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Everyone I’ve talked to that has used a Vision Pro has said it’s an incredible piece of magical technology, but it’s utterly useless.
It’s literally just Apple flexing.
but it’s utterly useless.
That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.
Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.
Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.
You’ve nailed it. Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.
That’s why the biggest use case for VR has been gaming and metaverses. It’s a ready-to-go thing that adapts well, but it’s certainly not for everyone. For my part, I’m saving up for a PS VR2, because it’s adding PC support soon and I already own a PS5 as well. Far, far cheaper than Apple’s device, and likely quite good still.
Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.
Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.
The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.
The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.
Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.
Yeah, I’m pretty convinced we need to be able to make the headsets lighter, and put more compute in an accessory and have the headset just do low complexity stuff like low latency last-millisecond angle adjustments to frames as you move.
To be fair, they have a similar problem with iPad, but they can flog those at a price point where many people are happy to grab one to see how they can make it fit.
The overarching opinion of iPads is that they’re just big iPhones, and because they can share apps, it took a long time to get to where we are now, where most iPad apps are actually developed for it. But ultimately, they’re still iPhone apps, just rejigged to take advantage of the bigger screen. As someone with an iPad and a MacBook, who’s had a really good go at making an iPad my main computer, the platform just isn’t there. So if I do use it, it’s always in the knowledge that what I’m doing is probably easier on my Mac.
VisionPro feels the same to me. Sure, I could surround myself with work, but pinching and tapping nothing in the air has zero tactility and is far less satisfying than clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard. And comes with having to wear a headset. So in the end, most people will just do the work on their Mac.
When the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift first came out, the rift didn’t yet have full-room support. You had to sit facing the base station and use a video game controller. Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.
One pro-con comparison I read at the time actually listed needing to walk around the room as a con against HTC. That is the whole point of VR.
I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.
Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides.
Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.
Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.
I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.
Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides
But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:
For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.
For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.
Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup
But that wasn’t the complaint levied. They were literally complaining about needing to walk around.
And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.
But everyone knows the people watching at home on traditional 2D TV get the best view. Zooms on the players/performers, slow-mo recap, etc. I can’t imagine the nausea of having your entire field of view warped across the court to see every special angle. Not to mention, until whatever VR app has a plug in for every thing you’d want to do on your phone while you’re watching the game, you’re stuck paying 100% of your attention to the sport.
Hell, even the people at the concert or sporting event spend half their time on their phone.
That would actually be super interesting. Yeah, let me switch between cams on cars, pit crews, stands, helicopter etc., with real sound where possible. Hell yeah.
This may be true for AR, but it is emphatically not true for VR. There are dozens of amazing games that are extremely addictive and fun. Steam VR is no joke, it’s a very solid store these days.
There are dozens of amazing games
…and 99% of them are tech demos.
Compare it to an industry that publishes over 10 thousand games every year, on Steam alone. Then you start to understand how VR is just a niche hobbyist toy. Not a mainstream product. Making VR experiences is several times harder while also aiming at a minuscule tiny market. VR is perhaps today on par to where general computing and gaming was in the 70s. Neat concept, not enough use cases and product development, still way too cumbersome and expensive.
as a VR enthusiast: if the had just added controllers it would have made it so much more useable.
No matter how good your gesture controlls are, it still greatly limits its use. Theres a reason we use mice and styluses with computers, instead of touch and mid-air gestures!
Are there still no 3rd party controllers? It seems like controllers like the quest pro has (that can track themselves) would be an easy match. I guess meta is spending millions on development though, so it’s probably not something easily made by a small company.
I would think Bluetooth should provide enough bandwidth, but IDK if apple’s OS is configurable enough to support something like that.
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VR in its current form, I agree, has only one real use.
But when improved upon and made smaller, I could easily see it being used to watch TV or similar. I’ve done that on a few flights and it was decent.
Not to mention, VR is a necessary step to get to AR, and AR has many more applications. Screens with anything anywhere, for one. Imagine a computer with one monitor, but numerous virtual monitors. Or a TV on your ceiling.
It’s iterative. Gaming just happens to be the current driver.
Human will immediately adopt anything they can carry with them. But humans have a very strong repulsion to adopting anything they have to wear or in general have permanently on them. It is uncomfortable, it is hot, it is annoying, it is visible, it is a wall between them and the world. There are people who don’t wear their correction glasses because they don’t like having something on their faces. There are people who don’t even withstand contact glasses. There are deaf people who refuse to use hearing implants. Wrist watches are tolerated because they are more peripheral and easier to remove.
This is a way more fundamental flaw on the concept of VR than technology, applications, software availability, etc. You can make VR as tiny and practical as contact glasses and people will still refuse to adopt it.
I use mine daily… primarily as a monitor for my laptop.
Now you might think that’s dumb, but I can go sit outside in the backyard, park, beach, coffee shop, wherever and work on a big, totally private, crisp and clear, glare-free anywhere monitor. I can bring it to the in-laws or on trips and even use it as a monitor for my Steam Deck. Or I can lay in bed or on the sofa or on a lawn chair and use the Steam Link app to play games from my PC.
Taken purely as a private, portable, omni-monitor, it’s absolutely worth the price for me.
As an AR/MR/XR device, it has some MAJOR software problems. Honestly, it makes sense they’d pause hardware development… it’ll be a couple years before there’s anything worth upgrading and they have a long way to go on UX, gestures, inputs, and even basic real-time object recognition and tracking. I bought mine knowing it was a Development Kit and planning to use it to get ahead on AR development experience, but I hit major roadblocks so frequently I’ve just about given up on every interesting use-case I went into this with.
VisionOS 2 is a baby step forward, but Apple has a long, long way to go before it makes sense for regular people. Heck, they aren’t even including all the cool new AI features in VisionOS 2, and it’s the one device that could benefit from that stuff the most.
So, yeah… it can still be worth it to certain people with specific use-cases, but I think it’ll be a solid 5 years before the software and hardware can reach a “normal consumer” level of quality and value.
This is the reason I want one. I really want to take a long haul flight with one paired to my wireless keychron with Mx blue switches, and proceed to code for the entire flight.
… long haul flight… mx blue…
I’m not sure if you’re joking but it’s hilarious either way.
I can’t hear you over the din of the kali box whites and the screaming child, what did you say?
Then it’s just useless…
The blackberry was the exact opposite, it was an unpolished piece of ugly hardware that was, at the time, incredibly useful
Pretty tech that accomplishes nothing is akin to the garbage toy lights they peddled to kids in Disney… Just landfill e-waste
Used or owned? I own one and bought several for my company and they’re not useless at all. They’re just limited in the AR/VR experiences you can do right now. As a computer, productivity, and production device, it’s far from useless.
Blue Steel Look intensifies
DARPA is going to have to play with this for a while before it gets to a point where it’s actually useful to the general public. And they are playing with it.
DARPA hasn’t been an innovator in decades. Their budget is pathetic compared to Apple.
“Hey look what we could do at six times the price point” isn’t a flex, it’s stupidity.
Like why not just release Apple brand Skis, or team up with Nike and make some shoes, or Jewelry if you want to do high priced stuff rich idiots pay for.
It’s a flex because the vision pro has the best optics and display technology ever made. It’s stupid because it has no use. It’s not a flex because it’s expensive, it’s expensive because it’s a flex, if that makes sense.
Best display technology ever made??
Extremely high density pixels
Note that suspends != cancelled and it’s just the “Pro”, with a cheaper model allegedly in the works.
We’ll see where a cheaper model lands in terms of price, but it’s very clear now that $3500+ isn’t really the price range where most people buy something out of curiosity. Because let’s face it: the Vision (Pro) still lacks a “killer app” for the masses.
That’s the important bit that everybody is missing:
Apple has suspended work on the second-generation Vision Pro headset to singularly focus on a cheaper model
Clicking through to the paywalled article, the headlines reads as follows:
Apple Suspends Work on Next Vision Pro, Focused on Releasing Cheaper Model in Late 2025.
I am as unoptimistic on the future of VR as everybody else here, but can we please leave the nuance in? Apple are not turning the key on VR, at least not yet, they are simply doing the predicable thing that everybody said their would: Release a VR headset that isn’t targeted at developers only.
My impression of the Vision Pro was that it was built and priced for developers to buy and expense and then build VR apps with it. That way when the consumer version comes out there’s stuff in the app store.
Have they built apps for it yet? I was going to get one but then it was stupidly expensive, was only available in the US, and would require a Mac for development not just for code compiling. To like many I didn’t bother with it. Even if I could have imported it.
Companies have been pushing VR so long now. I’ll say that I think the tech is cool and the idea is cool, but I will literally never use them.
I can’t wear them while working as I am in meetings 99% of the time.
I would not wear them in my free time, as I do not want to disassociate from my wife and cats.
My issue is, aside from gaming, I’m not interacting with the content or data in any meaningful, improved way.
VR for real life is just a series of flat two dimensional screens, usually with a novelty background of a waterfall.
Yeah, I think it could be useful for CAD or 3D art (with proper software) but I can’t think of many other jobs where it would be all that helpful.
I love VR. So I use it for gaming maybe once a week, for 1-2 hours, usually as an activity with my SO so we can switch who’s playing each “round” depending on the game. That’s the maximum I find fun instead of tiring. I can’t see using it for long periods or for work, that sounds like a nightmare.
This is just a price to function issue.
If the price was 0 everyone would have one.
But the cost of it is way too high for what it is. Price and weight etc will come down. Uses will increase.
Have one != Use one. I own two and stopped using them ages ago. All of them are too clunky and I realized I’m generally too lazy to want to interact with stuff in VR vs my more comfortable media consumption on a TV and a couch.
Maybe if they were super lightweight and I could legitimately do real exercise with them they’d be useful, but as is they’re too hot, too uncomfortable and too limited.
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I don’t think the cost is too high at all. But I also don’t think it’s a consumer device right now. It’s a dev kit with none of the cost savings of production at scale.
It’s absolutely phenomenal for gaming or vr “experiences” (basically movies made specifically for vr). But the corpos are really hellbent on making everyone use it for meetings for some fucking reason. Which is truly the lamest, most unnecessary use of this tech.
I would only use VR in racing, flight sim, or space sim games. probably once a couple of months after the initial excitement.
The current iterations have far more potential than the past.
But the hardware is stil too power inefficiënt and the display pixel density is expensive to produce.
Aren’t the meetings pushed as one of the basic function of these? But I guess it only makes sense if most of the participants use them and software has the support.
I have found my headset useful for work, when working from home and I don’t do camera on meetings anyway.
At home it’s pretty nice, and since my ears are open I can actually talk, so my wife actually prefers it over me wearing headphones. But all things in moderation, I wouldn’t wear it constantly.
Despite being a huge fan of the concept, I still couldn’t go for Apple’s headset, it’s heavy, it’s expensive, and lack of controllers are all deal breakers. The Quest 3 is lighter, has good controllers, and is more affordable. It may not have the displays as nice as Vision, but that doesn’t make up for the rest of the stuff.
Apple has suspended work on the second-generation Vision Pro headset to singularly focus on a cheaper model
That seems very reasonable and like what they probably should’ve been doing all along.
I still don’t understand who the pro was actually for. Everyone who had one said exactly the same thing about it which was they couldn’t understand how to use it productively for anything.
IMHO, it’s a fancy dev kit.
Exactly. Not promoting it as a dev kit was a major failure. This is the kind of product where you CAN’T do without external feedback, not everybody will use one in a clean office (or even one that stands still), not everybody has the same spatial awareness or motor skills, not supporting controllers locks out numerous people with limited hand movements, etc… As a dev kit it could’ve worked much better at getting the kind of feedback they need from devs working on useful AR stuff
The problem with it being a dev kit is that I don’t know what features are and are not going to be on the more consumer model, so I can’t really develop anything for it.
Will the consumer version have the truly excellent depth tracking or will it use the cheaper but more traditional point tracking system, because that will inform my UI decisions. Will it have iris recognition for logins or will I need to build that functionality in, will they please include controllers, will they please fix it so that you can pin things to a location, and not have them close just because you leave that location? I don’t know, as they haven’t communicated anything about it.
The point of such an early dev kit isn’t to commit in advance but get people to try out what works, then select what will be in the final product (and maybe releasing updated dev kits on the way). They’re would be a general plan, but this isn’t like a game console dev kit where almost all specs and major features are set in advance, so you’d expect devs to implement multiple variants of each software feature and see what they require of the hardware, how people use it, how popular they are, etc.
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The kind of people who would go around driving a Cybertruck with a Vision Pro on their faces and an humane pin strapped on.
You mean they’re doing what everyone said they should have done to begin with - release an affordable consumer product that will in turn attract more developers?
Everyone knew that they would release a cheaper model, and it was always their plan. That’s why it has ‘pro’ in its name.
I watched a YouTuber telling something like:
“I cannot believe Apple’s biggest premium VR tech wants to change the world… And they are advertising it with… Fucking spreadsheets”
I am paraphrasing ofc, but the meaning was that this could have been a pretty good toy for everyone, but they are trying to sell it as a work-buddy thingy, yeah seeing those spreadsheets focus was kinda dystopian (like in Ready Player One where they are caged doing work or something hah), watching movies in crazy sites yeah, that was what would have sell it more for me, and other ppl, if it wasn’t crazily expensive.
It’s not for gaming and it’s not for porn… what were they thinking?
If it fails it is totally on them.
Is this the virtual boy of Apple? A product that never really made no sense to anybody and was never really supported?
I was hoping they’d get the price down to something sane. It looks like it could be a cool tool for CAD. Of course there won’t be any input available from a non-Apple computer so I still wouldn’t want one.
I desperately want a virtual desktop environment for plain ass computing. Give me infinite windows for my spreadsheet and IDE and that’s all I need!
you can do this with the quest 3 i think
I’ve heard the quest 3 is awesome and does almost everything the Vision does. Not sure I can justify the price to myself yet.
i am using a quest 2 for productivity and ebooks but the resolution is so low that my desktops need to be 1280x720 or I can’t read them. it will be nice to upgrade when i get the chance.
I’ve heard the resolution is good enough to watch movies on too. Not sure if that is true, but that would be a selling point for me.
oh yea, watching movies is incredible. that’s the other thing im using it for
Without a Meta account tho? I’ve got hard blockers on price or shenanigans (or both) for every headset I know of.
Not sure what having an account has to do with anything. I get the objection on the grounds of Meta being a shit company and it’s perfectly reasonable, but having to make an account specifically for the device (and possibly nothing else - you don’t have to link it to facebook or anything) doesn’t magically give them any more power over you.
Yeah, I would genuinely use one for the virtual screen capabilities to do my normal Salesforce-and-Slack job, if not for the price.
In the article it says they’re cancelling the “pro” version to focus on producing a cheaper version. So it sounds like you might get what you want, although “cheaper” will still likely be very expensive, and your point about compatibility with non-Apple devices still holds.
At least the VirtualBoy sold enough to not make it a waste of time?
It did?
No.
At 770,000 sold, it is Nintendo’s lowest-selling standalone console and the only one to have less than one million units sold, seconded by the Wii U’s 13.6 million units.
The Wii U was seen as a complete and utter sales flop. The Wii U outsold the VirtualBoy 18:1.
it was cool though
I don’t know why everyone is so negative. The gameplan seems pretty clear to me.
- Make expensive fancy product. This is effectively a “devkit” that companies can use to start experimenting with AR software.
- Make lower cost product. There are now a few decent apps available and early adopters will be willing to buy it to be one the leading edge.
- Now there is a bigger market, leading more companies to be willing to develop apps.
Apple is hoping that this is enough to break the chicken-and-egg cycle. Enough to get a few powerful apps such that more regular consumers will be willing to buy which again increases the addressable market which makes it more attractive to companies.
Basically sounds like the Tesla game plan, which was super effective: roadster (which is purely a toy for the rich) and a little later the Model S (practical EV), and then introduce an affordable model.
This implies that eventually people will strap rusty boxes to their head though, so grain of salt with the analogy…
Yep that’s exactly why they had started the 2 then changed their mind lol. Alllll part of the plan
It’s all 5D chess, just like Elon.
They did something similar with Apple Watch and Apple TV and Home Pod and jt worked out well enough for them.
HomePod is still mid. But people really sleep on how terrible the first Apple Watch was, and how AppleTV is a media juggernaut now.
Apple should make a virtual headset you can buy in META, then put it on when you are already in a VR setting, except now you can use Apple services with it!
That way it would have zero production cost, be absolutely as useless as it already is, and can be just as overpriced.
It seems like the perfect Apple scheme.
If you can continue with vapid schemes that ensure endless shareholder value I’ll follow you anywhere senpaisano
Bro, just one more year. Let them come up with just another pair of goggles bro, trust me bro, one more year and we will be in VR future bro.
In the year 2000…
I’m not sure why they tried this.
‘We made a VR games headset, but replaced the games with office related programs, like calenders and notepads’
Did any of them ever use an Oculus Quest? Like, why did they try this? Is this Apple’s Google Glass moment? Did they really think that if you pay enough youtubers to wear it in public, normal people would magically go into car-level debt to emulate them?
In fact, I’ll go as far as to say this campaign and price point was a bigger mistake, and a louder failure than Google Glasses.
I don’t know how far things have come since the aptly named Acer AH101-D8EY, but that was the last time I tried to be “productive” in VR and it was absolutely not working.
The only thing I could see myself using it for, is being in bed and watching a movie. I can do that with ar glasses for 300$.
To do:
Cheaper headset
Actual controllers
Make it work with PCs
- Don’t make it out of a solid chunk of aluminium and glass so it weighs a ton and has nothing to balance it out on the back.
I still don’t understand how Windows got the PC name. A Mac is also a personal computer…
Also, apple isn’t going to make it work with other OSs any more than they have their other products, not sure why you’d even list that.
In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers
At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.
The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”
Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.
Thanks for attending my Ted talk
Thanks for the history, very interesting! I still hate how the term is used today and refuse to use it.
Nowadays I mostly think of it in regards to how much control you have over the hardware. If you can Ship of Theseus your way to a completely different machine with completely different specs, that’s a PC to me. If you’re stuck with what you paid for, then it’s something else. A Mac Mini is not a PC in my book, but a Hackintosh is even though it’s the same OS and general hardware architecture.
But that’s just how I use the term.
BUT THE SHAREHOLDERS!!!
The price immediately put this product into the grave. They should take out all the useless features like the eye passthrough, or the bizarre face scanning, if it’ll only ever be used for calls. If this were to be used in a gaming scenario, sort of like what the PSVR2 does, that’d be a whole different conversation
