I went to an Apple store for a demo, and said: the two things I want to evaluate are comfort, and use as an external monitor. I brought a compatible laptop (a Macbook Pro). They replied that the demo was highly scripted, and they weren’t allowed to let me do that. I went through their scripted demo. It was worse than I expected. I’m not expecting Apple to take over the VR headset market any time soon.
Bias note: Apple is intensely, uniquely totalitarian over software that runs on iPhones and iPads, in a way I find offensive, not just in a sense of not wanting to use it, but also in a sense of not wanting it to be permitted in the world. They have brought this model with them to Vision Pro, and for this reason I am rooting for them to fail.
I think most people evaluating the Vision Pro have not tried Meta’s Quest Pro and Quest 3, and are comparing it to earlier-generation headsets. They used an external battery pack and still managed to come in heavier than the Quest 3, which has the battery built in. The screen and passthrough look better, but I don’t think this is because Apple has any technology that Meta doesn’t; I think the difference is entirely explained by Apple having used more-expensive and heavier versions of commodity parts, which implies that if this is a good tradeoff, then their lead will only last for one generation at most. (In particular, the display panel is dual-sourced from Sony and LG, not made in-house.)
I tried to type “lesswrong.com″ into the address bar of Safari using the two-finger hand tracking keyboard. I failed. I’m not sure whether the hand-tracking was misaligned with the passthrough camera, or just had an overzealous autocomplete that was unable to believe that I wanted a “w” instead of an “e”, but I gave up after five tries and used the eye-tracking method instead.
During the demo, one of the first things they showed me was a SBS photo with the camera pitched down thirty degrees. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s something that rules out there being a clueful person behind the scenes. There’s a preexisting 3D-video market (both porn and non-porn), and it’s small and struggling. One of the problems it’s struggling with, is that SBS video is very restrictive about what you can do with the camera; in particular, it’s bad to move the camera, because that causes vestibular mismatch, and it’s bad to tilt the camera, because that makes it so that gravity is pointing the wrong way. A large fraction of 3D-video content fails to follow these restrictions, and that makes it very upleasant to watch. If Apple can’t even enforce the camerawork guidelines on the first few minutes of its in-store demo, then this bodes very poorly for the future content on the platform.
I went to an Apple store for a demo, and said: the two things I want to evaluate are comfort, and use as an external monitor. I brought a compatible laptop (a Macbook Pro). They replied that the demo was highly scripted, and they weren’t allowed to let me do that. I went through their scripted demo. It was worse than I expected. I’m not expecting Apple to take over the VR headset market any time soon.
Bias note: Apple is intensely, uniquely totalitarian over software that runs on iPhones and iPads, in a way I find offensive, not just in a sense of not wanting to use it, but also in a sense of not wanting it to be permitted in the world. They have brought this model with them to Vision Pro, and for this reason I am rooting for them to fail.
I think most people evaluating the Vision Pro have not tried Meta’s Quest Pro and Quest 3, and are comparing it to earlier-generation headsets. They used an external battery pack and still managed to come in heavier than the Quest 3, which has the battery built in. The screen and passthrough look better, but I don’t think this is because Apple has any technology that Meta doesn’t; I think the difference is entirely explained by Apple having used more-expensive and heavier versions of commodity parts, which implies that if this is a good tradeoff, then their lead will only last for one generation at most. (In particular, the display panel is dual-sourced from Sony and LG, not made in-house.)
I tried to type “lesswrong.com″ into the address bar of Safari using the two-finger hand tracking keyboard. I failed. I’m not sure whether the hand-tracking was misaligned with the passthrough camera, or just had an overzealous autocomplete that was unable to believe that I wanted a “w” instead of an “e”, but I gave up after five tries and used the eye-tracking method instead.
During the demo, one of the first things they showed me was a SBS photo with the camera pitched down thirty degrees. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s something that rules out there being a clueful person behind the scenes. There’s a preexisting 3D-video market (both porn and non-porn), and it’s small and struggling. One of the problems it’s struggling with, is that SBS video is very restrictive about what you can do with the camera; in particular, it’s bad to move the camera, because that causes vestibular mismatch, and it’s bad to tilt the camera, because that makes it so that gravity is pointing the wrong way. A large fraction of 3D-video content fails to follow these restrictions, and that makes it very upleasant to watch. If Apple can’t even enforce the camerawork guidelines on the first few minutes of its in-store demo, then this bodes very poorly for the future content on the platform.