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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

you’re really glossing over two major elements:

1. The ease of use of installing Android apps. This is the constant flaw of all the “well XYZ also does this” arguments from tech folks that ignore the flow of the process

https://www.androidcentral.com/how-sideload-apps-oculus-ques...

That’s not exactly something most people will be doing

2. As the person you’re replying to said, the iPad app can adopt visionOS features within the same codebase. The android apps cannot, because there’s no progressive API.

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1. That would be relevant if talking about mass adoption but for the enthusiast market, when people want something e.g. custom songs in beat sabre or to play quake, we are delighted to use Sidequest. I'd happily sideload any app that I could experience some value in using with a headset but it's only things like Google Earth that make sense to me. As far as I can tell, for something like a spreadsheet, learning a new keyboard shortcut is more world changing than what a headset can offer.

2. I just don't rate them. The magic of 3d headsets that differentiates them from 2D for me has been "presence". To stand in front of a massive temple in Skyrim or something and feel like you are there, it's special and can't be replicated in 2D to the same extent. As soon as you get into a focussed state e.g. a game loop churning out iron daggers to level a skill, presence doesn't matter. Your area of attention is quite small and having a headset on is just a pain in ass. 2d apps are in the latter category for me.

My basic rule of thumb is that if you don't already render the content in 3d on a 2d screen, "spatial" doesn't have much to offer besides gimmickery.

The annoyances of sideloading combined with the Quest 2's middling SoC (which can make it drop frames or chug in some cases) were enough for me to not even bother. I mostly use my Quest 2 as a dumb headset cabled to my tower with PC link and play the Windows/Steam version of Beat Saber, which is way more mod friendly and never stutters.

Don’t both your points boil down to: “for my use cases, I don’t care” but then you’re applying them to the general use case that the OP is talking about.

You’re also oddly fixated on games, which is clearly not what the product is focused on delivering.

That’s just incongruent and reductive to the argument at hand.

But to your last point, that’s exactly what the progressive APIs let you do. You can integrate 3D elements on top of your windowed iPad. You’re thinking in “either 3D or 2D”, whereas this is allowing developers to progressively adopt the entire gamut within the singular app which can target iOS and visionOS.

The quest just can’t do that.

> oddly fixated on games

Well, the reason I bought a number of headsets was for developing productivity applications. I just found that it was a bit of a deadend and that the only meaningful value was in existing 3d experiences (games, modelling, visualisation). I couldn't find the value in spatialising 2d productivity experiences. Hence the heuristic, if there was any value, we would already be wasd-ing our way around a 3d view in our 2d tools. There have always been a stream of 3d experiments like debuggers or knowledgement management tools but they just don't offer value compared to 2d text-oriented experiences.

Some of the talk about Spatial, feels like a pendullum swing back to Hacker's "Gibson" or Jurrasic Park's "Unix, I know this" 3d interfaces that were assumptions of what would be useful in 3D, and we have made real versions of these, but they just suck. Classic case of imagination / reality mismatch that often comes with tech.

> allowing developers to progressively adopt the entire gamut

That is just the "how", not the "why".

I still want to be able to tell a coworker to "go past the routers, turn to the left and go past views until you get to models; the one you're looking for will be the one on top of the pile on the right".

It would be "wow" for sure, but also - spatial memory is one of the easiest to hijack and repurpose for something useful. Of course, being able to visualize the codebase like this would require a Smalltalk-level system (I'm seeing a chance here for Smalltalk & Moose/Roassal/Mondrian/GToolkit/etc.).

The problem: once you get to that model, you need to read it. And until now reading lots of text in VR wasn't the best experience, not without things costing $10k+. So, the idea is shelved and waits for a good opportunity in the future... Maybe.

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