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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Did you own prior VR headsets? If so, what is different about this one?

I also have been telling people that VR is magical and that while both current hardware and the current software has issues it will get better and that this stuff is going to have a big impact on humanity... only, I've been telling people this for just shy of a decade now ;P. I don't see the Apple Vision Pro as either the product that made any of this magical nor is it the product that made any of this viable... it is just yet another incrementally-improved product in a category that has been on the verge of getting it right for, well, forever.

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I agree. It's obvious this technology has a big future, the question is, outside of the current $3500+ niche marker, when? The Oculus Rift was created in 2011, id Software was demoing it at E3 2012, and in 2016 consumer versions of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift launched, as did Microsoft HoloLens and Google Daydream.

As it improves, I don't question that it has a future, and some people like it so much they're working on it and writing apps now. The question is how many years from now before a larger mass of people are using it?

The OP talks about the Internet, but the Internet started some time between the 1969 first ARPAnet transmission and 1974 paper on the Internet protocol. Out to 1993 most people were not consciously using the Internet, it was a rather niche thing. With the release of the Netscape web browser in 1994, the inclusion of IP networking capability in Windows 1995 etc., this began to change.

One could say this about AI as well. Up until 2019, Norvig and Russell's CS textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" had only a ten page sub-chapter on neural networks. The now recognized as groundbreaking 2012 ImageNet competition victory by Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, was greeted with skepticism and disinterest on this forum ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). The ideas for connectionist AI were there starting with McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, so that's a lot of development where things still weren't really happening until around 2012 or even 2019.

Some people can see the potential in things decades in advance, but they can take time to move into the mainstream, and it is difficult to determine how long that can take.

Lots of companies had made “smart phones“ before the iPhone came along. The iPhone is what blew the market open.

Other companies had MP3 players for a few years first. The iPod exploded.

You listed some good examples yourself. Windows 3 was nice but it was 95 that really made it big. The Internet existed but it was Netscape that made it takeoff, followed by AOL.

There’s always an invisible threshold. You can make something in a category but until it passes that threshold it doesn’t really change the world. It could be price, speed, ease of use, some new piece of technology, or a combination of all those factors.

Existing VR headsets obviously sell well enough that an industry exists, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous. It hasn’t hit that threshold (assuming it exists for VR). Apple clearly has set their own bar, much higher than others, hoping that they’ve hit that magical point or at least gotten close enough to it. Today that cost a lot of money like the original Mac.

Going from the quest one to the two to the three has increased sales but I’m not sure it’s done anything to really approach that magic inflection point. Who knows how long it would have taken to get there. Maybe the quest four or five would, maybe the eight. We still don’t know where that line is.

But Apple is really pushing and that makes it interesting to watch if nothing else.

I bought an HTC vive 7+ years ago and have middling opinions on its viability long-term as a major game platform. VR is fun and novel, but once the novelty wears off it can be tedious.

It's worth doing a vision pro demo in an Apple store if you can. I'm not planning to buy one in its current state, but it was immediately obvious that this was entirely new territory. It moved a piece of technology from fiction to reality in my mind. The eye tracking is hard to believe without having experienced it.

I'm not ready to say that this device will be responsible for such a large technology shift as the previous person, but I think it will play an large, perhaps pivotal role on our way to the next thing.

Disclaimer: I know a lot of people compare this to a device that I can surmise was meant to do a lot of similar things made by Meta; I have not tried this and may be attributing first-mover credit to Apple for things that Meta may have done similarly well. My comment is made from the perspective of somebody who has never experienced eye tracking in any capacity before.

Other headsets are like a DC film and the Vision Pro is like a marvel film before endgame. The differences (that matter in GP’s context) are qualitative rather than quantitative, and a big distinction is the shift from VR gaming, which most incumbents and current VR fans won’t “get” nearly as fast as the public will (once things get going).

Somewhat ironically, I have no interest in showing people my AVP, I use it for hours everyday but showing it to people feels weird in the same way showing your neighbor your workstation and monitors feels weird. (Part of that is, of course, that I’m not going to give them my laptop to run Mac virtual display, which means they won’t fully “get” it anyhow.)

In contrast the quest devices are practically begging to be shown off but lie in disuse a majority of the time, especially if you don’t have time for gaming.

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