Tim Cook claims he uses every Apple product, every day. Does that include the VisionPro? It is certainly true that Nilay Patel's observation that when you take off the VisionPro & look around at...
Tim Cook claims he uses every Apple product, every day. Does that include the VisionPro? It is certainly true that Nilay Patel's observation that when you take off the VisionPro & look around at Real Reality, your reaction is “this is very nice”. So is a VR headset that simulates AR glasses that overlay on Real Reality a thing that i worthwhile? Probably not—but there are now some striking & intriguing real & important use cases in very limited circumstances.
Reporting back after again trying Apple’s VisionPro VR placeholder for the wraparound AR glasses à la Geordi La Forge that Apple dreams, someday, of building. No, it is not worth buying unless you have too much money and a weird life. But it is gonzo. And it is getting closer and closer…
Will we ever get to the vision (ha! ha!) of Neuromancer or Aristoi:
Walter John Williams: ‘Persepolis, in the Realized World, was an interesting artifact… the (largely symbolic) capital…. ‘Persepolis’, the dream, was a far more interesting place…. The two cities superimposed on one another in ways both intricate and obscure…. Archons and senators strolled along the corridors, holding conversations with people others could not see. Corridors that dead-ended in reality possessed doors… [which] led to palaces, dominions, grottos, and fantasies that did not exist anywhere…. ‘Who else won’t I know?’ she said. “Shankar will look like someone historical from old Earth, Abraham Lincoln or Li Po or Charlie Chaplin. Dorothy St.-Jean… likes to surprise people… something small, a moth or a mantis or—’ ‘A pair of gold cat’s eyes’, said a pair of gold cat’s eyes that had been gazing from the nearby pillar… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)>
A report: Again borrowing the VisionPro, now in its VisionOS 2.2 developer beta 3 state, and taking it on my mid-November trip to the 2024 Michael Chea Harvard Kennedy School Macroeconomics Conference, & Larry Summers 70th Birthday Party.
(It is now forty years after Larry Summers wrote the first draft of his Noise Traders Manifesto, the first time to my knowledge that anyone pointed out that “irrational” investors do not just buy high and sell low but take on risk, and where risk is priced the market may well vote to increase their wealth and give them more influence in aggregate over time. Here we have Andrei Shleifer discoursing on the development since then of ideas about “noise traders” and financial-market (in)efficiency :
Trying the Apple VisionPro again on airplanes and in hotel rooms has been a real eye-opener (ha ha!).
It now has three enormously advantageous use cases:
Immersive Video: Is absolutely amazing. The problem is that there is so little of it. Apple insists on crafting carefully wrought-out experiences at an extremely slow pace by painstakingly editing them, rather than going to a bunch of very interesting places and events, plunking down the immersive-video camera, and then uploading what results in a cinema verite manner.
Psychological Isolation: On a more-than-four-hour airplane flight, working in the VisionPro and using the virtual environments feature ups an economy-cabin window seat experience to a first-class cabin experience in terms of one’s elbow room: you really are in your own little world, with literally enormous amounts of elbow room. (The floor of Yosemite Valley, beneath El Capitan, on a bright winter’s day, if you ask.) In terms of feeling crowded, and not getting worn out by the crowding effect given the 100% load factors we now have routinely these days, it is a psychological game-changer, IMHO at least. (But, alas! it cannot simulate a lie-flat bed.)
SuperBig Screen: I can work in a hotel room on screens bigger than and almost as useful as in my main office! 5120 x 1440—10 feet high and 35 feet wide, (virtually) 20 feet away. If the experience does not make your brain feel like it is being poisoned by a neurotoxin (which happens for some people), it is glorious! Instead of being 2/3 as productive in a hotel room because things are no longer at my fingertips, I can be fully as productive!
Are these advantages worth the current price? No. But if you travel a lot, if it doesn’t discombobulate your eyes and brain, and if there were to be a semi-firehose rather than an eyedropper’s worth of content flow, it would be.
Thus I think that this from Mark Gurman is largely wrong:
FaceBook has built 1000 prototype models of the Orion AR glasses that it could not sell for less than $20,000 each. The Orion AR glasses prototypes consist of three parts: (1) glasses for your face, (2) a computer that goes in your pocket, (3) a wristband that picks up muscle-movement signals to control the device.
It is not selling these demonstration prototypes as products.
And if people outside Facebook are now programming up software and experiences for it, I missed the memo.
Facebook appears to have released this technology demonstration for two reasons:
first, to reassure shareholders that the money Mark Zuckerberg has poured into the Metaverse has not been completely wasted;
second, to light a fire underneath the Facebook teams working in the VR/AR space so that they actually ship something more than an Oculus gaming headset.
But in what way does presenting us with another non-product technology demonstration make FaceBook “ahead”? I do not get it. Will it become a product in two or five years? Perhaps. If it does become a product, As I see it, Facebook will have to get you to buy a neurolink wristband, a computer for your pocket, and the glasses. When Apple wants to match, all it will have to do is sell you the glasses—at least to those of us who already have Apple Watches on our wrists and Apple iPhones in our pockets. Thus I do not see how FaceBook without a product is or can stay ahead of Apple in any future AR-glasses race. If there is one.
But this doesn’t mean that FaceBook is behind in any sense in the VR space. The case for VR for gaming is clear—and FaceBook is wayahead. The case for VR for immersive experiences is clear—but Apple has not delivered with more than an eyedropper.
And this does not mean that the Apple VisionPro is not a gonzo insane device.
The point, as I understood it, of the Apple VisionPro was that it was a heavy $3500 VR headset that simulated the light sub-$1000 AR glasses that Apple really wanted but did not yet know how to build. But, Apple decided, real artists ship. Hence sell the VisionPro with as many of the capabilities of the future glasses as possible in order to get people started on building out software to figure out what the use cases for the product we think that ultimately we really want will be. And that process is now, creakily, moving forward.
So how does that mean that getting VisionPro into the hands of potential developers is a bad idea? Probably not. After all, what software is going to run on Orion-line devices besides FaceBook and Instagram, if nobody outside the FaceBook corporate empire can get their hands on one?
What the actual useful cases will be for AR and for “spatial computing”, if any, are much less clear. I think I would, while traveling at least, greatly value the ability to pin apps to the walls of my space—my calendar for the day to the wall by the door of the hotel room, my video app to the biggest semi-blank wall in the room, and so forth. But, so far at least, it is not easy to pin apps to surfaces in one’s actual physical surroundings, and then get them to stay.
And they are iPad apps.
Speaking just for myself, yet one more of the big things that Apple has gotten wrong with the VisionPro is that its non-immersive non-3D objects app model is that of the iPad rather than the Macintosh. I want my Mac apps!
The virtual ultrawide monitor mode goes a very long way to repairing that. But it would be much better if my Macintosh windows were not confined to a single virtual screen—even a very wide one.
On the other hand, even when confined to that very wide screen, I now feel for the first time that I am on the verge of a future semi-Singularity—of the VR-AR experiences of Neuromancer <https://archive.org/details/Timothy_Leary_Archives_206.dv> or Aristoi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)> that I have long been wondering if I would live long enough to ever see. I am looking forward to a virtual Widener Library but much larger, with every book in the world, in which I can virtually-visually search for the book I want, which is not the book I think I want but is instead a book catalogued near to it on the virtual shelves.
DeLong, J. Bradford, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, & Robert J. Waldmann. 1990. "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets." Journal of Political Economy. 98 (4): 703–738. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937765>.
Shleifer, Andrei, & Lawrence H. Summers. 1990. "The Noise Trader Approach to Finance." Journal of Economic Perspectives. 4 (2): 19–33. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1942888>.
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So, while it's not a use case for building a billion dollar business around, I am definitely all the way here for the "virtually-visually search for the book I want, which is not the book I think I want but is instead a book catalogued near to it on the virtual shelves" feature. But what's the cataloguing algorithm? I could use it right now.
So, while it's not a use case for building a billion dollar business around, I am definitely all the way here for the "virtually-visually search for the book I want, which is not the book I think I want but is instead a book catalogued near to it on the virtual shelves" feature. But what's the cataloguing algorithm? I could use it right now.
Use cases: Rule 34.