True…
I agree Paul, you’d have to go into this with a ‘I can’t take my money with me when I die’ sort of attitude. Apple do tend to support older devices longer than most, but the half-life of this thing would probably be measured in months, given that they probably want to use it to work out what resonates with their market. It is packed with a lot of hardware (lidar, IR eye sensors, six passthrough cameras etc), so there’s a chance the software will get better over time but any new ‘R2’ chip next year will probably make it seem pretty unfashionable after its 15 mins. Such is Apple.
The counterintuitive thing with this brushed aluminum hugely expensive lump is that it’s a computer on your head. For years all we’ve wanted is just the display, so we think in those price terms. It’s like the Quest 3 being similar to the specs of the Quest 2 apart from a big upgrade to the device’s computing power - all those airlink or virtual desktop people don’t really care that much. In a way the existing VR market sort of hurts the future XR (AR/VR/Whatever) market because the expectations are out of wack.
I’m keen to try one at least. I guess next up would be Deckard and to see what Valve do next, although that’s going to be another computer on head thing rather than plain display. Maybe the landscape is looking like (a) Quest 3 used as a display (subsidized by the social network money) (b) Pico Next (with a damn input port), (c) Pimax with the cheap parts and labor and then (d) Varjo at the top end of the market will just be the cockpit mainstays for us?
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I’d like to add Somnium VR1, as a wildcard, to that list.
Somnium Space freaks me out a little, but the headset could be a contender.
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Eek. Yes. As well as never saying the letters ‘V’ and ‘R’ too close together, it was interesting that Apple would never utter the phrase ‘Metaverse’ either. It’s a pretty interesting tale of two extremes between Facebook and Apple’s visions right now, with both ends seeming silly for cockpit VR veterans.
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Indeed.
But I wonder if not we VR flightsimmers and VR gamers in general, will have to accept that the hardware won’t be made only for us, in the future. There must be a broader appeal to putting a silly divers mask onto your head, for the development to continue…
Maybe we will have to get a social media headset and exploit what we can, in our sims. Or maybe pay up to get what the professional simmers use, like Varjo and XTAL. I wonder if Varjo will continue this “light” consumer version gig, much longer. I sure hope they do, but it is a market experiment…
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As DCS doesn’t work and wanted to try the Gazelle again, might as well add this. Zuckerburg’s take on the Apple Vision Pro:
"Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.
But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey."
src: Zuckerberg on Vision Pro: Could be the ‘future of computing’ but ‘not the one that I want’ - 9to5Mac
I don’t want Mark any closer and I don’t really want to pay for Apple jewelry, so hopefully something in the middle still keeps chugging.
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As was pointed above, I think Apple is going in a good direction with avoiding references to AR/VR. These terms seem to have fairly established perceptions/opinions among many people. One woman I know, we saw a commercial a year or so back featuring a VR headset (not sure which) and a guy using it to play BeatSaber. She laughed and made some comment about how the headset and game were toys and a waste.
I asked if she’d seen the Apple product, and when I showed her the video, when the demo of the 100’ movie screen appeared… Ok. Wow. Rewind that, and she showed told a friend to come look.
Different presentation of the same thing (speaking generally), different perception.
As always with Apple, the smooth and unified user experiences are key. And comparing some of what I’ve watched others doing with other VR headsets (quite the similar things, desktop in AR/VR mode and such), the Apple polish made what I’ve seen of the others look kind of like a smoking crater.
Same kind of thing was going on back in the mid 1980s. The first computer I ever used was a 1984 or 85 Macintosh. Used it for a few months, and working with the UI, keyboard and mouse made such clean sense. Why would anything be any different? Then I actually got my own computer a few years later, and was experiencing MSDOS for the first time. Hahaha.
My Mom and I actually went and took a local course in how to use MSDOS. They taught command prompt navigation, software loading and operation, and printing (on dot matrix). Mom never did grasp MSDOS, it was so very many miles away from that original Macintosh we used, years before.
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Randomly…
Concerning M2 vs 4090, my iPad Pro M2 crunches video impressively well in DaVinci Resolve.
That rotary knob to blend AR is brilliant and very much appreciated by those of us with ADHD attention deficit 
They might as well call it cerebral focus control.
I was watching Avatar 2 with the kiddos last night for the first time and couldn’t stop thinking how incredible that experience would be in VR, to be in the movie rather than watch it on screen. I wonder how long it will be before we have high res VR versions of movies. Not that the movie industry is equipped for that.
Isn‘t 4K enough for that use case?
When I watch a movie, I usually wear a BT headphone and look at a tv screen. So kind of in gear already, having to connect BT etc …
I could imagine watching a movie in VR if the headset is comfortable. Maybe while slacking off in a hammock? Just the other day I was thinking how uncomfortable our sofa really is, and how it might be time to give up on fashion and get a recliner. Maybe the cost of a new couch can go towards vr? 
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I’m thinking of the few “films” or “experiences” that have been made for VR that have been lower res, like the Winter Olympics downhill race course. But now that I think about it, that might have been the display goggles that I used, Samsung Odyssey.
The weird thing about movies (Apple TV has a lot of 4K content), at least in our house, is that it’s at least my wife and I watching together and often more than that. I suppose we could adjust our AR dials to be social…
It was odd that nearly all the demos showed people sat alone, given the effort they’ve put in to make it all less cut-off (pass through, front screen, AR dial etc).
I suppose work stuff would fit better, with lots of big virtual displays.
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Thinking about this, I was reminded of how many times in books and movies I’ve seen or read about fancy “holographic” 3D displays, usually giving “Gods-eye” views of futuristic battlefields…
I mean, the standard sci-fi trope was that this would be done with some sort of stereographic (usually bulky) laser projection technology, though I do remember the Matrix, where they showed a virtual control room existing only in the operators minds…
Apple is offering, I think, one of the most polished, well thought out and more importantly, technologically feasible applications I’ve yet seen of this idea, to the point where I’m reminded of something I read once about Apple playing chess and the long game, while other companies played…
Something else.
We are now practically capable of this! (With goggles, If this is a future we want)
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And with current 3D display technology you could have 3D view also without cumbersome helmet.
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Regarding the Lume: I’ve seen the ads for these and did some research… Seems there are a few downsides…
This company/product is likely not going to survive.
Googly eyes stickers?
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Stick an Apple logo on it and…
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The problem with LTT is it’s hard to trust their assessment, given their history…
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