Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

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For what it's worth, on the off-chance that anyone at MS who worked on this views the thread, I thought it was cool. I liked what you did. I'm sure that seeing people review the Vision Pro is frustrating, seeing how many things you already did being declared revolutionary. I'm sure it's like that for Oculus developers, too.

In retrospect, people like John Gruber and Tim Urban will mock the industry prior to the Vision Pro for not Getting It Right, or for fundamentally-flawed interaction models, ignoring where things were right. Eye-tracked selection was already a thing in the Sony headset. Tracking windows fixed throughout your environment has been a thing in the Oculus inside-out devices since release, good enough to keep track even on different floors. Varjo does reprojected AR better than Apple, for a cheaper price point (though still a steep one).

Microsoft, for their part, captured a sort of mundane magic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97mqPUn-4x0

I still dispute that eye tracked selection will prove to be the correct solution. I think it might be part of the correct solution but eye, hand and controller based interactions all have distinct advantages and disadvantages and I'm very sceptical of anyone claiming that only one of them should be the only option across a wide range of applications.

Personally speaking I have used all three and if someone put a gun to my head and insisted that I had to pick just one, it would be 6DOF controllers. (and that's me also trying to take into account future improvements in implementations for each)

I agree. I do think eye tracking selection is part of the solution, but combined with at least one physical button on a physical controller. The worst part of my Vision Pro demo was the finger gesture tracking; it's simultaneously impressively good and not nearly good enough. The reliability and tactile feedback of buttons can't be beat.

But there are a lot of ways to do minimal controllers that don't look like gamepads. They could be tiny to fit on your keychain, or built into a ring the size of a normal wedding band. You really only need one solitary button when combined with eye tracking. Since you're already carrying your phone everywhere, perhaps phones could add a physical button on the back for this use case. (The existing buttons wouldn't be good for this because they are intentionally hard to press.)

I love controllers, personally. I think the actual solution is a lot closer to making controllers into hands than the other way around. For now, though? People are going to incessantly bask in the Sony-Apple approach.

I want a little track nub like thinkpads have that’s glued to my thumb so I can click as if doing a bomb detonation movement or do basic 2D movement inputs

What about that track pad you use with your tongue? [1]

Or maybe some wires implanted into your tongue nerves that activate cursor movement when you think about moving your tongue and shock your throat muscles when you become apneic at night (a la inspire device).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684828

This happens with every Apple product, and people need to get over it.

iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

iPhone: "it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard"

iPod did not invent MP3 players, iPhone did not invent multi-touch or smartphones.

Yet both became the defacto standards for every future mp3 player and smart phone.

The same is going to happen with the Vision Pro - for better or for worse. Everyone trying to do only AR or only VR will give up, and try to do what apple is doing.

Is there some law of nature that Apple always has the right ideas? I very much doubt it.

They've had plenty of misses, not just hits. They got the mouse wrong (three buttons are now universal, one was never even close to good enough). The touch bar was a failure. The Apple Watch has not redefined how smartwatch UIs work. MacOS has plenty of UI ideas which have not been adopted by any other OS, most notably the top bar and the left-hand side window controls.

they only succeeded when the market expanded such that you don't have to be technically right, but just have the larger marketing budget.

ipod was advertised around the world like absolutely nothing before it. there was no international launch of consumer device before it.

iphone destroyed the media because att did not have the best network but saw they could sell more data than they could sell minutes. so it also had the most marketing of any telecom device in history.

all that in a time consumer eletronics left the enterprise+niche market.

hardly either are the case with the headset. it will flop. and if not, it's because they undertood fomo influencer marketing better than everyone else.

True enough. And very accurate about the mouse.

But at least the touch bar was honestly pretty great. It happened to arrive with a generation of MBPs that killed all their ports and ruined the keyboard, which is what people more hated.

The Apple Watch seems to be the only smart watch I see around - though granted smart watches are not as ubiquitous as smart phones.

MacOS is tricky because it just feels like if it wasn't for Office at The Office, it would have just fully won...

> The Apple Watch seems to be the only smart watch I see around - though granted smart watches are not as ubiquitous as smart phones.

From some quick Googling, while they are the biggest player by far, they have around 23% of the smartwatch market. And as far as I have seen, other smartwatches are not so similar to the Apple Watch as Andoid is to iOS.

> MacOS is tricky because it just feels like if it wasn't for Office at The Office, it would have just fully won.

MacOS is tied to extremely expensive hardware, so it was never going to win. And Apple never actively pushed for training on Macs like MS did, so there are many orders of magnitude more pieces of software exclusive to Windows than to MacOS. Office may be MS's crown jewel, but there is giant long tail of Windows software that dwarfs even Unix, not to mention MacOS in particular.

Macs also simply lack many things you want in corporate office from manageability standpoint, compared to Active Directory with GPO.

You see more apple watches than other because it's one of the smart watches that can't be mistaken for a normal watch.

I see quite a lot of people using smart watches due to actively going to gym (where a lot of people use them for fitness tracking etc).

A lot of them are hard to recognise as smart watch unless you know the specific model already, or catch someone interacting with it. The ones I and my partner uses are similarly "invisible" (Garmin Fenix series).

In comparison, Apple Watch is the kind where it's immediately obvious you see an apple watch or something that apes its design.

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