For starters we're in the middle of a huge financial crisis, so releasing yet another VR set, a 3500 USD one at that, is hilarious. To further hammer in how terrible the timing of this is, we are also amid so many tech bro shit schemes failing. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, you name it. The Metaverse was a laughingstock, Twitter is imploding from Elons idiot decisions, Teslas are literally crashing and burning and all major tech companies have been on the News at some point for fucking with people's personal data and other con jobs. AI is scaring people as much as it is entertaining them. Confidence in emergent technology is at an all-time low. It doesn't help that the promo poster features the most dead-eyed soulless-looking person staring through it at you. People are sick of it. VR headsets were already niche, who cares if it has AR or whatever tacked on? Sure, some rich yuppies will buy it to impress their friends, but they buy anything the market tells them is the next big thing and are a small minority (again, more poor people than ever at the moment)
TLDR this is going to be Google Glass again but this time even more of a flop because now people are poorer and more skeptical of big tech than ever.
It's not about advertising to your normal consumer, it's about marketing to corporations. That's why they made a big deal about Microsoft office apps, like Excel, being included. Corporate definitely wants that office environment back, and with work from home and the professional class rightfully refusing to budge, they are looking at VR as a way out. That way you can be in a virtual office while at home.
I think it's all going to fail (opening an excel spreadsheet in VR? Uhh no), and the VR tech will mostly be used for more escapist hedonism in hellworld. More treats, more movie slop, interactive series like that black mirror episode tried, more videogames, more porn. All to distract from a shitty job and crippling loneliness.
Probably one of the most consistently populated apps right now is VR chat. It's a big virtual fever dream where people wearing weird avatars go to socialize and hang out.
I saw a bazinga comment with the poster's ideas for AR "killer" apps that included an overlay showing where you already vacuumed and showing you a recipe and cooking instructions while making food. Who the fuck is going to spend $3500 and actually wear one of these things for that?
an overlay showing where you already vacuumed
:data-laughing: the future is now.
Getting marinara sauce splatters on my $3.5k headset because I want my recipe to be in a HUD. :anti-italian-action:
I was just envisioning getting sweaty because I'm standing next to cooking food with foam rimmed goggles on.
overlay showing where you already vacuumed and showing you a recipe and cooking instructions while making food
very useful for people with no short-term memory
No short term memory, but also $3500 and enough of a short term memory to remember they wanted to buy this because of a redditor's hypothetical ideas.
Imagine a future where people are so deskilled they can’t wipe their ass without a VR prompted quick time event
I give it 10 days after launch before there is a gross ai "x-ray" clothes remover app.
cooking instructions while making food. Who the fuck is going to spend $3500 and actually wear one of these things for that?
3500 dollars for a pair of onion protection glasses
I can see the appeal of overlays if the glasses were low-profile and transparent. But I don't know who would want to wear these massive goggles to look at the real world through a screen.
VR needs to die already. It has existed for more than a decade and people still haven't done anything interesting with it. They are still just making tech demos
The Sensorama was one of the earliest examples, from 1962. It was essentially the prototype of those 4D movie theaters at theme parks.
I think you’re deadass wrong.
Someone else already said that the iPhone launch was before/during the mortgage crisis and the cost is on par with other wildly popular technologies released during bad economic times like the personal, family or business computer.
To go a little further, based on the last uhh two hundred years of specifically American history, the thing that comes after a bust is a boom and a boom is a great time to have some whiz bang new thing with most of the kinks worked out especially if it’s a prestige product.
You’re right that public confidence in new technology is at an all time low, but public confidence in Apple as a company is still relatively high. See the other thread on Tesla being the second least popular car company for the list that puts Apple in the top ten (although public confidence and popularity are two different things and who knows how they made that list). Wrong or right, people trust Apple, especially when it comes to new technology.
Ar is a more important technology than vr. Why would you want to set up full body tracking in a five cubic foot section of your living room clear of lamps to knock down just to see floating dagoth ur avatars when you could pull down the goofy ski goggles and see your nephews meme avatar overlaid on their actual body while you’re in the real world family reunion and safely interacting with it in a way that lets you see everyone laughing at you?
Or if you’re not a satanic pedophile you could use it for all the other bullshit we use phones and computers for with your hands free.
The eye projection thing is weird. I almost want to say they’ll drop it in favor of a more exaggerated emoji style display or can it altogether but who knows. If they’re really angling for the work crowd and the casual use like a phone crowd they need some way to ensure that people get eye contact with an ar user and on that tip it’s insanely necessary.
I invite you to join me on a sojourn back to 2007 when everyone was making fun of the iPhone including RIM.
I'm still making fun of the iphones. Overpriced toys that suck for actual uses beyond playing candy crush.
I was surrounded by people making fun of it constantly and was one of them.
I was in high school and everybody was hyped for it. The only thing being made fun of were the hyperfans who camped outside for days in preparation for it.
Cell phones were a niche in the 80s when a handful of game companies made their first forays into VR. By 2007 mobile phones were already mainstream, can't-live-without-it devices for a great number of people, including the vast majority of kids at my high school. Palm pilots existed for years, the Blackberry, Sidekick, and the like were pretty popular long before the iPhone, too. It's not shocking that a direct competitor would make glib remarks about Apple, a potential future competitor at that point and a company that spent the better part of the preceding 15+ years as the butt of every joke about failure in tech. Samsung still pulls that shit every year despite literally sharkbiting Apple's marketing and design language to sell their stuff.
With the iPhone, Apple nailed it on implementation and UX, which might be the only point I'd concede to their headset since they have a pretty good track record of doing that. But that's really about it. What long-established market full of subpar devices and services does the ski mask leverage and replace? Who occupies this market and what kind of sway would they have with the general population—even if we ignore the whole issue with strapping it to your face and assume this thing were the price of an Oculus? Above all, what practical reason is there for this thing to even exist? Based on what they've demoed, it doesn't even seem like even Apple knows lol. So at best we have a novelty with an mode of interaction that is an instant turn-off to an overwhelming majority of potential users because they simply don't want to wear their computer on their head. At worst we have a device made for the most selfish and/or lonely suburbanites ever, who can't reasonably share what they're doing with anyone outside of their single-occupancy dissociation device.
This is an indictment of what capitalism does to pervert technology and technological advancements and peddle them as some kind of bazinga toy that Changes Everything™ despite not actually improving on anything that came before it. And because there's no money in improving core services/experiences on already-mature platforms, the baggage just builds over time. Especially in Silicon Valley, which has been hollowing itself out (was there ever anything in there?) to keep the music playing at the expense of everything else.
This junk is nothing like what the iPhone was to mobile phones/smartphones. This is like what the iPod Hi-Fi was to home stereos/hi-fi systems: expensive, incredibly niche device in an already-niche corner of the market with interesting technologies but a severely limited set of practical uses that no one can coherently articulate that fanatics will ardently defend regardless.
What really ticks me off is that, looking at what else they had to talk about yesterday, Apple dumped all of their time and effort into trying to do Google Glass again while sacrificing their actually thriving product lines: all the software updates were lazy and lackluster (even looking at the extended lists of features on their website is still super light on under-the-hood optimizations and improvements) and the Mac Pro update is an utter fucking embarrassment. Despite having what I think is the most coherent product line in 20 years, Apple is trying too hard with this one, and their time would be far better spent making their existing shit work better. But the line needs to go up, so of course those initiatives will take a back seat indefinitely to peddle some shiny new turd.
Sorry for the rant; wasn't expecting to write so much lol. It's nothing personal, just that I've seen more than my share of this comment in the last few weeks and months regarding the headset (this and the "in x years it'll be the size of a contact lens bro, just x more years bro, I swear"), and looking at how neglectful the "World's Most Valuable Company" is to the actual products and tools people use every day to live their lives, be productive, be creative, etc. in order to pursue gimmicks is really infuriating. So much potential in spinning up their own SoCs and specialized hardware-software integrations, and this is what it's getting us.
I never made all the comparisons you brought up. It’s like the iPhone in that it’s an expensive new technology released during an economic downturn and is being mocked and praised simultaneously.
I agree that there are a bunch of problems with the technology and its relationship with people. I think apple did a good job cutting out the parts that aren’t useful and focusing on the stuff that matters, ar, productivity, normal use and not looking like a weird psycho. Only a little bit of a success on that last part. It remains to be seen if the idea is gonna take off.
I kinda disagree with you about it being a mistake to not push bigger and faster computers. As someone who works with lots of different computers daily, apple has the fastest thing on the block with m2 and I’d even say the m1 machines felt faster than contemporary windows systems. When you’re on top with a technology that’s fundamentally different than what the competition has, why push that? That’s the part of the cycle where you mass produce your product, broaden your offerings and rake in a bunch of money.
People are claiming 18 tps with llama on the m2 max. That’s pretty good.
I also think you’re off the mark with this not being the promise of the m series socs. one of the shortcomings of the intel Mac’s was their variety. Plenty of the unibody computers have a fast enough processor and support enough memory to run the new oses but are excluded because they don’t have gpus that are supported, don’t have the cpu extensions required etc. even with patches and opencore there’s a big window of amd gpu models that are just not usable. The promise of the m series for me at least is even longer support windows after official support ends.
Im interested in hearing what was disappointing about the other parts of the announcements re: hardware though. Probably not gonna watch it since im also probably not gonna buy any of the shit in it.
I never made all the comparisons you brought up. It’s like the iPhone in that it’s an expensive new technology released during an economic downturn and is being mocked and praised simultaneously.
Fair enough and agreed. Like I said, it's just one of those rebuttals I've seen flying around whenever criticism or concerns about the headset were brought up over the course of the last few months, so sorry if it sounded accusatory. I do think that if there's anyone who could sell this tech to people it's going to be Apple, but I worry a lot of the hype will come from the brand loyalty and the bandwagon effect. Overall, however, I find the whole idea of strapping tech onto your head to be strange. It demands my full presence all the time to use and interact with it—quite unlike a computer, phone, or watch. I can't use it when it's sitting on a table or when it's in another room, and I can't share things with other people in my immediate vicinity unless they're also wearing a headset. I don't see a good value proposition there, exchanging my current ability to log off, so to speak, for a big virtual screen and eye tracking.
I actually think the M series is dope as fuck and am really looking forward to picking up an M2 (or more realistically, next year's M3 since my i9 MBP is still chugging along) MacBook and/or Mac Studio. I can't believe that my grandmother's iPad is more performant than 99% of any other computer I've owned. I've been very impressed with its performance and the insane battery life even those MBP beasts can achieve. You certainly can tell that they've been doing a lot of work to make the seams between their hardware and software appear invisible, and as much as I know it's part of the show, I very much delight in how well they're able to do it, and how much more pronounced it is when their own SoCs are under the hood. Still would like a bit more QC on their first-party apps, though, and I do think there is a propensity to eschew that kind of stuff in general, but especially because Apple operates the way that it does internally as an organization.
My issues with the current notebook lineup is the decision to ruin some of the best displays in the industry with a non-functional notch that fucks with application menus and is just generally an eyesore. I can't for the life of me understand that decision and I haven't ever heard a good excuse for it. It's just a weird aesthetic that takes away from an otherwise great machine. The Mac Pro debacle revolves around the issues with having a RAM limit that's 8x lower than the Intel Mac Pro (1.5TB to 192GB), no ECC for unified memory, no additional GPU support at all despite all those PCIe slots, and that aside from that and the dual gigabit ethernet you're getting a Mac Studio for twice the price. I realize these limitations are part of the current M series and that could be mitigated or eliminated in a future iteration, and granted, I haven't been in the market for one since the OG Mac Pro in the G5 chassis, but it just feels like a very lazy port so they can say "we did it, we transitioned the whole lineup." Apple's had a very contentious relationship with the people who typically made up the market for these behemoths, so it is a fairly big regression in terms of specs outside of the M2 for the few people who stuck around after the last time they painted themselves into a corner from 2013-2019. I only watched clips from yesterday, but figured they'd still be selling the Intel Mac Pro alongside this one, so I was surprised to see they weren't.
I will say that the Apple headset specs are super impressive, better than anything out there. 4156×3740 pixel display per eye, with a 1.4 inch diagonal, that's over 4000 PPI. Over 33 pixels per degree before any fancy lens tech is considered. Varjo is able to get 70 pixels per degree in the focus area with fancy lenses and eye tracking, Apple could do even better.
Lenses can only trade off PPD at different places in the FOV. The best lenses actually try to reduce distortion and keep PPD equal, which leads to the best performance and quality (having different PPD in different location requires distortion which requires supersampling to correct)
Eye tracking can't increase PPD either. It's purely something you do for performance when you already have a high PPD.
This is Apple. They wait for other brands to make the initial fuck-ups, use their sycophantic fans and high-salary Bullshit Job people as early adopters, and in 5 years these headsets will be available with a cellular modem available for a 3-year lease at every Verizon
Yeah I think the first iteration will probably flop at that price point, but once they find a way to get it in the hands of less luxury consumers it will probably take off.
I think it's pretty stupid as-is. The idea of sitting on the couch and watching a movie through a headset that just puts a TV where my TV already is sounds incredibly weird, as does filming a moment between family and friends while wearing it. There are some cool gimmicks for sure, but most of what it does can be accomplished with a $200 phone or computer.
Is there a future for AR? Probably. I just don't think this price and functionality is going to lead to mainstream adoption.
You don't need to buy another TV for every person watching though. Even just for 2 it'd be 7k and forget about having guests over.
It’s the home cinema experience, but lonelier but everyone is watching something different
Feel another 2008 in my worn millennial bones.
Also feeling severe tech fatigue. Now I even feel disgusted by Linux or free software in general. Technology become some hyper-speculative giddy playground that real lives are getting ruined by that has no way of paying back the huge debts or be relied on with any meaningful assurance. After the bubble bursts there should be a kind of butlerian jihad where we question how much time we are devoting to these things and how much they have screwed up our attention spans and mental health.
There are essential applications for computers but they don't need such a huge industry that the economy and the path out of poverty depends on. If anything the next iteration of these applications needs to come from public funding where software is developed to formal specification like with ATS2 virtual machines running on top of seL4. All this should be under Donald Knute's literal programming paradigm where software engineers must first provide comprehensive documentation explaining the code they are writing and algorithm they are using. This documentation should be legally available the public emerging from regulations and guidelines decided through whole process democracy.
They don't know what to even show it doing! Apple and every fucking AR VR whatever company KEEEEEP imagining that a human being is going to strap goggles to their head to read a text or an email or do a fucking Zoom. Like, call it a wizz bang gamer device, or shut the fuck up holy shit
They all imagine a Ready Player One experience but don’t realize that it was a dystopian future with rampant poverty and cultural death
One of the funniest things about Metaverse was that Zucc wanted you to use shitty, ugly legless human avatars instead of having a sexy dragon avatar or a talking car or darth vader. VR is always going to struggle as a corporate product bc they're always going to make people's avatars look "Professional", ie boring and probably shitty, instead of acknowledging the human need to be an animu furry copyright violation.
It's like these people don't understand what convenience is. Nobody is going to strap on $3500 goggles to do boring office work. Do they think I'm going to get a notification on my phone/laptop and put these on to respond instead of using the thing that's already there in front of me? No one is going to wear these all day long outside of VR porn addicts.
I could see these used by engineers, architects, planners of various kinds, shipwrights - There are lots of contexts where being able to walk around a structure, or blow up a product until it's big enough to step inside, could be useful. Likewise, giving a corporate presentation where your clients can actually walk around in the building before the break ground has some niche uses. But stillllllll.
Exactly. It's a specialized 3D viewing device, not a fucking text message reader
Out of that entire presentation nothing was more deluded than this image
Every aspect of this photo is intentionally built to imply you would literally just sit around C H I L L I N G wearing one of these fucking things. She's comfortable, she hasn't moved, she's enjoying a long story. She's up close face to face. She's relaxed. She expects everyone in the room to just hold a normal conversation while she uses a literal headset to poorly replicate the visual properties of three cups of air.
The close second is the woman in a hotel room wearing the fucking goggles while packing her suitcase. While packing her suitcase. And someone calls her. Fucking incredible.
I think it's stupid because VR has not become popular despite cheap all-in-one headsets like the Meta Quest 2. Sony releasing a new PSVR is also stupid, especially since they just seemed to give up on the last one and you can't use it on PC.
For gaming, VR is both resource intensive and restrictive in terms of what you can actually do: moving freely in a 3D environment is very hard to do without motion sickness, so most VR games confine you to standing or sitting in place plus most people can't stay in VR for that long. Probably the best use case is flight sims and sim racing, and I don't know about flight sim people, but most sim racers really use VR only as a novelty.
edit: and of course AR is even more of a non-starter.
moving freely in a 3D environment is very hard to do without motion sickness
The last number I saw was like 80% of people get their VR legs sooner or later.
The flight sim people I know love it. Being in the cockpit is a huge gamechanger. But these are 300 dollar flight yoke + pedals + expensive software enthusiasts. The kind of people who hacked together their own eye-tracking systems years ago out of IR lights and webcams.
The meta quest 2 has a 1832x1920 pixel display for each eye, that is a terrible resolution for anything realistic. Your entire vertical FOV is 1920 pixels high. That's the same vertical resolution as a 4K screen, but inches away from your eye and occupying your entire field of vision.
The PSVR2 has a slightly higher resolution of over 2000 pixels vertically, but it has two key features witch improve image quality massively. Better lenses, and HDR screens. HDR in gaming makes a massive difference in terms of how realistic colours look. It's still pretty much a novelty for use with Gran Turismo though.
For context, the apple headset is going for 4156×3740 pixel display that's about 1.4 inches diagonally across, for each eye. That's a massive image quality improvement compared to almost anything out there, given how high the resolution is, and how small the screen is. That's the kind of numbers you need to make it usable for stuff like office work and AR spreadsheets or word documents. It's also using OLED screens, so you'll get true blacks, and 5000nits of brightness, with HDR presumably.
The thing is, unless we get massive improvements in resolution and massive price drops, VR will remain a niche technology. The resolution with these two VR headsets you mentioned, is the same resolution you'd get if you strapped a google cardboard to one of Sony's smartphones with a 4k screen. It's not great. But it is coming. Phone screens went from 240p to 1440p and 4k in a couple of years, VR could do the same. And that is very worrying. Or cool if you like VR.
Realistic is a trap. There really aren't many use cases where you need or want realistic. What you want most of the time is immersive; Good art direction, easily read colors and textures, clear map flow or physical layout.
For video games the quest2 and PSVR are fine, as long as you work with the medium instead of trying to fight it. The best VR games use stylized graphics
Breachers in the new hotness right now. The textures don't look this sharp in game, but I hope this conveys that you don't need, or necessarily want, a huge amount of graphical fidelity or clutter to make VR games work. AFAIK it runs well on the Quest2.
It's not about realistic necessarily, that was the wrong word. It's about being able to see what's going on in detail and reading fine text and the like. Maybe not important for stylised video games, but important for what the corporates want to use VR for. And the Apple headset's specs make it very good for that. Better than anything you can buy right now with the extremely high resolution displays and eye tracking.
For videogame, you're absolutely correct. But that's not the market Apple is aiming at.
The meta quest 2 has a 1832x1920 pixel display for each eye, that is a terrible resolution for anything realistic.
I know it's not great, but it's kind of old now and always more intended as a budget headset for playing stuff like Beat Saber on the onboard hardware, although IIRC it does have a better resolution than the Rift S.
That’s the kind of numbers you need to make it usable for stuff like office work and AR spreadsheets or word documents.
But why tho? This isn't aimed at you personally, just in general I don't see why anyone would want to do office work on a $3500 VR/AR headset when it's cheaper to just use a couple of monitors, and that's also a system that's proven to work.
I don't know why either, I'm not going to stap a VR headset on my face to do office work. I think it's because companies want the office environment back, and work from home is making it impossible. So the idea is that everyone straps on a VR headset and can all be in the same office while working from home. If the companies don't have to pay rent for office space, they have a ton of money to burn on stuff like this.
they probably dream of using the biometric sensors to police your working at home
Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. It clearly looks like what Apple is going for. A device that can integrate into your work and home life.
Size of the screen doesn't matter because the optics correct to a fixed FOV anyways. For the same reason in VR nits are a meaningless unit, because there's no fixed area, so what actually matters are lumens/candela for a given FOV.
In that case, using a 1.4in 5000nit screen is going to provide the same result as a 300nit 6in screen.
My guess is they wanted to compete with the Metaverse and started designing it before it became public, but they put too much into it? I do think VR and AR will be a thing, but it will not be in any form we see today. Apple clearly wanted to be ahead of the curve. It will probably fail. Might do a bit better than the metaverse, but it will very likely fail
Who would win? 11 billion dollars of bazinga money, or a bunch of furries working in Unity and distributing for free?
You don't have to strap a PC to your face. Shit looks heavy. Wonder what the battery life is like. Does it get hot? It can't be as powerful as a PC either.
It can’t be as powerful as a PC either.
It is, it has a laptop processor in it.
Battery is external and goes in your pocket, I do wonder if you can hot swap it. Definitely helps with the weight.
2 hour battery life
External battery pack that goes on your pocket
Holy shit they made a VR Game Gear
Not having wires makes a big difference in how you can move, Doubly so if they want this to have some kind of pass-through AR so you can walk around without running in to walls and then swap to your VR app wherever you happen to be.
it has a laptop processor in it, whereas VR games require graphics cards bigger than the typical Macbook.
They absolutely do not. You can run an index on a midrange cards now, depending on what games you want to play. Keep in mind, the Quest2 is an all in one headset that runs this game just fine.
It's not an Index, it has 4x as many pixels, and a modern midrange GPU is far more powerful than an Apple laptop GPU.
Yeah I don't think they've marketed it as capable of those kinds of games, it's like a big iPad that fills your vision.
Apple doesn't have the technology to make a GPU that's as good as NVidia or AMD in performance per watt, so there's no way they can put out even close to the performance of a gaming laptop in a standalone VR headset.
I can't speak for Apples thing but I've worn HTC Vives and the Valve Index for several hours at a time without too much trouble. They're a few pounds, which isn't nothing, but they're not that heavy either.
For starters we’re in the middle of a huge financial crisis
nice so a novelty item for people to buy and jack up the price for resell market
Bold of you to assume this is meant for non-rich non-yuppies
As far as I'm concerned the internet turned out to be a crock of shit, and then every radical new technological advancement since then has been an attack on human existence.
I think this will succeed, because I've looked at every single new Apple product since the iPhone and thought "man, that's fucking stupid" and then it sold like hotcakes anyway, so clearly the intended market is out there, and i'm not in it. I think this one will do exactly what it says on the tin and it's gonna suck shit through a straw. Practical cyberpunk demands that we kill the computer and I mean it.
