A friend was one of the first to order and receive an Apple Vision Pro headset. He’s had it for about six months. He’s a great programmer and a sophisticated user of technology. I asked him what he’s done with the $3500 device. “I use it to watch streaming movies,” he responded. Does it have a full two hours of battery life? “I don’t know,” he said, “because I always use it plugged in.”
AR is the technology of the future and always will be? Apple claims to be the company that makes everything useful. (They’re bringing us AI next, which is upsetting when you reflect on the fact that the iPhone isn’t smart enough to correctly oriented a picture of an English-language museum sign nor can it fill out an online shopping form with the owner’s name and address, despite having seen hundreds of similar forms that all get filled in with the same info.)
Readers: Have you figured out what to do with one of these?
One possibility: ForeFlight Voyager, a free “playground for aviation enthusiasts” from the flight planning nerds who were acquired by Boeing. It includes real-time traffic. This was purportedly being demoed in the Boeing pavilion at Oshkosh, but I didn’t see anyone with the headset on. The ForeFlight folks were happy to talk about it, but didn’t offer to demonstrate it. I wonder if it is too cumbersome to get a new user into and out of a Vision Pro. Or maybe people throw up as soon as they are in the VR world?
Was hoping someone would be using generative AI to create highly detailed virtual worlds to live in by now. Those of us without air conditioning wouldn’t be able to wear it in summer though.
AI, self-driving cars, and virtual reality are all technologies that go back to DARPA efforts beginning in the 1950’s when the idea of “smart weapons” was first incepted. Those working on these technologies have always been able to present great demonstrations now and promise that working systems are just 5 years away.
This has been true since I went to an AI lab open house at MIT in 1986 and it is still true today.
I have met people who I have high-regard for who have managed to make entire careers and retire from working on these things without ever delivering anything more than a good demo.
I have a lot of sympathy with your point, having taken a small amount of the dodgy demo AI shilling, but isn’t, say, a Tomahawk cruise missile exactly a fully working “smart weapon”? Or the Storm Shadow that has nullified the Russian black Sea fleet?
Researchers on academic budgets can hardly be blamed for failing to deliver AI systems that turn out to require entire 21st century data centres and ingestion of the whole WWW, especially if they actually wanted explainable AI (“why should we nuke that target?”).
If you have a 360 degree panoramic camera like my Ricoh Theta Z1, VR glasses make for a great immersive experience. Not enough to justify a $500 Oculus Quest 3 let alone the Apple Vision Pro, but the discontinued Oculus Go was ideal for $250.
When football (not soccer) streams on VR, is when VR will kick off.
A while back, I posted about this on this blog when Philip blogged about Apple Vision.
There are many cameras in use at a football game, add some more and send all those feeds to a computer. Off the feeds, create a virtual world of the game. Off the virtual world, allow a VR wearer to watch the game live in action. The VR wearer can then position self anywhere in the game: next to the QB, head coach, referee, anywhere in the field, or stadium, or even on the ball as it moves around! You now get an experience like nothing before.
And if that’s not enough, you can re-wind, re-play and watch an action from different views and angles.