[HN Gopher] Apple delays its mixed reality headset by two months...
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Apple delays its mixed reality headset by two months, to debut at
WWDC this June
Author : astlouis44
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-02-15 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I'm skeptical about this timeline and this tech, but hear me
| out... a lot of folks in this thread and in past threads about
| this subject have viewed this through a consumer lens. But why
| wouldn't Apple be looking into commercial uses with deep pocket
| buyers instead? They've expressed an interest in health care in
| the past, for example. Truckers who need info and who don't
| exactly have CarPlay in their rigs - this becomes a heads-up
| display of road / weather / gas info.
|
| Even in the consumer world - my game-playing son already has a
| headset with a microphone attached while he's on his PS4. The VR
| headsets with the PS4 (or xbox, or whatever...) have been clunky
| in the past and had limited games, but it doesn't negate that
| there are already consumers being conditioned to use headsets
| here that could be extended in some way.
|
| Finally - look at all the people wandering around with AirPods in
| their ears... is it really that hard to imagine some extension to
| this in glasses form or some other lightweight, non-intrusive
| form where the iPhone has the smarts and the headset is just
| another augmentation like the Watch?
| qball wrote:
| >But why wouldn't Apple be looking into commercial uses with
| deep pocket buyers instead?
|
| Because Apple _has never_ makes things with business-to-
| business intent. Sure, there 's iOS MDM, and what little passes
| for networking in macOS in general (and briefly, the Xserve),
| but that's the full extent to which they're made for business
| use.
|
| It's all only ever been higher-end consumer-level stuff, and
| the fact that some businesses happen to use their gear is more
| a happy accident than anything Apple themselves explicitly
| planned for- they didn't have a good rackmounting solution for
| years after you'd find businesses hacking together server room
| mounts for the circular computers.
|
| So no, I don't think they'll be explicitly courting businesses-
| sure, they could almost certainly make a good run at it
| (especially with the technological edge they enjoy now, but
| will likely lose to Nuvia-Qualcomm in the coming years), but
| that's just not how they've worked for their entire existence
| as a company.
| riffraff wrote:
| Wasn't there a large calibrated monitor aimed at visual
| production companies?
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Aside from the fact that Apple doesn't have an enterprise sales
| organization, at this point in time the market for profession
| AR glasses is probably around 1% of what Apple needs for a
| product to be viable.
| sensitivefrost wrote:
| If you've ever tried to manage Apple products on an enterprise
| level, you'll find it hard to believe they give a shit about
| enterprise.
| guhidalg wrote:
| And it's good for them they don't. I can imagine few things
| more potent at stifling innovation than corporate IT.
| mumumu wrote:
| I don't think Apple has interest in small markets. They are
| really good at making stuff at huge volumes.
| prawn wrote:
| How skeptical though? This is a company with an extreme
| attention to detail, who've demonstrated expertise in compact,
| high quality, powerful devices. And they're bringing a product
| to market some time after Meta already has the (from all
| accounts very decent) Quest 2. I think they've got as good a
| chance as anyone.
|
| But I don't think truckers and medical enterprise are really
| the target market. Those people might find a use for this
| product, but Apple focus their high-end products and
| advertising on trend leaders, media professionals, creative
| prosumers/aspirants.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Meta's current gen and upcoming stuff out of their R&D lab is
| pretty impressive, but much like what Apple is rumored to be
| putting into their headset, it is SO expensive that they're
| limited to large corporations/governments with deep pockets who
| are also willing to develop a use-case for the technology.
|
| I guess my point is: Yes, this stuff is better than Microsoft's
| Hololens. However, it is also a product targeting the same niche
| market, and the Hololens hasn't really been successful. Turns out
| most organizations don't want to buy expensive headsets to then
| develop most of the key software themselves when any other
| alternative exists.
|
| A lot of people have faith that anything Apple will release will
| just be successful by the virtue of the Apple-y-ness of it. But
| realistically how big do you think the market for a $2-3K headset
| is? Are you going to buy one? I'm certainly not.
|
| The Quest 2 ($400) is maybe near the current best case scenario
| in terms of cost-to-user experience ratio. Anything better has
| huge diminishing returns, and we'll likely be waiting a few years
| minimum until technology has advanced enough to be affordable. We
| know, today, what it will look like since everyone's R&D lab has
| produced a few demos of it, but we also know, today, what it
| would cost to put into your hands.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Are you going to buy one? I'm certainly not.
|
| Probably not. And I say that while having the first commercial
| Oculus Rift, a HTC Vive and a Quest 2.
|
| However, that's not important. When Apple does something,
| people pay attention. If Apple invests in and releases a
| product, you know other companies will follow. Companies will
| be scared and won't want to miss the boat. Samsung will release
| a design that will be cheaper and look mostly the same. Other
| manufacturers will try to come up with their own spin on
| things. All of a sudden, you have a battleground.
|
| Think about this: Meta is hemorrhaging cash. They would be
| widly profitable but are in the red because of VR investments.
| Apple has plenty of cash (although stock has taken a beating
| with the rest of the market) and is also dedicating tons of
| R&D. What are they seeing that we are not seeing?
|
| This is the exact sort of thinking that got the Soviet shuttle
| (the Buran). "The Americans wouldn't be crazy enough to build a
| spaceship as big as the shuttle for no reason, would they? They
| must have a pretty good reason we are not seeing, so let's
| build our own and figure out later." It does not have to be
| true. Maybe Meta and Apple are way off the mark and high on
| fumes from Milpitas. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
|
| If the worst problem we can think of about this tech is how
| much it costs, that won't be a problem for much longer. It
| never is. It may take some time, but it will happen. We forget
| how much precision is required to make a CPU, an old fashioned
| hard drive, or a modern display. They all cost millions of
| dollars not that long ago and had to drop by _several orders of
| magnitude_. A VR headset costing 3k has to drop to maybe a
| third of its price to reach cellphone prices. If you drop by
| one order of magnitude you get to Quest's levels (before the
| price hike).
|
| We need killer apps and comfortable headsets that are accepted
| by society. That's it. They look dorky today, but so did
| bluetooth phones until Apple released theirs. Now, they are
| fashionable.
| jhaenchen wrote:
| You'd pay that for a laptop. And I think that's part of this,
| these companies really believe they're looking at the next
| consumer device on the scale of the iPhone if they can just get
| the transportability and input interfaces figured out. The
| quest 2 is so very close, it's just a tad too heavy, a tad too
| low quality display, and with a mobile operating system.
|
| Just replacing the custom android OS on that thing with a fully
| fledged iOS like interface would go a very long way IMO.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I largely agree with what you've written. I love my Quest 2
| even though I own other headsets, but I feel that the Quest Pro
| is largely a failure. How you market a headset with a PPD of
| only 22 as a headset for work? 35 PPD is the minimum if you
| want to read text. The only headset capable of that is the
| $1999 Varjo Aero. What's even more puzzling is that there's
| currently no good way of extending the Quest Pro's battery life
|
| Edit: The pro new controllers are nice, but I have no clue how
| they will enhance work when your hands will likely be in front
| of you compared to either gaming or fitness. They should have
| kept the focus on the headset itself and saved the controllers
| for the Quest 3 release.
|
| Whether Meta and the other manufacturers will admit it or not,
| they need Apple to make VR & AR acceptable to the masses and
| workplaces. Despite the name change, meta still cannot escape
| its past yet. The Quest 2 is a revolutionary consumer device
| that is largely ignored because of meta's poor public image
| idaseing wrote:
| The selling point will be that it can put another person in the
| same room with you. That's a massive leap in communication, on
| par with the introduction of mobile phones. Originally mobile
| phones cost thousands of dollars and had a limited market.
| Everyone wanted them but couldn't afford them till the price
| came down over time. It'll be the same way with VR headsets
| that are capable of doing teleportation like the Apple headset
| is rumored to be able to do.
|
| From Mark Gurman: "The headset's FaceTime software will
| realistically render a user's face and full body in virtual
| reality. Those avatars will allow two people -- each with an
| Apple headset -- to communicate and feel like they're in the
| same room."
| phyrex wrote:
| The quest pro is more tech preview and dev platform than actual
| consumer product. Meta is planning to release their quest 3
| this year, which is supposed to be a lot cheaper
| Maursault wrote:
| > A lot of people have faith that anything Apple will release
| will just be successful by the virtue of the Apple-y-ness of
| it.
|
| Apple is rational. They won't sell this with marketing, they'll
| try to grow a developer community, just like with Mac, iPhone,
| iPad. My thing is, no matter what it is, it's a solution
| without a problem. I honestly can't believe they'll actually
| release it, and if they do, I won't believe it will be
| successful until it is. Just because Apple is Apple doesn't
| mean they can do the impossible. Usually Apple will take what
| is there and make it better. But with this, there's really
| nothing there to speak of, just a very small amount of
| splintered vociferous supporters of VR, and even less with AR.
| Watch, they'll downvote my comment soon enough. Apple needs to
| sell this to a lot of people that wouldn't think they needed or
| wanted it. But this isn't an iPod, so I just don't get how it
| can possibly be made essential or even sexy. Trying to make
| VR/AR a successful seller is like trying to fight a land war in
| Russia in winter.
| zr0k wrote:
| > My thing is, no matter what it is, it's a solution without
| a problem.
|
| I don't know what this Apple headset is, but a theoretical
| headset can solve the problem of phones. In 15 years
| cellphones will be replaced by a wearable closer to a Ran-Ban
| Story than a Oculus Rift. The market can support a cellphone
| replacement wearable at a cost equal to and possibly more
| expensive than flagship cellphones ($1400+).
|
| The Problem of Cellphones:
|
| 1. Has to be carried around. Glasses are much more natural,
| with a longer history in our culture.
|
| 2. Draws the gaze/attention away. Maybe we've gotten use to
| this, but its actually a huge problem.
|
| 3. High friction of notifications. Was that buzz in my pocket
| important? I have to spend ten seconds finding out.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Except people found don't like wearing glasses all the
| time. Source: I wear contacts
| dmitriid wrote:
| First you have to figure out how to break laws of physics
| it seems: battery, cpu, gpu, ram all need to go somewhere
| valcron1000 wrote:
| Same issue when the first smartphones were developed: how
| do you fit a camera, phone, PC, GPS, etc. into a single
| device. It's just a matter of time until it gets figured
| out
| dmitriid wrote:
| It wasn't as big of an issue. And there's a limit on how
| small you can go, especially with batteries.
|
| It's not "just a matter of time".
| outworlder wrote:
| > It wasn't as big of an issue
|
| Clearly you weren't around when cellphones came out. They
| were seen as borderline miraculous devices, even if they
| were huge. The first phone weighted 4 and a half pounds!
| Even at that size, people didn't believe it was possible.
| Remember, that pre-dates personal computers. No laptops
| existed.
|
| It _was_ a big deal and required newer technology and
| even advances in mathematics (for the cellphone signal
| processing).
|
| We can make them tiny now. So tiny, in fact, that you can
| have tiny spy devices which are nonetheless able to talk
| to cell towers.
|
| Sure, we can only make battery so small until they can't
| store much in terms of useful energy. But that also
| depends on how much power the devices require. An Apple
| Watch was an impossibility until not too long ago. Not
| just because of battery size, but also because of power
| draw (specially from screens). Have you seen how small an
| Apple Watch battery is? And that powers quite a bit of
| compute (an Apple Watch equals to about 2 Cray
| supercomputers from 1985, around 3 GigaFLOPS).
|
| It is a matter of time.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > But this isn't an iPod, so I just don't get how it can
| possibly be made essential or even sexy.
|
| I mean, people said that about the iPod. Slashdot, famously:
| "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
| ghaff wrote:
| Or Watch.
|
| "Younger people don't wear watches any longer."
|
| That said, genuinely useful AR in a headset seems
| challenging as a consumer device.
| fragmede wrote:
| * * *
| crooked-v wrote:
| > My thing is, no matter what it is, it's a solution without
| a problem.
|
| Gorilla Tag has hit 760,000 daily players and $26 million in
| free-to-play buy-a-hat revenue in December [1], and that's
| with the many, many issues that come with playing a
| physically active game while wearing a current-gen VR
| headset. Anything Apple comes out with now will be too
| expensive for that market, but there's definitely a market
| there, and I think it's more limited by the physical weight
| and display quality of the headsets than by anything else.
|
| [1]: https://mpost.io/vr-game-gorilla-tag-reached-26-million-
| in-s...
| latchkey wrote:
| Woah, first time I've heard of Gorilla Tag... hilarious
| that they did away with the "pants issue" by just deleting
| everything below the waist.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8IDJq0tvsw
| greedo wrote:
| I think that AR will be much more impactful than VR, but I
| also think it's further away.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| > solution without a problem
|
| If it had been out three years ago, we'd have 10M blissful
| zoom schoolers by now.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I'm probably not part of the target audience of this - I don't
| enjoy VR and I honestly feel like proper XR is still years beyond
| our reach.
|
| But I will say that, as someone who travels quite a bit, I would
| love to just have some nice, high resolution glasses, that would
| emulate my monitor setup back home with minimal drawbacks. That
| alone would make me quite happy.
|
| The Apple headset would be probably overkill for this, I know.
| Regardless, it surprises me that there are very few vendors
| aiming at delivering such a straightforward feature.
| deergomoo wrote:
| This is about the only XR use case I'm remotely interested in,
| but I think it would require infeasibly high res displays.
|
| Using my own unremarkable setup as an example, 2560x1440 is
| about as low as you'd want to go for a single 27" screen, for a
| comfortable level of sharpness and amount of content on-screen.
| If that's taking up say 40% of your FOV, that's 6400x3600 per
| eye (for the simplified example of a 16:9 display overlaid
| across your entire FOV). That feels a ways off still,
| especially for a portable device.
|
| I know some of Meta's offerings (current? Future? I've been bad
| at keeping up with this stuff due to general apathy) are
| offering a virtual desktop, I wonder how readable/useable it
| is. Maybe I'm wrong about this stuff.
| modeless wrote:
| I think the Bigscreen Beyond is the best you'll get for that
| application this year: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/
|
| Probably not yet high resolution enough for it to make sense,
| but higher than most alternatives, and the comfort and
| portability should be good.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Regardless, it surprises me that there are very few vendors
| aiming at delivering such a straightforward feature.
|
| A "straightforward" feature that requires packing cpu, gpu,
| ram, battery and screen into form factor of glasses.
| robbyking wrote:
| I really like the idea of using XR for sports training, like in
| snowboarding goggles or cycling classes. Almost all road
| cyclists use some sort of stem mounted computer for GPS and/or
| fitness tracking, and it would be amazing if someone made a
| descrete HUD that allowed you access that info without having
| to look down while you're riding.
| velp wrote:
| Or for maps/vehicle information for motorcycles. Blind spot
| monitoring? Overlaid turn-by-turn directions? Etc
| chaostheory wrote:
| There are multiple SAAS startups offering this feature but
| affordable hardware isn't there yet going this route. A Varjo
| Aero is capable, but it's $2000 for just the headset and it
| needs a PC that likely runs $4000 and up. For other headsets,
| text just isn't readable.
|
| The closest product so far is from NReal, founded by a former
| Magic Leap engineer.
| koolala wrote:
| I hope they advance the state of the art for software in XR. The
| BS-Beyond has proven how good Hardware can be. Now we just need
| Apple Spatial Software to show how good Software can be.
| [deleted]
| verdverm wrote:
| Microsoft MRTK is a great display of the possibilities. Super
| disappointing they nuked that team recently...
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity
|
| Though it would be nice if everyone could get on an open
| standard, like https://www.khronos.org/openxr/
|
| The big question I have about the future of AR/VR/XR is how do
| we have shared experiences across devices without putting
| significant compatibility code on the developers?
| astlouis44 wrote:
| WebXR is the ultimate open standard we need everyone getting
| on board with, Apple included.
| FormFollowsFunc wrote:
| Hopefully they have been working away on RealityKit. The
| current version seems to be far from complete.
| valcron1000 wrote:
| I'm supper bullish on Apple on this one. If a company can figure
| out how to properly do AR is Apple. We might be approaching the
| next revolution on personal computing after the iPhone.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| If Apple can pull of AR then we won't even need iPhones
| anymore, and that is absolutely wild.
| Femtiono wrote:
| I'm super curious what the target audience will be.
|
| I really not seeing the writing for a mixed reality headset on
| the wall at all.
| chaostheory wrote:
| According to various reports, Apple views this as the successor
| to the smart phone. Unlike everyone else, they are focusing
| more on everything other than games.
|
| This also explains why Meta is still committed to plow billions
| into XR to secure their own viable hardware platform.
| sawert wrote:
| Ya, you nailed it. If AR is possible to build someone will
| build it and if they do it will (in due time) completely
| supersede the iPhone and destroy Apple's revenue. They
| literally cannot afford _not_ to compete in this market.
| Facebook's aggressive move here makes sense considering all
| of the scar tissue they have from not controlling their own
| destiny on mobile.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's gonna be _huge_ when someone nails it. Huge for work. Huge
| for home. The next Smartphone revolution; Smartphones took the
| Internet from a place you physically go (a desktop computer, or
| a laptop that 's not terribly portable and that nobody's gonna
| carry all the time) to something that could follow you around.
| It put the Internet everywhere--not like water on tap, but like
| air.
|
| AR glasses are going to mean the Internet's not just available
| everywhere, but is available _on_ the real world, all the time,
| which is a pretty big distinction, about as big as the
| smartphone revolution.
|
| A bunch of stuff that's kinda sucked will suddenly be great. AR
| tools. AR games. QR codes. Questions we used to have to ask our
| phones will simply be _answered_ , automatically ("what's this
| song I'm hearing?", "who's that person?"). Voice assistants
| will become far more useful (get used to hearing a lot more
| people in public talking to their assistant--it'll be weird or
| seem dickish and annoying at first, but then, so did texting in
| public or talking on the phone in public, until, in a very
| short span, they didn't anymore)
|
| Of course, we'll see if Apple's the one who finally cracks it.
| Someone's going to, I'm pretty sure, and I think all the major
| tech companies agree--they've all been pouring money into AR
| R&D for years and years, even though it's been clear the whole
| time that, on a phone or table or gaming device (Nintendo DS)
| it's got _terrible_ UX, and there 's no fixing that without new
| hardware. They must all believe wearables are going to be A
| Thing before too long.
| greedo wrote:
| I agree with everything you wrote, but I don't think Apple
| will be releasing an AR headset within 3 years. A VR headset?
| Sure, but AR is much more challenging.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I've been hearing that for 5 years. Apple is just about to make
| AR/VR a thing for the masses. Just listen to this random rumor I
| found
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