Bear in mind that the iPad was rumored to cost >$1000 but then launched at $499.
On the other hand it might sense to launch this as a pro-workstation for the usual kinds of task: architects, designers and engineers being able to visualize and interact with models directly in space.
If they can make that affordable and usable for pro designers at every level, (which $3500 clearly would be), they will have a hit.
A consumer gaming device can come later.
Having done a fair bit of AR/VR work in medical and industrial settings, I've always thought the 'killer app' of VR is not in gaming.
It's this very weekend: The Super Bowl.
Well, not the Super Bowl precisely, but in experiences like sports or other time/space limited events. Sitting ring-side for the next big match. Or at the 50-yard line at the Super Bowl. Or at the finish line of the 100-m dash. All for, I dunno, $15? And the cost for the company is just rigging a google-maps-like camera ball and streaming the data out. Especially as the quarantine grinds onwards, a better form of escapism that AR/VR provides may have a big market for time/space limited events.
Ehh. I've owned a VR headset for a long time now, and I think many people underestimate how fundamentally isolating being in VR is. Humans are social creatures and unless you live by yourself and want to escape into VR, you're a lot more likely to enjoy watching the big game with friends and family so you can shoot the shit, and share the experience.
Don't get me wrong... VR is and can be a lot of fun, but I just don't see it being this next big thing that people seem to hope it will be. On the other hand, I think when someone solves AR, I suspect that may very well produce a seismic change across society with widespread adoption.
Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring and their main value is the social context - cheering for players/teams, spectating together with family and friends. In contrast, the market for serious movies or single-player videogames suggest that there is a lot of demand for "lone time" experiences.
I think a big factor in lackluster adoption of VR is... space. VR games require space, which is expensive, and people seem to have less of it in recent years. On top of that, usable space disappears very quickly once you start a family, which cuts out a good chunk of the target audience.
Games do you are right, but productivity work is much like sitting at a desk in a cubicle -- just with so much much more you can do, even now. Sure, today there are a lot of caveats, like you need to touch type and transitioning between controllers and keyboard is sub optimal on the hardware side; while the software is still all 99.9% game oriented, there's no native multitasking, even little things like cut/copy/paste are a hassle. Today, your only option is some version of screen casting with all its multiple window resolution/scaling pain. But once you get it working it is hard not to be amazed working on a 10foot tall visio diagram and by the time Apple rolls anything out all these problems will have been solved for all practical purposes.
And rugby, rugby league, Aussie rules etc are essentially aerobic physical contact sports not anaerobic impact sports. These sports have relatively few stops, and certainly no time for advertisements outside of the half or quarter time breaks. And there are no bulky pads and helmets, and the physicality is just as dynamic, if not more, than US football.
Cricket is like baseball, where it tends to be on in the background and you pay attention at each delivery/pitch. Cricket can last 5 days though...
As an outsider in the US I was struck by the crazy high percentage of time dedicated to advertisements - even to the extent of intentional breaks for that purpose.
As a former american football player I find that watching the game is not as exciting as playing it. From the outside, and if you don't know about all the micromanagement and stuff going on, american football looks rather "static".
Other sports are much more "obviously dynamic" and are therefore probably better suited to be watched through TV or VR.
I had to do a search for that [0] and surprisingly (for me, not watching the sport except snippets in movies) it's actually real. The downvotes may come from people who took that as an unrealistic exaggeration.
I’ve also never watched American football, so forgive me. This sounds incredibly dull. Can someone ELI5? What is going on for the rest of the game? Why do people watch?
A lot of the time in the second half of the game is intentionally wasted by the team with the lead.
A lot of the time throughout the game is wasted intentionally by game procedure, e.g. refs are setting up for the next play.
Of course there are varied reasons individuals have to watch, but the overwhelming majority of it's market success can be ascribed to tribal desire to see your team win.
To anyone else confused: ELI5 means "Explain (it) Like I'm Five (years old)." Now I'll try.
Caveats: I don't watch American football on TV, but I watched it some when I was a teenager. I mostly remember how to play, and while I don't think it'd be safe to do it at my age, I do like to play catch with an American football whenever I get the chance. I wouldn't mind watching a game now, but only live and very close to the field.
The thing is there's a lot of strategy, and each play is a meticulously, often spontaneously, planned action by the Offense (team with the ball) which the Defense does its best to disrupt.
That disruption is almost always at least partially successful, forcing improvisation on both sides. In particular the quarterback (guy who throws the ball) often has to rethink the plan in real time as people chase after him -- he really really doesn't want to be tackled, for his own protection as well as for the game -- and somehow make this work with people who are running around at some distance from him. When it works it can be awe-inspiring and utterly unexpected.
These things -- the strategy, the plan on the field, the disruption, the improvisation, the danger -- are all directly and intimately connected to the physical and mental abilities of the players, which are routinely pushed to their limits, sometimes to the point of causing permanent damage.
This is all the stuff of human drama, and as in most human dramas the decisive physical events don't take up that much of the time.
Another thing I'd add is that compared to a lot of other sports American Football offers an interesting combination of extreme chaos (the tackle, etc) and extreme precision (the long-distance pass to the wide receiver).
Soccer by contrast never has that much precision and is much more about mastering the ever-present chaos, most of it very slow paced; basketball can go long stretches without getting very chaotic at all despite things constantly happening. (I know some people will take umbrage here, but I'm ready to defend these points!)
I can't think of another sport that so closely tracks an idealized version of warfare and group combat. Though I'd love to see other examples.
All that said, familiarity has a lot to do with how much you can enjoy watching a lot of sports. If you grew up surrounded by the culture of Sport X there's probably stuff in it you will like to watch.
I like to watch squash, because I played it enough to understand what's going on. I have a friend who watches hours of snooker online. Even golf draws an audience. Even cricket!
An NFL game consists of a series of designed plays, and the 12 minutes is just the execution time. In between plays, there are formation changes and setup, so fans can guess at what the offense is planning and how the defense is reacting. (That happens in other sports too, but here there's a formal beginning and end to each play.) Then there are also breaks between quarters and after changes of possession, where genuinely nothing is going on.
> Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring and their main value is the social context
I think this is a bit of a fringe opinion. I can certainly see how people appreciate the social aspect of sports events with necessarily appreciating the sports. But I don’t think I wake up in the middle of the night to watch F1 alone for the social benefit.
Just remember. If you accidentally fall asleep, Lewis will somehow lose. I nodded off during Monza this year and then the moment I was asleep all hell broke loose.
I totally agree; VR is very isolating, while AR is all about enhancing and augmenting one's interface with the real world. There is no contest: the real world will win, simply because the real world is sophisticated to start with, while anyplace in VR is what you see only, and that's a façade.
VR is isolating because its the blank canvas precursor to AR. AR is just a datastream for VR all sexed up for the media. What matters are the graphics engines/OSes. VR Chat is not isolating. Is it VR or AR to change your camera scale and 3d zoom into a reconstructed electron microscope scene and look around? Hugs will increase in value surely..
I was never arguing that VRChat/social apps are worse than other remote social experiences (phone call / video conference, etc.). My point is that it is very isolating and impossible to share the experience in any meaningful way with folks around you, or just be present at all while doing something in VR.
Like I can play Mario on my TV while sharing that experience with my kids or chatting with my wife about things, while still being around my family in a shared living space. VR just isn't cut out for that. I do use it for sim-racing (which is pretty much a perfect fit for VR headsets) which is anyway a situation where you need to be distraction free and kinda isolated from everyone else so it works well in those types of scenarios.
Counterpoint: The same argument is true of phones, and that has largely not stopped people from being regularly severely distracted by them even in social settings.
Even sans pandemic, my family all lives several states away (drivable), and my extended family are all even further (flying distance). In person connnections are great, but it’s not like I can just pop over for dinner after work.
I haven’t gotten any of them to join me on the VR train, but as it grows I think that’s a big use case for it. You can hang out together with someone in a VR space in a way that video chat doesn’t capture.
You could be at multiple super bowl parties/other events at once in VR. I know it's not exactly the same as being physically proximate but it offers some advantages that being there irl can't offer. You and all your friends in the lower stands at halfway marker all game. Maybe you want to all "sit" wherever the ball is on the field as it moves up or down the field of play. Maybe you have a specific spot in the stadium you like to sit at and you don't have to fight with others for that spot. I don't know it sounds kind of interesting for some things. I'd still personally rather be at a concert in person, I guess.
I'm not arguing against VR for shared social experiences over the internet with remote participants. I actually do think that it can be great for that, especially once technology catches up some more. My point though is that if you already have family or friends in your home, then it is pretty much impossible to have any sort of quality social interactions in VR and you are much better off enjoying things IRL, even if it isn't as immersive as what a VR experience could produce.
>you're a lot more likely to enjoy watching the big game with friends and family
This is more a comment on the state of VR software than the technology itself.
With the Apple product described, it's pretty easy to imagine software that allows you to have a "virtual box seat" where you can get online to watch the game with your family/friends, even if you aren't all in the same place, and use the tech to both watch the game and talk to each other when nothing's going on with plays.
Alternatively, you can use the cameras in the app to merge your immediate surroundings with the game feed, so you see the people beside you in a part of the picture, or in the aforementioned "virtual" box seats. You can watch the game as if you're on the side lines (or on the ball) and see people around you react to plays, too. With eye tracking tech, the headset knows when you're looking at the game vs. your surroundings and can react accordingly.
I think Apple producing a VR headset would be a very good thing for the market. Like or hate Apple as a company, they tend to set the standard for industrial design and UI technology, and their products drive other products' features and uses.
Yes, humans evolved to live in groups. However, we did not evolve to live in huge cities, surrounded by millions of people and tall concrete boxes. That would scare the soul out of our ancestors. My point is that we can't always judge the technology by what's "natural" to us. Brain is extremely flexible, and children who grew up with VR might just want to live in it, instead of the "real" world.
We adjusted our culture, but our brains are likely the same as they were before the mega-cities came into existence. My point is that we shouldn't necessarily judge the technology by what's "natural" to us, i.e. "VR isn't going fly because we're social creatures".
"Evolved == went on" to live in big cities vs "evolved == adapted as an evolutionary process" to live in big cities, etc, are two very different things.
Evolution adapts to present conditions, not future conditions, and on a time scale of millenias. It chanced into a feature set that let us change our environment much faster than that. We're still adapted to the lifestyle we had many thousands of years ago.
>Yes, humans evolved to live in groups. However, we did not evolve to live in huge cities, surrounded by millions of people and tall concrete boxes. That would scare the soul out of our ancestors.
Well, it gets us to stress, depression, suicides, the loneliness epidemic, and other such day-to-day suffering today too (plus obesity, poor physique, etc).
Living in a better environment, without the "huge cities, surrounded by millions of people and tall concrete boxes" but keeping the modern advancements in medicine, sanitation, and so on, we would probably live 20+ years more...
I agree about it not being the next big thing. But, for some people who are extremely introverted, it can be the best thing ever. I think it has a lot of therapeutic use, although underdeveloped.
I find it to be disorienting, relaxing, and exhilarating, like a drug. To me, gives me the feelings of nitrous oxide without the strange nitrous oxide sensation.
I started and got out of VR due to the complete lack of anyone grasping how isolating and empty it is without other people, and those other people really ought to look non-generic. I'm an "original 3D graphics researcher" from the 80's, and have created 3D production pipelines as one of my career specialties. VR needs an entire "face lift" where it includes people, at a moderately personal appearance level. When girls can look like themselves and it requires less effort than their own getting dressed each day, while also presenting their real time actual facial expressions they will use VR, if for nothing else, a gossip (social media) platform. But my main point is, until a person can go into VR and be themselves, look and act like themselves, VR is alien.
I totally agree and is probably the main reason I don't use my Rift more - it takes me to another location.
> unless you live by yourself
Is a very important point, I think the social (especially with covid) aspect of VR for people that are not together might be the angle that Apple is looking at.
Presumably, this isolation would be less of a concern with mixed reality. Just place “the game” in a shared middle of the room and blend your friends into the stands.
When I’m playing in VR and no one else is at home, I feel no more vulnerable than if I had my nose buried in a book. I do keep the door locked and the blinds down, though.
It really does depend on the app, I was once playing the game Hotdogs Horseshoes and Handgrenades. It has this western level which is wide open. But I really hated it, it felt really isolated. The echos only made things worse.
For people who are really sports fans (which might be a little out of the Hacker News audience, I know) not having your friends and family talking during the game might be a pro, not a con.
100% this. Why not do full audio/video capture of the best seat in the house for every sporting event. I am very bearish on VR in general, but as a sports fan this is something I would use about 480 hours per season. Apple actually acquired NextVR that was doing this sort of thing:
Even the best seat in the house is not the best seat when the action is at the other end of the playfield. I've seen some sporting events where they have multiple cameras set up to always get the best view of the action. They have a man who watches all the camera feeds and switches to whichever one is offering the best view of the action. It's even better than the best seat in the house.
Back in the 90's, during the first attempt at mainstream VR, some company surrounded the World Cup Finals with 16 cameras, and they published an application that was the World Cup Finals as a 3D soccer field with 3D players, and a virtual camera that could be placed and moved anywhere during gameplay. The company was one of the video card manufacturers of the time, promoting their large and bulky VR headset. This was around '93-94?
I don't really understand your argument. Videogames revenue is higher than movies and NA sports combined. That said, there's enough room for everything.
>rigging a google-maps-like camera ball
This is also not really how it works at all. Volumetric capture is a lot more complicated than 3D TV which is considered a dud.
They've been trying to do this but they always put the 360 camera somewhere really dumb, like next to the goal (this is soccer I've tried it with) and just normal head height, so you can't actually see the game at all.
I agree if they put the camera somewhere cool, like right above the pitch kind of like god-view, that would be awesome.
> they always put the 360 camera somewhere really dumb, like next to the goal
Human stereo vision doesn't work at long distances, because of the geometry - the exact distance depends on how good your eyesight is, but somewhere around 18 feet [1] the brain starts using other cues because the difference between what your left and right eyes see is so minuscule.
This all happens unconsciously so you don't notice - but when you estimate the speed of a car 100 meters away, you actually start comparing its motion to the road markings, using your knowledge of about how big a car is, and so on.
So a bird's eye view doesn't really benefit from stereo vision. I suspect they like to put in those weird close-up shots to make the people paying $$$$ for 3D notice the 3D effect and feel they've got their money's worth.
I wouldn’t really care about stereo vision. I just want to watch the game from a great position.
Also I’ve tried some experiments with VR looking down over a race track with virtual race going on and it’s totally awesome- but that was in full 3D so more exciting I guess.
They could have tens or hundreds of cameras, and reconstruct what a virtual cameraman moving on the field with the action would record.
I think such a virtual camera technically almost is possible. Getting a smoothly moving camera image that doesn’t get distracted by ball-like objects (e.g. a bald referee, as happened in soccer recently) and tunes zoom levels to show just enough action probably is the hardest part.
Apple purchased NextVR last year. They had previously been screening NBA matches (and theatre/comedy) on the Quest. They were one of my favourite apps..
The resolution on today's consumer headsets still isn't there to provide good experience (maybe https://varjo.com/ can work but it's not for consumers). Oculus Quest also last only 2-3 hours after fully charged. Main reason at least for me is it gets quite uncomfortable after wearing it for long (~30 min) due to weight and sweat
IMO the resolution is there so long as you have one of the latest headsets and are viewing a VR180 8K feed (my reference is the Quest 2). Live casting of an 8K feed probably is the limiting factor here (not the headset hardware).
It’s 8K per eye and to meet latency expectations right now you’d need to send the whole 180/360 video with enough resolution through it’s entirety so that there’s always enough pixels within the spherical polygon the eye frustrums create. Far more than an 8K feed and in particular I don’t know of any cameras capturing at that resolution?
360 video is also quite nauseating for people as it has no positional component (e.g. moving your head forward brings the scene with it). What we really want are streaming light fields.
VR180 6-8K video at 90hz is such a visible improvement compared with lower quality formats on Quest 2. But there is so little content available at high resolutions and high frame rates. I just hope this will improve (at least slowly) in time.
>The resolution on today's consumer headsets still isn't there to provide good experience (maybe https://varjo.com/ can work but it's not for consumers).
I think the display hardware is good enough, but I've only been able to get that quality by manually copying over 8k video files and playing them on the device itself. Not sure why they can't match this quality when streaming...
>experiences like sports or other time/space limited event
How would streaming work with a custom point/angle of view? Can the participant walk, move head - etc. Unless all the possible cameras are streamed AND processed locally the latency would destroy the experience.
You could probably take it a step further. Use lots of cameras all around the stadium from various angles then use machine learning or whatever to recreate the game in a 3d world. Then, let people move and fly around through that world. Get up close to the players, fly anywhere you want.
Add the ability to watch the game with all your friends next to you in VR sharing the excitement just like you would if you were in the stadium sitting next to each other and that's a killer app IMO. I think the sky sports app in oculus is like that but haven't tested it
To put it another way, the killer app had better not be games if Apple is going to succeed with a $3K headset. Apple, a proprietary Apple processor, and $3K are all things that tend to make game developers run far, far, away.
The problem with this is that it’s not VR though. It’s 3D from a fixed point.
You can’t look around unless the camera is mounted on motors to allow for that, and even then you’d need to be the only viewer otherwise who’s head does it track?
They had a partnership with Valve back in 2017 for Vive support on MacOS... Just three years later it was canceled. (There were actually more VR games running on Linux at that point than on MacOS, thanks to Proton.) I'm not expecting Apple to try to enter the VR gaming space again anytime soon.
There are more games on the iOS app store than exist on steam.
I don't think apple needs valve or steam's support to make their own VR gaming platform just as they didn't need their support to make iOS a larger app-store for games than steam is.
I see what you're getting at, but I think you probably want to look at total engineering hours per game if you want to get there. There were about 45,000 games on Steam at the end of 2020, based on what I've been able to pick up from news reports and Statista; there are over 950,000 games for iOS. Even presuming the average good iOS game takes fewer engineering hours and presuming there's more quick-buck cookie-cutter crap on iOS, there's almost certainly more engineering hours spent there than there is on any other platform.
But, I think you're still on to something. The biggest strike against Apple in this space is the same strike they've always had: they've never seemed to take gaming truly seriously at a corporate level, by which I mostly mean courting (and spending money on) AAA-class developers. Maybe this will change, but they have a very long track record of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in this area.
I don't agree. 99% of games on ios are cookie cutter or trivially small. I'd wager the average engineering hours put into a steam game is >100x the hours put into an average ios game.
A mobile device strikes me as different here - it's more consumer centric where VR right now at least is more hobbist/professional centric. I think they could away w/ the higher price.
I'll add when the iPhone came out it was way way more than it's competition. It was effectively the first $100/month w/ 2 year contract phone bill as compared to other devices where $35/month was common.
Maybe try ordering from insight.com? Or check the hololens subreddit, apparently there are a number of companies which can get one out to customers within a few days.
Hololens 2 is not a virtual reality headset. It's a wearable HUD and UI (since you can control it with hand gestures). It's an industrial inspections and automation tool - and for those use cases the users love it. For offerings in this space built around Hololens 2 see for example https://fieldtech.trimble.com/en/products/mixed-reality/trim...
The virtual workspace for hololens is the physical world. The view area is a bit small. But the idea is not in HL to create a virtual world, but to overlay information to the real world.
Yeah I've used a hololens for a building walkthrough (showing a new fitout) and whilst it was a cool experience, the resolution was really low, and the field of view was tiny - just a small square in each eye.
The latency tracking was on par with other headsets, which I consider quite good.
Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, opinions my own, yadda yadda yadda.
Apple haven't quite convinced me they're serious about being in the pro design segment. They seemed to just quietly forget about graphics and video professionals, focusing on iOS and the consumer side instead. Sure, there's a fresh mac pro lineup now, but is it going to be another 6 years until the next gen?
Why is the AirPod product line a near-Fortune 500 company sized hit on its own? Why did no other company do this?
Why is the Apple Watch dominating it's segment?
Why have Android tablet sales fallen flat compared to Apple's?
Why did the iPhone destroy the prospects of Windows Phone and Blackberry and force Android to completely revamp it's UI prior to release?
Why is the long in the tooth Macintosh line having a sales renaissance?
Apple TV is about the only recent vertical I can think of where Apple hasn't outpaced its competitors in recent years, and even there it's UI is appreciably better than the competition, pricing and incredibly stupid remote being its downfall.
I think you can answer your own question by answering mine.
You mean why are people, of a specific demographic, buying luxury items from Apple Inc?
People are buying the luxury brand, like peopke who buy a Mercedes or Ferrari, not the functional qualities of a product. Airpods are good, my Bose headphones are phenominal. At work I use an iMac which is great but my own PC is a beast.
Really? The article says “well-known method”, not “all vr headsets already doing”. From what I can find, DeepFovea and others were only work in progress (summer 2020) at best, in contrast to mainstream tech. Is there more info on that?
"NVIDIA VR Ready Quadro or GeForce Turing based GPU required for foveated rendering. For developers, Unity foveated rendering plug-in and run-time are also required and available from the Unity Store or HP Developer Portal"
Nobody does that and it's not possible due to GPU latency.
Eyeballs rotate very fast, up to 1000°/s. Fovea has just under 1° of high resolution. You gonna need to render 1000 FPS with 1 frame of latency to catch up.
GPUs can't do that. They evolved for decades optimizing for throughput at 60Hz, not latency at 1000Hz.
IIRC snappy eye movement makes us essentialy blind not only during the movement itself, but for a brief time after the eye settles also.
Foveated rendering (where IR cameras look where pupils are looking, passing this info to PC and the frames rendering with high detail only in that spot) was already demonstrated to be working well and fast enough to not be noticable.
It is not present in any consumer VR headset, and the software side is also not yet plug&play
Would this enable me to look off to the edge of my headset and not have it be blurry? It's been rough training myself to turn my head and made me realize how much I rely on that ability for vision in general.
On the other hand it might sense to launch this as a pro-workstation for the usual kinds of task: architects, designers and engineers being able to visualize and interact with models directly in space.
If they can make that affordable and usable for pro designers at every level, (which $3500 clearly would be), they will have a hit. A consumer gaming device can come later.