Apple Vision Pro

QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyzmod to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 984 points –
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Sometimes I wonder of all these Apple Vision memes popping up are a weak guerrilla marketing campaign by Apple trying to desperately make it relevant.

I sometimes feel like it’s the opposite. Memes and images of people being stupid while wearing the damn thing make me feel like people are trying to increase the stigma around it to kill it. I mean… this meme is showing the character completely unaware of their situation and doesn’t make the product seem good at all.

Hard disagree. We are all sitting here talking about Apple Vision. Worst thing for Apple is if we were not talking about it. People did the same shit when iPad was introduced and all the tampon memes. Ancient history but the iPad is not.

Look at all the memes and discussions regarding Teslas. #5 and #13 top sold car in the USA.

Yes, the worst thing for them would be not talking about it. This meme is making a negative connotation with it. Apple probably wants people to associate it with positive things. That’s why I don’t think the memes are a guerilla marketing campaign from Apple. I think it’s just people who hate Apple thinking they’re funny.

It’s just like the memes about those wheels or the mouse. There’s no way Apple has anything to do with those so GP’s suspicions that Apple is driving these makes no sense.

any publicity is good publicity

Not true. If someone was driving a car wearing the headset and got into a crash, how would that publicity be good exactly?

Which is dumb, because Apple wants this to be AR first and foremost. So most of the time, you'll use it with video passthrough so that you can see around you.

Also the original meme this is based on is also about being aware of the surroundings being on fire and saying this is fine

The original form of this meme is almost as popular as Mickey Mouse

Stop wondering, it's literally always a marketing campaign. How wildly inept would any PR firm be not to do this in 2024.

Yeah I mean VR headsets have existed for a number of years now. Weird how people are reacting this way to Apple's headset but didn't feel the same way about things like the HTC Vive, the Oculus/Meta Quest, etc.

For me there are two interesting bits that make the Vision Pro worth watching.

  1. When Apple gets into a new market, others follow. Whether you like apple or not, you have to admit they have sway in the industry. Remember how much wireless earbuds blew up after AirPods came out? At the very least, a big competitor has entered the VR space, which will pressure others to do even better.

  2. More on the apple fan side, it’s rare apple releases an entirely new line of products. And even more rare they take risks. This is risky, and therefore interesting!

Not sway but they have many mindless morons that'll buy their products and make others want it therefore demand

Which is called “having sway” haha. They have a big audience. Doesn’t matter how you feel about said audience. They’re there.

I own all those headsets in addition to a Valve Index and a Vision Pro. They’re not comparable. The Vision Pro blows the others out of the water.

I didn’t react the same way to them because they’re not the same. The AVP is the first time I’ve had a physical reaction in VR.

On the Index I've played a couple of games that made me get physical vertigo feelings, cringing nauseated vertigo feelings. Going really high and fast launching off of mountains and stuff like that. The AVP sounds cool but I have no compelling reason to get one. Interesting how this product debut is generating more interest in VR and related things, seems like a good thing for the VR tech market.

That’s exactly what got me. I’ve never gotten that feeling before and I got it twice on AVP - once when watching the Highlining experience (when she falls) and once when watching Avatar. My brain knew it was fake but my body reacted as if it was real. When she dropped, especially, I almost instinctively reached out to try and catch her hand.

I booked an appt to demo the Vision Pro this morning. It was absolutely amazing and the quality was unmatched. My only complaint was weight distribution and light bleeding into the headset near my cheekbones, but I suspect that will be resolved in time.

It costs 7x as much as a Quest 3 though... Is it 7x better?

Any reviews from someone who’s tried to wear it all day? The Hard Fork podcasters only got the 45-minute experiences (same as Colbert, incidentally) and one mentioned the relief of taking off headsets.

I had it on for 30 minutes or so today and told the guy I didn’t like all the weight to the front of my head. It felt like it was pressing pretty hard on my nose bridge and making me want to breathe through my mouth more. It felt great taking it off after 30 minutes. I don’t think I could do it all day.

It supposed to have a large selection of light seal cushions to choose from. If it's uncomfortable or the light was not fully blocked, then the cushion was probably not fit for you. They didn't offer to change the cushion to fit your face before testing?

Some of it is just Apple fandom, but this headset does make more of a leap into AR/productivity than others have as a main feature. From reviews it sounds like it still ain’t thaaat great at it, and I’ve heard the meta quest pro or whatever can do some similar stuff, but this is another step towards it I guess.

I realize google glass and the Microsoft ar glasses attempted this a bit, but both were such immature tech that they seemed like Proof of concept instead of a potentially mass market product.

I want to know what happened to magic leap… all that super hype about light fields and AR, and then some super expensive goggle things and silence for a while, maybe I just haven’t been saying attention enough or something.

I have own a rift and Q1, 2, and 3 (plus some older, but polished, Cardboard products) but have NOT had a VP demo. The jump from fresnel to pancake lenses - for productivity purposes - is substantial and I expect the VP's moderately higher resolution to be enough to make the headset actually productive (Q3 is close but still resolution handicapped). I expect the tight integration with OSX to be useful and, if I were (a) on OSX (b) didn't already work on an 8K monitor and (c) was a digital nomad or had no dedicated office/room in which to work, I could see a use case for them. Having attempted to work in i(Pad)OS professionally as a remote platform, the standalone capabilities might be useful for a blogger or journalist but is utterly unsuitable for professional work, even less so without a dedicated keyboard and mouse/advanced multitouch track pad. Again, I've not used the VP hand-sensing for advance selection* but my expectation is that it is still in its infancy, even with (and perhaos hindered by) eye focus selection.

My hope is that $3500/pop will allow more research, more fine tuning, and advancing to vision limited resolution (Apple is still a factor of 4 short in pixel count, and a factor of 6+ short of my desktop monitor) for future headsets.

* multi-functional, 3D manipulation of, say, finite element model components or full building/industrial models in a program like Revit or multi-assembly models in Blender or Fusion360, where you have 4+ key modifiers plus 3 buttons and two scroll wheels for fine manipulation and hundreds of quick-key commands)

Forget consumers, they said!

Same $3500 price point.

Yeah I went after commenting and read up on it, sounds like super hype, first release was meh, now they’ve retooled and are enterprise oriented. The 2.0 headset sounds sorta neat, but still pretty niche.

Sigh, I was excited for the seamless whales flying across the sky… but I should have guessed it was too good to be true.

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I think that the push for using it as AR is much stronger than with other headsets. Apple (and their investors especially) want there to be another huge shift in how computers are used, on par with the massive shift from desktop PCs to mobile devices. I think it's a long shot, but there is some belief that AR will replace all your other devices. You'll go to the coffee shop to work with your visor instead of your laptop, setting up your "virtual office" wherever you are. They want you to drive with it on and get smart AR navigation and avoidance hints.

I don't think the memes are entirely astroturf (I wouldn't be surprised anymore though) but there's definitely a societal shift occurring where people are hashing out what the acceptable norms for headsets are. Memes are part of our communication about what we find normal and what is weird or bad.

You’ll go to the coffee shop to work with your visor

I like to think of myself as a reasonable, nonviolent person, but even I would be hard-pressed not to smack the shit out of some goober sitting in Starbucks with one of these on pinching the air in front of him.

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It’s the power of marketing. Apple have crafted a strong brand with broad appeal, which gives the launch of any new product line a wide reach.

Focusing the Vision Pro more on productivity and apps has probably helped in this specific case too. All of the other big consumer VR systems have been heavily focused around gaming. Gaming is a lot more popular than it used to be, but it’s still anathema for a lot of people.

Because Apple is mommy and when mommy does something it is different than other people doing it

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some may very well be theirs, they did it with the airpods very successfully

There is only one thing I'm paying attention to with the Vision Pro at this point: use in public. When the Quest 3 came out people did stupid stuff like wearing it at amusement parks and ordering coffee with it on, then stopped cause it was just for the memes. I really hope people stop being such fuckwits with Vision Pros but I'm afraid they won't because Apple status symbol.

I'm waiting for them to make it remove specific things from your vision. In the future we don't even need to see homeless people or security guards.

Imagine a government making Apple censor a protest.

Imagining non-profits buying them to shield young women from anti-abortion protestors as they walk into clinics.

Couple with earplugs + studio monitors at high volume and you can significantly protect against bad actors, as long as they don’t assault you.

What a terrible future

Modern update to a technology we’ve had since 2500 BC!

I see the problem with upper classes eliminating homeless people with them.

What rubs you the wrong way about using it against people who’re hoping to actively interfere with your life?

Because you are silencing peaceful protesters. If they start actively blocking you that's a different story but to protest something you find unethical is not a bad thing.

The government should absolutely not inhibit peaceful protests.

A private person spending a bunch of money to pretend nobody is yelling at them for making an already heartbreaking decision is a pretty epic trump card.

It's the launch of the iPhone all over again. Smartphones existed before, even touchscreen smartphones. But the iPhone made people so vocal and opinions so polarized just because Apple did it.

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