I’m not a techie and don’t usually pay attention to the latest toys, but this one intrigues me.
Has anyone bought one and can give us a review?
Dang, those things are $3500, I had no idea. I don’t see getting one, but I’m also interested to know what people’s experiences of them are.
Me, too, I’m going to go read some reviews.
My first reaction was “Is this really necessary? Didn’t the Oculus Rift already do this?”
But that was my reaction to the iPod and the iPhone, so what do I know?
I went to a tech conference for work in the 90s and they had a very very crude early version of something like this. There was a long ass line to get to use it and you got to experience it for a minute or two after an hour wait.
It was just line drawings of pyramids and cubes. The scene moved as you nodded your head or spun around. As easy as it seems, my poor coordination in general made it impossible to use and it was insanely frustrating. The person in charge was annoyed as fuck that I wasn’t getting it and I finally just pulled the thing off halfway through which really pissed him off. I’ve been nervous about those things ever since, probably without merit. You can try one at an Apple Store if you make an appointment but I’m scared.
A sportswriter I follow on Twitter is a huge (self-described) Apple fanboy, and he is always trying the latest Apple tech. He definitely didn’t drop 3.5k on them, but did go to the local Apple Store to try them. He was absolutely blown away, and highly recommended people go try them out for themselves. (His words: “when you see the rhinoceros, think of me.”)
$3500 is a hilarious amount of money to spend on something that looks like they do. But I’m not going to downplay Apple’s ability to foresee the future of everyday tech. I’d go check them out myself, but the Apple Store is a cursed place, and I have little free time. Maybe in a few months when my office moves locations to the same block as the Apple Store.
I wonder how many people are going to buy them and use them primarily for laying flat on your back for watching tv/movies? Cuz when I saw the commercial I was like “yeah, I want it for that.”
I’m not an Apple guy, or a tech gadget guy, and VR triggers unpleasant balance and vision reactions for me but this commercial for these things got my attention. Very cool stuff from the factory but I think I spotted a few ways some corners could be cut and the manufacturing expenses brought down a hair.
No; the Vision Pro is absolutely plastered with cameras, and what you see is more like Augmented Reality than VR. That is, you see the outside with an overlay of computer stuff. Although it can also control how much of the outside you see, from being pure VR to pure “reality”.
But it’s not quite traditional AR either, because those have existed before, and generally have clear lenses (so you can see the outside without extra cameras) with a kind of projection system to overlay things. But those have limits as well.
Aside from all that, the Vision Pro has fantastic resolution, image processing, eye gaze detection, and other things.
Unfortunately (for me at least), it’s an Apple product, and is virtually useless outside of their ecosystem, and you have to pay for the right to develop for it. Unlike PC VR systems where the software platforms are free for anyone to use. I might have actually sprung for it if it were a totally open development platform.
Where’s the bragging rights in that?
Does that video explain how much it cost for others to be able to see the video of the user’s eyes? That must have added a ton of cost.
Especially since it apparently doesn’t look very good (color inaccuracies) and has noticeable lag that makes it feel uncanny. That kinda negates what was supposed to make it work.
Jobs might have come up with the eye thing, but he also would have made sure that it worked perfectly before shipping it.
That’s going to be tough to pin down in an isolated way. Screens are cheap, and it already has cameras inside for gaze tracking. But the front screen also demands the front glass. Did they put in the glass for the sake of the screen, or did they want to make a headset with glass on the front, and then realize they could put a screen behind it?
The whole thing would be cheaper and more functional if it were made out of plastic, but the cameras and processing chips and such would have still meant a multi-thousand dollar price, and people would rather have a $3500 “premium” looking headset than a $2500 plasticky-looking thing.
I imagine making the front part glass makes it heavier, if nothing else. I wonder if they would need the same quality cameras inside if they were just for gaze tracking.
I’ve used a few a few different VR headsets at this point, and they are very cool, but very isolating. I guess with all these cameras, the Vision Pro will seem less isolating.
That seems to be the intent, though it remains to be seen how it works out. The external cameras do face detection, and someone trying to get your attention will sorta pop into your vision. The dial on the top can change the degree of immersion, too.
I like VR because it’s isolating 
. Though it needs to be more cat-compatible…
I was involved in the virtual reality industry in the 1990s. The technology then was quite a bit more primitive than today. Some of the early designs uses small TV screen for the image source (though there were lens systems as well), and most were hard-wired to an expensive video card on a desktop PC. I worked at one company with real-world applications of such systems, including virtual walkthroughs of 3D models of building designs or airplane designs.
No experience with the Apple Vision Pro (or the Oculus Rift) but I am curious how the display quality compares to what we were doing back then. I’m leery of the Oculus products because I don’t have a Meta/Facebook account and don’t want to get one and am not willing to spend $3,500 for the Apple product.
If they knocked a zero off that price, it would still be a lot more than I’d pay for one.
Consider this consumer-grade VR headset from the 90s:
263x230 pixels per eye. That’s 0.121 megapixels (really we should just say 121 kilopixels). The Vision Pro is 23 megapixels (also at a higher refresh rate).
There are already a dozen or so on-hand reviews of the thing on youtube. Looks interesting but seems more like just a new way to interface with the same old apps you already have on an iphone or ipad. Just that the icons or screen are now floating out in the space in front of you.
Really? I’d pay probably up to $800/$1000. $350 is a steal. I don’t own any VR stuff, but what I’ve played with is cool and usually around $300. This seems a good bit nicer than stuff like the Oculus.
I was excited about VR, in the 1990s. My excitement ended there.