i wouldn’t normally be concerned since any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail… but it’s apple and somehow through exquisite branding and sleek design they have managed to create something that resonated with “tech reviewers” and rich folk who can afford it.
what’s really concerning is that it’s not marketed as a new VR headset, it’s marketed by apple and these “tech reviewers” as the new iphone, something you take with you everywhere and do your daily tasks in, consume content in etc…
and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.
this is why i think all these tech giants (google meta apple etc) were/are interested in the “metaverse”. it holds both your vision and your hearing hostage, you cannot do anything else when using it but to just use the thing. a 100% efficiency attention machine, completely blocking you from the outside world.
i’m not concerned about this iteration as much as people are not hyped about this iteration. just like how people are hyped about the next apple vision, i’m more worried about the next iterations with somewhat lower price tag and better software availability. i hope it flops and i know it probably won’t achieve any sort of mainstream adoption even if it’s deemed a success because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky, but the possibility is still worrying. what are your thoughts?
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Is this a copy/paste from when Google Glasses launched and then completely disappeared within months? I feel like I’ve seen this panic before.
Your problem is with capitalism and an Apple VR doesn’t change that.
Google glass never actually “launched” in any meaningful sense of the word, and was a rough-as-fuck user experience.
Ironically what did it in was the ability to record video. People were so panicked about being filmed that they started reacting violently to glass users (called glassholes). From that point on it sort of became a laughing stock. Not cool. A tainted product.
Apple seems to have mitigated the obvious pitfalls, let’s see how it shakes out.
It’s funny that you don’t know what you don’t know. Google glass definitely launched, and is used by certain businesses. They went B2B instead of B2C and apparently did well enough.
You are right! There were enterprise editions that apparently were for sale until 2023.
Yeah, they had a surprisingly long life time, given they were created by Google.
In terms of privacy in public, the Vision Pro isn’t much different from Google Glass. Both have video recording capabilities, and both displayed some form of indication when recording.
The only real difference is that the Vision Pro is easier to spot in public due to the bulkier design.
It will be interesting to see if there will be similar “Glasshole” reaction to the Vision Pro once they are seen in public enough.
Not like vision peo aint also recording everything :p
And if not for the environment travking then for their passthrough and tracking.And probably a shitload of telemetry.
Your problem is with capitalism and an Apple VR doesn’t change that.
Some people call VR dystopian, but it’s got great potential too.
During COVID while I was living alone and we were under lockdown…
I used a Quest to watch movies in a virtual theater with a bunch of people from around the world. I remember being in a theater watching an absolutely ridiculous Nicolas Cage movie laughing my ass off with a bunch of dudes from Australia. Another time I watched a cricket game with some people who explained the rules to me and kinda gave me some play by play on what was happening.
I’ve also attended a few support group meetings in VR for coping with loss that had quite a lot of attendants. The meeting was run by a licensed group therapist and we took turns sharing and then reflecting on each others stories. It was frankly amazing.
I also played mini golf with friends of mine as well as had a couple meetings over a round of mini golf with the other guy on my design team during lockdown. Honestly the best virtual meetings I ever had.
All of the above were very social and very positive experience. I didn’t feel far away from people, I felt connected to them.
Same way a smartphone can be a useful tool that enhances your life or a screen you stare at for hours consuming bullshit TikTok videos. You’re in control of what you make of it. You can also stick to a dumb phone and not participate at all.
Not to take away from your experience because I’m sure it was genuinely wonderful, but all I can picture for that support group is a bunch of absurd VRchat avatars sitting in a circle for a therapy session.
There were no insane avatars, everyone looked pretty normal. Sorry to burst your bubble.
I’ve never used those. How does it work, you see a picture of the people or is it real video of them?
This was in Altspace VR which unfortunately got axed by Microsoft IIRC, but on there you kinda looked like a less shitty version of one of those Nintendo avatars customized however you wanted.
The craziest anybody looked on there would be to have like rainbow or blue hair or something along those lines. It was pretty tame compared to like the furry anime cat sex doll looking things some people run around in VR Chat with. It also wasn’t overrun with screaming children which I think is VR Chat’s biggest overall problem.
Anyway, that support group thing I think has since moved to another platform, I forget which.
There is nothing wrong with 10 Ugandan Knuckles who just need to find closure
How many of them have fursonas?
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People will rip off the headsets if the ads are too intrusive and annoying. Which is why they’ll either be dead subtle, or they’ll offer you paid ways to avoid them.
I don’t think there’ll be mass adoption of this either way, mainly because it’s an expensive gadget coming at a time when folks on median incomes are feeling the pinch.
Have you visited a website without an ad blocker recently? Because typical web advertising has become as intrusive and annoying as technically possible, and millions of people willingly accept that.
VR/AR/Spatial Whatever has the potential to be just as bad, if not far worse.
Have you visited a website with an ad blocker recently?
Do you mean without an ad-blocker?
i mean it’s easily circumventable, “and now you don’t have to worry about losing progress on your favorite game or losing battery, because when you are not using the headset it goes to sleep mode” or whatever, but you are right if the ads are too annoying people are probably not going to use it, or will they? this is the thing i already think the way ads currently are is very intrusive but there’s a large segment of people who are fine with it. and subtle ads are way worse imagine if they constantly put ads in your peripheral vision. it’s cartoonishly evil which is why it probably won’t happen but even giving that power to them is dangerous.
It’s really easy to avoid if you don’t use them.
I love spaceship games (think Elite: Dangerous and the like), and motorsport games. Anything where you’re set in a cockpit is a perfect candidate for VR. All I wanted was a headset that would act analagous to a dumb monitor - simply provide vision and audio and head tracking (with “simply” being a relative term - the challenges overcome and technology produced to date is, admittedly, amazing).
But no. What we have are a bunch of privacy-invading face huggers. I shouldn’t need to sign in to anything to use a piece of hardware that should require zero internet access (which is why anything Razer is also on my do not buy list).
So am I concerned about the Apple Vision Pro? Couldn’t give a shit to be honest. I’m not their customer.
Doesn’t valve provide login-free setup and use of SteamVR for the index and the like? Granted, you’ll need a beefy PC for it, and probably some kind of storefront for most games. But at least no Facebook login strapped to your head.
It does! It can be played fully offline, doesn’t require an account, and works great with my pirated copy of elite dangerous. The index is the shit! Apple vision pro can’t do shit for me that the index has done for years now.
OK @max, @thorbot, I didn’t know about this. I’d written off all VR in protest against corporate overreach. Time to do some more investigation…
The index is the GOAT, I highly recommend it if you have a powerful gaming PC to run it and are concerned about privacy
Please let me know if you ever find one. Best I have seen are the ones without head tracking or laggy tracking.
I’m not american and i can’t imagine a world where someone with these weird ass ski goggles don’t get laughed at.
Not everyone cares if strangers are laughing at them. Especially the rich.
They do if it gets them assaulted and their $3,500 toy stolen.
Exactly the same with smart phones back in the day. And in fact still one of the most stolen items.
Precisely. Like Apple’s headset isn’t going to have lockdown and Find My features. It’s worthless stealing an iPhone now because it can easily be locked down and rendered useless.
People used to think someone who used a cell phone in public was a weirdo too. I remember at my high school grocery store job coworkers judging someone walking down the aisle on their phone.
Wow your country sounds horrible and toxic, I hope things get better and it evolves to the point where people can live their own lives without needless bullying and abuse for trivial things.
Could you imagine not having the social freedom to wear whatever the fuck you want without having someone else loudly judge you and tell you how to act?
/u/BruceTwarzen I hope you move to a better country from that shit hole you currently reside in and heal.
Maybe that user is still in secondary/high school and deals with that. I’m being charitable by this guess.
The last time I thought about what I might be perceived as when in public was when I was in school… I’m old now and free to go out in public with my partner in bad dragon hoodies.
I mean, you can just take it off?
Also, regarding the adoption of the headset, I think it’s absolutely crazy to say that it probably won’t get less bulky. Tech is constantly getting smaller and that will be the number one priority with the headset.
If they can make the price and comfort level right, then I do think it becomes a mainstream product. Not saying people wear it 24/7, but that most households would have one, and it would become somewhat important for WFH and remote meetings.
I’m not a fanboy for Apple, but personally I just think it is the tech of the (relatively) near future.
it won’t get less bulky compared to phones. the headset will still need lenses, a display which itself needs to be a certain distance away from your eyes, a board for processing, a separate battery pack, audio, wifi, straps, space for some airflow so it doesn’t overheat and damage the display etc etc. small form factors have come a long way and it can probably get thinner, but i don’t think apple vision pro is that far off from the physical limit of how much smaller it can get.
Hmm, we’ll have to agree to disagree there. They can 100% decrease the size of the processing bits and reduce weight.
I just think it’s very shortsighted to look at such an early version of the product and say “it won’t change much”. Especially when however many years ago you could have said that what we’ve got right now isn’t possible.
Disagree strongly. If there’s one sure thing in the tech world, it is the fact that electronics get smaller and smaller with each generation.
Never seen pancake lenses, huh?
Oh, tech will just stop evolving after this point? Okay, I guess now is the time it stops. Right now.
because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky,
Airpods are probably one of the ugliest pieces of tech ove seen in the last decade and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. Never overestimate apple’s customer base.
They’re pretty much the only company on the planet that can push the “because your friends have one” aspect in their marketing and succeed. Apple users think they’re all part of this exclusive club and really don’t care that they’re straight up being robbed by the cost.
Yesterday or a few days ago I’ve read that people already jailbreaked the vision. So if you must have one, you will still be able to tinker with it.
Someone found a way to crash the kernel, which may or may not lead to an exploit, which would be just the first step in a long process of developing a jailbreak. I wouldn’t get too excited yet. Even if one does get released, Apple can just patch the exploit, and it could easily be years before a new jailbreakable exploit is found.
At the risk of facts getting in the way:
- You can install ad blockers
- Apps are not able to do that
I remember this being discussed when Apple first announced it because developers have to hand off graphics to the os so the os can do the divested rendering specifically because Apple didn’t want individual apps to be able to gather data about where users are looking.
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Adguard home for built in encrypted DNS. Better UI (imo) and uses the same lists.
Never knew about it, thank you for teaching me something new)
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I’d love to be able to set up a laptop and have much more screen real estate by putting on a headset. The ability to watch something like game of thrones on an airplane without the 6 year old behind me seeing shit would also be nice.
The biggest downside of the apple headset is that it’s apple and their stupid ecosystem.
Oh, man, I would love if I could walk around my town and every billboard and annoying flashy sign were replaced with a bit of smart auto-fill or a color-matched segment of a wallpaper image from my wallpapers folder.
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I think that, in practice, putting a headset on is a big ask for most people. Phones caught on because they’re extremely convenient, almost everyone had a use case that was improved by a smartphone, and once they had it in their pocket it was a short hop to using the phone for other things as well. A headset though? Maybe if it was as unobtrusive as regular glasses, people would put up with it - but even then, regular glasses are so annoying that many people use contact lenses instead. So if you want to put any kind of technology on people’s head and keep it there all day, that’s where your benchmark has to be set, not way up in the same size category as a motorcycle helmet.
Bingo. At the end of the day it’s still something massive that sits on their head. It’s going to sell well as a gimmick. But people will get tired, their necks will hurt, some will get motion sickness, and over time they’ll collect dust like all of the others.
The fact is that vr technology is stunted until hardware can catch up, and by that I mean literally as easy as putting on sunglasses.
AFAIK there’s some strides being made here, like I think there are see-through LCD screens that work in the lab but aren’t mass production ready, so I can see the “final form” of this being a pair of glasses with the ability to put stuff in front of your eyes and all of the actual processing is done remotely by your phone.
…but even then, I think that lands the tech somewhere in the neighborhood of headphones, not the smartphone itself.
My biggest concern is that everyone will eventually be forced by societal and institutional expectations; for now people can easily choose not to wear them, but if/when your employer requires it for work or if/when the only way to talk to your friends is by using it, then you won’t have much of a choice.
For example, Zoom has very shady ties with the Chinese government (and several reports say that they’ve used it to surveil and censor people), yet many schools and workplaces required it (and many still do now). You could refuse to install/use it, but then you’d lose your job or fail your classes. It’s a similar story for TikTok, Discord, and Facebook before that.
I’m much more concerned about the very real and confirmed ties (see:
) Zoom, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, my ISP, my cell phone service provider, etc have to the security apparatus of the country I actually live in who have actual power and authority over me and a long history of murdering left wing activists.If you’re in America, I wouldn’t worry about the Chinese Government spying on you, and be much more worried about the American government doing it, since they can actually use what they find to prosecute you for crimes real or imagined.
But while it is true that you could get forced into using it by social pressure, my post is about how I really don’t think that the tech has the potential for the kind of mass adoption that would create those conditions. You could be forced to use it by your job, but then when you’re not working you can take it off - compare that to the cell phone in your pocket, which they can already use to call you back into work at all hours of the day, the emails they use to get you to give them free labor outside of working hours, and the other ways in which corporations have gotten their fingers into our off time I just don’t see this as a breakthrough or a new threshold being crossed in any way.
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I think what the tech implies these big tech giants want for the world is more worrisome than the specific tech itself.
They may fail with this iteration or the next, but why do you think they’re trying so hard insisting this is the next big thing? To survive, capitalism needs to create new problems to be solved. The smart phone didn’t solve any problems we had, it created a desire, which then became a fear (FOMO), then it became a need, which then finally became a problem if you didn’t have one.
If you’re homeless today and want to get out of it, one of the first things you need is an address, then an internet connection, and a smart phone. Why? Because most jobs require it to get a hold of you and in many cases to facilitate the software used on the job.
They don’t need to convince consumers to adopt the new tech per se. They just need to convince businesses that without the new technological progress, their competitors will leave them behind. Then it won’t matter if you like the tech or not, you’ll NEED it to have a job and survive. Just like the smart phone is today.
They’re directing us, telling us how the future will look like based off of THEIR vision, not OURS.
That’s what worries me. Not this AR headset, but rather the reasons they have for insisting this is the future we are all heading towards.
I think about the Vision like I think about a new Gucci bag or a new set of Air Jordans. There’s a small, but very visible, community that is super into that product, probably for reasons not related to its actual functionality. The difference is that there’s a lot of overlap between Apple fans and broader technology enthusiast groups, where we’re more isolated from the Gucci and Jordan communities. There are lots of brand-based fan groups who will happily accept branded merch or content, but not interpret that as ‘advertising.’
The rest of the world tolerates spyware and especially ads if they feel like the product is worth the intrusion. There’s a reason Meta doesn’t have a logo watermark foating in the corner of Quest view field. There’s a reason VR is still very niche, almost entirely limited to gaming.
Maybe Vision’s AR experience will change that. Maybe viewing your entire life through a video camera with overlaid graphics has real-world value beyond privacy in co-working spaces. I doubt that value is $3000 and think Vision is more like Apple’s Newton than Apple’s iPhone.
It’s probably more like the Apple II than the Newton or iPhone. It cost $1300 at the time, which is about $6300 today. For early adopters, it was a revolutionary glimpse of the future. It took another 10 years for it to become widespread.
