Is VR/AR computing actually useful?

• Apple announced a new platform – the Vision Pro. The idea is to strap it to your face and enter a virtual workspace, doing all of your general computing.
• I kind of don’t need this at all at the moment. I already use all of the other platforms: phone, laptop, tablet, watch, TV, portable game console, headphones.
• First impressions are that this is wildly impressive from a technology and engineering perspective. This will open up new physical environments for people to work in that they couldn’t before. You can sit in an awful corner and from your perspective, it will look like an expansive computing utopia.
• From a user experience point of view, I don’t think I need this right now. I would consider using a headset for gaming and a truly 3D representation of those environments, but for general computing, I’m not in a situation where this would be all that beneficial to me. Coupled with the high launch price of $3499 (USD) and I’ll be waiting for a while to see how it goes.
• What does it seem like it’d be good for?
  • Entertainment. The idea of getting an arbitrarily large screen in any environment is a nice one, assuming that the quality of the content being displayed is up to par with a real world display.
  • Maybe communication, if you can just throw it on and talk to your friends and family like “you’re there”. I’m not sure how the headset would represent your own face, though. Is it stitching together internal and external camera views? Does it show anything at all?
  • People who travel a lot. Giving them a consistent experience wherever they go (including on a plane). Reducing the amount of stuff that Digital Nomads need to carry around.
• Challenges
  • Apple’s product page says the battery life is “up to 2 hours, and all-day use when plugged in”.
  • This doesn’t seem to be made for gaming, specifically. You can connect external third-party controllers and keyboards for better interfaces, but it doesn’t seem like you’re intended to be walking around with this headset on or playing games like Beat Saber in your living room. Maybe I’m wrong on that? If it more directly addressed gaming, that would enhance the value proposition a bit more, in my opinion.
  • There didn’t seem to be a unique killer app shown. I suppose that’s the point of announcing it to developers, but we’ll have to wait and see what people come up with.

What Might Advance Computing More?

• This all kind of feels like the Vision Pro will let you do iPad-equivalent levels of work with a very nice piece of hardware that allows you to gaze and wave your hands around to control it, but what if we just went back to the drawing board? I like having backwards compatibility and interoperability with the existing platforms, but it limits your creativity.
• What if we had a document-focused OS that was totally integrated, using OLE-like concepts to allow for linking and embedded of documents and/or pieces of documents.
  • I’m mostly thinking of traditional computers here, but a new platform like the Vision Pro could be a way to break from tradition and try something really interesting. It would certainly be more risky to say “give up most of what you know about computers”, though.
  • What is the current state of the art with this? Something like Notion maybe? But how do we add in functionality?
  • Sort of like Lisp or Unix command-line tools except instead of each atom of data being a string, it’s a document piece?
• Dynamic documents as personal software - Geoffrey Litt
  • I watched this talk as I was writing and it is a much more deeply explored concept along these lines. I like the idea of building in little snippets of functionality with the content of the document. I’m not sure how easy it would be to get regular users to start using Javascript to solve their problems, but the addition of the LLM assistance mentioned in the talk might be a way to mitigate that a bit.
  • To me, the key idea here is the focus shifting away from prioritizing which app you want to use. Instead, the idea of the document the user is trying to create or the problem that the user is trying to solve becomes most important. A person isn’t sitting down at their laptop thinking “Let’s go do some computing in Microsoft Excel”, they’re trying to figure out whether they can afford a mortgage payment or whether they are saving enough for retirement.