Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?
medium.comDoes no one remember the Eee PC? The whole "netbook" craze? It was at least 2-3 years that each quarterly earnings call some analyst would ask, like clockwork, why Apple was letting the netbook market get away from them.
Officially, the answer that Apple repeatedly gave was that they "weren't impressed with any of the current offerings" and that they would not "rush to market with a product we're not proud of" (not exact quotes, but probably close enough). The unspoken truth of the matter was that the margins on existing netbooks were razor thin. When Apple finally did introduce the MacBook Air, it was more powerful and with better economics than anything else on the market by far.
The Eee PC was discontinued in 2013. The MacBook Air (and now MacBook) are still going strong today. Of course, this shouldn't be a surprise, Apple did the exact same thing with the MP3 player.
I suspect that something similar is going on with VR (and a whole host of other technologies). Until the first products hit the market and Apple has a sense for how the price/features/demand equation balances out, they'll be more than happy to sit on the sidelines. So no, I don't think there is a skunkworks team fashioning an end-to-end solution. This isn't about Apple not wanting to accommodate third party parts/devices. It's about building something that is good and makes money.
There's a big difference between Apple making their own VR hardware and shipping a computer with a fast enough GPU to run other VR hardware (or ability to have a fast enough GPU via something like the Razer Core).
The latter would be necessary for Apple in the growing VR ecosystem but it could be great for many other areas that require an intensive GPU. And that's the argument of the piece.
Apple's target customer doesn't need a graphics card to do anything more demanding than video editing. It's been probably at least 7 years since you could get a Mac with anything like a top-of-the-line graphics card. Are there potential customers that Apple is not grabbing by not having a high-end graphics option? Sure!
But Apple doesn't care...
The thing about Apple is that, unlike almost all of their competitors, they really don't care about a "Mac in every home". They'd much rather target specific slices of the market where they can excel and make a lot of money (think BMW, not Ford).
Apple's target customers tarted to switch to PC for video editing because editing 4K> even on an Mac Pro is a nightmare because the GPU is weak as hell.
Rendering also takes considerably longer because the GPU performance is fairly limited.
Apple doesn't innovate. It combines proven technologies into polished products.
When VR has proven itself, with R&D investments of other companies, Apple will release a near-perfect refinement of all things VR and everyone will hail them as the savior who brought VR to the world.
> It combines proven technologies into polished products.
Is that not innovation? Maybe technically the iPhone was just a combination of existing technologies, but it went above and beyond them to the point that it was essentially new.
>>Is that not innovation?
Yes but not at the same level of complexity. The processor, electronics, battery technology and manufacturing processes require multi-decade spanning consistent efforts, iterations and investments to make it happen.
Once the difficult part is done. What remains now is building a end user product. Which has its own complexities. But once the hard part is done, the other parts are relatively easy.
More accurately: Apple doesn't bother with early adopter and enthusiast technologies. They wait until the tech is mass market ready and polish it.
There's no real reason for Apple to get into VR yet. They can make a deal with Oculus / Valve / Sony and have a decent VR product supported on Mac in under 6 months.
No, it's marketing more than innovation.
I'm sure their hardware engineers would beg to differ.
You mean the hardware engineers they brought onboard when the bought NeXT (OS X)? How about Lala.com (iCloud)? Fingerworks (iOS)? Soundjam MP (iTunes)? We can just go on and on here [1].
None of this is to say they don't have brilliant hardware engineers working on things all the time. But the boldest moves Apple in the past decade and a half have come from strategic M&As.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Yes, that's what Microsoft used to do. As odd as it sounds because that doesn't 'sound' like leadership to those who don't understand how technology and science works as iterative processes. That was when they were the de facto industry leader for decades. Now Apple is that leader. It's not a slight to say Apple is the new Microsoft. It's a massive accomplishment to have taken the mantle of the tech industry leader that everyone looks to.
Everyone, whether it's on top of love, hate or indifference, wants to comment on Apple. That's how you know you've won (the money probably doesn't hurt either).
Apple won't have pornography. This will kill their VR ambitions.
Because pornography hasn't found any way to be available on Apple platforms?
VR is not yet 'here' and is not currently delivering, but it is promising a lot.
The form factor alone has challenges which the public will not be willing to sacrifice for the experience, which could turn out to be mostly a gimmick. Some things people don't think about;
-) looking at your keyboard/input device whilst wearing a VR headset
-) being the same room as other people for prolonged periods of time with a headset
-) sharing experiences with other people close to you
-) what are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad? Who is going to pay/develop and what is this content going to be... can it actually deliver, making good immersive software is incredibly hard.
-) and then cost...
"what are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad? Who is going to pay/develop and what is this content going to be... can it actually deliver, making good immersive software is incredibly hard."
The real problem with this question is that it's like asking someone in 1990 what the point of 3d graphics are. Beyond what's been announced, there's no definite timeline for anything - who besides John Carmack would even imagine the genre (FPS) that would popularize 3d graphics cards? Who could predict that Castlevania would suck in 3d but Mario would find an amazing niche?
I trust that most people reading this thread are alive and well, so clearly we don't "need" VR, but I can imagine some incredibly engaging experiences that will make today's best entertainment options look second best at best. Imagine playing a competitive game of ping pong with a friend that lives a few states away. Imagine watching a sporting event from the best seats in the stadium. Imagine being able to golf at a luxurious seaside resort... after work in the middle of winter, in your apartment. Imagine watching movies on a movie screen sized virtual screen. All of these are necessarily limited by being based on existing analogues, some or all of which could be completely off the mark, but I for one believe we'll see some breakthrough experiences rather quickly.
The "unique" experiences of something like having the best seats in the stadium or more immersive experience with a golf simulator would be awesome. But for movies, it takes a commonly social experience and makes it strictly solo. You cannot use a shared VR headset. You may experience the same thing at the same time (or similar since you'd be looking in different directions, most likely), but it wouldn't be common. Would you really want a date night where you sit on your couch and each put on headsets blocking the other out? A family night in, everyone trapped in their own VR headset. What do you do for guests?
Let's not even address cleanliness (honestly, one reason I have no interest in most of the 3D TV tech that came out, even if it offered cheap, passive glasses).
It's useful, and cool, but really only applicable when you're physically alone or wiling to be deliberately isolated from others in your physical proximity.
"For movies, it takes a commonly social experience and makes it strictly solo."
Well, not if Netflix can make a "watch together" mode and you find yourself sitting with 3 college buddies' avatars who could be anywhere in the country. Facebook, for one, will have a strong interest in shoving "social" into everything - they certainly have the social graph, VOIP technology, infrastructure, etc. to make this easy to imagine.
I don't want to feel like there is a brick strapped to my head.
VR won't be a mass market product until the brick becomes less brick-like.
The VR market is likely to be limited to gamers and a few devs for at least the next few years. That's not a tiny market, but it's much smaller than the market for phones and tablets.
It's also unlikely to take off until VR becomes social, with couples and families all playing in the same virtual space on the same hardware.
Costs and hardware requirements make that impossibly expensive for now.
Not impossibly expensive, I've already been talking to my wife about this. Building two machines so we can each have our own Vive headset. But in regards to 'impossibly expensive', I'd also consider buying two PS4s with PSVR headsets for the same purpose. We're talking $1,600 total for the next best thing to a holodeck.
If someone delivers the software and it gets rave reviews as a cooperative experience, I will buy those PS4s or build new computers for it. That's how trends start, but the PS4 option for VR brings the cost and complication down considerably for everyone on day one.
What are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad?
Elite: Dangerous. DiRT Rally. Minecraft. Movies, and interestingly, documentaries. These are all currently available.
Further down the line, VR will replace multi-screen setups. As a developer I'm very excited to code in a VR IDE.
It'll be great for video games. it'll be useful for movies and documentaries if they weren't "flat". And really only useful for solo experience with them. TVs are large enough and cheap enough that with the lights dimmed you get a similar experience to a VR headset, but shared with others in the same room.
I'm not totally sold on the virtual desktop concept, but I'd be willing to try it. But I, personally, benefit greatly from actual tactile feedback with paper and handwriting. A multi-sensory experience (touch, sight, smell, sound) is far better than a 1-2 sense experience (sight w/ maybe sound) for memory retention and recollection.
To that we can add the biggest problem: nausea.
We have a DK2 at the office and no-one has experienced any nausea. Anecdotal but still, I think that was a much bigger problem with the DK1.
What percentage of your office is women, and how old is the oldest person to try it? I've heard some suggestion that the anti-nausea stuff is optimized for men. And obviously older people will have more issues.
I recently picked up a first person game for the first time in quite a few years, and I was surprised to discover I got a little motion sickness after a few hours. It was fairly mild, but it's not an experience I'm keen to repeat for the sake of entertainment.
It's low and we're young. It's interesting though because I spoke to a female acquaintance this weekend who said she tried an Oculus Rift and was nauseous, after which I told her it was probably the old version. I had no idea there's a suggested difference between the genders so now I'm not so sure anymore.
You get inured to it. I used to get sick but I perservered - three teenaged boys, it was something I could do to engage with them. Soon I had zero problems, and never had them again. Like riding a bike?
Just to give a counter anecdote: I get terrible simulator sickness from using Oculus, I've tried DK1 and DK2.
It's a huge, unsolved issue that affects a not insignificant portion of people.
What rig? What games?
I got some truly awful nausea that lasted nearly 48 hours! I felt like I broke my brain. But I was running a DK2 on a wayyy underpowered rMBP on early firmware.
I quickly learned: (1) if a game has judder or is otherwise not running smoothly, do not play it; and (2) do not move unnaturally (i.e. no fast strafing or running like in a FPS).
When I followed those two rules, the nausea disappeared and when I felt presence it was mind blowing.
I don't doubt that some people may have unavoidable motion sickness, but I wonder how many reports are due to people like me running early dev kit software on underpowered hardware, and playing games with mechanics not meant for VR. There may be some subset that just can't play without some nausea, but the same is true for riding in cars or on boats.
It certainly wasn't an underpowered rig. It has a Titan X GPU and top of the line Broadwell or Haswell CPU. I tried some of the Oculus demos as well as War Thunder flight sim. DK2 was miles better than DK1, but the nausea was still there.
You're right about FPS strafing and some other unnatural movement, that seems to make things worse for some people.
Additionally, I think the situation might improve if you really take the time to adjust the lenses and the headset to match your head and eyes. This makes the Oculus headset a "personal" device in that you can't really borrow or share one, though.
However, I got terrible nausea that lasted for the rest of the day and rendered me incapable of doing any work (fucked up my eyes so I couldn't focus on text) after just 30 minutes of play. I'll need a pretty good reason to try it again.
Nausea probably won't be a problem with the young generation, who will eventually grow up with VR, if it succeeds.
what VR dev kits have you tried?
the HTC Vive and Oculus don't come out until next month.
It also doesn't help Apple's VR prospects that many VR developers are coming from games, even if they aren't working on gaming VR applications, and from high end 3D games in particular because of the skill set overlap. Apple has never really embraced games and particularly not high end desktop games and my experience at a major AAA game developer (I'm now a freelance VR dev) was that Apple was by far the worst partner to work with of any of the platform holders (and we worked with pretty much all of them).
Apple gets a lot less love overall from game developers than from web developers because they don't appear to care about games and don't give the kind of developer support game devs are used to from other platform holders and hardware companies. Even if they were to announce something in the VR space it would take a lot of changes to their approach for that to change I feel.
On Oct 22nd, 2001 Apple was asleep at the wheel with MP3 players.
On June 28th 2007, Apple was asleep at the wheel with smartphones.
On January 26th, 2010, Apple was asleep at the wheel with tablets.
I'm not trying to claim Apple is definitely in VR, but if you don't know by now that Apple is committed to not announcing products that aren't ready to show/sell, then you haven't been paying attention.
*edit formatting
VR has its use cases. But the question is, will it be like 3D for mass market? Everybody praised 3D when it started a few years back. But now 3D seems to be dead, with the few exceptions like movie cinemas. Even most of the TV manufacturers seems to get rid of it.
So what about VR? Only a hype by the tech savvy community and the lost and forgotten in a few years when it should be ready for mass market?
3D was never really there as a technology, it was pseudo-3D.
VR tech is actually quite impressive, and as a result people will figure out how to apply it to humans.
Have you tried any of the consumer VR headsets? My experience is that nobody makes the comparison with 3D TV any more after trying high end VR.
Seriously, was anyone ever hyped on 3D TVs? It always felt like a marketing push. I don't know a single person that was ever excited by it. Whereas the excitement from people who have tried VR is palpable.
Yeah, speaking for myself I was never excited by 3D TV or movies but I quit my job to work full time on VR because I'm so excited about the possibilities.
Game developers can be a pretty cynical bunch. I worked with a lot of seasoned devs who were totally blase about getting an Xbox One or PS4 on their desk years before they launched but were genuinely excited even by the DK1.
I think it's very much like 3D and will fail to be a wide commercial success for the same reasons.
-With standard 2D monitors, nobody has to wear equipment on their heads.
-People have physical reactions to 3D/VR that they don't normally have in a 2D monitor.
-3D/VR requires each participant to have their own set of gear.
I think there's a lot of hype because many gamers are really excited the technology, and because we don't have any other up-and-coming tech to latch onto these days.
I just bought my first Windows PC in 13 years to power a VR headset.
And after removing all the unnecessary HP crapware, driver installation headaches and navigating the weird hybrid UI, I was reminded of how much I haven't missed.
"I’m willing to bet there is a high stress team in the basement of Apple working on an End to End VR solution but it could be years before it sees the light of day."
Sure, that sucks for developers and us on the bleeding edge, but it doesn't hurt Apple one bit. At the most optimistic, it'll take 2-3 years for VR to become mainstream, and as long as Apple comes out with a polished Apple-like solution by then, they won't miss out on the market. If their offering is compelling then content will be ported to it.
If they wait much longer than 2-3 years competing solutions may achieve critical mass.
At this point, releasing any solution before nVidia's Pascal and/or AMD's Arctic Islands is available would be just silly. Maybe we'll see something in September.
Myopic article and bad clickbait where the author doesn't attempt to think big at all. How do you know they're sleeping at the wheel? Because they haven't enabled OSX VR?
I don't believe that console/PC VR will be the VR that makes it in the end. Small tablet (mobile phone) VR is where it will land and reach massive success.
The industry needs to keep the phone upgrade cycle working, people already reduced their reliance on their PC and laptop with their phones.
Samsung is nailing it with GearVR. High res, high powered phones are going to iterate until people simply put their phone in a $100 headset and experience VR that way. It'll be cheap to become a social experience, watching sports in 3D and as much gaming as people will want in that mode.
I still do not see any significant added value from VR except a bit higher immersion at the cost of more head movement.
But the head movement will be limited, nobody wants to do 180-360 degree turns in their living room and walk around. The key of video games is to sit and barely move and still be able to control a muscle packed fighter or whatever. Looking around can be fun but at the end I will do only small 5-20 degree turns (left , right, up, down) and then a big screen creates a similar level of immersion with no movement required.
Maybe we haven't find the killer use case yet but I assume it will be like with 3D screens, the added value of a 3D screen to a normal screen is so small that nobody will care.
Don't know if this comment will make a difference but its worth saying, before you make a comment here, to mention some context on what VR hardware you've tried.
I've tried the consumer Oculus, the HTC Vive, and the Hololens.
Note: Have not read article, going from title.
Apple is usually not a first to market type. They are a first to market with an amazing, polished, product type. They'll wait to see what gets proved in the market and what doesn't.
> They are a first to market with an amazing, polished, product type
That hasn't been true for a long time. The iPad might have been the last product fitting that description, and it was released in 2010.
Not the Apple watch, which is selling faster than the iPhone or iPad were at this point after launch and has captured ~70% of the smart watch market?
Ok, 'amazing' and 'polished' are aesthetic judgements on which reasonable people can disagree. How much better would it have to do to count, in your opinion?
The iPod, iPhone, and iPad redefined (you might even say created) their categories. People have argued that tablets are fairly useless in the end, but the iPad still made tablets mainstream and is arguably still the best tablet.
The watch did none of those things. I saw lukewarm reviews at best, and I've never met anyone who raved about having one. Capturing 70+% of the smart watch market is probably more a function of demographics, since a smart watch is a huge luxury, than of the quality of the product.
How much better would Apple have to do? It would have to make smart watches mainstream. For VR, it would have to make VR mainstream. That's the bar that they set in the past.
(Note that I despise Apple and am certainly not just being nostalgic.)
As someone that works in the VR industry where I think Apple can make the biggest difference would be in the self contained headset using their mobile components. Google is reportedly already doing this, http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/google-is-reportedly-buildi....
Think something like the Samsung Gear but an all in one headset thats nicely designed. Out of all the current available headsets, I think the PS is the best designed and best fitting. I think Apple could do better.
The article doesn't go into details as to why Apple should be doing anything with VR that isn't a) a proven technology nor is it b) anything more than a fad.
I've heard of the same thing being said about 3D TV, it quickly died a few years. I have a 3d Projector but never used it. I've tried a few 3D movies but prefer the standard vision.
In addition, we went through the VR fed back in the 90s, just like 3D TV, it died out after a few years.
Google Glass itself died out very quickly as well.
I have zero intentions of wearing a VR headset all day long, so this is ruled out for general computations. Gaming? I've stopped gaming many years ago. So, what is the purpose of VR or even AR for me?
The one single benefit that could convince me to wear an AR glass (Google Glass style) all day long if it comes with closed captioning support for real life, that to me as a hard of hearing person would provide so much benefits.
I think the difference between VR and 3D Movies is gigantic in terms of potential and experience. Already the VR experience is much more immersive and will continue to grow in that regard in the future. Of course there are people who dont care much about Virtual Worlds. And it might not have the mass market appeal, as for example a smartphone, in the near future and thats why its not really interesting for Apple. I think they go for products that basically could be for everyone. VR right now is clearly aiming at the gamer crowd, maybe the movie buff crowd. But that might change in a couple of years.
Me as a gamer, though, or somebody who is still interested in that, anyway, I must say I am exited :)
>The article doesn't go into details as to why Apple should be doing anything with VR that isn't a) a proven technology nor is it b) anything more than a fad.
You could say the same about cars, but Apple is supposedly working on building one. The same could be said about watches before the Apple Watch was released too. I agree with your point, but I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Cars and watches are definitely proven technologies and not fads.
Electric/self-driving cars are not proven technologies.
I would say that smart watches are still a fad.
what VR hardware have you tried?
I'm really surprised at how much skepticism there is here towards VR. I have a feeling a large majority of the commenters here have simply never tried the latest offerings and/or are not up-to-date on where the field is.
The consumer versions of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive are both very good. In particular, Oculus has very much already taken the Apple approach to VR. The final Rift has a high-end, premium design, including a lot of quality-of-life enhancements that feel like they came straight from Steve Jobs, like an obsession with making the cable as thin and lightweight as possible.
Oculus is pushing hard for a completely vertically integrated product. They're designing the software and the hardware specifically for each other and aren't very interested in supporting anything outside their ecosystem. They're having developers produce titles specifically for the Rift to maximize the quality of the user's experience.
Even the box they're shipping the Rift in is premium: http://3dprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/box1.jpg
The Touch motion controllers, expected to ship later this year, are similarly premium, and they don't just track their own locations in space but also offer basic finger and gesture recognition. They also have a small, lightweight design, enabling fine interactions with virtual objects.
Frankly, I can't think of what Apple could bring to this space even if they tried. Oculus has already done all the classic things that Apple does, and Apple is extremely inexperienced with game development.
With regard to the HTC Vive, I would argue that it's a little less polished and premium than the Rift, but it's also the first mover for fully tracked motion controllers, so I regard it as one of the most innovative products of the last five years. It's highly unlikely Apple is going to find a way to be more innovative, and even then by the time they enter the market the Vive and Rift will have moved on and both will be equally premium by that point.
IMHO, Apple has absolutely no chance in VR outside of smartphones, because Oculus has already played all of Apple's traditional tricks and Apple has no experience with games. Mobile VR is an area where they might excel, though the screens in the current iPhones are not nearly good enough to compete with the S7 and Gear VR, so at the very least they'd need to design future iPhone screens with VR in mind. This would mean both increasing the resolution and trying to maximize the pixel fill ratio.
Then there's the problem of positionally and wirelessly tracking the smartphone user's location in 3D space, a problem that Oculus and Google are already tackling. Google has Project Tango and Oculus has John Carmack working on this problem. Once they achieve this goal, Apple will be even further behind with even smartphone VR.
Was thinking the same thing. I've had both DK1 and DK2 of the Oculus headsets and have followed VR from the start to the now and there have been SO much happening with hardware and software that it's hard to grasp!
There is so much hardware for body tracking, environment tracking and soon Magic Leap that Apple really will be irrelevant when or if they enter the market.
I mean, just consider the patents involved here - it will be hell for them to enter!
was really hoping some sanity would leak into this thread. thanks for this awesome comment. what's your twitter handle? want to follow.
How did this post drop from the front page to the 7th page in less than a few minutes?
I don't know the specifics of the algorithm that HN uses, but reddit used to factor in 'post velocity'.
Assuming HN does something similar then a relatively small number of quick early upvotes can send something to the front page.
A more mixed response from front page only viewers will send it crashing down.
There are a lot more comments than there are upvotes to the article. The HN algorithm appears to penalize that heavily. There seems to be a cliff at about 40 comments: if you hit 40 comments before 40 upvotes, it falls off the front page.
Apple created Quicktime VR before sunsetting it, in a sense they pioneered VR
Here's Apple's homepage from 1997 [0]: "MOVIES FROM MARS: QuickTime VR takes you out of this world"
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19970715124703/http://www.apple....
If I was running Apple I wouldn't be wasting my money going into VR either. It's nothing but hype right now, and frankly I don't see it going much beyond that with any of the products that are on the horizon.
Personally I don't care much for VR in general. It's more like the new opium for the masses once it's affordable. While VR promotes escaping in virtual realities (hence, the name), Apple is looking for ways to improve your actual world with it's products (no marketing intended). This is where AR will matter, not VR. Google kinda pioneered here with Glass, Apple gave it a shot with it's wearable devive (watch), and I'm super excited what will come next!
Alone glasses that don't suck visually (people shouldn't notice the difference from a distance) and an all-day-battery-life would be features I'd spend $1000 upwards on, just because.
I agree, im really looking forward to AR systems. They are just so much more useful then VR. Sure, VR has its places like gaming, movies, documentaries etc. but AR is something that could be implemented in our daily lifes to really enhance them. The social network could actually extend into the real world.
How is the Apple Watch an AR device?
How does it feel being such an Apple fanboy? :)