Apple just launched their AR/VR headset called Apple Vision Pro.
Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset | The Verge
A big but preliminary step toward mixed reality.
theverge.com
Do you have any initial reactions?
Latest comments (44)
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I've a confession. I do not see the point of it it's massively pricey from a user point of view, I don't see folks wearing one for hours even I'd it's far more comfy than any vr device you buy now, and don't see what makes it compelling at this price.
I know it has expensive hardware, but really what use cases are so compelling that ordinary folks will shell out?
Thats my reaction. I have heard from pro apple folks on twitter a little lol
Why does the outside world need to see your eyes? It's a waste of energy, a waste of extra cameras and a waste of computer power if you ask me. Which of course the consumer has to pay for. (so in the end: a waste of money)
It feels like something popped out from a sci-fi novel
day by day apple keep making gadgets that keeps getting dumber
Already possible since 2013, check for example Vipaar solutions.
There are already tons of glasses they can use. That are cheaper. Also compatibility plays huge role here. I would be very cautious to invest huge pile of money into developing training soft on very expensive and closed source hardware (this is whole new OS we are talking here) that may be abandoned any time.
Technically it's under the apple OS ecosystem. Half the apps are lifted from iPad and mentioned you'll be able to leverage iPad apps here. The abandonment is true,however that's true in any developing market, and this is a company with the cash flow to weather the storm.
I should get to writing my own full post on this, but some thoughts I'm borrowing back from my past self yesterday when I was live commenting on the event on Mastdon... (we also did a deep dive on the last minute rumours on our podcast which dropped right before the presentation, and will revisit the actual outcome this week)
First of all, my view is that this is Tim Cook's Legacy product as CEO. He's been bigging up XR/AR for a long time, and this is really the product he has seemingly pushed towards throughout his tenure at the top. The WWDC presentation needed to be slick, polished, and have wow factor. It did. In spite of myself, I'm curious to try this thing out.
There's a lot of folks reacting against the headset - price, aesthetics, experience, use cases, social awkwardness etc - which is not surprising. I’ll be watching to see how quickly or virally the presentation affects the rest of the industry / how far other companies instantly pivot to this same sort of direction. That was the impact of the iPhone, remember - suddenly every phone had to have a touch screen, camera, a similar-to-iOS experience. Let's see what comes from this: that's the real test for Tim Cook's Legacy
I think that the WWDC preview "did what it needed to do" in terms of sprinkling the Apple magic, but I want to see and hear how well this actually works, and it is nowhere near a widespread adoption price point (though, nor was the first iPhone, or Watch, etc). This could be the start of a technology wave, but I think the current form factor will be off-putting for many many people for a long time, in ways that other personal devices like tablets and phones have succeeded in avoiding. I maintain some skepticism. Tellingly, I noted that no Apple presenter wore one…
There are two important differences here
A smartphone is a small object that you can put in your pocket and a touch screen is a really convenient interface, smooth to use. If you want to know when the next bus will arrive, you reach for your phone in your pocket, type "bus timetable" and you have the answer. Smooth, fast and convenient.
The iPhone was something new, 3D viewers are around since long time and despite the periodic hype, they never became really popular. Sure, you can have applications where they can be useful, but I fail to imagine people having "virtual parties," the guests in their homes with a clumsy viewer above their eyes, drinking some virtual beer (I heard descriptions like this).
taking the Tesla/Lucid approach... go for high end to validate and slowly move downstream with less expensive models
Failure due to lack of use cases. Allow me to explain:
Gaming. Apple killed gaming when they decided to outdate OpenGL and then go their own way with Metal instead of Vulcan. That immediately made porting AAA titles unprofitable. Current game portfolio on Apple is garbage, mostly iPad clickers. For price of Apple headset you can get both PlayStation and PlayStation VR headset. And I doubt any serious games will arrive on Apple Vision due to limited popularity and weak hardware (M2 3D capabilities ale ~2 generations behind current leaders).
Office work. No one will spend 8h with headset on, no matter how comfortable it will be. Meta experiments clearly showed that. Buying this headset for occasional work in the train or during flight is kind of pointless because you will need keyboard/mouse anyway and that makes whole solution a weird patchwork of a simple and more portable laptop.
Outside work. This will have huge contrast issues. Dimming is made by LCD layer and transparent screens and Google glasses failed for a reason. One simply cannon block enough backlight on demand to achieve good contrast. My guess is that this tech is no different and will be completely unusable in daylight.
Video calls. Without camera?
Home cinema. Virtual screens are offered by every VR headset and never got popular. And Apple Vision is outside of budget for people to whom it may be beneficial in this aspect - living in small apartments without space for proper TV setup.
To be fair - I see some use cases for Augmented Reality, like for example you can order furniture for your home while walking and virtually placing tables in rooms. But those rare cases will not give this product traction it needs. It will remain "cool gimmicks".
But they mentioned a release that solves your first point on the porting issue.
Nah. Even if you have Vulkan to Metal transparent translation layer there will still be so many issues to solve with ARM builds and general macOS system API differences that porting will remain nonexistent.
Apple may throw big bag of money for studios to compensate porting costs of few bigger titles to have something to show. But paying for porting even 10% of last 5 years AAA titles to build reasonable game library is too much even for them.
This is intentionally not designed for gaming. There's no need for it yet, it's too costly on both ends. Let Sony, Valve, and Meta work on that end and they can work on the other end.
looks really impressive, but remember hololens?
youtube.com/watch?v=eqFqtAJMtYE
Honestly, it looks OK.
People are going on about the price, but there are plenty of expensive business-oriented VR headsets on the market already, and this isn't particularly out of their range.
I didn't watch the demo, because I'm generally uninterested in Apple stuff until it's ubiquitous enough that I have to deal with it in real life.
What they've done as far as I can tell is make a better hololens. It supporting their regular app store is an important step, because that's missing from things like the Quest.
The higher resolution is an incremental improvement in VR tech as far as real people are concerned, but it's a good thing.
So it's... ok.