For me, it’s Apple doing R&D in the public square. This is not a mainstream product, but they are shipping it now to learn a great deal and to prepare app developers.

The tech is crap at this time. Too bulky, batteries too inefficient and the form factor like @kr says is terrible. But they will eventually end up on a new & improved product before the end of the decade.

What comes of it could be interesting. Glasses that you never need to go to the doctor again, they improve your vision instead of constantly playing catch-up to your prescription. They provide extra context when driving, and point-out things that we wouldn’t otherwise notice or that may have been forgotten. I.E. where I last left my keys.

The tech will never be transformational though. It’s a replacement product so is not going to improve productivity in my opinion, not in isolation. It might just help us look-up and stop us slouching on our phones & computers more, and replaces the need for headphones with bone-conduction sound. But I’m way more excited about other applications of tiny tech/electronics than a pair of smart glasses or doomsday goggles.

I'm bullish. It's expensive but 10-100x more natural a form factor than a normal computer.

At one point computers having screens and then mice were "going nowhere" and were "annoying," but it doesn't matter how annoying they are in a vacuum. All that matters is the alternatives were much worse.

That trend is accelerating rather than reversing.

Lot of critique and comments that maybe one day the tech will be there, but not yet. Or maybe it never will bc it's solving a non-problem. Here's a good one.

Alternate take: VR is awesome, right now, and ready, right now, to disrupt modern work life.

I work at a full-remote company where we do VR meetings for some of our meetings. Everyone at the company has a headset. We spent a year figuring out how to do it, make use of the tech. We use a 'good' commercial headset but it's evident that the headset tech sucks and the headset software super-sucks. Just laughingly bad. And even still, those of us who've been on the journey over the past year are like: holy shit, this is already such a big improvement for the things that it's an improvement for. Imagine what a competent VR vendor could do? Imagine what a good business model could do?

Even the current shitty tech is good enough. From what I can tell the AV is an order of magnitude better, and I expect more companies to do what we're doing once they see what it's good for. The only thing that would prevent this is a mass migration away from remote work, and I don't see that toothpaste going back in the tube.

It's similar to btc in some ways, actually. What needs to change is people's expectations and beliefs and paradigms of how computing is deployed; and, just as importantly, the dominant paradigm about what it means to work with a distributed team.

But those changes will come because what they unlock is awesome.

I'm sure it's a great product, but the form factor and price are clear indicators for how far away from mass adoption we currently are. Sure, strapping on an Oculus Quest might be compelling for occasional use, primarily due to its relatively affordable price, but I bet most of those cheap headsets still collect dust, because after all, using it still requires strapping on a headset.

I say this as a person who has been absolutely nuts for VR ever since the early 90s. While the technology is good enough to be cool from an enthusiast perspective, getting people to regularly don a full headset is pretty much impossible. The PSVR is the most comfortable headset I've ever used, and I still get tired of using it after a while... and I used to play my Virtual Boy for hours at a time. I neglect it more than I should simply because I don't feel like moving furniture and strapping on a headset every time I want to play a game (never mind the fact that the gaming library is a lot more limited).

And software is a huge sticking point for the technology at the moment. From a gaming perspective, creating a good VR experience is a lot more work than creating a traditional game. I am reminded of this blog post from Gregg Tavares about how much more work it was to create Gex for the 3DO compared to a typical 16-bit game. Sure, the tools improve over time to make the job easier, but there's inherently more complexity, which means it's inherently more difficult to make the experience actually feel good. Furthermore, I expect AR/mixed reality to be the real innovation, something that actually enables people to be more productive rather than being simply a gaming product. I don't think it's a coincidence that Apple has designed Vision Pro in this manner.

In general, I don't think Apple with Tim Cook at the helm nearly understands its own product stack or where its headed compared to how Steve Jobs ran the company. I highly doubt that Jobs ever would have removed ALL ports other than USB-C or kept trying (and failing) to push the terrible butterfly keyboard mechanisms onto their users. Vision Pro feels, to me, like yet another misstep. It's a product that is too expensive and not yet compelling enough for anyone but the most ardent Apple zealot (and one that will drop in value faster than the first-generation iPad or Apple Watch). VR/AR/MR needs to be lightweight and with a long battery life. It needs to be as simple as wearing a pair of sunglasses. We're nowhere near that yet. We'll get there eventually, but until then, it'll continue being a niche technology.

i think most of these products will converge on glasses, hope they get lighter over time though.

try spending all day with a 1lb weight attached to your head, then recognize that vision pro is even heavier.

i’m optimistic the size and weight of these devices will shrink over time, but i think we’re still in the brick era of cellphones for comparison.

I'm old enough to have seen the rise of "Everyone looking at their iPhones 📱 while I ignore them."

I therefore look forward to seeing the rise of "Everyone wearing VR headsets all the time while I ignore them."

I'm not especially bullish on any of these tech tools, except where they undermine my competitors' productivity under the guise of convenience 🤷‍♂️

=> https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vision-pro-hands-on-january-2024/

No thanks. Not going closer to the matrix. Rather move away from that.

A bag of shrooms in nature for me

In 10 years we will have blink powered contact lenses that are 100x more powerful. This is the just the prototype.

It's fiat nonsense from one of the biggest shillers of fiat nonsense on the planet.

Apple needs to chill with the lock-in. Only way I'm getting into VR is with open source and open hardware. Could be fun to program a virtual 3d environment while in it.

It's a nice device, but it's pretty useless if it needs to be connected to the charger all the time.

Could see this easily replicating 4-6 additional monitors though.

Tricking the brain into thinking you are in a different reality is incredibly interesting to me.

But the way we are doing it now is a bit primitive. Our eyes didn't evolve to stare at millions of tiny flickering lights right next to them.

yeah I was so excited for VR for years, got a quest 2 thought it was amazing and stopped using it after 2 months and I haven't touched it in 2 years.