I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market or is going to be game changing in every day life. I can see why Apple feel that they need to have a product in the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if its presented as “Just a Hobby” the same way that Steve Jobs presented Apple TV back when it launched (and for a good few years later).
I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats where they truly can do something different and new that will impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next generation of iPhone and Macs.
I want my AI to be local and privet.
In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see Apple do some stuff similar.
To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email, calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and not in the cloud:
"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
Seems pretty simple. If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.
The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”
But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
I’m not sure that focusing on something no one else can see when you appear to be looking elsewhere is a good look either. At least other people can tell you are distracted when you’re looking down at your phone.
> If you could have UI overlayed on the world around you, it would be huge, and would change how people use computers, like the smartphone did.
Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
It's absolutely a game-changer. Imagine having driving or walking directions laid out on the street in front of you. Imagine using AI to help you identify things like engine parts in your car, plants, birds, other people (never forget a name again). Looking at a package and scanning the barcode to get price comparisons. Recipe directions on the counter in front of you, even labeling the next ingredient and how much of it to measure. Walk into a museum and see highlighted details of every painting or information about a particular element in a sculpture. First aid details right in front of you, keeping both hands free to offer assistance in a roadside accident. Live AR-driven instructions for changing a tire or locating an oilpan plug.
Currently any time you need information you have to pull yourself away from your present moment to dive into your phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just integrated into the world around you.
Whether or not we're way off-base or not, it's certainly possible to envision a HUD in a fairly ordinary looking pair of glasses. It's certainly SF today but it's possible to imagine. There are of course various creepy aspects as well but, honestly, if the technology can be made to work well, most people will just get over that.
There's plenty of neat ideas for what AR could do - but how often are you changing tires or having to find an oilpan plug on an unfamiliar car? Some great professional use cases, potentially, but for a consumer? A lot of this sounds like an open-world video game with no design restraint, where your map gets littered with dozens and dozens of points of interest all at once and it just makes it that much harder to focus on what you actually wanted to be doing in the first place.
And with people's resistance to paying for software services, you'll have exactly the same problem with looking at something on your phone of half the crap being ads intentionally trying to sidetrack you.
I think there's certainly a risk of information overload, but I'd say that's a risk of our modern lives in general, whether we have AR glasses or not. Well-designed AR would, in my opinion, be vastly less intrusive than having to stare into a handheld device for hours a day. I would trust Apple to make a well-designed UI for the thing if and when they manage to release them. 3rd party apps not so much (although certainly there will be a handful of great ones). That's more on users making informed choices about the apps they download than a downside of AR, though.
I hear your killer features and don't care for them at all in any way to carry a tiny computer for them.
I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.
And all the other Infos? I don't even use my desktop PC for them. Why would I carry an expensive handheld computer to compare a 3€ product?
>I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.
This is actually what happened historically. Various pocket devices existed for navigation (e.g. by Garmin), but they never got too popular until the smartphone became popular for entirely different reasons. Only after the smartphone become really common, then it was reused for existing applications where the benefit existed but was not that big compared to alternatives. AR/VR will need a killer application first, only then it might be reused for navigation.
What you've described would be a game changer because of incredible AI, not so much because of a UI overlay. It would be just about as good to leave one of my headphones in and just ask an ultra-AI assistant my questions. Maybe have a set of glasses (not capable of UI overlay) but just having a camera so the AI assistant can see what I see.
To add on, having a phone being your heavy computing device is a little silly if you think about it. It's essentially the smallest portable form factor people can conveniently carry around, connect to the internet, consume and send information.
A pair of glasses or monocle/power reader, wrist device with holo display or some other format makes much more sense as a way to interact with a portable computing device conveniently. The main bottleneck is hardware.
With Apple Silicone, I think Apple is in the perfect place to take advantage of the AI craze to sell hardware with something like "Neural Engine V2". If they can figure out how to run AI workloads at fraction of the cost of what is costs on current hardware, I can see there being a huge market for their Mac's and they could even bring back XServe and become the predominant player in the "Server Hardware for AI" space.
It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
It's still not favorable, even compared to last-gen (30XX series) hardware. Here's the OpenCL scores for multiple different GPUs, including the Ultra: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
The M1 Ultra is a 200w chip, fabricated with 5nm silicon. It's being outclassed by the RTX 3060, a cheap 10nm card that draws ~170w max. In Nvidia's 40-series cards (on 4nm), the M1 Ultra's performance profile is most comparable to a laptop-class RTX 4060 that draws less than 115 watts.
There's a story in the total package draw to be made here, and it does weigh slightly in Apple's favor. Overall though, even with last-gen cards it's clear that there's a massive performance-per-watt lead in Nvidia's favor right now. Which is impressive, considering how they've been stuck with second-class silicon when the M1 Ultra debuted.
VR and AR are a solution looking for a problem. It's admittedly a cool tech demo. I enjoyed my time playing Half Life: Alyx and The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on my Valve Index before I decided to sell it out of disuse.
The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.
Agreed. The technologies will have their uses, like entertainment, training, education, and therapy, but it will never meet mass adoption for practical reasons like price, safety, and power consumption. I'd be curious to know why so many people think otherwise.
I don't think it's a solution looking for a problem. I'd be willing to put them on at work and see which pins on a piece of hardware do what instead of looking back and forth between a datasheet. Lots of examples exactly like that, especially if the glasses are fed sensor data so the temperature/pressure appears right beside the area it is measuring.
Like I said, industrial environments. A small niche group of people and businesses who could use some information in front of their face as they do hands-on work.
How is this feasible at all? Not only all the tech for the AR device to be light and have decent battery life, but the software you describe would need optical recognition of what you're looking at, then match that to the manual of the object to tell you what the pins do. All on a device with significant size and heat constraints.
For early generations I'd imagine you'd have to plug them in via usb (which would still be fine for my use case I was describing). Processing done on a different device, get some type of AI to summarize datasheets and match it to pins. All of which probably doesn't sound good to you but I'd still prefer it over turning my neck and scrolling back and forth.
But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.
> I'm utterly unconvinced that AR/VR is a large market
Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
Wow, I had no idea it made that much money. My kids love it.
I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.
Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.
Yes - honestly, if a company like Nreal can do it using OTS components, I think Apple could easily have punched out a set of glasses like that and delivered 90% of this functionality just by attaching to a macbook pro in a true glasses format. They could probably have done it years ago and then built from there. What Nreal has made is already super compelling [0]
Hope the rumor in this article that Apple will sell the device at cost is true. Oculus understood that they needed to sell cheaply at first. I don't expect Apple to come in at $299, but the rumored $3k is a pretty heavy lift.
At £3K, they're not going after gamers or even enthusiasts.
They're more likely going after creative professionals who're already all-in on the Apple ecosystem. Maybe product designers or architects, who want to show clients their designs in VR, and a slick Apple device will probably make a better impression than a PC VR setup with a bulky headset, cables everywhere, fans whirring, etc.
Bit disingenuous about PC VR. There’s only 1 cable to the headset and if you have a decent rig the fans won’t be blasting. Big Screen’s new headset is going to blow Apple out of the water on weight, size and comfort too.
The Beyond doesn't fit the kind of role mentioned here at all, though, since a major part of how they've made it so small and light is by ditching the idea of being adjustable at all and just assembling each unit to match a specific person's face.
I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was. That makes me sad having been in AR since 2010 - and knowing what we could do with it if done right.
I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100, where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive devices off of people's heads [1][2].
Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people have the wallet that could support this.
I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features, economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
I think it's going to continue to be a long time before persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
> I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was
I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery too fast.
Google Translate in Lens mode is pretty much the killer app for this type of device. Having the in-place translation working feels like damn magic, and if you could do that while in a foreign country then it would be amazing.
I'm surprised more people don't use the Lens feature, it's one of the main reasons I still use Android. I use it to find where to buy clothes and shoes I see in photos, I can just hold my phone up to it and it returns shockingly similar looking products (usually the exact item).
I agree that getting to a genuinely useful/comfortable/fashionable AR device is a pretty heavy lift. (And that it's arguably unrelated to VR except maybe to some degree at the tech level.)
But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this factor.
I assume that it means you'll have people walking around wearing glasses that basically plug them transparently into all sorts of information. However, we've had an uneven rollout of mobile technology for the last 25+ years and that factor hasn't slowed anything down. If (and I agree it's a significant if over the next x years) AR is a genuinely useful mainstream technology people will adopt it even if others don't like it.
People aren't in their EV while sitting in a restaurant, talking to you at a party or standing in a checkout line. It's literally in their face while talking to you.
That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols. People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this case would be different because of the growing anti-tech resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
> and knowing what we could do with it if done right
The implication here is that you know a compelling case for "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
For military or police use I can imagine superimposing models of hidden targets derived from aerial imagery. Granted the derivation part is presently missing.
Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
The whole concept of AR/VR rises dystopian red flags, everything Mark Zuckerberg did with their attempt looked somewhere between scary and dumb.
I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it means people instead of improving their lives and actually doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent their precious lives and money away on this BS.
VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by controlling the content.
It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to do things you can't do in real life.
>I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was.
All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
I really hope it's not legal to drive while wearing a consumer AR headset. You would need to guarantee the device can't fail in ways that block important parts of your vision, and also prove that it is not a distraction hazard (which seems impossible)
Even for a HoloLens type device, if the device fails in such a way that it’s projecting white across the entire field of view, you may not be able to see through it.
> I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore
anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor and price. History suggests that price of such devices will increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might be some time off.
Right. $3,000 is obviously a luxury/niche product, but $450 Nreal Air (which is a product you can buy today off Amazon) much less so. It's like 3D TVs, the idea will never die. Even if it's doesn't work out time around (which I doubt, having spent a tiny bit of time with an Nreal Air), expect to see it again in 10 years or so.
The good:
- Great form factor
- Image quality for screen mirroring is great
- Display has good brightness
- Decent speakers
The bad:
- Nebula (AR software that allows projecting multiple screens) has a worse image quality (I see some flickering). It's also buggy (e.g. it doesn't work on latest MacOS)
- Slightly heavy. You would start feeling the weight on your ears after wearing it for an hour or so.
- When screen mirroring an M1 Mac, the display settings on Mac doesn't allow you to resize the screen. It works on an Intel Mac though.
Eventually I decided to return it as I want to wait for the device to mature and I don't really have a strong need for AR glasses at this time. I'd be looking forward to their next version.
I think the current AR glasses (Nreal, Rokid, etc) are probably at the same level of maturity as smart watches when they first came out in the early to mid 2010s.
I think there is a much more important question, which is: what can you do with the tech that makes it valuable at any price point? Like cool, I can augment my vision. Now what? Now much... at least from what I've seen.
“ I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000”
Yep, that’s an easy one. Guess what. It’s not for general use.
I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I’m all for Apple spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee something useful will come out of it.
Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says “you know what we could do with this technology…”
> don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product
Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$ monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their top fans is Apple's thing.
They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open problems in VR/AR right now.
Apple doesn't make money by selling to their target demographic. They make money by convincing buyers that they need a $5,000 monitor to do work that certainly does not require it.
I can bet that most people and companies buying the pro-display XDR don't need that level of color calibration to do their job well. But as long as Apple is the most fashionable brand, they can convince people into thinking that's exactly what they need.
> I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes.
Entire industries are built upon impossible to ignore distinction between classes - 100 thousand dollar watches, 10 million dollar cars, designer clothing, and a thousand other examples that come under the category of "bling".
While I have similar doubts about the short to medium term AR/XR future, I don't think it's based on people not wanting to be seen as better than everyone else. As a society we basically encourage that behaviour.
There is a market for AR glasses, it's just not wireless or tethered to a smartphone, on your face, walking around and using them like that, at least right now.
I think the SpaceTop laptop[0] shows an excellent use case for a realistic AR device.
Right now, the kind of AR headsets that companies seem to think they can produce are all fantasy/sci-fi, not much different than the whole Dream of Self-Driving Cars. Sure, it's probably possible eventually, but not anytime soon, or at a price point most can afford in the case of self-contained AR headset that look like normal glasses
Why do we think AR will devour smartphones? I just don't see it. I say this as someone that loves Gran Turismo on PS5.
I could see an argument for it growing along side smartphones. But even then, this feels like fantasy. VR only "works" for driving simulation because... you are sitting there. Any dreams of it making Zelda more immersive will have to grasp with the fact that, you know, you can't actually win a fight with most wild animals. Or climb a mountain. Or hike across the entire continent...
(I say "works" for driving, because even that is glossing all of the physicality of driving that fast. Which is intense and would also be beyond most of us.)
"Growing" is probably a better word than "devour".
In a companion essay, I try to make the argument that AR peripherals are likely.
My best guess is that a smartphone-like peripherals will be shipped alongside the flagship AR/VR headsets. I guess the AR headsets might be viewed as the "peripheral" in the beginning, but I think eventually the AR headset will be the main focus, and the thing you hold in your hand will feel more like a keyboard/mouse.
1. What problem with smartphones will AR device solve? So far it seems more bulky and requires you wear shit on your head. It automatically excludes everyone who already wears glasses or doesn't want to wear glasses. Anyone can put a smartphone in their bag or pocket.
2. Not Meta? They're the #1 VR company with 75% marketshare and a years-long head start in the industry. The Reality headset from Apple has no rumored/leaked feature that goes beyond what the Quest Pro already has on the market today.
3. Is distribution difficult? Meta distributes content. Valve distributes content. What's so hard about distributing content?
Apple notoriously hinders it's own potential so it doesn't cannibalize it's own market share. They have no incentive to turn off the iPhone faucet, so why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
> why would they make a product that devours smartphones?
Likely because they expect AR to eventually devour smartphones, and they would rather devour it themselves than let others do so.
Plus, it will be a painful growth with rough edges anyway, so the iPhone faucet isn't turning off anytime soon. In fact, it would be quite a helpful source of revenue, until AR adoption reaches the masses and gets to the stage of actually being polished and commonplace enough to devour smartphones.
See: Apple slowly winding down iPod over the course of many years, as iPhone cannibalized it almost entirely.
"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," Jobs famously said. It's not just a good quote--it might be the smartest realization he ever had, and the reason the company he founded is now more valuable than any other. It's not often that a company is willing to cannibalize its own product to make a new one.
I think number 2 is a really good point. But I think the biggest reason why they could be immensely successful there is, Apple dog foods their own stuff. Apple will generate enough apps for it to be useful. This is where I feel like Oculus/Facebook(Meta)+Oculus kind of messed up where the Google really messed up with Daydream. The expectation for most of the product life cycles was for developers to just jump on board and start developing, turning out the apps. I love DayDream, but there were hardly any decent apps. Google relied too much on indie devs and 3rd party. Most of the daydream apps by google were essentially just demos. Apple will provide at least enough apps to make it useful while also using that knowledge to feed back in to the development cycle.
Other than games, I'm not convinced. I do think there's an interesting use case for sports and music. Imagine being able to walk around on the field during the superbowl or on stage at a concert. But then it becomes a how do you capture it so you can walk around a real, live event problem.
I do think there is a use case in work - I can imagine sitting down and doing CAD in a 'real 3D' environment once the resolution and responsiveness are high enough (probably still with a keyboard and mouse).
One thing that VR gives you that a monitor doesn’t is 1:1 scale. It’s so easy to get that wrong when working on a scaled down version of the model. Though you can just place people in your scene for reference.
I continue to believe that IF (and that is a big if) anyone can make AR/VR a mainstream market it would be Apple.
Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions done 2 things:
1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry. I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes right out the gate.
They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that properly.
That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance, etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in the position to possibly pull this off.
A study of futurism I read made the insightful observation that things which explode in popularity don't just do things differently -- they let you do new things.
Apple II - graphical OS
iPod - music in your pocket
iPhone - smartphone with cellular data
iPad - large screen low cost
iWatch - phone functionality on wrist
These are all different in kind, not different in amount products.
What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a screen?
It's different... but different in amount. It's a better screen.
That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to explode in popularity.
Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR that was actually just a pair of eyeglasses would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected when I'm mobile."
If "phone functionality on wrist" counts as a "different in kind" product, why on earth wouldn't "smartphone functionality without looking down at a smartphone, watch, or other device" qualify?
For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
> Or, to put it another way, how many people do you know who complain about the difficulty in looking at their wrist or cell phone?
Everyone who tries to speak a text message with Siri. Apple should have been brave and not reshaped messages - that screen is not meant to consume text messages at any length - they should have changed the communication to match the context.
I mean the fatigue and awkwardness of holding a wrist up to speak to it. Think of twiddling your thumbs but productively for phones (how natural)… But yes, voice to text is a great solution to their problem - there’s just a lot left on the table
I think that is shortsighted. If you could realize a futurists dream of AR, i.e. smooth overly interacting properly with anything in your view, with context aware detail etc, it would pretty clearly be a game changer (I think).
On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side of the equation changes.
The Apple II OS wasn't graphical. The hardware had very simple colour, which made it stand out.
Mac was graphical, but it was a productised/commodified version of someone else's R&D.
Nokia's Communicator range had cellular data long before the iPhone was a thing. What iPhone did differently was - again - productise and commodify existing technologies to create something that was more than the sum of its components. Touch was the biggest part of that, but the App Store really killed the competition.
iPads were never particularly low cost. There were numerous tablets before the iPad. The iPad difference was - again - touch. And the App Store.
iWatch wrist phone may be true, but I suspect it's not the main use case. (I've yet to see anyone talking into an iWatch. I'm sure it happens, but not nearly as often as phone conversations do.)
The common factor - apart from iWatch - is taking/blending existing tech and packaging it into an accessible non-nerdy form with obvious and instant mass market appeal. And creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. And adding design stylings that make the product cool.
That's exactly what this display project doesn't have. Even if it does its job well it has no obvious instant applications.
And clamping a rubber facehugger to your head is the opposite of cool.
It may have mass appeal after version 4 or 5 when it's closer to the ideal of stylish glasses with a supporting ecosystem. But I suspect version 1 is going to have a very limited market.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Apple usually takes a look at a growing trend and decides that it can provide a far better experience.
... with the exception of: Apple Watch.
- Apple Watch defined the smartwatch category. Smart watches weren't that popular before the Apple watch. But, watches and luxury watches have been fashionable for a long time.
As awesome as AR / VR headsets are, they are practically dead on arrival. This will be the most challenging product launch in Apple's history.
From a marketing perspective, an Apple Car makes more sense.
Yeah. Apple enters when there’s clear product-market and out-executes everybody. For the watch, notice that fitness trackers (Fitbit) were already getting popular.
And then Apple introduce the Macintosh and changed the industry forever.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
And then Apple introduce the iPod and iTunes and changed the industry forever. The ability to purchase and download music sealed the deal.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
LOL. Blackberry? Windows Phone? And then Apple introduce the iPhone and changed society.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
Meh. I'm not sure these are game changing, but that said my technophobic wife loves her AirPods Pro and has somehow not lost them, so shit, actually that's pretty game changing.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Well, Siri kinda sucks TBH, and Alexa works just fine, so maybe not this one
Let's hope this is a Windows Phone situation, and Apple's headset is night-and-day compared to previous headsets. If it's a me-too like home automation, then it can only be a flop.
"Execs distance themselves" - Good, that means the company can still push through risky projects without getting caught up in bureaucracy.
"Selling at-cost" - Also good, because they need to get the device into the hands of developers to seed the ecosystem before it becomes more mainstream.
If it's a gamechanger for remote working, then I'll buy them for my company and have my remote employees use them
If it's a gamechanger for communicating with family overseas, then I might see if I can convince one of my relatives to get one (though the price will be harder to justify for personal use - but not impossible if it's a gamechanger)
Both of those are contingent on how good it is. If it's something where I do a shared presence FaceTime call using it, and I feel like I can't go back to not having it, then I'll buy them and I expect it'll be a huge success. If I/people try it and it's not much of an improvement over regular FaceTime, then it won't be a big success.
I like the idea of the shared presence, but don't see how that doesn't come at the cost of losing the actual video off the person you are talking to. I want to see my family in higher fidelity, not their Mii version or have them look like Zuckerberg in the Meta demos.
The original iPhone was an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. It was a hard sell at $599, and didn't take off until the price was lowered and the App Store started proliferating. If it had an external battery pack or cost $3,000, nobody would have bought it.
If the big killer app for this headset is "calling people", then Mark Zuckerberg is probably doubled-over in hysterics right now.
The will have to make presence _really_ good for this to be worthwhile. The closest thing I have seen to next level is Google's Project Starline [1]. I would spend so much money to get one of these for my home and one for my parent's home halfway across the country.
Videocalling barely works at 1080p because of network issues. I don't know how much bandwidth FaceTime++ would need but I am not optimistic on this usecase at all.
Motion capture processed data and pre-processed 3D models are far less bandwidth-intensive than a video feed. The only problems that can't be really solved by super realistic 3D is latency.
The rumors that have come out say that Apple has achieved 1:1 3d video chat where there avatars are almost completely photo realistic. I'm very interested to see this especially. Apparently this is a big reason why the device has to bundle 2 X M2 processors and also limits it to one on one calls. I think it's going to be amazing and significantly shift people's perceptions here with how good it is. They should be able to demonstrate hyper realistic pass through as well so essentially you are looking at an almost completely realistic image of the other person teleported into your own surroundings.
This isn't particularly surprising if true, as I've seen several demos of similar on Two Minute Papers, and even before them considered a 3D video chat system which just sent depth info from the depth sensor along with the normal RGB info.
I even made a proof-of-concept of my own at some point in… I think 2018?… which was just recording locally and playing back with Apple's own AR libraries.
Honestly, it was so easy I'm surprised it isn't already standard the same way custom backgrounds and 3D overlays (hats, face-paint, etc.) already are.
I use to with Supernatural on Quest2. It was cool and at the same time a huge pain in the ass. But there is something there for sure, the headset just needs to be like a pair of those lightweight wraparound sunglasses that baseball players wear and I would be shedding pounds.
If I am going to spend $3000 on a VR headset, I don't really want to sweat all over it...
Also, the sort of people who are going to work out consistently don't need a headset to work out. Or any other tech. They just do it.
I know you're not implying this in your comment, but if anyone thinks you are going to take someone who is sedate, strap on a cool headset and give them some sort of virtual experience that will finally motivate them to work out consistently...I'll take the other side of that bet every day...
The key to losing weight with VR for the average person isn't in exercise-specific apps, it's in replacing sitting video game time with something just as engaging but that has you standing, walking in circles, crouching, and waving your arms around for a few hours instead. You're obviously not going to get buff from it, but it can add up fast for an otherwise sedentary person.
You don't lose weight via exercise, you lose it via diet. Exercise is sometimes found counterproductive in empirical studies because it makes you less compliant with your diet, which is much more important.
It seems exceedingly unlikely that Ozempic will compare positively to regular movement and a healthy diet in the longer term. Even our most prized pharmaceuticals seem like hacks compared to behaviour-based solutions.
But I don't think behavior and diet are necessarily the cause; there's some room for gut bacteria (which control your behavior anyway) and environmental pollutants.
I used FitXR througout this winter. Fantastic experience, I just wish I had a dedicated room for sweat-inducing activities. I especially liked HIIT training, where you hit glowing spheres and glass that appear in the air. Level and quality of multisensory stimulation (visual/audio/haptic) during those hits are just mindblowing. Reality can't offer that.
One particular thing that I believe is underexplored is using visual/haptic cues for movement learning (motor skills acquision). For example in FitXR there is a glowing semi-transparent path showing how your hand is supposed to move. If you deviate from it, it gives a light haptic feedback. There is no substitute for that in reality – we learn hand movements (like in dance or martial arts) either by proprioreception, visual feedback through mirrors or verbal feedback from teacher. All three ways are inferior to what VR can offer.
I think some progressive sports researchers are experimenting with VR (especially in Constraint-Led Approach community), but these are just first steps.
PS. I personally want to invest in learning VR programming for years, but waiting until software ecosystem will stabilize and settle on something. So waiting for the Apple announcements in that field.
Its not exactly a workout but Eleven Table Tennis on Quest 2 has been my primary exercise for the last several years. My Quest 2 broke a few months ago. I am getting fatter.
I really want to get a new sleek VR/mixed reality device but I can't actually afford to spend $1000 right now let alone $3000.
AR is impossible to do well enough with todays technology. This is also the reality for Apple sadly.
VR works very well today. But it's a niche business sort of like racing wheels and joysticks. So not very interesting to go VR only for the big players.
AR and VR are separate things, and it's sort of a delusion that has been pushed by Meta and others that one leads to the other. Or that they can be combined even.
I think there's a false leak here, because one of the comments on the Bloomberg article mentions them going with a design where the battery is external and connected via a wire to the headset (to prevent heat issues). That seems like such a bizarre design choice for Apple that I can't imagine they'd actually do that. Just... make the chip weaker?
(Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if you're sitting in a chair your back pockets may not be easily accessible, which means the battery is either in front and you're constantly bumping the wire, or it's on the floor or something. I know it's not a completely unsolvable problem because the Vive had that special head strap that draped down the middle of your head which was fine, but I still got tangled up from time to time.)
Making it not able to do as much is sometimes a winning move, but also sometimes not. The primary utility concerns that people have with headset products come from display resolution and framerate. It takes a lot of pixel density for readable text and a lot of frames per second to prevent display-lag-induced motion sickness. Crapping out on the displays and processing makes that worse, not better.
> Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go?
Clips. Straps. Bags. Hooks. People have been successfully carrying things on their person without pockets for millennia. Have you really never seen someone at the gym strap their phone into an armband?
You may as well be asking "Like if you don't have pockets, where does your cellphone go?" And yet billions of people all over the world manage to carry cellphones.
This device is going to have color passthrough vision. That means it has cameras on the outside, and then an image of the real world is shown on the inside. If you try to just directly display the video from the camera on the screen inside the user will throw up. You need to do a lot of processing to reconstruct what the user’s eyes need to see on the inside display, which probably includes a stack of analytic methods and ML inference that has to run in real-time and produce high-resolution video signal. Trust me that the engineers working on this are absolutely pushing the limits of what their hardware can do. The tradeoff space would include the following factors:
1) low quality passthrough is unpleasant
2) heavy headset is unpleasant
3) headset with weight imbalance is unpleasant
4) sensors, chips, and display all use power
5) battery with more capacity is heavier
6) battery with more power draw is hotter
7) hot headset in your face is unpleasant
8) battery at the end of a cord is ugly and annoying
So it’s easy to say “use a weaker chip”, but what if that means you have to degrade some must-have functionality? Or it means you have to wait 3 years for TSMC to come out with a smaller node before you can release your product? Battery on the end of a wire is a “bold” choice, probably an engineer won a cage match against an executive to make it happen.
Ok, you just gave yourself a different set of hard engineering problems to solve. Turns out that field-of-view, brightness, color reproduction, and resolution are all difficult to achieve on that kind of display. You can try a Magic Leap 2 if you want to experience those constraints.
One thing that Apple’s approach has going for it is that it could also be great at VR content like Beat Saber, Half Life Alyx, Bigscreen movies, or as a monitor for your MacBook. A Magic-Leap-esque device will suck for any of those.
However, the Magic Leap form factor may work better for a Google Glass type use case where you wear the headset as you go about your life and get some augmented features (maybe it can be an iPhone replacement eventually).
I once demoed the VR goggles at Facebook HQ on a tour, my boss and I put on the glasses and were immersed in a world where there was a large dragon. We really roared with excitement and kept saying “wow, amazing” and shaking our head in astonishment as we took the headset off. Then, later we said our goodbyes and left. In the parking lot my boss and I turned to each other both agreed, that VR headset wasn’t that impressive at all, we just acted impressed to be polite.
I think these VR headsets are built for the demo. How much daily demand they have is probably much more limited than the builders think it is.
Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people.
> Also, prolonged use causes Nausea in large percentage of people.
Supposedly Apple has been working off a patent that fights this specifically. Not arguing for or against whether this headset will slap (personally, I don't care for VR and think it's overrated) but just relaying some info.
At this point, with the boom in AI, I would settle for very simple AR glasses. Not trying to make 3D objects meld with the the real world view, but just superimposed graphics, kinda like Google Glass, but better. Imagine if it could automatically subtitle foreign languages, or translate Japanese street signs and advertising in real-time. Join that with a conversational AI so you could point your eyes at something and just say “What is that?” and then get whatever level of detail response you want, from a subtitle, to a voice description, to a full dive into the historical details. This is the market space for a fashionable device, but it needs to be a real view of reality, not video pass-through. Imagine renting one (if they’re expensive) when traveling to a foreign country, or at a museum. The cool think about AI integration is that you wouldn’t have to create the content like an audio-guide does. In a museum, you could learn about the artist, the time period, critical analysis, the school of art, etc. dynamically and organically. As a tourist, you could look at an attraction across the street, read (or hear) reviews, check hours and prices, book tickets, etc. Would also be great for directions.
I don't like that you took the augmentation out of AR but "Translator glasses" are a great idea. Also a huge quality of life improvement for deaf people.
Everything you said I can do with my iPhone, and all of those are rare things. Meanwhile my iPhone does things I want to do everyday all day, is unobtrusive, makes it clear when I’m interacting with it vs the world around me, allows me to touch things which feels good as an embodied human, and isn’t vaporware.
526 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadI don't use archive.is that often so I don't know if that link is any different from the one up there ^
I really do think that Apple are much more likely to present some interesting AI products that run locally on Apple Silicone, thats where they truly can do something different and new that will impact all their customers. It will help them sell the next generation of iPhone and Macs.
I want my AI to be local and privet.
In some ways I think Humain have a better idea where this market is going to go. I'm not convinced by their product, I think it should be built into a phone, and I would be suppressed to see Apple do some stuff similar.
To copy what I put in a comment the other day, a next gen Siri with chatGPT like functionality, trained on all your docs, email, calendar, movements, browser history, video calls. All local and not in the cloud:
"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
Apple execs: "why not both?"
The current stumbling block is that the tech sucks and the headsets are enormous. If someone got it into a lightweight pair of glasses or contact lenses, the use case is obvious, and it would be a big of a shift as the smartphone.
Denying this is like being the guy in 1993 saying “why would I want a computer in my pocket? Am I going to work on spreadsheets on a tiny screen in the bathrooom? And where would I plug it in?”
But yeah, so many things are obnoxious and clunky about smartphones. Glancing down is never a good look, let alone glancing down and then walking into a wall. The moment that minimum viable AR tech happens, people will suddenly remember how many compromises we have to make for smartphones.
Is this really a game-changer? Technology adoption is all about tradeoffs. We already have location-based services and applications that are granular enough for most purposes. AR applications add sensory awareness and localized interaction at the cost of distraction and intrusiveness.
History is littered with inventions that were supposed to be the next telephone, computer, smartphone, etc., but most of them never materialize because they don't meet people's practical needs. And if AR/VR isn't the quintessential solution in search of a problem, I don't know what is.
Currently any time you need information you have to pull yourself away from your present moment to dive into your phone. AR will make it so the information you need is just integrated into the world around you.
And with people's resistance to paying for software services, you'll have exactly the same problem with looking at something on your phone of half the crap being ads intentionally trying to sidetrack you.
I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive glasses on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country.
And all the other Infos? I don't even use my smartphone for them. Why would I wear an expensive headset to compare a 3€ product?
I only need real navigation on holiday and I'm pretty sure not taking some expensive pocket computer on travel. Neither when hiking nor in a foreign country. I just print out the directions from MapQuest. K.I.S.S.
And all the other Infos? I don't even use my desktop PC for them. Why would I carry an expensive handheld computer to compare a 3€ product?
And where would I even plug it in?
This is actually what happened historically. Various pocket devices existed for navigation (e.g. by Garmin), but they never got too popular until the smartphone became popular for entirely different reasons. Only after the smartphone become really common, then it was reused for existing applications where the benefit existed but was not that big compared to alternatives. AR/VR will need a killer application first, only then it might be reused for navigation.
You don't see the difference? Especially when hiking?
You are then a non sweaty asian?
A pair of glasses or monocle/power reader, wrist device with holo display or some other format makes much more sense as a way to interact with a portable computing device conveniently. The main bottleneck is hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
It's discussed quite a bit on this site, but I wouldn't expect Apple to pull ahead in the GPU department. They really lit a fire under Intel and AMD's ass with the M1's IPC, but Nvidia laughed their way to the bank with every M1 upgrade. Even the 5nm M1 Ultra struggled to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm, bog-cheap 30-series cards. In the datacenter it's even more of a blowout, Apple would have to invest in something competitive with CUDA to turn heads. That's no small feat, and I don't think it's possible with an overnight API launch. It takes time and integration into the industry, something Apple wasn't patient enough for (see: Xserve).
The M1 Ultra is a 200w chip, fabricated with 5nm silicon. It's being outclassed by the RTX 3060, a cheap 10nm card that draws ~170w max. In Nvidia's 40-series cards (on 4nm), the M1 Ultra's performance profile is most comparable to a laptop-class RTX 4060 that draws less than 115 watts.
There's a story in the total package draw to be made here, and it does weigh slightly in Apple's favor. Overall though, even with last-gen cards it's clear that there's a massive performance-per-watt lead in Nvidia's favor right now. Which is impressive, considering how they've been stuck with second-class silicon when the M1 Ultra debuted.
The article says that Apple has a glasses product and a VR/AR product that sounds similar to a Quest Pro.
So if we look at the glasses product it immediately runs into a lot of issues. Do I want to be wearing glasses? Do I already own glasses? Do I like how glasses look on my face? Wearable tech is very personal especially when it's sitting on your face. At best this is a product for industrial environments.
Then the Quest Pro-like VR/AR product...separate battery pack in your pocket, need I say more? Now compare that experience to an Oculus Quest for $300. It doesn't really matter that the Quest is a less capable product, it's at the right price point and form factor and its strong sales show it.
Estimates of the size of this market were in the single digit billions of dollars for Google, who bailed out of Google Glass recently: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/google-glass-enterprise-mark...
For comparison, the iPhone makes $200 billion in revenue every year. Apple Services (Music, TV+, etc) make something like $20 billion every quarter.
Apple does not enter many businesses that only have the potential to make $1-2 billion.
But like the parent poster pointed out, I'm now talking about niche industrial uses, not widescale adoption.
Gorilla Tag, an indie VR game where you're an ape and run around with your hands and tag people (seriously, that's the whole thing) has made $26 million selling virtual hats and has peaks of 90,000 concurrent users.
I think what makes it stick is that it's more than just a game. It's a social space where my kids jump in to sometimes just to chat with their friends from school. Reminds me of hanging out in Team Fortress 2 game servers and just chatting while casually screwing around in the game.
Here's the interview where those stats came from for those curious.
https://venturebeat.com/games/how-gorilla-tag-made-it-big-on...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSBESw3a_tc
They're more likely going after creative professionals who're already all-in on the Apple ecosystem. Maybe product designers or architects, who want to show clients their designs in VR, and a slick Apple device will probably make a better impression than a PC VR setup with a bulky headset, cables everywhere, fans whirring, etc.
I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think we're at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it's google glass all over again x 100, where unhinged people are attacking and pulling these expensive devices off of people's heads [1][2].
Maybe in 2017 when AR was really hot could it have gotten adoption, but as it stands in 2023 the average consumer is starting to reject this level of tech and fewer and fewer people have the wallet that could support this.
I also suggest avoiding a comparison with the VR market - the only thing they have in common is that it's a thing you put on your face. The infrastructure, deployment, product features, economics, user interfaces, battery, environmental use, UX, legal etc... are all doubly complex with HMD AR over HMD VR
I think it's going to continue to be a long time before persistent everywhere HMD AR is going to be a reality
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/i-was-assaulted-for-wearing-...
[2]https://mashable.com/archive/google-glass-assault
display in-coming text messages and caller ids, a navigation arrow and take snaps. that's it
I suspect there's a market there, but only if the device can be made to look like a pair of fashionable sunglasses, and was driven by the phone in your pocket, adding a customizable HUD to the real world, doing all sorts of things, from translating foreign-language text to overlaying directions or providing real-time info about the bus or train you're trying to catch.
But for now, that's science fiction. Even if we could make the screens/optics work, the glasses still need power, and batteries are still relatively bulky. It wouldn't be much use if it had a short battery life, or drained your phone battery too fast.
But, if you get there, I'm pretty convinced that you will have a population of adopters whether it creates a class divide or not. Certainly cell phone adoption wasn't held back by this factor.
What do you mean by that?
Just curious because I feel the same about EVs, when I see one I think that's a richer than average person.
So I don't see how an AR headset would be a problem. It really depends how does it look like though.
That said, usually people tend to seek out status symbols. People obviously wear Gucci sunglasses in their faces because they are Gucci and expensive. However, I also wonder if this case would be different because of the growing anti-tech resentment and the wearer now being associated with issues liked gentrification, disliked mega corps etc.
The implication here is that you know a compelling case for "what we could do with it" and how to "do it right", so what are the answers (because I'm stumped)?
Interior design is another subject that comes to mind.
I think this is because these companies are preoccupied with controlling the content, they envision doing the same things we do IRL but on their platforms. This is problematic because it means people instead of improving their lives and actually doing things are expected to be pretending doing it and spent their precious lives and money away on this BS.
VR and AR becomes exciting only when you can explore yourself and the world by doing things you can't do in real life. Maybe you want to try being assassin? Maybe you you want to try being from another gender or species? Maybe you want to try being in an actual war zone? Maybe you want to try to create a society with completely different rules from we have now? But no, these are too dangerous because someone might be offended, so in VR you are supposed to go to Paris and spend real money throwing virtual darts or something. They also can't distance themselves from the moral panic because they must milk the platform by controlling the content.
It is outright dystopian and dumb. The core promise of the platforms is "do the same things you do when you don't already do on our platforms so we can monetise that too" and this doesn't converge with the core promise of the tech which is to do things you can't do in real life.
All it takes is a killer app to come along. AR music instrument instruction is my bet. If Apple released this one app along with the glasses it would become a massive hit.
for anything glasses like, you can simply take them off
https://youtube.com/shorts/eeMte5UbFJ4?feature=share
Might as well just buy a keyboard with lights built into the keys.
anymore, or yet? I think the biggest barriers are form factor and price. History suggests that price of such devices will increase over time. Whether the tech can be squeezed into a form factor that will be desirable to the masses is another problem altogether. The fact that apple (according to this article) have not managed to do it suggests to me that it might be some time off.
The good: - Great form factor - Image quality for screen mirroring is great - Display has good brightness - Decent speakers
The bad: - Nebula (AR software that allows projecting multiple screens) has a worse image quality (I see some flickering). It's also buggy (e.g. it doesn't work on latest MacOS) - Slightly heavy. You would start feeling the weight on your ears after wearing it for an hour or so. - When screen mirroring an M1 Mac, the display settings on Mac doesn't allow you to resize the screen. It works on an Intel Mac though.
Eventually I decided to return it as I want to wait for the device to mature and I don't really have a strong need for AR glasses at this time. I'd be looking forward to their next version.
I think the current AR glasses (Nreal, Rokid, etc) are probably at the same level of maturity as smart watches when they first came out in the early to mid 2010s.
You can get a huge screen in a portable form factor anywhere.
Yep, that’s an easy one. Guess what. It’s not for general use.
I have no idea where AR/VR is going. However, I’m all for Apple spending part of its large cash reserve in R&D. I guarantee something useful will come out of it.
Hopefully, someone with a little vision comes along and says “you know what we could do with this technology…”
Even as an Apple enthusiast, I think this product is destined to be this year’s HomePod.
Apple currently sells a pair of 500$ headphones and a 5000$ monitor. High margin products that are sold as fashion to their top fans is Apple's thing.
They will need one killer app and a sleek enough package, and those are the main bottle necks. The money is hardly an issue.
Technologically, Apple has the distinct advantage of having the best power efficient mobile chips which Facebook did not. Other than that, I don't see how they can solve all the other open problems in VR/AR right now.
I can bet that most people and companies buying the pro-display XDR don't need that level of color calibration to do their job well. But as long as Apple is the most fashionable brand, they can convince people into thinking that's exactly what they need.
Entire industries are built upon impossible to ignore distinction between classes - 100 thousand dollar watches, 10 million dollar cars, designer clothing, and a thousand other examples that come under the category of "bling".
While I have similar doubts about the short to medium term AR/XR future, I don't think it's based on people not wanting to be seen as better than everyone else. As a society we basically encourage that behaviour.
It’s might have been possible 5 years ago, but they missed the bus.
I think the SpaceTop laptop[0] shows an excellent use case for a realistic AR device.
Right now, the kind of AR headsets that companies seem to think they can produce are all fantasy/sci-fi, not much different than the whole Dream of Self-Driving Cars. Sure, it's probably possible eventually, but not anytime soon, or at a price point most can afford in the case of self-contained AR headset that look like normal glasses
[0] https://www.bigtechwire.com/2023/05/19/spacetop-the-groundbr...
Instead they've been spending $1b/yr developing something that will never be finished
The first apple computer wasn't a fully loaded macbook pro. It was a circuit board strapped to a piece of plywood
some upstart will come up with something usable
They have probably iterated a lot, what makes you think they haven't? You have zero visibility into their process
They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of advantages.
1. AR will devour smartphones.
2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer AR/VR design challenges.
3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR content.
4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble effect.
---
[1] https://taylor.town/apple-will-win-vr
I could see an argument for it growing along side smartphones. But even then, this feels like fantasy. VR only "works" for driving simulation because... you are sitting there. Any dreams of it making Zelda more immersive will have to grasp with the fact that, you know, you can't actually win a fight with most wild animals. Or climb a mountain. Or hike across the entire continent...
(I say "works" for driving, because even that is glossing all of the physicality of driving that fast. Which is intense and would also be beyond most of us.)
"Growing" is probably a better word than "devour".
In a companion essay, I try to make the argument that AR peripherals are likely.
My best guess is that a smartphone-like peripherals will be shipped alongside the flagship AR/VR headsets. I guess the AR headsets might be viewed as the "peripheral" in the beginning, but I think eventually the AR headset will be the main focus, and the thing you hold in your hand will feel more like a keyboard/mouse.
[1] https://taylor.town/ar-peripherals
2. Not Meta? They're the #1 VR company with 75% marketshare and a years-long head start in the industry. The Reality headset from Apple has no rumored/leaked feature that goes beyond what the Quest Pro already has on the market today.
3. Is distribution difficult? Meta distributes content. Valve distributes content. What's so hard about distributing content?
4. What early lead? Meta has the early lead.
They might have a rocky start, but they still have a lot of advantages.
1. AR will devour smartphones.
2. Apple is the only company that can quickly overcome consumer AR/VR design challenges.
3. Apple has positioned itself to distribute the best AR/VR content.
4. Apple will cement its early lead with a new blue-bubble effect.
---
[1] https://taylor.town/apple-will-win-vr
Likely because they expect AR to eventually devour smartphones, and they would rather devour it themselves than let others do so.
Plus, it will be a painful growth with rough edges anyway, so the iPhone faucet isn't turning off anytime soon. In fact, it would be quite a helpful source of revenue, until AR adoption reaches the masses and gets to the stage of actually being polished and commonplace enough to devour smartphones.
See: Apple slowly winding down iPod over the course of many years, as iPhone cannibalized it almost entirely.
Just for the simple fact that Apple has in multiple occasions done 2 things:
1. Come out with something that shapes the rest of the industry. I mean how many times has Apple done something and within a year or 2 basically the entire industry follows.
2. Not captured a large (or majority) percent but continued to invest in a platform. I don't think anything they are in (except maybe the smart watch) do they actually have a majority marketshare but they continue to work on those platforms.
So there is a part of me that hopes that Apple realizes that this platform will be the same way. It will be a very niche product that will take years of iterating on (like the Apple Watch) with it in consumers hands to turn it into a mainstream product.
We have had too many failed attempts (Google Glasses and Microsoft HoloLens) just fail since they were not major successes right out the gate.
They also have the developer buy in on their other platforms that they may be able to transition that to this if they handle that properly.
That isn't saying that this is anywhere near a guarantee and obviously the hardware has to be there, the societal acceptance, etc. But I just don't currently see another company that is in the position to possibly pull this off.
What does AR allow you to do, that you can't already do on a screen?
It's different... but different in amount. It's a better screen.
That might be enough to ship units, but it's not enough to explode in popularity.
Hell, even mystical eyeglass AR that was actually just a pair of eyeglasses would struggle. "Why don't I just do the same thing on my screen?" or "But I'm already constantly connected when I'm mobile."
For that matter, if "smartphone with cellular data" counts, why not "smart glasses with cellular data and apps"?
As you can tell, I'm a skeptic of this difference in kind v. difference in quantity construct.
That's the count of people for whom AR glasses would be different in kind.
Everyone who tries to speak a text message with Siri. Apple should have been brave and not reshaped messages - that screen is not meant to consume text messages at any length - they should have changed the communication to match the context.
On the other hand, existing AR, like existing VR, just doesn't deliver on that promise, not even approximately.
With current tech, it's more an issue that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That can change when either (or both) side of the equation changes.
The Apple II OS wasn't graphical. The hardware had very simple colour, which made it stand out.
Mac was graphical, but it was a productised/commodified version of someone else's R&D.
Nokia's Communicator range had cellular data long before the iPhone was a thing. What iPhone did differently was - again - productise and commodify existing technologies to create something that was more than the sum of its components. Touch was the biggest part of that, but the App Store really killed the competition.
iPads were never particularly low cost. There were numerous tablets before the iPad. The iPad difference was - again - touch. And the App Store.
iWatch wrist phone may be true, but I suspect it's not the main use case. (I've yet to see anyone talking into an iWatch. I'm sure it happens, but not nearly as often as phone conversations do.)
The common factor - apart from iWatch - is taking/blending existing tech and packaging it into an accessible non-nerdy form with obvious and instant mass market appeal. And creating a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. And adding design stylings that make the product cool.
That's exactly what this display project doesn't have. Even if it does its job well it has no obvious instant applications.
And clamping a rubber facehugger to your head is the opposite of cool.
It may have mass appeal after version 4 or 5 when it's closer to the ideal of stylish glasses with a supporting ecosystem. But I suspect version 1 is going to have a very limited market.
- PCs were already growing in popularity.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Apple usually takes a look at a growing trend and decides that it can provide a far better experience.
... with the exception of: Apple Watch.
- Apple Watch defined the smartwatch category. Smart watches weren't that popular before the Apple watch. But, watches and luxury watches have been fashionable for a long time.
As awesome as AR / VR headsets are, they are practically dead on arrival. This will be the most challenging product launch in Apple's history.
From a marketing perspective, an Apple Car makes more sense.
And then Apple introduce the Macintosh and changed the industry forever.
- Mp3 players were already growing in popularity.
And then Apple introduce the iPod and iTunes and changed the industry forever. The ability to purchase and download music sealed the deal.
- Smart phones were already growing in popularity.
LOL. Blackberry? Windows Phone? And then Apple introduce the iPhone and changed society.
- Bluetooth headphones were already growing in popularity.
Meh. I'm not sure these are game changing, but that said my technophobic wife loves her AirPods Pro and has somehow not lost them, so shit, actually that's pretty game changing.
- Home automation was already growing in popularity.
Well, Siri kinda sucks TBH, and Alexa works just fine, so maybe not this one
Let's hope this is a Windows Phone situation, and Apple's headset is night-and-day compared to previous headsets. If it's a me-too like home automation, then it can only be a flop.
"Selling at-cost" - Also good, because they need to get the device into the hands of developers to seed the ecosystem before it becomes more mainstream.
If it's a gamechanger for remote working, then I'll buy them for my company and have my remote employees use them
If it's a gamechanger for communicating with family overseas, then I might see if I can convince one of my relatives to get one (though the price will be harder to justify for personal use - but not impossible if it's a gamechanger)
Both of those are contingent on how good it is. If it's something where I do a shared presence FaceTime call using it, and I feel like I can't go back to not having it, then I'll buy them and I expect it'll be a huge success. If I/people try it and it's not much of an improvement over regular FaceTime, then it won't be a big success.
If the big killer app for this headset is "calling people", then Mark Zuckerberg is probably doubled-over in hysterics right now.
1. https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/
I even made a proof-of-concept of my own at some point in… I think 2018?… which was just recording locally and playing back with Apple's own AR libraries.
Honestly, it was so easy I'm surprised it isn't already standard the same way custom backgrounds and 3D overlays (hats, face-paint, etc.) already are.
Also, the sort of people who are going to work out consistently don't need a headset to work out. Or any other tech. They just do it.
I know you're not implying this in your comment, but if anyone thinks you are going to take someone who is sedate, strap on a cool headset and give them some sort of virtual experience that will finally motivate them to work out consistently...I'll take the other side of that bet every day...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221226721...
Anyway, the modern answer is Ozempic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-a...
But I don't think behavior and diet are necessarily the cause; there's some room for gut bacteria (which control your behavior anyway) and environmental pollutants.
One particular thing that I believe is underexplored is using visual/haptic cues for movement learning (motor skills acquision). For example in FitXR there is a glowing semi-transparent path showing how your hand is supposed to move. If you deviate from it, it gives a light haptic feedback. There is no substitute for that in reality – we learn hand movements (like in dance or martial arts) either by proprioreception, visual feedback through mirrors or verbal feedback from teacher. All three ways are inferior to what VR can offer.
I think some progressive sports researchers are experimenting with VR (especially in Constraint-Led Approach community), but these are just first steps.
PS. I personally want to invest in learning VR programming for years, but waiting until software ecosystem will stabilize and settle on something. So waiting for the Apple announcements in that field.
I really want to get a new sleek VR/mixed reality device but I can't actually afford to spend $1000 right now let alone $3000.
That is the same PR tactics as AirPod. Gruber taking about AirPod was selling at a loss. Insane value coming from Apple.
Most people who comment on these sort of things have absolutely zero idea about supply chain or manufacturing, let alone BOMs.
But of course, people will fall for it. ( Thinking Apple selling it at cost or loss )
VR works very well today. But it's a niche business sort of like racing wheels and joysticks. So not very interesting to go VR only for the big players.
AR and VR are separate things, and it's sort of a delusion that has been pushed by Meta and others that one leads to the other. Or that they can be combined even.
(Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if you're sitting in a chair your back pockets may not be easily accessible, which means the battery is either in front and you're constantly bumping the wire, or it's on the floor or something. I know it's not a completely unsolvable problem because the Vive had that special head strap that draped down the middle of your head which was fine, but I still got tangled up from time to time.)
Heat and weight from the battery directly just exacerbates the problem.
Making it not able to do as much is sometimes a winning move, but also sometimes not. The primary utility concerns that people have with headset products come from display resolution and framerate. It takes a lot of pixel density for readable text and a lot of frames per second to prevent display-lag-induced motion sickness. Crapping out on the displays and processing makes that worse, not better.
> Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go?
Clips. Straps. Bags. Hooks. People have been successfully carrying things on their person without pockets for millennia. Have you really never seen someone at the gym strap their phone into an armband?
You may as well be asking "Like if you don't have pockets, where does your cellphone go?" And yet billions of people all over the world manage to carry cellphones.
1) low quality passthrough is unpleasant
2) heavy headset is unpleasant
3) headset with weight imbalance is unpleasant
4) sensors, chips, and display all use power
5) battery with more capacity is heavier
6) battery with more power draw is hotter
7) hot headset in your face is unpleasant
8) battery at the end of a cord is ugly and annoying
So it’s easy to say “use a weaker chip”, but what if that means you have to degrade some must-have functionality? Or it means you have to wait 3 years for TSMC to come out with a smaller node before you can release your product? Battery on the end of a wire is a “bold” choice, probably an engineer won a cage match against an executive to make it happen.
One thing that Apple’s approach has going for it is that it could also be great at VR content like Beat Saber, Half Life Alyx, Bigscreen movies, or as a monitor for your MacBook. A Magic-Leap-esque device will suck for any of those.
However, the Magic Leap form factor may work better for a Google Glass type use case where you wear the headset as you go about your life and get some augmented features (maybe it can be an iPhone replacement eventually).
I kind of hope it's not a false leak, just to see the battery with cord, lmao.
I think these VR headsets are built for the demo. How much daily demand they have is probably much more limited than the builders think it is.
Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people.
Supposedly Apple has been working off a patent that fights this specifically. Not arguing for or against whether this headset will slap (personally, I don't care for VR and think it's overrated) but just relaying some info.
There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHLpKzUxjGk
I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at all.
Other than that - I agree. Combining AI and AR successfully with cool and minimal hardware would make the iPhone revolution seem like a footnote.
Unfortunately no one seems to be working in that space. Or if they are, their efforts are comically terrible (like Meta.)
aaaand, that's all I needed to read about that. It's never coming to market, maybe they'll revisit the idea in years to come though.