Technology

but it’s utterly useless.

That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What's lacking is content and use cases.

Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it's capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren't cutting it. You'd need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.

as a VR enthusiast: if the had just added controllers it would have made it so much more useable.

No matter how good your gesture controlls are, it still greatly limits its use. Theres a reason we use mice and styluses with computers, instead of touch and mid-air gestures!

It's quite predictable. This is the same story that's been told over and over: "it's really cool but not really practical". Pick it up and play with it for a few weeks, then get bored and never touch it again. iVR certainly moved VR forward but it didn't solve any of the fundamental problems that VR has had since its inception.

VR has 1 practical application, and that is gaming, and Apple has very little in the world of gaming outside of super basic 2D games.

I use mine daily… primarily as a monitor for my laptop.

Now you might think that’s dumb, but I can go sit outside in the backyard, park, beach, coffee shop, wherever and work on a big, totally private, crisp and clear, glare-free anywhere monitor. I can bring it to the in-laws or on trips and even use it as a monitor for my Steam Deck. Or I can lay in bed or on the sofa or on a lawn chair and use the Steam Link app to play games from my PC.

Taken purely as a private, portable, omni-monitor, it’s absolutely worth the price for me.

As an AR/MR/XR device, it has some MAJOR software problems. Honestly, it makes sense they’d pause hardware development… it’ll be a couple years before there’s anything worth upgrading and they have a long way to go on UX, gestures, inputs, and even basic real-time object recognition and tracking. I bought mine knowing it was a Development Kit and planning to use it to get ahead on AR development experience, but I hit major roadblocks so frequently I’ve just about given up on every interesting use-case I went into this with.

VisionOS 2 is a baby step forward, but Apple has a long, long way to go before it makes sense for regular people. Heck, they aren’t even including all the cool new AI features in VisionOS 2, and it’s the one device that could benefit from that stuff the most.

So, yeah… it can still be worth it to certain people with specific use-cases, but I think it’ll be a solid 5 years before the software and hardware can reach a “normal consumer” level of quality and value.

That's the important bit that everybody is missing:

Apple has suspended work on the second-generation Vision Pro headset to singularly focus on a cheaper model

Clicking through to the paywalled article, the headlines reads as follows:

Apple Suspends Work on Next Vision Pro, Focused on Releasing Cheaper Model in Late 2025.

I am as unoptimistic on the future of VR as everybody else here, but can we please leave the nuance in? Apple are not turning the key on VR, at least not yet, they are simply doing the predicable thing that everybody said their would: Release a VR headset that isn't targeted at developers only.

I still don't understand who the pro was actually for. Everyone who had one said exactly the same thing about it which was they couldn't understand how to use it productively for anything.

My issue is, aside from gaming, I'm not interacting with the content or data in any meaningful, improved way.

VR for real life is just a series of flat two dimensional screens, usually with a novelty background of a waterfall.

I love VR. So I use it for gaming maybe once a week, for 1-2 hours, usually as an activity with my SO so we can switch who's playing each "round" depending on the game. That's the maximum I find fun instead of tiring. I can't see using it for long periods or for work, that sounds like a nightmare.

I'm still waiting for:

• good Linux support, including apps/games
• not too expensive - $500-ish
• relatively privacy-friendly, so anything Meta is out

Valve Index is close, but it's expensive and Linux content is very limited. Bigscreen VR Headsets looks interesting since it seems more comfortable than Index, just as privacy-friendly, and should work on Linux, but it's still a little expensive ($1k) and there aren't many Linux VR apps AFAIK. I might get it though, still deciding.

• Don't make it out of a solid chunk of aluminium and glass so it weighs a ton and has nothing to balance it out on the back.

Apple: nah

It's not for gaming and it's not for porn... what were they thinking?

I was hoping they'd get the price down to something sane. It looks like it could be a cool tool for CAD. Of course there won't be any input available from a non-Apple computer so I still wouldn't want one.

The video phone is now facetime, skype, zoom, google meet etc…