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by mpolichette 1099 days ago
Computers were invented to speed up calculations, and yet the primary thing we use them for today is to read the news and send each other messages and memes…

I think it’s totally reasonable, to expect developers to find the real use

4 comments

It's the users that will find the real use.
So — pornography, then.
In one or more of William Gibson’s early books, maybe neuromancer, there was a think called simstim where you could vicariously live a celebrity’s life as they live streamed their daily existence while wearing a headset.

Combine that and pornography and I think you’ve nailed it. Pun possibly intended.

Hey, I've seen this one!

https://vimeo.com/144850907

Any talk of Vision Pro should include a link to this 1983 movie (Brainstorm) that features Christopher Walken

https://youtu.be/NNiZP2G-nEM

A killer app might be:

"Better Than Life: Las Vegas"

Games, gambling, shows, and porn all in one "so immersive you won't want to leave" experience.

"Disney ain't got nuthin' on this!"

VRChat with payment integration, then. No reason to choose Apple.
So we're supposed to get excited about our future Brave New World?
That depends on your view of VR entertainment and Las Vegas-style (adult) attractions.

The Vision Pro was showcased with Disney as a content partner. While Disney has historically featured "family friendly" entertainment, there is definitely a market for adult entertainment that the Vision Pro could excel in.

Is it "an exciting Las Vegas adventure in the privacy of your home" or "a lonely person in a dark room trying to escape the sadness of reality"?

You're the Hiro Protagonist of your own story -- Y Not Both?

FWIW, my take is that this is yet another "slippery" media [0] and will mutate to whatever form brings its creators the most succe$$

[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/

Apple won't allow porn-focused applications in their stores.

Apple won't allow alternate stores on Apple-branded mobile devices, or sideloading.

This is a fundamental disrespect of their customers who have purchased the device. Apple regards their brand image more than allowing their customers to display what they want on the device they own.

“Why is it every time a new thing is invented, humans immediately try to use for it porn?”

- Janet, the Good Place

Is that why they call them users?
Not necessarily. Developers and product designers assume that users are going to use their product in a particular way. In my - limited - experience in those roles users tend to find entirely different ways to use your product that you never ever would have thought of, and if you had thought of them would have had significant impact on the product itself. The resulting impedance mismatch tends to be overcome with ruthless applications of duct tape, post-it notes, bending and twisting of parts and - unfortunately - the overruling of safety devices and lock-outs.
Computers had a 100% open platform from day 1. Tell me, will Apple allow a pornography app for the Vision Pro?
> Computers had a 100% open platform from day 1.

The first computers were operated by the British and US defence establishments. Could you explain in which way you feel ENIAC was "100% open platform"?

People who owned and had access to ENIAC could load and run any software they wanted on it. They did not have to fight with an app store support agent for months over arbitrary rules only to get their software rejected. That's what open means.
So you think "convincing the army that your software should be run" is open?

The word is meaningless as you use it.

They certainly had to fight the librarian to install something on ENIAC.
It has a web browser. You can access anything you want via that, same as the phone.
Neither a web browser, nor the iPhone are remotely comparable to a general purpose computer in terms of free use
I've never understood this criticism of iOS. It is a fully fledged general purpose operating system with bare metal access and ability to run anything that can be compiled. Sure you can't distribute apps that do whatever you want on the app store. But there is absolutely nothing about iOS that makes it any less of a general purpose computing platform than Windows or Linux.
On iOS you don't have root. This prevents you doing many things with it, which is why jailbreaking exists. The fact that you can write an app and deploy it directly to a restricted number of devices for testing (if you're on the Apple Developer Program and own a Mac) doesn't change that.

Try altering the iOS home screen behaviour, directly accessing the filesystem, writing your own device driver or tweaking the kernel. You certainly don't have "bare metal access" except by voiding your warranty and risking bricking your device by jailbreaking it, if there even is a jailbreak exploit that currently works on your device.

Many of us learned development by using a computer to program apps that then ran on that same computer.

As far as I’m aware you can’t do that with iOS devices (potentially including the AR ones).

>As far as I’m aware you can’t do that with iOS devices (potentially including the AR ones).

Sure you can. You can fire up Xcode right now and build a self signed app to your phone with whatever the heck you want in it. Distributing that on the App Store is another story, but there's nothing stopping you from executing whatever arbitrary code you'd like on your own phone.

Says who? Is Apple going to make the entire Vision SDK web compatible?
Safari was shown in the demos.
The question isn't whether you can view the existing web content on the Vision Pro, the question is whether all of the Vision Pro SDK, sensors, and 3D functionality is exposed to the browser to enable VR-enabled webapps for the genres which Apple would disallow on their app store.
You don't need an app to watch porn. Just connect it to a stream, either online, or offline through a storage device. An app would be useful only if we're talking about VR, but so far this hasn't worked for porn.
Hopefully it's as open as macOS, or at least much, much closer to it than iOS. Otherwise the options for exploration are limited by Apple.
New opportunities for abuse do exist with Vision Pro. If you allowed free reign access to the sensors people could record the inside of your house/work, capture your face, fingerprints, retinal pattern etc.

And again with Objective-C it's impossible to prevent private API usage unless you have some sort of App Store model which can inspect the binaries and prevent abuse.

So it's ultimately going to be the same as iOS.

> And again with Objective-C it's impossible to prevent private API usage unless you have some sort of App Store model which can inspect the binaries and prevent abuse.

A alternative is to sandbox applications to prevent them from calling anything else than the official API, and to use a less restrictive sandbox for applications signed by a key owned by the vendor.

> If you allowed free reign access to the sensors people could record the inside of your house/work, capture your face, fingerprints, retinal pattern etc.

Yes, yes they could. That's not and shouldn't be Apple's problem. That's your workplace's problem to regulate how the device is used on-site, the government's problem to regulate how it can be used in public, your household's problem on how it can be used in private, etc.

The device will be inevitably jail-broken anyways, so a walled-garden isn't going to stop bad actors.

Not to mention, most of the things you mentioned can already be accomplished with less expensive and much more subtle devices, like a standard digital camera. And those device definitely don't try to prevent abuse. (Imagine if your camera refused to take a picture because it thought you didn't have permission!)

> Yes, yes they could. That's not and shouldn't be Apple's problem. That's your workplace's problem to regulate how the device is used on-site

Considering the vast majority of exploits on Windows are not the fault of Windows and are the fault of 3rd party applications. The fault is always put on Microsoft.

If Apple gives you free rein, and shit hits the fan. People won’t blame the company for allowing a piece of software to go rogue. People will blame Apple.

At least where I live in Australia there are laws about how biometrics are managed.

Apple can't just capture them and then allow any rogue app to access it. The device would be considered a threat to national security and banned.

And no there are no other mass consumer devices which specifically store a 3D representation of your face and a high resolution scan of your retinal pattern.

Personally, I much prefer the walled garden approach to what you're describing.
Imagine if your Xerox machine refused to copy a bank note...
Private API is not a security boundary. The platform sandbox is.
It is more locked down than both.
Video games require A LOT of calculations.