Spatial Facial

June 6, 2023 12:00 AM

Apple Vision Pro: I Tried the New Mixed-Reality Headset [ungated] - "At the end of the demo, I took off the headset and felt two things: 1) Wow. Very cool. 2) Did I just do drugs?"

Maybe it was that when I was finally able to see again with my own eyes—looking at my notebook, or my hands or the other people in the room—I realized I was no longer staring at the world through a screen. Even Apple’s crisp 23 million pixels can’t replace standard vision. Maybe that’s the long-term challenge, getting us to forget that difference.[1]

I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It's the best headset demo ever. - "Apple wouldn't say anything specific about its field of view this long before launch, but I definitely saw black in my peripheral vision. The Vision Pro is not as totally immersive as the marketing videos would have you believe."[2]

The display itself is absolutely bonkers: a 4K display for each eye, with pixels just 23 microns in size. In the short time I tried it, it was totally workable for reading text in Safari (I loaded The Verge, of course), looking at photos, and watching movies. It is easily the highest-resolution VR display I have ever seen... The video passthrough was similarly impressive. It appeared with zero latency and was sharp, crisp and clear. I happily talked to others, walked around the room, and even took notes on my phone while wearing the headset — something I would never be able to do with something like the Meta Quest Pro. That said, it’s still video passthrough. I could see pretty intense compression at times, and loss of detail when people’s faces moved into shadows. I could see the IR light on the front of my iPhone futilely blink as it attempted to unlock with FaceID to no avail. And the display was dimmer than the room itself, so when I took the headset off my eyes had to adjust to how much brighter the room was in reality.

Similarly, Apple’s ability to do mixed reality is seriously impressive. At one point in a full VR Avatar demo I raised my hands to gesture at something, and the headset automatically detected my hands and overlaid them on the screen, then noticed I was talking to someone and had them appear as well. Reader, I gasped. Apple’s also gotten a lot farther with eye tracking and gesture control: eye tracking was pretty solid, and those IR illuminators and side cameras mean you can tap your thumb and index finger together to select things while they’re down in your lap or at your sides. You don’t need to be pointing at anything. It’s pretty cool.

Hands On With Apple's Vision Pro: The Opposite of Disappearing - "Apple's Vision Pro headset has the potential to eventually mainstream AR in a way that other face computers haven't, simply because it's Apple."[3]

In a teaser of a new dinosaur-focused series from director Jon Favreau, a dinosaur stomped dangerously close to where I stood in the room, based on the positioning of my sensor-filled headset. A butterfly fluttered around the room before landing on my outstretched finger... The experience can be remarkable and surreal, for sure; but it requires a suspension of disbelief and a sacrifice of autonomy. Even Apple can’t out-design its way out of what is fundamentally an obtrusive technology.

posted by kliuless (222 comments total)

While it’s nice to see what the richest company can do when they invest time and energy, I remain entirely sceptical about AR/VR as a platform. Yes, this is a beautiful thing… but so was the apple newton, at the time.
posted by The River Ivel at 12:57 AM on June 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

A Newton for your face? - yes that was my thought too. I was involved in AR devices back in the 90s - and it is interesting that the human factors limitations have not really changed, even as the tech has evolved. We are still the same old humans with tendencies to get nauseous claustrophobic and dizzy.
posted by rongorongo at 1:11 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm cautiously curious about this whole realm. It does seem like a foregone conclusion, though, that if you want to eventually make your way to "affordable, non-clunky headset," you gotta start somewhere, and the demos at least imply it has a good bit of functionality so far. I'm looking forward to trying one out some day, but, well, $3,500 is a lot of cash. Presumably that's related to why they put the "pro" moniker on the initial release, to imply that the long-term goal is something more mass-market-priced.

The lenticular screen on the front fascinates me, and I suspect that it might actually wind up being a pretty clever choice that pays off. If nothing else, it implicitly signals to others whether they are currently visible to the person wearing it (and whether they're being recorded!).

So yeah, interesting to see a sort of "halo car" push to see what you can truly get when you spare no expense, but I'm personally more interested in what happens when they can spare some expenses and still have a compelling product. As it stands, my main "gotta have it" from the new hardware announced is the 15" MacBook Air, heh.
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:20 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have some thoughts!*

After seeing my go-to tech nerd news-bringer MKBHD tweet :

Just spent 30 minutes in the Apple Vision Pro headset. Y'all. I am. VERY impressed with a few specific things. Definitely stay tuned

...I was curious what he'd say. If you're also curious, here's his first-impression video (20 min length, but as detailed - still in mostly layperson terminology - as you're likely to find this early on). Even if you're not a nerd like me and have no idea who he is, he's charismatic and excited enough to make it a good watch.

Personally, I'll admit, I woke up this morning to watch the keynote with zero interest in VR (and only a *slight* interest in AR) and wondering how Apple would make this exciting and/or useful (the leaks ahead of time, in mainstream news outlets no less, were too detailed for this to not be a thing Apple would announce).

Currently, I'm of the "well that's too damn expensive and I don't care that much" mindset but I also know this is for developers, early-tech-adopter fetishists, and rich folk right now**. In 2-3 years, they'll make it more accessible for the ... well, still not everyone, but at least more folks and maybe I'll wait another generation or two after that and pick one up on eBay.

Full disclosure : I didn't give a damn about iPad or Apple Watch at first either, but I'm now on my 2nd watch and 3rd iPad. All of which I waited enough generations to pick up older versions of on eBay.

**(pet theory : that's why it's already using "Pro", so they can justify the price and later launch an "SE" or "Mini", or whatever, for us plebs)

It's possible this may become the future. I'm skeptical as hell about that. But it's possible. If anyone is gonna pull off "hey everybody! let's wear a headset!", it's Apple. My prediction : if this doesn't take off in the next 3-4 years, no one else is gonna make it take off either, at least for the next 10 years. Even Hank Green realized in the first few minutes of the reveal that Zuck knows his tech is fucked. 

(I also fully agree with his multiple skeptical follow-up tweets)

In a world where this is accessible and cheap enough for me and my friends to reasonably have one, I would genuinely love to sit in a room with all of them while we wear our headsets and watch some big blockbuster movie together, just for the weirdness of that experience if nothing else.

*this entire reply is mostly non-committal so I can avoid "less space than a nomad, lame" fame if any of the above predictions are laughably wrong
posted by revmitcz at 1:28 AM on June 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

Do love a MacBook Air, dunno if i can justify a new one yet.

Interested in seeing what this thing turns into at a non-insane price when it actually has software. At this point I’m not betting against any Apple product until a couple of versions in when they’ve had a chance to establish that. Don’t really have much interest in it as is though.
posted by Artw at 1:29 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

yeah, it's tricky and difficult to make predictions at this point because, like, the watch and even the iPhone were kind of regarded as "not that big a deal" for the first few years after release, until you started noticing you were constantly seeing them everywhere, at which point the narrative switched to "they've always been a big hit"
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:32 AM on June 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Has someone who needs corrective glasses tried this? Because I already need progressives, and I don't think those diving mask-looking things are compatible with mine.
posted by sukeban at 1:34 AM on June 6, 2023 [23 favorites]

I have thought to myself in the past “one of those sky mall style virtual giant cinema screens would be cool for watching things in bed”, then I’ve thought about the inconvenience of having a thing strapped to head and thought “nope” before getting to whatever the silly price is - not sure the same doesn’t apply here.
posted by Artw at 1:42 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Has someone who needs corrective glasses tried this? Because I already need progressives, and I don't think those diving mask-looking things are compatible with mine.

Per the “best headset demo ever” link it takes prescription lenses, no idea how well that works with progressives.
posted by Artw at 2:02 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Put on the headset, Shinji
posted by Artw at 3:14 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

this is gonna be a game changer for movie cops with dead wives
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:21 AM on June 6, 2023 [29 favorites]

Should rename the company to Verse, since Meta was already taken by MetaFilter.
posted by UN at 3:55 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm rooting for this thing mostly because it's so damn cool, and it really does seem like Apple have solved a lot of the technical problems with existing systems ... at ridiculously-great expense.

As everyone is pointing out, though, we still don't know what the use case is, outside of office work, basically. With the iPod and iPhone, everyone knew what those devices could and should do, more or less. And even if they didn't seem like best-of-breed at first (too expensive, not enough storage, etc.), when people realized that they delivered a genuinely superior experience in most ways, they won the market in spite of premium pricing.

This thing? Nobody knows what it's supposed to do. We have our inferior devices already, but they don't have a compelling use case either. Even with Meta making a janky toy at a tenth of the price, there's still no good reason to own one outside of a pretty small niche.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:02 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

We don't know if the experience will be worth it, but it does seem like this answers the question of what does it take to do AR/VR "right" in 2024. And the answer seems to be a lot: a very good laptop chip, another chip for all the video, two screens that each have higher resolution than my 16" Macbook Pro, etc. And that's comparing elements of this to other things that already exist. There's also a new operating system and interaction model, the screens are incredibly small, etc.

It is interesting to see how everything they've done feeds into this. Chip development, of course, but stuff like figuring out fitting wearable stuff via watch bands and those really expensive headphones, the digital crown from those devices, figuring out spacial audio stuff via the Airpods, etc. Even stuff like multitouch trackpad gestures that I've been using to swipe from one screen to another on my laptop for years. And all the content stuff, like the streaming tv and why they wanted to get deals with sports leagues.

It seems like something they've been working on for 10 years or whatever and even though Apple has a reputation for entering into markets late with a better product, I think it is also possible to say that the ipod, iphone, etc were all launched as soon as they were technically possible and I think this is, too.

It is also going to take years for any other company to come up with something comparable. Even if you were to tether it to a full-size computer because you don't have the chips to make it possible, I can't think of a company that has the other pieces. And the average person probably doesn't own a computer powerful enough to run something like this anyways, especially if that computer isn't completely optimized for doing so.

And all of this for something that is not obviously something that anyone wants! So many times during the presentation, I kept thinking about the new season of Black Mirror dropping this month. It may be a flop, but it does seem as innovative as anything that Apple has done so far. For Tim Cook, that must feel pretty good.
posted by snofoam at 4:02 AM on June 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

It's for porn, isn't it?
posted by chavenet at 4:18 AM on June 6, 2023 [39 favorites]

Thank you for the links, kliuless.
posted by doctornemo at 4:21 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

This could replace the tablet/laptop/desktop experience. The working space experience looks very impressive. As the price point drops (which it does, historically) it will eventually become competitive in that way.

Besides price, a big challenge is battery life, unless someone just plugs the thing in.
posted by doctornemo at 4:24 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The thing I can see this be most useful for is having higher quality and more realistic zoom conversations with friends who live far away.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:25 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Unpopular opinion: nobody wants to wear a visor for more than a few hours, full stop. Eventually the Apple Vision Nano Solo 6j BIEBER Edition or whatever clips effortlessly to one lens of your glasses (or simply is your glasses) will be the thing that unlocks a moving, living use case for this technology (and gods willing replaces screens entirely).

This is a higher resolution "more of the same" thing nobody already wants to use much longer than a movie (uh I mean "immersive experience").

But the porn will be spectacular if they allow it in their pristine walled garden.
posted by abulafa at 4:28 AM on June 6, 2023 [17 favorites]

It's a very Apple approach, in the sense that most of the things it's offering have been things that people have been stipulating as the necessary elements for a successful AR/XR market product - high resolution, professional utility, natural-feeling passthrough, desirable apps, lower weight, comfortable headband.

I think Apple's bet is that it is the only company that could actually put all of those things into one package (e.g by being able to develop its own custom silicon optimised for heat/power in XR applications), and get people to pay the real cost (i.e. the COGS plus the fixed research and development costs, plus a premium that made it worth the risk of producing) of having all of those things in one place.

No product is perfect, and both cost and battery life are probably obstacles to purchase, but probably for segments Apple isn't currently interested in (people who want to walk around with an XR rig strapped to their faces at all times, and people who don't want to spend a minimum of $3500 on an XR rig). The other thing you need for a successful product like this is network effects, which isn't a component, but comes from getting the product right...
posted by running order squabble fest at 4:30 AM on June 6, 2023

I think the ability to (nearly) effortlessly get "in and out" of the thing without getting too disoriented/dizzy/sick is going to be key. I've played with my brother's Oculus and while it's admittedly cool, I find it feels creepy after a few minutes. I could not imagine being alone at home, so completely walled off from the reality of my home for more than a few minutes at a time. I just plain get paranoid and creeped out, no other way to explain it.

Only the fact that I was safely at my brothers place with him and his wife around was I able to enjoy playing Beat Saber for a while. And even as a video game nerd, I just wanted to take the damn thing off after a short while. I know I am a sample size of one, but it's gotta be a common reaction.

I hope they eventually make something that I could enjoy as I like toys like this. I just think it's more than a decade away, especially at prices still this high.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:41 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Besides price, a big challenge is battery life, unless someone just plugs the thing in.


It has to be plugged into the battery pack anyway, so it's effectively always plugged in.

Unpopular opinion: nobody wants to wear a visor for more than a few hours, full stop. Eventually the Apple Vision Nano Solo 6j BIEBER Edition or whatever clips effortlessly to one lens of your glasses (or simply is your glasses) will be the thing that unlocks a moving, living use case for this technology (and gods willing replaces screens entirely).

This is the bottom line. Google Glass was a much more practical approach to this sort of thing, even if it wasn't quite ready for the market.

Apple making this work with all of their ecosystem is great, but you still run into the big clunky visor issue no matter how slick the interface is. I wear prescription eyeglasses and no matter how much Apple insists it works with them, it's going to get uncomfortable pretty quickly.
posted by Fleebnork at 4:43 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

I just read a novel (Device Free Weekend, a pretty solid airport thriller but not, like, a brilliant commentary on social media or whatever) that featured VR goggles that had, as part of the setup, an optometrist-style 'which is better, a or b?' deal for people with corrective lenses. I don't know if that's the answer, but it was an interesting thing to visualize.
posted by box at 4:55 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Maybe future headsets will do your eye tests for you, and you won't have to spend half an hour wrangling the optician into giving you the prescription you've paid for without having to buy new frames off them.
posted by Grangousier at 5:02 AM on June 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

the few times i’ve tried a vr headset i’ve found them exhausting when they weren’t making me sick to my stomach. this thing is some kind of dystopian horror show with that terrifying grimace of simulated eyes, so i’d basically never want to ever use it without the door closed, but if the infinite screen experience is really good and if you can use it for a few hours without getting sick, i could see doing my job with a device like this, or watching movies. not for 3.5k!!! though
posted by dis_integration at 5:06 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
VR goggles $3,500
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
posted by autopilot at 5:16 AM on June 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

It has prescription lenses that you can slot into the device - like an optometrists kit perhaps or maybe custom ordered. You don't wear your glasses in it.
posted by goddess_eris at 5:19 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Obviously, it’s best to think of this as a proof-of-concept, rather than a finished consumer product. This is Apple saying to developers “This is something we think has real potential, and we’d love to see what you can, or cannot, do with it.”

I think the key differentiator here is that Apple didn’t start with a defined destination (i.e. Meta and its Metaverse) and tried to fit hardware to serve it. Apple’s made a bonkers interface device and is asking everyone the question “Where can you go with this?”

The pricing alone tells you this isn’t a finished consumer product. Apple is being smart here. Had they priced it more-or-less within the average consumer’s grasp, it would probably be D.O.A. or nearly so. Developers would be scrambling to create something, anything, to meet consumer demand, which would probably end up being half-baked iterations on existing ideas, instead of new and exciting things they actually took the time to imagine and refine.

The really interesting piece will be where this idea is two or three years from now, as developers/users/industries/etc. explore the possibilities.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:22 AM on June 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

This is half the price of what the original Macintosh cost at launch ($2,495 in 1984 or $7,500 in today's money). People will buy it.
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:24 AM on June 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

I’m pretty excited about this, at least if they can get a version off the ground that regular people can afford (regular being relative, of course, but at the level of a gaming device or better). I’m also really glad to see a review by a woman, because the gender gap in VR has been a thing for a while. Motion sickness is a real stopper for me, and it’s something she did call out, so hopefully the promise of improvement there is real and not for-men real.
posted by Mchelly at 5:30 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

oh people are going to buy it. i’m always surprised by how many people got oculus headsets when you had to also buy a serious gpu to run them. like i’m sitting here thinking that i want to try it out because there’s this bizarre itch in me that wants to buy it. i already stare at a screen all day to pay my mortgage, what if i could sit on the patio and have my work soaring in the sky, etc. and the idea of simulating a movie theater sounds really appealing to me, and i mostly watch movies alone these days. if the experience is better than a 65” oled, that could be really appealing. but jesus if i ever take this out to record a 3d movie of my wife please just end it all
posted by dis_integration at 5:33 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Regarding prescription lenses: For comparison, I've recently used the Nreal Air (I guess now it's Xreal), paid for and waited on shipment of custom lenses for my outlandish Rx, carefully installed those lenses into the device and used it successfully.

This was after jamming my smallest old pair of glasses still on my face inside an Oculus and even before that a Daydream headset and suffering for 20 or 30 minutes before they steamed up or I sweat my face off. (I empathize with those who are also nauseated by the visual effects themselves, but that's one thing I have happily avoided so far.)

The Xreal Rx experience works. Barely. The space allotted for corrective lenses (think a diminutive prince nez) needs to be very aligned with your gaze and, of course, the XReal field of view is comparatively puny versus the fully immersive face sweat generators above.

But I could lay down or recline or sit comfortably and have a usable interface in front of me for work and it's still got exhausting after an hour or so. (Anyone who has ever worn glasses as a prosthetic for their entire lives might recognize the very real exhaustion that comes from very small differences in vision correction over time.)

My understanding of optics suggests that we are still pretty far from devices that can adjust prescription dynamically and effectively and cheaply and in a small package in a way that can make prescription lenses unnecessary. I want magnetic oilfield suspension lenses a la Dune as much as the next nerd but it's not something you can do by adjusting the pixels on the screen, to my understanding. (Maybe people are doing things with light fields that I'm not aware of, happy to find out and be wrong.)

So, in summation: I fully expect to be, as with most previous Apple products which had to be dragged, kicking and screaming into supporting any kind of accessibility whatsoever, fully excluded from this product for quite a while.
posted by abulafa at 5:38 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think the initial market is hard core gamers. They already buy special chairs and have three monitors running. Expense isn't an issue for them.

After that, it's about waiting for technology to catch up. We're already very close to having quantum-dot LEDs 3D printable. That will reduce the weight and cost of the headset.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:40 AM on June 6, 2023

Using VR goggles to hang out with Mark Zuckerberg was very Meta, but with visual pass-thru these AR goggles act more like a Filter.
posted by grog at 5:44 AM on June 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

CheeseDigestsAll: "hard core gamers."

2 out of 3 words in that phrase are correct.
posted by signal at 5:45 AM on June 6, 2023 [21 favorites]

So I just updated my Apple price charts for the quarter (the 13" Airs are all down $100 across the board to open up space for the 15" air, more or less?) and I noticed that the Vision Pro is basically the same price as the current top of the line 16" MacBook Pro M2 Max with the 12 cpu / 38 gpu configuration and 32 gigs / 1tb of disk. Just as a point of comparison. Do I think it's mass market? Lord no. But I guess the comment earlier about needing to buy a hefty GPU and a solid gaming desktop to plug most traditional PC VR headsets into probably offsets the jump from (say) the $1000 Valve Index - the Vision Pro is self contained.

I mean, so's the Oculus Quest 2 at $300. Eh?

If it manages to walk the line between immersion and exclusion, if it doesn't induce screaming nausea, if the resolution is actually high enough to do real world (i.e. text-based) tasks, maybe? But I'll admit a whole bunch of the presentation had me thinking, yeah ok great my Windows Mixed Reality headset has done a lot of that for a few years, at an almost useless resolution and latency, but it was only $200. Is the Vision Pro 15x more capable? Does improving the resolution and computational latency change it from neat tech demo into something actually usable?

I'm still on the borderline about the external eyes view, that just looked weird, and easy to get wrong.
posted by Kyol at 5:53 AM on June 6, 2023

I think it is very expensive, but also consumer oriented. Maybe prosumer oriented? It will probably sell a million or more units on the day it launches and by the end of 2024 it will be the majority of the headset market in dollar value and, since there will be only one model, it will probably be the best selling product in the market in units, too. (And it will capture, 100%+ of the actual profits in the market.)
posted by snofoam at 5:54 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can see the hand tracking and eye tracking components make 3D modeling / making really take off with this. That is where this Pro version is likely going to get traction - the MS HoloLens is a business product that they sell for $3500 already, and this is just a much broader and appealing ecosystem for someone to invest development cycles into vs a niche manufacturing / machine control system that HoloLens market is current touting.

I’m reminded to how the iPad’s release killed a big chunk of the point of sale market - or atleast made it go dormant until cheaper tech could catch up to justify custom hardware again. Because all of a sudden developing a POS solution didn’t mean having to deal with weird bespoke hardware manufacturers and windows drivers. You could leverage the iOS ecosystem and develop to a common platform really quickly.

The adult cam market is also going to be a big seller - there’s already a virtual avatar cam market, but one that has much better facial tracking and frankly ‘device free’ hand tracking, opens up a huge potential. Given that certain regions Apple will have to allow sideloading apps, that may happen no matter what.

Like the first gen iPad or the first Apple Watch, this is an ecosystem creating / seeding product, vs what we see in 2-3 years as an end consumer market will be different. The whole push / release of this is essentially Apple going “we made the parts but we know that we just have to let other people inside and play with the thing to figure out what it works” because its a whole new level of computing that there isn’t a complete experience to yet. This is bringing a bunch of tools to to enable an existing developer ecosystem to fill out the whole thing.
posted by mrzarquon at 5:55 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think it is very expensive,

I see dumbasses around me spending 70k on a truck that can't even carry a christmas tree. I think this will sell. With two year financing its ~145 bucks a month!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:16 AM on June 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

When I think about all of the changes in public and personal life that have happened in the 15 years since Apple made it possible and socially desirable to have a tiny computer and camera in our pockets at all times, I am absolutely terrified of the consequences of one which straps to our faces.
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:16 AM on June 6, 2023

I mean, it’s so stupid looking. But whatevs, as long as it stays in your rec room or cool office or whatever. Fingers crossed that it’s never normalized for just walking around in public…It’s already a huge challenge riding across the Bloor Street bike lane so I’m really not looking forward to navigating through masses of dumb rich introverts in scuba masks, stumbling through intersections while pawing at the air.
posted by chococat at 6:17 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Seems to me it's all about early adopters, refining the next generation, more early adopters, repeat the process dozens of times and eventually this kind of thing will be pared down to a pair of regular-looking glasses. That may not happen in my lifetime, but assuming we don't kill ourselves I think it's actually inevitable.
posted by zardoz at 6:21 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Thinking about this more, as someone who used to attend WWDC / follow these things really closely, the VisionPro and Apple's talk of it is all about getting developers excited to make the ecosystem and to adopt it as a tool to build with and for. Of course this is not fully baked and there's still a ton of things to sort out.

This is the old WWDC like announcements, back when Apple wasn't just repurposing the keynote so they could stop being forced to sponsor (and ship products for) the Macworld Expo. There's a ton more indepth, under NDA sessions all week for the developers to really figure out what they can do with it.

The dedicated Vision Pro shipping now / demo / announcement day in late December or early 2024 will be where enduser consumers will start to get an idea of what folks can do with it. It could still be a flop or find a lot of niches to support itself.

I wonder what the assistive devices and tools that the eyetracking tech in the VisionPro could unlock, especially when the second and third gen VisionSE like models make it really affordable.
posted by mrzarquon at 6:27 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think it's fascinating because this is still so obviously Not Ready For Primetime and yet here Apple is just stampeding into the market. I wasn't around for Apple in the '90s... is this what Apple in the '90s felt like? Why the fuck are they releasing such a janky thing in the form factor? You have to keep the thing plugged into a battery? Is this a joke?
posted by rhymedirective at 6:35 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

There will be solid markets for both gamers and porn-viewers. What I'm curious about is what, if any, uses develop beyond those core customers? Maybe drone warfare operators, maybe forensic engineers looking at ultra high detail photos and videos of a bridge collapse?
posted by Dip Flash at 6:35 AM on June 6, 2023

Next summer I'm going to see people walking around Wal-Mart with these...
posted by Tenuki at 6:37 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I see dumbasses around me spending 70k on a truck that can't even carry a christmas tree.

But why do you need a truck for that? Strap it stump-end first on the roof of the car, go and be jolly.

But back to the subject, I'm kinda curious to try it to see how much better than the current state of the art it is. I doubt it's comfortable enough to replace a good ultra-wide monitor for work, but if it was, it wouldn't actually be such a bad deal just for that.

I'm very skeptical that it won't isolate you, and gosh that's even worse than everybody on their phone in a family setting!! Instead of looking down but being able to quickly disengage, we'd all be looking in the distance with this massive visor on our face. Not that you'll outfit the whole family with one at that price.

I wonder how it'll integrate with consoles, it's hinted that it does, but I hope it doesn't rely on compressed streams over wifi.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:40 AM on June 6, 2023

I think now that Apple has planted their flag in this space, it's no longer a pure thought experiment to imagine what kind of impact a device like this would have when it is, say, twice the speed/resolution/etc. at a quarter of the price (3-5 years, give or take?) In other words, what does the world look like when a decent amount of people around you are using one. I personally find it an incredibly depressing vision (no pun intended) of the future, one in which we're more atomized and digitally separated from each other (the clip of the dad filming his kids with the Vision Pro on was a particular bummer.) I'm a little surprised at the enthusiasm here. It just seems like a device to create loneliness. I know the counter argument is "we already use all kinds of tech to separate us from the physical world and other people and we're doing fine! Think of all the ways it connects us to people far and wide!" But I've been watching Apple announcements for years and I usually come away excited, but this year, while the scifi-loving kid in me was amazed that the future had finally arrived, the present me had a pit in my stomach thinking about the actual future that was coming.
posted by gwint at 6:44 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

What if Google Glass but people were okay with it because it's Apple?
posted by biogeo at 6:44 AM on June 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

It's for porn, isn't it?

Forget it, chavnet. It's technology.

nods to virtual Jack Nicholson, walks away
posted by kokaku at 6:44 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

> Why the fuck are they releasing such a janky thing in the form factor? You have to keep the thing plugged into a battery? Is this a joke?

There's definitely herd behavior going on in big tech. Facebook has invested like 10 billion dollars or more into VR, Microsoft has the HoloLens, so Apple probably thinks: well, we've got to get to this market too before it's completely captured. There are probably some non negligible number of people within Apple who think: but what if there's just no market for this stuff. like no real mass market? To those naysayers everyone can say that there was a chorus of opinion about the iPod and iPhone that this was a janky toy without a real market, and instead those devices made Apple the richest company on earth. Who knows. Honestly with this one I hope it fails, I don't want to have to talk to anyone in person through a lenticular lens with a horrifying uncanny valley eye projection.
posted by dis_integration at 6:46 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Fingers crossed that it’s never normalized for just walking around in public…

When AirPods were released in 2016 I remember thinking they would fail because they looked like cigarette butts sticking out of people's ears...

Seven years later and they've sold 150 million of those things.
posted by jeremias at 6:49 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Someone in the free thread commented that the price point was similar to what the original Macintosh was when it was introduced, and... it's not even that bad. The original Mac cost $2,495 in 1984 (in current dollars, that's a bit over $7K), so inflation-adjusted, that was twice as much as this thing for a computer that badly needed more RAM. That doesn't mean that I'm going to spend $3.5K on this thing, not just because of the cost but because of some of the accessibility issues; in addition to prescription lenses, I'm completely deaf in one ear and need to have a decent mono audio option. But it also looks hella better than the competition, and 2.0 will probably be both cheaper and bug-diminished.

It’s already a huge challenge riding across the Bloor Street bike lane so I’m really not looking forward to navigating through masses of dumb rich introverts in scuba masks, stumbling through intersections while pawing at the air.

I don't think that it's entirely coincidental that Apple's own video for it takes place entirely in living rooms.

Why the fuck are they releasing such a janky thing in the form factor?

Have you seen other VR headsets? "Janky" would be kind.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:52 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm a little surprised at the enthusiasm here. It just seems like a device to create loneliness

Yeah, honestly, I'm excited about the tech because I think it's really neat, and I do hope there's a viable use-case and form-factor somewhere down the line that's not so isolating. But as-is, even ignoring price, the weird isolation (and especially the eye thing, holy hell!) is a total non-starter for me.

As a laptop on the road (or on the couch, I guess)? Pretty okay, actually. Dad cooking dinner and taking creepy pictures of the family? Woof.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:52 AM on June 6, 2023

here Apple is just stampeding into the market.

They aren't shipping this tomorrow. They're shipping this next year. They aren't putting up billboards telling people to buy it now.

WWDC is a tech event and people who make money writing software / building hardware that works with Apple products (or whose jobs are based around Apple hardware) are attending it. It is a week long session of developer training, coding, seminars on the new APIs and tools that have just been released, something Apple's been big on because they're not a "develop in the public" kind of company.

In the 90s and 00s WWDC was almost entirely just people who were devs and working on Apple things (or IT consultants like myself) attending to learn about what was coming soon and how to work with it. It wasn't a huge press thing. This is like the 2005 WWDC where Apple drops the PowerPC chip and demoed buggy builds of OS X on Intel with their Rosetta (v2) emulation in a generic OEM case with an intel processor in it. Apple needed to get developers onboard for it to be successful, so they announced it.

I've been hearing mention of this (along with Apple's car) in the rumormill for years, but this sounds like it was an even tough decision internally for Apple to acknowledge they just had to ship it and see if it works, because for it to succeed it needs an ecosystem and not something that can emerge fully baked into the market. The technology just isn't all there yet and the ecosystem to justify isn't either. The first iPhones couldn't get phone calls while you were surfing the web, which was all you could do because you couldn't install apps on them on either. But they had enough to prove what they were doing and how they were doing it was the way to go, and they moved on it and iterated.

I'm in that mindset while looking at the VisionPro - I want to see what gen2 and gen3 look like.

There's an entirely different dystopian rant about the future where that is how everyone interacts, but following the industry and the tech cycles alone I've always found fascinating.
posted by mrzarquon at 6:53 AM on June 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

God I can't wait for the first horror movie making fun of these
posted by thecaddy at 6:55 AM on June 6, 2023

but jesus if i ever take this out to record a 3d movie of my wife please just end it all

Calling it here: a year or two from now, iPhone 17 ProVRMax++ will have an extra camera/LIDAR assembly at the bottom of the phone. Holding it horizontally puts the two cameras exactly where most human pupils are. Add some more range sensing and ML in software and you'll use the iPhone as your 3D camera.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:57 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Dad cooking dinner and taking creepy pictures of the family? Woof.

I mean I wouldn't actually mind some less features but less intrusive AR glassses with eye tracking and a cool interface, just to track recipes, setup multiple timers and track the wireless thermometer.... all stuff I can do on my phone but it's a hassle of constant hand washing. BUT.... I don't really need this, and it would still be isolating.

What might be nice is familly/friend/group integration where you share apps and their location in space so that if you're cooking with others, or some other common activity you're not the only one who can see things. Still unecessary.

And I'm still skeptical and "interacting with the room" like virtual object placement, this always spectacularly fail for any empty-box type room.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:59 AM on June 6, 2023

This is definitely the next big thing and I can't wait to use it to browse web3 in my self-driving car.
posted by lkc at 6:59 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm in that mindset while looking at the VisionPro - I want to see what gen2 and gen3 look like

Spoiler alert: they will be released at a significantly lower price point. Base model Apple Watches are now approximately half the dollar value that they were at release and that's before accounting for inflation.

This is how Apple always does things. The initial release is utopian and builds hype. The second and third generations are about mass adoption.
posted by mightygodking at 7:00 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, I can see the porn use cases for this. AR modes that let you see the people around you "naked" or with "enhanced" bodies. Possibly making everyone around you anime characters. Snapchat filters for everyone as you walk around. There's all sorts of possibilities.
posted by Spike Glee at 7:03 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

this product is a credible effort to address the longstanding human issues with HMDs . . cables, weight/ergonomics, prescription lenses, can't see your hands for typing/can't see your feet for moving about, scene rendering latency (from the video card), pixellation, sensor jitter/drift, plus also relevant APIs, the secret sauce that's kept Apple in business these past 40 years after the Apple II.

the Apple Card has installment pricing ($300/mo for a year) so this will be 'affordable' for most tech nerds with access to credit from Goldman Sachs & that much discretionary income.

any solution is only as strong as its weakest link and like the 2007 iPhone this effort tries to coalesce and productize the strongest set of technologies it can into a sellable offering.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:09 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

the past is prologue

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

posted by kokaku at 7:09 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

The best fictional depiction of AR I've seen is Dennou Coil (recently on Netflix in the USA). It shows people just wearing normal glasses, a la Google Glass. Something that unobtrusive would absolutely be worth it to me as a shopkeeper to hover people's names above their head and remind me of their past purchases, for instance. My customers all remember me, but I'm bad at tracking hundreds of people who come through maybe once every few months. I understand how it's a big step on the slippery slope of privacy intrusion, but it's also possible to see a use case as just a memory aid for normal people.

I kind of really hope it fails, because it's the sort of technology that's so tempting you can see it really catching on, but it makes the evils of social media look like kid stuff.
posted by rikschell at 7:09 AM on June 6, 2023

>I can't wait to use it to browse web3 in my self-driving car.

watching movies & consuming media is actually an interesting use case for my cybertruck w/ FSD.

A 10' screen w/ 4k projector is hard to fit in an RV . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:16 AM on June 6, 2023

Have you seen other VR headsets? "Janky" would be kind.

Yeah, I'd love to see the profile of this compared to other headsets. Like I'm sure it's a lot of very flattering product promo shots, but if it really is just ski goggle sized and not "you got a box hanging off your face, son" sized like current headsets, that itself is a big step forward in the optical path, which is what I believe is why current headsets are so oversize. And I'll be curious what the fitting process is like - there's an implication that both the face mask and the headband are relatively fit-to-wearer and not just one size fits all like the current market. That's ultimately what soured me on both my PSVR headset and my WMR headsets - if I had them in the right spot on my head for the best visual alignment, they were pinching off my nose and made me feel like I was suffocating. Bleh. I mean, in addition to the screaming nausea and hot box on my face problems.
posted by Kyol at 7:18 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

> watching movies & consuming media is actually an interesting use case for my cybertruck w/ FSD.

You just introduced the horrible reality that people are GOING to wear this while driving since it has passthrough. I give it 12 months before we see videos of some guy in a tesla wearing the vision pro on the 101
posted by dis_integration at 7:21 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

so my rule of thumb with metafilter comments is that i’ll make a joke if I can expect that 2% of the audience will get it. as such:

the best thing about this is that since your eyes are displayed on a screen, sinister futuristic super-psychologists can’t intuit your thoughts and desires by examining your facial expressions.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:21 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

My favorite part of that Introducing Vision video was the "so conversation is more natural" section featuring goggle woman gesturing at floating heads in her home office. So natural.

Is there a name for the perfect people in the Apple ads? They're deep in the uncanny valley IMO.
posted by UN at 7:23 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's for porn, isn't it?

I mean, VR porn has been a thing for years now.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:38 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Apple announces their VR glasses; Apple's stock price falls and no one can see a use case. If history is any guide, that means we will all be wearing one in five years. But seriously, those city walk-thru videos will be amazing in these, and not to mention the Pokemon Go++!
posted by jabah at 7:45 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think the most obvious use case is in an open concept hot-desk office, in the same way noise-cancelling headphones are great for open offices. For everyone else, just buy a bigger/another monitor.
posted by sfred at 7:46 AM on June 6, 2023

I'm sixty-three so whether I feel a need/want for this kind of thing doesn't really matter from a market (or anything else really) perspective. My generational cohort will not be the ones who decide what/if the future of so called VR (Mixed Reality* now, I guess) shall be.

Fifteen to thirty year olds on the other hand. They're the ones invested in the future as that's where they're going to be living the bulk of their lives.

So to them, I ask, well, what do you think?


* memo to marketing types: get "reality" out of the branding asap, folks already have enough of that shit in their lives as is.
posted by philip-random at 7:51 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

People pay $15,000 for a jet ski. This thing will move massive units.

Between voice and gesture recognition and noise cancelation this could be the final blow for the conventional desk. Just issue one of these and a recliner with a cupholder with mandatory treadmill breaks every 90 minutes.

MJD
posted by MattD at 7:55 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: masses of dumb rich introverts in scuba masks, stumbling through intersections while pawing at the air.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:06 AM on June 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

Why aren't you helping, bombastic lowercase pronouncements?
posted by flabdablet at 8:10 AM on June 6, 2023

Apple's stock price falls and no one can see a use case.

The stock fell 0.15% yesterday. I'm not taking any position here but that's background noise to a $2.8T company.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:10 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Just issue one of these and a recliner with a cupholder with mandatory treadmill breaks every 90 minutes.

Cut a deal with Peloton to make the recliners and they won't even ask for the breaks. Just strap them into their workstations and tell them it's healthy!
posted by flabdablet at 8:14 AM on June 6, 2023

It just seems like a device to create loneliness.

This is my main reaction, too.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:15 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not necessarily a loneliness trap, in my opinion. There are plenty of us who don't go out to events for whatever reason, or who want to attend events that happen far away.

I would love to "attend" a Taylor Swift concert through these, without having to wait two hours to get out of the parking lot after the show. (Reducing the video on the shrieking would be sweet, too.)

I would love to be able to once again have the experience of Google Cardboard plus Google Earth, ten years ago: I want to go for a walk but far away! (I have a couple sets of Google Cardboard downstairs, and it's the only thing I ever liked to do with them.)

I would attend more weddings and graduations and corporate events that are streamed from across the country, assuming that the video & audio are clear enough.

And it would be super cool if sports stadiums could send you real-time statistics and player info as you watched a game with these on (either at home on in-person).
posted by wenestvedt at 8:18 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's for porn, isn't it?

I mean, VR porn has been a thing for years now.

Okay, I guess I’ll be the first to admit this: I dropped $1500 on the Vive Pro 2 - the best consumer display out there by far until this is released - for a VR contract last summer and then used it a bunch to play Elite Dangerous VR as God intended. I also, out of morbid curiosity, decided to check out VR porn…

My friends, there is a shocking paucity of non-fetish content. There is a much, much greater lack of any high-res (think 1080P over 720P) content. Like, hit up the big site that actually filters their content following a very public clash with the credit card companies, filter for VR, high-resolution 180 degree, high production value, heteronormative, conventionally attractive talent, non-fetish and you’re down to (IIRC) …5. Like literally 5 high quality clips on the biggest site targeting the biggest demographic.

So, no, if you don’t pay for it (like 98% of the human race) the content is simply not there.

VR at the moment means having a hot, heavy screen clamped to your face and that is the precise opposite of hot and heavy sensations in better contexts. “Extremely unsatisfactory” is being generous. Maybe Apple solves the subjective sensory part but I’m betting they haven’t, and I don’t see this ushering in a revolution in erotic content availability anytime soon. YMMV.
posted by Ryvar at 8:18 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

The other mass use case will be industrial/ medical training - if you can show a mechanic how to troubleshoot fixing a complete machine part remotely without having to send it in, or train someone on a lifelike model as if they’re there, that’s a huge deal. Right now there are lots of rarely-happens-but-you-have-to-know-it applications in all kinds of industries where companies fly people across the country for training - or cities can’t get experts at all. The price is nothing if this can be a substitute for that.
posted by Mchelly at 8:28 AM on June 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

I remain incredibly skeptical of AR and VR. The technology is there, but the use case for the average person still isn't. It's a really cool tech demo. If there's a test unit at my local Apple Store, I'd give it a try, but I doubt it's going to work for me—and for a lot of other people, and here's why: non-stereoscopic vision.

See, my left eye isn't for looking out of, it's just for looking. It works, mostly, but it's misaligned, so my brain sees primarily out of my right eye. I have extremely poor depth perception because of this, and I know I am far from the only one with this sort of visual disability.

Unless AR and VR sort that sort of thing out, it's going to be a problem. And even if they do, I still doubt it'll get mainstream acceptance as a platform for ordinary users.
posted by SansPoint at 8:29 AM on June 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also: for me this was dead on arrival the moment I heard they expected to drive a 23 Megapixel display with a GPU on the display unit itself. Even factoring in Apple fabbing custom chips and controlling the entire vertical software stack, that is not a viable proposition for gaming in the Year of our Lord, 2023, unless they are making use of alternative physics and just outright ignoring thermodynamics.

AR at those resolutions? Sure, I’ll buy that given the advantages they have and their patent willingness to plow through with sheer muscle, cost be damned. Gaming VR at 4k per eye on a display-mounted GPU? Absolutely not in this decade, unless they’re rendering to a massively reduced resolution backbuffer and upscaling to an extent that will look like total shit.

Apple regularly magicians UX and I’ll give them a lot of benefit of the doubt there, but they have not violated physics, bottled it, and announced they are selling it for $3500.
posted by Ryvar at 8:33 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wake me up when somebody sells an AI that will wear the goggles and play the games for me so I don't have to.
posted by flabdablet at 8:35 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's for porn, isn't it?

Yes, but the porn is an interactive AI recreation of Steve Jobs ranting about being insanely great and endlessly berating you about your complete lack of vision while he's constantly stomping around a sprawling modernist kitchen juicing things and giving himself turmeric enemas.

God I can't wait for the first horror movie making fun of these

The horror movie is an interactive AI recreation of Steve Jobs ranting about being insanely great and endlessly berating you about your complete lack of vision while he's constantly stomping around a sprawling modernist kitchen juicing things and giving himself turmeric enemas.
posted by loquacious at 8:47 AM on June 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

It just seems like a device to create loneliness. I know the counter argument is "we already use all kinds of tech to separate us from the physical world and other people and we're doing fine! Think of all the ways it connects us to people far and wide!"

though my initial reaction is yeah, loneliness. My next thought is -- there's a profound difference between loneliness and solitude. For instance, solitude is the perfect place to read a really good book. I suppose my inner Marshal Mcluhan sees using this tech as very reflective of honing in for a good read. You shut out all distractions. You immerse yourself in ... whatever it is.

The huge difference, of course, is that with the fiction interface is words and only words -- your mind's eye does all the actual conjuring. Here we seem to be shoving the mind's eye off into the anachronism drawer. I wonder where this gets us. The brain does like to conjure. Mine does anyway.
posted by philip-random at 8:47 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The other mass use case will be industrial/ medical training - if you can show a mechanic how to troubleshoot fixing a complete machine part remotely without having to send it in, or train someone on a lifelike model as if they’re there, that’s a huge deal.

And you create a great training set for robo-mechanics by requiring a feedback loop to Apple.

(I'd say robo-surgeons too, but I suspect the rich will have some thoughts about trying to automate one of "The Professions".)
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 8:48 AM on June 6, 2023

Echoing the comments above on the loneliness vibe. I wonder if it's my age, which is "old as dirt". The demos in particular felt incredibly lonely to me. All those achingly beautiful people in their perfect, clutter-free, mid-century modern, round-cornered boxes (literally!) living what I guess is the Apple-approved life of the future -- they all seemed so terribly alone, even in the scenes where Apple was trying to show them making "connections."

There is a very strong chance that this is just me, and that it comes, in some large part, from my view that my teenagers' devotion to their Apple devices has already contributed to a decline in their social presence. A bunch of the other announcements and demos focused on how Apple is "improving" AirPods so you don't have to take them out, essentially, ever, including when people are trying to have a conversation with you face to face. But for me, there was something about the production of the Vision demos themselves -- particularly the person watching a movie alone at home with the popcorn, and the guy recording his child's birthday with the goggles strapped on -- that left me with a strong feeling of loss.

I'm sure they will sell a quadrillion of them once the price comes down, and I will sit here with the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
posted by The Bellman at 8:49 AM on June 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

I think it's fascinating because this is still so obviously Not Ready For Primetime and yet here Apple is just stampeding into the market.

This is not at all atypical for Apple! The original MacBook Air, and then the "untitled" super-skinny 12" MacBook, were both examples of this from the semi-recent past. The Apple Watch Edition—you know, the one that debuted at $10,000—was a similar launch.

Generally speaking, Apple's product philosophy has been that the hardware needs to be exactly what it ought to be, in terms of form factor and general usage expectations, and the software needs to be... ballpark. The Apple Watch originally launched with a bunch of "intimate communication" technologies as one of its main three features; two years later, those were all entirely removed from the platform. The iPhone debuted without an App Store, famously, and its operating system was criticized for years for being lackluster.

What's fascinating to me about the Vision Pro unveiling is that it doesn't have a specific use case. It's closer to the iPad in that regard, which premiered with only one new app (for ebooks, which wasn't exactly thrilling). What Apple's debuting is the platform and the computing medium, rather than the product itself; the hardware stuff that matters is the emphasis on remaining at least somewhat present in the world around you, detaching digital interfaces from "screens," and replacing the flat "desktop" with a spatial environment for working. They hinted at some of the implications—most prominently by throwing a weird 3D model out there without really explaining what it would be used for—but this wasn't a pitch to consumers so much as it was a developer pitch. Here's their new fun engaging playground—go wild.

One thing that I found interesting about the keynote was that they mentioned augmented reality quite a view times, but didn't use the phrase "virtual reality" once. Their Environments toggle, which activates the VR-esque mode, was posited more as the visual equivalent of sound-canceling headphones—and even there, they emphasized that people nearby you, or people who talk to you, will "break through" into your bubble. But the default mode is: not drowning anything out. The world around you presented as-is, with a layer of digital interface added on top.

That, to me, is significant. So, too, is the fact that Apple was demoing desktop applications, for the most part. This isn't Google Glass, in the sense that Google Glass wanted to project a continuous layer of data on top of the world; Vision Pro is more conspicuously being positioned as a computer, for computer-y kinds of needs. It's less like Oculus or Google Glass than it's like... a laptop. But a more fluid, expansive device than a laptop is.

At $3,500, it'll be pretty niche—but not so niche that it'll keep people from getting them. There'll be plenty of time for people to work out what kinds of spatial real-world computing (or digital experiences) they might find compelling, at which point Apple will have improved the hardware and dropped the price. (They'll have also introduced the iPhone's 3D camera, which I'd put hard money on coming out either next year or later this year; the awkwardness of that "dad wearing goggles at kid's birthday" demo was clearly Apple trying not to reveal new products in advance.)

If this thing can be powerful enough to replace laptops—and it will be—I could definitely see this being really popular with people who don't have strong needs for laptops at all. This potentially makes for a much better movie-watching experience than a laptop, and a much better sit-on-airplane experience too. And while this clearly isn't about to replace real life—and I'm not sure Apple showed a single instance of two people using these headsets in the same room together?—I'd much rather take Zoom-esque calls on a thing like this than on a laptop.

I don't think it's the next iPhone, but I doubt that Apple wants it to be! And Apple certainly doesn't need it to be. They make a stupid amount of money on wearables (watches, headphones) and a decent amount of money on smarthome things like HomePods and Apple TVs; this feels like it exists in the space between those two categories, but with a computer interface attached. Maybe it winds up being another iPad in the sense of being a lush, enjoyable tool without one specific use case that means everybody needs to buy it, but that's okay.

I think my take was basically that it looks super neat and that I'm going to love seeing how Apple handled the UI for this. Alan Dye seems to hate actual Macs, but he does amazing work on every other platform, and from the sounds of the reviews, this thing's software does a lot of delightful little things.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:00 AM on June 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

Maybe it winds up being another iPad in the sense of being a lush, enjoyable tool without one specific use case that means everybody needs to buy it, but that's okay.

That was my take on it too. I mean, not even 20 minutes prior they announced an update to Mac Studio, a weird duck of a computer that not as many people want but it's going to be highly useful to a specific audience.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:04 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also, out of morbid curiosity, decided to check out VR porn…

My friends, there is a shocking paucity of non-fetish content.

Does that imply that there is fetish content? Asking for a, er, online acquaintance.

(In all seriousness, it sometimes seems that there tends to be a higher proportion of kinkier content in non-live-actor-filmed porn--art, comics, etc.--because there are fewer people willing to film it.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:04 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Regarding loneliness: see I can absolutely already see this worn by friendly point of sales people looking at you through their augmented goggles helpful to their ability to separate you from exactly the largest amount of cash you can realistically expend in their presence. Not sure I will actually see it on people the subway but definitely on the runway.
posted by abulafa at 9:04 AM on June 6, 2023

As for loneliness...

Every Gen Z friend of mine has an insane amount of online connections. Even the ones who are outright club-and-party extraverts belong to Discord servers, do livestreams, play Jackbox and D&D over Zoom, and all that stuff. (My millennial friends are a bit more evenly split.)

I used Neopets at 11 and posted on message boards when I was 13, and Facebook became omnipresent partway through my time in college. For me, the divide between IRL and digital connection always feels like... well, a divide. But then, phones will always feel slightly artificial to me, because I didn't have them as a kid. That's not true for the people I know whose first computers were iPhones and Androids, and who got their first smartphone when they were between 6-10. For them, this has always been how people stay connected. The digital tissue of their lives expands and contracts, vanishing more when they're in person and strengthening as they pull apart, but they don't treat it like the artificial limb that I do. It's just one of many ways they stay in touch.

My younger sister used to live three doors down from me in Philadelphia, and then moved about a mile away, before shunting halfway across the country during early COVID. I've played D&D games with her and her wife, we've shared Discord/Minecraft servers with our mutual friends, and one of the things I find fascinating is how that digital/physical divide just stops existing after a while. We gathered together in a room and played Among Us IRL on the day before her wedding; we piped one remote friend in via Discord chat, and they played too. Our D&D games will sometimes consist of different "pods" of people, all playing together, IRL when possible, online if not. I just came back from a week's vacation with my family, and even my mom shares memes at the dinner table now. Each of us checking Twitter or Reddit or what-have-you doesn't feel like disconnect—it feels almost like watching a movie together, but with the added social aspect of us sharing with one another, or remembering something that we want to share and flipping around online trying to find it.

I'm not sure how that applies to people wearing goggles in a room. I will say that, while I've enjoyed Oculus and even PSVR quite a bit and have even enjoyed sharing it with friends, it feels weird to have one person visually disconnected from everybody else in the room; Visual Pro might have solved that issue, and it's neat! But what will the "togetherness" part feel like? Who knows. Maybe it's a bunch of people playing a board game IRL, only it's visually augmented somehow, or the game has digital components that allow it to be way more complex. Maybe it's sharing a game across a digital divide, with everybody staring at copies of the same board. Maybe it's a fusion of the two. Maybe it's neither.

But I'm not immediately sure that "a bunch of people wearing goggles together" feels inherently more disconnected than "a bunch of people sitting next to one another in a dark movie theater," or "a bunch of people holding video game controllers next to one another." Our parents used to think that, when my sister and I played games, we were socially disconnected from each other, because it looked so different from the social experiences that they were familiar with. Now my sister and her wife keep in touch with all of their friends through gaming, half of the people I've dated in the last decade have played something online with me, and entire cultures exist around the bonds people make when they play. I'm not saying that that will definitely happen with something like the Visual Pro—it depends on what we collectively come up with. But the fact that, when I think about doing stuff like that, my reaction is "oh that's neat!!" rather than "aw FUCK no," makes me think that there'll probably be something. Even if it's more League of Legends-sized, or even Dwarf Fortress-sized, and not flat-out Minecraft or Fortnite or Pokemon Go.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:17 AM on June 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

I think it's a Lisa. A super-expensive look at a future that isn't quite here yet.

Noting beats having a limited product on the market that can inform what you're doing as you design the Mac.
posted by bonehead at 9:23 AM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Have you seen other VR headsets? "Janky" would be kind.

That's pretty much my point! If this is the best Apple can do... yeesh.
posted by rhymedirective at 9:28 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

What I really want is a product like this, with a better FOV + Zbrush.
posted by Tenuki at 9:28 AM on June 6, 2023

I don't think we're going to see public use because every nerd on earth will mutter "Chilidogs, gotta go fast" as folks wearing them walk by.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:29 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Someone above mentioned good ol’ Marshall McLuhan… Media… In one of the AI threads churning away here on MF, there has been a discussion about color and that reality, whatever it might be, is mediated through our senses and that color is just subjective. This device is one huge mediator of both reality and ourselves. If I’m wearing one, a person looking at me sees a movie simulating my eyes. If I go on FaceTime, other people see an animated image of me, while I see a video of them, unless they have one on too so I just see their animated image. (Do they have legs?) Since this is strapped to your face, the boundary between internal and external becomes blurred. Loneliness? Right now, zoom meetings and FaceTime are videos of actual people, though backgrounds are usually fake. But with this, you sit alone in a room, watching cartoons of other people. The pressure of the HMD on your face presses you in emphasizing both the unreality of this world you are viewing and if you are self-aware the unreality of the presentation of yourself to them.

The iPhone became an electronic vacuum sucking people in to a self-alienating simulation of human social interactions. Sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend at the table, the only mediation is in each of our heads. This device is just stage n in the progress of wrapping ourselves up into electronic cocoons, heavily mediated away from actual reality. Marx said that we are alienated from the product of our labor. Capitalism is extending this alienation now to be from life itself. As much as I have been involved with electronics and computers since the 70’s (yeah, I’m old denigrate away), I’m having more and more difficulty getting excited about it because instead of being a tool, an extension of our human abilities (McLuhan again) it is becoming a blindfold and handcuffs locking us into ourselves, fed by what they want us to see.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:29 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

how Apple is "improving" AirPods so you don't have to take them out, essentially, ever, including when people are trying to have a conversation with you face to face

Kinda curious then if you also object to hearing aids, because that’s one of the features they already have, and which I use AirPod Pro 2 for. The transparency mode, plus a custom audiogram file, is exceptionally handy for minor impairments.

I apologize if my minor disability has made you uncomfortable. Would it help if I identified myself by, I dunno, wearing a label?
posted by aramaic at 9:33 AM on June 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

> I’m having more and more difficulty getting excited about it because instead of being a tool, an extension of our human abilities (McLuhan again) it is becoming a blindfold and handcuffs locking us into ourselves, fed by what they want us to see.

We should never forget that in Snow Crash the Metaverse was a cautionary tale, it was a damn dystopia. The masters of the universe read that book and thought: but what if it wasn't? Because I guess they're too insane to realize that of course it is.
posted by dis_integration at 9:35 AM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

If someone crosses a busy road while wearing one of these and gets hit by a self driving car who do we sue?
posted by Lanark at 9:45 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is something sort of viscerally claustrophobic to me about strapping a screen and a camera to my head and looking out at the world that way.

I say this as someone who spends a great deal of time on screens- the prospect of slipping a screen in between my eyes and reality itself gives me the willies.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:59 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

If someone crosses a busy road while wearing one of these and gets hit by a self driving car who do we sue?

Oh, easy: sue whoever installed the bit of code that erased the car from the victim's perceptual field.

(But all witnesses can attest that s/he walked right into the car's path, so there might not even be any investigation.)
posted by nobody at 10:10 AM on June 6, 2023

in re the wearing glasses thing, couldn't the software be adjusted to show the images on screen corrected as if through a prescription lens? I mean, I know next to nothing about optics but this seems like something that could be done "from the other side" as it were.
posted by chavenet at 10:13 AM on June 6, 2023

Kinda curious then if you also object to hearing aids, because that’s one of the features they already have, and which I use AirPod Pro 2 for. The transparency mode, plus a custom audiogram file, is exceptionally handy for minor impairments.

I apologize if my minor disability has made you uncomfortable.

Please don't do this. I'm had a whole response typed, but I deleted it and I'm going to step away now.
posted by The Bellman at 10:15 AM on June 6, 2023 [16 favorites]

Does that imply that there is fetish content?

Advanced Search on the big site allows two inclusion and ten exclusion categories when filtering. So… maybe? Ten exclusions is a lot to distribute across, though. Other sites do not take pruning underage/nonconsensual/revenge content seriously, and that matters to me, so I didn’t go beyond a quick confirmatory search this was typical at a few other big ones, but: confirmed.

The whole experience was just zero out of ten, would not bother ever again. And if you’ve lost the freshly-divorced tech enthusiast whose tastes run “surprisingly basic” according to several partners (“disappointingly basic” for a few), well… I’ve got a notion why there’s so little content overall.

Like maybe it just sucks because it’s a bad idea.

couldn't the software be adjusted to show the images on screen corrected as if through a prescription lens?

Optics are calibrated specifically to force your eyes to focus as if the distances were real world because the alternative is extremely likely to induce or significantly worsen myopia in a substantial portion of frequent users. That’s what we were told while developing for the pre-alpha original Vive, at least.
posted by Ryvar at 10:17 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wearing glasses… I am extremely myopic, nearsighted. If I hold up my iPad with MF on it, takeoff my glasses, it’s in focus about 3.5 inches from my face. Move it .5 inches either way, it’s blurry or too close to see clearly. I wear my computer glasses, single vision, set for a display a few feet from my face. Otherwise I wear progressive lenses, such as using my iPad or looking at reality, but still have to move them up and down my nose depending how far away things are I’m looking at. So, do they fit me for optical inserts to adjust things for my vision at the Apple store, or do I have to go to an optometrist to get fitted? I have little faith that I could actually use this thing. My two pair of glasses are custom made for me, off the shelf Zeiss lenses, in a very inflexible mechanical device? Having worn glasses since the third grade, and having progressively deteriorating vision, my knowledge of optics is limited to my experience, which has become rockier with age. But maybe you youngin’s can use this. Us old folks are probably stuck with eyeglasses corrected reality.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:33 AM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have optical inserts for my Quest and it works fine. My spouse and I don't have the same prescription but we share the lenses and it's close enough. The 3-D effect relies on parallax so as long as you can focus well enough to resolve the pixels it'll be OK. You don't need progressive lenses.

As I sit here with my temporary disabled arm due to a dumb accident I need one of these right now. We're all getting older and it's harder to use keyboards and screens, and I love to just zone out with 10 different virtual windows for a while. And you can eat while wearing these! I love how they showed off that feature in the demo.

The current Meta devices are a lost opportunity. They are just Android tablets strapped to your face. I mean they ask you for permissions to access your files (?) whenever you start an app. Half of the time I can't even connect to my friends to play a game. Their stack sucks and it's getting worse, it's pretty bad when the third party games are better than your OS.

Apple owns their whole stack from silicon on up and I would trust them to make a serious device where the Quest is just a child's toy. I think they're doing the right thing by taking their time.
posted by credulous at 10:56 AM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

in re the wearing glasses thing, couldn't the software be adjusted to show the images on screen corrected as if through a prescription lens? I mean, I know next to nothing about optics but this seems like something that could be done "from the other side" as it were.

As I understand it the image is "projected" through the lenses at a comfortable viewing distance and not the 2 inches off your eyeball that it physically is to prevent eyestrain. It might be possible to correct through a physical adjustment, but at that point you may as well drop in prescription lenses and go through the whole glasses doffing and donning problem whenever you put on your headset.

As someone who just hit the age where they need bifocals, I'm curious which correction I'd need (I assume whatever correction I have for the virtual projected distance) and how well the presence cameras focuses. Like, could it read the fine print on medicine boxes, even if I couldn't at that prescription, or does it have a minimum focal distance and resolution that's good enough for keeping you from walking into the coffee table, but don't try and read Finnegan's Wake through them either.

But that starts leading down the "oh wouldn't that be nice" accessibility nods - could software use the camera array to zoom in on the real world so you can blow up things that are too small to read, like the iOS Magnifier app does? Could you use it to do realtime colorblindness correction? Stuff like that makes me interested in it more than anything else. Because right, as much as Apple is pushing Metal and their iGPU capabilities, on a practical level it's still roughly competitive with what, the current Ryzen iGPUs for pixel pushing? It's better for acceleration (compression and etc) duties, but it's far from going toe to toe with a 4090, and from what I understand even relatively high end GPUs struggle to keep up with even the QHD screens in most PC headsets at acceptable (non-barfy) framerates.
posted by Kyol at 10:59 AM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

> A 10' screen w/ 4k projector is hard to fit in an RV . . .

Total derail, but with the affordability of 4k projectors these days, it's easy just to hang a sheet (or even a proper screen) off the side of the RV to have an outdoor movie night in the woods. But with a 4k short throw projector, you can hang it off the ceiling inside and get a picture that fills the inside wall.

I bet you could fit a 10' screen on the front wall of the back bedroom.
posted by fragmede at 12:14 PM on June 6, 2023

I'm nearsighted and as I've gotten older I've had to start taking my glasses off to read. I use the oculus without a a prescription or glasses.
posted by interogative mood at 12:20 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

So, I just went to their product page for it, and one of the sections is titled, "Free your desktop. And your apps will follow." which is kind of clever.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:41 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Apple Made More Money on Games Than Xbox, Sony, Nintendo and Activision Combined in 2019

Yeah. Wow. Apple collects 30% tax (the irony) on every game on the app store. Devs are getting screwed hard. 30 cents for every dollar, it's a swindle. Apple doesn't need to make games, that's too hard, they just need to collect the rent.

Oh but they really fucked up this time. Gamers don't want this thing, and gaming is the only thing VR is good for. But Apple hasn't supported OpenGL since 2014. Almost 10 fucking years! There's no way to use your fancy graphics card with this - that is a deal breaker. No way sir.

You may think the M2 can do pretty graphics, but it's a dinosaur compared to modern enthusiast kit. The gamers with the money for this won't accept 2014 quality. It's a joke.
posted by adept256 at 12:57 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Okay, ran the numbers over lunch because my performance misgivings above were pretty serious:

An RTX 3080 (8704 CUDA cores, $800 despite being last gen tech) which is a good Covid-era baseline (also what I have) will just barely cover the usual VR-enabled games on the Vive Pro 2’s 12 Mpixel display at an acceptable FPS (>90, and FPS directly correlates to latency = absolutely critical for VR, especially those susceptible to motion sickness). I can vouch for Elite Dangerous and Half-Life: Alyx in particular.

To achieve matching performance on a 23Mpixel display your options are the 4080 Ti (14,080 CUDA cores, $1360) or the 4090 (16,384 CUDA cores, $1790). Both are higher frequency (2.2GHz vs 1.45) but perfect 100% utilization isn’t a thing so you need slightly more than double the raw fragment shader throughput/fillrate (abbreviated as fillrate hereafter).

FWIW AMD’s absolute best (7900-XTX) clocks in at $1000 for a 30% real world benchmark average over the 3080, and under ideal conditions 66% of a 4090’s performance.

For Apple we have to use synthetic benchmarks since direct comparison is impossible but a latest gen M2 Max shows just slightly over half the throughput of a 3080. That’s their top performer with current draw/heat generated cautions thrown to the wind. Maybe they’ll pass a minor miracle and achieve M2 Max parity in a wearable form factor by launch, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Like I said above: short of alternative physics and outright violating thermodynamics (current draw vs heat dissipation), Apple is looking at twice the fillrate reqs with at best half the fillrate, unless the game in question supports rendering to a lowres backbuffer and upscaling - which at these kind of performance gaps is going to look fucking terrible. As in palpably unacceptable for the mass market bad.

AR is a much, much easier job for the hardware. 4K video’s a pain but very amenable to bespoke hardware solutions in a way games are decidedly not. Assuming the demo is actually representative there’s some deeply impressive black magic fuckery with environmental contextual awareness (the hand tracking in particular is jaw-dropping), but it’s not a full-on “we have X pixels to push through Y vector math pipelines at least 90 times every second, minimum” continuous near-redlining the available hardware at all times proposition.

I don’t see any kind of viable path for rendering at anything approaching native display resolution, even with perfectly optimized custom binaries and control of the full vertical hardware/software stack. The numbers look more like 25% native and 2x2 block upscaling. Hello Games are super careful with their reputation ever since the NMS launch, and I take their involvement seriously, but gaming on this? There’s a reason the current HMDs aren’t attempting 4K per eye, and it’s because nobody has the raw GPU in a desktop tower without dropping nearly two grand on that component alone.
posted by Ryvar at 1:18 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Unless I'm missing something, Apple's not claiming that they can render Elite: Dangerous or other modern AAA PC games at full resolution and framerate. Games and other VR/AR experiences have vastly different rendering costs depending on the complexity of the scenes and the rendering pipeline; even my old gaming PC was able to run Job Simulator just fine in VR, and it wasn't any less fun because it wasn't photorealistic.

Even the Quest headsets are running games perfectly fine on much less powerful hardware than an M2 chip, although they aren't as "pretty" as the most graphically-intensive AAA PC games. I'm sure Apple's aiming for a middle ground in terms of shiny graphical realism, and I'm betting it'll work just fine for them, considering the graphics quality possible on current iOS devices.
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 1:34 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Your first point: you’re missing that they’re claiming No Man’s Sky at launch, which is very much a AAA fullscreen PC FPS and space dogfight sim, with VR support since 2019. Despite its age it has received massive continuous updates and fully pushes the performance envelope. As part of their all-procedural-everything approach they offload large amounts of planetary voxel mesh solving to the GPU as well, which only increases the load.

They announced a Mac port last week, so they’re serious about this.

To your latter point: what percentage of your field of view do iOS devices occupy? What is the lower bound on acceptable frame rate? Same questions again but for VR.

Answer: at least three times higher for both and probably well over that for FOV.
posted by Ryvar at 1:53 PM on June 6, 2023

Regarding the thought that it is a device to create loneliness, I kind of look at it the other way. There are a lot of lonely, isolated people in the world. I think this could be life changing for them.
posted by spilon at 1:58 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh but they really fucked up this time. Gamers don't want this thing, and gaming is the only thing VR is good for.

If you think they made this thing for gaming, you badly misread the room. The entire reveal was 30 minutes of text and subtext making it clear that, sure you can play some games on this, but that's not what it's all about.
posted by BlueDuke at 1:58 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ski meme accounts already asking if you wear Apple Vision with the straps over or under your ski helmet. I mean it is one place where the majority of people are wearing large goggles, and spending thousands of dollars on equipment/passes for the experience is common. I predict I will see at least one in the Park City lift lines in the 23/24 season. Not sure what the battery life at negative temperatures will be.....
posted by inflatablekiwi at 2:05 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Something that unobtrusive would absolutely be worth it to me as a shopkeeper to hover people's names above

That is also my vote for an AR killer app, although more general because I forget everyone’s name.

I’m not sure where this loneliness thing is coming from. People with earbuds in and staring at their iPhones are not particularly connected to what is going on around them. And it appears to provide some marginal improvements to online communication.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:05 PM on June 6, 2023

Oh and, as always, Ben Thompson has a thought-provoking take:
posted by BlueDuke at 2:06 PM on June 6, 2023

NMS is a pretty low tech title, should be fine.

Then again, I don't think this thing is about games, especially not VR games. VR games have proven they don't have that much appeal, and Apple just isn't that interested in games (see everything they ever did with MacOS/iOS) they just collect their fee and don't really do anything useful in that space.

They seem more interested in their version of iOS/Facetime/AR/desktop extension than in full VR. And well I'm not sure this provides enough value, it's probably more value than VR games.

Also about OGL, Metal is a fine API and will let you get good perf when used correctly. It's supper annoying for devs that it exists, since that's another complex API for a somewhat fringe platform.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 2:18 PM on June 6, 2023

I don't know anything about videogames, but Apple seems to be pretty good at fine-tuning their tech to offer the best experience. Like, other phones often seemed to have more lag, even if they had higher refresh rates. Also, they might have big efficiencies between hardware and software that could offer great performance if developers are incentivized to build for the platform.

I'm curious about the R1. It was just kind of mentioned but not really explored that much. Is it like a T2 or whatever chip is in the airpods, or is it something much more powerful. Eventually we will know.
posted by snofoam at 2:25 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Apple is looking at twice the fillrate reqs with at best half the fillrate

They have a shitload of eye tracking in the thing though, which opens the possibility of getting away with vastly cruder rendering everywhere except the relatively tiny bit of imagery that's finding its way onto your foveas.
posted by flabdablet at 4:06 PM on June 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I thought they were pretty clear that they’re leaning heavily on foveated rendering. I mean if you’ve got super high rate eye tracking, you may as well, right?

Still, absolutely, I think you aren’t going to see high end gaming on this, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same sorts of games the Quest and other standalone hardware has.
posted by Kyol at 4:38 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

But Apple hasn't supported OpenGL since 2014. Almost 10 fucking years!

As of yesterday, the only way to have OpenGL* support on Apple Silicon is to...install Linux.

*Currently 3.1, Vulkan coming along
posted by jaduncan at 5:38 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

they’re leaning heavily on foveated rendering

Yeah rereading the marketing sludge some kind foveated/localized dynamic resolution appears to be the plan. Not what I’m used to but I recall nascent/experimental support for a similar approach in the more recent HTC dev tools (Google says as a nVidia 3000 series-only plugin which sounds right).

After some digging it looks like Apple has actually been building towards this for a while with some DLSS/FSR 2-style techniques.

Huge “Thanks. I hate it.” reaction to all of this. I was skeptical at first but now I’m asking chatGPT for cool-sounding synonyms for “implacable foe.”

Nemesis? Nice. Someone needs to make dogeGPT so I can give it a treat when it does good.
posted by Ryvar at 5:56 PM on June 6, 2023

i already stare at a screen all day to pay my mortgage, what if i could sit on the patio

this could be the final blow for the conventional desk. Just issue one of these and a recliner

do you guys, uh
do you know about laptops
you can already sit in a recliner or on a patio to do your work, if you want. like right now
posted by queenofbithynia at 6:08 PM on June 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

leaning heavily on foveated rendering

This is genuinely exciting. While humans have a theoretical field of view of 190 degrees, we only see with maximum acuity in a 3 degree field, and everything else is a low resolution image field that is reconstructed by our brain into a sharp and coherent image of our environment based on our previous experiences... this sounds eerily like AI image generation run by our own brain. That means they only need to render 3 degrees out of 100 degrees of that 4K display at maximum resolution.

Even our eyes quickly darting from one focus point to another isn't going to be an issue. To avoid our vision "smearing" during quick eye movements, our brain suppresses image data coming into our eye during the motion (saccade) which lasts as long as 200ms, which is well long enough for the eye tracking software to update the 3 degree field which needs to be rendered at high resolution. There may be prediction algorithms to predict where your eye is going to end up focusing on and preemptively improve the resolution along that path.
posted by xdvesper at 6:09 PM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

VR games are mostly exhausting. It is ok when I want to actually do a workout, but as causal entertainment the console and controller will be a better experience.
posted by interogative mood at 6:11 PM on June 6, 2023

chavenet have you seen the opening scene of Pete Davidson's new show Bupkis on Peacock?
posted by oldnumberseven at 6:25 PM on June 6, 2023

I can see this thing being useful in television control rooms, especially for things like sports.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 7:56 PM on June 6, 2023

It's less like Oculus or Google Glass than it's like... a laptop. But a more fluid, expansive device than a laptop is.


As someone who uses two 24" screens at home for work and music production, I can imagine something like this being better than a laptop since I could have all of my screen space. And my laptop cost $2600 so it's not that far off.

The huge difference, of course, is that with the fiction interface is words and only words -- your mind's eye does all the actual conjuring. Here we seem to be shoving the mind's eye off into the anachronism drawer.

Since everybody is pointing out their stereo vision and auditory issues here, here's mine: I don't have a "mind's eye". So something like this, if it could let me just look around a place I can't really get to... could be amazing.
posted by mmoncur at 9:25 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was a Google Glass explorer and heavy user/ developer. I think there is a market for a device that combines the best features of a Bluetooth headphones, an action camera and heads up display. Where Glass failed was that it couldn’t do any of those things well. The camera features were bad. The pairing with the phone for media / streaming was bad and the display was tiny. It also had very poor durability so it broke often. I think I went through six devices under warranty.
posted by interogative mood at 9:32 PM on June 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't have a "mind's eye". So something like this, if it could let me just look around a place I can't really get to.

Now that's a post right there.


If you think about the trend in computing for the past fifty years it's been from large and complex to small and simple.

So mainframes to minicomputers to desktop personal computers to laptops to tablets to smart phones. And then to wearables like watches and ear pieces. The trend is to be more accessible but this device goes in the opposite direction. There's an activation energy to pick it up and use.

Seems to me that the product will really catch fire when it's as light and easy to wear as a pair of glasses, and looks just as good on you.
posted by euphorb at 10:10 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

posting in epic thread.
posted by wmo at 10:32 PM on June 6, 2023

I wonder if R stands for retina?
posted by polymodus at 10:45 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not sure really catching fire is a selling point for a wearable.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on June 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

That's nice and all but I really want my Apple Calendar app to work better, you know? And err, the music app, too.

I also am in the how is this going to work with crappy vision and eye hardware contingent. If it is to replace the laptop then I am still not sure how it is better than the present experience without seeming too disconnected. do I virtual conference with an avatar? Do I talk aloud with the VR?

I guess I need to think of a use case that does not seem complicated and making one even more detached from immediate experience.
posted by jadepearl at 10:51 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Foveated rendering sounds like a way to get the lotion sickness problems but for eye movements.
posted by Artw at 11:15 PM on June 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't have a "mind's eye". So something like this, if it could let me just look around a place I can't really get to.

Now that's a post right there.

The one I was thinking of was this one but there are three other posts for the tag aphantasia.
posted by pwnguin at 12:20 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

do you know about laptops you can already sit in a recliner or on a patio to do your work, if you want. like right now

Not with multiple screens, and in sunny days screens also suck outside. With that said, I’m not sure working outside is that interesting (especially if you have to wear that) there more to screens in a comfortable desk.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 4:13 AM on June 7, 2023

Foveated rendering sounds like a way to get the lotion sickness problems but for eye movements.

it puts the eyedrops on its umbo foveation :P

> Yeah rereading the marketing sludge some kind foveated/localized dynamic resolution appears to be the plan.

from stratechery's thought-provoking take: "Here is Mike Rockwell, who led the creation of the headset, explaining 'visionOS': '...we added a host of new capabilities to support the low latency requirements of spatial computing, such as a new real-time execution engine that guarantees performance-critical workloads, a dynamically foveated rendering pipeline that delivers maximum image quality to exactly where your eyes are looking for every single frame...'"

also btw re: isolating (like in that scene in her ;)

It’s going to seem pretty weird when dad is wearing a headset as his daughter blows out birthday candles; perhaps this problem will be fixed by a separate line of standalone cameras that capture photos in the Apple Immersive Video Format, which is another way to say that this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

What was far more striking, though, was how the consumption of this video was presented in the keynote. Note the empty house: what happened to the kids? Indeed, Apple actually went back to this clip while summarizing the keynote, and the line “for reliving memories” struck me as incredibly sad. I’ll be honest: what this looked like to me was a divorced dad, alone at home with his Vision Pro, perhaps because his wife was irritated at the extent to which he got lost in his own virtual experience. That certainly puts a different spin on Apple’s proud declaration that the Vision Pro is “The Most Advanced Personal Electronics Device Ever”.

• What it's like to try Apple's new Vision Pro headset - "The real world and other people are always present. The default mode while wearing the device is to see the outside world in full color. Even when fully immersed in a virtual world, exterior cameras keep an eye out for other humans. If another person approaches the user, that person starts to materialize through the virtual world... The sense of place can be startling."
• Apple Vision Pro demo roundup: Here's what everyone is saying - "Miller said consuming content like movies, TV shows and sports games was particularly impactful: 'The experience is absolutely incredible.'"

> And all the content stuff, like the streaming tv and why they wanted to get deals with sports leagues.

more from thompson:

There was one clip of an NBA basketball game that was incredibly realistic: the game clip was shot from the baseline, and as someone who has had the good fortune to sit courtside, it felt exactly the same, and, it must be said, much more immersive than similar experiences on the Quest.

It turns out that one reason for the immersion is that Apple actually created its own cameras to capture the game using its new Apple Immersive Video Format. The company was fairly mum about how it planned to make those cameras and its format more widely available, but I am completely serious when I say that I would pay the NBA thousands of dollars to get a season pass to watch games captured in this way. Yes, that’s a crazy statement to make, but courtside seats cost that much or more, and that 10-second clip was shockingly close to the real thing.

What is fascinating is that such a season pass should, in my estimation, look very different from a traditional TV broadcast, what with its multiple camera angles, announcers, scoreboard slug, etc. I wouldn’t want any of that: if I want to see the score, I can simply look up at the scoreboard as if I’m in the stadium; the sounds are provided by the crowd and PA announcer. To put it another way, the Apple Immersive Video Format, to a far greater extent than I thought possible, truly makes you feel like you are in a different place.

Again, though, this was a 10 second clip (there was another one for a baseball game, shot from the home team’s dugout, that was equally compelling). There is a major chicken-and-egg issue in terms of producing content that actually delivers this experience, which is probably why the keynote most focused on 2D video. That, by extension, means it is harder to justify buying a Vision Pro for consumption purposes. The experience is so compelling though, that I suspect this problem will be solved eventually, at which point the addressable market isn’t just the Mac, but also the iPad.

What is left in place in this vision is the iPhone: I think that smartphones are the pinnacle in terms of computing, which is to say that the Vision Pro makes sense everywhere the iPhone doesn’t... I recognize how absurdly positive and optimistic this Article is about the Vision Pro, but it really does feel like the future.

for me, i wonder what kind of 3blue1brown videos grant sanderson could make if he ported manim to visionOS. the educational math tutorials would be insanely great! think of the astronomical 'planetarium' shows!
posted by kliuless at 4:32 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

As someone who uses two 24" screens at home for work and music production, I can imagine something like this being better than a laptop since I could have all of my screen space. And my laptop cost $2600 so it's not that far off.

Right, this actually seems like a nice solution for working at a cafe, or in an airport, etc. etc. The M2 is certainly powerful enough that it could be a full laptop replacement for many uses, if they can ensure that most MacOS (or even iPadOS, I guess) software runs on VisionOS without major hitches. Yes, it will work as an external display for a Mac, but then you're carrying two devices, which is great for Apple, not so great for actual travel use.

It's still goofy as hell, and not at all "there" yet, but if they can capture even a little bit of the power-commuter and power-office market with this initial offering while shrinking and streamlining the package, it might be a viable product someday, I think.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:04 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's still goofy as hell, and not at all "there" yet, but if they can capture even a little bit of the power-commuter and power-office market with this initial offering while shrinking and streamlining the package, it might be a viable product someday, I think.

I was thinking about that, how in theory you could use these and have multiple virtual monitors set up in your field of view. It doesn't seem like something you'd want to do all day, at least until the form factor radically improves, but for travel or other small-space, no-monitors work, it might be pretty good. It would beat squinting at a spreadsheet on the laptop screen for sure.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:50 AM on June 7, 2023

I'm afraid I still don't understand what problem this is solving. Is it to be a laptop you don't have to walk away from? (but I don't want to have to always be strapped to my laptop at work!) How is it better for tasks like writing or building a spreadsheet or editing video? What are the ways I use to input text or manipulate things?

I guess I Just Don't Get It. Maybe a new generation can find a good use for this, but my old brain doesn't see yet what is so compelling about either VR or AR in this state.

They don't seem to be using the AR even in their demos in the way that AR would be most useful. Physical tasks with additional information overlays: mechanics with dynamic models in their vision, shared interactive spaces. This still seems a generation or more too primitive to be really useful to me.

Games incidentally are a a good first step because the audience is more forgiving of an interface in a game---it doesn't need to be as complete/complex for one thing, so a limited set of commands/verbs are OK. That makes them good toy models for the real thing that follows later, and trains your market to use the systems.
posted by bonehead at 5:57 AM on June 7, 2023

If there’s one thing the cafe experience needs it’s people stumbling around and gesticulating with a blindfold on.
posted by Artw at 6:05 AM on June 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think Apple is taking it cautiously with what the AR can do, given how Magic Leap promised whales diving through your living room and all.

But there are hints in the video, like showing how the virtual screens cast shadows on your real world furniture. That implies they are tracking the whole room to some degree.

When the real product is a year out, I don't think this was a bad way to introduce the thing.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:11 AM on June 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

The extreme underestimation of pointing with your eyes and your focus has me in the believe column.

Downside: pop-up ads. (mitigated by physical acknowledgement)
posted by filtergik at 6:16 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

If there’s one thing the cafe experience needs it’s people stumbling around and gesticulating with a blindfold on.

While yelling into their microphone.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:17 AM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

But there are hints in the video, like showing how the virtual screens cast shadows on your real world furniture. That implies they are tracking the whole room to some degree.

Those looked a lot like "artist vision" of how they'll look like, not the actual thing, especially since it's from a fake external POV. I guess we'll see when it launches. These are really hard to do in the real world when you're room is cluttered.

The fact there's no footage whatsoever of anybody using those outside of the Apple provided footage, is probably just as much Apple having always been extra OCD to control the image they project and a warning people look goofy as hell wearing and using this.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 6:46 AM on June 7, 2023

Those looked a lot like "artist vision" of how they'll look like, not the actual thing, especially since it's from a fake external POV. I guess we'll see when it launches. These are really hard to do in the real world when you're room is cluttered.

Samuel Axon, for Ars Technica, writes, on the dinosaur demo:

The dinosaur cast a shadow in the room and was lit naturally by the lamps nearby. Placing the dinosaur in a real space like that made it much more convincing than any other VR dinosaur video or game I’d seen before.

He also writes:

To be clear, it wasn’t perfect. But it’s the first time I’ve tried an AR demo and thought, “Yep, what they showed in the promo video was pretty much how it really works.”

All of which suggests that this is pretty spectacular tech, at least under controlled conditions. And given that the environment is always being 3D scanned, it "should" even work in cluttered spaces. It won't be perfect, but I do have reasonable confidence that Apple will deliver something remarkable to the early adopters.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:19 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

the guy recording his child's birthday with the goggles strapped on -- that left me with a strong feeling of loss.

Remember birthdays with these or these?
posted by fairmettle at 7:21 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

JoeZydeco, they are 100% tracking/modelling the entire room, this is just a continuation of the ARKit work they've had for years on iOS - the developer talks go into further detail. Not having used ARKit before but reading the documentation, this appears to be primarily for use in surface detection, so the OS can understand the limits of the space you're in to avoid placing virtual objects in physical spaces that are already occupied (which would look very jarring) as well as to let you plop down objects onto horizontal surfaces in a natural way.
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 7:26 AM on June 7, 2023

...I'm going to love seeing how Apple handled the UI...
Tom Hanks CBT

This fascinated me in the demo, starting to approach the interfaces in Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge. Jason Snell had something to say about it on 6 Colors:

Honestly, what I’m most excited by about the Vision Pro might be the fact that a lot of people at Apple have devoted years to figuring out the next evolution of computer interfaces. What they’ve done is build on the last 15 years of Apple touch interfaces, adapted to a new platform. It’s familiar—yet also new.

Let’s start with the pointer. There isn’t one. Nor are you expected to poke at virtual interfaces with your fingers. Instead, the Vision Pro’s eye tracking knows exactly where you’re looking at all times. (Items subtly highlight or move forward when you look at them.) Your gaze is the pointer. Look at an app and then tap your thumb and index finger together, and you’ve done the equivalent of tapping on app icon to launch it.

Other gestures are similarly intuitive. To swipe or scroll, you just bring your thumb and index finger together and then move your hand sideways (for swiping) or up and down (for scrolling). It took me no time to understand the gestures, because they’re clearly derivative of everything I’ve learned about using an iPhone or iPad.

Each app window on the Vision Pro has a small horizontal line at the bottom, just like what you’ll find at the bottom of an iPhone screen. On visionOS, it’s a grab handle. You look at it and bring your thumb and index finger together to grab it. Then you move your hand to relocate the window in the space around you in three dimensions—you can push it further away, bring it closer, or just choose to stow it off to the left or the right.

posted by kingless at 8:11 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

A potentially incredible platform for Pokémon Go is what I’m hearing.
posted by Artw at 8:11 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would be much happier if this thing could also pick up subvocalized speech, to mitigate the problem of the flailing and the gabbling and the whatnot in public spaces.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:42 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’m not sure about this yet, but let’s remember how much the iPad and tablets were ridiculed. A screen size between a phone and a laptop? No keyboard? Who’d want that ?

Heck, I remember when I said texting was dumb because we already have email ….
posted by caviar2d2 at 9:09 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

this is just a continuation of the ARKit work they've had for years on iOS

Yeah after I hit post I realized that this was already in iOS and they've had a lot of learning already in this space. But after messing with the IKEA PLACE app a few times I'm really hoping the more powerful processor and whatever can get this looking a lot smoother.

This gizmo will be awesome for architects and interior designers.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:19 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I recall the heydays of Apple iPod/iPhone/iPad launches and the hype around them, less so the criticism that they'd fail — though that was also a thing. I mean, people used to sleep outside of stores so they could be the first to snatch the latest iPhone.

The point being that there's a marketing-driven narrative of Apple being the underdog that releases daring products that nobody believes will work and then: massive success. Visionary.

And while I have no doubt that this will be a technological wonder, it might just be another iPad. People buy them, sure, but have they changed the way people live and work like they were supposed to? There's one on my coffee table right now, good to watch a YouTube video now and again.

For work: people say "Apple AR/VR is a thing that could be very useful for [insert a profession that's not the one they're in: doctors, architects, porn stars]." But for me, well I guess the screen in front of me is as good as the one in my eye made to appear further in front of me — and I don't need to strap into the metaverse.

For relaxing: Apple avoids shots of people goggling together because it's looks as ridiculous and cold as it is. Not a kiss from your goggling partner, no eye contact — only the illusion. So you goggle alone — but when?

I'm skeptical.
posted by UN at 9:42 AM on June 7, 2023

For relaxing: Apple avoids shots of people goggling together because it's looks as ridiculous and cold as it is. Not a kiss from your goggling partner, no eye contact — only the illusion. So you goggle alone — but when?

I'm betting there are at least two use cases for using them together, aside from gaming -- people in long distance relationships and also a (smaller but probably pretty dedicated) set of people who would use them while having sex with a partner in person, maybe each person wearing their own goggles.

But otherwise, yes, two people sitting on a couch and separately browsing things wearing goggles sounds distancing.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:57 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

If there’s one thing the cafe experience needs it’s people stumbling around and gesticulating with a blindfold on.

While yelling into their microphone.

Why don't we just complete the package and provide a sound-proofed whole-head motorcycle-like helmet?
posted by JoeXIII007 at 10:14 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think we might be seeing a product like Apple Newton or the NextStep Computer and not the iPhone / iPod/ IPad. The device is probably feature complete in terms of the components; but the form factor is too unwieldy for mass adoption. It does seem to be enough to bring in a core of early adopters who can push the product forward and start to build out the use cases and refine it.
posted by interogative mood at 10:22 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

> JoeXIII007: "Why don't we just complete the package and provide a sound-proofed whole-head motorcycle-like helmet?"

I demand the Cone of Silence!
posted by mhum at 10:22 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Having been in and around the personal computer arena since the 70’s, I don’t remember a whole lot of discussion about the psychological effects of using technology until the birth of the web form of the internet. Now it seems to be one of the top issues with most technology. In regards to this device, loneliness and alienation seem to be the theme, with this device amplifying them. Maybe McLuhan’s notion of technology being an extension of human capabilities, needs to be extended to include other human characteristics that can be affected by technology. And just what problem, inability, etc are we trying to address with this technology? And there may be some dopamine hit issues using it given this person’s reaction to trying it for the first time.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:36 AM on June 7, 2023

macOS No Man’s Sky port numbers are in (from Reddit Mac users): M2 Max 16” Macbook Pro with all settings at low (save memory-bound ones like texture resolution) seeing 120FPS initially with MetalFX Spatial upscaling (the crap option, but likely more representative of foveated rendering) on a 7.7 Megapixel display. 90 FPS sustained after thermal throttling kicks in at around 5 minutes.

7.7 Megapixel is not a bad initial guess for the most aggressive foveation likely to ship, so that result puts 12ms at lowest quality just barely within the realm of feasibility assuming ongoing optimization efforts through launch. I remain profoundly skeptical a pleasant experience is possible but I’ll concede my “incompatible with known physics” above was wrong. There’s no reason to believe they’re strapping a full M2 Max or equivalent power draw and thermal dissipation to everyone’s face, but bespoke hardware in the form of the R1 might do some lifting. I’d bet it’s an even wash but we’ll find out shortly after launch.

The part that’s actually good news? Cross-save / cross-play with PC so if you’ve got a few hundred hours logged or run missions with friends you can continue.

Apple has also announced a major new tool to help automate porting PC games to macOS, so it looks like they are potentially starting a push into the core gaming space. We’ll see.
posted by Ryvar at 10:49 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The thing that I'm kind of ... I dunno what the right word for it is, future me is curious to see, I guess? Is if this takes off enough and if there are upgrades, is what kind of jump we'll see from what Apple considers the current minimum viable product for developers and futurists will be to the truly great hardware for the general public two or three generations down the road. Like, every time I bring out my 2015 series zero Apple Watch I'm shocked at how frankly barely usable it is compared to my 7th and 8th gen watches. And yet, at the time, it did _just enough_ to be interesting and useful to spawn a decent sized business for Apple. I mean I guess the other way to consider it is that the current hardware is neat and sort of shows a bunch of possibilities, but it is also very much a first release.

I sort of get the same kind of "can you believe this?" when I think about how much video card technology has progressed too, mind you. What used to be an unimaginable amount of 3d horsepower is now some ridiculously overpowered cores tucked into an otherwise disused corner of a CPU's iGPU.

And 120FPS honestly sounds like it's capping somewhere in the render chain - Andrew Tsai was seeing 120fps in ultra on an M1 Max, but that's only from skipping through the video, there might be caveats. It's on sale in Steam, but I've already bounced off the updates on the console version (too much fiddly construction stuff? not as much lonely semi-dead universe wandering?), I'm not sure it's worth $30, despite the heroic marathon that Hello Games is engaged in.
posted by Kyol at 11:14 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

the guy recording his child's birthday with the goggles strapped on -- that left me with a strong feeling of loss.

I wonder if a company like GoPro could make 3D cameras mounted on an indoor drone that follows people around, with an AI that can record birthday scenes for you.

And maybe with multiple of those drones the system could reconstruct a fully holographic scene for such facehugger devices
posted by polymodus at 11:20 AM on June 7, 2023

Agreed re: 120 FPS was likely VSync capping at the max display refresh (checked: it’s 120, adaptive), but the sustained (90) is the number that matters especially for VR. Curious how long Hello Games has been working on this / what the ceiling for additional optimization beyond the launch build looks like. And the M2 Max / Vision GPU performance delta, of course. It’s feasible, but real skin of your teeth based on the only currently available reference points.
posted by Ryvar at 11:24 AM on June 7, 2023

Apple's designers and engineers probably already are working on this, but one thing they need to do is to make the outward facing goggle screens curve until you can see them from the sides more too. Because when people converse with each other in a physical space they don't only do so looking directly eye-to-eye. We stand/sit with each other side-by-side, especially in a meeting or when they're both working on something in front of them.

Being able to lean over a bit and look at someone's eyes in profile would help reduce that feeling you're just looking at someone through a porthole.

Also, the outward facing screen goggles are the new lock screen. If they're capable of doing graphics or filters, I expect they're going to be a lot of custom "eyes" and "watch mode" animations in the future.
posted by FJT at 11:27 AM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm also slightly curious how the 3d live events stuff would work - as I understand it the current state of the art is basically a binocular camera arrangement, stereo image in, stereo image out. So great for fixed camera events and porn, although I'd think you'd still want to be close enough that there's stereo separation, which I'm not sure you'd get with the majority of a baseball field or the far side of the court in basketball?

But then the reviews are saying they could look around them, so... what, fisheye stereoscopic cameras? A pair of insta 360s and some hellacious math? Not actually stereoscopic, just spherical?
posted by Kyol at 11:37 AM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Apple's designers and engineers probably already are working on this, but one thing they need to do is to make the outward facing goggle screens curve until you can see them from the sides more too.

It sounds like it already does this.
posted by Tenuki at 11:50 AM on June 7, 2023

Look, to me it's obvious. THE killer app for any of these things is that you can wear it and it will identify people's faces and give you their name from your contacts.
posted by Wild_Eep at 12:14 PM on June 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Tired: Stuck in traffic with GPS app reading me directions in Darth Vader voice
Wired: Absolutely bombing around the city with Apple iMask making directions fly past my face Iron Man HUD style
posted by oulipian at 12:30 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

So great for fixed camera events and porn, although I'd think you'd still want to be close enough that there's stereo separation, which I'm not sure you'd get with the majority of a baseball field or the far side of the court in basketball?

This. Someone mentioned watching NBA games courtside, but honestly? I don't understand how that would work. You have fisheye lenses I guess? It just feels like it would be janky no matter what, particularly for a fast-paced sport like basketball or hockey.

And there are a couple of other things that make me wonder about all of this, w/r/t sports. If you've ever been to an NBA game, sitting in a single place is kind of weird, if you're used to watching it on tv. TV has done such a good job of tracking players, cutting to close-ups and reverse angles for particular replays, etc. Not to mention the storytelling that goes into a televised game: they put particular stats on the screen at particular times, and this enhances the game. I suppose that could happen here as well, but if they're talking about a particular player, while you're watching someone else, that could be confusing.

And also, part of the reason to get courtside seats is to be there. To be seen. Jack Nicholson attends Lakers games because he loves the game, sure, but he certainly doesn't shy away from the camera when it's on him. Likewise, non-famous people like to sit near him so they can sit near him. You can't do that on a headset.

I'm not saying this tech doesn't have promise, I just suspect that some of the ideas people have won't be as cool as they hope.
posted by nushustu at 12:43 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

THE killer app for any of these things is that you can wear it and it will identify people's faces and give you their name from your contacts.

Apple's face-matching already works on photos in about 4ms, they say. The device certainly can do this. Whether Apple will allow it is another (creepy) story.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:46 PM on June 7, 2023

Any wild speculation on to what extent Apple Vision may help you see in the AR mode in low light conditions (e.g. through LIDAR, the truedepth camera, etc. allowing you to "see" much better in the dark by artificially increasing the brightness of objects or something like that).

I can think of a bunch of scenarios where that would be extremely useful (and some wild use cases I'd love but are probably still a long way off - like in whiteout snow storms etc.)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 12:47 PM on June 7, 2023

With the Apple Watch I thought I'd give it a few iterations. But then I kind of lost interest. I'm going to give this a few iterations.

Two things, however, are certain: firstly, Apple have defined the form factor (remember what mobile phones used to look like before the iPhone?), secondly there will be a characteristically cheap and nasty rip off from somebody like Samsung launched just before Apple's launch.
posted by epo at 12:51 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

it will identify people's faces and give you their name from your contacts.

Man that is an interesting question: which is more socially awkward? Forgetting someone’s name or wearing these goggles outside the house?

So great for fixed camera events and porn,…
But then the reviews are saying they could look around them, so... what, fisheye stereoscopic cameras?

There are a few existing standards but the most common is a stereoscopic 180 degree 1080P hemisphere projection centered around the viewer’s head (cameraperson obviously wearing a stereo fisheye lens GoPro headmount type thing for capturing, um, POV content) covering the entire forward plane. If you look at the file in a video track editor it’s like two rows of frames, one eye top the other bottom, and each frame heavily distorted towards the edges from (hemi)spherical deprojection.

In practice you have full depth perception on every pixel of that hemisphere and if the crew bothered to dial in their settings correctly it works really, really well as long as you avoid looking at the edges of the hemisphere. You get about 45 degrees pitch and yaw with a 130 degree FOV display before the illusion starts to break, but you can’t lean in or anything.

I will say if this takes off it is going to make shit so much worse in terms of toxic masculinity/judging bodies. You know how standards skyrocketed after 1080P video became the norm? Subpixel stereo inference (kinda like aperture synthesis) means the whole “see every pore” is beyond a 4K flat video at only 1080P per eye.

For more savory purposes, I did once generate a full 360 stereoscopic Mars walkthrough video that synched to a treadmill for a certain major media company’s joint project with NASA. But the only reason we were able to do that was the entire scene was already loaded in an Unreal Engine project based on photogrammetry from the Mars rovers.

If you google Ninja Theory Hellblade stereoscopic Unreal you should turn up the writeup they did on the process for generating that sort of thing. It’s basically 5,000 4K screenshots per single frame of video, stitched together to correct for perspective distortion, for each eye separately. Took five godtier developer workstations over three days to chew through the two minute clip.
posted by Ryvar at 12:54 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

there will be a characteristically cheap and nasty rip off from somebody like Samsung launched just before Apple's launch

Might have more defensible patents this time around than rectangles with rounded corners, though.
posted by flabdablet at 12:57 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nevermind, Google is fucking useless these days, here’s the link.
posted by Ryvar at 1:04 PM on June 7, 2023

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has his impressions here. There's a lot to digest, but one thing in particular that I wanted to pull out was:

A few years ago I stopped wearing contact lenses and have since worn corrective eyeglasses full-time. Before my demo, a rep from Apple took my glasses and used a device to measure my lenses to provide corrective lens inserts for my demo unit. It only took about 3 or 4 minutes. When Vision Pro goes on sale next year, buying corrective lens inserts will probably work like buying eyeglasses online from a retailer like Warby Parker — you’ll provide a copy of your prescription from your eye doctor. It’ll be a slight hassle for us glasses wearers, but not much, and it’s unavoidable. (I see pretty well close up without glasses, so I’m curious how well I might see using Vision Pro without corrective lenses.) After the lens measurement I used an iPhone to do a brief facial scan akin to registering for Face ID (look at the phone, turn your head in a circle), and an ear scan. This test was for identifying a light seal that would best block light, and calibrating the speakers.

That addresses some of the accessibility concerns that I and others have had.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:37 PM on June 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Man that is an interesting question: which is more socially awkward? Forgetting someone’s name or wearing these goggles outside the house?

The whole concept of the killer app is that it lights a fire under an entire industry. Get that working satisfactorily and you will see a flood of money toward getting the price and size down. For starters you wouldn’t need it in both eyes or with anything near the resolution. You could also wear the processor on your belt and use Bluetooth to a very thin set of glasses.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:04 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Any wild speculation on to what extent Apple Vision may help you see in the AR mode in low light conditions (e.g. through LIDAR, the truedepth camera, etc. allowing you to "see" much better in the dark by artificially increasing the brightness of objects or something like that).

For what it's worth, Windows Mixed Reality's see through mode would flip to IR-illuminated black and white "nightvision" when the ambient light is low. Now, whether Vision Pro has IR illuminators, or if it just depends on the lidar for tracking in low light scenarios, we'll have to see. I mean, it's probably out there already, but I couldn't find it in a minute or so of searching.

There are a few existing standards but the most common is a stereoscopic 180 degree 1080P hemisphere projection centered around the viewer’s head (cameraperson obviously wearing a stereo fisheye lens GoPro headmount type thing for capturing, um, POV content) covering the entire forward plane. If you look at the file in a video track editor it’s like two rows of frames, one eye top the other bottom, and each frame heavily distorted towards the edges from (hemi)spherical deprojection.

Oh, I know about SBS videos, and sort of can picture the hardware, but it seems like it would be kind of lousy for anything that isn't within 5-10 feet. Certainly not to an outfield or even the far side of a court. And that's getting beyond the whole "how do you make it stereoscopic for a full sphere instead of the frustum of one" sort of challenges. On the other hand, having a "popular" standard would start to provide an impetus to solve a lot of these sorts of challenges.

That said, right, televised sports have really made any kind of "single camera" viewing kind of weird and retro. You put up with it in person because you get the benefits of attending in person - the crowd energy, the sights and sounds of the arena, the $20 beers. But sitting in my living room? I dunno. Maybe multicam and director switching would work, but I suspect bouncing all over the court like that would just be nauseating to the viewer at worst and hard to follow at best.

But FINALLY all my old stereoscopic Nintendo 3DS pictures can be LET LOOSE.
posted by Kyol at 2:08 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

getting the price and size down. For starters you wouldn’t need it in both eyes

Featuring the new ARRR1 chip with full pirate mode.
posted by fairmettle at 2:33 PM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Man that is an interesting question: which is more socially awkward? Forgetting someone’s name or wearing these goggles outside the house?

Obligatory Veep clip.
posted by rongorongo at 3:23 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

You could also wear the processor on your belt

which was the style at the time.
posted by flabdablet at 4:27 PM on June 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

You can do light field capture with 4 or 8 cameras, then render two views, one for each eye. Most of the processing is done during/post capture. The view reconstruction is pretty low compute and can definitely run on headset hardware.
posted by ryanrs at 4:58 PM on June 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

‘Johnny Mnemonic’ remains the only work of science fiction that correctly foresaw that virtual reality will be so enervating that it will require a mouthguard to stop from grinding your molars into a fine powder.

Remember that sometimes bullying can be used as a force for *good*. If we can bully people out of wearing Google Glass, doing cultural appropriation at fancy dress parties, or dating that guy from the 1975s, we can stop people using this too.
posted by MarchHare at 5:57 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Regarding how you do total immersion live 3D video – I can't find the paper right now but I recall seeing a setup where folks had attached a bunch of cameras to a half sphere, with the lenses pointing inward (sort of like those field-side microphones you see at NFL games). They used that to create a live video NeRF (neural radiance field) which allows the viewer a range of movement within the space of the sphere. One of those for each eye, basically, is how I imagine this kind of 3D capture working, though extended 360 to get the full effect. Its kind of like bullet time in the Matrix, really – with enough cameras you can synthesize all possible viewpoints within the available range.
posted by wemayfreeze at 6:14 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

For vision impaired people this could be a real benefit. There was an app developed for Google Glass that allowed visually impaired people to use the camera and voice prompts get intonation about their surroundings. Like reading a page of text or finding an object. It was very limited because of Glass’ limitations; so this could do so much more.
posted by interogative mood at 6:19 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

And tbh the bullying thing only worked with Glass because the Google team failed to understand that being cool requires being confident and ignoring the haters. Instead they bent over backwards and came across as desperate trying to prove how cool they were.
posted by interogative mood at 6:22 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

THE killer app for any of these things is that you can wear it and it will identify people's faces and give you their name from your contacts.

If Apple can make it as acceptable to wear this sort of AR device as it is to wear a watch I'll break my no Apple rule and buy the thing even at three grand. It would be worth it for this app alone.
posted by Mitheral at 6:29 PM on June 7, 2023

I'm not seeing this as a torches and pitchforks moment. Apple's new head mounted computer is just another tool, in line with the printing press and telephone. It may be used for destructive or creative tasks, just as a hammer can be used to hit someone or build a house.
posted by fairmettle at 8:05 PM on June 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

honestly I found it rather telling that the demo basically only showed people using this in indoor environments, essentially in place of a desktop computer or a TV, with the main exception of showing that you could record 3D photos/videos with it in kind of a dystopian-looking sort of way

like one of the main social issues with Glass was Google's insistence that it should be worn everywhere at all times, and with (if memory serves?) no clear indicator that whoever you're looking at is or is not being recorded at any given moment
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:44 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

A little more info since I'm not typing on my phone.

Our system used 8 cameras, spaced 6-12 inches apart, facing in the same direction. Imagine a rectangular metal plate with 8 cameras stuck on it. It's kinda unwieldy, but you can stick it on a tripod just fine.

The multiple cameras give you two distinct kinds of information.

1) Precision depth map based on stereoscopic principles. Per-pixel, sub-millimeter precision.

2) View of the scene from different angles. This is especially important for occlusion: you need to see both sides of someone's nose to reconstruct it correctly.


The video recording side calculates the depth map. This is quite GPU intensive at the resolutions the Apple device is using. But these calculations do not depend on the viewer location or orientation. So in a streaming 1-to-many scenario, you only do this computation once, not once per viewer.

Using the video from the multiple cameras + the pre-calculated depth info, the viewer's local machine does the image reconstruction, one for each eye. If you're good, you get stuff like thin occlusions and reflections in eyeglasses working convincingly. We did.

Since the image reprojection is done entirely client-side, it can be inside your very-low-latency 120 Hz whatever loop. We ran the head tracking and rendering faster than the source capture FPS. So you can do 120 Hz head tracking with 30 fps source material, with big benefits wrt the viewing experience.

One neat consequence is that if the streaming connection cuts out or freezes, you can still look around the frozen scene. This is much less jarring than if your head gets "frozen" along with the stream.


(note: the Apple device does not use our tech, but the tech proves these capabilities are possible, so it'll be along eventually)
posted by ryanrs at 8:53 PM on June 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

To that point DoctorFedora, there’s a line of thought that suggests that the endless pushing of “VR/AR is coming, real soon!” is a form of softening people up to the idea that in the lifespan of many folks alive today climate change means the outside may become borderline uninhabitable.
posted by MarchHare at 9:11 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ryanars: that was really informative and sounds fucking badass. Good shit. Were you able to infer any kind of BRDF/BSDF-type information from the multiple views of a surface after you’d solved the local lighting environment? Seems like a logical next step for being able to introduce virtual lighting, GI, SSS so AR widgets integrate flawlessly with the captured environment…
posted by Ryvar at 10:17 PM on June 7, 2023

Nope. Small company with only a couple engineers. We ran out of funds and I just cleaned out our SF office yesterday. I have a few of the cameras in my garage now, ha ha.
posted by ryanrs at 10:23 PM on June 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Sorry to hear that. And not surprising with that team size - even as I wrote the question I was thinking “it would be fucking awesome if they pulled that off but Christ I’m glad I’m not the one trying to work out the math on something like that.” In theory all the information you need is there, in practice… profoundly yikes.
posted by Ryvar at 10:34 PM on June 7, 2023

In terms of performance, we were able to run 720P realtime, bidirectional videoconferencing on a Skull Canyon NUC. Apple's ultra-res displays are probably out of reach with the current chip, but probably not for long.

You don't need a head mounted display to use light field tech, btw. We had a great light field demo on an iphone that used the accelerometer and front-facing camera with face detection to reproject a recorded stream. Think of the phone display as a little physical window, and if you crane your neck, you can look around the scene. It used the face detection for head tracking. (You only really need to track the eyes for this to work well. Not the pupils or direction the eyes are pointing, more like the (x,y) position of the nasal bridge.)
posted by ryanrs at 10:39 PM on June 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I designed the robot that swung backlit checkerboards around so the cameras could be calibrated. We used OpenCV to find the checkerboards in the images, then used fancy math to solve for all the lens distortions, relative camera positioning, assembly tolerances, etc.
posted by ryanrs at 10:46 PM on June 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

It seems nobody can launch one of these fancy devices without inviting Marques Brownlee along to have a go at it. He actually used the device in this case - and I found his comments interesting.
posted by rongorongo at 1:43 AM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

>Has someone who needs corrective glasses tried this? Because I already need progressives

> in re the wearing glasses thing, couldn't the software be adjusted to show the images on screen corrected as if through a prescription lens?

What you are looking at here is a postage-stamp sized display which is manipulated via lenses etc to appear to cover most of your field of view.

From a glasses-wearing point of view, the entire field of view is going to be at a single focal point (or, to be more pedantic, focal plane). You are not going to have actual "near" things and others that are "far" - which is the reason people need progressive lenses or bifocals or reading/computer glasses for some things and distances glasses for other things. It is because when you get older your focal plane becomes fixed and unadjustable - you can't move it to focus on near things, and then far things.

So, for example, progressive lenses are not going to do you any good while using this device. Progressive lenses give you a close focal point in some parts of the lense, then gradually moving to further and further focals points until the top section of the lense has a distance focus - so you can see things across the room or across the city. Point is, when you take those kinds of lenses into a device like this they are not going to help. They will make part of the field of view clear and the rest progressively more blurry.

I haven't tried this device specifically, but all such devices are going to work in the same basic way. They will be set up to work for the typical person with 20/20 vision - ideally for them with their vision focal plane at or near infinity, because that will reduce eyestrain.

Then, they will also have some way of focusing the device, hopefully separately for each eye. This will allow people who are a little nearsighted or farsighted to adjust the device so that it will work for them - probably either with or without glasses.

So why would you need or want to allow people to use prescription glasses with the device?

- Some people will have have greater corrections than the device can correct for - ie, more nearsighted or farsighted than it will adjust for. If they have done their job right, not too many people will need to use prescription lenses for this reason alone - only people with truly extreme near/farsighted prescriptions.

- Many people have some degree of astigmatism correction in their lenses. So even though they can adjust the focus of the device, the best focus is still a bit fuzzy due to the astigmatism. Most often, the astigmatism correction is different for each eye. So you'll need a different prescription lens for each eye.

Having a built-in lense in the device that would allow people to adjust it and compensate for different levels of astigmatism would be difficult or maybe straight-up impossible. To correct for this, you'll need your custom manufactured prescription lenses.

Flip side - some people, if they have only mild or even moderate astigmatism, might be able to get along OK without the astigmatism correction.

- Some people have other customized corrections in their lenses - most commonly prisms to help bring the two eyes into better alignment.

For some people - typically those with quite strong prescriptions and the like - there might be some issues with getting the prescription to work correctly with the other lenses used in the device.

But for most, this shouldn't be a huge issue. People use microscopes, telescopes, etc etc etc with custom prescription lenses in the stack and it can work very well.

Again, for things like bifocals and progressive lenses, those kinds of compensations are just not needed within these systems. In fact, one advantage of such systems is you can just look around as you like, the device will do the focusing for your, and you can just look at everything and it will be in focus.

For the same reason, I actually prefer to look at things on screens any more. I just arrange my lenses so that the screen is nicely in focus (computer-range reading glasses or whatever) and then whatever I look at is always perfectly in focus - near, far, whatever.

In real life I'm constantly tilting my head, flipping glasses up and down, switching glasses and all that to get the right focus for things that are near, far, middle, very-very near, etc etc etc.

Finally - people who do need progressive lenses, bifocals, etc might actually find they prefer to wear a device like this for just this reason. Once you have the thing adjusted to your focus within the device, ou could just go around the house or outside or wherever and everything will be in focus for you, with no scrambling around for different glasses, tilting your head around, etc.
posted by flug at 4:46 AM on June 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Regarding the device itself, one of my joys here is seeing billions of dollars trickling through idiot Mark Zuckerberg's hands.

The Facebook/Meta vision for VR always seemed like complete unadulterated crap. I honestly couldn't believe he could get anyone to invest in that garbage.

The Apple product, on the other hand, puts something out there that you can actually see potential utility for. Maybe it will work out and maybe not, but there is some actual potential out there instead of just a steaming pile of hot garbage, that additional investment will only make hotter and more garbage-like.
posted by flug at 4:51 AM on June 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Once you have the thing adjusted to your focus within the device, ou could just go around the house or outside or wherever and everything will be in focus for you, with no scrambling around for different glasses, tilting your head around, etc.

Seriously, please Apple or somebody just take my money.
posted by Mitheral at 4:59 AM on June 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

one of my joys here is seeing billions of dollars trickling through idiot Mark Zuckerberg's hands

Then you'll probably enjoy watching Adam Conover and Dan Olson expressing a certain degree of glee over this as well. Debunking the Tech Hype Cycle with Dan Olson - Factually! - 213 (YouTube, 1h19m9s). Zuckdunking starts at 29m47s.
posted by flabdablet at 8:00 AM on June 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

And yeah, all the hands-on previews seem to be coming away with pretty positive feelings about it. Will it be life changing? A new paradigm? The Must Have Christmas Gift in 2025? Probably not? Not right away? But it seems like maybe it's starting to figure out what the actual minimum viable AR/VR/XR product is, as opposed to stuff that's sub-minimum and not viable. I mean, honestly I worry that the head clamp versus having a > 2lb device cantilevered off or your brow ridge is an insurmountable problem with current and near future technology and optics? But Apple is at least approaching it with some degree of semi-personalized face shielding and headband sizing, if I understand the fitting process right. God only knows how the retail end of things will work out, I assume a genius bar appointment where you get scanned and maybe they assemble it out of components at the store like the modern Apple Watch?

I wish we could get a better idea of whether Zuck's $10 billion attempt was waaaaaaaay too low for what their competitors were spending, or if Zuck was spending in the wrong directions like network infrastructure and servers instead of the hardware and operating system. I mean, I don't expect Apple will ever break it down, although maybe Jason Snell can tease out some data from the earnings reports.
posted by Kyol at 9:51 AM on June 8, 2023

The Super Natural workout app for the Facebook/Oculus/Meta VR headset is totally worth it. It is cheaper and takes up less space than a Peloton or other home workout device. You'll have to get some accessories though like a better headband and a fan that keeps your face cool. Gorn is the only game I've found that hasn't lost its magic pretty quickly and takes advantage of the unique capabilities of VR.
posted by interogative mood at 10:07 AM on June 8, 2023

I wish we could get a better idea of whether Zuck's $10 billion attempt was waaaaaaaay too low for what their competitors were spending, or if Zuck was spending in the wrong directions

My instinct is that if it really took all the development that Apple did (or the majority of it) to hit the level of viability for the tech then Meta never had a chance. It wasn't just the R&D on this device, it was the years of building technology – and capacity! – in hardware and software design, and, critically, chip design that set them up for this. The question Zuck has to confront looking the Vision Pro is: is there a viable ar/vr/xr device that is accessible for Meta to build, at all? They won't see the kind of tight hw/sw integration or excellence at execution that Apple has, so how crappy can they make something and still be successful?

As I said, my gut says they don't have a chance. Meta has never succeeded at hardware or software (as we know it here; social media apps is imo a very different beast from embedded software etc.), and they've built exactly one successful social network. So what strengths are they leaning into here? They're outclassed in every way.
posted by wemayfreeze at 2:00 PM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Suddenly thinking about how I have heard it supports VoiceOver (accessibility feature for blind users) and that they announced this feature a few weeks ago that notes the text on a surface and lets you point your finger at, say, microwave buttons and it’ll tell you what’s written there.

I suddenly think there might actually be a very real use case here for blind people, paradoxically, wearing this to help them navigate parts of the outside world that lack braille.
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:47 PM on June 8, 2023

I suddenly think there might actually be a very real use case here for blind people, paradoxically, wearing this to help them navigate parts of the outside world that lack braille.

Hmm. I’m not sure how it would be superior to a smartphone in that respect.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:15 PM on June 8, 2023

My instinct is that if it really took all the development that Apple did (or the majority of it) to hit the level of viability for the tech then Meta never had a chance. It wasn't just the R&D on this device, it was the years of building technology – and capacity! – in hardware and software design, and, critically, chip design that set them up for this.

Yeah. Facebook has to use off the shelf components to build its headsets. They have some commodity snapdragon in the Quests. It's basically an Android phone chip. Apple has a near monopoly on TSMC capacity making the most advanced chips in the mobile form factor available, and they can fab custom chips, (the "reality" chip) to handle things like the very niche problem of how you render all that visual information within 12ms or so so that the human eye is continually fooled into thinking it's reality and not a projection on a screen. This represents much more than $10 billion of investment, but they were able to do it incrementally across the entire product line in preparation for building this device. Essentially Apple has been building up to this point since they first started designing the iPhone. Facebook only acquired Oculus in 2014, and they aren't even close to building their own chips afaik.
posted by dis_integration at 3:45 PM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I expect they're going to be a lot of custom "eyes" and "watch mode" animations in the future.

Oh god someone’s going to make an app that gives you anime eyes aren’t they. The first day I’m forced to interact with someone who has anime eyes will be the last day that I willing participate in society.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:02 PM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Well, if you have your own headset on, you'll eventually be able to change their eyes to whatever you want.)
posted by nobody at 7:27 PM on June 8, 2023

I suddenly think there might actually be a very real use case here for blind people, paradoxically, wearing this to help them navigate parts of the outside world that lack braille.

Hmm. I’m not sure how it would be superior to a smartphone in that respect.

I was just listening to this episode of the Living Blindfully podcast where they were discussing it. It sounds like the wide field of view and not having to hold your phone out in front of you is pretty compelling.
posted by adamsc at 8:46 PM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is the first time I’ve seen an AR / VR application where I actually felt like they evaluated everything the technology CAN do, and then endeavored to do it all as well as possible. I would love to know how they accomplished this organizationally because the degree of coordination on a brand new platform seems incredible.

It really does seem like a “reality enhancement” device, in a positive and mostly human-centered way. (Of course, a better form factor would be great, but this is round one.) Good for Apple.
posted by stoneandstar at 1:35 PM on June 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was sceptical beforehand, but between the home cinema and sports experiences, I think it already has enough of a lease on life to be successful. If the productivity use cases take off it's a given.

The keyword for me is presence. Vision Pro seems to have had a visceral effect on people that have tested it. Even the 3D videos it can shoot — which were presented terribly — are apparently very affecting when viewed through the Dork Goggles. There is a real chance that, rather than being exclusively alienating, they may bring experiences closer to feeling real on an emotional level.

Scattered thoughts

• Feel like you're there at an event: A game of your favourite sport, a concert, a talk, a political rally, a beautiful slice of nature… The combination of immersion and spatial audio will, I think, make it possible to feel like you're there at times and places you otherwise wouldn't have been able to — for a variety of reasons.
• It might finally be possible to enjoy 3D movies! By all accounts people seemed floored by the Avatar demo
• Co-presence in a shared environment with your colleagues, while you have the equivalent of a private office (where none of your personal monitors are visible to others) but you can hear them milling about and reach out to them in a way that feels more connected.
• I live halfway across the world from my family. Being able to feel like I'm in the same room as them more than once every couple of years would be lovely. Facebook Messenger isn't it.
• I would love to be able to throw up a window to my home town and see a live (3D?) feed of a view from there.

I'm definitely getting one next year. I work from home, and I work as a macOS/iOS software developer. I also enjoy lots of my media consumption privately. It's right up my alley.
posted by flippant at 4:32 AM on June 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Regarding the battery: I was sure I saw somewhere that it could charge while using the device, which changes the battery life experience somewhat/significantly. But now I can't find that detail – does anyone else remember if that's true??
posted by wemayfreeze at 8:46 AM on June 13, 2023

Regarding the battery: I was sure I saw somewhere that it could charge while using the device, which changes the battery life experience somewhat/significantly. But now I can't find that detail – does anyone else remember if that's true??

You'll be able to plug the battery pack into mains power, but can't plug the headset in directly
posted by flippant at 5:01 PM on June 14, 2023

Fun fact if you took a Google Glass XE original version and wore of while plugged as one would while developing apps you would occasionally get a little tingly feeling in your head because the USB port was not properly insulated from the metal head band.
posted by interogative mood at 5:46 PM on June 14, 2023