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Comment by randmeerkat | Hacker News Reader

> One thing which ties this all together is that Apple has a full-blown legitimate OS that can run professional software that already exists. Throw it into a headset, driving up the price significantly, but potentially make a computer replacement.

There’s no reason that the iPhone or iPad couldn’t be a computer replacement. The issue is that Apple locks down devices preventing them from being fully utilized. I’m expecting the Vision to be just as locked down as iOS. What I would like to see is Valve take this on with a device as hackable as the Steam Deck.

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It's a long way away for corporate to buy it's developers a headset like what your describing. As far as Work goes, if you cannot get a corporate office to buy them then it's never going to take off.

> It's a long way away for corporate to buy it's developers a headset like what your describing. As far as Work goes, if you cannot get a corporate office to buy them then it's never going to take off.

GDP is driven by consumer spending, business spending, and government spending, in that order. B2B is a nice niche and a person or a company can become wealthy in it, but if you want to be fortune one, the consumer _has_ to be your primary focus.

Yeah, there’s a big up front cost and it’s an almost total gamble.

My spouse’s company bought an engineering team Oculus headsets. The thinking was they might generate new ideas and concepts worth exploring further.

My understanding is that they use it for virtual golf games in lieu of Zoom meetings sometimes, and that’s about it.

I think VR has a future, but I don’t think it has a broad workplace future. Medicine? Absolutely! Gaming? Sure! Office work? Ehhh

> I think VR has a future, but I don’t think it has a broad workplace future. Medicine? Absolutely! Gaming? Sure! Office work? Ehhh

I actually think office work is more practical than medicine in VR. While I agree that office work in VR is less than ideal, I think medicine is even less ideal. How does a doctor diagnose and treat a broken foot in VR..? How does a person accomplish physical therapy in VR? How is an X-ray taken in VR..? How does the doctor take vitals for a physical in VR..?

I don’t think VR will be a component of patient encounters, at least not directly. My thinking on VR in medicine is more AR than VR if we’re to differentiate, and I see it being used mainly in scenarios where visual inspection is more difficult or currently limited.

For example, giving diagnosticians and clinicians a much more economically viable COTS solution to reviewing minutely detailed scans of internal organs. Being able to use imaging data to go “inside” a patient to practice an uncommon, experimental, or otherwise high risk operation for instance.

That’s fair, I’m not trying to be argumentative, normally I would agree with you on the AR applications of medicine. However, given the debut of ChatGPT this year, I really do wonder if AGI will be doing the kinds of analysis you’re talking about before AR is at the level of being able to do it with a human.

:) I didn’t read your comment as argumentative. I hope I didn’t come off that way.

That’s an astute point! I hadn’t considered that there may be a bit of a race between AR/VR and AI/ML in medicine.

Ideally the strengths of both technologies would be incorporated into well defined products eventually.

As long as we are damn careful to properly label, review, and check AI generated medical information.

> :) I didn’t read your comment as argumentative. I hope I didn’t come off that way.

:) I didn’t read your comments as argumentative either, this is actually a great conversation, thanks!

> That’s an astute point! I hadn’t considered that there may be a bit of a race between AR/VR and AI/ML in medicine.

Thank you, it’s a new idea I’ve been thinking on.

> Ideally the strengths of both technologies would be incorporated into well defined products eventually.

I couldn’t agree more. I feel like there must be some fusion of VR/AR/LLM technologies that I’m missing.

https://store.steampowered.com/valveindex

The Index is a neat piece of hardware, but it needed a refresh even before the release of Vision. Now that Apple has planted a flag in the ground, Valve has the opportunity to make a cheaper, open, mixed reality headset, and own modern computing in the 2030s.

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