[HN Gopher] Apple is building the metaverse substrate
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Apple is building the metaverse substrate
Author : grork
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-06-21 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.codevoid.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.codevoid.net)
| Ankintol wrote:
| Slightly adjacent to the article, I don't think Apple cares all
| that much about the AR metaverse/ecosystem.
|
| My own prediction, using many of the same data points as the
| author, is that Apple is trying to create a suite of features
| that act as a sort of Software Personal Assistant. For years
| Apple has consistently put in better sensors and larger TPUs than
| strictly necessary for the expected lifetime of the device. We're
| already seeing some of the results of this with the Health app.
|
| Apple understands the profit potential of platforms, so they'll
| make some of the data that enables these features to App
| Developers and that in turn may enable AR, but I doubt any Apple
| executives are seriously focused on bringing AR capabilities to
| developers.
| dwhitney wrote:
| I hope you're wrong. I understand that the technology for the
| dream that "Google Glasses" was selling isn't quite there, but
| I hope Apple has a research team moving closer and closer to
| it.
| Ankintol wrote:
| They may still make that, but I suspect developers will not
| have full access to the full power of the platform.
|
| A thought I should have fleshed out in the above post: the
| kind of sensor data that enables AR can also be used to
| deduce a great deal of personal information[0]. With Apple
| taking a strong position on privacy I suspect they will make
| only a limited subset of data available to developers.
|
| [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332386880_Priva
| cy_I...
| root_axis wrote:
| "Not quite there" is an understatement. The advancements
| necessary in optics, battery technology and GPU performance
| for a practical AR wearable are considerable, this is without
| considering the need for a fashionable form factor and
| practical heat dissipation. IMO we're at least a decade out
| from a serious MVP.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Non-gaming AR tech will have to be extremely good out of the
| gate to dodge the issues that sank Google Glasses. I suspect
| it will remain an active research project for as long as it
| takes, and in the meantime Apple will chart their product
| roadmap along a sequence of technologies that they can be
| confident of having ready on 1-5 year timescales.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Is this just a fancy/confusing of way of saying "Apple is
| building an AR ecosystem"?
| ronyfadel wrote:
| Yes. Apple could be building AR/VR hardware, but if you're
| convinced they are, then you'll start to mentally force
| everything they publish as a building block for said hardware.
| SamBam wrote:
| And is the "AR ecosystem" the "metaverse" or the "metaverse
| substrate?"
| vincent-toups wrote:
| I'm really looking forward to not engaging with any of this stuff
| at all!
| kyle-rb wrote:
| Some of this stuff is cool, and I can see how it might fit
| together (although I doubt half of it will pan out). But some of
| it just seems like nothing.
|
| The Shazam stuff seems very limited in use case, and I'm annoyed
| at "AppClips" because they should just be websites.
|
| Notes+Spotlight+Shared with you all seem like they're inventing
| new paradigms to avoid ever adding a user file system on iOS,
| since Apple is opposed to that. It's possible that those new
| paradigms will be great, but I think they'd be better if Apple
| gave up a little control.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files_(Apple)
|
| That's existed for 4 years. A user file system is effectively
| available on iOS, even if it's not exactly what you might
| expect coming from a desktop OS.
| mncharity wrote:
| > SwiftUI [...] doesn't feel like an AR platform component
| (Where's the third dimension?).
|
| I'm unfamiliar with SwiftUI, but fwiw, I found the extensions
| needed for CSS3D to support AR to be surprisingly small.
|
| A few years back, having a custom browser-based VR stack with
| passthrough AR, I sketched a talk for the BostonVR meetup, to
| give around April Fools. It would have purported to be an
| introductory onboarding demo, of newly available CSS3D extensions
| for AR. With support for placement in realspace, billboards, HUD
| overlays, integrated multiple displays, position aware and 3D
| displays. The extension needed was surprisingly minor. The talk
| would have been basically "introductory CSS positioning, in a
| slightly enriched context", which I expected to be quite
| believable, followed by a "surprise! - the making of the demo
| spike". I don't quite remember why it didn't happen.
|
| > 2(.5)D experiences
|
| Shallow-3D UIs seemingly have a lot of potential, but don't get
| much discussion.
|
| Meta: I wish HN discussions around AR were of higher quality.
| It's be clear for years that Apple was pursing this. Being
| unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, I'd have liked to see more
| discussion of what those pieces and their characteristics might
| suggest about the future. Or for instance, of whether Apple is
| doing any CEP complex event processing, or retraction of app
| state changes, to support input with diverse latencies.
| narrator wrote:
| The funny thing about Apple is how people confabulate mythical
| powers to it. I can't wait for Apple iTulpa[1].
|
| Jokes aside. What is the mission statement here, what is the
| dream? Make you never want to interact with the real world again?
| Help you manage your to do list better?
|
| I feel there was much more of a mission statement for mobile back
| when everyone was stuck on public transit and at the office for
| hours every day. You could finally make your life on transit and
| at the office more meaningful by integrating your personal life
| with that through your phone.
|
| What's the dream now? I don't get where all this is going unless
| it's like you're never going to leave your house again, so escape
| into VR.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
| zelon88 wrote:
| This guy is way too excited. He's thinking he's gonna get
| Cyberpunk 2077 but in reality he's getting a combo of Wall-E and
| The Final Cut.
| rektide wrote:
| Apple's Bluetooth-LE tags don't seem to be mentioned but to me
| this is one of the most notable beachheads for Apple to mix the
| metaverse with physical reality. we still don't see a ton of
| uses, but there's something super enticing about being able to
| casually discover digital things amid the physical. I'm not
| surprised good adoption has been slow, that we don't have a ton
| of neat use cases to wow people, but also: I was shocked as heck
| to see Google retreat from their open standards competitor,
| Physical Web/Eddystone.
|
| Apple also makes good use of Bluetooth for airdrop & wifi
| password sharing, something else google is light-years behind in.
|
| Good writeup, interesting, even if it seems a bit (quite)
| oversold to me. Makes me think of Benjamin Bratton's The Stack,
| the many tiers that compose the digital.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| That was touched on in the "Find My" section.
| rektide wrote:
| > "Find My"-style devices will help tighten up the mapping of
| the physical world to enable augmentation -- really this is
| part of the platform substrate, but the same tech underlies a
| key bridge between physical and virtual.
|
| The section has good stuff in it, but to me it came off as
| me-centric, as about high end experiences like VR, accurate
| spatial systems.
|
| And that feels like it's a very different piece of the
| platform than what I was talking about, which is beacons that
| we can leave for each other. Getting to a bar & having the
| menu advertise itself. Art installs that come with
| interesting mini-sites on the browser, or which are cross-
| media. QR codes are the closest thing we have today, but QR
| codes require very explicit intent to use, and I've long been
| interested in the promise of more ambient computing, of
| seeing the numerous micro- / edge- clouds about me, & seeing
| what they might offer.
|
| I didn't get any of that from the Find My. I'm looking for
| Find Your, I guess. Or Share Mine. Which Physical Web did,
| which Apple's iBeacons continue to do.
| [deleted]
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| The conclusion almost followed the points except for one major
| failure of imagination: VR. Apple will release a VR product but
| it can only do so after the migration to Apple Silicon. Anyone
| familiar with M1 performance and VR games on Intel will
| immediately see why. Did anyone else notice/remember what
| specific use case Apple touted for the the newest generation of
| Mac Pro? VR content creation. Very resource hungry. Apple can't
| release the VR device we know they could, without giving content
| creators the tools. What makes VR more than just a gaming
| product? Giving everyone with an Apple laptop the ability to
| create content for a meta verse. You might be thinking Ready
| Player One, I'm thinking more like a better Roblox. There's
| massive ARR potential in a VR metaverse ecosystem where everyone
| can be a content creator / inhabitant. Apple is the only company
| that could put it all together and make it work from soup to
| nuts.
| Animats wrote:
| This is the feature set needed for Hyperreality.[1] Which is hell
| with interactive overlays.
|
| AppClips. Drive-by installs. What could possibly go wrong?
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
| walterlb wrote:
| Hell is exactly how I would describe this.
|
| Well-made, cool video though!
| asadlionpk wrote:
| This is what Android equivalent would look like.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Apple keeps trying to make AR a thing. Bless their heart...
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| shirhan wrote:
| I learned Apple keeps trying to make AR a thing, but it's not
| a thing.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Bless their heart, and their $204b in cash, and their team of
| 1000+ engineers dedicated to AR.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Something that's dawned on me for the last few years is that
| Microsoft basically settled on the idea that the modern operating
| system is effectively done, which I suppose is true, but then
| they stopped creating technologies to build on top of Windows all
| together.
|
| It was as if they said, OK, here's the supermarket, now vendors,
| create stuff and we'll stock the shelves.
|
| Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game
| developer is targeting the web. Which means the best software
| you're going to get for Windows that isn't long-lived incumbent
| software like Creative Cloud is going to be... over Google Chrome
| (or Microsoft Edge).
|
| OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great,
| integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great
| Windows is. But they don't. I have mixed feelings about this,
| because when Apple does it, they basically put people out of
| business.
|
| But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have
| Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows.
| And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is going
| to be so much more. And they already are so much more.
|
| For those who haven't experienced it yet, or can't afford Apple
| products, they're missing something that just hasn't happened in
| computing in any other period of time I can immediately think of.
|
| Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so great.
| The lattermost is probably more likely.
| outside1234 wrote:
| That's because they got sued for antitrust the last time they
| tried to do this.
|
| And given that they don't sell hardware, there isn't money in
| it. And if there isn't money in it, it isn't worth getting sued
| over trying it.
|
| So here we are.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > and every other Apple OS, is going to be so much more...
| [non-Apple users are] missing something
|
| Android hasn't really faced many obstacles in cloning things.
| Consumers in China, for example, still buy Android phones,
| despite iPhones and despite having enough money for those
| iPhones. I don't know if anyone is missing out on all that
| much. I wouldn't say they are like, unenlightened. If anything
| the Android ecosystem has led to more digitization of life in
| China than in America, far faster - it looks way more like the
| metaverse in terms of computing taking over daily life than
| here, which is to say that you're really far off the mark in
| terms of what really matters.
|
| Anyway, this metaverse stuff. It blows. Roblox blows. Second
| Life blew. World of Warcraft is great, but you can hear about
| why it's great direct from the source
| (https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/conversations-2014-05-07/)
| and it's all about really carefully curated and purposeful
| design choices, the user driven parts of it are not why the
| game was so good.
|
| Existing metaverse experiences blow not for lack of immersion!
| So the technology will change little of that. If Roblox was
| photoreal, it would still blow. Minecraft AR didn't matter.
| None of that shit matters.
|
| A company that barely supports 1 external video card vendor,
| that releases shit graphics APIs, that sues game companies -
| they're not going to break ground in the "metaverse." Apple
| Arcade games are good, but that's because they are fighting the
| real antagonist, the real horror show: free to play gaming.
| That is the antagonist of the metaverse, having to be free and
| monetize people via Robux or V-Bucks or whatever it is that
| activates neurons in a 10 year old's brain. It's got nothing to
| do with the technology.
| yellowfish wrote:
| > Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so
|
| > great. The latter most is probably more likely.
|
| Isn't Microsoft already shipping AR headsets to the US Army? if
| anything they are the leaders in the space
|
| anyway, as far as "Metaverse" goes I'd argue we already have
| multiple and the presentation layer is just gradually changing
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Like what exactly? What is Windows missing? They have a way to
| integrate with Android phones, I can share my Galaxy's screen
| with PC and use apps that way even. They are working on AR
| stuff with Hololens and VR. You can do wireless screen sharing,
| sync your Microsoft Edge tabs, do 3D audio in games.
|
| I was all in the Apple ecosystem the past couple years except
| for the Watch. And I'm struggling to think of something that's
| impossible to do with Windows and non-Apple devices besides
| Airdrop and that didn't even work half the time between my
| iPhone and Mac mini. Sidecar is a cool feature to have built
| in, but apps like Duet and Astropad do the same thing...
|
| And I don't think it's a bad thing that MS doesn't Sherlock
| devs either...
| arghnoname wrote:
| Windows is a gigantic market so in general the vast majority
| of things one could do in MacOS are going to end up being
| possible in Windows (assuming Apple even was the first to
| market some feature in the first place).
|
| It's almost unthinkable that some in-software feature that a
| lot of people like can be done in an Apple OS and not a
| Microsoft/Android OS.
|
| The question is not whether it can be done, but how easily it
| can be done. If you have to jailbreak your phone or cobble
| together a collection of different applications to simulate
| the experience, for 80%+ of people that's basically
| equivalent to impossible.
| greggman3 wrote:
| you mean like play all the VR games or too AAA games in
| general?
|
| I own both. From my POV I'm able to do more on Windows even
| if I prefer MacOS for day to day use and iOS for my phone
| (though again can do more on Android)
| salamandersauce wrote:
| You don't have to jailbreak your phone or root it to
| accomplish these things. Stuff like MS "Your Phone" for
| integrating your Android phone and Windows is built into
| some devices like those from Samsung and Windows will even
| walk you through the steps at first boot. Most of this
| stuff is built in and I'm not entirely sure app installs
| are onerous. 80%+ seems a little ridiculous.
| thekyle wrote:
| I'm curious what you use the Galaxy screen share feature in
| Windows for, because I've tried it a few times and always
| found it to be a bad user experience.
| tyingq wrote:
| On the other hand, Microsoft did a fairly decent job capturing
| cloud revenue with o365 and Azure. Apple is leaving most of
| that on the table.
|
| Apple has cloud services, but they are, for the most part,
| intended to help sell more iPhones. Can't argue with the
| Apple's approach since it works well revenue wise though.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so
| great. The latter most is probably more likely.
|
| As a fellow cult member who hasn't drunk enough kool aid, Apple
| products have been losing their luster in recent years.
|
| Apple TV still doesn't have hands free voice control. Fire TV
| has had this for years now. Using your iPhone isn't great
| because it doesn't have the microphone setup to consistently
| hear your voice well. Does Siri and Apple TV finally work
| together with Home Pod like how Google TV uses smart Google
| speakers?
|
| Apple Macbooks have suffered immensely with the near useless
| touch bar and terrible keyboard.
|
| Thinness as a feature seems to override everything else. I
| don't care about having a thin desktop. I want something I can
| open and replace parts in without paying about $10k.
|
| The list goes on. Including how there's still no word on the VR
| / AR unit, while Facebook mops the floor.
|
| The only light in the darkness is the M1 chip.
| edem wrote:
| Can you name a few examples? From what I've seen I can now run
| a Linux within my Windows, that solves my long-standing gaming
| vs developing problem. I can finally run Docker properly on my
| Windows box, and literally everything else that was problematic
| before. I'd pick Windows over MacOS 12 times out of 10.
| flatiron wrote:
| I was a contractor for Apple for 4 years and when I left a
| few months ago my new company let me choose windows or mac
| and I chose windows (mainly spite) but it's really good now.
| I live in the command line and having full blown Ubuntu
| inside windows is great. Docker works as expected. On top of
| that ms office is wayyyyyy better on windows than mac. I
| won't be switching my personal devices off arch anytime soon
| but I think windows is a better development platform than mac
| now (can't believe I just wrote that)
| edem wrote:
| I also couldn't believe it when I realized it a while ago!
| Also...I hear Arch more often lately. Why would someone
| choose Arch over let's say Ubuntu? I'm curious. Never used
| it.
| flatiron wrote:
| Arch is great for desktops and laptops because it's
| rolling and always up to date with upstream. Install it
| once. Update it once a week. Never have to do anything
| else. They also have a user repository where they pretty
| much have everything. There's nothing on my laptop that
| isn't version controlled with their package manager.
| gilbetron wrote:
| Seems like you are just really in deep with Apple. I've used
| Apple professionally for over a decade now, and personally for
| a long time before that (Mac SE was my first). When I'm on my
| personal laptop (windows/linux) I miss absolutely nothing about
| Apple. Well, that's not _quite_ true, I appreciate the
| uniformity, but the uniformity costs too much in terms of a
| walled garden, which is an antithesis to how I think things
| should be.
|
| I think Microsoft does far more interesting research than
| Apple, which largely (but not completely) just buys new ideas
| like Cisco. An effective strategy, granted. I feel MS has a
| feel for where development is going better than Apple, with VS
| Code and the purchase of Github.
|
| "missing something that just hasn't happened in computing in
| any other period of time I can immediately think of" is just
| hyperbole. To me, Apple has always been the company that takes
| other people's ideas and polishes the hell out of them - which
| is amazing, but when I look at my 30+ year tech career, I don't
| get very excited about Apple.
| Terretta wrote:
| Keep hearing about "walled garden" as though it's a _bad_
| thing -- Archibald Craven doesn't want Mary to play?
|
| The word "garden" suggests bespoke curation for appreciation
| and abundance, while "walled" suggests within this boundary
| the experience is purposefully tended and safe.
|
| The Japanese put them in the middle of their homes. The
| British write children's literature set in them. Just look --
| the very idea of a walled garden is _lovely_ :
|
| In film: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5b/52/41/5b524125c48b
| 35bfe0ca...
|
| In life:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Maytham_Hall#Gardens
|
| In my experiences with the non metaphorical variety, most
| anyone who can afford one prefers it.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I think HN and similar value free (as in freedom) and
| openness of a system a lot more. So "walled garden" is a
| bit of a buzzword against those ideals.
|
| > bespoke curation...purposefully tended and safe
|
| These ideas are antithetical to what many on HN seem to
| want. I personally love Apple products, but walled gardens
| are great when you don't bump into the walls all the time,
| which a lot of other people seem to do.
|
| In these cases (wall bumping) I think it's reasonable to
| want alternatives. But there are fanatics and anti-fanatics
| that I think skew any discussion about Apple.
| john_minsk wrote:
| Interesting. So you think they are not even working on making
| this thing faster? Shame. Windows needs some performance boost.
| carl_dr wrote:
| > OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great,
| integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great
| Windows is.
|
| For a few years now there has been some noise that Apple's Pro
| hardware lineup isn't Pro, that macOS is becoming more locked
| down and more iOS-like, that the software is buggier than ever,
| and - until they dropped their App Store split to 15% for small
| developers - that 30% was too high a price.
|
| With WSL, and VScode and GitHub Microsoft are making a (messy,
| so far) play for developers. But as you point out, they didn't
| take it to the nth degree and nail the execution. I wonder if
| they've missed the opportunity now.
|
| I develop for web on macOS, and have all Apple hardware, so
| maybe I'm missing some of the other things Microsoft have done.
|
| Maybe it is the lack of verticality MS have, and the
| integration between devices, something they can never match
| Apple on that means there hasn't been the transition they were
| aiming for. That's why I've not switched.
|
| I'll be very interested to hear what people think about this.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I would say MS nailed VScode remote development. It is
| seriously, seriously good. I used it during WFH and while VS
| didn't work nearly as well as the version of IDEA I was using
| the remote part worked so well I would forget I was working
| remote.
| nextstep wrote:
| >> Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game
| developer is targeting the web.
|
| What?
|
| Even your example (Creative Cloud) has an iOS and iPadOS app.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Sorry, to clarify, anyone targetting Windows users, is
| probably only doing so by proxy, because there's no
| compelling reason to create a first-class Windows desktop
| application over just a web app.
| nextstep wrote:
| Aah I see what you mean
| criddell wrote:
| I think you are right on this and it's a real bummer.
|
| In Ellen Ullman's book _Life in Code_ , she writes about
| Whitfield Diffie's (of Diffie-Hellman fame) speech at the
| 2000 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Toronto.
|
| > "We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb
| terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the
| big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped
| to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then
| networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a
| "thin client," just a browser with very little software
| residing on our personal machines, the code being on
| network servers, which are under the control of
| administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin
| browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net,
| our machines having become dumb terminals again."
|
| I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Smart people
| like Diffie saw this happening more than 20 years ago.
|
| It's really made me rethink web apps that don't need to be
| web apps (including stuff like electron). Like you said,
| Microsoft has thrown in the towel and it seems now Apple is
| really the only platform making a compelling argument for
| native apps and keeping the computer _smart_.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Apple products have every right to be great: after all, Apple
| is the largest company in the world. But they also have a duty
| to extend their services, one that they have sorely neglected
| for the past 15 years. I wouldn't be so angry at Apple if
| things like Airdrop, Handoff and Airplay were all open
| protocols. The only reason Apple _doesn 't_ extend these
| protocols is to have leverage over their competitors. It's not
| like any of the aforementioned technologies are impressive,
| either: they were all preceded by Warpinator, XDG and MPRIS,
| respectively. So Apple embraces these open-source concepts,
| extends them with proprietary interfaces and then extinguishes
| the source... where have I heard this one before?
| jolux wrote:
| EEE is about actual intellectual property and compatibility,
| not just concepts. As far as I know AirDrop, Handoff, and
| AirPlay are proprietary all the way down.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think Stratechery accurately called Microsoft's strategic
| shift: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ around
| the time that Nadella showed up to save them.
|
| I think Apple is better positioned with total vertical
| integration to lay the ground work for the next platform (AR)
| and has been doing so for years now. They'll ship some hardware
| when the time is right.
|
| They've repeated this approach since the iPod successfully,
| never first to market, but laying the ground work before
| shipping the best in class product.
|
| FB (Zuck specifically) recognizes the next platform and Oculus
| is a bet to win it. Their issue is they don't have their own
| phone OS, the Oculus platform they have to build up from
| scratch (which they've done a decent job doing). They also have
| a brand issue (I personally dislike their ad-driven business
| model).
|
| It'll be interesting to see what hardware Apple ships - the UI
| potential for AR is enormous and very cool. I know Zuck sees
| this and is public about it, Apple is acting in such a way that
| they definitely see it - they're just quiet about it until they
| ship.
|
| Looking at tiny glass displays will be a funny anachronism of
| our time.
| timmg wrote:
| > the Oculus platform they have to build up from scratch
|
| It's Android, right?
| chaostheory wrote:
| It's Android.
| [deleted]
| germinalphrase wrote:
| That AR will be visual first is the eventual obvious thing,
| but the soft start is audio based. Siri and transparency mode
| on airpods is the unacknowledged AR present that hasn't been
| fully unveiled.
| slver wrote:
| Well, it's easy to get excited fantasizing about the future,
| but your predictions are about as likely to occur as the
| flying cars we're flying around right now.
|
| In fact none of the major platforms we use today was just
| predicted and constructed. They've evolved and shown their
| benefits naturally and not entirely in expected ways. No one
| actually planned the web to be an application platform. It
| was a university paper exchange program. And the Internet
| before it was a military communication network.
|
| Your predictions about the grand future of AR remind me of
| the excitement around VRML couple of decades ago.
|
| "Looking at stale 2D web pages will be a funny anachronism of
| our time" we thought. Turns out making existing content more
| fancy in 3D wasn't that useful, it actually was more
| cumbersome both to create and to use, so 3D web pages died
| before they even had a true chance to live.
| fossuser wrote:
| You can see the direction things are heading.
|
| The iPhone was a UI step change improvement over previous
| 'smart phones' and the app ecosystem came out of that.
|
| The ground work being set in the OP's post is about getting
| things ready for hardware that can then take advantage of
| it.
|
| It's possible to make predictions based on trends and the
| capability of hardware that becomes possible when it
| previously wasn't:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTdWQAKzESA (Also see:
| Douglas Englebart's the Mother of All Demos:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos).
| Xerox PARC too - computing history is filled with examples
| of people pulling the future down because they recognized
| what was possible.
|
| Just because 3D websites are a bad UI doesn't mean looking
| at little hand-held glass displays is the best one. Likely
| in AR we'd still pull up flat 2D websites a lot of the
| time, you just wouldn't need to pull out a little glass
| display to do it.
|
| Michael Abrash used to have a blog post about the hardest
| AR problems when he was at Valve (he's at Oculus now):
| drawing black, and latency - the latter is mostly a
| hardware constraint - I'm not sure if anyone has solved the
| former (the magic leap sucked).
|
| If the hardware is possible, the UI benefits seem big.
| slver wrote:
| I don't know if you remember Google Glass was a thing,
| and turned out that wearing glasses on your face 16 hours
| a day is far more annoying than those "little hand-held
| glass display" you're trying way too hard to be
| dismissive of.
|
| Google Glass didn't die because it wasn't AR, it died
| because wearing glasses all the time wasn't practical.
|
| Not practical technologically in terms of battery life,
| weight, and not practical in terms of simply that you
| don't need to interact with some digital UI every waking
| moment of your life.
|
| Also while in our imagination we can conjure up virtual
| displays in AR and use them for complex UIs, actually
| waving your hands in empty air, aside from being super
| weird, is also super inconvenient, compared to handheld
| multitouch glass.
|
| You're not making AR predictions based on "current
| trends". You think you are. Instead you're trying to draw
| a straight line from the present reality to your favorite
| sci-fi movies that have shaped your idea of what the
| future is going to be like, while also skipping over all
| the pesky details that can trip up that idea from concept
| to realization.
|
| In other words, same reason why everyone was dead set
| flying cars are coming. And yeah, the generic "no one
| believed in XEROX PARX and no one believed in trains and
| car engines, no one believed in airplanes" argument was
| brought up about flying cars. Turns out that this
| argument is not an automatic win for believing whatever
| you wanna believe is coming.
|
| Just because someone didn't believe in airplanes doesn't
| mean I can't roll my eyes at predictions that faster-
| than-light travel is just around the corner.
| fossuser wrote:
| Google Glass died because the hardware sucked, the UI and
| utility were not there. The general magic device was also
| a failure, but mobile computing is obviously not.
|
| The timing has to be right and the hardware has to be
| possible - if you're too early it won't work.
|
| Flying cars is a bad comparison - they mostly don't exist
| in widespread use because of reasons not related to
| computing. Risk, fuel, control, etc. - even then rich
| people do have helicopters (though that's mostly
| different).
|
| Pointing out failed predictions does not imply that all
| predictions are similarly wrong. In computing - the
| examples I showed (and there are others) are more
| relevant.
| slver wrote:
| > Google Glass died because the hardware sucked, the UI
| and utility were not there.
|
| And nothing has changed about that.
|
| > Pointing out failed predictions does not imply that all
| predictions are similarly wrong. In computing - the
| examples I showed (and there are others) are more
| relevant.
|
| Most predictions are actually wrong. Let's see the
| hardware that "doesn't suck", let's see the UI and
| utility that "are there" and then I'll tell you if we
| have a winner or not.
|
| Right now we have nothing except bold fantasies powered
| by sci-fi movies full of cheap hologram VFX.
| fossuser wrote:
| > And nothing has changed about that.
|
| Yet - it's a prediction based on the capability of future
| hardware that seems plausible.
|
| > Let's see the hardware that "doesn't suck", let's see
| the UI and utility that "are there" and then I'll tell
| you if we have a winner or not.
|
| Yeah sure, it's way easier to make predictions in
| hindsight after other people have already built it. Even
| then - when the iPhone launched in 2007 it was largely
| panned in a similar way to what you're doing now.
|
| Making accurate predictions is hard - I agree with that.
| If you dismiss everything you'll be right a lot of the
| time, but you'll also miss every big and interesting
| change until someone else builds it.
| shirhan wrote:
| Comparing the launch of the iPhone with the "launch" of a
| prediction blog post void of any idea how said AR device
| is even going to work is honestly absurd.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have
| Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows.
| And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is
| going to be so much more. And they already are so much more.
|
| And what is wrong with this? A stable, long-lasting platform is
| a beautiful thing.
|
| Maybe I'm an old fart (at 36...) but I don't really want "so
| much more". I want something that I can count on and bank on
| _now_ , and that will be there for me for as far into the
| future as possible. None of this lofty futuretech seems to
| promise that, at least without bleeding me dry in pointlessly
| recurring interactions like subscription fees.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game
| developer is targeting the web.
|
| All pro or semi-pro creative applications target native.
|
| live streaming / video editing / animation / DAW / image
| editing
|
| There are some toys for parts of these workflows in the
| webspace, but no serious tools for people who do this stuff
| seriously.
| mioasndo wrote:
| > Something that's dawned on me for the last few years is that
| Microsoft basically settled on the idea that the idea of the
| modern operating system is effectively done, which I suppose is
| true, but then they stopped creating technologies to build on
| top of Windows all together.
|
| What happened was open source software, linux dominating the
| server side, and android dominating mobile (iOS as well, to a
| lesser extent).
|
| > Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game
| developer is targeting the web.
|
| Except for nearly all backend development... which mostly
| targets linux first.
|
| > OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great,
| integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great
| Windows is. But they don't. I have mixed feelings about this,
| because when Apple does it, they basically put people out of
| business.
|
| For example? Apple software is average, and Microsoft has a
| long history of 'putting people out of business' (not in a good
| way).
|
| > But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have
| Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows.
| And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is
| going to be so much more. And they already are so much more.
|
| You forgot... android and linux. How does apple 'already have
| so much more'?
|
| > For those who haven't experienced it yet, or can't afford
| Apple products, they're missing something that just hasn't
| happened in computing in any other period of time I can
| immediately think of.
|
| That just sounds like an opinion of the average non-tech user
| who lives inside an apple bubble and likes icon shapes and
| default keybindings. You're not saying anything specific, just
| poetry about apple being 'first-class' and 'something that just
| hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time' (???)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Can someone please define 'metaverse' in the context of...
| whatever this article is about?
|
| Like jfc people, 'End users will experience the metaverse through
| the default device delivered experience.' sounds like the most
| doublespeakiest doublespeak ever to have been written.
|
| I love tech and this lofty shit makes me want to gouge my eyes
| out. Speak plainly and simply, folks.
| slver wrote:
| Basically bunch of wanking about futuristic AR sci-fi
| technology that the author has decided to accept as proven to
| be coming, but actually isn't.
|
| See flying cars 20 years ago.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I assume it's a reference, at least in part, to the virtual
| reality world in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
| OedipusRex wrote:
| Which is where this falls apart. In the book the Metaverse is
| basically a completely novel location in "VR".
|
| If we're pursuing a Metaverse, VR Chat is closer to a
| Metaverse than Apple.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > Can someone please define 'metaverse' in the context of...
| whatever this article is about?
|
| Personally, I dislike the term and I believe that it causes
| people to lose credibility when they use it. However, I _can_
| define it to some extent.
|
| Consider the term 'universe' in the context of 'a particular
| sphere of activity, interest, or experience'. For example, the
| 'Harry Potter universe'.
|
| The 'metaverse' is simply such a 'universe' that you can't
| really opt out of, because it's a layer on top of, rather than
| distinct from, the regular old world. This is why AR is often
| considered to be such an intrinsic aspect of it.
|
| Now, you might say that 'the internet' is just such a
| metaverse, but it isn't because it doesn't benefit the people
| who peddle the buzzword.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I guess I don't get what's so meta about it. We're not
| talking about a universe that describes universes.
|
| Metaphysics = the physics of physics
|
| Metascience = studying science itself with science
|
| Metaphilosophy = Philosophy about philosophy itself
|
| Metadata = data describing data
|
| Gaming 'meta' = the game of how to best play the game
|
| 'Meta' is one of those ultra-abstract terms that obfuscates
| the meaning of whatever word it is attached to unless the
| listener gives or has given the word a fair amount of
| thought. Ah, then maybe that is why it is being used here.
| [deleted]
| Grustaf wrote:
| Why wouldn't you be able to opt out of some AR world?
|
| I thought metaverse just meant Second Life 2.0.
| sombremesa wrote:
| You're right, that wasn't the best choice of words. I just
| meant that it would be difficult to ignore or be
| uninfluenced by it, at least if there were able to exist
| "THE metaverse" rather than several fragmented attempts.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The Metaverse in this context is a continuously updated digital
| copy of the real world, where the "environment" is generated
| passively by users.
|
| Imagine a city park where a handful of people have glasses with
| cameras on them that are continuously sending a geo-located
| feed of the images to a map server which processes it into a 3D
| reconstruction. You could watch in real time as the city park
| is reconstructed and updated in real time 3D, add in virtual
| content, make content "layers" for different digital assets,
| track interactions etc...
|
| It's a globally crowdsourced, consistently updated real time
| digital twin of the world.
| grawprog wrote:
| I could be wrong, but sifting through that utterly terrible
| corporate buzzword filled whatever the hell that was...
|
| I think it's what Apple's calling their new Augmented Reality
| platform...I think...or what the author is calling what could
| be Apple's potential AR platform...maybe?
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Ads that follow you around in VR. There will be no escape.
|
| Also, Apple will try to make useful things appear in your VR
| goggles - like showing you how to get home on a map, when in
| fact you're planning to go out for a drink, or go grocery
| shopping, or anything but.
|
| This is a terrible article, but the idea is - if not sound, at
| least potentially interesting.
|
| It's basically enhanced location-aware cognition, taking input
| from _everything_ around you - sound, video, tactile input, GPS
| location, event history, AI-enhanced memory - and combining it
| in real time to produce (checks notes...) "a new class of
| life-enhancing interactions."
|
| The problem? It needs a lot of moving parts working together
| seamlessly with better-than-human performance and reliability.
|
| Otherwise it will be a kludgy distracting nightmare of failed
| meta-everything - like the most annoying and useless intern
| anyone has ever had, only everywhere.
| Accujack wrote:
| Except it won't go on a coffee run.
| eecc wrote:
| > Otherwise it will be a kludgy distracting nightmare of
| failed meta-everything - like the most annoying and useless
| intern anyone has ever had, only everywhere.
|
| Clippy?
| dole wrote:
| Can I just get Alexa on a drone that perpetually follows me
| around and broadcasts (or projects visually) occasional
| targeted advertising? /s
| donpdonp wrote:
| HYPER-REALITY from 2016 is a very well done imagining of that
| AR advertising dystopia.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Great, then I look forward to another useless technobauble
| being hamfistedly shoved down my throat.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Completely agree. The words "metaverse substrate" just set my
| BS meter to a thousand, so I didn't even bother reading the
| article at first. Then I did read (most of it), and still my BS
| meter was at a thousand.
|
| If you can't explain what you mean in simple, easy to
| understand language, and you're not talking about quantum
| physics, you're just bullshitting. Should be required reading:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's right there in the first paragraph:
|
| "I've been less sure they understood the full scope needed to
| build a compelling AR ecosystem - a metaverse."
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I saw that, and the definition still says nothing.
|
| Ok, so a metaverse is somehow the realization of the "full
| scope" needed for a compelling AR ecosystem? And what exactly
| does that mean, and how does that define this particular
| usage of the (heavily overloaded) term 'metaverse'?
|
| Meta meaning 'about', so a universe about a universe?
|
| edit/ugh: googling the term says 'a virtual-reality space in
| which users can interact with a computer-generated
| environment and other users.'
|
| Like wtf does that have to do with the meta root word here?
|
| There is far too much abstraction in this vocabulary defining
| a thing that is very real.
| lallysingh wrote:
| It's the universe (the regular meatspace one) augmented
| with metadata, traditionally named such in AR/VR circles.
| Metadata like names, statistics, directions, etc. Such as a
| HUD you'd see in first-person video games.
|
| Another use of the term (not here) would be a way to jump
| between VR systems, but they never generalized well enough
| to make that a significant thing. Right now Steam would
| count
| blowski wrote:
| To understand the metaverse first you need to understand
| the metaverse. That's what I take from these comments and
| the article.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| mind_blown.gif /s
| beeandapenguin wrote:
| In general, the term 'metaverse' is commonly used in the AR/VR
| space to describe virtual worlds. Today, in (virtual) reality
| it feels somewhat analogous to an "immersive operating system".
| It's the entry point for doing _other_ things on a VR system.
|
| Some examples: Roblox, Facebook Horizon, VRChat, NEOS
| canadianfella wrote:
| > most doublespeakiest doublespeak
|
| > Speak plainly and simply, folk
|
| Ironic
| memco wrote:
| I was also confused and clicked just to try to figure out what
| the headline meant. In the very beginning of the article
| there's this line:
|
| > I've been less sure they understood the full scope needed to
| build a compelling AR ecosystem - a metaverse.
|
| Seems this is about augmented reality being integrated into the
| regular experience of a significant population.
| deeviant wrote:
| Of course, I think I can help.
|
| What is trying to be communicated here is psychographic content
| will be delivered via standard device substrates existing in
| well aligned usage patterns that will no doubt delight the end-
| user with value. Metaverse here simply means they will deliver
| an experience that is parallel to user expectation yet
| orthogonal to the digital representation of the physical model
| of the prevailing social zeitgeist.
|
| Or maybe someone just read Ready Player One recently, and is
| just thinking: We're going to build the Oasis but nobody could
| possibility understand what that is, I'll have to break it down
| into easy-to-misunderstand corpobabble.
| bjornjajayaja wrote:
| Like a hipster wearing a monocle fashioned with metaverse-
| substrate. The new age user interface is like cup of coffee
| and a pipe with eco-friendly, translucent tobacco.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I appreciate the irony of your second paragraph
| hprotagonist wrote:
| > We're going to build the Oasis and
|
| The Black Sun was there first.
|
| Can i interest you in a loose collection of extremely janky
| perl scripts? The bar's owner hates it but, who cares? If he
| kicks us out we can just race bikes for a while until the
| fuss blows over.
| jsemrau wrote:
| You rmemeber Blaxxun from the '90s ? Man, that was a
| Metaverse.
| [deleted]
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Any idea where a guy can score The Librarian these days?
| Wikipedia is cool and all, but it's lacking a certain...
| finesse.
|
| On a more serious note, I think these are different
| metaverses. Ours is pretty much locked in VR as far as I
| can tell, and Apple is building an overlay on zeroth-order
| reality, aka AR. Arguably harder and more powerful if done
| properly. Which I'm sure it won't be.
|
| :P
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > Arguably harder and more powerful if done properly.
| Which I'm sure it won't be.
|
| My response is kind of stuck between "that's overly
| cynical, isn't it" and "statistically speaking, that's
| pretty likely".
|
| (I was actually working at an early AR project at Nokia a
| bit over a decade ago, at the time called Point & Find,
| later called CityLens. It gave me a feeling that good AR
| may be one of those things that remains "just a couple
| years away" for decades.)
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Define "good AR"? Pokemon Go is nearing its 5th birthday.
| A VRchat overlay you can use on the street? If you get
| the Epson AR glasses, combine it with the Quest 2's
| Snapdragon XR2, and mess around in Unity for a bit, that
| could be done by the end of the year. Create an app
| that's killer enough to make up for the
| bulkiness/inconvenience/price of a version 1 streetwear
| AR headset and we'll be getting somewhere.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| That's fair -- with the caveat that your last sentence is
| asking for a lot. :) I think Pokemon Go did a great job
| of being an AR game, although I couldn't help but notice
| that literally everyone I knew playing it turned off the
| camera functionality after a few weeks and gave up on the
| AR overlay part.
|
| I don't know what the "killer app" for AR is really going
| to be. CityLens and comparable apps like Yelp Monocle on
| smartphones clearly haven't cut it. (Show of hands: how
| many people remembered Yelp _had_ an augmented reality
| mode? I don 't think it's there anymore.) I think the big
| challenge now is thinking of applications that _aren 't_
| games where using goggles/glasses give you more than
| incremental improvements over putting the UI on your
| wrist or in your ear(s).
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| That's where my mind immediately goes when I hear
| 'metaverse' too
| amelius wrote:
| Does this have something to do with the reality distortion
| field?
| ant6n wrote:
| >> Speak plainly and simply, folks.
|
| > Of course, I think I can help. (...)[jibberish]
|
| Lol, well done!
| abricot wrote:
| Listen to him. He speaks jive.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| This very light grey text on white background = almost
| unreadable. (Firefox 89 on linux)
|
| https://contrastrebellion.com/
| piinbinary wrote:
| Interestingly, the background is black for me in Chrome, and
| white in Firefox (both under macOS)
| ezekg wrote:
| Almost seems like Chrome has some default styles for dark
| mode, such as a black background on <body>.
|
| Edit: TIL about the color-scheme (draft) CSS property. FF
| doesn't support it.
| 00jimbo wrote:
| similarly, it renders light on black/dark grey for me in
| safari.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Reader mode to the rescue! It is almost the default way I
| consume most blogs and news sites, reading experience is so
| much better!
| gtirloni wrote:
| Same here. I use it on every other website and it's just
| great.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Something is screwy with the dark-mode CSS.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Yep, it's fine unless you use a dark mode, in which case it
| looks like this:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/7XwxrSb.png
|
| If you're not using dark mode, it's #EBEBEB on #121212, which
| has plenty of contrast:
|
| https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23EBEBEB-on-%23121212
|
| If you're using dark mode, it doesn't simply do nothing,
| which would be the reasonable approach with those colors, it
| gives you that light gray text on #FFFFFF pure white
| background. It's basically the opposite of dark mode.
| grork wrote:
| Apologies for this -- I apparently failed to test on dark mode
| in Firefox. I fixed it up just now
| (https://github.com/grork/personal-
| blog/commit/b9df1e924ef296...), and should be much more
| readable.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Much better, thanks!
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Please don 't complain about website formatting, back-
| button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to
| be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then
| friendly feedback might be helpful._" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| >> SwiftUI is getting more capable with every release, and
| appears to be the long-term UI platform for apple. It also isn't
| just about 'below the glass' experiences.
|
| SwiftUI 2 is so much better. I am taking a 50 hour course, and
| spent a few hours hacking this morning. So much better than when
| I tried it 14 months ago.
|
| Spacial Audio works really well. They are probably using
| something called Head Related Transfer Functions, which I used at
| my company's VR lab in the mid-1990s.
|
| The example AR Swift Playgrounds examples are also pretty cool.
|
| I agree with the general premise of the article!
| th3h4mm3r wrote:
| Marketing buzzwords.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| The curious thing about the past, present and future of AR... if
| there was low hanging fruit (in terms of irresistible
| applications) that people must absolutely have, love at first
| "sight" experiences, wouldn't it have happened already? with
| whatever crude software and hardware? Not as a gimmick but as
| persistent interest and investment[0].
|
| People got busy with computers when computers were the size of
| houses. They carried mobile phones when phones were the size of
| suitcases. Is the proto-AR revolution happening somewhere out
| there without anybody noticing?
|
| Its possible that there is no low hanging AR fruit. That somebody
| has to do the difficult job of climbing up the AR tree so to
| speak (refine the technology until it feels like magic).
|
| It just seems that this would be an exception in how things
| played out so far in the "digital transformation" journey. Its
| the nature of the human brain to fill-in the gaps and overlook
| the rough edges when it really has an incentive to do so.
|
| [0] investment in the sense of personal time by users, creators,
| business people etc to really learn and use the technology to
| scratch whatever itch they found it is scratching...
| nottorp wrote:
| Technobabble aside, I'm betting the battery life on the Apple
| Glasses will be as bad as on the Apple Watch or worse.
|
| And people with prescription glasses won't be able to afford the
| Apple Prescription(tm) anyway.
| titanomachy wrote:
| > Device-local speech recognition is fundamental to AR -- we
| can't tap our feet & twiddle our thumbs while we wait for a
| round-trip to the cloud to conclude how to handle "Group these
| five items, and remember them for next week when I'm at the
| office"
|
| I'm not convinced that this is true. Round-trip latency has
| gotten a lot lower, especially if you take edge computing into
| account. 20-30ms round-trip is not unusual. If your mic feed is
| being streamed in real-time, and the program is able to achieve a
| high-confidence prediction at (or before) the moment you finish
| speaking, I think it should be possible to deliver an experience
| that feels instantaneous, at least for users with cutting-edge
| connectivity. For visual interactions, 100ms feels instantaneous;
| I bet tolerance for spoken interactions is even higher.
| dangus wrote:
| Some of the ideas in the article make a lot of sense in the
| context of AR, specifically the parts about on-device Siri and
| Spatial Audio.
|
| However...I'm sorry, the article as a whole just leaves me with
| the taste of Apple butt-licking.
|
| So many of these parts of this "metaverse" are typical recurring
| revenue and ecosystem lock-in encouragements.
|
| Find My: Let's sell some high profit margin trackers and
| keychains.
|
| SharePlay: let's sell more TV+ subscriptions.
|
| Universal Control: platform lock-in: make you question using a
| Windows desktop instead of an iMac if you already own an iPad.
|
| Spatial Audio: sell more headphones
|
| Notes features: sell more News+ subscriptions, more vendor lock-
| in.
|
| ShazamKit: data mine advertising info. Yes, Apple has ad
| platforms, and with each passing day their business model creeps
| closer and closer to Google's (e.g., When they inevitably drop
| Yelp in favor of their own review system, or if they launch their
| own search engine)
|
| (Apple can still mine data and use it to sell you things and
| understand what you're likely to buy even if they "respect" your
| privacy and leave all the data on-device. They can still get you
| to click an affiliate link or buy an app without leaving the
| realm of on-device ML.
|
| And remember that Apple's marketing is not the same as their
| documented privacy policy.
| ericmay wrote:
| Heh, I'd say at least Apple is differentiating...
|
| Google:
|
| GMail -> Let's sell some ads
|
| Android -> Let's sell some ads
|
| Android Auto -> How can we put ads in cars?
|
| YouTube -> How can we show people more video ads?
|
| Search -> Let's sell some ads.
|
| Google Music -> Did this sell enough ads? If not lets rebrand
| it and try to sell more ads.
|
| etc.
|
| Anyway, not a slight against Google, but you can do this with
| any large company probably. I'm not sure how meaningful it is.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Oh please describe all of these Apple ad platforms.
| dangus wrote:
| Sure!
|
| The App Store has sponsored apps.
|
| Apple News has ads in the app, before you click on any
| articles.
|
| Apple Music/iTunes Store/Books has promoted
| artists/albums/movies/TV. It's unclear whether any of these
| are paid promotions by the content producer but they're in a
| banner so I have to assume Apple gets something out of it.
|
| Apple Podcasts also has a featured section, likely paid ads.
|
| And, as I mentioned, it's extremely likely that Apple is
| working on a replacement for Yelp for Apple Maps, which will
| potentially be a big source of revenue.
|
| And of course, there are ads for Apple's own in-house TV+
| content. Not an ad network, but if they know what you like
| they can better promote their TV shows. By default the TV app
| sends random push notifications.
|
| The more Apple gets into content the more knowing your
| personality and interests is important to their business
| model.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This is the most biased take on useful platform differentiating
| features I've ever seen.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Meh, I think that's not out of line with how other vendors
| (e.g. Google) are treated here right now.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Indeed, it's totally nuts to suggest that the world's most
| capitalized company might be focused on revenue growth
| instead of the "metaverse substrate".
| lazyfuture wrote:
| Are you out of your ducking mind?
|
| Sent from my iPhone
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| The ramp up in the use of the term 'meta' for everything over the
| past few months makes me cringe.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Well, 'metaverse', here, comes from 1992's _Snow Crash_ and has
| been in use for nearly 30 years. Not really just the past few
| months.
| Animats wrote:
| If this is correct, Apple's vision is that in the future, all
| their customers will be glassholes. They could be right. I
| never expected people would walk around wearing iDweebs, those
| silly headphones.
| meh99 wrote:
| Apple makes the idea of Plan9 viable using wireless technology
| and smart protocols.
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