Also, if the people who say it hurts would get a third-party strap, I bet they would feel better. I use a halo strap on my Quest 3 and it makes it way more comfortable.
Honestly, at this point, if Jobs were still there we'd probably have no VR headset, but a TV with appleTV built in that also magically provides Atmos surround without any extra hardware and magically "just works" to find any and all content you'd want to watch from any service. The resurrected Apple used to be good at finding what people didn't even know they wanted. Now it's a zombie walking around hoping people see the value in what they make.
C'est la vie. I'm still wanting Apple to return to routers. The Airport Extreme was a great product for a Mac-centric household.
It is indeed one of the niches that VR is great for. There are many others like gaming. But porn definitely is one too.
This isn't a problem unique to the Apple Vision Pro. There's still relatively little to do with an Oculus, PSVR2, and many other headsets.
Honestly, my favorite part about my PSVR2 is the ability to cut off most everything other than what I'm doing just then.But it's kind of a lot of work for that feature.
I demoed it to a lot of my friends and everyone was very impressed but no one ever asked to go back. When I realized this knew there was a problem and that when I started doubting the adoption of VR.
Once Meta/Facebook bought occulus, I full checked out and never bought another VR head set ever again.
I still managed to make a VR version of one of my games before fully quitting. I don’t know what it would take for me to care about VR again.
Then when Facebook took them over they finally had the chance to buy first class custom made components instead of going for scraps from the mobile industry. I don't like Facebook/meta either but their cash was desperately needed.
I also really appreciated the gift of the Rift consumer version, they were under no obligation to do that.
Apple considers developers so far below them nobody is willing to touch it with a pole.
To Apple’s credit, nearly every iPad app works on it unless the developer specifically opts out.
I don’t think the issue is how Apple treats developers, it’s simply a matter of market share. Making apps for Vision Pro won’t be profitable until there are a lot more users.
Reminds me of the VR storyline in HBO's Silicon Valley.
I'm sure android phones could be paired to it now and you'd swipe using the phone against a keyboard displayed on the headset. It just seems like it should be much nicer to read things without crocking your neck.
Why? Its users would still be called "glassholes" just like before. Nobody likes looking stupid in public, and wearing AR ski/diving goggles in public makes you look like a complete tool.
Then there's the issue with privacy. People wouldn't want to be constantly filmed/scanned in public by other people's AR goggles. It would be like wherever you go people having their smartphones pointed at you.
Apple VP is a niche solution looking for a niche problem. It's no iPhone moment.
GG won't/didn't fail due to the perception of "this person is filming me without my consent", that is a strawman meant to create more headlines than the less-sexy "it just doesn't have much purpose and is too expensive." Exactly like with VisionPro.
We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house. A person wearing glasses with a UI layer and a camera walking down the street likely isn't saving that picture, footage, to their home server to then send me a citation over. But the commercial businesses, police, DOT etc sure are, and are all subpoena-able by courts. Less so with a guy wearing glasses.
But ignoring that, you're right -- one of those two things is certainly worse than the other, but they're both still bad.
Who's "we"? This is not the case where I live. I live in an EU country with very strict laws for privacy and restrictions on video surveillance. You aren't allowed to film random people on the street without their consent, except with some exceptions.
AR glasses would require retooling of such laws, not to mention gaining the public's trust as "send all public images to some megacorp's severs without their consent" is not a popular public opinion here. In Germany for example Google street view was not allowed for a long time also because privacy laws and public outrage(justified and not).
I also dislike your defetist line of thinking "well, we're under 24/7 surveillance anyway, so we might as well allow Apple and Google to spy on us in public now while we're at it". How about NO, how about they can fuck right off.
Though I think long term enough into the future, it's inevitable that governments, even within EU, will allow these corpos to have this surveillance as long as the data is processed and hosted in the EU, and the EU gov gets front door access to the data to spy on its citizens to prevent us from voting right wing candidates.
It was a thing - https://www.google.com/search?q=google+glass+user+punched
However the world has changed in 11 years.
My kids love our Quest 3. It’s a great system for gaming. They’ve clocked hundreds of hours playing Beat Saber and Gorilla Tag.
If Apple can lower the price significantly and make it more comfortable I think there is potential for this to be a successful product.
It's a $3500 VR headset, so a niche bit of kit from the jump. Nobody's made this work in a meaningful way, and the initial reviews of the Vision Pro made it clear this was no different (though there were kinds words about Apple's implementation of this level of tech).
Another commenter notes that it's beautiful, does what it does well, but there's little to do with it. That's utterly true. Maybe in a few years, that'll be different, but I think the real problem is that Apple brought it to market before the rest of the market was ready to jump forward. It's too expensive for the level of mass adoption that would jumpstart a VR software ecosystem (ie, in the same way the iPhone catalyzed phone apps).
The movie watching is nice and I often watch movies on my meta quest. It's comfortable to watch for hours. But the quest was 400$ not 3500$. It needs much less justification.
Also I game a lot in VR. It's so fantastic. Even old games gain a totally new dimension such as half life 2, gta san Andreas. This is not even possible with the vision pro despite being more than 7 times as expensive.
They do have a sizable part of the mobile gaming market though it's not what serious gamers are looking for. But we're not a massive group either compared to the consumer that just wants to shoot a chicken at pigs once in a while.
Nags:
* It's absolutely too heavy. I'm really not sure how this got out of the door given how sensitive Apple is to the dimensions and tactility of their products. I'm guessing they were insistent on material choice and EyeSight over all else. I think that was the wrong bet.
* The Vision App ecosystem is a dumpster fire. I recall developers complaining about Apple's developer relations, I can't imagine this will change course any time soon.
* The displays are outrageously high quality, but the foveated rendering becomes really obvious when you use features like the Mac Virtual Display. I can't use it as an external display for more than an hour or so.
* Speaking of which; it's annoying to put on/take off. I find myself hesitating to use it for that reason. And this is mostly down to the weight.
Pros:
* The displays/speakers/airpods integration make this the single best individual media consumption device on the planet. Yeah, a bigscreen beyond or similar are great options too, but I can slap the VP on in bed (nullifying the weight problem) and toss on something from either a streaming service or my SMB share.
* And because it's portable, it's the perfect device for airplanes.
TL:DR; VP is too heavy, but there are some great things about it, and the faults don't really matter to Apple because they knew this would be a low-volume product.
They REALLY do need to shore up developer relations before launching the next face computer, but that's unlikely as they are the most prideful company I can think of.
LorenDB•5h ago