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What Do People Think of Apple's Vision Pro Headsets?
(thenewstack.io)
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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Technology
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The coolest piece of tech I've ever experienced by a large margin. The potential is endless.
But the people actually wearing it in public are crazy.
What would you use it for? Honest question.
I can't see using it for work. Writing a long email with an onscreen keyboard is not realistic.
It doesn't really play games.
So it's for watching YouTube on your face? I have a TV and couch that do that, and a phone in my pocket 24/7 that will do that. I honestly can't figure out the use case.
Today? Building stuff. The app ecosystem isn't there for casual audiences yet, because devs need their hands on it to do most stuff that utilizes what it can do. You can't build much more than the basics using a phone to test.
You don't have to use an on screen keyboard. It supports Bluetooth mouse and keyboard perfectly fine. The bigger restriction is the number of windows to me, but there are ways to make that work.
Interacting with and laying out information in 3D space is just different from doing it on a 2D display. Our brain understands 3D space intuitively in a pretty deep way. There would be some level of "OK, I turned my MacBook display in bed into a 500 foot screen next to a waterfall", and stuff like the demo 3D videos of animals were super immersive. I did feel like I could reach out and touch them.
But I want to build out the books in my personal collection into a 3D library with shelves to browse. I want to see stuff I'm modeling in actual 3D instead of one 2D angle at a time I have to manipulate to get different perspectives on. I want to plan out a room layout by standing in the middle of the room and virtually dragging things around. I'm just spitballing a couple of the first things that come to mind, but AR Kit is powerful and capable of all of that with relative ease. I can think of countless other "small" things that change the experience compared to doing stuff on a monitor pretty significantly. I don't think it's that different to people saying "you can do whatever on a computer" when iPhones or iPads came out. Sure, but as it gets into more hands and more people are able to build apps for it, people will come up with all kinds of uses that fundamentally feel different even if the same core thing can be done on existing hardware.
Ok cool, if I may take a swing at summarizing what you said?
What you are really talking about are the potential applications of AR (Augmented Reality), which I will totally agree with, that is a future state that is coming, unfortunately those apps mostly don't exist for the consumer space yet, but they will.
The apple headset being the first commercially available headset that does AR well.
Pretty much. AR has amazing potential and Apple waited to enter the space until they could provide something that can actually do AR without the massive compromises other headsets people pretend can do AR have to make.
I haven't bought one yet because it's a lot of money. But I did get to do the in store demo and it crosses a bunch of minimum thresholds nothing else does. They've been building to this for a long time.
The other benefit is that, as much as they control distribution, Apple's set of libraries/etc for software development make it extremely possible to make actual money developing reasonably high quality apps for iPhone/iPad as a solo developer. ARKit on iPhone already has led to solo developers being able to do real AR phone apps (with limited scope because you're looking through a phone obviously). It's definitely the first and most accessible way to build AR functionality compared to the limited access enterprise headsets (with their own limitations) with whatever tooling they had. When they announce the next, more affordable version, they'll have a huge head start on an ecosystem because this is out there.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful and detailed replies, it is much appreciated. This headset finally makes some kind of sense for what it is.
No problem. This is tech I've been waiting for for a long time. I understand why it's hard to imagine the benefits without seeing some applications actually built out, and would not encourage anyone to buy it at this point unless they do have that clear vision for what they want from it. For the tech in it, though, when you compare it to the alternative VR only headsets, the price is pretty aggressive.
If you're interested and near an Apple Store with demos, I highly encourage you to try it out. It doesn't really showcase any AR, but the level of clarity and depth you get on 3D photos and videos is really impressive, and worth checking out for the sake of it. At least at my store, I was super open about "I definitely can't buy this in the immediate future" and they were still perfectly happy/friendly about doing the demo.