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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

They showed hints of what this could do outside of the floating windows in their announcement.

Like the Dinosaur coming out of your wall and then also talking about Unity.

We have to remember that when they talked about this it was around a year (or more if it isn't delayed) away from shipping and they talked about it at a developer conference. It was clear that they were focused on the technology it has and the mostly Apple developed experience of it.

I still don't fully understand where the idea that this could not be used for gaming came from, except maybe the lack of (VR) controllers but I can't imagine not being addressed by the Mifi program later down the line.

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> I still don't fully understand where the idea that this could not be used for gaming came from

In the keynote they showed exactly one scene with a game: someone picks up a console controller and starts playing a basketball game... on a flat, virtual TV. That communicated pretty clearly to me that they didn't have any interest in VR gaming for this device.

EDIT: Not the keynote, but this video [0] at 3:22 pitches gaming in exactly the same way: you get a big screen!

[0] https://youtu.be/TX9qSaGXFyg?t=202

I remember that, but just because they showed that doesn't mean that there are not other fully immersive capabilities.

Like I said, we are talking about a product that is at least a year away when they first showed it off and they did tease other 3D setups.

To me all that ever said was, hey you can pair a controller to this if you want. A natural extension of being able to watch a movie or whatever.

I feel like saying no games based on that presentation was very premature. Really saying almost anything about what this can and can't do except for exactly what we were shown is premature given the large chunk of time between announcement and release and needing to see what developers can actually do with it once all of the pieces are ready.

Yeah, I agree that saying "no games" is inaccurate, but I do think that Apple does not intend to prioritize "serious" games on this device.

The way I read the keynote is that they intentionally left out any spectacular gaming content because they very much do not want people to treat the Vision Pro as a gaming device like the Oculus. It's intended to for a very different set of use cases, and they tried very hard to communicate that with the emphasis on passthrough and productivity.

So while that doesn't suggest that there will be no games, it does suggest to me that the hardware and software will lend themselves much more to the casual games that are already prevalent on Apple's devices, rather than appealing to the PC or console gaming audience.

Also if the device can be used as a legitimate tool it can be used for gaming. Gamers will figure out because gamers gotta game.

Not saying it can’t or won’t be used for gaming, but the lack of precisely tracked 6dof controllers does severely limit it from being usable with a lot of popular genres of VR games: thinking Beat Saber & Pistol Whip specifically but anything with swords/guns/bows & arrow or generally precise twitch-based mechanics will likely not work well with just hand tracking.

MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game…

I can imagine lots of game genres that could work fine but they’ll only be economically viable if the market for VisionOS games itself is big enough to support such a business model or if Apple jump-starts things by investing heavily in individual titles. Their messaging to date hasn’t really suggested that they’re interested in playing that game though.

We’ll see, though.

I think eventually we may see some tracked controllers, perhaps they shied away from them for launch because they would add to the already higher than expected price point and won't be used in most of the work-focused scenarios they seemed to present. Having to stop typing to pick up a controller to twiddle some 3d ui and then swap back to keyboard seems .. shitty.

Absolutely, controllers don’t make sense at all for most of those kinds of use cases, and would only add friction.

A device like this already has so many conflicting constraints to deal with that I’m not really surprised that they didn’t prioritise the things that would benefit gaming.

Hand controllers may well come a few years down the line (if the product line survives that long), but it’s very much in line with their behaviour historically to initially avoid requiring additional input devices: anyone remember how long it took Apple to release a stylus for the iPad?

Also seems like their efforts to protect privacy by restricting direct gaze input access may make certain kinds of gaze-related input actions tricky to implement, but the Unity video shared earlier suggested that they may be giving developers more access to that stuff (at least via Unity-based apps) than they’d previously implied.

Assuming their hand tracking is super fast (no noticable latency over controllers like on the quest), the biggest loss to not having controllers is haptic feedback. I can see haptic feedback being useful even in non-gaming situations, feeling buttons is better than not feeling buttons.

also other things like doing two things at once... On my knuckles I can pull the trigger and run the thumbstick or other buttons at once.

Hand gestures are cool and all but i have yet to use a gesture system that isn't more than a little 'lossy'...

Oh that also, though I'm not sure how useful that is in productivity scenarios (I don't have enough imagination). IF gesture tracking was super accurate, there would still be the problem of haptic feedback. Someone needs to invent a VR glove that allows us to feel things.

> MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game

Yeah, you're already talking about the most expensive headset, nevermind that added cost for controllers. With this price tag you're going to be talking about a tiny installed base.

If it's easy enough to port stuff... and the controller ecosystem develops... well, sure, I guess this thing could find its niche. From an ROI perspective though it can't possibly be the primary target for game developers, which means it gets ports... and with ports to niche platforms there's always the risk of low quality / jank, which would only hurt the brand.

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