Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Why the Vision Pro Rules with Hugo Barra

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

This week, Marques and David talk with Hugo Barra about his blog post where he makes a number of points and observations about the Apple Vision Pro and the state of VR in general. There's a lot to get... into! Enjoy! Links:  Hugo's Blog Post: https://bit.ly/4cYlEhS Hugo hired by Facebook: https://bit.ly/4azeBur Verge Oculus Rift review: https://bit.ly/3W20Obw Piano Vision: https://bit.ly/3Q3nap7 Karl Guttag: https://bit.ly/3VZu4iQ DisneyQuest Paper: https://bit.ly/49yIREo Shop products mentioned: Apple Vision Pro: https://geni.us/po94 Meta Quest 3: https://geni.us/SUUuw Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:06 the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Yeah, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And this episode is a bit of a guest interview. A bit. It's the whole interview. It's pretty exciting. We were able to get Hugo Barra to join us in the studio, in the flesh. If you haven't heard the name or if you don't know if you've heard the name, you might remember Hugo from work at Google or Xiaomi, or most recently, this is why we had him on. He had this huge, super in-depth blog post about Vision Pro
Starting point is 00:01:52 and like the state of VR and AR. And obviously he has experience from Oculus and a bunch of history in those companies. But there were a lot of things in those posts that I had never read before, like unique thoughts about VR and AR, which in a world where it feels like everyone said everything about this stuff, it was really interesting to see. So I wanted to dig in on some of his hot takes. Yeah. If you don't know the name, you know probably 10 products that he's worked on. No, like he's been in this space for so long and has a ton of great insights and is really, really knowledgeable, just everything tech. Yeah. So it was really fun to have a true expert in the industry come on and
Starting point is 00:02:31 elaborate on some of his takes. So I think we should just jump right into it. Let's roll it. Welcome, Hugo Barra to Waveform. you, guys. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. We've talked a little bit in the past about this, but we've seen you on stage presenting with Google, with Android stuff. We've seen the Xiaomi stuff, and you've had a long history with VR. And we've talked a lot about Apple Vision Pro on this podcast. But I feel like a lot of your thoughts are things that we hadn't even considered. And a lot of takes from your blog post are angles about the history and the future of VR in general that we somehow haven't
Starting point is 00:03:18 gotten to yet. And I would love to talk about them with you. I'm excited to be here, ready to do it. Okay, amazing. Well, I feel like the first thing I want to jump into is like Vision Pro as it exists today. Like it's a pretty good product. You've owned one, you've used one. We've had our review unit, our review came out. What is your like 30 second summary you give to people who ask like, oh, you've used Vision Pro, right? What do you think of it? To me, the coolest thing about it is that it feels like a product that comes straight out of science fiction. And I think David, you talked about this previously.
Starting point is 00:03:48 It is, I think, easily the most sophisticated piece of consumer technology, certainly, that I've touched, and likely of almost anything in the world today. So putting on a Vision Pro feels like you're visiting the future, right? It has that taste of sci-fi-ness that is just a beautiful way to create curiosity, to create optimism around tech and all that stuff. So sci-fi. It is close to magic for a lot of people, I think, especially people who have never tried tried other headsets so that's something with a lot of reviews that i like to look at is context if you're reviewing this headset have you tried other headsets and if so how many and how far back have you tried the headsets and we are also briefly talking about like the first oculus when it came out yeah how long ago that thing came out, and how basic it was.
Starting point is 00:04:45 But if you've used headsets since then, this might not have the same magic appeal, but it is fun to give people who have never tried a headset a look in the Vision Pro and just the look on their face. Can I throw just a completely random story into the mix when talking about the history of VR? So I've been a VR enthusiast for my entire adult life. And for me, it started off when I was a freshman in college.
Starting point is 00:05:10 My first internship was, I was a QA engineer at Walt Disney Imaginary. This was in the 90s in a project that was part of Disney Quest, like the indoor theme park thing that they had going on until a few years ago. And this project was called the Aladdin Magic Carpet. It was a virtual reality attraction. And this was the craziest thing ever because of the equipment,
Starting point is 00:05:37 the technology that was available at the time. So you'd like sort of sit on a chair. It was kind of like just holding your bum. You put on a seatbelt and then you'd put on this headset, which was this massive CRT display. It protruded out like a foot and a half off your face. We can pull a photo and show it. And it was so heavy, like we talk about 600 grams, et cetera. It was in the kilograms that it needed steel cables hanging off the ceiling to hold it in place so your head you know wouldn't fall and each eye it was vga resolution so it was actually not bad each eye
Starting point is 00:06:13 was powered by a separate silicon graphics onyx workstation and it was incredible and they actually had what you might call the first motion controller that anyone ever came up with. Now, this launched 25 years ago. So to me, the history of VR, certainly in entertainment, kind of starts back then. So boy, have we come a long way. We have. I could probably pull video from that from my family archive because I've gone to that ride so many times. Really? Do you remember what it was like i remember it was it mind-blowing at i feel like it would be mind-blowing to have no yeah as like a six-year-old it was insane yeah i was gonna say adam how wait did you exist i'm older than i look that is really funny yeah i mean so we even if you only go back to what when's your did you use the first quest
Starting point is 00:07:02 i mean the first oculus yeah i did stuff so that's a decade yeah it was yeah i mean i was using it as a freshman in college in 2013 so yeah so now now we're looking at like okay we've seen this arc of improvement clearly we've figured out what parts of a vr headset that we want to improve the most to deliver the best experience to people. Lots of resolution, lots of high-quality sensors and tracking. And we've arrived in 2024 where we have things like Quest 3, Quest Pro, those are the most common ones I'm going to reference, and now Apple Vision Pro. I think one of the most interesting things is that
Starting point is 00:07:43 while you may or may not consider Vision Pro the best VR headset, you can definitely argue that it's the most important VR headset, especially just because of the way people treat what Apple does. Can you expand a little bit on why it's so important, not just for Apple, but for the entire industry as a whole? important not just for apple but for the entire industry as a whole yeah totally so first of all i i think that the vision pro is one of two seminal events for the for the vr industry the other one is probably the founding of oculus and obviously the subsequent acquisition that gave them so much investment firepower but i really i put vision pro right up there for a very simple reason, which is like, if Apple cares, then everybody cares, right? Like if a brand that has earned the respect and reputation of consumers all around the world actually cares about this thing enough
Starting point is 00:08:34 to put a product in the world with their perspective, then everybody cares. You know, Palmer Luckey started Oculus, used to say that like VR has to be something that everybody wants before has to be something that everybody wants before it can become something that everybody can buy or can afford which is why by the way in that long essay that i wrote i don't even talk about price because i think it's not really the point yeah of a product at this stage so so to me it it is the fact that apple
Starting point is 00:09:04 you know has a perspective and they are applying the Apple attention to detail in a way that no one else, frankly, has the patience to do because it takes years to arrive at all of those little things that they've done. And I think that's really important. There's one thing about the Vision Pro, which I think is probably the most important thing from a product perspective, which is how they introduced gaze and pinch.
Starting point is 00:09:30 To me, that is the VR equivalent of the introduction of multi-touch, which is without any doubt, right? Capacity of multi-touch is the defining characteristic of the current generation of smartphones. And it was introduced in the first iPhone and defined that product more than anything else yeah if you go back and look at those videos of the first iphone when he pinches to zoom in the picture and the whole crowd goes oh whoa like that moment yep that intuitive moment that magical understanding everyone had that that click that's interesting so gaze you think is one of them i think yeah it's the combination yeah you know it's looking at a thing feedback Haptic feedback in a way.
Starting point is 00:10:05 Yeah, exactly. The fact that you're giving yourself haptic feedback by touching your other finger. Yeah. People laugh when I said that, but that's true. Yeah. When you're actually touching your finger. Super high quality. That's the moment.
Starting point is 00:10:15 Yeah. Okay, interesting. Yeah. I think, and also, this is the headset that has a screen on the outside of it. It's got the eyes going through. It's got the transparency where you can see through and people can see your eyes. Do you think that's also a critical part of maybe what makes VR more appealing to people or is that lower on the totem pole? I think that's much lower in the totem pole. First of all, I don't know why, but no one's talking about the fact that that came straight
Starting point is 00:10:39 out of Ready Player One, like where the headsets are all all i think they're all optical pass through in ready player one oh yeah okay uh and you know and and it's it's almost like eyesight when the person is like super immersed in content you can't see their eyes right but then oh yeah yeah it's like totally i've gone back and i've re-watched yeah that's totally where it comes from so funny okay um you know i think that's like it's like Apple design perspective at play here. It's just like doing something really different and unique that tries to bring sort of human nature out into this crazy, potentially isolating new type of technology. I hope it survives because I think it's fascinating.
Starting point is 00:11:20 Let's forget about the implementation as it's there today. I think it's going to get a lot better if they decide to keep investing on it i hope it stays but i worry that it may not because the quest to reducing weight yeah pun was not intended is so much more important do you think that's something that would only happen in the non-pro version like in your opinion would they keep it in the pro model and still try to get rid of weight in other ways? There's one circumstance where I think they might, which is if the pro model uses such premium,
Starting point is 00:11:53 you know, lightweight materials, carbon, et cetera, you know, very expensive, but lightweight materials that it allows the bill of weight to sort of still have that lenticular display, which I don't know how much that thing weighs, but it's probably like in the 30 gram, 20 to 30 gram territory, maybe including the display controller. But then you still have to have glass on the outside.
Starting point is 00:12:15 And, or faux glass, pseudo glass, whatever that thing is. Which, so, so I think it comes down to like this trade-off space of weight versus features, which I think is so ridiculously important. Right, yeah. I'm kind of curious about your thoughts on, like Apple doesn't like to call this a VR headset, you know? They like to call it a spatial computing headset, which the first time I ever used this at our first briefing at WWDC, it sort of clicked for me what that meant, because they had been talking about that over and over and over again, like, it's spatial
Starting point is 00:12:48 computing. The era of spatial computing, it's here. And for the most part, unless you immerse yourself in a full environment, you are mostly in just an AR environment. That's right. And so I know that now with the Quest 3 and with the Quest Pro, but mostly with the Quest 3, Meta has been pushing into like, okay, we actually also have to enable these like AR mixed reality environments. is the thing that's going to like push forward because i feel like meta sort of gave up on that a little bit for quite a while and realize people mostly use this for gaming yeah and that actually
Starting point is 00:13:32 i think is a reason why the this still feels like a dev kit because there's not there's nothing to do in it yet you know and like they want you to use it for work but like do you think that that's that's a paradigm that's going to move forward? Or do you think that Apple is going to realize that maybe the hyper productivity stuff is not it, but there's still merit to spatial computing and they'll pivot? Yeah. So I think, um, short answer is I think spatial computing is the right bat to place with mixed reality, augmented reality, whatever we want to call it,
Starting point is 00:14:06 as sort of this super important defining element of it. I think it is, it just has so much more utility. You know, the OASIS isn't a thing, in my opinion. Right. The way Oculus ended up focusing on gaming beyond sort of its founding philosophy, you know, it was a company that was built by gamers, was the fact that we tried other things and they didn't work.
Starting point is 00:14:36 You know, so gaming was like, okay, like product market fit exists here. Let's keep investing on tech that would enable something like mixed reality but let's go all in on gaming first yeah i think that that's what i keep thinking about those especially the quest headsets is they didn't really necessarily have an obvious thing and gaming kind of surfaced as the thing that people like to do the most and that's that's the thing that people started gravitating towards and it works really well with controllers. And now I see, I mean, this has happened with Apple products before where a first gen comes out and we just kind of wait and see what developers come up with. And oh, it seems like, oh, fitness is catching on.
Starting point is 00:15:13 So the watch is now a fitness watch. Is it possible that a new thing will come up as the thing that people want to do in Vision Pro? Or does it have to be gaming again? Because there's no controllers with the Vision Pro. So it feels like gaming is going to be a weakness of the vision pro there's no really immersive vr or ar gaming experiences that i have found to be convincing yet yeah so spatial computing feels like it's the other possible big thing but yeah i don't know gaming gaming's pretty
Starting point is 00:15:40 good on the quest i think gaming is first of all it all, it is a piece of anything you want to do. Because if it's a productivity device, you're still going to want to have fun with it. Always. I do think that casual gaming, mixed reality gaming is a fertile enough territory that Apple can go all in on that stuff for a while without sort of giving in to the immersive gaming stuff, which, as you said, I think would require some sort of controller support and so on. I think that's going to be more of a hobbyist thing. And I hope that Apple opens up enough sort of hooks such that those Team VR hobbyists can still find a way to play, you know, games with, immersive VR games with Vision Pro.
Starting point is 00:16:27 But I think they're going to go on all in on casual games, things that you can certainly do just with your hands, going to, you know, social and share play gaming as well with multiple personas in one place. That to me feels like a big enough place that it's worth Apple bet. Yeah, that's fair. enough place that it's worth apple bad yeah that's fair it's funny because like for years they're always showing ar kit demos at these launches with the new ipad and to what end nothing has happened from that but it's like every single year they're like oh a dnd game is on a table and oh look everyone with their ipads can see it and at the time obviously it was like
Starting point is 00:17:03 you're not gonna go meet up with your friends in real life with your iPads and do this the whole time you're hanging out but this makes more sense with like the share play you're in different environments you're in different rooms and that was part of the videos yeah too yeah there's no yeah that shared experience feels like the obvious next dimension if you will of what would make something like this really appealing to people and would want them to use more often uh but yeah that's there's a lot of things are like one update away that i think could be really cool about this this type of headset um okay i want to i want to go through some of your uh your takes in your blog post that i would consider hot takes and i don't know if you would agree obviously you have a lot of thoughts and you've much more experience than
Starting point is 00:17:44 i do but some of these to me read as like really fascinating that may or may not turn out to be true. So I want to go through some of them. And people may or may not disagree with. Yeah. Well, we'll see. A lot of emails. We'll see. All right. Here's the first one I saw that I read. Apple intentionally made the display blurry to hide the screen door effect. Now, just to clarify what the screen door effect is, because these displays in the Vision Pro are incredible. And the screen door effect is most often noticed in displays that are lacking resolution. So break it down. Why do you think Apple would do something like this? And why would it happen on a display with such high resolution? So first of all, hugely controversial point. There's a very famous blogger in the VR space called Carl Gutag, who's a display expert. And I've based a lot of my sort of commentary here on some of his sort of objective findings. I've since learned that there's a lot of people that sort of disagree with the approach that he's taken in some of these things. But I still think that his perspective is really useful.
Starting point is 00:18:47 So the challenge with VR is that the pixels are too close to your face. So even when they're so close at, you know, 3000 PPI, 3000 plus PPI, they're still not close enough that you can't see pixels. There's a whole thing around how you measure resolution in VR. You use angular resolution instead of pixels per inch or pixel display. Per degree. Yeah, pixels per degree. Yeah. And even as high resolution as the Vision Pro is,
Starting point is 00:19:20 it's not approaching what you would consider retina display for a VR device. They're like maybe 60 to 70% of the way there. So what that means is pixels are still actually discernible. You can see two pixels apart, which means that things like screen door effect and aliasing, which are some of these sort of distortions or kind of visual artifacts that make it, make things less smooth to look at, are still mildly present. So my hot take here is that Apple maybe tuned their display to add a tiny bit of blur and lose a bit
Starting point is 00:20:00 of perceived resolution just so that these little visual artifacts disappeared and they would get a softer look on the display which to me is kind of like a matter of taste right which is obviously something that we respect apple for so i support that decision if that's how they went because it does make for something that just feels a bit more pleasant and less harsh than these visible things. I think that's a good word. Here's the parallel I was going to draw. When I'm shooting a video about a smartphone, I'm pointing an 8K camera and a lens at a screen. And these screens are incredibly high resolution. And you can actually see when I pull focus on the lens, when I hit the exact focus plane of the lens
Starting point is 00:20:47 because there's this harsh, banded, crisp display. And it's not like you're seeing individual pixels, but it is harsh. And I found that if I turn it just another fraction of a degree and it's slightly out of focus, it's a little smoother and easier to look at, especially with macros. And so I was thinking about that when reading that. I was like, okay, I don't know if Apple
Starting point is 00:21:09 is necessarily making their display blurrier or maybe just tuning the lenses to be slightly beyond the plane of focus of the display or whatever they're doing. But as a taste decision, I feel like I also support it because overall, you't want eye fatigue and as much as I want to see all the pixels I'm a pixel snob I kind of like I like it to be a little more pleasing to look at so I get it I feel like I get it yeah so that is I agree with the take I like that one all right we're going to take a quick break for ads we'll be right back to talk about how maybe Apple Vision Pro is the best thing to happen to the Quest. See you soon.
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Starting point is 00:23:34 celly and an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Well, we kind of already went over this, but I'll sort of phrase it in the way that you did which is apple vision pro is the best thing that ever happened to vr including for meta who has made their own headsets so this is probably like the highest confidence sort of take that i have having
Starting point is 00:24:19 been in sort of the middle of the thing when I used to work at Oculus at Meta. You know, side note is I used to joke or semi-joke, I would say, in like company all hands and stuff that like the best thing that could happen to us was if Apple decided to enter, you know, VR. And, you know, we've been, there've been rumors about this for a long time. Because I really do think that, as I said, when Apple cares, everybody cares was going to be a thing that would help us tremendously, like massively floats all boats, massively grows the pie. And it was interesting to even see Mark Zuckerberg's video recently where he kind of talks about the elephant in the room, right? Obviously, he cares about what's happening, so why not talk about it, which I give him huge props for. it's just so interesting you know putting aside whether you agree or disagree with things he said i mostly
Starting point is 00:25:09 agree um but putting that aside for a second it's so interesting to see how meta you know in the voice of mark in this case has now shifted from evangelizing to competing right so before it was it was like, hey, VR is cool. Like you gotta try this. You got, please, please try it. Like go try it. Here's some cool things that you can do with it. So like no longer consumers don't need to be convinced that VR is cool.
Starting point is 00:25:36 They now know that VR is cool. So now it's like, why do we have a better product? And I love that because now it's all focus is on the teams that build the product and how to make it better and chasing your competitor, whether they're in front of you or in your rear view mirror. It's kind of like Android versus iOS all over again. That's the comparison. I think a lot of people would make, and obviously it's Apple. So it makes sense that this is the iPhone of it, but the competitor to the iPhone often needs to come up with the reason why you
Starting point is 00:26:06 would choose it over the iphone especially in this country that's just a very popular thing you have to do yeah and so sometimes it's price sometimes it's a couple features that this one doesn't have sometimes it's some customization that this one doesn't have and there are a lot of really good reasons why people would buy a quest 3 over a vision pro despite being a seventh of really good reasons why people would buy a Quest 3 over a Vision Pro, despite being a seventh of the price or whatever it is. So I think that's a comparison a lot of people will make. On that note, where you say now that we have competitors, it legitimizes everything. The interesting thing that I've noticed about this that you actually said in your blog was
Starting point is 00:26:39 that this is one of the first Apple products that didn't really meet the build it and they will come mindset for developers, which I also find weird, right? Because Apple announced it eight months before it came out, something like that. And they were like, you know, we've got these dev kits available, you can build these apps. And it seems like you would have developers rushing to make Apple Vision Pro versions of apps, right? When it launched, there were like 600 that were native. Everything else was iPad, which, cool, you can natively port over stuff.
Starting point is 00:27:18 But why do you think developers have not garnered so much interest in making native Vision Pro apps? It seems worth it to do now so that when the second generation's out, you already have something you can build on. What's your take on that? Yeah, so I totally agree with everything you said. And I think that it's likely that Apple just really underestimated the sort of the Apple magic influence over developers by thinking that more things would show up. Of those 600, frankly, Apple probably had to even lower its bar for approval in the App Store,
Starting point is 00:27:44 because there's a lot of like random clocks and timers and things. Yeah, yeah. Widgets you can put on walls. You know, like, yeah, a collection of widgets makes sense. But, you know, widgets as like maybe individual apps are just not as interesting. So I think they did underestimate their or overestimate their power over developers and didn't actively do what they possibly could to get some of these key apps in the store. You know, to like really,
Starting point is 00:28:12 even if they had to pay developers or give them all sorts of incentives, I think they probably should have done that. They thought the incentive would just be, we're Apple. We're Apple, right? So, and I'll mention my favorite example of where Apple missed a beautiful opportunity.
Starting point is 00:28:25 Have you guys tried Piano Vision on Quest 3? I think Ellis has. Yes. Ellis is a piano player as well. Ellis, what do you think of that app? It's one of those things that like, wow, this would be so cool. It's a really good way of phrasing it. And there's like a Piano Vision clone in the Vision Pro store,
Starting point is 00:28:48 which is really not that good. It's called Piano Frames, I think. But Piano Vision is like a legitimate tool for learning how to play piano. I learned piano as a child, and I forgot it all, and I sort of went back to learning it with that app. And it's just like like I can't think of a better example of an augmented reality app right but that one so why isn't it available on vision pro right you know it's so weird it just I maybe it's because the price is expensive
Starting point is 00:29:17 and developers don't know but my sort of take on that was that I just felt like developers didn't know what to do yet and I think that that's why you're seeing so much kind of shovelware apps is because people don't understand yet what the paradigm of spatial computing is versus just something in virtual reality. We at Oculus, we had to shave developers a lot. Like we sat down with them, we helped make the app better. We put a lot of budget to work towards, you know, funding this developments. And I think maybe Apple could have done a bit more of that. Maybe there's still time to do it. Yeah, they when we talked to Apple about this, they I mean, maybe they're not talking to us about it, but they talk so much about the development of the hardware, how amazing
Starting point is 00:30:00 the hardware is, how long they've spent inventing new technologies and building new things, materials inside this to make it physically possible. We had to invent this to make it fit in this so we could do this. I'm like, that's all amazing, but people have to use it now. What are we going to want to actually do in the headset that are kind of like lacking at the moment? Like there's a couple of big apps, Netflix, YouTube, things that just aren't here that I think if they were, that I can more easily answer the question, what does it do?
Starting point is 00:30:30 Because that would have a couple more things to say that, oh, you already know about Netflix. You know what this does. And it's just right there, just right on the doorstep of like being easy to explain. Here's another one of your hot takes.
Starting point is 00:30:43 I'll read to you. The battery, this thing right Uh, the battery, this, this thing right here, the battery hanging off the vision pro. Um, I, I thought it was, you know, a compromise for weight and heat, but you're saying it's actually an intentional decision and that they will keep it this way for the foreseeable future to tether other things and get you used to the idea of tethering to the Vision Pro. Please explain. Yeah, and this is a super controversial one. I do really really think that it's one of the most important things that Apple did. It's like number two in my list of thank you Apple things. The first one is Gaze and Pinch and introducing the world to that. It's just a gift to humanity. This
Starting point is 00:31:22 one is not quite a gift to humanity but it sets the right tone for VR. Taking the battery off is the first step in the journey of reducing the weight by pulling components, but also pulling heat generation out of the headset. Just to give you an idea, I don't know how much this thing weighs. Obviously there's a lot there besides the battery,
Starting point is 00:31:42 but the Quest 3 battery is 69 grams. Nice. Which like what 15 maybe of its weight 69 yeah it's about yeah 500 grams yeah something like that right um and but when you start to take off 70 grams for the battery and you you know you take out a whole pcb and now all of a sudden you can take out the fan because you don't have heat on that thing anymore like you start to find a path to that magical 300 grams which i think is where things really turn and people stop saying that this headset is too heavy to wear but also it starts making their face hot. And Ellis, I hear you totally on that. Nah.
Starting point is 00:32:28 Totally, totally hear you on that. So the only way to do that is to set expectation with V1 that there's a tethered brick off this thing. All the way to inventing a belt clip and sell it in your store, despite the ridicule that that may seem, I think that's all worth it. So, okay, the foreseeable future of Vision Pro then is battery is always tethered,
Starting point is 00:32:54 but also getting people used to that idea also allows them to, in the future, possibly take more pieces of Vision Pro out of the headset and tether them as well so that you get this lighter and lighter face computer. Yep. It's a good idea. And not only moving things to this brick, but at some point, you may not need the brick anymore because you can just plug it into your MacBook or your iPad or even your iPhone. Sure. Definitely. Well, I guess the magic right now is that you just look at your Mac and it appears and that's super cool. But if you get, let's say, because we expect there to be a non-pro of this headset at some point. An Apple Vision Pro is $3,500. An Apple Vision Air or whatever is somewhere down the road, which has a certain different feature set that enables it to be cheaper. and different feature set that enables it to be cheaper. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:33:45 Maybe it doesn't do the wireless stuff as well, but you can plug it right into your Mac and they still have the tether and everyone's used to the tether. I think getting that headset to $1,500 without getting rid of the compute is going to be a really tall challenge. What do you think is, okay, if you were to start now chopping things out of Vision Pro
Starting point is 00:34:01 to get to the magical $1,500 headset, what do you get rid of right off the bat? I feel like you have to get rid of the eyesight with today's tech. Yeah. I think, yeah. Eyesight. I don't know how much that weighs,
Starting point is 00:34:14 but it is a bit of dead weight. You might argue, I think the, the, what's their depth camera, not the lighter, but the other camera true depth the true depth camera which i think they only use for the personal enrollment it might be another thing
Starting point is 00:34:30 you can get rid of use that use your iphone to chop that off altogether yeah i think you know they can probably use four or five tracking cameras instead of six i have to think about your mouth because that's almost exclusively i have the facing the cameras facing down that um anyway but then i think so then the next thing i would move out is the m2 chip and that whole thing yeah the last thing to go would probably be the r1 chip and everything around it because of because that's when you really are there it needs to be there because it's a sensor right right i wanted to drill down into that a little bit further into the plugging in paradigm because apple specifically see it seems like they want this to feel like it's computer don't need your macbook anymore
Starting point is 00:35:15 you don't need it you know it's it's a whole thing it has an m2 chip in it it's just as powerful as a macbook air yeah so it's So it's a weird paradigm, right? Because they're basically selling it as a whole separate computer, but they're also selling it as a headset, which we don't traditionally see as a computer. Yeah. And I know that Oculus, you know, they have a standalone chip inside of it too, but you're not doing, you're not like running a browser on that generally,
Starting point is 00:35:44 you know, but apple has safari in there they've got yeah i message in there and all of these different apps do you see a point in time where they i know that you said that they were gonna like remove it and switch to plug could they feasibly do that you know and have like a cheaper one that doesn't have its own computer and is powered by a separate computer? You could sell this as an accessory, right? This is essentially an iPad Pro in a box, probably with some additional co-processing capability. Maybe not even, because if you want to make it pluggable into an iPad, you then have to move that into the iPad anyway, right? So this is like, you could literally sell the computer as an option, right? That turns your headset into a fully enclosed spatial computer
Starting point is 00:36:30 that gives you the equivalent of an iPad Pro in terms of compute capabilities and power and so on and so forth. And I think that's a very viable computer to have with you. It's like a Mac Mini in a way. And we're very close to it. It doesn't have a screen. We're very close to it. It doesn't have a screen. We're very close to this being a special iPad Pro that's very usable and suitable
Starting point is 00:36:50 for a lot of different tasks. Forget the price, right? But as far as job to do, I think we're very close. We're maybe two software updates away plus filling the app store gap from being there, which is very exciting. Yeah. Could we get rid of the speakers and have consumers be happy?
Starting point is 00:37:08 You have to use AirPods. You have to use something else. But that just feels like, you know, in 99% of other electronic times we're using devices, we're using not the speakers on the device. But it seems like VR headsets, I don't know a lot of people that feel that way, that wear specifically headphones when they're doing VR. Yeah, I think you probably don't need to because I don't think it necessarily buys you that much in terms of weight reduction and cost reduction. And I think it does take away from that sort of magical put it on and you're good to go kind of thing. So that probably would rank a lot lower in my priority list.
Starting point is 00:37:44 Yeah. Oh, I have like very existential questions that are like yeah future out i don't know if you want to jump into those right off the bat yeah i i could i could pitch one if you want sure go for it um okay so i remember when i was reporting on oculus stuff way back in the day and they i think acquired, um, what company to acquire? It was, it was some VR 360 storytelling company and they basically made a couple of movies that you could watch in VR and it was like immersive because it would be all around you and you had to do all this stuff. Where do you see the,
Starting point is 00:38:20 like, do things like that actually pull users in and make it a paradigm that people want to use because i always thought when i was reporting on that was like it's a cool little experience but just like this launched with the alicia keys experience and i'm sure that they'll launch yeah and it's amazing right it's amazing but it's sort of like a demo of what the headset is good for in general yeah do you think that invest apple investing in more of those kind of experiences is something it would actually get people to buy the headset because when with the oculus thing it was a cool couple of movies but it didn't feel like someone was going to buy an oculus to watch these movies because not that many of them are going to
Starting point is 00:39:03 be produced yeah and then you know how many times they're going to want to watch these movies because not that many of them are going to be produced. Yeah. And then, you know, how many times are you going to want to watch that same movie again? Right. Right. So you almost need like an infinite. That was part of the appeal, but it was also something that would get old kind of fast. Yeah. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:39:18 I've watched the Alicia Keys video like 12 times now. Really? It's great. No, no. But yeah, that's, that's, it me of um the 3d phase we did the whole 3d team for a while or even when the red hydrogen came out and it was like look at this amazing video on the red hydrogen and it would look pretty cool and then you'd be done and be like okay what else a tech demo that's it yeah it's over it's a party trick yeah i think that's something mark zuckerberg talked a lot about which is they have invested so much in not just games,
Starting point is 00:39:47 but also content, library, and just partnerships in general for things for people to do in Quest. And that's a big part of why Quest is pretty good. But to me, that still feels like a way for trying to get people to stick around, but not necessarily the reason people show up. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, boy, do I have a lot to say.
Starting point is 00:40:07 Yeah. So first of all, and this is a bit of a hot take, I don't think, this is not exactly what you asked, but it's background. Okay. I like background. I don't think that rectilinear video watching in VR is a thing that retains.
Starting point is 00:40:21 We've tested it extensively and it's really cool. Yeah. But over time time you're like i know i'm just going to watch it on the tv or on my phone or on my ipad and so on so you know rectilinear video which is rectangular whether it's 3d or not yeah i don't think is a major appeal it's i mean you don't create a device as sophisticated this just for people to watch tv in it right um so then you go into the immersive yeah video format which is what you're talking yes which is incredible but it's also like is this the reason to buy the device so there's three
Starting point is 00:40:51 things that i that i can think of all of which my guess is that apple will experiment with the first one is storytelling and it's tv shows right because the thing with the magic with tv shows is that if you're into it there's like seasons and seasons and seasons that you can keep making, kind of exploring the same characters and so on and so forth. I think dramatic storytelling in immersive format is going to be difficult to do. And you talk about this in one of the Waveform podcasts early on about sort of how storytelling in 360 was so much harder. And I agree with all of that. on about sort of how storytelling in 360 was so much harder. And I agree with all of that.
Starting point is 00:41:32 So yes, they'll experiment, but I just don't see it being that good from like a cinema and artistic perspective. The two things that I am excited about, one is music, which I think proven by the Alicia Keys sort of intimate studio concert. And I think there's a lot to do there. And the other one is sports and especially live sports. I need that. I need that. That's the number one thing I cannot wait
Starting point is 00:41:53 to actually get to use in this thing. And so many people have told me I'm wrong on this and time will tell, but I could not be more convinced that the biggest thing that VR will change or I should say the biggest thing that VR will change, or I should say the big thing that VR will change first is not gaming. It's not productivity. It's spectator sports.
Starting point is 00:42:16 And I was personally involved in shooting that Oculus Go, Adam Levine, Jonah Hill, like courtside at the NBA ad from a long time ago. Of course, we couldn't deliver all that product experience. That's a different thing. But it really, really, really transforms the experience of watching sports. And it's so complicated technically and artistically. Technically, because you have to figure out a way to do like 8K live broadcast, which is super complicated. You know, you guys know a lot more about this than I do. And artistically, because each sport is different, like where do you put the camera,
Starting point is 00:42:49 where do you put the big screen, you know, when do you change angles, you know, how do you do replays and so on and so forth. But I'm so convinced, just look at how much money people spend to go to a game. That's what, that's exactly what I was saying. Yeah. You know, there are infinite ways that I've thought of that I would like to participate
Starting point is 00:43:06 in live sports in the Vision Pro. The one that came to mind because there was that like demo reel where I think it was there's a basketball game and there's a soccer one where you were like above the net. That's not even a real seat you can buy. That's better than any seat you can buy. But you're above the net and you can see the play developing in front of you. And it's like, yeah, you know that there are people with disposable income spending three thousand dollars on a headset that would love to spend an extra hundred bucks to watch that game live from the best seat in the house
Starting point is 00:43:34 like that's a real obvious opportunity the other one that comes to mind is basketball where if you're at a i don't know courtside seat which is very expensive you don't actually get the best view but it is super cool because you get to to see the size of the players and the coaches right in front of you and the ref runs past you and all this fun stuff. And I wish, I don't know how technically difficult it actually is to execute on, but I wish that there was a little rig right next to the scorer's table that would let me sit there and look around as if I was sitting in that seat. But it's not a real thing yet. And I just keep waiting for someone to pull it off. Well, Apple bought that company. It was a company called NextVR in 2020. These guys are absolute geniuses. They've been doing this for a decade. So they know the ins and outs of shooting in 180 3D,
Starting point is 00:44:21 including that dual 8K crazy format that they've just launched, but also they've really invested into thinking about the broadcast pipeline because they want to get to live sports. And like, it's not even that hard to do something simple that already works. Even the center court seat, you know, basketball, NBA, center court, courtside seat
Starting point is 00:44:42 with a big ass projected TV just on top that shows the regular broadcast exactly man that's good enough for a lot of people you don't have to go much further yeah and then you go all the way to like the formula one craziness you guys talked about that in the pod as well like yeah i mean that's just is a different world that requires a lot more production um so it's it's i think it coming. I am convinced that when Apple was negotiating its MLS rights and they got like
Starting point is 00:45:09 the full package, they got it all. They were already thinking about this and people have been seeing cameras courtside in MLS games for a long time.
Starting point is 00:45:18 There's a film coming. Question is, how long until we can watch an MLS match live in immersive? Right. I'm, that will make this purchase worth it for me.
Starting point is 00:45:28 Just that. I think Apple could sell millions of headsets if they can nail live sports. I guess the benefit of that is that there's sports happening all the time. So it's not like you have to wait for Apple to develop a new movie with the storytelling and the shooting and the production. It's just like
Starting point is 00:45:45 repetitive. I remember back when the HTC Vive was out and it was pretty new, Valve released, I don't know if you're privy to like Dota 2, the video game. Yeah, okay. So I played Dota for like 12 years. Data, you like
Starting point is 00:46:01 Dota? And Valve, because they worked so tightly with htc early on because steam vr and all that stuff they've always been into vr they released like a special dota 3d mode that you could spectate in where you could look at the map from above and kind of tilt the map or map around while the live pro match was happening amazing and you could like zoom in on the players moving around and stuff and i thought it was super cool but it didn't feel like a better way to watch the live game like it again sort of felt like that like tech demo party trick thing for me where i liked watching one game in it and then after that I was like I would rather watch
Starting point is 00:46:45 this the regular way and this is not a real well real sport it's an e-sport very different from like people jumping in front of you but I wonder like it just makes me wonder whether or not that has that much appeal but then you guys say that it does so i guess i should just believe you um yeah i don't know i i guess that if if you could have a better watching experience every single week people would probably buy these even if they could just only use it to watch the live sport once a week i think the vision pro and any high quality vr heads can can be a single purpose device for a lot of different people. Live sports is one thing. You know, teleportation is another thing. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:29 You know, an external monitor is another thing. It just has to get good enough. Right. For those things to be, you know, viable. All right, we're going to take one more quick break. But when we come back, a lot more on how Apple's been marketing and packaging Vision Pro.
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Starting point is 00:49:44 Must be 19 or older, only please play responsibly if you or someone you know has concerns about gambling visit connects Ontario CA Apple kind of like they kind of twisted their marketing for the vision Pro to be more focused around media consumption more recently right because they kind of realized that the workspace thing wasn't really built out yet and the apps weren't coming. Yep. So a lot of their verbiage, you wrote about that in your blog post.
Starting point is 00:50:10 Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, I call their marketing like 60-40, 60, initially at least, 60% productivity, 40% video. And I think that may have flipped if you look at some of the latest assets that they've put out and so on. And you're totally right. I think that Apple pulled a product marketing rabbit out of their hole, out of their hat, knowing how little they had for this launch. They were already committed to it, right? Developers didn't come. So what do you do? So you go all in on something that is magical and that demos really well, which is video watching like watching uh 60 fps avatar in 3d it's 60 fps i think right yeah it's like some weird which is
Starting point is 00:50:51 between 48 and 60 and 96 96 difference it's it's literally not the same frame rate throughout the movie it switches frame it switches frame i wonder what it's like if it's also like that i mean it must be right probably is it's dynamic it was it was a headache to watch in the theater i'll tell you that yeah yeah it's funny i think i could sense something but my eye was nowhere near as well trained as yours to like notice oh that's a frame rate because yeah when they would switch to like running scenes where it was moving fast it would switch to 60 fps and it felt like a video game cut scene. I think it was 24 to 48, by the way.
Starting point is 00:51:27 24 to 48, okay. Which is what The Hobbit was filmed in for the entire movie. And the entire movie looked like a video game cut scene. So they put high frame rate videos in Apple TV Plus, you know, and did all the things that they could to make this as appealing as it could be. I just don't think it's gonna sustain
Starting point is 00:51:43 the product for very long. Yeah. Here's another context question with Apple Vision Pro. What is the ideal weight to actually feel like you've successfully made something that people can wear for a long time? Because this is a notoriously heavy headset. It's aluminum. It has some plastic and glass. It's around 600 grams, right?
Starting point is 00:52:02 We've seen lighter headsets. A lot of people reference the quest 3 the quest 3 happens to be around about 500 grams but if you could keep going down is there like a magical weight that you hit where you just feel like you can wear it forever like sunglasses and if so is that anywhere because i think about like what tech is actually possible with what we have now is that actually possible with what we have now. Is that actually possible with the tech we have to make a light enough headset that's still good but also light? I think it is if you can get, if you can work really hard on your sensors, if you can move the compute and the battery off the headset.
Starting point is 00:52:37 Okay. Work for a couple of generations. I think you can break the 300, 350 gram kind of territory, which, can I show my toy? I would love, yeah, please. Which, funny enough, is where Oculus started. This is an original Oculus DK1 from 2016, I believe. And this is just a display.
Starting point is 00:53:03 It's nothing else. Right. And it's 380 grams. You know, you put this thing on, and it's a little bit strange. The foam is not exactly super comfortable and so on, but you feel, okay, like this is a qualitative difference
Starting point is 00:53:17 from wearing any of the headsets that exist today. So I think 350 grams is kind of where it starts to look really interesting. That's like about a smartphone weight, I think. Wait, let me Google that. iPhone 15 Pro Max weight. About 260, right? Yeah, I think.
Starting point is 00:53:36 220. Yeah. Okay. So like it's two. So one and a half smartphones? Yeah. Now this is even lighter. This is the matrix.
Starting point is 00:53:44 What are you wearing now? And this is what lighter what is the matrix what are you wearing now and and this is what some people call the ready player one headset um this is called the big screen beyond uh and to be clear i have no affiliation with the company or anything i just think they're badasses this is 127 grams wow and which is lighter than most ski goggles or many ski goggles yeah it's half a iphone 15 pro max yeah that's lighter than most ski goggles or many ski goggles. Yeah. It's half an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Yeah. That's lighter than most phones. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:09 But that's just a screen and that's it. No. This is just a screen with a custom facial interface that's made for my face. And it's not like one of 28 that was chosen for me. It's actually custom printed for my face. And this is just a screen with, it's a micro OLED display like in the Vision Pro
Starting point is 00:54:26 with a pancake lens like in the Vision Pro. It's a tethered headset to be clear. It has no sensors, no pass-through. So obviously it's a very different subclass of VR product. But what I like about this product and the fact that it exists is that it kind of shows us what sort of this desirable end state is.
Starting point is 00:54:44 Like where do we think that this thing could ultimately us what sort of this desirable end state is like where do we think that this thing could ultimately go when all of the technologies that need to be invented are finally there yeah um and this would be a beautiful future yeah i made a video kind of talking about this collision course that we're on and it may not be a collision but on one side there's vr headsets with a ton of technology in them that weigh 500 grams. And we're trying to make them smaller and smaller and lighter every year. But on the other side is smart glasses.
Starting point is 00:55:13 And it's something you can wear today and look normal, but you can't fit much tech in them. So they're trying to fit more and more and more tech, cameras, sensors, compute, while keeping them the size of smart glasses. And they're kind of just doing this. They're going at each other. This feels right about in the middle. I don't know if you have a thought about which one might end up winning people over faster or which one
Starting point is 00:55:33 could win. I tend to feel like smart glasses are more approachable to more people. They're also less tech, so they're more affordable. But what are your thoughts on that? I think there is a theoretical form factor right in the middle there, which is the SkiGoggles optical pass-through theoretical product. It's actually what a lot of the Ready Player One headsets look like. You can see the person's eyes and their optical paths or their transparent displays. That to me would be one of the most revolutionary form factors. It's very unclear if one can build a wide FOV transparent display
Starting point is 00:56:19 that would be sort of all the good things that we need. That was a pun. I don't know if it was that on purpose. It was very unclear that was good i you know it was a great pun they just come up yeah yeah so so that to me you know and that would be like a you know a 300 200 to 300 gram device ideally that's a beautiful thing i think the the optical pass-through glasses form factor where there's an actual display that's more than just a notification screen, I worry that product may never exist. Because it's just phenomenally difficult to build an actual display into such a small form factor where everything is so close to your eye and so on and so forth. So there's prototypes of that out there. I've seen some of them. Will that product exist, you know, in the next 10 to 15 years? I'm not sure if it will. Yeah, that feels like one of those sci-fi things that is hard to imagine with what we know about
Starting point is 00:57:20 technology today. Yeah, even though it seems really cool. As quickly as the headset and glasses things are like approaching each other, it still feels like they're on their own track because especially with what Meta is doing with its AI assistance that you can have in your Meta Ray-Bans now, it's more about contextual awareness of your everyday life
Starting point is 00:57:42 and not necessarily manipulating your everyday life. Whereas this is more focused on manipulating your everyday life and not necessarily manipulating your everyday life whereas this is more focused on manipulating your everyday life but obviously it's a giant headset and so i'm sure that there's some sort of like in between that because they want to get those smaller meta wants to get those more powerful but like you said the the technology required just weight wise you can't have a pair of ray bands that have an m2 chip inside yeah you know so i i have a question around this sort of like developers build it and they will come mindset because that didn't happen in the Vision Pro. But it especially is not happening now, I feel, because when there was hype around the
Starting point is 00:58:18 Vision Pro when it first came out, we saw a lot of developers that were making Vision Pro apps as soon as they got their vision pro because they needed to understand the paradigm of how spatial computing worked better but now it feels like it's been out for a while people aren't talking about it every week anymore and there was already way less developer hype than apple assumed there would be now how does apple get people more excited about this device? And do you think that people are still going to be working on like stuff for it? Or is it going to take until a generation two to reignite developers to actually think maybe this is worth building for?
Starting point is 00:58:58 Yeah, I think the organic creating organic excitement is going to be very tough because, as you said, a lot of that wave of excitement, of curiosity, of interest in the product from consumers is starting to go away. So I believe Apple will just have to use money. They'll have to fund some of these startups, some of these game developer studios and others, plus do ambitious partnerships, which require executive-level conversations and so on
Starting point is 00:59:30 to really bring some of these new things to life. It's not an unknown playbook in developer relations. It's just one that I don't think Apple uses that often because they have such incredible market power. But I think it's a rounding error to zero. They're going to have to open the old wallet. And then they've got to get Final Cut Pro in 3D. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:59:52 Thank you. That just needs to exist. I'm tired of mirroring from my Mac and having one monitor. I need spatial Final Cut. Yeah. I'm just saying. Tim, you can make it happen tomorrow if you wanted to. No, I also think part of it is Apple could have gone two different directions with
Starting point is 01:00:08 like attracting people to this VR idea. One of them was super, super high end, amazing tech. The other, which is a little bit less Apple like is super, super accessible, available, cheaper. And I think they typically go with this before they go with that. So ideally drum up excitement. People get to experience this, which that's what they're doing. You can go to an Apple store today and experience the fun thing.
Starting point is 01:00:30 But someday when there's a Apple Vision Pro SE, whatever, that's going to be another exciting moment for, okay, the developers have gotten the thing to the form factor and now it'll start to be available for the masses. But that's TBD. We'll have to see. Yeah, and there was something really fun that I found very interesting in your blog post, kind of piggybacking off that, about how Apple over-engineered this thing on purpose.
Starting point is 01:00:59 Can you expand on that idea a little bit? Yeah, so I think we all know that Vision Pro has just been under development for years and years at Apple. And I'm sure they've gone through like, you know, hundreds of prototypes and so on. And a lot of these technologies that sort of became good enough to ship became good enough to ship like a couple of years ago. Right. And the way that Apple does their kind of pipeline for launched product is like you have to start de-risking it and making it like production ready,
Starting point is 01:01:30 sometimes years in advance. So I think what happened is they just, it's like a train, right? So they just onboarded a bunch of these technologies a few years ago onto a train, continued to work on them. And today there's ways to do less sensors, lighter sensors and so on, but like that stuff isn't ready to go internally at Apple, at least at the level of quality and integration that they need. So they just got to ship the stuff that's been on the shelf for a
Starting point is 01:01:56 while. So I think that's one component, right? It's just like, it's technology that was built a couple of years ago that leads to like higher weight and so on and so forth. The other thing is like this being the first time they were launching this product into the world, they have to make it almost like unbreakable, right? Like they have to make it extra everything so that no matter what developers throw at it, no matter what reviewers throw at it, no matter what users throw at it, it will sustain.
Starting point is 01:02:22 So I really think that that's part of what they're doing is like an overdoing a little bit, overplaying a little bit, just so that they are in a kind of a safe position before starting to take some risks. You know, that could be a lot of crack gate type things if you didn't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's always people will find gates no matter what. They have a habit of doing that.
Starting point is 01:02:41 I have maybe an existential question to finish this, which is, okay, we want to make this the most incredible piece of technology of all time, super immersive, best field of view, highest resolution. Let's fast forward a little bit. Let's get 10 years down the line with the highest end, best possible VR headset. best possible VR headset. If people are able to successfully deliver retina resolution, and as a bonus, let's throw in other senses too. It's got incredible speakers,
Starting point is 01:03:17 and it can make you feel heat or cold and the wind in your hair. Let's say you can give people all of the senses through a VR headset. Yeah. And you go out to this virtually reconstructed Grand Canyon in the headset, and look at it and you really think you're looking at the Grand Canyon. Like all of your senses are fully tricked. You hear the birds chirping. You hear that you feel the wind in your hair and you feel the heat on the top of your head through the headset and you know it's through the headset, but it is a perfect reconstruction do you still feel and there's no right answer to this but do you still feel like you have to go see the real thing or do you feel like you've seen it
Starting point is 01:03:51 are you in the oasis at that point basically i think the moral of the story is watch ready player one because that's kind of how it feels sometimes but i wonder what your thoughts are yeah you know i i think that it's like mostly great that people, you know, will be able to get to places that they otherwise maybe couldn't afford to go or can travel, you know, all that far, take the vacation to go to and so on. But I think there's just a little bit of like,
Starting point is 01:04:17 okay, that's like a philosophical challenge for humanity. Like, you know, it is kind of the oasis at its fullest state. But, you know, i think it's mostly great and you're still not going to be able to like hug in vr uh you never know i felt half the half the gloves are pretty pretty good they're just kidding they're terrible and yeah i i i think at the the end state of this is teleportation you know you and cleo talked about that in in that video that she put out a few weeks ago. I think that's the greatest contribution to humanity of this new computing paradigm is just being able to just be with other people in their house or in your house or in some other place. It's going to take a while to get there. Yeah, that's pretty powerful. Yeah. Well,
Starting point is 01:05:06 that's pretty powerful yeah well i have one more question for you how fast can you type the alphabet oh man uh it's been such a long time since i think i measured that last i may have to try it again well boy do we have the test for you this is a bit of a tradition around here where uh we have our guests type the alphabet a through z as fast as we can. You can be as competitive or non-competitive as you like but we will offer you a chiclet style keyboard. Three different keyboard types. You can either use the keyboard built-in, there's a mechanical keyboard or there's like a Apple Magic keyboard. Yeah. Whatever your best at. I think I'm gonna go Apple Magic. Apple Magic? Yeah. Okay. do you spend a lot of time typing on like apple keyboards like chiclet little style keyboards like that i have that exact
Starting point is 01:05:50 same magic keyboard okay that's perfect home field and and i also have a digi key thanks to andrew convincing me that mechanical keyboards are better he's gotten into all of our heads at some point and definitely got us the bug. I just bought a mechanical keyboard because of Andrew. I went backwards. I used to be into mechanical keyboards and now I'm like, give me the magic keyboard. Is the screen recording? It's already screen recording.
Starting point is 01:06:14 Amazing. Okay. Well, it's pretty simple. All you got to do is hit the letter A and then hit the letter B and then hit the letter C. And then when you hit Z, don't hit enter.
Starting point is 01:06:25 Just that's it. Yeah. And if I made a mistake? If you make a mistake, it will not continue until you hit the appropriate letter. So you don't have to backspace. You just have to hit every letter in order. So you have to watch the screen while you're typing
Starting point is 01:06:35 to make sure you. Okay. Do I get one practice run? We'll give you three total runs. Okay. Most people tend to improve as they go. You know, no pressure no pressure okay I'm glad we're not recording all right here we go
Starting point is 01:06:58 you know there's one challenge here which is forget about I'm gonna do again five seconds five point five seconds I think that's pretty good that's already pretty good five point five yeah it's better than you think all right it's pretty good we have a little leaderboard five point seven nice dang one more alright I feel like you're pretty high on the leaderboard Adam do you have the leaderboard available he does
Starting point is 01:07:35 I have it pulled up 4.83 4.83 dropping tenths of a second off of that time wow so 4.83 puts you right after Marquez and ahead of Josh Wardle so you are in 5th place
Starting point is 01:07:54 oh my gosh top 5 well done not that many tries top 5 on the leaderboard is very impressive this may be a new skill I didn't know about. Yeah. You never know.
Starting point is 01:08:06 And this is just this first three tries. You might go try this later and get added to your resume. 4.2. All right. That's good. I will take that. If you're curious about some other times, the list is very extensive. Who's top?
Starting point is 01:08:18 Tom Scott. 3.5 seconds. Wow. Tom Scott was very prepared, very competitive, broke out his own keyboard. Here's the list. And seconds. Wow. Tom Scott was very prepared, very competitive, broke out his own keyboard. Here's the list. And the list goes, I don't think there's any double digits on there.
Starting point is 01:08:31 Well, look at Clio, 4.3. Yeah. Damn, that's good. Yeah. And Quinn. Yeah. So, you know, people who type a lot, people who spend a lot of time around keyboards,
Starting point is 01:08:40 you might be surprised how fast you can type the alphabet. But that's it. That's where we end it so thank you for thank you for your time and of course for all the insight well we'd love to have you back obviously we talk about stuff like this all the time not just the current tech but the history and the context of it so
Starting point is 01:08:55 this is super fun and hopefully we get to do it again sometime it's a dream come true to be here thank you guys great work appreciate it so that's about it that was that was really fun thanks again to hugo for coming to the studio and for sharing the time the expertise so it's fun having conversations with people who are very knowledgeable about this stuff and i feel like this is still very early like as much as we've talked about vr for the past 10 years like this
Starting point is 01:09:21 is rapidly developing we didn't even touch spatial what are they called spatial personas yeah in this conversation and like all the weird stuff that's been happening with hardware since that conversation brandon's vision pro has like cracked up yeah all this stuff is going to be pretty constant but i feel like this is a fun spot for this episode in this conversation because uh it was a good time so uh thanks again. Leave any comments of any things that you learned maybe while listening to this episode. Maybe Hugo will be
Starting point is 01:09:48 in the comments. Maybe he will. That would actually be pretty sick. But I think this is the part where we sign out. Oh yeah. Wayformers produce.
Starting point is 01:09:57 Actually, I think David did this already. Let's throw it to David. Wayformers produce by Adam, Aliyah, and Ellis Revin. We are associated
Starting point is 01:10:03 with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro to our music is by Vane Silk. Close enough. Pretty close. We'll do it. Wayforn was produced by Adam and Alistair Revin. We are associated with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro to our music is by Vane Silk. Close enough. Pretty close. We'll do it. We'll take it. We'll keep it.

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