Disney Plus and Vive are coming to Apple Vision Pro

On the Arms Race of Apple and the iPhone: What are the Benefits of a Quest for a VR and AR Companion?

Many people speculated that Apple’s headset could be the same as the very expensive and unique, car that sold people on the idea of electric vehicles. Apple’s devices make people care about them and are actually useful in a way that makes them want to use them, according to the SVP of 3D social platform Spatial.

Apple is expecting less than a million units a year for the device compared to the 200 million or more that it expects for the iPhone. Despite the rumored cost of the device, some are predicting a gold rush of app designers trying to duplicate the success of the early iPhone developers. “I’ve been like, wait, why am I not making some goofy version of some application that everyone likes — like, being one of the first to-do apps on the Apple headset?” says Gabe Baker, VP of browser-based VR collaboration platform Frame. “There’s going to be so much garbage out there, and there’s going to be some cool stuff, too — it’s going to be a fun time.”

Passthrough avoids some of the problems that AR glasses like Magic Leap and Microsoft HoloLens face, like translucent virtual objects and a limited field of view. Meta, the biggest player in consumer headsets, chose the style for its Quest Pro design last year. The video feed on the Quest Pro was washed out and it had limited practical applications. A convoluted sync process with your Mac or PC is required for a virtual office. Meta focuses on the lower middle of the VR and AR market, including passthrough as a point of sale on the upcoming $299 Quest 3.

“I think the other thing that’s compelling is the arms race that it starts between Meta and Apple. We have never had the two giants go toe to toe on a new platform. Even for hardware makers, Apple’s Entry isn’t necessarily a bad thing because the Ar glasses market is small enough that any New attention to the space is welcome.

There are plenty of downsides to the dominance of the iPhone. Many app developers are unhappy with the results of their work because Apple has mastered the walled garden. It has taken years to fight some developers in court, and others have testified in Congress about having their apps locked down and put up against Apple’s own copycats.

The exact uses of Apple technology aren’t known yet. Tim Cook claims that AR is for “communication and connection”, and it will feature a face and body camera that can be used. It’s said to also offer access to iPad apps, games, entertainment via Apple’s TV app, and a version of Apple Fitness Plus. “One of the reasons why I think Apple is immensely successful in many of their ventures is they’re not just launching a device, they’re launching an ecosystem,” says Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen, who covers the VR / AR market. “It’s that combination of different applications applied to different use cases for different users — that is the ‘killer app.’”

Apple has a headset called Vision Pro. The virtual reality and augmented reality experiences offered by the device are designed to combine the real and digital worlds for both the wearer and those around them. The primary interface displays apps over top of the real world for the wearer; meanwhile, people nearby can see the wearer’s eyes through the device using an external display feature that Apple calls EyeSight.

Its hardware is wildly varied, ranging from bulky headsets with sophisticated tracking to smart glasses that do little more than show alerts. Its software is frequently used for business uses. There’s no settled consensus on control schemes.

Facetime on Apple TV: How to Make the Most of your TV and the Continuity Camera, and Its Implications for Webcams

There are doubts surrounding the jump into augmented reality by Apple on Monday. There are a lot of reports of changes in direction inside Apple. The device has allegedly been hard to manufacture and required numerous compromises. The process has taken more time than Apple expected. And at a rumored $3,000, even Apple reportedly expects slow short-term sales.

But among AR professionals, the mood is jubilant. If there is a single thing that could happen to the industry, it’s this. It’s not a distinction between hardware or software. We are excited about it.

You will soon be able to use Facetime on Apple TV. The new capability leverages the iPhone’s Continuity Camera, allowing you to use your iPhone as a substitute for a webcam as you see and chat with the people you’re meeting with from your TV. It will even ensure that you’re in the frame using Center Stage.

New Feature Announcements for iPadOS 17, including Apps, Games, Photos, Notes, Homescreen and Journal, and Related Apps

As you can see from the above announcements, widgets were pretty big at this year’s WWDC. They are even coming to watchOS 10, which will let you look at various information at a glance by pressing the crown on your watch. There are also new watch faces Apple is introducing that will help measure how much time you spend in the daylight and how much time you spend cycling.

Apple is also introducing a new “game mode” for macOS that will prioritize the GPU and CPU while gaming on a Mac and offers lowered audio latency on AirPods. As part of Apple’s push into gaming, developer Hideo Kojima also announced that Death Stranding (and some of his other games) will arrive on macOS.

Apple announced some visual upgrades to macOS Sonoma, which will now support widgets that you can add to your desktop, along with new moving screensavers that you can also use as your wallpaper. There are some new features for Safari as well, which let you create and pin web apps to your Dock, as well as make profiles for different browsing sessions.

Those aren’t the only updates coming with iPadOS 17. It will also feature a personalized lock screen, just like on iPhone, and will finally come with the Health app.

Apple is adding new ways to access features and apps from the homescreen with iPadOS 17. There are also updates for the device’s Notes app, which will now be capable of detecting the fields in a PDF. It will also let you work with others in real time to organize and annotate PDFs.

The new version of the phone app will have a number of new features, including a Check In feature, which will allow you to easily share your email address and phone number with another iPhone user, and transcription for voice messages. Oh, and Apple’s dropping the “Hey” portion of its “Hey, Siri” trigger phrase.

Along with a new journaling app, Apple revealed a number of new features for iOS 17. Most notably, that includes a new StandBy feature that turns your iPhone’s screen into a smart home-like display when it’s tilted horizontally while charging, allowing it to display essential information, like the time and date.

There is an app for the iPad called Journal. Journal is intended to encourage you to journal your thoughts about recent activities. Apple says the app is secured with end-to-end encryption and that your logs are stored locally on your device. This year, the app will arrive.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23749243/apple-wwdc-2023-biggest-announcements-vision-pro-macbook-air-15-inch-ios-17

Apple Silicon promises: a 15-inch MacBook Air and a Disney+ VR headset, and some other interesting features from the Apple Silicon-powered improvements

The Mac Pro and Mac Studio are getting Apple Silicon-powered improvements. The new M2 Ultra chip is an upgrade from the old chip that has an up to 24 core and up to 76 core, both of which are important in Apple’s latest devices.

Apple claims it is the “world’s thinnest” 15-inch laptop, with a weight of just over three pounds. The device has a full eighteen hours of battery life, 500 nits of brightness, and a high-definition camera. You can order it today, and it will be available next week.

Apple showed a new MacBook Air with a 15-inch display, as well as the Vision Pro headset. Until now, the MacBook Air lineup only had 13-inch displays.

The device is powered by two chips: the M2 and a new R1 chip for real-time sensor processing. According to Apple, the Vision Pro features a single strip of glass on the front of the device, along with a digital crown that lets you switch in and out of AR and VR. It also comes with support for spatial audio through built-in speakers and an external battery pack that’s capable of lasting two hours with a single charge.

I also know that Apple still has a long list of things it wants to refine between now and next year when the Vision Pro ships. That is part of the reason for it being announced, to let developers get started with building new apps, so they can react to it. We’ve been hearing about the same promise for years from Meta and others. Apple can clearly outpace everyone in the industry when it comes to hardware, especially when cost is apparently no object. The ideal headset demo reel is still just a headset demo reel, and whether Apple can provide a killer app for the Vision Pro is still up in the air.

Aside from watchable content, the teaser also suggests that Disney Plus will add some interactive VR experiences to its platform that can be accessed via the Vision Pro headset, such as the ability to “travel via a National Geographic adventure from your couch.” A turtle swimming across the presentation seems like an experience akin to the one you would get if you played the video game.

The video also teases that Disney Plus users will be able to use the Vision Pro headset to watch sports games in VR, a feature that prominent Apple leaker Mark Gurman mentioned in his Power On newsletter in April. This is demonstrated in a few ways: the first of which features a regular 2D football game surrounded by useful information in widget-like boxes, such as the score, win probability, and player stats. In another instance, a basketball game projected onto a coffee table in the user’s lounge allows them to see a courtview replay of the match from every angle.

All of this was basically a greatest hits reel of VR demos, including some old standbys: Apple showed off 180-degree 3D videos with spatial audio in something called the Apple Immersive Video Format, which the company apparently shot with proprietary cameras it may or may not release. They looked like the demos we’ve been watching for a long time. I looked at a 3D photo of some cute kids shot by the headset’s cameras and watched a 3D video of those kids blowing out a birthday candle. (Same.) I did a one-minute meditation in which a voice told me to be grateful, and while the room was dark and a sphere of colorful triangles hovered around me. (This looked great, but Supernatural exists, has millions of users on the Quest, and has offered guided meditation since 2020.) And I watched Avatar in what looked like a movie theater, which, well, that’s one of the oldest VR demos ever.

I did get to see a quick FaceTime call with someone else in a Vision Pro using an AI-generated 3D “persona” (Apple does not like it when you call them “avatars”) which was both impressive and deeply odd. It was obvious that I was talking to a persona that was similar to a valley and most of the person’s face was frozen apart from their mouth and eyes. But even that much was convincing after a while, and certainly much nicer than your average Zoom call. I’ll wait to make a decision until later, since I was not able to set up my persona myself and there’s clearly a lot of work to be done.

The video passthrough was similarly impressive. It was very clear and sharp. I happily talked to others, walked around the room, and even took notes on my phone while wearing the headset — something I would never be able to do with something like the Meta Quest Pro. It is still video passthrough. I could see intense compression at times, and loss of detail when people moved into shadows. I could see the IR light on the front of my iPhone futilely blink as it attempted to unlock with FaceID to no avail. The room wasn’t as bright as I would have liked, so I had to make adjustments when I took the headset off.

The display itself is absolutely bonkers: a 4K display for each eye, with pixels just 23 microns in size. In the short time I tried it, it was totally workable for reading text in Safari (I loaded The Verge, of course), looking at photos, and watching movies. It is easily the highest-resolution VR display I have ever seen. I can say that there was a bit of green and purple around the edges of thelens, but I can not say for certain if it was due to the device’s early demo nature or something else. But we will have to see when it ships.

The light on the front screen of the Vision Pro is used to indicate whether you are in the headset or not and it can also show a view through which the eyes of the wearer are projected. That view will either be innovative or horrifying. We’ll see.

I did not get to try out the shutter button on the left side of the Vision Pro that was used to take 3D videos and photos. The Digital Crown is on the right; clicking it brings up the home screen of app icons, while turning it changes the level of VR immersion in certain modes. I asked if anyone would like to have the middle level set as a kind of workspace, which would allow them to talk to their colleagues in the middle of the workspace, while leaving the sides open for apps.

The small bumps you see on the sides of the Vision Pro’s band are where the built-in audio lives. Audio is one of the big selling points of the device. Most of its other sensors and cameras are housed just under the front-facing glass; at just the right angle, you can see some of the cameras pointing outwards from the headset. The vent under both eyes is meant to push all the processor’s hot air down onto your cheeks.

The design language is all brushed aluminum, shiny glass and soft fabrics, and the vibe is very similar to the iPhone 6. The front of the camera and the display is made of a curved glass, which is an important part of optical engineering because it serves as a lens for both the cameras and the screen. I was not given the chance to try this feature in any way.

What Do I Expect to Learn About the Apple Vision Pro Bose Headset and Other Mixed Reality Devices? A Review of Apple’s Workshop at the Fieldhouse

The headset itself weighs a little less than a pound — it’s connected by a braided white power cable to a silver battery pack that offers about two hours of use. The cable detaches from the headset with a mechanical latch, but it’s permanently connected to the battery pack. If you want to plug into the wall you plug a USB-C adapter into the battery pack.

Apple held Vision Pro demos in a large white cube-shaped building it built for WWDC called the Fieldhouse. After entering, I was given an iPhones that I could use to take a face-in-a-circle scans and a side-to-side face scans that looked at my ears. After that, Apple asked me if I wore glasses and if they could fit my Vision Pros with the right lens, but I had to get a prescription first. (The lenses are made by Zeiss; Apple needed a partner that can legally sell prescription lenses. They snap in magnetically and will be sold separately at launch.)

It is a dramatically better- looking device than any other headset we have seen, based on the little bit we have seen. The headset is thin and has a big, plushy band around it, but it is not much heft or size. The goggles are slightly curved and should wrap around most faces fairly nicely. The whole thing is a nice silvery color, down to the cable coming out the left side and the iPhone-sized battery pack at the bottom that provides its two hours of battery life.

How it feels in use will be the big question. Will it sit too firmly on your nose if there is no overhead band? Will the cable running down to the battery pack be a bother? Will it be hot after a few minutes? Can it look from the inside? Apple spent a long time talking about how you could use the Vision Pro to replace your television or computer monitor, but doing that well on your face requires a huge amount of processing power and display prowess. Even the 4K displays Apple announced might not be enough.

And, of course, there’s the “what is this for?” debate. There is hardly a market for mixed reality devices, unlike when the company launched the Apple Watch and AirPods. Most people are unfamiliar with how the headsets work and how they should work.