Apple: You (Still) Don't Understand the Vision Pro (stratechery.com) 66
Analyst Ben Thompson, sharing the experience of watching an NBA game on the Vision Pro: When I started the broadcast [on Apple Vision Pro's immersive view of the Bucks vs. Lakers NBA game] I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste.
Here's the thing that you don't seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it's an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it's worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse.
[...] I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing. The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop [...]
Here's the thing that you don't seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it's an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it's worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse.
[...] I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing. The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop [...]
Re: Same as VR in 1998 (Score:5, Insightful)
You've completely missed the point of the article. Ben Thompson's problem isn't with wearing a helmet, it's with Apple trying to "direct" the immersive basketball experience for him as the viewer. He doesn't want multi-camera views changed without his input, graphics appearing in his field of vision, or even a play-by-play commentary from an announcer. He wants Apple to get out of the action and let him watch like he's actually sitting courtside, like he has before in real life. This would arguably be cheaper for Apple (one 360 view camera at the "seat" position and maybe a couple more at key locations the viewer can change to?).
But the closer the experience comes to actually being there the more I wonder if the cost to the fan will be adjusted to offset an effect on in-person attendance it may cause. There are plenty of people who prefer watching movies at home to going to the theater now because you can pause or rewind the content as you wish, eat what you want, avoid distractions from other audience members and excessive advertising pre-show, etc.
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But the closer the experience comes to actually being there the more I wonder if the cost to the fan will be adjusted to offset an effect on in-person attendance it may cause.
They can just either black out dates where attendance is less than 98% or whatever, or charge a premium for home viewing for dates that aren't sold out.
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YOU SIMPLY DON'T UNDERSTAND!
We're ONLY trying to force this shit on your face that you don't want on your face! It BELONGS on your face, otherwise you're not ENJOYING it!
BTW, just TRY aspic! You'll like it! No, really - not like last time!
You can (not) Release (Score:2)
Tim Cook is at the bed. What does his hand do? What substantial subject matter does it grasp?
Re: You can (not) Release (Score:2)
Salami?
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I know... I know I've let you down. I've been a fool to myself.
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Mass-produced iPhones? Are they planning on starting it here?
Agreed, I don't understand (Score:4, Interesting)
Operating a virtual computer screen by waving my fingers around seems awful and useless
I sit at the computer when I need to use it
I can imagine a device like that might be useful for visualizing a building or large machine made in a CAD system
I can imagine a virtual tour of a city, real or simulated
I can imagine playing a video game
But operating a computer on a virtual screen? Nope
Re:Agreed, I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
More than that, if you have created a product that someone has to "understand" for it to be useful, you've created a small-market niche product.
If you create a product that is inherently understood by the intended audience, then you have removed a barrier to a sale.
Expecting the entire world to figure out your product and chiding them for not understanding it just means you've made a singularly bad user experience that nobody wants to understand, or your marketing people are fucking morons.
Re:Agreed, I don't understand (Score:4, Insightful)
Expecting the entire world to figure out your product and chiding them for not understanding it just means you've made a singularly bad user experience that nobody wants to understand, or your marketing people are fucking morons.
The person doing the chiding in this case was Ben Thompson, who is chiding Apple. (The Slashdot headline is misleading, as it makes it sound like Apple is telling its customers they don't understand the product, when it's actually Thompson telling Apple that Apple doesn't understand its own product)
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The person doing the chiding in this case was Ben Thompson, who is chiding Apple. (The Slashdot headline is misleading, as it makes it sound like Apple is telling its customers they don't understand the product, when it's actually Thompson telling Apple that Apple doesn't understand its own product)
He's clearly right. If they understood it, it would be a different product.
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But operating a computer on a virtual screen?
It's actually really good at this and is my favorite way to use it, particularly when I'm not at home. It ends up being a large, high resolution screen that you can sit comfortably on a couch and work with. I spend a lot of time coding in this environment.
It's video games that I'm not sold on yet. It's great at RTS/factory/flight sim games, or when you can stand still and shoot/slap/etc. It's not great when you're moving.
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But operating a computer on a virtual screen?
It's actually really good at this and is my favorite way to use it, particularly when I'm not at home. It ends up being a large, high resolution screen that you can sit comfortably on a couch and work with. I spend a lot of time coding in this environment.
It's video games that I'm not sold on yet. It's great at RTS/factory/flight sim games, or when you can stand still and shoot/slap/etc. It's not great when you're moving.
I agree, a sweet spot for it would be large, high resolution 2D virtual screen for a PS/xbox/switch if they could nail the latency and throughput requirements. Export some console screenshots and clips to your phone's photo library and open them in the Vision Pro, makes me drool.
Then build up from there with companion features that render alongside the remote display, for example, the controller light bar to start with, could be sent to the headset and rendered in the frame of the window or something like t
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R2-D2 should be in my spellchecker apparently.
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It's hard to be sure, but it looks like he's saying that Apple actually created the video for the Apple Goggles but don't realize people wearing Apple Goggles want to be in the game and not jumping around from camera to camera like sports TV.
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Apple was providing their own commentary, scores/graphics, and deciding which camera angle the viewer would see as if it was a regular broadcast. Which it is not. Instead of feeling like a floor level seat it is another TV broadcast forcing your perspective. This adds expense and reduces the being there live experience he wanted. To my understanding this is a specialized broadcast not a TV show being viewed through the headset.
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Dammit, not only do I hate agreeing with am abject coward but now I have to wonder what type of asshat does it take to downvote this cowardly but correct statement.
This is a blog post by a child with nothing better to bitch about than an extreme first world problem and yet it somehow made it to /. ? Must be a paid submission.
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I kind of disagree. He seems to be pointing out that when people are watching something in VR they don't want to be pulled out of it all the time by traditional TV production techniques.
I was watching Dredd 3D in VR last night and that while it was pretty good it would be much better if I could somehow move around and watch the action and wasn't just watching a 3D movie on a virtual screen in a virtual movie theatre. I don't see how that could work though, without turning it into something more like a VR ga
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Lol your funny I've been around /. nearly since the beginning when it was a real news for nerds site and not this thing.
I have a real username and number you can find my real name very easily if you made the slightest attempt, while you hide in shame behind the cowards tag.
Re:apple didnt say anything (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a blog post by a child with nothing better to bitch [...]
If he was just bitching, I'd agree with you, but in fact his post contains some critical positive information as well: he's identified a compelling use-case for the Vision Pro, one that (he believes) would make it seem like a bargain to sports enthusiasts, that Apple has apparently missed. All Apple has to do is setup one or two static immersive cameras at court-side, and stream the video and audio from them, verbatim, while leaving it entirely up to the viewer to decide which camera to view from, and Apple can start selling product to sports fans. That's it!
Lol "compelling" (Score:2)
It's in TFA. (Score:5, Insightful)
While I could see the appeal of watching a game on a VR / AR headset, it certainly doesn't justify a $3500 price tag. That's 7x more than an Oculus Quest 3, which has a lot more content and actual controllers to play games with.
TFA already answered this point.
There is a very very finite supply of seats that are courtside / within the first 5 rows.
Because supply is very low and demand is very high, those seats are very expensive.
The reason there is very high demand is because those seats have a visual sight line that is literally, tangibly exclusive. There has been no other way to access that visual experience other than competing with tens of thousands of people, thus driving price into the $hundreds/thousands per seat.
TFA is pointing out that this this is an inefficiency for both the supply side and demand side. Instead of only being able to sell that supply-limited experience to ~300 Lakers fans who live within driving distance of the arena (or have so much leisure wealth that distance doesn't matter), you could sell that experience to 300,000 Lakers fans across the continent -- many of whom are wealthy enough to pay for the tickets, but can't fly in for the game because of job or family obligations, or tickets were all snapped up before they decided to attend, or just would rather watch from the veranda of their beach house in Nassau.
How many wealthy Chinese are there? How many would have paid to watch Yao's games? How many wealthy Germans are there? How many would have paid to watch Nowitzki?
Millions of potential customers with the wealth to afford that experience have zero physical access to that experience, and the companies who own that experience have had zero way to physically squeeze more seats into the arena and sell more units.
Except... now, they do.
And, according to the author, that's what the production should focus on. Not stapling a VR gimmick headset to the existing TV production format. But using VR to sell an already-expensive experience to an even larger audience.
There are way more than ~300 people who would pay $3000 for that experience, without hesitation.
Sure, supply increases so the exact price point would drop over time, but with a literally infinite supply and the huge amount of unmet demand, selling 300,000 units at 0.50x is tremendously more profit than selling 300 units at 1x.
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the obvious point, is that the Vision Pro costs too much money and sales are not going to be sustained because a few idiots are prepared to spend that much to be able to stream a game.
VisionPro and similar products are things that would be made much more cheaply if they became mass consumer items that everybody has. The problem is that nobody has found a way to make them into that system. Demonstrating that, say, 30% of the population would be willing to buy them and regularly buy access to top end seats in sports stadiums at close to the price of sitting in those seats would be transformational to that market.
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Er no, they haven't answered the point. Because the point, the obvious point, is that the Vision Pro costs too much money
to you.
and sales are not going to be sustained because a few idiots are prepared to spend that much
a few hundred thousand (actually, several million) wealthy people on a planet of 8 billion are prepared to spend that much, because millions of humans every week of the year already are spending that much to sit through a couple hours of sports, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, The Sphere, Broadway, First/Business-class airfare, etc.
Especially when they could stream the exact same game from a device costing 1/7th as much. The potential to watch sports is not exclusive... slightly better resolution or refresh... content which is bound by streaming rates.... do a thing (that the competition can also do)... It doesn't justify the ludicrous price of the headset
Yes. Exactly.
You either didn't read the article or your eyes merely OCRed the words without your mind parsing the concepts, because you seem to believe you're arguing against the a
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to you.
To anyone with more sense than money. And yeah there may be assholes who'll sit there with a headset on for 3 hours by themselves, paying a fortune pretending they're at a concert or a game. What fun that will be all by themselves. I guarantee you that this is not as compelling as you think. And even if it were compelling well... competing headsets cost 1/7th the cost of this thing.
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Especially when they could stream the exact same game from a device costing 1/7th as much. The potential to watch sports is not exclusive to this garbage device.
You could watch the exact same game from ten seats back for 1/7th as much, but why are you angry about it?
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I'm angry for pointing out that the Vision Pro is overpriced garbage? Okay. Or that the same experience could be had on a cheaper device from exactly the same vantage point? Okay. Or that the whole proposition is laughable - a niche within a niche.
It's like you're arguing about 1080 upscaled vs 4k native or LCD vs OLED or 80" vs 60" but move the sofa closer, saying it's the same, and the technically on paper better hardware is overpriced garbage. Who are you talking to? Nobody that bought a 90" TV with the best refresh rate, the best grey to grey times, the best refresh rate, best black levels, best brightness, no artifacts, expensive as fuck TV bought garbage.
It's better hardware. Did they pay by the inch, by the pixel, by the nit of brightness? No,
Apple cancelled production of their VR goggles (Score:3)
Apple announced they were cancelling production of their VR goggles, and as a pressure relief valve to save face, made vague hand-wavey gestures towards using all that R&D money for something in the future.... maybe.
If you're still standing up for Apple's VR ambitions, then you don't get it - VR has failed as a mainstream product. The same as 3D TV, 3D Blue Ray, etc. There will always be a core audience of VR users but they are vanishingly small, the number of VR headsets manufactured per year is in the 85,000-175,000 range. On a global scale it's effectively artisinal.
If Apple with all their technological, UI/UX might, their infinite advertising budget, could not ship 250,000 iGoggles, vr is dead. Sorry not sorry.
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Oddly enough, VR headsets are the best way I've found to watch 3D movies now they're capable of playing HD videos without losing much (if any) of that resolution.
> There will always be a core audience of VR users but they are vanishingly small, the number of VR headsets manufactured per year is in the 85,000-175,000 range
Quest 3 alone allegedly sells over 1,000,000 a year, though quite a few probably go into the closet after a few weeks. So small, but not vanishingly small.
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Well, the 3D video thing makes sense...
With traditional approaches, well first you either halve the frame rate or resolution, depending on which technique is in use.
And even the highest end versions tended to have a bit of uncomfortable cross-talk where the wrong side would bleed through because the shutter glasses or the polarization wouldn't block *all* of the intended other one. With the VR headsets, you have actual dedicated pixels per eye, so no crosstalk.
Yeah, VR is a bit of a niche, but not under a
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3D Blu-Ray uses full HD for each eye, but it's non-trivial to play 3D Blu-Ray in a VR headset. I think Oculus used to offer 3D videos for rent but that was a long time ago.
As you say, it's definitely better than our 3D TV because of that lack of cross-talk. But I still sometimes find myself thinking 'did I screw up and play the 2D video?' until I see something point out of the screen at me due to the limited 3D effect.
Re: Apple cancelled production of their VR goggles (Score:3)
Apple never announced that they cancelled production. What actually happened is that you believed a rumor and failed to do due diligence.
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Doesn't really make sense (Score:3)
His primary criticism is that there are cuts between cameras. The alternative would be a view from a single place which, even from a courtside seat, isn't as good a view of the action as you can get from multiple cameras. It might be a realistic experience, but that single point of view would get tiresome pretty quickly.
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Perhaps it's more not liking having the cut happen without having control. Or maybe the composition, like have a 180 feed and pop up key views on extra screens. Just like how sporting events have big screens for letting the audience get a focused view, but let the 'immersive' view remain while you may also use that focused view.
Biggest problem with even the 180 degree view is that the source resolution tends to be rather underwhelming, Even 4k becomes underwhelming when spread across 180 degrees. Properly
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There are many things that could be done with VR to enhance the viewing experience, but no, that's not the complaint expressed in TFA about how Apple is doing the broadcast.
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I think it is, he says point blank he doesn't like that his perspective keeps getting yanked around without his control. The counter is 'oh but that seat isn't going to be the best'. So I'm suggesting a compromise, a selectable 'seat' for the basic immersive experience that will not cut unless you explicitly select to do so, and a separate 'screen' to provide those curated cuts that you propose are vital to getting to see the action as it moves beyond your ability to reasonably see, just like the 'jumbotr
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That would probably be great, but Apple could also just let them decide which of the cameras they want to watch from at any moment.
Misleading Headline (Score:2, Troll)
Apple didn't say this, it was just some asshole calling themselves an "analyst."
Apple is well aware that the VP is a failure. They're still going to push ahead though. The first iPhone and iPad were disappointing but it turned them into a trillion dollar company.
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There are real uses for VR and particularly AR in industry. For example, I've seen a VR app which teaches truck drivers how not to screw up and kill themselves by loading cargo incorrectly, and aircraft manufacturers using an AR headset to show the workers exactly what they're supposed to do for their work order (so no putting the wrong cables or rivets in the wrong place).
But that's not as sexy as imagining people walking down the street wearing goggles while posting Twits and seeing everyone's Twit histor
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Why VR & 3D keeps failing (Score:1)
VR/3D will need a killer app to take off, comparable to spreadsheets launching desktop computers into most businesses.
However, Big Tech has not been good at producing such killer apps. Instead, open-source and standardize the tooling and let tinkerers tinker. Then you have a pool of many thousands of enthusiastic amateurs experimenting and sharing ideas with each other. Eventually killer apps will bubble out from this Lab Of The People.
Meta and Apple should cooperate since if it takes off, both will likely
Re: Why VR & 3D keeps failing (Score:2)
iâ(TM)d just love to have falling and flying simulations from Lawnmower Man.
I think the problem is corporate culture (Score:2)
Corporations have gotten so used to inserting themselves between users / customers and whatever is being purveyed / sold / consumed, that they simply don't know how to stop. They reflexively manage all kinds of customer experience because they've learned - rightly or wrongly - that doing so increases profits, improves their control, and makes customers more reliant on them and more pliable.
I think they simply can't grasp the idea - no matter how persuasively and vehemently it's explained - of creating a gre
product needs content (Score:2)
They built a product that requires an entirely different way of producing content. They haven't figured out how to do that very well yet. It's early days.
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There's always pr0n! Limitless content!
absolutely, and Apple has veered off script (Score:2)
This really nails it. The whole point of this type of experience is to 'be there'. If you went to a live game and sat courtside the worst possible thing would be for the facility to bring over a flatscreen monitor and block your view of the game so they could shove the 'dunk cam' down your eyeballs and put up loadspeakers in your ears so you had to listen to commentary.
The hardware has so much more capabilities to offer up the views as if you were in a future stadium. A 100 foot screen behind the backboa
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There is no point in developing software for it (Score:2)
Most people can't afford the device, so if you write an application for it, it will just not sell very well, and i doubt you can charge $500 for an application to compensate for the lack of users.
It's like the neo geo, except without the arcade platform to support it.
You still don't understand my internet connection (Score:2)
Because Apple can't admit that it's VR. (Score:1)
Apple wants to pretend that the Vision Pro is an innovative product and not just an incredibly overpriced knockoff of the Meta Quest VR headsets. So they call it an AR device. And to make sure everybody gets the point they made sure to not make it immersive. I don't understand why they won't just admit that this isn't some fucking huge idea and admit that it's just their own version of VR. Apple didn't pretend that the M1 was the first ARM CPU or the first SOC and people still loved the product. Why not jus
How do you broadcast the immersive 3D view ?? (Score:3)