It was as if they said, OK, here's the supermarket, now vendors, create stuff and we'll stock the shelves.
Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game developer is targeting the web. Which means the best software you're going to get for Windows that isn't long-lived incumbent software like Creative Cloud is going to be... over Google Chrome (or Microsoft Edge).
OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great, integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great Windows is. But they don't. I have mixed feelings about this, because when Apple does it, they basically put people out of business.
But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows. And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is going to be so much more. And they already are so much more.
For those who haven't experienced it yet, or can't afford Apple products, they're missing something that just hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time I can immediately think of.
Or, idk, I'm blind because I think Apple products are so great. The lattermost is probably more likely.
I think Apple is better positioned with total vertical integration to lay the ground work for the next platform (AR) and has been doing so for years now. They'll ship some hardware when the time is right.
They've repeated this approach since the iPod successfully, never first to market, but laying the ground work before shipping the best in class product.
FB (Zuck specifically) recognizes the next platform and Oculus is a bet to win it. Their issue is they don't have their own phone OS, the Oculus platform they have to build up from scratch (which they've done a decent job doing). They also have a brand issue (I personally dislike their ad-driven business model).
It'll be interesting to see what hardware Apple ships - the UI potential for AR is enormous and very cool. I know Zuck sees this and is public about it, Apple is acting in such a way that they definitely see it - they're just quiet about it until they ship.
Looking at tiny glass displays will be a funny anachronism of our time.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...
It's Android, right?
In fact none of the major platforms we use today was just predicted and constructed. They've evolved and shown their benefits naturally and not entirely in expected ways. No one actually planned the web to be an application platform. It was a university paper exchange program. And the Internet before it was a military communication network.
Your predictions about the grand future of AR remind me of the excitement around VRML couple of decades ago.
"Looking at stale 2D web pages will be a funny anachronism of our time" we thought. Turns out making existing content more fancy in 3D wasn't that useful, it actually was more cumbersome both to create and to use, so 3D web pages died before they even had a true chance to live.
I think Microsoft does far more interesting research than Apple, which largely (but not completely) just buys new ideas like Cisco. An effective strategy, granted. I feel MS has a feel for where development is going better than Apple, with VS Code and the purchase of Github.
"missing something that just hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time I can immediately think of" is just hyperbole. To me, Apple has always been the company that takes other people's ideas and polishes the hell out of them - which is amazing, but when I look at my 30+ year tech career, I don't get very excited about Apple.
The word “garden” suggests bespoke curation for appreciation and abundance, while “walled” suggests within this boundary the experience is purposefully tended and safe.
The Japanese put them in the middle of their homes. The British write children’s literature set in them. Just look — the very idea of a walled garden is lovely:
In film: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5b/52/41/5b524125c48b35bfe0ca...
In life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Maytham_Hall#Gardens
In my experiences with the non metaphorical variety, most anyone who can afford one prefers it.
That being said, iOS is absolutely a walled garden, though I rarely find myself in need of something that it doesn't accommodate anymore (with the exception of WebXR, which isn't exactly popular yet). But Microsoft doesn't have its own mobile OS anymore, so not sure this is analogous.
I was all in the Apple ecosystem the past couple years except for the Watch. And I'm struggling to think of something that's impossible to do with Windows and non-Apple devices besides Airdrop and that didn't even work half the time between my iPhone and Mac mini. Sidecar is a cool feature to have built in, but apps like Duet and Astropad do the same thing...
And I don't think it's a bad thing that MS doesn't Sherlock devs either...
If you have Apple Watch, you can authenticate services on your computer just by double-tapping the Watch side-button. It also unlocks your nearby iPhone if you have the Watch on.
You can trigger Do Not Disturb across the ecosystem from any of your devices.
Find My lets you keep track of all devices in the ecosystem with a global lost and found mesh network built in.
Apple Pay works seamlessly across iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and iPhone. My Mac uses my iPhone's FaceID or a confirmation on my Watch to authenticate payments - no setup or weird configuration required.
AirDrop works perfectly for me with all my devices. I can beam documents and data from device to device without thinking about it.
Handoff works across all my devices. I can start an e-mail on my iPad and continue on my Mac instantly.
I can see the charging/battery state of my iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple Pencil from any device in the ecosystem, including Mac.
AirPlay works across my iPad, iPhone, HomePods, Apple TV, Mac, and even Apple Watch. AirPlay 2 is incredible and has no delay. Rock solid connection - much better than any other protocol I've used.
If I get a new device, setup and integration with the rest of my devices is instant - no configuration required. This is especially great with AirPods - I don't have to pair them with each device. I just pair with 1 and I'm good to go on the rest.
Apple Store support for everything in my ecosystem.
etc etc etc
It's almost unthinkable that some in-software feature that a lot of people like can be done in an Apple OS and not a Microsoft/Android OS.
The question is not whether it can be done, but how easily it can be done. If you have to jailbreak your phone or cobble together a collection of different applications to simulate the experience, for 80%+ of people that's basically equivalent to impossible.
For a few years now there has been some noise that Apple’s Pro hardware lineup isn’t Pro, that macOS is becoming more locked down and more iOS-like, that the software is buggier than ever, and - until they dropped their App Store split to 15% for small developers - that 30% was too high a price.
With WSL, and VScode and GitHub Microsoft are making a (messy, so far) play for developers. But as you point out, they didn’t take it to the nth degree and nail the execution. I wonder if they’ve missed the opportunity now.
I develop for web on macOS, and have all Apple hardware, so maybe I’m missing some of the other things Microsoft have done.
Maybe it is the lack of verticality MS have, and the integration between devices, something they can never match Apple on that means there hasn’t been the transition they were aiming for. That’s why I’ve not switched.
I’ll be very interested to hear what people think about this.
What happened was open source software, linux dominating the server side, and android dominating mobile (iOS as well, to a lesser extent).
> Except everyone publishing software today that isn't a game developer is targeting the web.
Except for nearly all backend development... which mostly targets linux first.
> OK, but Microsoft is in the best position to create great, integrated, first-class technologies that build on how great Windows is. But they don't. I have mixed feelings about this, because when Apple does it, they basically put people out of business.
For example? Apple software is average, and Microsoft has a long history of 'putting people out of business' (not in a good way).
> But here's the thing, in 10 years time, you're going to have Windows, which is still just, and will continue to be, Windows. And macOS, and iOS, and tvOS, and every other Apple OS, is going to be so much more. And they already are so much more.
You forgot... android and linux. How does apple 'already have so much more'?
> For those who haven't experienced it yet, or can't afford Apple products, they're missing something that just hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time I can immediately think of.
That just sounds like an opinion of the average non-tech user who lives inside an apple bubble and likes icon shapes and default keybindings. You're not saying anything specific, just poetry about apple being 'first-class' and 'something that just hasn't happened in computing in any other period of time' (???)
Some of those, perhaps, but MacOS has been on a steady decline for the past five years. Apple doesn't seem to care about the Mac platform except as a lifestyle accessory/devbox for iPhone owners. Windows may be limiting itself by merely trying to provide a decent daily-use desktop environment, but Apple isn't even doing that anymore.
And what is wrong with this? A stable, long-lasting platform is a beautiful thing.
Maybe I'm an old fart (at 36...) but I don't really want "so much more". I want something that I can count on and bank on now, and that will be there for me for as far into the future as possible. None of this lofty futuretech seems to promise that, at least without bleeding me dry in pointlessly recurring interactions like subscription fees.
All pro or semi-pro creative applications target native.
live streaming / video editing / animation / DAW / image editing
There are some toys for parts of these workflows in the webspace, but no serious tools for people who do this stuff seriously.
I am not an old timer like some here that has a MacSE, but for 20+ years, this is the biggest come back of Apple, and many of us were once hoping for. For me it was a simple thesis, something that is so much better deserve to be in a better position. May be it was more of a hatred against Microsoft in a way, since they were shipping crap after crap.
And here we are, Apple dominating and will continue to do so. But since 2016 Apple smells exactly the same as Google in 2003. Don't be evil Hypocrisy.
Except this time around Apple has the better product, services and brand. From a strategic point of view there are no major flaws of weakness. Google's only major weakness was relying on browser for access. That is why they created Chrome. They also saw what could happen if everyone were using iPhone. They will have access dictated by Apple so they need to built Android.
But Apple has no access problem. They are the final End Point ( or starting point would be more appreciate ) of all technology and digitalisation.
> I'm blind because I think Apple products are so great.
Not really, objectively speaking it is hard to argue Apple's product are not some of the best on the market.
And they are the only ones who have this.
It is called: Mesh.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/02/microsoft-debuts-its-ar-vr...
As a fellow cult member who hasn't drunk enough kool aid, Apple products have been losing their luster in recent years.
Apple TV still doesn't have hands free voice control. Fire TV has had this for years now. Using your iPhone isn't great because it doesn't have the microphone setup to consistently hear your voice well. Does Siri and Apple TV finally work together with Home Pod like how Google TV uses smart Google speakers?
Apple Macbooks have suffered immensely with the near useless touch bar and terrible keyboard.
Thinness as a feature seems to override everything else. I don't care about having a thin desktop. I want something I can open and replace parts in without paying about $10k.
The list goes on. Including how there's still no word on the VR / AR unit, while Facebook mops the floor.
The only light in the darkness is the M1 chip.
Yes it does. I use it everyday. Which Apple TV do you have?
> Apple Macbooks have suffered immensely with the near useless touch bar and terrible keyboard.
Still the best laptops in the market by a mile.
> Thinness as a feature seems to override everything else.
Many recent products have actually been thicker. New iPhone is thicker/heavier. New iPad is thicker/heavier. AirPods Pro are chunkier than regular AirPods. AirPods Max are some of the heaviest headphones in the market. Their new Mac Pro is a massive, modular beast. etc etc
> Including how there's still no word on the VR / AR unit, while Facebook mops the floor.
Apple is never first to market. But when they do enter, they tend to wipe the market clean. They also never talk about unreleased products.
> The only light in the darkness is the M1 chip.
This chip and associated tech will power their entire ecosystem and make every product better.
> great. The latter most is probably more likely.
Isn't Microsoft already shipping AR headsets to the US Army? if anything they are the leaders in the space
anyway, as far as "Metaverse" goes I'd argue we already have multiple and the presentation layer is just gradually changing
Apple has cloud services, but they are, for the most part, intended to help sell more iPhones. Can't argue with the Apple's approach since it works well revenue wise though.
Android hasn't really faced many obstacles in cloning things. Consumers in China, for example, still buy Android phones, despite iPhones and despite having enough money for those iPhones. I don't know if anyone is missing out on all that much. I wouldn't say they are like, unenlightened. If anything the Android ecosystem has led to more digitization of life in China than in America, far faster - it looks way more like the metaverse in terms of computing taking over daily life than here, which is to say that you're really far off the mark in terms of what really matters.
Anyway, this metaverse stuff. It blows. Roblox blows. Second Life blew. World of Warcraft is great, but you can hear about why it's great direct from the source (https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/conversations-2014-05-07/) and it's all about really carefully curated and purposeful design choices, the user driven parts of it are not why the game was so good.
Existing metaverse experiences blow not for lack of immersion! So the technology will change little of that. If Roblox was photoreal, it would still blow. Minecraft AR didn't matter. None of that shit matters.
A company that barely supports 1 external video card vendor, that releases shit graphics APIs, that sues game companies - they're not going to break ground in the "metaverse." Apple Arcade games are good, but that's because they are fighting the real antagonist, the real horror show: free to play gaming. That is the antagonist of the metaverse, having to be free and monetize people via Robux or V-Bucks or whatever it is that activates neurons in a 10 year old's brain. It's got nothing to do with the technology.
And given that they don't sell hardware, there isn't money in it. And if there isn't money in it, it isn't worth getting sued over trying it.
So here we are.
What?
Even your example (Creative Cloud) has an iOS and iPadOS app.
Like jfc people, 'End users will experience the metaverse through the default device delivered experience.' sounds like the most doublespeakiest doublespeak ever to have been written.
I love tech and this lofty shit makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Speak plainly and simply, folks.
What is trying to be communicated here is psychographic content will be delivered via standard device substrates existing in well aligned usage patterns that will no doubt delight the end-user with value. Metaverse here simply means they will deliver an experience that is parallel to user expectation yet orthogonal to the digital representation of the physical model of the prevailing social zeitgeist.
Or maybe someone just read Ready Player One recently, and is just thinking: We're going to build the Oasis but nobody could possibility understand what that is, I'll have to break it down into easy-to-misunderstand corpobabble.
The Black Sun was there first.
Can i interest you in a loose collection of extremely janky perl scripts? The bar’s owner hates it but, who cares? If he kicks us out we can just race bikes for a while until the fuss blows over.
> Of course, I think I can help. (…)[jibberish]
Lol, well done!
If you can't explain what you mean in simple, easy to understand language, and you're not talking about quantum physics, you're just bullshitting. Should be required reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
But it’s also not totally unfair. I think much of the metaverse & AR ecosystem doesn’t have great terminology.
I mean ‘slap some goggles on and touch floaty doo-hickeys that you see but they aren’t really there’ doesn’t quite have the same curb appeal…
If we’re pursuing a Metaverse, VR Chat is closer to a Metaverse than Apple.
Also, Apple will try to make useful things appear in your VR goggles - like showing you how to get home on a map, when in fact you're planning to go out for a drink, or go grocery shopping, or anything but.
This is a terrible article, but the idea is - if not sound, at least potentially interesting.
It's basically enhanced location-aware cognition, taking input from everything around you - sound, video, tactile input, GPS location, event history, AI-enhanced memory - and combining it in real time to produce (checks notes...) "a new class of life-enhancing interactions."
The problem? It needs a lot of moving parts working together seamlessly with better-than-human performance and reliability.
Otherwise it will be a kludgy distracting nightmare of failed meta-everything - like the most annoying and useless intern anyone has ever had, only everywhere.
Clippy?
Personally, I dislike the term and I believe that it causes people to lose credibility when they use it. However, I can define it to some extent.
Consider the term 'universe' in the context of 'a particular sphere of activity, interest, or experience'. For example, the 'Harry Potter universe'.
The 'metaverse' is simply such a 'universe' that you can't really opt out of, because it's a layer on top of, rather than distinct from, the regular old world. This is why AR is often considered to be such an intrinsic aspect of it.
Now, you might say that 'the internet' is just such a metaverse, but it isn't because it doesn't benefit the people who peddle the buzzword.
Metaphysics = the physics of physics
Metascience = studying science itself with science
Metaphilosophy = Philosophy about philosophy itself
Metadata = data describing data
Gaming 'meta' = the game of how to best play the game
'Meta' is one of those ultra-abstract terms that obfuscates the meaning of whatever word it is attached to unless the listener gives or has given the word a fair amount of thought. Ah, then maybe that is why it is being used here.
I thought metaverse just meant Second Life 2.0.
Some examples: Roblox, Facebook Horizon, VRChat, NEOS
"I’ve been less sure they understood the full scope needed to build a compelling AR ecosystem – a metaverse."
Ok, so a metaverse is somehow the realization of the "full scope" needed for a compelling AR ecosystem? And what exactly does that mean, and how does that define this particular usage of the (heavily overloaded) term 'metaverse'?
Meta meaning 'about', so a universe about a universe?
edit/ugh: googling the term says 'a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.'
Like wtf does that have to do with the meta root word here?
There is far too much abstraction in this vocabulary defining a thing that is very real.
Imagine a city park where a handful of people have glasses with cameras on them that are continuously sending a geo-located feed of the images to a map server which processes it into a 3D reconstruction. You could watch in real time as the city park is reconstructed and updated in real time 3D, add in virtual content, make content "layers" for different digital assets, track interactions etc...
It's a globally crowdsourced, consistently updated real time digital twin of the world.
> I’ve been less sure they understood the full scope needed to build a compelling AR ecosystem – a metaverse.
Seems this is about augmented reality being integrated into the regular experience of a significant population.
I think it's what Apple's calling their new Augmented Reality platform...I think...or what the author is calling what could be Apple's potential AR platform...maybe?
See flying cars 20 years ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit - ah: I see the author is present. Ok then!
https://i.imgur.com/7XwxrSb.png
If you're not using dark mode, it's #EBEBEB on #121212, which has plenty of contrast:
https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23EBEBEB-on-%23121212
If you're using dark mode, it doesn't simply do nothing, which would be the reasonable approach with those colors, it gives you that light gray text on #FFFFFF pure white background. It's basically the opposite of dark mode.
However…I’m sorry, the article as a whole just leaves me with the taste of Apple butt-licking.
So many of these parts of this “metaverse” are typical recurring revenue and ecosystem lock-in encouragements.
Find My: Let’s sell some high profit margin trackers and keychains.
SharePlay: let’s sell more TV+ subscriptions.
Universal Control: platform lock-in: make you question using a Windows desktop instead of an iMac if you already own an iPad.
Spatial Audio: sell more headphones
Notes features: sell more News+ subscriptions, more vendor lock-in.
ShazamKit: data mine advertising info. Yes, Apple has ad platforms, and with each passing day their business model creeps closer and closer to Google’s (e.g., When they inevitably drop Yelp in favor of their own review system, or if they launch their own search engine)
(Apple can still mine data and use it to sell you things and understand what you’re likely to buy even if they “respect” your privacy and leave all the data on-device. They can still get you to click an affiliate link or buy an app without leaving the realm of on-device ML.
And remember that Apple’s marketing is not the same as their documented privacy policy.
Google:
GMail -> Let's sell some ads
Android -> Let's sell some ads
Android Auto -> How can we put ads in cars?
YouTube -> How can we show people more video ads?
Search -> Let's sell some ads.
Google Music -> Did this sell enough ads? If not lets rebrand it and try to sell more ads.
etc.
Anyway, not a slight against Google, but you can do this with any large company probably. I'm not sure how meaningful it is.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-hires-chaos-monkeys-au...
The App Store has sponsored apps.
Apple News has ads in the app, before you click on any articles.
Apple Music/iTunes Store/Books has promoted artists/albums/movies/TV. It’s unclear whether any of these are paid promotions by the content producer but they’re in a banner so I have to assume Apple gets something out of it.
Apple Podcasts also has a featured section, likely paid ads.
And, as I mentioned, it’s extremely likely that Apple is working on a replacement for Yelp for Apple Maps, which will potentially be a big source of revenue.
And of course, there are ads for Apple’s own in-house TV+ content. Not an ad network, but if they know what you like they can better promote their TV shows. By default the TV app sends random push notifications.
The more Apple gets into content the more knowing your personality and interests is important to their business model.
People got busy with computers when computers were the size of houses. They carried mobile phones when phones were the size of suitcases. Is the proto-AR revolution happening somewhere out there without anybody noticing?
Its possible that there is no low hanging AR fruit. That somebody has to do the difficult job of climbing up the AR tree so to speak (refine the technology until it feels like magic).
It just seems that this would be an exception in how things played out so far in the "digital transformation" journey. Its the nature of the human brain to fill-in the gaps and overlook the rough edges when it really has an incentive to do so.
[0] investment in the sense of personal time by users, creators, business people etc to really learn and use the technology to scratch whatever itch they found it is scratching...
For one, it arguably requires even more CPU/GPU than VR because unlike current phones and current VR you really want ALL the apps to run concurrently in AR. You want your social media app to show the names and or interests of the people around you. You want your mapping app to show you directions. You want your restaurant app to point out which restaurants have seats available or a low waiting time and price / cuisine / style. You want your virtual pet to run around your feet and body, you want to see each person's virtual fashion, you want your virtual monitors showing your older 2d apps running, you want your virtual cooking instructions and while sometimes you'll want to turn down one app over another, usually you'll want many running at the same time highlighting different things. You can even argue you want the various apps to share 3d spacial data (sans privacy issues) so your virtual pet can interact with your friend's virtual pet and the virtual furniture they have placed in their house via some furniture app.
one app at a time is just not good enough for the general population to get iPhone level interested in AR.
Getting full view glasses with fast enough depth sensing so things can be correctly occluded and run all apps simalutainiously and have the batteries last all day seems many years away
AR doesn't have to have those same requirements because you're not going to get nauseous looking at a buggy label flickering in the distance. You don't have to spend compute cycles to trick your brain into believing what you're seeing is real, because it is actually real (minus the overlayed 3D models, of course).
Now, sure, you will have to spend compute cycles on depth sensing and mapping your immediate area. But that's something the OS should/will do, not every app simultaneously. If you think about what an AR operating system would be responsible for doing, mapping your surroundings and providing that data via API is probably one of the first features it would have. It's no different from Windows or macOS communicating with your monitor so that your applications can draw on it. Similarly, every app likely won't be responsible for drawing its UX onto the user's vision - it will probably submit some graphic or model to the OS, which will then anchor that model "onto" reality and handle the user moving their head around it. Much like how every Windows app is not responsible for resizing or moving its window, that's the window manager's job to do. In AR we would probably have a reality manager or something.
What I will agree with you on is that we probably need desktop-level rendering power to solve AR, not mobile-level. However, with the release of M1, it does seem like we're pretty much there already, and I would not bet against Apple's chip team failing to make a smaller M1 that fits into AR glasses.
The main problem is that it's so personal and low latency, but it also takes so much processing power. You need to spend a lot of time on performance and power work before anyone will use it without their phone melting.
My own prediction, using many of the same data points as the author, is that Apple is trying to create a suite of features that act as a sort of Software Personal Assistant. For years Apple has consistently put in better sensors and larger TPUs than strictly necessary for the expected lifetime of the device. We're already seeing some of the results of this with the Health app.
Apple understands the profit potential of platforms, so they'll make some of the data that enables these features to App Developers and that in turn may enable AR, but I doubt any Apple executives are seriously focused on bringing AR capabilities to developers.
A thought I should have fleshed out in the above post: the kind of sensor data that enables AR can also be used to deduce a great deal of personal information[0]. With Apple taking a strong position on privacy I suspect they will make only a limited subset of data available to developers.
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332386880_Privacy_I...
AppClips. Drive-by installs. What could possibly go wrong?
Well-made, cool video though!
Apple also makes good use of Bluetooth for airdrop & wifi password sharing, something else google is light-years behind in.
Good writeup, interesting, even if it seems a bit (quite) oversold to me. Makes me think of Benjamin Bratton's The Stack, the many tiers that compose the digital.
The section has good stuff in it, but to me it came off as me-centric, as about high end experiences like VR, accurate spatial systems.
And that feels like it's a very different piece of the platform than what I was talking about, which is beacons that we can leave for each other. Getting to a bar & having the menu advertise itself. Art installs that come with interesting mini-sites on the browser, or which are cross-media. QR codes are the closest thing we have today, but QR codes require very explicit intent to use, and I've long been interested in the promise of more ambient computing, of seeing the numerous micro- / edge- clouds about me, & seeing what they might offer.
I didn't get any of that from the Find My. I'm looking for Find Your, I guess. Or Share Mine. Which Physical Web did, which Apple's iBeacons continue to do.
It is bad enough that it reminds me of Carbon and the related legion of missteps that hurt Apple badly some 20 years ago and pissed off a lot of loyal developers.
Honestly, SwiftUI combined with Apples now complete market dominance is enough to make me reconsider my career path.
Just because they’re so big doesn’t mean they can do no wrong and several of their recent technologies have been regressive.
The magic involved is not really magic at all, just Swift syntax sugar. Nothing about SwiftUI is proprietary, you can make your own SwiftUI variant by copy and pasting its code. It's just another library after all. Granted, some Swift features do seem like they were explicitly granted to make SwiftUI prettier, but it's not like you can't use those features in your own code or libraries too.
It also means there’s a lot of hidden determinism where there didn’t used to be.
Storyboards were rubbish, I agree, but SwiftUI is more fundamental. Apple is abandoning the PostScript model which permeates every graphical computing paradigm (WinForms, GTK, Qt etc.), and if you don’t like programming with cotton gloves on, you’re basically not welcome.
All very much a shame from my point of view, because UIKit is easily the most powerful UI toolkit around. It’ll be interesting to see how long third parties will continue to be able link against it directly.
I'm unfamiliar with SwiftUI, but fwiw, I found the extensions needed for CSS3D to support AR to be surprisingly small.
A few years back, having a custom browser-based VR stack with passthrough AR, I sketched a talk for the BostonVR meetup, to give around April Fools. It would have purported to be an introductory onboarding demo, of newly available CSS3D extensions for AR. With support for placement in realspace, billboards, HUD overlays, integrated multiple displays, position aware and 3D displays. The extension needed was surprisingly minor. The talk would have been basically "introductory CSS positioning, in a slightly enriched context", which I expected to be quite believable, followed by a "surprise! - the making of the demo spike". I don't quite remember why it didn't happen.
> 2(.5)D experiences
Shallow-3D UIs seemingly have a lot of potential, but don't get much discussion.
Meta: I wish HN discussions around AR were of higher quality. It's be clear for years that Apple was pursing this. Being unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, I'd have liked to see more discussion of what those pieces and their characteristics might suggest about the future. Or for instance, of whether Apple is doing any CEP complex event processing, or retraction of app state changes, to support input with diverse latencies.
And most displays have some privileged focus depth(s). Vergence-accommodation conflict, and eye strain from long use, can be reduced by staying close to that. Ahem, and as my eyes have grown old, the annulus where I can focus well has narrowed.
And maybe, it might be possible to have text in layers, close enough to avoid vergence-accommodation conflict eye strain, but far enough to be tolerably readable, and ideally to allow eye tracking to determine which layer is being read.
I was layering a keyboard-cam-with-annotations over desktop for a bit, to see the kbd in an HMD, but also to explore "graphic artist looking at screen containing processed view of tablet input"-like UX for software dev. The layered clutter was somewhat annoying, so I'm unclear on viability, but it did seem intriguing.
Also, "shallow" still permits some depth. A cm or few at 50 cm (laptop screen) seemed comfortable for me (for some limited frequency of focus switching, and I've only a little experience, and ymmv). That's depth enough for more than buttons and text, but still a very different design regime than "fill the room with XR UI". ILM effects, hmm... someday I'd like to find a stereo drone straight-down view of beach surf, shallow but 3D, to use as desktop background. :) Maybe.
The Shazam stuff seems very limited in use case, and I'm annoyed at "AppClips" because they should just be websites.
Notes+Spotlight+Shared with you all seem like they're inventing new paradigms to avoid ever adding a user file system on iOS, since Apple is opposed to that. It's possible that those new paradigms will be great, but I think they'd be better if Apple gave up a little control.
That's existed for 4 years. A user file system is effectively available on iOS, even if it's not exactly what you might expect coming from a desktop OS.
Jokes aside. What is the mission statement here, what is the dream? Make you never want to interact with the real world again? Help you manage your to do list better?
I feel there was much more of a mission statement for mobile back when everyone was stuck on public transit and at the office for hours every day. You could finally make your life on transit and at the office more meaningful by integrating your personal life with that through your phone.
What's the dream now? I don't get where all this is going unless it's like you're never going to leave your house again, so escape into VR.
Anything that currently has a paper label or barcode in the real world, could be a candidate for an AR app that helps users find stuff quicker. And rather than having to look through aisles or buildings to get to what you want, you could just use a search bar or virtual assistant to look up the thing you want and get a persistent marker to its exact location.
Basically just imagine the kind of UI a video game presents to a player, and how a well executed UI blends in subconsciously to the point that you can navigate menus and issue commands without having to think of it. Now imagine that experience but overlayed over real life, where an app can help you remember someone's name or birthday as they approach and you can take a note with your location and current view attached to it. Something as silly as "funny car" while looking at the funny car, or as serious as telling the nurse after your shift where the patient's pain point is.
I wouldn’t say /too/ excited. Maybe ‘had his brain pulling a Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia with that Pepe Silvia meme thing’.
SwiftUI 2 is so much better. I am taking a 50 hour course, and spent a few hours hacking this morning. So much better than when I tried it 14 months ago.
Spacial Audio works really well. They are probably using something called Head Related Transfer Functions, which I used at my company’s VR lab in the mid-1990s.
The example AR Swift Playgrounds examples are also pretty cool.
I agree with the general premise of the article!
I'm not convinced that this is true. Round-trip latency has gotten a lot lower, especially if you take edge computing into account. 20-30ms round-trip is not unusual. If your mic feed is being streamed in real-time, and the program is able to achieve a high-confidence prediction at (or before) the moment you finish speaking, I think it should be possible to deliver an experience that feels instantaneous, at least for users with cutting-edge connectivity. For visual interactions, 100ms feels instantaneous; I bet tolerance for spoken interactions is even higher.
Sent from my iPhone
And people with prescription glasses won't be able to afford the Apple Prescription(tm) anyway.
