mattspace

AppleInsider said:

AppleInsider provides an overview of the current state of the two technologies, and what Apple needs to consider for creating its own headset design. 

As someone who is now doing a lot of actual content creation work inside VR - as in VR is now the work environment where I get a significant proportion of what I do, done, here's some observations:

• AR is an open plan communal workspace, with all of the associated distractions, and the need to build a visually clean work environment so you can concentrate on what you're doing. VR is having your own office, which is always clean and tidy and specific to your current needs.
• Anyone complaining that headsets are "too" bulky, needs to get out of the office and look at the basic safety gear any other industry requires. A VR headset is nothing compared to the gauntlets, welding helmet, leather protective jacket, angle-grinding shield etc I wear whenever I step into my analog studio. Not all computing technology revolves around people in Jony Ive's antiseptic white world.
• Apple does not have a single computer that is "good" for VR, because...
• AMD does not have a single GPU that meets the minimum spec for a machine you'd want to work in all day.
• Nvidia's 1080ti is the entrypoint for a serious VR station, and the top range AMD Vega 64 comes in around 30% below it in terms of powering 3D gaming engines at high resolution (which is what a VR environment is).
• Metal and Metal-optimisation will not make weaker hardware on the Mac outperform stronger hardware on Windows PCs. The Windows 3d ecosystem is not bogged down by inefficiency that Metal can "cure".
• Go look up how many non-game VR utility apps there are for macOS on Steam - most of the ones that were a part of the iMac Pro launch, still haven't been released. A year after Apple announced VR at WWDC 2017, there's a grand total of 4 non-game apps, as opposed to 192 for Windows.
• VR app makers are not going to flock to macOS in the absence of affordable, high performance GPU hardware that can be kept updated with annual upgrades. There's no ecosystem for high-performance 3D on the Mac.
• People looking for a VR machine, are not going to buy an eGPU solution that costs more, while only having 1/4 the PCI bandwidth of a machine with a motherboard PCI slot.
• The state of the art in VR, is not going to stop progressing for at least a decade, and until then, when goggle resolution exceeds visual acuity, and 3D hardware is capable of maintaining enormous models without slowing down, quality will never be "enough".
• In VR there's nothing of the OS for the user to interact with, every VR app is its own universe, providing all the UI elements, file navigation etc. Headset makers, and Steam, provide the launcher apps, so you don't even need the operating system to manage starting and stopping the apps. VR makes the operating system on the computer as irrelevant to the user, as the firmware in the bios. Gravity Sketch on Windows is the same as Gravity Sketch on macOS, it just performs better on Windows.
• Tracking without lighthouses, no matter how good it is, is unlikely to be as good as lighthouse tracking, and VR's succeed / fail margin is in the final percentages of how good it is. Non lighthouse tracking is probably ok for AR, because AR is always about what you're looking at in your current field of vision. Lighthouses let you track objects that aren't in your field of view, and free you from spending any processing budget on recognising the ambient environment in order to track the wearer's position.

Most importantly:

• The experience of creating in VR is more compelling than any user experience of any device Apple makes. Next to Tiltbrush in a Vive, painting apps on the iPad Pro are banal and dull. VR apps are a new artistic & creative medium, capturing the ability to draw in space, which sculptors have been chasing since the dawn of time. The iPad Pro is, to be uncharitable, the ruination of the no-safety-net thrill of paper.

I've been mac-based since 1994. I'd give up the Mac in a second if I had to choose between it, and a user-upgradable Nvidia-powered VR station. macOS being "better" or "nicer" simply isn't a part of the equation.

Book writers are getting screwed, primarily, by Apple not offering Apple Books on platforms other than their own. The key to iTunes and Apple Music, is its availability on Windows and Android - it provides a service to the content providers by getting their work in front of, effectively, 100% of customers.

Publishing on Apple Books, you're limited to only iOS / Mac users, so you still have to publish on Google Books and an Amazon-owned platform, so you still get screwed by those companies, but now you also have to cover the costs of developing for multiple platforms, and spread your revenue over multiple vendors, so it's harder to meet minimum payout levels.

Effectively, Apple is using Book content as a leverage / lockin for their own device sales - there's nothing magnanimous about their efforts.

The worst thing about it is, Apple's platform is really a lot better than anyone else's - to give an example for Comics / Graphic Novels:

With Apple:

• you get ~70% of the coverprice.
• you have total control over the file you make, Apple doesn't re-author your file.
• Apple Books is a great reading experience, because it's WebKit, you can use JQuery to build rich interactivity (eg use an off-the-shelf lightbox to remake  ComiXology's "patented" panel-by-panel view).
• ~24hour turnaround from submission to live.

With Google:

• you get as little as 50% of the coverprice if they sell through an affiliate
• their EPUB reader has no support for javascript.

With ComiXology (Amazon):

• You get (IIRC) 50% of the 70% Apple left ComiXology keep when it sells through the ComiXology App (so 35% overall).
• You have no control over the authored file - ComiXology takes your high resolution .pdf and remakes it manually into their format - all that frame by frame stuff is done by hand.
• turnaround from submissions and corrections can be months.

With Kindle:

• you get 30% of the coverprice.
• If you want 70%, you have to agree to pay download fees per sale. So for each $5 comic book, you'd have to pay Amazon ~$25 in download fees.

racerhomie3 said:

Apple has better technology that it wants to merge with excellent hardware. The mainstream developers will only come over once Apple makes an excellent pair of Glasses. So it’s cool that there is a lower quality alternative to that option, but it’s not really important like the open web. The Apple Watch doesn’t even need the open web that much ,even though it has gained WebKit support.

Coming from a "I currently get paid to create content in VR, for VR, and wish I could do it on a Mac" point of view... That's not a very realistic appraisal of the situation, to me.

Apple's problem with VR isn't the glasses, it's that they have a continued tendency to use low end, garbage graphics hardware on their products.

Their top of the range desktop, has barely half the graphics horsepower when it comes to VR, of some windows laptops (Vega 64 Vs. dual Nvidia 1080). They don't even have a laptop that can do VR without lugging along an eGPU. AMD has nothing on its horizon that's likely to offer users a credible alternative to Nvidia, when it comes to generating immersive 3D environments.

No form of glasses will solve that, and the evolutionary path of graphics hardware isn't going to level out until image quality meets the resolution of the real world (maybe a decade at least).

Go look at Steam - non-game VR apps for macOS - 3 (one of the headline apps they used to show off VR on the iMac Pro at launch still hasn't been released for macOS (it's on Windows) as far as I can see). For Windows, 200+

Developers will go where the users are, and the users are where the fastest, and cheapest-to-replace GPU tech is. That's still based around motherboard slots. Thunderbolt is sufficient for computation / rendering, but it's not good enough to compete for real-time immersion performance.

"But Windows VR is just games" Game engines are the general-purpose operating environment for VR software. Good game-engine performance is table-stakes to play. Your VR painting environment, your VR media compositor, your VR network topology viewer all use game engines to deliver their user experience (as do a growing number of CAD apps etc).

"But macOS has Pro Apps". Not in VR it doesn't - VR isn't a place to view content created on a 2D screen (the Final Cut worldview), quite the opposite - tools for VR content creation are VR tools, and if anything, we go in the opposite direction - 2D screens are for consumption of media created in VR. In this new, levelled playing field, macOS doesn't offer anything, because the operating system is effectively just a dumb pipe between your VR app (which handles the UI) and the 3D hardware. Windows having a janky file explorer compared to Finder simply doesn't matter - you don't use it. Our VR stations boot, auto launch Steam, one press of the VR icon, goggles on, and we're in Steam, or Viveport - launching the app we want to work in. We don't even "use" Windows.

Look outside games for a moment, there are a lot of Pro media creation apps that rely on OpenGL. Usually they're made by small teams, for specific tasks, and the only reason we get Mac versions, is because they can develop the interface using Qt, and the engine with OpenGL, and amortise the high cost, relative to number of seats, of maintaining a Mac version, across Windows and Linux.

The Mac is riding on Windows' coattails for a lot of these sorts of niche, heavy-lifting apps. We get a version, because we're low marginal cost. Once that changes these developers aren't going to re-tool for Metal, they're just going to dump macOS.

Would these products be better with Metal? No doubt, but that assumes that a Metal version is an option on the table.

Federation Square's importance, whether anyone likes the style of the architecture or not, is that it's a single, intact project, created for public benefit, in a single architectural style from a specific period in history. I'm not personally a fan of the style of Fed Square, and while I like most of Apple's architecture, to be fair, Apple's work is now an architectural "international generic" style, which is considered disposable by themselves as soon as technology (eg glass sheet sizes) changes. When it comes to their proposals for Fed Square, their first "Retro Pizza Hut" version was a more interesting building than the current design, but neither of them are worth breaking the existing Fed Square scheme.

The fact that a company as psychotically devoted to aesthetic purity as Apple, could even contemplate imposing its own taste and style on an existing, complete architectural scheme is, frankly, disappointing. It displays a fundamental disrespect for the location, and the existing architecture. There's no reason for Apple to have any visible branding presence if they want to be in that location, other than a simple sign with their logo. They managed to handle that quite well in historic buildings in Brisbane, London & Paris.

It's hard enough to protect significant "modern" architecture from the greed of developers, without companies like Apple trying to build temples to their own aggrandisement at the expense of culture in general.

Most importantly, the rejection of Apple's plan is a clear message that society is sick of back room deals between companies and governments, presented as fait accompli, to make sweeping changes to public spaces, and public infrastructure, without the public's consultation, or consent.