"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

[globoy]

Apple's take on AR has arrived.

Without wading into religious waters, it does seem to pack a lot of amazing tech in what looks like a pair of old ski googles.

[thm_w]

$3400

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23738968/apple-vision-pro-ar-headset-features-specs-price-release-date-wwdc-2023
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/05/apple-headset/

"The headset has a glass front and an aluminum frame, containing five sensors, 12 cameras, a 4K display for each eye, and a computer that’s apparently cooled with a fan."
"The hardware utilizes a new feature called “EyeSight,” which uses a front-facing display to reveal your eyes to other people in the room (compensating for the opaque visor), creating an “authentic representation of you” on the curved front glass. This is accomplished through an initial facial scan. That image is also used as your avatar to represent you to other people wearing the headset."

This has to be a flop consumer wise just due to the price, but, interesting take and design ideas for sure.
Might be useful commercially for museum/tourist walk-throughs, etc.?

[Haenk]

Impressive tech demo, but soon to follow Metas billions of wasted dollar in 3D on the trash heap of history.
(I mean, come one, what was their market strategist thinking? 3D television has been dead for years, META has been in the market for years and recently dropped their prices significantly. Not one single sign of a possible positive trend there...)

[tom66]

Does strike me as Apple trying to make VR a hit without fundamentally understanding most people don't really like VR.  It doesn't matter how many other features you add to it, the fundamental experience of VR for many is 30-60 minutes is enough before feeling a bit sick and disorientated.

There's a small section of enthusiasts who keep the technology alive but Apple likes to make mass market products so I wonder how well it will do in the longer term. 

[Marco]

The point is mostly reducing VR/"AR" to practice so you know where to throw up patent minefields, as long as you're doing that any way you might as well market it at ridiculous margins and still make a profit because of your devoted consumer base.

Apple is here because Microsoft and Meta are here, they've got the money laying around to prevent getting driven into a corner by patented monopolies, they're rather on the giving end of that.

[Alex Eisenhut]

I'm impressed that someone could title a thread with a reference this ancient in 2023!

It's an older meme but it checks out. That's even older!

[nctnico]

Impressive tech demo, but soon to follow Metas billions of wasted dollar in 3D on the trash heap of history.
(I mean, come one, what was their market strategist thinking? 3D television has been dead for years, META has been in the market for years and recently dropped their prices significantly. Not one single sign of a possible positive trend there...)

VR is pretty popular in gaming. Likely Meta could drop the prices due to volume.

[tooki]

Does strike me as Apple trying to make VR a hit without fundamentally understanding most people don't really like VR.

There is zero percent chance that they don’t understand that. And nobody has any illusions about it being a “hit”: everyone (including them) understands that VR is a comparatively niche product on a good day, and that at $3500, it’s targeting a very small market.

I’ll be honest that I don’t know what their game plan is. But it’s certainly not for this product to be a mass-market item.

[mendip_discovery]

The apple fanatics will buy it and if it works put then Apple will have invented another thing. Just like how they invented smart phones, mp3 players, even Airtags.

[tszaboo]

Does strike me as Apple trying to make VR a hit without fundamentally understanding most people don't really like VR.

There is zero percent chance that they don’t understand that. And nobody has any illusions about it being a “hit”: everyone (including them) understands that VR is a comparatively niche product on a good day, and that at $3500, it’s targeting a very small market.

I’ll be honest that I don’t know what their game plan is. But it’s certainly not for this product to be a mass-market item.

facebook doesn't seem to understand it.
Apparently, this is not the future:

[Jeroen3]

Opinion: Current vr tech is limited by the price point for the target audience. There is amazing stuff around but it requires a lot of additionalities.  Good VR is not cheap today yet. Meta tries, but their quests aren't magic either and require significant external pc and fiddling with software to do anything real. This limits development of applications to either the very rich companies, demonstations and the highly motivated.

Perhaps apple will kickstart companies?

Concidence: Apple priced vision pro the same as HoloLens 2.

I think Apple seriously entering this market will boost innovation from other brands and suppliers. Eventually leading to a lower price for everyone.

Apple is a big player with a lot of cash, and when big players invest in partners to develop tech the partners capabilties also improve and they are able to offer new stuff to competitors. This is a good thing, even when it flops.
Also, the people working on this at apple won't all stay at Apple and this knowledge, even through NDA's, will find it's way out.

But yes, it's f'kin expensive. The audience reactions on this are funny. But so are their macbooks, which the thing basically is.

[Haenk]

But yes, it's f'kin expensive.

I don't think "expensive" would be a problem. Apple users are/were never short of money, I guess (maxing your IIfx would have been the ultimate experience). But this is such a niche product, outside their mass product spectrum.

[nctnico]

But yes, it's f'kin expensive.

I don't think "expensive" would be a problem. Apple users are/were never short of money, I guess (maxing your IIfx would have been the ultimate experience). But this is such a niche product, outside their mass product spectrum.

I don't think so. It is a perfect product for people that are stuck inside cities because there is nowhere to park a car and public transport sucks. So if they want to go out, they put on the VR headset and step onto a multidirectional walking pad or spinning bike to go for a trip 'outside'.

[globoy]

Ars has an initial handson https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/hands-on-with-apple-vision-pro-this-is-not-a-vr-headset/.  As expected good and bad, but it does seem to be a step up.

The thing that looks interesting from my perspective is the software environment for it.  I think it's smart of Apple to essentially make it a continuation of their mobile environment (iPhone, iPad).  This means there are a *lot* of developers out there who can transition over.  This is different than Microsoft's development environment for Hololens, for example.  And would position Apple well for the time when the technology both comes down in cost and can be implemented in more appealing form factors.

Apple's virtual Facetime people are a bit creepy in that uncanny valley way but the whole product is definitely not as juvenile as Zuckerberg's vision.

I definitely hope there's an API to allow access to the front facing OLED screen.  That thing is just begging for googly eyes and other fun stuff.

[tom66]

The 2 hour long battery life and external battery did kind of surprise me for Apple.   This is a company that has long emphasised battery runtime, Macbook Air achieving in limited circumstances 18hr long runtime, even my 6yr old iPad 10.5" achieves days of occasional usage and my iPhone manages a whole day on a charge.

No doubt, there is a tonne of processing power and capability under the hood, but 2 hours?  That really isn't great.  The size of battery pack suggests roughly 5,000~6,000mAh @ 3.7V - about 15Wh say - so the product is pulling about 7-8 watts in normal usage.

Compared to what an iPad pulls when playing a movie, around 2-3 watts?  (30Wh battery with 10hr runtime.)  It's quite a big penalty for augmented/virtual reality, and is going to hamper adoption as an 'all day' usage device (they suggest it for spatial computing, so would people be expecting to use this for a whole workday?)

[coppice]

At last Douglas Adams vision of panic sensitive sunglasses can truly be with us.

More seriously, with a 4k panel for each eye this might finally be something that can create a reasonably immersive experience.

[globoy]

The 2 hour long battery life and external battery did kind of surprise me for Apple.   This is a company that has long emphasised battery runtime, Macbook Air achieving in limited circumstances 18hr long runtime, even my 6yr old iPad 10.5" achieves days of occasional usage and my iPhone manages a whole day on a charge.

No doubt, there is a tonne of processing power and capability under the hood, but 2 hours?  That really isn't great.  The size of battery pack suggests roughly 5,000~6,000mAh @ 3.7V - about 15Wh say - so the product is pulling about 7-8 watts in normal usage.

Compared to what an iPad pulls when playing a movie, around 2-3 watts?  (30Wh battery with 10hr runtime.)  It's quite a big penalty for augmented/virtual reality, and is going to hamper adoption as an 'all day' usage device (they suggest it for spatial computing, so would people be expecting to use this for a whole workday?)

Yeah.  2 hours is not long.  Maybe that matches how comfortable it would be to wear for long periods of time as well.  I guess you could plug it into a USB C adapter if you're just sitting somewhere but that's pretty un-Apple like.  As others have said, this is clearly gen 1.

Still kinda amazing from a technical perspective that all processing and display it is doing is being done with only 7-8 watts of energy.

[globoy]

One app I'd like, as a EE, would be instrument displays (scope, DMM, etc) as I looked at, and probed, my DUT.  Imagine a floating set of waveforms just above the gadget you're debugging.  And maybe with voice + eye tracking control so you don't have to move your hands to change settings.

[Jeroen3]

An iPad doesn't need any processing at all to display a static PDF, this thing...
It needs to run:
- two 4k displays (estimated 3840x3000 per eye)
- 3D rendering of everything
- inertial motion tracking
- 12 camera's
- room detection (probably some photogrammetry)
- gesture detection (lidar, liek face-id)
- the puny app you run

I'd compare that to an macbook running games: https://youtu.be/jYSMfRKsmOU?t=50
Then 2 hours is pretty good if you ask me.

One app I'd like, as a EE, would be instrument displays (scope, DMM, etc) as I looked at, and probed, my DUT.  Imagine a floating set of waveforms just above the gadget you're debugging.  And maybe with voice + eye tracking control so you don't have to move your hands to change settings.

Schematic realtime augmented onto the pcb... 

[tom66]

An iPad doesn't need any processing at all to display a static PDF, this thing...
It needs to run:
- two 4k displays (estimated 3840x3000 per eye)
- 3D rendering of everything
- inertial motion tracking
- 12 camera's
- room detection (probably some photogrammetry)
- gesture detection (lidar, liek face-id)
- the puny app you run

I'd compare that to an macbook running games: https://youtu.be/jYSMfRKsmOU?t=50
Then 2 hours is pretty good if you ask me.

I'm sure Apple have tried to optimise battery life, and of course there's a lot of hardware to run, but the problem is: the user might acknowledge plugging in a charger to play on their MacBook, but will they be happy to have a charger for their VR headset always tethered?

I guess we will see. IMO they need to figure out a way to get 10hr+ runtime in normal usage to be mainstream successful, then you have a full day's usage before needing to charge.

[David Aurora]

One app I'd like, as a EE, would be instrument displays (scope, DMM, etc) as I looked at, and probed, my DUT.  Imagine a floating set of waveforms just above the gadget you're debugging.  And maybe with voice + eye tracking control so you don't have to move your hands to change settings.

Would definitely be interesting. Literally my first thought went to component overlays and schematics. It's not really going to happen in practice given how much work would have to be done to get all that data in for every board you work on, but man... imagine being able to just look at the board you're working on and being able to see hidden tracks, component values and all that stuff without taking your eyes off it

[Marco]

Apple's virtual Facetime people

I wonder if there will be a mousewiggler equivalent for face meetings, just simulate your simulation so you can handle the meeting on voice for a while.

With proper futuristic AR glasses it would be less of an issue, since you could just wear them doing whatever ... but these ain't that.

[thm_w]

[Bud]

One must be nuts to wear that thing for 10 hours.