Apple hopes to convince people to buy its $3,500 Vision Pro headset using free 25-minute in-store demos::undefined
Oh. My. Goodness.
$3,500?!? HAHAHAHAHAHA
I’d buy it if it was the kind of tool that earned me $5000… but it’s still really hard to justify the business use case for VR these days.
If I can lie on my couch while typing away on my custom virtual workspace it might be worth it but the resolution requirements make that unlikely any time soon
This thing is overpriced but there’s no way Apple ships it if they don’t have the pixel density to render text in a way that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. It’s being marketed as a work device, after all.
Yah but my dream setup is something that mimic 2/3 monitors sitting on a desk (or some VR-optimized version of that). In the real world those monitors are each 1080p+ and sitting in full view so the whole “scene” you’re looking at has many more pixels than just what is on all the monitors combined. If you scale that scene down to 4K resolution then the text on those monitors would likely be blurry or unreadable.
Obviously there are other ways to make a 4K resolution usable by zooming way in but that’s much less “screen” real estate than what a real workspace offers.
Also it’s too heavy to wear comfortably for long sessions
Drone pilot?
It also has basically no battery life and once that mostly useless battery becomes completely useless you are never unplugging that thing from the wall because you bet Apple made that battery impossible to replace!
Not impossible, just impossible to afford
Is 25 minutes a long enough in-store demo test time to have a $3500 wank?
The bigger question is what will you do with the other 24 minutes?
Well it’s indicative about the amount of content you’ll have for it when you buy it.
Yea what kind of privacy and amenities are provided?
Is this going to introduce “body tracking” similar to oculus hand tracking so it knows where the body is for it to become an AR wank? That’d be a game changer if VR wank.
Oh hey, it’s that time again. Copy-pasting from the last time around…
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Because the price is always the main topic, I’m gonna drop a link to an AR/VR expert contextualizing the Vision Pro price within the current (well, 7 months ago) market:
Apple Just Beat the “BEST VR Headset In the WORLD”… and did it cheaper.
Norm from Tested on yt had good things to say after his hands-on with the headset iirc a while back. This is just the price of a flagship VR device ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For $3500 it better be good. But I doubt the value is added linearly since you get a pretty decent vr headset for under $800
Totally agree.
Relatedly, I think people would be surprised how little the Apple Tax really is when accounting for specs and performance. That said I’m sure the margin is quite a bit higher on this device than an mbp. It’s very clearly not positioned for consumers but for businesses and bleeding edge enthusiasts
OK, but that doesn’t make it affordable or relevant.
It’s like comparing a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. It doesn’t matter because the world runs on Toyota Corollas.
Additionally, VR lives and dies on software.
I mean, it may not make a difference to you, but it makes a difference to people who are into Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
Oh yeah like I wanna get head lice from the snot-nosed kid some mom dumped there so she could go get some Starbucks in peace.
The price is always the joke, but this is aimed at commercial buyers right? Not consumers
Honestly, I just want to experience it for 25 minutes and then I think I would be good. My Valve Index does enough for me for gaming, and I am not wearing a headset all day to work.
As someone with an Index, I’m interested in this because it doesn’t need the lighthouses. The fact that the index can only work in one place in my house without needing mount points severely limits its usefulness to me.
That’s a good point! My lighthouses sometimes disconnect to, so I have to unplug and re-plug them to get it working, which is a barrier in itself.
25 min of VR-Porn nice
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Its Apple, that will be 99.99$
Careful there, that’s about the amount of time it takes to realize that it’s just a gimmick that has no use in your personal life, and very narrow industrial application. They might actually lose potential buyers rather than gain some.
As someone who wears a VR headset for about 8 hours a day on average and has for nearly ten years now, I can say our definition of gimmick varies somewhat.
Apples headset of course won’t do well, but it sounds like it will raise awareness that it isn’t a gimmick or a fad. And people that try it, will buy a practical modern headset instead.
The newest generation of headsets are as clear as a 4k monitor, despite not having enough actual pixels to literally display a 4k monitor at a comfortable viewing distance. There is a sort of free temporal anti-aliasing gained by the fact that your head will never be in the same exact place frame to frame, which effectively works out to percievably double the resolution clarity. A modern headset does have enough pixels to display more than raw 1080p at a comfortable viewing distance.
So even if you are not using them for actual VR, at the very worst, they replace a 4k screen at whatever size and distance you choose to have it at. I recommend about 20 feet away and scaled up to about 60 degrees accross your field of view. Unlike a monitor placed 3-4 feet from your face, or a TV 8-10 feet away(or a phone screen less than a foot away), 20 feet is very comfortable for your eyes. So you won’t get eye strain anymore.
And as for what environment that screen is in? Anywhere… including your real reality. The current generation of VR headsets has near-perfect clarity of a well-lit room that seamlessly blends with whatever virtual content you want to superimpose on it. The clarity goes down with worse lighting conditions, either with too much range of brightness, or not enough light in total.
Usually I will put my virtual screen beside or below the TV that the rest of my family is watching. Until it gets too dark out that the comparatively bright TV screen just gets washed out by camera optics(hopefully we get settings for this in the future, it could very much be fixed in software), then I move my screen to cover the TV, which is of course placed in the most comfortable viewing position from our recliners. I choose whether I want to hear audio from and see outside of the headset, or whether I want to ignore the outside world and focus entirely on my virtual screen.
And that is just the least interesting thing you can do with a VR headset, and enough to already justify the 500 dollar price tag of a practical VR headset. As an incredibly low latency remote 4k monitor you can place wherever you want, at whatever size and distance you want. Even if it would be through a wall. Still incredibly comfortable to view for way too many hours in a row.
You could also use a VR headset to do VR stuff. I occasionally do that too. It’s also good and more than worth the purchase price, as there is nothing else like it and no other way to experience that.
And then of course there is the porn. Even completely ignoring that exists, VR would already be awesome and very worth the price. But most people with VR headsets don’t ignore that it exists, even if they pretend they do. And let me tell you, there is also nothing else like that. But, you have to be careful/selective, as with all porn, most of it is terrible. You can find some good stuff for free, but as always the best stuff is not free.
Suffice it to say, the future really is VR, just like it really was computers, cell phones then smartphones, even if the first computers, cellphones and smartphones didn’t feel at the time like they were gonna catch on. Try telling someone when the first iPhone came out that people were going to spend hours playing games on their phones, and that phone gaming was going to be literally 3x the size of the next biggest gaming market. The next biggest being computer games. Then consoles.
https://images.app.goo.gl/W2YBPTryTf675ZGD7
There isn’t a more up to date version of this info graphic, 4 years ago mobile was only double computer. And VR has significantly increased since then, the Quest 2 wasn’t even released yet for this infographic. Quest 2 sold 20 million units, that’s just one headset, the highest selling one, but there are other reasonably popular ones too since then. And Quest 3 has been out for a while now. And again, just one of the popular options.
Can you expand on your use case and setup? I have an OG vive and really enjoyed it while I had space for it but haven’t kept up with the meta after moving to a smaller place. I’m very curious what headset you are using for this long and what you are doing with it and why you decided on this workflow.
It has been various headsets, most often Quest headsets for me personally. Currently a Quest 3. For most of them a halo style strap with battery on back was most comfortable for me. But everyone is different. Custom face pads don’t matter for me once I have a halo style headstrap, but for other headstrap styles the facepads would be very important for 8+ hour comfort.
Silicone facepads are good for short term exercise sessions as they clean quickly and easily, plu leather is a good choice for longer sessions with less profuse sweating. And cloth is good for very long sessions with no or mild sweating.
But yeah, in terms of what I actually do with it in this example, it’s very similar to a steamdeck, I just play my computer games on it, but while sitting on a nice comfy recliner.
I do also play VR games, mostly adventure RPGs. I have played the MMOs, specifically Orbus and Zenith. They are both pretty good. Lately I have been playing Dungeons of Eternity, Into the Radius, Ancient Dungeon, and the beta for Legendary Tales.
Previously I have played over 100 different games over the past 9 years in VR. All the “I expect you to die” games are great, everything from Owlchemy labs is awesome, while also being entirely kid friendly too. The official Iron Man VR game, surprisingly good. The moss games are good. Both “little cities” and “Cities VR” are great in completely different ways if you like city builders.
Walking dead:saints and sinners was good, once you get past some of the frankly too scary parts at the start of the game and to the part where it’s an action game instead of sneaking around in the dark being surprised by unsuspected zombies. Also never stay out past the bells. I’m glad I played the Quest version first before playing the PCVR version. Not sure I would have gotten past the start if the zombies were scary looking instead of cartoony, hehe. The Quest 3 graphics upgrade is also kinda getting there, lol.
The Red Matter games are an interesting experience, but I mostly played them to see the kickass graphics running on mobile hardware. The people that made those games have alot of talent for getting good looking graphics efficiently.
Speaking of graphics, for a Quest 3, I highly recommend the purchase of “Quest Games Optimizer”. It’s a program with the ability to override alot of the hardware settings on the headset with ADB commands. And a database of presets for each game. You’ll be able to pick between a few for most games, depending on if you prefer higher framerate or higher resolution, or if you want to not run the headset at max but still have better graphics than a game originally made for Quest 1 or 2 would otherwise have. Otherwise some older games can look unnecessarily not great on a Quest 3. When they are fully capable of looking great.
“The Under Presents:” was a truly unique concept. They hired actors to perform as all the NPCs in the game, between live showings of the plays they put on. The plays were classic plays enhanced by effects that could only be done live in a VR environment. And they also tended to have some audience participation. Unfortunately the live aspects of the game don’t exist anymore. They brought them back every now and then for a month or so, but it has been a while since the last time, so it likely won’t happen any more. Hopefully more stuff like that exists in the future.
For PCVR stuff, I played alot of Elite:Dangerous, I still play some American truck sim. And various racing and rally games. I also play alot of the same types of games as what I play on stand alone. I play wirelessly either through Virtual Desktop, Steam VR Link, or Oculus air link. Whatever the game I intend to play works best on.
I also do indeed watch 3D movies on it, this is the first reasonable household medium in human history with perfect 3D. Definitely gonna take advantage of that. And speaking of 3D, most computer games with a modern engine can be played in 3D. Like either making a virtual 3D monitor, or by actually putting your head inside the game world. Also most gamecube and wii games too. But yeah, just recently the entire Unreal engine got a VR mod, so any game made on unreal engine all of a sudden is capable of being a VR game out of the box. Most will still need some minor bespoke mods to clean things up here and there, or if they want to do motion controls, but the hardest part is done as a baseline now.
There is also the old program “VorpX” which is a dll injection based universal VR mod database. It doesn’t work with every game, but the list is pretty long. One caveat, playing a computer game in VR is harder to run than 4k 60fps. So depending on what game you want to play, like say Cyberpunk 2077 or something, you might need what is currently pretty expensive hardware to have a good time. But if you want to run something from 5-10 years ago, you’ll have no problem with a computer that wouldn’t be able to run modern games at 4k 60fps, as long as it can run those old games at that. Playing games on a perfect 3D monitor alone is pretty awesome, but “stepping into” a gamecube game potentially from your childhood, is a whole other thing.
Also on that topic, Quest 3 just got a native 3DS emulator that runs most games at full framerate in 3D. Many well enough to increase the render resolution too. And this is the initial release, so it should only get better from here. I loved my “new” 3DS back in it’s day, even though the resolution was so low, but I love it more now that I can fix that.
Also as a parting note, Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, and VR chat are all individual games/apps that can easily support thousands of hours of use each. VRchat seems crazy and darn near repulsive until you manage to find “your” crowd. And skyrim and fallout 4 have an insane selection of mods. You can turn them into whatever you want, as long as your computer can run what you want.
I personally have a pretty wide variety of activities I do in/with my VR headset, but in terms of time clocked, using it as a virtual computer monitor with 2ms network latency and a 40 foot tall screen where I control every aspect of the monitors properties, shape, size, brightness, curvature, whether or not the light it casts interacts with the rest of the room, what even the “rest of the room” completely means… probably my most time spent, just ahead of time spent playing VR games.
It also can run any android app you sideload, but unfortunately it has no GPS. But there are some pretty useful android apps, notably any emulators made for Android. Those versions will just be run on a virtual flat-screen, it won’t suddenly make android apps 3D. But it can still be nice to have a 6 foot wide phone game where you use laser pointers instead of fingers to tap the stuff. Save your finger joints, and your neck from looking down at your phone.
I read your whole comment and didn’t find even a single sentence that made VR appealing to me. Much less the idea of spending over 8 hours a day with a VR headset on.
ADD: In other topics, are you perchance interested on buying a 3D TV? I have a sale for you…
This, I just want to experience it for 25 minutes and then I think I would be satisfied.
Apple users don’t care, they’ll buy it simply because other people are buying it. Buying Apple products is partially a status symbol to a lot of non-tech people.
Jesus. Y’all actually need to believe that about people who own a particular phone or computer hu?
I work in the tech industry with support engineers. This is the smartest group I’ve ever worked with and we support a ton of services, more than the typical SE supports - everything from databases to networking to load balancers to virtual machines.
We all own iPhones.
It’s okay to own an Android. You don’t have to justify it by making up a story for yourself about how all people who buy Apple products are mindless drones.
Being an engineer and being smart are not synonyms. I’ve met quite a few dumb engineers in my life. Fine engineers, quite shit at making any non specifically engineering related decisions. Just the implication that choosing Apple is the smart choice is plainly a disingenuous argument. Every choice is an exercise in compromise, and choice of smartphone OS vendor is no different.
Remember that doctors used to prescribe tobacco and taking up smoking. Authority doesn’t automatically means someone is always right on everything.
Being an engineer and being smart are not synonyms.
The fact that I mentioned those two things separately should indicate to you that I believe they don’t always go together. I mentioned it and called out the specific services we support to counter the claim that only “non-tech” people buy iPhones. That’s complete and utter bullshit.
Just the implication that choosing Apple is the smart choice is plainly a disingenuous argument
Good thing I didn’t say that then, hu? I said the smart group of guys I work with all chose iPhones. YOU read into that and came out with “smart people ONLY choose iPhones”.
You’re just adding your voice to the original person I responded to. Neither of you seem to be capable of just being happy with your purchase. You must believe that iPhone users are stupid. Does it make you feel better or something?
How pitiful. The only one overly aggressive about defending their own purchase is you. I never said anything about either choice being better. Specifically I argued the opposite. But you seem extremely sensitive and eager to fight online for a multi billion conglomerate tech corp. They don’t need you, and no one was attacking you in particular. I was just commenting, you know, in a public forum, to try and provide an additional perspective that overall doesn’t actually differ much from yours. If you want private conversations go to a chat.
If its amazing like revolutionary amazing it would change my mind, if it’s just a vr headset nope.
It’s a mixed reality headset that works. Still too expensive for consumers.
I don’t believe Apple made this product to sell. it might be just marketing ploy to keep people talking about Apple and how they are always ahead of the curve. they have a brand reputation to maintain.
They don’t care if it sells or not. It shows the tech industry that they are still “at the forefront” and “relevant”. Apple can’t appear to be left behind. This is also a way for developers to jump in and start making things for Apple’s inevitable AR glasses that this thing was supposed to be. In 5 years, they’ll use all the data and development they’ve collected from this headset for their newer devices.
This is exactly right. They did the same thing with the iPhone. Launched with minimal features, riddled with bugs, the butt of every joke and cynical opinion, and let the consumers tell them exactly what was wrong with it in excruciating detail. 5 years later, a literal majority of all human beings alive had one in their hands (or similar products from their competitors). Will this specific product be any good? No, probably not. But in 10 years or so, it may very well be the next thing everybody has to have in order to function in society
Id buy it right now if it was maybe $500.
Spatial computing is the future.
I don’t need 3 screens. I need a pair of spectacles.
Screens have always been the bottleneck. The phone tablet monitor tv.
Glasses can do entire field of vision.
It doesn’t even do spatial computing well. It can simulate a single 4k display and that’s it. You can have some other apps floating around you, but not much.
If I could simulate 8 4k displays all around me, or freely float my full blown Mac OS programs and resize them to infinity then I’d be cool with this. But I’ve got more screen in front of me right now than the vision could ever hope to do. And Apples “apps” are far too gimped to be useful. Notes and email are cool, but not much else.
It uses foveated rendering, so yeah it is effectively close to looking at a hidpi display across your entire field of vision, in a sphere around you. And you can use it effectively as a virtual monitor with a Mac, but you really have to design for the interface for a good experience
Then it’s not spatial. Maybe they will bring that to the table.
That’s what we need. I agree if it’s a downgrade from your Mac.
It’s an upgrade from my Thinkpad.
But price is the issue.
Once devs get it. They can improve.
Technology used to be more about solving a problem or making something difficult easier. This thing has no real use beyond “neat”. But that Apple logo holds some very powerful magic for certain people.
Technology used to be more about solving a problem or making something difficult easier. This thing has no real use beyond “neat”.
I guess you haven’t been following the video game industry for the last half a century?
No I have. Creating a product then finding a use is the very definition of cart before horse-ing. Marketing does most of the heavy lifting for getting people excited about crap they don’t need, and Apple is the king of marketing.
That’s a no from me dawg
It’s Apple. I expected nothing less than the most ridiculously priced products to be produced by them. So the figure is eye watering but expected. If these sellout, as some predict, it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.
For a high end enterprise geared headset that functions as its own standalone device and doesn’t require any connection to any other computer to work, this isn’t even expensive.
This isn’t meant to compete with something like a Quest. It’s meant to compete with something like the Varjo Aero, which goes from $5-10k.
For a company deciding on implementing AR/VR, the cost to get a Quest Pro for $800 plus a $2500 workstation to power it, vs a $3500 Vision Pro that doesn’t need a workstation, it’s pretty comparable.
For a high end enterprise geared headset
That Apple wants to sell to John, Martha and their 2.5 children.
Company sells goods to consumers, more at 11.
There’s always people out there that want to be on the bleeding edge. People spend $2000+ on just a 4090 card, or $2000 on a stupid folding phone that breaks from a grain of sand.
Where 2.5 children? There, or here?
Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 does less than Apple’s Pro Vision and it costs the same. Is it really that overpriced? And the cost goes way way up from there.
it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.
Maybe you should look inward before making silly comments like these.
Honestly, I don’t even need half of the things that it does to justify the price, for me - just give me a dual 4k, 100 hz displays and a display port connector and I’ll gladly shell out 3k to play vr video games on it.
If these sellout, as some predict, it proves unequivocally that Apple fanboys are the most rabid idiots in existence.
looks like you value money much higher than some others do - interpret that however you will.
I wholeheartedly believe that Apple is a marketing company more than a tech company.
I hate what the company stands for, but they do have brilliant marketing and make beautiful products.
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Every successful mega corp is a marketing company. Just look at video games where the marketing budget is the same as the development budget.
