Virtual Reality

[CMcK]

Yep, I'm still not getting what Apple really brings to the table other than an inflated price tag

A huge R&D budget, class leading SoCs, one of the worlds most popular operating systems and matching development environment.

[Brad]

Most importantly, I’m right lol.

It’s impossible to describe vr to someone so likewise it’s impossible to describe apple’s implementation. We will have to experience it to know if it’s any good. The quest pro implementation of AR is piss poor. Will be interesting to see how apple do it.

[Neon Ignition]

A huge R&D budget, class leading SoCs, one of the worlds most popular operating systems and matching development environment.

Personally, I'm doubtful it will be resourced that well. It will undoubtedly be business orientated as Apple has little love or attention for gaming and I'd expect this is very much something commissioned during the VR hype wave and had Apple seen then how the market has withdrawn the way it has now, they'd not have bothered. I honestly don't see much of a path for Apple in this arena despite their being corporate giants, they're an expensive choice for an incredibly niche market whatever the consumers intended use is.

For non-commercial business use... maybe, depends on how far the tech pushes
For commercial business use - nope
For gaming market use - practically dead on arrival as an option

[Asura]

Yeah; the Apple Faithful in VR spaces are a bit insufferable at the mo because many of them expect this to follow their general track record for mobile devices, i.e., MP3 players existed but were niche and not great until Apple made a really good one. Smartphones existed but were crap until Apple made a really good one. Tablet PCs had been around for years but weren't all that until Apple made a really good one.

And I'm not going to knock them; I had the early smartphones and PDAs and they were terrible; when Apple came along with the iPhone it's true that it just did what you pictured in your head before you got one of the devices. But I'm not convinced they can do that for VR.

[Neon Ignition]

You have a mixture of elements when it comes to Apple.

Their brand power is definitely the biggest factor but it is also a bit of a curse too. Apple hasn't done anything particularly interesting or of note since it became the powerhouse it is, protecting the brand power means too much and understandably so. It's why I would expect this device to get effectively soft launched, the chances of it performing well aren't great and they won't be looking to have a high profile failure attached to their name so anyone expecting an iPod/iPhone style product launch I expect will be woefully disappointed.

I think the other is the part Jobs was good at getting onto incredibly quickly. Identifying an obvious tech-gap and moving in on it in a simple to use manner. People went nuts for the iPod but as far as a device goes it was something that was always coming, it's literally a hard drive in your pocket, an evolution of the walkman, but rather than hesitate Apple moved quickly to fill a space that the likes of Sony were too slow on. The iPhone was one of the most uninspired products ever created. From the second the iPod arrived everyone and their mum was saying it should be able to make calls too so you wouldn't need two devices in your pocket, if anything the iPhone felt slow to originally arrive but it did exactly that and as such rightfully did gangbusters. But both, though previous incarnations were unrefined, were evolutions of existing products and more importantly of existing mass consumed devices.

VR isn't that. There's no mass demand, there's no obvious or even likely fix for the practical limitations VR has and likely will always have because they're issues inherent to the tech itself in concept. But I think that's why I have very little faith that gaming is even a spec of a real consideration in Apple's motivations behind the device and even if it is ahead in some regards, it's literally a difference of months until another high end headset gets announced that surpasses it. It feels like the companies are in a rush to perfect the tech for industrial purposes and contract it out when they're the first to truly crack that nut. Gaming wise, I struggle to imagine this will even catch much focus once the dust settles and offices won't be using them either.

[wakka]

The iPhone was one of the most uninspired products ever created.

The iPhone in 2007 was a quantum leap forward in usability and its design was absolutely inspired. It literally created the modern smartphone market and made every other handset maker, many of whom had been making smartphones for a decade by that point, go back to the drawing board and create their own version of it.

Whatever to the VR side of things, but just had to comment this!

[Asura]

Yeah, got to argue with the idea that the iPhone was uninspired.

When it came out, it was only available on a very small number of networks (I think just one?). The reason for that is because smartphones were crap, everyone knew they were crap. I had some of the early ones. Connecting them to your computer was a NIGHTMARE and barely ever worked, and even when it did, you had to install custom apps and transferring data just never seem to work; even doing something basic like synching your Google calendar to your phone via Bluetooth (often the only format they supported) would take forever and result in loads of problems. And there were artificial blockers put in place too, to slow the progress of apps like Skype, because the phone networks were actively trying to dam internet telephony from cutting into their bottom line. Basically these devices were crap because all the phone companies were dictated to by the networks, and if they didn't "play by the rules" then those networks wouldn't carry them.

Apple came to that scene and said, rightfully, that was all bull****, and they were just going to make a phone like a computer that can also make calls, like it should've always been. The networks all said they wouldn't carry it, except this one (I wanna say Verizon?). Then it came out and it was a fantastic device, and suddenly the networks were beating down Apple's door because everyone wanted one.

Seriously, I dislike Apple in so many ways, but they really did something great with the iPhone by destroying that monopoly through sheer product quality.

[Neon Ignition]

It definitely revolutionised the the mobile market but its doing so comes back to the idea that Jobs was always good at reading the gaps. From a phone market perspective the iPhone was a massive disruptor, from an iPod line up perspective they just decided to slap a phone function into the iPod Touch project to stave off the risk the evolving mobile market posed. It's not a slight against the iPhone, the biggest successes often come via these routes - just that I don't feel VR exists in this space and that imminent massive craze moment isn't coming regardless of who puts out a headset

[Lebowski]

It definitely revolutionised the the mobile market but its doing so comes back to the idea that Jobs was always good at reading the gaps. From a phone market perspective the iPhone was a massive disruptor, from an iPod line up perspective they just decided to slap a phone function into the iPod Touch project to stave off the risk the evolving mobile market posed. It's not a slight against the iPhone, the biggest successes often come via these routes - just that I don't feel VR exists in this space and that imminent massive craze moment isn't coming regardless of who puts out a headset

evolving mobile market? in 2007 flagship phones looked like this


3 years down the line in 2009 Nokia the biggest phone maker in the world didn't have a decent answer to the iphone, don't believe me well here it is in their own words.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/sep/02/nokia-smartphones-apple-iphone-music-mobiles

Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, has admitted it was slow to react to the rise of new devices, such as the iPhone, and has launched a major offensive to win back market share from its rivals Apple and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry email device.

Android completely changed their OS after seeing the iphone it didnt include touch screen support in its intial form. as far as history gose it would seem apple invented the current smart phone template, they have been pretty sucessfull at keeping up sales too despite a lot of other company's bringing in new tech and outpacing them. Not every bit of new tech is good though Samsungs self destructing folding phones being one such piece of tech that isnt ready for market yet.

[wakka]

Yep. Here's the prototype of the first Android phone Google were developing back in 2007...



Unsurprisingly this went straight into the bin the moment the iPhone was announced, in favour of a project to clone Apple's handset as quickly as possible.

The iPhone was a genuine gamechanger. Its design is obvious only in hindsight - otherwise Google, Nokia, and others wouldn't have been caught on the hop.

[Neon Ignition]

They deserved to get caught out, putting a phone function in an iPod was talked about well before it made it market. I suppose being the existing market leaders meant a reluctance to move forward with things like touchscreens which would have incurred cost for little reason from their perspective, till it happened without them

[wakka]

I think frankly from my perspective the mobile phone market can be divided into pre-iPhone and post-iPhone. Love it or hate it as a product and as a brand, but it totally changed the way phones were designed and used.

To bring this back on topic a little bit, my biggest curiosity about the Apple headset is whether they've been able to achieve something similar with the interface and controls of the new headset. Even at the outrageous price and without an obvious use case for the device as whole, if moving your fingers in the air to control it works well, that will be pretty fascinating to observe as a portent to where the whole category might be going.

[Asura]

To bring this back on topic a little bit, my biggest curiosity about the Apple headset is whether they've been able to achieve something similar with the interface and controls of the new headset. Even at the outrageous price and without an obvious use case for the device as whole, if moving your fingers in the air to control it works well, that will be pretty fascinating to observe as a portent to where the whole category might be going.

The leaks suggest they're only going to use hand-tracking.

This is interesting because if they pull that off, then they must have a hand-tracking system which is just better than anyone else's; even hardware like Magic Leap which does hand-tracking stuff for non-VR applications and stuff like the military.

The hand-tracking on the Quest 2 (and pro) is honestly very good. Some people say it's poor, but that's because they tried it when it was launched, and now the Quest uses its 2.0 implementation and it works really well. However, it's limited in terms of speed and occlusion, and only works reliably in a 3D space that is well-covered by the cameras (the regular Quest controllers still track their tilt and velocity when unseen by the cameras, so they can guess a lot by dead reckoning and the pro controllers use their own cameras), which is one of the reasons controller-based games work better in most cases.

It's a bit of a philosophical argument. To use an example in another industry, a lot of self-driving vehicles use LIDAR, a light-based equivalent of RADAR/SONAR to make a 3D map of the world on-the-fly, to allow them to navigate. However, Tesla's cars don't do this; they just have video cameras and try to navigate the world using those. The logic that Tesla applies here is more of a philosophy; humans aren't bats, we don't have LIDAR or SONAR, yet we can drive and navigate fine, so arguably you shouldn't need that equipment to do it.

In the early days of VR once hand-tracking became a reality, there was a great deal of discussion on this topic, because many people had a similar belief; we as humans don't carry controllers around to manipulate the world, we just use our hands. So in a snese, there was the idea that good VR wouldn't need controllers; instead, we would just need haptic and prehensile gloves that could simulate stuff. Prototypes of these exist but they're not ready for public use yet; i.e. they resist your fingers if you try to grab something that would put your hands inside an object, and they can even get hot, cold... There are companies working on electrostatic induction so you would literally feel if you immersed your hand in water.

Honestly that latter stuff sounds amazing but all the prototypes at CES were still clunky and years from anything resembling a viable product.

[Neon Ignition]

Without the gloves hand tracking is useless, if VR games didn't have some form of tactile feedback their appeal would vanish. Even something with a control system as simple as Beat Sabre showcases the need as the feel of the controllers in your hand and the blades rumbling as they clash lightsaber style is one of the key, simple elements as to why that game feels so good to play.

Using the hand tracking to navigate the menu works but then you introduce the need to pick up the controller and put it down whilst blinded by the headset. Pass through can solve this issue but by that point the whole process has become a technological solution to a situation whereby the existing point and click with a controller is simpler and faster.

[wakka]

Yeah, in all the leaks about the headset over the years, there has never been anything about wands or any other kind of physical input device that you manipulate.

I suspect it's philosophical as you suggest. They only want to bring something to market that works using your naked hands.

Whether that will actually work well or not remains to be seen. I suspect the commitment to this as an interface has been a key contributor to the endless delays the product seems to have received internally.

Interesting, though.

Without the gloves hand tracking is useless, if VR games didn't have some form of tactile feedback their appeal would vanish. Even something with a control system as simple as Beat Sabre showcases the need as the feel of the controllers in your hand and the blades rumbling as they clash lightsaber style is one of the key, simple elements as to why that game feels so good to play.

Using the hand tracking to navigate the menu works but then you introduce the need to pick up the controller and put it down whilst blinded by the headset. Pass through can solve this issue but by that point the whole process has become a technological solution to a situation whereby the existing point and click with a controller is simpler and faster.

I don't really think Apple are trying to build a gaming product though. They're trying to build something more in line with the iPhone, iPad and Watch that people use for a variety of purposes.

And that's not me saying 'And I think it's gonna be the best thing since sliced bread', because I have no idea how well it will work and more importantly a lot of scepticism about the viability of head-mounted computing beyond gaming and niche CAD/industrial uses with existing technology. I just reckon that that's their objective.

I would say that if they can crack it and make hand tracking work well, it will be interesting. Going back to the iPhone, if we were having this conversation about a supposed touchscreen iPhone in 2006 I think there would have been doubts about the viability of a touchscreen as a sole input mechanism.