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by faeriechangling 1108 days ago
I’m sceptical for a very simple reason. When Apple came up with the UI for the iPhone, the functionality of it wasn’t some vague promise, Steve Jobs gloated at length about how intuitive it all was while audiences gasped and applauded over and over. He did this by introducing several new sensors and technologies simultaneously.

Not really seeing that this time around.

3 comments

I think a lot of that was just the Steve Jobs’s presence and presentation style.

It’s pretty bananas they’ve crammed an M2 into a headset with all the cameras, sensors, ML engines, and high res displays. The M2 chip alone (I have an M1 Pro) is still blowing my mind with the low wattage performance.

But much like the first iPhone, it is yet to be seen if it will stick. I do think it’s far more capable than existing VR headsets.

I really think people aren’t putting enough weight behind the fact that it’s going to have an M2 chip in it. Obviously there’s no way to tell if it’ll deliver until it’s released but the idea of having a headset with potentially the full power of a MacBook is kind of insane.
OTOH wasn't it inevitable -- that small devices of tomorrow will overtake the most powerful cutting-edge gadgets of the past in computing power, storage, performance.

Maybe in a decade small thumb-drives will have an M2 chip equivalent built into them. To encrypt/decrypt data on the fly with zero latency on multiple GB/s data. Or whatever other application can gobble up that much compute power.

I think the eye tracking is the multitouch of this generation of devices. It's not a new idea, but it's the first device to ship with it (at least in the "consumer" space). Even if they end up with some sort of controllers in the future, the eye tracking enables so many interactions. Not to mention foveated rendering, which they mentioned in a few of the slides. Basically, render a super high quality dot where the user is looking, and fade out the quality in the peripheral vision. 2x4k screens is a lot of pixels to render, even with the M2 being a decent GPU, but with eye tracking, it's possible to really push the rendering quality.
They have insanely low latency. Every VR has noticeable latency but so far everyone who have tried vision pro says it’s unnoticeable. That’s a huge leap forward. And this is in a device that doesn’t feel like a center block on your head.