WWDC 2023: What to expect (READ FOR UPDATE)

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, Obioban said:

Lastly, while Apple seems to be known for innovation, what I think actually makes Apple compelling is their relentless year over year improvement. Apple actually debuts new categories pretty infrequently, and the first gen is always pretty borderline. But, year after year after year after year after year after year after year they improve/tweak/refine. After a while, the products get to the point where, overall, they're just in a different league than the competition, with almost no rough edges.

The headset was 8 years in the making. The actual hardware seems to be already refined, so the engineers did a fantastic job.

The software is also refined but the interface is questionable. You can resize Windows and they have shadows. Amazing! How do you write an email with this device and this device alone? The contrast between software "embroidery" and unanswered questions about how to actually use the device is puzzling.

But let's see what they actually launch in 9 month.

[Obioban]

9 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

The headset was 8 years in the making. The actual hardware seems to be already refined, so the engineers did a fantastic job.

The software is also refined but the interface is questionable. You can resize Windows and they have shadows. Amazing! How do you write an email with this device and this device alone? The contrast between software "embroidery" and unanswered questions about how to actually use the device is puzzling.

But let's see what they actually launch in 9 month.

I mean, how do you write an email on a desktop computer without a keyboard attached? Same answer-- through a clunky, on display keyboard. If you want to do real typing, a hardware keyboard is going to be the answer. I don't see any reason that's a failing of the product: a keyboard is literally a hardware device specifically optimized for text input-- if it could be bettered, that better device would be what a keyboard is. If your take is that AR/VR is a failure until it can improve upon 155 years of text input evolution and improvement, I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

 

Pretty sure their previous releases also had multi year development periods before release, so don't think that differentiates the Vision Pro.

 

Hardware may be refined already, but undoubtedly it be better if it was lighter, better battery life, battery on device, and/or higher DPI-- what we're seeing is what they consider the minimum viable product for release.

[saltycaramel]

49 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

How do you write an email with this device and this device alone?

 

The great, profound, imponderable questions…

 

Btw I’m curious to try the virtual keyboard. Could be fine for some quick typing. Or a mix of voice+virtual keyboard+a text expander. 

 

Or just grab the nearest bt keyboard. 

[saltycaramel]

2 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Btw I’m curious to try the virtual keyboard.

 

If anybody wants a sneak peek, go to 16:50 here:

 

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10073/

[saltycaramel]

This monstrosity here is kinda related to one of the Vision’s use cases:

 

 

I’ll take Apple’s Personas, thanks..

 

Another soon-to-be-obsolete (maybe that’s why Google suddenly surfaced it from the labs just before WWDC?) monstrosity:

 

 

A whole booth. 

To do what Apple’s headset can do in a ~1 pound compact device. 

 

Can’t wait to see the final, fully textured, fully volumetric, version of Personas. 

[HenrySalayne]

On 6/23/2023 at 2:46 PM, saltycaramel said:

Another soon-to-be-obsolete (maybe that’s why Google suddenly surfaced it from the labs just before WWDC?) monstrosity:

 

 

A whole booth. 

To do what Apple’s headset can do in a ~1 pound compact device. 

Apple's headset can do the same thing?!? WHAT?! You must be either thinking Apple can bend light rays around objects or you have no clue what Google tries to do. It's impossible to do this with the Apple headset. Claiming otherwise is wishful thinking far off the terrestrial laws of physics.

[saltycaramel]

Remote 3D presence as-if-you’re-there-in-the-same-room is the point, I’m not talking about the technicalities of each solution.

 

Apple’s headsets are gonna do that without requiring a whole booth-like fixed setup.

 

Of course the overlap between the use cases of the two completely different products is not 100%, duh.

[HenrySalayne]

6 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Remote 3D presence as-if-you’re-there-in-the-same-room is the point, I’m not talking about the technicalities of each solution.

 

Apple’s headsets are gonna do that without requiring a whole booth-like fixed setup.

You should look into the technicalities. A headset has the PoV perspective of the user, not the perspective of a camera across the room. It cannot physically see behind you, it cannot see your arms and legs if they are not in front of your body and it cannot see objects facing away from you.

Google has a virtual plane / window they put in front of you so you can converse and show things to the person on the other end (and in the future probably several persons, since auto-stereoscopic displays can simultaneously show multiple perspectives). That's something you simply cannot do with anything head-worn.