conciselyverbose

I wanted to like it more than I did. The story was fine, and the world was more alive, but it didn't do as good of a job at balancing the police response to give the sandbox "collect wanted stars until there's full on military vehicles" experience.

Admittedly it's possible that that's because people thought it would be fun to play that game in real life, but between that and focusing all their development on online bullshit I was kind of let down.

I recognize that there is a non-zero audience that buys the lite because they prefer the smaller size.

But I'd be willing to bet a good bit of money that they're outnumbered massively by the people buying the lite for the price difference.

Gacha bullshit? Oh no.

Anyways...

Yes. They're dogshit. Not mediocre, not bad. Complete and utter unusable dogshit without a single redeeming quality. The fact that even mediocre passthrough doesn't exist is the entire reason there are no AR apps.

There's a reason every YouTube tech enthusiast in the space, who routinely experiment with all of them, had their minds blown by the Vision Pro, and it's because there's literally nothing on the market that resembles actual AR regardless of price point.

I would love to see the progress of development in real time, and I think there are a lot of publishers who would love to do it.

But the internet definitely can't handle it. There are exceptions (some games manage to use early access extremely well), but there are enough voices that just want to shit on everything to make it really hard for a publisher to trust doing it.

Definitely fuck people doing it for spite though.

Of course there will be better. That's irrelevant. The only thing relevant is that it's unconditionally impossible for worse to be functional. My argument wasn't that Apple would be the only AR headset that will ever exist. It's that it's the first where AR isn't a lie. It's the first that a developer with a brain would consider making software for.

The idea that photorealistic rendering is required for AR to be useful is moronic. So is the idea that rendering at full resolution is needed. The resolution is mandatory so your eyes aren't bleeding 10 seconds into looking at text, because you could be blind as a bat and see the giant pixels if you step down much. Nothing more, nothing less.

Existing quality does not exist. There is nothing on the market that passes through the real world with low enough latency to use for literally anything that isn't very slowly repositioning yourself in a room. There are options that are transparent and can kind of sort of do really rough shapes and have them be visible, but that's it.

What they call it is critical. It speaks to their vision for the product, and Apple does an exceptional job at having their vision stick. Removing the headphone jack launched wireless headphones to the moon.

Zero headsets are meaningfully capable of AR. "We'll show you a high latency low quality poor color passthrough so you can sort of move around the room without removing your headset" isn't AR. Projecting an absurdly low quality image onto glasses that show the world without doing any processing on it isn't AR. Nobody is going to develop AR apps for either of those types of hardware because neither of those are useful. Phones are capable of limited AR, and those are used to the extent a phone is capable of, which is putting objects into your room to visualize them.

The Vision Pro is the first product out there that has the bare minimum hardware to even approach AR. Without Apple's weight behind it, it would still be in a great position purely on the strength of its capability. With Apple and their software (including the already very rich and accessible AR libraries they've had in developer's hands for iPhones for a while now), it's almost impossible for it to fail.

$3,500 is expensive, but it's absurdly cheap for the capability compared to the VR market. Without the passthrough and without the full computer, just the resolution of the display is already in the multiple thousand price bucket at a bare minimum. If they priced it at $10,000, it would still be completely unmatched for what it offers. The $3,500 price point is insanely aggressive.

They're literally not even calling it VR. The focus is all about AR (labeled spatial computing), which is a space that basically doesn't exist because nothing on the market can handle it without massive deal breaking compromise. The goal is the same as the iPhone, though, democratizing app development. Their AR tools on phone lower the barrier to entry enough that solo developers can make and ship AR-capable apps far more easily than they could otherwise, and that's what they're leaning on.

The Vision Pro isn't the mass market device. It's an enthusiast product/devkit. But there's nothing comparable to put it up against. The space can't develop with insufficient hardware, because low resolution in the display or any meaningful latency or quality drop to the passthrough are showstopper flaws to anything but games and movies.

Ok, be wet then.

Thanks for the permission?

And seriously, while you can ignore the pixels on the vive/index in action well enough, they're there, and they're extremely obvious and unpleasant on text. There are a couple third party options that get in the neighborhood on resolution, but shockingly, they're also really expensive.

But, even considering the high-end optics and so on, it should only cost about $2k-$2,500 before offering

Based on what?

There aren't options with just the resolution and high quality low latency passthrough for that price before you add the computer part.

It should be federal law that any recurring service with online accounts in any format offers two click cancellation (cancel directly on the account page, plus confirmation), and any recurring service that doesn't must be cancellable in less than 5 minutes in person or on the phone, with massive fines per user if it can be demonstrated that they failed to do so.

Actual rentals of physical goods or properties are a different category, because things have to be returned, but services are as simple as removing access or cancelling future scheduled visits from personnel, and complicated cancellation processes are effectively always malicious (in the cases they aren't actually deliberate, they're at best grossly negligent).