Just felt an overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness in so many of their demos.
The ones of parents wearing the helmet while interacting with children just were straight up depressing to me as a parent.
I’m all for spatial cameras in the phone and having better ways to view them later but this “future” looks lonely.
I've been following the Tilt five AR sets, and frankly those look like a better advancement of social shared virtual reality tech. https://www.tiltfive.com/ They're targeted much more narrowly though.
It does feel like they're well into the uncanny valley. We'll see how they fare against the ineffable "ick" factor.
Google Glass cost half as much and was in a much tighter form factor, but it failed because the general public perceived it as creepy and isolating.
If this product gets associated with people striving to wall themselves off from the world in their own personal dreamscape...well, I don't know. Maybe that sort of personality type will become a virtue in the zeitgeist. Maybe it already is.
Agreed. I get that these would probably be great for me at work, but I have a 5-year-old who has limited screen time. There’s no way I would use this at home in front of the kid. They would just want to use it and if they did use it, I could
see them getting hopelessly addicted. I see uses in industry for this (AR for fixing complex machines, VR for editing 3D data), but hope these never catch on for day-to-day use. I just can’t get over how isolating and sad these things look when demoed. I think part of Apple feels this way too. It’s interesting that all of the Apple promos for this that I’ve seen show a person by themself using this. In the past I recall seeing Meta and others showing more than one person in the same room using VR devices and it always looked horrifying to me.
I agree. I think the work they put into the eyes feature is evidence of their concern about this issue. I'm really curious to know what the "feeling" is like to be in a room with someone wearing one of these.
3d photos should have been an iPhone feature for sure, it felt really out of place on Vision. Generally using this in a physical social context doesn't make a lot of sense except in a workplace with others wearing them and working on specific tasks together.
However, this is probably the best device ever made for remote work and I think can make it far less lonely, with an immersive shared environment, 3d avatars that have real facial expressions and visibility of hands, etc. I'd so so much rather use this than sit at a monitor on Zoom.
I was neutral on it until I was told that I could “remember” a special moment by detaching from reality.
Total bullshit. We’re at total tech: a point where tech is so pervasive we think making it the point of things (rather than an enabler) is perfectly fine. Witness the scores of people grasping at likes, awkwardly binging social media in public, putting giant screens in cars, etc etc.
I’m all for spatial cameras in the phone and having better ways to view them later but this “future” looks lonely.