocket computers since the 1990s (PDAs etc), but it would take a solid decade for the iPhone to be made under the vision of a statistically rare product genius (means we can wait ±5~10 yrs for things to emerge as commercially successful tech). Or how video games took about 20 years to move from whatever came before the current "modern" era/paradigm (say late 1990s) that lives on to this day in terms of UI/UX. Same with the "desktop" metaphor for PCs, etc.
We have yet to nail the hardware for VR, let alone the OS code (core libs etc) whose precision and intuitiveness will feel tremendously "corporeal" in the case of VR, visceral, much more than any TV/monitor + vibrating thing could ever do (let alone keyboard/mouse). If you've ever did the timing for an action-paced fast video game, you know the kind of intricate subtleties I'm talking about, where one frame can make or break some experiences.
Then will come the time to nail killer metaphors, high-level GUI/GUX, killer apps.
We're not quite there yet.
This is such an Engelbart-esque statement. Bravo! I'd love for AR to go there too :)
Do you have a source?
Anecdotal, I work without external displays and keep one window in focus, this helps my productivity.
And displaying more things mean you need to context switch less.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1753326.1753336?casa_toke...
There’s much more. Search “sensemaking” or “immersive analytics” on Scholar. Depth and width of field, achieved via stereoscopy and tracking, is well documented as a performance enhancer when it comes to generalizeable task completion in VR.
Where do you get this from?
It seems to me if there was even a correlation, which I'm not sure, it would have more to do with resolution, since same resolution but bigger display doesn't actually show more information.
Its true, up to a point.
you just have to ignore that at the extremes it's probably negatively correlated, and there's a significant non-zero possibility that at least in the short term, that possibility of negative correlation applies to the area VR is interested in as well.
It’s a popular myth propagated by American public. Funnily enough, in many European and Asian countries the opposite is deemed to be true. The truth is that there has never been any conclusive evidence one way or the other.
“The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study of 1679 decreased men and women from the general American population supported these findings. In the present study data on the height, weight, and age at death of 373 men were obtained from records at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Men of height 175.3 cm or less lived an average of 4.95 years longer than those of height over 175.3 cm, while men of height 170.2 cm or less lived 7.46 years longer than those of at least 182.9 cm. An analysis by weight difference revealed a 7.72-year greater longevity for men of weight 63.6 kg or less compared with those of 90.9 kg or more. This corroborates earlier evidence and contradicts the popular notion that taller people are healthier.” [0]
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1600586/
I find a hard time believing this. Do you have a source?
People can learn 3D environments by viewing them in a 2D screen very happily, and millions of gamers do exactly that every day. I can still remember my way around the map in GTA 3 about 20 years after I first played it...
The "flight" in GTA is more like a moving viewpoint than a space full of 3D objects and affordances.
Full immersive 3D navigation through code and file systems would be an interesting experiment. I suspect we'd get used to it very quickly, and we'd then wonder why we spent so long tied down by virtual paper metaphors. (I could be wrong, of course.)
inb4 "It's a Unix system, I know this!"
The idea of an AR wearable that is tethered to a fixed base station is so very lame. Why even bother with AR when you can only augment the reality that is in your office or bedroom?
Also the eye-view outer display is essential for situations where one person is using the goggles but others aren’t. How unsettling would it be for someone to look at you, be able to see you, but for their upper face to completely obscured by goggles? How could you have an in person face-to-face conversation with someone like that?
A 4K display per eye, a powerful and efficient SoC on the latest node, and some really fine industrial design will surely be within Apple’s reach.
Everyone will have to build apps for this thing. If it’s real, it will be every bit as successful as iPhone.
Base station for AR would be detrimental, as you inherently want to explore and interact with the world around you.
For most VR use cases that is not the case, and I can see the argument for the benefits of a base station (higher performance) outweighing the costs (limited movement).
I haven't read more than the abstract, but it seems there is some good research going into this. It must be years off however, as we barely have LTE networks in some locations, let-alone UWB 5G to even begin supporting this type of architecture.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9103475
Very few people predicted the iPhone accurately before its launch. And it’s reasonable to say the iPhone blew minds because Apple figured out multitouch AND reduced the latency of the interface to the extend required so that it felt natural to use. If they mail AR in the same way, they will have the next iPhone.
I am bullish on the prospect of this happening.
Apple buyers are not necessarily tech savvy (from a percentage perspective).
They use their high end phones for normal consumer things.
I have a hard time imagining what a normal person would want to do with VR/are glasses.
Showing your face in a Videochat? Not being able to show your face?
Playing games?
I would assume that there is still a lot of apple people not playing anything than casual games.
I expect Apple’s AR product to be functional, and dubbed a niche failure by the tech commentariat, but by 2026 really start to eat into the smartphone market.
Meta and Google are just less capable of making humane software, and while they may release slightly better devices from a technical perspective they’ll miss out on the light touch that such an immersive experience will require for normal people to feel comfortable with it.
Edit: ditto for automotive assembly/repair. Power plant maintenance. Basically all complicated engineering fields could make excellent use of AR.
AR through a phone or iPad is lame and close to useless. Only looks good in video demos till you use it yourself and see how clumsy it is interacting through a tiny window.
Very clear they have a headset in mind for all this but are struggling to ship.
Quite a juicy tidbit, this is not something I had even contemplated as a possibility. I struggle to imagine how this will work without looking bizarre. And the effect on battery life of doubling the screens would have to be significant.
So either Apple has figured out something really compelling in AR/VR that everyone--not just gamers and nerds--will want, or they are reaching.