I like Mastodon quite a bit, but for whatever reason, the bad takes on there do triple psychic damage on me compared to other places. Monday during the WWDC presentation felt like a cavalcade of performative anti-capitalism, and it was exhausting being reminded so forcefully and so frequently how I was a corporate shill for not thinking that everything on display at Apple was complete bullshit.1I have no doubt that there were a tiresome number of ride-or-die Apple fans gasping at the wonders on display, but I feel like it’s a lot easier to just shrug and let them have their thing.
Also I don’t know WTF that AR/VR headsets have to do with heat pumps, but one YouTuber took to Mastodon to scold all of us for being more excited about dinosaurs coming through magical portals into our living room, than efficient HVAC systems. I hope you’re all proud of yourselves for murdering our only planet Earth!
Anyway, there were a couple of takes that I thought were pretty interesting, from people who’ve actually tried out the Apple Vision Pro headset.
One was a first impressions video from Marques Brownlee, which I liked because he’s able to talk about this stuff with the healthy skepticism of somebody who’s seen a lot of devices pushed by companies as being the next big thing, but isn’t too jaded to say when a new piece of technology feels “magical.” If we can’t get excited about this stuff, and instead are doomed to just wallow in minimum-viable-product-induced cynicism, then what’s the point in following it at all? There are plenty of parks outdoors that one might enjoy.
Another was this post from Ben Thompson on his Stratechery blog, where he quotes himself from Twitter but is otherwise pretty insightful. He has some interesting observations about mimicking AR with a headset that is technically VR (instead of using actual glasses like Google Glass, for instance); and he also takes some time to guess where Apple might be positioning the Vision product line, based on what they’ve done in the past with the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
To me, the common thing that stood out in both was the emphasis on the personal and societal implications of this device, beyond its technology.
MKBHD said he didn’t like the demo of 3D photos at all, and he thought it was too creepy to imagine a dad wearing this headset to take video of his kid’s birthday party. Thompson says that he felt that Apple’s demos seemed sad and lonely; a man looking at photos or watching videos of family events while alone on a couch suggested “a divorced dad, alone at home with his Vision Pro, perhaps because his wife was irritated at the extent to which he got lost in his own virtual experience.”
I think it’s fascinating that so much of the conversation about the device is already about questions like these, because it suggests that a dramatic shift is imminent. And that the difference between this and previous dramatic shifts in technology and society is that we can see this one coming.
A good bit of Apple’s presentation was reminiscent of Black Mirror. I think it’s telling that the reports from people who’ve used the Apple Vision headset2In a controlled demo environment, of course haven’t objected to the WWDC video as looking faked or staged. It really does look like it does in the videos and advertisements. By every account that I’ve seen, the team at Apple has actually achieved the tech shown in their demo videos, and it’s at the level of near-future sci fi concept art.
“Congratulations on achieving the most cynical and dystopian vision of a bunch of clinically depressed British television writers!” is, admittedly, an odd take. But I see it as optimistic, because we’re talking about technology not just in terms of what it can do, but in terms of how it feels and how it can affect us on a societal level.
I vividly remember being in an AT&T Store and seeing the first iPhone: I was so impressed by the screen that I thought it had to be a pre-printed sticker, no color handheld display could possibly be that sharp3I ask that everyone take that as an indication of how quickly display technology has improved, not as an indication of how gullible and easily-impressed I am., and it would be amazing to have a portable touchscreen that was always connected to the internet. I had no idea how fundamentally it would change things, and how much it would creep into my everyday life.
Here, we have a better idea of the implications and ideally, we can steer it in the right direction.
And even better, the conversation is already talking about the right things. Back when the iPad was released, for instance, it was all either “lol it sounds like maxipad!!!!” or “what’s the big deal it’s just a big iPhone” dominating the conversation. I didn’t see anyone with the foresight to predict what it’d mean for increased screen time for kids, or the implications of the App Store model on a more general-purpose computing device than a smart phone4In other words: there have always been people complaining about the “walled garden,” but they always focused on principle instead of practicality. I want my primary and essential communication device to be safe from malware, even if it means I lose some control over what I can put on it..
One of the (many) frustrating things about Facebook/Meta buying themselves into the role of Stewards of VR is that they’ve controlled the messaging about what VR can be capable of, and what is and isn’t important, and they’ve often been clumsy about it. A prime example is the whole non-issue about avatars not having legs. The reality is that without a bunch of extra cameras or sensors — which would be a compete non-starter for mass adoption of an HMD — it is near-impossible to track the user’s legs in 3D space. A more patient and thoughtful company would’ve side-stepped the issue entirely, because it doesn’t matter in practice, but instead it was allowed to become a running joke.5For the record, I’m not at all convinced that Apple’s uncanny valley virtual avatars are the right answer, either. But I’m a lot more optimistic that smart people will find a way to make 3D avatars more convincing, than that they’ll find a way to let cameras strapped into your head see down and around your body and somehow map your legs in 3D space with no depth information. Or that we’ll ever live in a world in which anyone anywhere genuinely gives a damn about what you’re doing with your legs unless you’re either dancing, or you’re kicking them.
Something that is much more important than avatars with legs: whether technology facilitates human interaction, or tries to replace it, or worse, obviate it. One of the things that elevated the movie M3GAN above camp into genuine social satire is that it depicted a world where people were so impressed by the potential of tech that they ignored all of the obvious problems with it.
Even as an Apple fan, I thought some of the marketing images crossed that line. “They know how weird this looks, right? Tell me that they still get how this is unnerving.” But I also feel like so much of it is from a determination to stay on-brand as a lifestyle-facilitated-by-technology company instead of just a computer company; and the need to undo years of counter-programming from other companies who’ve released VR headsets and set people’s expectations for what VR is like.
I can’t see anyone wearing this thing while packing a suitcase, for instance, but the message is that it can be a personal communication device. I don’t see anyone wearing the $3500 version while cooking — although an AR-enabled recipe and cooking instruction app for a lower-cost version is a no-brainer — but the message is that you can do other stuff while wearing it, and you can communicate with other people in the room. Consumer-grade HMDs have so far always been like diving into a sensory deprivation tank, and that’s the main idea they need to counteract for this to ever get traction.
For what it’s worth: I don’t believe that making this a “real” AR device — i.e. applying a display on top of transparent glasses instead of using opaque video screens and cameras — would’ve helped with that. After all, headphones can be isolating. I’ve never had a conversation with someone wearing a glasses-mounted camera, but I know I would’ve noped out of such a conversation as quickly as possible, because that’s hell of creepy.
I think that one of the issues with Apple’s demo videos is that it’s difficult to convey the idea of being alone but not lonely. There’s nothing inherently weird about looking through old photos or video of family gatherings when you’re by yourself, for instance, but it’s become a familiar symbol of “sad about the past” almost as much as panning over to the fireplace means “they’re doin’ it.”
The more troubling aspect of that part of the presentation is the whole question of how the 3D video of the family gathering was made in the first place. We already know the problem of people using their phones to record things instead of being in the moment, and it’s much worse when you think of the photographer wearing an opaque headset projecting unsetting video of his eyes on the front. I think that’s the image that Apple’s eager to counteract — and to be honest, it’s kind of their own fault for making the iPhone ubiquitous in the first place — and to convey that wearing this thing does not mean cutting yourself off from other people or not being in the moment.
But personally, I think that a device like the Apple Vision is something you’d most often be using while you’re alone. I don’t necessarily see that as a problem, since that’s also true of my computer, my iPad, and my phone. They often facilitate social interaction, but they’re not inherently social experiences. Writing a blog post, for instance, is completely solitary but still helps fill my “social meter” in Sims terminology.
By that standard, maybe the uncanny-valleyness of the virtual avatar and the front-facing eyes are not bugs, but features? Maybe it’s good to have a reminder that the goal isn’t to perfectly recreate or replace real human interaction, because it will never be as good as the real thing.
I predict that the biggest use case for the Apple Vision, at least initially, will be the most solitary parts of their demo presentation — the guy working at his desk with multiple large virtual screens, and the people sitting on their couch watching TV shows or movies. It’s a huge screen replacement with a built-in computer, essentially a 120-inch-or-more iMac, with any number of additional monitors, all of which are also 3D-capable displays.
That’s a lot less ambitious than what I imagined back when I first saw my first demo of a VR headset. I’m as surprised as anyone to realize that I’d be more interested in 2D gaming in a 3D headset (even though if that’s mostly because I could remain seated comfortably). But it’s also a lot more practical goal, and, I think, a lot more optimistic. If you concentrate solely on the escapist nature of VR and AR, you’re emphasizing the idea that the everyday world is something you need to escape.
The “alone but not lonely” thing is for me the absolute correct thing for VR. I know we’ve talked about this IRL, but I hate that Meta’s constantly pushed VR for social crap, when the hardware is so good at giving you a great, solitary, immersive experience.
No, it’s not that you need to escape the real world. But the best VR experiences I’ve had have been “Oh, here’s a thing you can’t do IRL because it’s too dangerous/expensive/whatever, but you can try it out on your own.” Kingspray Graffiti, Tribe XR – stuff like that. It lets me try things on my own in a more physical way than video games, but in a safer/less public space than IRL. It’s SO GOOD for that kind of thing, and Meta’s pushed so hard AGAINST it for reasons that are totally nonsensical to me.
And the display thing – Apple getting the display right in a way where watching a movie in VP could be BETTER than watching it on my huge-ass TV, or being able to do work on an infinite-sized screen where I could just throw apps off the “screen” and into wherever? Awesome. The Quest was never capable of that, because it’s just too low-rez. Which meant that for all of Meta’s crowing about what a great work device the Quest Pro would be, it never, ever felt like a viable option.
I have no idea if VP will. But Apple’s made a case for it, and if they’re not blatantly lying, then it’s a really genuinely exciting possibility to me. Trying to conceive of a Vision Pro version of something like Ableton Live, which knows what instruments you’re using and can actually show you what’s happening overlaid over all your gear, instead of consolidated on a single display? So individual audio tracks are tied to the hardware on which they were made. Parameter changes are highlighted on the actual knobs you turned to change those values. Hooooooo-boy, that’d be a good time. And that’s like… the easiest thing you could do with a VP-enabled version of Live.
I just assumed that Facebook’s eagerness to establish VR for social and shopping was based on the assumption that it needed to be more than just a toy, or a gaming device, to gain the kind of market saturation that Facebook would need.
I’m definitely not a businessman, but it seems like Facebook/Meta has to price the Oculus cheap or at a loss in order to get the kinds of numbers they need, but the cheaper headsets make all kinds of concessions to comfort, fatigue, battery life, and rendering power that make them seem inferior to non-VR experiences, which means that they don’t sell in the kinds of numbers they need.
Meanwhile, it’s not even the prospect of games that are winning me over to the idea of the Vision headset, but more mundane stuff like sitting at a desk and having multiple monitors available in 3D space. (With a bluetooth keyboard, of course). The big question I still have is whether Apple is going to treat it like a Mac or like an iPad. An M2 is plenty sufficient for the kind of programming I’d want to be doing, but if Apple doesn’t let you run Xcode or other compilers on it, then that severely limits its usefulness and flexibility.
I’d never even thought of your Augmented Reality Ableton Live example — although surely you mean Logic Pro, right! — but it makes me think of an entire submarket of motion graphics houses doing nothing but advanced UI interfaces. It’s stuff like that that makes me realize why Apple would be treating it as an entirely new computing platform!
I think the best counter response to the “think about how awkward the dad must have been taking that birthday photo wearing one of those” is a reminder of the 90s VHS camcorder era. Dads will Dad no matter the era and the iPhone era is the weird less clunky exception compared to the 90s camcorder (or 80s Polaroid or 1880s Daguerreotype).
Though I think a different thing that the keynote briefly mentioned but I think a lot of people missed it: iPhones today already capture a bunch of depth information in certain types of Live photos. You can do basic stereography with the existing camera hardware on recent iPhones. (Even Meta knows this: you see interesting parallax effects when certain iPhone friends post their photos to Facebook because that’s FB having fun with available depth information.)
iPhone has already been adding the sensing hardware for things like those sorts of photos. (How’s that for long term planning synergy?)
All good points! Even more recent than camcorders, the awkward-tech-thing is to record video or take pictures with an iPad, so it’s not like there’s no precedent.
I’d completely forgotten about Facebook using the depth information for 3D photos. Now I’m wondering if the 3D photos and videos in the Vision are like that, or have even more depth information by virtue of having multiple cameras. It hadn’t occurred to me (until people suggested it, and it should’ve seemed obvious in retrospect!) that existing cameras could be used to record these photos or videos, because I just assumed that of course you needed multiple cameras with at least as much separation as a person’s IPD. But a) you could do that by putting a camera on either end of an iPhone, and b) as you mention, it might not even be necessary if you’ve got LIDAR already getting enough depth info to build a 3D model.
Speaking of synergy: I’ve been working on an AR project for the past couple of years, and it’s amazing how well AR Kit works on the iPhones, even though Apple hasn’t ever seemed to tout it as a big deal. It’s not just image tracking, but entire scene tracking — you can just put a 3d object somewhere in the room, and it’ll do a pretty remarkable job of staying put.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about AR Kit a lot this week because I’m one of the millions whose most interaction with it was turning it on once in Pokemon Go, deciding it was neat but not worth the battery cost and turning it back off.
After Microsoft announced the HoloLens they announced that new phone handsets would have a bunch of 3D scanning tools from then on, which mostly didn’t come to fruition because that was already the death spiral of Windows Phone.
It’s very interesting to look at how quiet but capable AR Kit is and with the hindsight from Vision Pro start to project backwards. From that perspective Apple may have been following Microsoft’s exact same playbook on the exact same timeline, but just quietly executed it so much better. Including that they also learned from Microsoft’s Kinect playbook that Microsoft themselves maybe forgot worked so well. Apple sold AR Kit as a “silly” feature for fad games like Pokemon Go and “maybe some cool Map stuff”. They sold adding tons of sensors and extra cameras and lenses in the iPhones on quality “nice-to-have” photography and also maybe those silly AR Kit games. They packed an extraordinary AR sensor kit into lots of people’s everyday pockets (and in the process smartly leveraged economies of scale to drastically bring down the prices on a lot of it) and barely tipped their hand how serious they felt about AR and sold it all mostly on short term silly/fun/nice-to-have.
It’s fascinating. I have a lot of questions and curiosities. I still think Apple has a few more cards sleeved.