Apple Scraps Work on Mac-Connected Augmented Reality Glasses(bloomberg.com) |
Apple Scraps Work on Mac-Connected Augmented Reality Glasses(bloomberg.com) |
https://youtu.be/bdc9rcrZW8I?si=j9kY7rrCaQstYoQd&t=78
edit: I think this maybe answers my question: https://www.reddit.com/r/VITURE/comments/159gt36/i_wear_glas...
| You can easily adjust each VITURE One XR Glasses lens to your prescription (0 to -5.00D) with convenient knobs located on the top of the frames.
| If your prescription doesn't fall into this range, no worries – to make sure everyone has access to a clear VITURE One experience, we’ve also developed a prescription frame that you can have your own lenses fitted into. This frame attaches to VITURE One XR Glasses magnetically for easy on and off.
I love the notifications and the other stuff as well (mapping, translations... Even streaming YouTube through them while I exercise) but my primary driver for these was to have a rapidly accessible camera. I found great success with the Humane AI Pin primarily for this feature.
FYI there are some other options available today for glasses without cameras (Vuzix has some, as well as some announced at CES) and/or with simpler screens... As well as some with screens in the frame (like Halliday) if the rainbow effect gets to you.
Now...outward facing screens displaying my face? Billet Aluminum frame?
other I have are Viture’s, Frame, Everysight, and ActiveLook. All of those have downsides to wearing as glasses over Vuzix’s Z100. People just find you a big big frame geeky and don’t necessarily notice them as smart glasses unless they are particularly observant type.
Everysight Maverick are runner ups and work for summer outdoors situations as they are basically sunglasses.
It feels like Apple thinks they're really good at hiding stuff, but forget that their employees love to talk. Nobody will forget the prototype iPhone left just sitting there unattended at a bar.
For example, I’m skeptical that Apple ever intended to release a car.
I started my career as a dev working in VR apss. At the time there was consensus in the industry that apple was about to release something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream - and indeed you couldn't rely on any new VR/AR product or software without it being silently acquired in months and their website redirecting to apple.
Fast forward one decade, nothing's happened yet. I moved to web dev long ago, but people seem to be still waiting.
You see this constantly where people desperately hope for some form of FTL. They want it to be true and cling to fringe theories because of that.
Companies have been trying to make VR happen for decades. It's not going to happen. Not only do people not want to strap something to their head, there are fundamental technical limitations around latency, true blacks, depth-of-field and what input feels "natural".
People just take Snow Crash and Ready Player One too seriously.
AR is kind of the between of that but it has fundamentaly technical problems and constraints like processing power, energy, true blacks and lag. A true AR experience would have to constantly repaint the overlay as you move your head at incredibly low response time to feel "natural".
Lag will be a major factor with AI chatbots for probably some time to come. The processing loop is basically text to language to embedding into AI model and then converting that token stream to spoken language. That takes time. We're such a long way from something that feels "natural" like talking to another person.
IMO, none of those things are major factors compared to how insanely clunky current VR headsets are. That's where the real fundamental issues show up-these headsets need to lose ~90% of their weight and size before they'll catch on.
Just because a program with an internal codename gets terminated doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of other initiatives in related spaces going on.
And the work on the core technologies certainly doesn't end.
There's no product until there are boxes piling up in warehouses, getting ready to be shipped.
If only we could stop giving attention to these "news", which are really just propped up narratives for investors to nudge the market in their favor, and for Mark Gurman to get a paycheck.
If the path of the previous project led them to a product that would have to be connected to a Mac to work, that seems like a dead-end that wouldn't make a compelling consumer product in the near future.
You could write a similar headline about "Apple cancels iPod Phone Project" back in 2005 or whenever they made the decision to go with the Darwin/touchscreen phone instead of the iPod-based alternative.
If big tech decides that VR/AR is not worth the investment any longer, then its tough to be a startup in this space. Hence tracking apple rumors is a way to get a read on where the market is heading.
> The company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro, including updated versions of the original model. It also has other concepts in the works, such as AirPods with cameras, and executives still hope to eventually create a set of standalone AR glasses someday.
[1]: https://workplacebullying.org/2024-wbi-us-survey/
[2]: https://www.thehotline.org/stakeholders/domestic-violence-st...
I was reading a thread where a bunch of people complained about their iPad not having use cases while for me, it is a dream device. Curious about your experience with vision pro.
How will these risk averse slow moving teams with a ton of process keep up with 100x more tiny teams of engineers who can ship whole features in days instead of months.
Or maybe the bottleneck is the willingness of customers to try new things? Risk-adverse customers will often avoid startups. Showing yourself to be trustworthy isn’t purely about the rate of feature development.
If the other bottlenecks can’t be removed easily, instead of 10x features you could end up with fewer software developers.
Having worked at early stage startups and mid sized companies there's already a 10-20x productivity gap between them due to this (even on brand new projects at large companies vs startups, where it's not an issue of legacy code).
As an example I just witnessed a large co hire a consulting company to help them "ideate" on a RAG app that barely worked and required 3 rewrites and ~18 months to make it to POC stage, even though a front end dev had a better working POC that he hacked together in a day and a half.
I've heard way worse horror stories from friends at Google / Meta / Apple.
What will happen when tiny startups of 3-8 people get 5-20x more productive and can ship new stuff daily?
100% agree. The SW pipeline is complicated. AI may one day slot into every part and improve velocity, but it will be piecemeal and better at some processes than others for a long while.
The Mac benefited from all the work Apple has done on the iPhone CPU, but the software scene on the Mac has been deteriorating because developers are using the same tools and the same toolkits to develop desktop applications that are motivated by mobile. The article mentioned here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42930025
claims to be about the deterioration of desktop interface but it's by someone who's so steeped in the Apple culture that they don't get it is really about the deterioration of Mac interfaces.
Apple doesn't care if you buy a Mac, in fact they'd feel most comfortable if the Mac became a peripheral of the iPhone. It's hard for them to picture developing a new peripheral for the Mac, even something straightforward like the Magic Mouse. A peripheral for the Mac that's groundbreaking? It doesn't fit into their world view.
Prior Art for
G06F 3/0338 - Computer mice, trackballs or similar devices for computer control
G06F 3/041 - Digitisers using touch-sensing
G06F 21/32 - Biometric authentication
It's like NFTs in gaming, NFTs in general, AI shoehorned into places it doesn't make much sense, wifi connected can openers, Soylent, ...
Startup founders are always told that there must be market pull, and many startups fail because they try to push an idea nobody wants, but it's not just startups. Big companies and VCs do this too.
I'm an early adopter, but even at that, I don't use VR a whole lot over the course of a month. It's a tech that people (nerds) really want to take off and it just hasn't. I'm not sure it will...it could be replaced with other equivalent technologies that aren't strapped to your face.
So, we've been in a stalemate for more than 10 years. The AVP finally had to come out - antsy investors - and turned out to be the overengineered product of Apple trying to outmaneuver everyone else's outmaneuver, with the entire field understanding that whoever wins this owns the next 20 years.
However, it's a bit of a Chinese finger trap. Consumers and users want actual value out of this technology, and developers want to provide fantastically innovative uses, and both are at odds with the platform owners' lust for unilateral control. The platform that wins will be more like a PC than a Silicon Graphics workstation (which is what Apple et al seem hellbent on forcing down people's throats). Get something with basic functionality that just works out of the box, and that is open and ready for experimentation, into as many hands as possible. It will bulldoze the field. (This is why the Quest line has gotten so close. Shame about the owner.)
I'm sure the Vision Pro will get some follow up, but as someone who wears glasses I don't see the glasses/headset version of AR/XR ever catching on in the mainstream.
The AVP, on the other other hand, was just too expensive. At that price it could go with a seat of [2] (been a high end enterprise play) but no way was it going to compete with buying a big ass TV and a home theater system, which you can enjoy with other people. Worse than that, Apple rejected the immersive world experiences that are big fun on the MQ3 -- if a device is that expensive it has to do it all.
[1] https://components.one/posts/gamer-and-nihilist-product-hunt [2] https://www.3ds.com/3dexperience/
The answer is in the comment you just wrote.
If those tiny startups are successful, they will become the next bloated large companies where things take forever because of "intra team conflicts, legal hurdles and processes", which are categories of things LLMs will never solve because LLMs can't solve problems of human consensus.
If those startups aren't successful, they will run out of money and die.
Big companies take forever to do things because they have lots of paying customers to keep happy, a bunch of people who are ready to sue them at the slightest misstep, thousands of employees with families who want job stability and therefore don't want to be betting the farm every 6 months, etc.
Tiny companies can iterate really fast because they have none of this.
LLMs don't change anything about this fundamental reality.
I have a lot of friends who started similar companies recently, who are making millions in revenue with 2-8 people and deliberately plan to never grow head count past around 10 people.
We'll have way more teams like midjourney, early whatsapp / instagram and 37signals.
I had a time when I was involved with startups of various kinds (sometimes West Coast, sometimes Research Triangle Park, more often NYC or upstate.) I was a Windows user in a MacOS world and the most important accessory I packed was whatever I needed to hook up to mini-Displayport.
For me the magic of tablets is that they are low cost, so I'm not afraid of losing or breaking them. They don't become a nexus of further expensive consumption: adding an expensive case, particularly one with a an expensive and special purpose keyboard, just takes something sleek and easy to handle and makes it klunky and awkward.
Go to a hackathon? Get any Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a $5 plastic clip from Amazon Basics and you've got something sleeker and more stylish than any Macbook or gaming laptop with which you can connect to a powerful desktop computer or a cloud instance that is anywhere from 50 cents to $4 an hour depending on your thirst for power.
I started out with a B&N Nook, then Amazon Fire Tablets (amazing value for the money), then iPads, I had bad luck with my last iPad (either lost or stolen) and figured I'd use an old Samsung Galaxy tablet I had kicking around. Every time I got an iPad I looked at my options, hypothetically I thought I might like the Pro but a new Pro is crazy expensive (I couldn't afford to break or lose it) and an old Pro in my price range is old technology.
(Note I'm a little weird because I've never owned a smartphone with a plan. Carriers choose not to serve my valley, why should I get an expensive plan? My data plan is WiFi, and my phone plan is Skype)
The Pro, like the AVP, also seems hobbled by Apple's short-sightedness. A device that expensive, with hardware as capable, should be able to do 100% of what a MacBook can do. It should be able to completely outdo the Microsoft Surface, but it doesn't.
This may be true globally, but isn't necessarily reflective of actual market share for the markets targeted.
If your startup is selling to people in say, United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand, then Mac marketshare is 20% to 30% of all computer usage (depending on which nation, how you count, and whose measurements you use, etc).
I haven't wasted a minute arguing with the app store if I'm allowed to do this or that. For what? So I can add an icon to an over-crowded home screen that is already crowded with twisty little icons that all look alike? So I can spam people with unwanted notifications?
I can even use the web platform to make real immersive applications for XR, though I'm currently trying to figure out the exact memory limits to make things work on the MQ3. I've got a vision in my mind of an app that provides a visually intense and expressive experience on phones but also puts you in a world if you've got the hardware for it. The web platform is totally up to it, I just have to figure out to do it.
VR is for gaming. I can see it finding a solid niche there. Make a VR headset that connects to a PC/Mac with extremely low latency and focus all the engineering on the quality of the display and making it lightweight. Gamers will buy it.
AR is IMHO for industrial uses. I could see it being incredibly valuable doing inspections of industrial systems, working in a high-risk environment (for safety awareness), etc. I think the most practical depiction of AR in sci-fi is probably the heads up displays in The Expanse, which make perfect sense to augment human sensory in both military and industrial/maintenance operations in an environment like space.
I actively do not want AR for civilian uses. Yeah, I want to wear glasses and contacts to superimpose ads and slop and Internet drama in front of my life. Get that the hell away from me. When I want to touch grass, I want to touch grass.
A lot of that kind of stuff shows up in cyberpunk, and people forget that most cyberpunk is dystopian. The cyberpunk aesthetic is also kind of 1980s-1990s and is not contemporary. People are stuck in it. We're well past that and even on the tail end of "millennial minimalism" (the Apple aesthetic).
We can imagine HUDs of various sorts with AR glasses that are light and non-obtrusive. But largely well into the future. You may have (probably do have) early adopters who can overlook the manifold limitations that exist today but now you have a tiny audience that isn't enough to drive interesting software development.
I'd buy that in an instant except last time I checked they thought they'd be scanning my face as part of the purchase.
The Palm Pilot (not the first PDA, but an early decent one) pre-dated the iPhone by about 11 years. By that standard, we're likely on the order of a decade away from an "iPhone moment".