I'm very confused by Apple's strategy. As an owner of the original HTC Vive headset, its word-of-mouth power was off the charts. It was a blast at parties, and many of my friends bought their own $700+ devices after trying it.
Here's what won them over:
- Being able to try it themselves with little preparation ("put this on your head, tighten it here, and click these buttons on the controller"). You could even use it over glasses.
- Games that you play by grabbing things with your hands. The heavy hitters are Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx, but Climbey and UltraWings also got fans, and all the combat games where you punch cartoons or reload guns realistically.
(seriously, if you've never tried, the jump from mouse+keyboard to hand tracking is like going from arrow keys to mouse+keyboard)
Meanwhile, here's what Apple seems to be doing:
- Customized accessories, to the point that you need a face-scan and to send them your glasses prescriptions.
- Eyetracking and gesture-only interactions. I haven't seen a single demo where somebody picks a virtual object up.
How is that going to work? Do they expect to make up for all the lost word-of-mouth with marketing campaigns? Also, did they give up on VR games?
it's a totally different model of generating demand. They don't need marketing, because they have a completely captive audience of loyal apple fans who will easily saturate the first year (or even two years) of supply for this product.
They are following Palmer Luckey's "Make people want it first model". Being supply limited, traditional marketing would only generate demand they can't satisfy. What they actually have to do is make sure every person who gets one has the most perfect experience possible.
> What they actually have to do is make sure every person who gets one has the most perfect experience possible.
This is particularly important when it comes to a VR headset, where it's very easy for bad initial experiences to literally physically condition the user into getting sick every time they put on a VR headset.
Stepping the most diehard fans through how to metaphorically "hold it right" also gives them a built-in backstop of support when it comes to preventing those issues with future consumers once they eventually hit the point of proper mass market production.
>What they actually have to do is make sure every person who gets one has the most perfect experience possible.
But they can't have the most perfect experience if the software isn't there. And there won't be enough software that actually utilises the 3D features until a sufficient number of developers get access to the device.
So I agree that the strategy can work but it can also be overstretched. If expensive devices become obsolete before they become useful, and if developers write this off as some sort of forever niche then momentum will die.
> And there won't be enough software that actually utilises the 3D features until a sufficient number of developers get access to the device.
Judging by the keynote, Apple doesn't seem to care too much about 3D features. The Vision Pro looked more like a 360deg window manager for iOS & macOS-like apps.
And that's an entirely different niche, because suddenly it competes with desktop monitors. Focus on immersion seems to be much less than what eg. Meta is building; even the games they showed in the keynote were traditional, flat iOS games.
True, but this seems more like stopgap owed to the dearth of software rather than a long term strategy. If this thing never becomes more than a fancy monitor then it will be a disappointment for most users as well as Apple itself.
Surely you understand how emotionally invested in the success of VR he is right? Palmer wants "Ready Player One" to happen even though that would mean most people live in squalor and their only escape is some highly financialized "virtual world". Most normal people don't want that.
> Everyone I have seen with actual experience USING VR and AR say it is not even evolutionary, let alone revolutionary.
Luckey obviously has that experience. Now you're changing to a different argument. Marques Brownlee also has experience with these products and says it was impressive and that there's nothing equivalent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI.
My experience of the same has been the opposite. Friends I showed it to telling me "interesting" then moving on and never mentioning it again. And I felt the same. It went to storage less than a month after I received it.
Same here. I organized a trip to a VR center for the entire team at work.
Everybody had fun, but more like going to a theme park. Nobody ever talked about it again or bought one, just zero interest. And these are tech people.
Many people even by their mid 20s begin to lose the ability to embrace or even enjoy paradigm shifts. Moving from flat gaming to fully immersive 3D gaming just doesn't do enough to budge the hardened neural pathways that have embraced 2D gaming over the years. It's a frankly common case of being "stuck in ones way".
Will VR and AR be the future? Absolutely, and a large part of the current population will be left behind. Happens with every new technology.
I think you are taking the idea of hardened neural pathways as being absolutely unbend able. If that was the case, smart phones would have been the realm of people in the early 20's and below on release. But even the elderly figured these things out very quickly.
While anecdotal, I know of many folks in their teens that use VR a few times and then just move on. VR is a neat toy but for a lot of people it is something that they forget about very quickly.
Personally it was the same, the tech was brilliant but after you take the headset off - you just forget about it.
>Many people even by their mid 20s begin to lose the ability to embrace or even enjoy paradigm shifts.
That word paradigm is doing so much work in this sentence. You realize we're talking about a gadget/product here, not a new system of government or medicine or locomotion right? So what you're basically saying is "some people lose the need to buy useless gadgets foisted on them by marketing".
Young one, let me tell you that as you gain responsibility (employment, find a home, start a family)...your gaming days are as good as over. It becomes a casual infrequent hobby at best.
As for a paradigm shift, we've had AR for 10 years now. With the exception of navigating a city by foot, there's zero successful mainstream use cases.
There's not a single VR game that has appealed to the masses so much as to buy a headset. Not one.
It's expensive, inconvenient, anti-social and it doesn't stick.
I have no doubt that AR will be the future (VR? I don't know: I'd like to retain a sense of my surroundings when I'm working). However, I think most of the population will adapt.
Smartphones for the 60+ age group was a paradigm shift. It was very difficult at first, but within 3 or 4 years, it became pervasive worldwide. Somehow I feel that AR is less of a disruption than the "swipe" mode that touchscreens introduced around 2008 or so.
I just tell people that VR makes me feel sick, but really I just find not knowing what is going on around me disconcerting. It's nice to see someone express a similar sentiment.
This is a pretty short-sighted take. VR just doesn't offer much of anything currently. Some games work well, but most games are pretty clunky. Office work isn't substantially improved. A big warm sweaty headset is not nice to have on your head for extended amounts of time.
There's a plethora of reasons why VR in its current state is little more than a gimmick.
There is absolutely no reason to believe it so far - from all of my experience, both VR and AR are technically inferior to a screen in almost every way that actually matters, except for a short demo.
Sure, but we need to base our predictions of the future on our experience of existing similar technologies to have any credbility.
For example, if I predicted that phones the size of a coin are the future, you could meaningfully say "in my experience, bigger phones are actually more sought after, so I don't believe your prediction".
if I predicted that phones the size of a coin are the future
My phone is on my wrist currently (Apple watch), I left my iphone at home. To me your prediction would have been correct (for now).
If you insist on basing your predictions on existing experiences, think of your sunglasses: light, comfortable, stylish. I predict that 10-20 years from now your sunglasses will offer great AR/VR experience, most likely through improvements in retinal projection technology. It will take nothing away from your experience using sunglasses and will add a whole lot more. Similar to traditional wrist watch —> Apple watch transition.
> My phone is on my wrist currently (Apple watch), I left my iphone at home. To me your prediction would have been correct (for now).
Your Apple Watch is still dependent on your iPhone. You're also unlikely to be browsing the web, watching YouTube, or browsing social media on your watch, and these have been the biggest factors for smartphone adoption by far - so I don't think such a prediction works. We can also see that the market for smartwatches is dwarfed by the market for phones, and this trend shows no sign of reversing.
> I predict that 10-20 years from now your sunglasses will offer great AR/VR experience, most likely through improvements in retinal projection technology.
The problem with a glasses form factor is that it fundamentally can't create enough contrast for a good quality image, especially not for VR - that requires blocking out most light coming into the eye, which no additive technology can do. I do believe that some equivalent of a smartwatch could work very nicely in a glasses form-factor (i.e. a device that acts as an accessory to your main computing devices, for small specialized tasks).
I still don't see any plausible way it could replace phones or laptops/tablets with any technology visible on the horizon. So I'm not saying AR/VR won't have a place or even be wildly successful - just that I don't believe they will ever be "the future of computing" in any reasonable sense, say like the smartphone was to the PC.
Again, you’re associating AR/VR with a specific implementation (headsets, glasses, etc), based on your experiences with existing technology. That’s a very short sighted way to think about the future. AR/VR is the future of human computer interface, as a paradigm, as a “reality 2.0”.
Smartphones became widespread 15 years ago, and will be obsolete 15 years from now. We will still see an old lady in 2040 pulling out iPhone 23 Ultra Super Pro Max, just like we still occasionally see an old lady in a supermarket pulling our her checkbook.
Both screens and retinal projections will be seen as historical curiosities 50 years from now, just like we now look at VHS tapes and compact disks. Provided we have not turned into unimaginable cyborgs by that time, surely any information that can be consumed by our brains would be fed directly into our brains - why would you want to rely on our unreliable, deteriorating and severely constrained senses to consume information - most (or even all) of which by that time will be created or transformed by an AI?
If to you brain-computer interfaces also include AR/VR, then in that sense only I can agree that they are probably the future.
However, you are wildly overestimating how near brain-computer interfaces are if you think they will obsolete smartphones in 15 years.
My prediction then is this: screens on fixed devices (desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, probably other form factors) will remain the most common way of accessing the majority of our computer use for the next, say, 50 years. They will not be displaced by glasses-mounted displays, though "smart glasses" will become a more and more common secondary device in the coming decades, just like smartwatches. The only thing that will displace regular screens will be safe, high-bandwidth, high-fidelity brain-computer interfaces - which is where the 50 years timeline is coming from.
And I believe even 50 years is optimistic given the difficulty of making such a technology mass-market.
It’s interesting that you keep confusing a concept (AR/VR) and a technology (screens, bci, etc).
For the record, what I predict is:
1. In 15 years smartphones will be obsolete. The most likely technology that will replace them is retinal projection via glasses. Laptops and monitors will probably last a bit longer.
2. In 30 years, BCI will replace all other human computer interfaces, unless by that time humans will already have merged with computers on a more fundamental level.
As with any examples of progress in human history things will appear to change slowly until they suddenly change very fast.
I had a blast showing my Rift CV1 to friends, but only one person I showed it off to got a VR headset, and both mine and his seem to be gathering dust at the moment.
It seems to me that Apple is very worried about their device getting slotted into the “fun expensive limited use toy” niche.
I bet they need time to ramp up their manufacturing. In the meantime - they can either artificially restrict the purchase of these things (what they are doing now), or have scalpers camp outside the stores and resell for 2-3x what apple are selling them for.
If they can actually deliver on their promises - they will fucking sweep the VR market. Current VR headsets blow chunks. If the meta quest cost 10$ - people would still not use it for normal things, because it unpleasant to interact with.
Hard disagree. Current headsets are perfectly fine for the well established use-cases like gaming and stereo/3D video. The problem is, as always, going to be shoehorning real features into a goofy form-factor. We've been down this avenue before with Hololens and it was very clear that enterprise customers aren't really interested in developing bespoke AR workflows. Even with perfect passthrough vision there wasn't any tangible benefit to the tech outside very narrow military applications (and who knows where those contracts went).
So now we're here. If Apple delivers on their promise of a very nice Oculus Quest sorta thing with iPhone apps and AppleTV+, I can't imagine people using it more than their Oculus Quest, iPhone or AppleTV.
My experience following the VR scene. The unreleased product doesn't solve the weight problem, it doesn't solve the friction problem of needing to put on a headset, it doesn't solve the VAC problem which can strain people's eyes, etc. I would also speculate that it doesn't solve the content problem in motivating people to consistently use the device instead of regress to using your iphone or whatever to do those normal things.
Just doing VR, but with more resolution or VR, but with a different input scheme or VR, but with a heavier headset, or MR, but with higher resolution passthrough doesn't solve the current challenges that VR headsets are facing.
It doesn’t sound like a gaming play, rather a productivity/media consumption play.
I really wish Meta or someone else would focus on fitness more. Augmented fitness (not normal gaming) seems to be an area ripe for viral adoption. Without any haptic feedback, VisionPro is less suitable than the Quest.
I don't think this designed to sell in numbers, it exists as a placeholder for them, in case m$ or Pico start drawing too much attention, the old 'what we have is better, you just can't have it yet' routine. I will be interested to see what they spend on content and how they approach webXR, I'm not sure a market for walled garden devices in 2024 will be there, hopefully not :)
They had many WWDC sessions covering 3D objects especially with the Unity integration [1] and their Reality Composer Pro [2] tool. Both were covered during the keynote. And if you look on Youtube there are countless videos of third party developers developing 3D apps.
It's just that they are positioning the device as a spatial computer i.e. something you use to get real work done. And right now for 99% of people that involves 2D windows.
I take their point as a problem of control. Picking up objects with hand tracking is, in my experience, much less deterministic, and much less useful, compared to picking them up with a button and haptics.
> Everyone that has tried the Vision Pro has said the eye and hand tracking is flawless.
Context of the interaction is important. I've seen this mentioned with selecting, but not with doing something like picking up a 3d object. I don't recall seeing this use in any of the release footage.
26 joints per hand. Assuming that all the joints in your hand are visible to the device (this seems to be unlikely for much of the time).
As per parent's line of questioning, it doesn't address how that maps to a manipulation in the virtual realm in practice.
In comparison, each controller on my Valve Index has 87 sensors - that can distinguish touch vs actual press (triggers etc), pressure, presence vs absence (fingers on the handle), as well as the usual orientation / accelerometer sensors. Even with an abundance of processing power, a camera-tracking system can't get there.
It's notable that despite the claimed joint tracking, the only actual hand interaction shown in that video is knocking something over, not any real dextrous handling requiring precise finger motion.
I get the impression they made a deliberate decision not to include any 3d handling in the launch demos because it's just not good, whereas 'look and click/swipe' works well.
I think you're right to pick up on the fact that 99% of digital content out there is 2D and they're leaning into that. It's a known quantity and easier to market.
Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYxPO-bfbOk (https://www.immersionanalytics.com/) would absolutely be possible with Apple's support for 3D objects. I hope that Apple doesn't neglect the analytics/visualization use case for launch; it could be gamechanging for their go-to-market strategy, as it would find its way into many corporate budgets.
> seriously, if you've never tried, the jump from mouse+keyboard to hand tracking is like going from arrow keys to mouse+keyboard
Totally different experience here. It's interesting but the mouse still blows away anything VR has offered thus far. Games like Beat Saber /are/ a ton of fun and cool input method but but the novelty wears off fast. A majority of my friend group all bought VR headsets together and after 1-2 months of playing (often together) our usage has fallen off a cliff. I can't remember the last time I picked up my headset and I even bought lenses a couple months ago to try and reinvigorate my interest (I wear glasses/contacts but glasses always fog so I'd have to put in my contacts to play which was an annoying barrier) but I literally played it 1-2 more times before getting bored and moving on.
Current VR headsets are only good for gaming (yes, even the Meta Pro, it's resolution is joke for real productivity) and I have a limited interest in that method of gaming. I still play my Xbox, I still play games on my computer, I still play games on my phone but VR gaming isn't as interesting to me. It's novel but it wears off and the motion sickness is really annoying in certain types of games. All that coupled with absolute shit hand tracking (it's cool when it works but it fails too often), lackluster controllers (I can only take my sabers going wild when that's not what my hands are doing so many times), and poor graphics makes my headset a toy and not a particular good one.
We will see if Apple is able to improve on what's currently available and their track record has me hoping they succeed. Their vision, no pun intended, of AR/VR is much more in line with what I have been dreaming of for decades.
Hmm. Are you aware that mobile gaming revenue is larger than console and PC and that the majority of mobile gaming revenue comes from iOS (iPad and iPhone)?
It's gaming in the same way that a slot machine is "gaming" or how Android is Linux. True in some sense but still not at all in line with the general usage of the word.
Most of my gaming this year has been on my iPad. There are a lot of enjoyable “real” games… Just to give some examples: Total War, Six Ages, Slay the Spire, FM23, Kingdoms Two Crowns, Vampire Survivors, and I’ve played many more.
Just in my small social circle, I know of a family where the father was addicted and it actually kept them from putting food on the table, and another friend who only has part time work but still managed to spend over a thousand dollars and choses to live with her parents.
>> I haven't seen a single demo where somebody picks a virtual object up.
Why do I need to do that? It’s a great demo but it’s not something I need to be able to do day to day. And that seems to be the strategy from Apple. Make it a useful device for daily tasks rather than a gaming specific device or a device for doing something “new”. If you’re paying $3500 it needs to be immediately useful.
Think about it, you’re trying to tell me Vive is great and their marketing strategy (word of mouth) was a huge success…I have never seen one in the wild and Occulus seems to be much more popular. In other words their strategy hasn’t worked so probably not a great idea for Apple to copy it.
I don't think they expect to sell many of these. I don't think this is some hype campaign, I think they just think/know the market for this is very limited.
"Why isn't Apple approaching their device in the same way this other company approached their device? A device which, incidentally, nobody really cares about anymore after some initial."
Apple doesn't want their market to be the same as the market for the HTC Vive, which isn't exactly a successful product (at least by Apple standards). They also don't want the market to be defined by their competitors, so they're approaching the market in a very different way. An example of this is how, in the keynote where they announced their new VR headset, they didn't say the words "Virtual Reality" once.
One area of friction that hasn’t been mentioned but is out of Apples control is that in some states like MA prescription eyewear requires a current, within one year, prescription.
After decades of hearing about Apple only being kept afloat by their indoctrinated, rabid fan base (whose numbers curiously appeared to grow exponentially with each passing year), Apple “always” making sales only by ad spots and not word of mouth is certainly a hot take.
Here's what won them over:
- Being able to try it themselves with little preparation ("put this on your head, tighten it here, and click these buttons on the controller"). You could even use it over glasses.
- Games that you play by grabbing things with your hands. The heavy hitters are Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx, but Climbey and UltraWings also got fans, and all the combat games where you punch cartoons or reload guns realistically.
(seriously, if you've never tried, the jump from mouse+keyboard to hand tracking is like going from arrow keys to mouse+keyboard)
Meanwhile, here's what Apple seems to be doing:
- Customized accessories, to the point that you need a face-scan and to send them your glasses prescriptions.
- Eyetracking and gesture-only interactions. I haven't seen a single demo where somebody picks a virtual object up.
How is that going to work? Do they expect to make up for all the lost word-of-mouth with marketing campaigns? Also, did they give up on VR games?