I’m biased, I work with Palmer and have always 1) found him to be genuine, 2) reasonably impartial in how he judges these sorts of things, and 3) been blown away by his passion for head-mounted display tech.
Some of the early Apple leaks scared me off from early adoption — external battery/compute, talk of only producing 300k units to satisfy enthusiasts only, etc. I’m excited that Apple is taking the leap but it seems like the headset is unlike the iPad/watch/iPhone in that it’s not intended for mass adoption. I was content to be part of the second wave.
If some credible folks attest to this being excellent, why not? Strong initial reviews would swing me towards buying a first unit.
It’s easy to add power banks to a belt or backpack while generally every added ounce on the head makes it less comfortable. Especially for longer times. The Quest Pro really bombed on that point.
Actually I’d go further and say the compute unit should also be external as it’d allow more compute. It should still be attachable to the person to allow freedom of movement.
The other big thing for me would be opening up SDKs for peripheral developers. The lack of 3rd party peripherals for Oculus has hindered people experimenting on ways to solve the last piece of full immersion. I wanted to make my own treadmill for walking in games, but theirs no real APIs for it on the Oculus. I’m unsure how Apple will do. They love dongles but also love control.
People who insist on an internal battery miss the point entirely.
The device is going to spend 95% of its time connected to a Mac where an internal battery provides no benefit and significant downsides in weight and bulk.
The key initial features will be adding virtual monitors and allowing new UI controls e.g. floating timeline for video editing. It will be a productivity enhancing device not for gaming or entertainment.
> It will be a productivity enhancing device not for gaming or entertainment.
I disagree with this. I suspect the majority of iPad owners aren't using their devices for productivity and the majority of Apple Watch owners also aren't serious athletes. We'll likely get two devices to cater for different needs at some point - apple glass pro and apple glass - but I've got a pair of nreal airs and I'm absolutely convinced that AR is going to be the defining tech hardware of the decade. I use it for productivity purposes but I also use it most nights in bed to watch movies and to read books and pdfs because the ergonomics and experience are so much better. I don't really do mobile gaming but I can absolutely see people using it for that in the future as the steam deck/nreal air combo is proving wildly successful.
Apple are going to want to own this product category the same way they dominate the phone market in the English speaking countries and if they don't have a product that competes on price they'll end up losing out to cheaper competitors and run the risk of people defecting to Android. They can get away with charging a premium because they're Apple but they can't get away with the price differential of say a MacBook Air and a Mac Pro which is what we're looking at if they price this at the rumoured $3000.
I even showed the Nreal Air to my middle aged mother today and she was instantly sold and wants to get a pair. VR was always going to struggle to get mass appeal but AR is a whole other ball game.
Apple Watch was not popular in its first or second iterations. And in fact in the early days its sales were so lack lustre it was borderline 50/50 as to whether the device would even continue to be sold.
It wasn't under years later when the performance improved and the cost came down that it started to gain traction amongst the mass market. I suspect the Apple Reality headset will do the same.
He's an enthusiast, so frankly I don't trust his opinion.
I don't intend to imply that he might lie or anything like that, simply that his criteria are not the mass market criteria. Worse, he could be scaling his opinion based on what he knows about the state of the technology and the difficultly of getting things right. An innocent, even kind view, but doesn't imply that someone like me might happily adopt it.
If you consider the "Crossing the Chasm" model, the early adopters are where you get a toehold, but the money is made on later users who have different, and even disjoint criteria.
I don’t think calling Palmer a run-of-the-mill enthusiast does justice to his passion/obsession. Last I checked he had the largest HMD collection in the world. His passion (more than anduril) has been to bring VR/AR to the masses, and if he feels like the Apple headset is a step towards that then I’m inclined to accept his interpretation.
> He's an enthusiast, so frankly I don't trust his opinion.
To call Mr. Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, "an enthusiast" seems a bit diminutive. Do you not think the Rift was designed with the mass market as its target?
"Enthusiast" undersells for sure, but is still a true statement.
The fate of all VR at large defines what his ultimate legacy will be. In this, I think "enthusiast" is perhaps a less apt choice than "promoter." What he is doing here is promoting VR.
It's probably pretty well deserved. But I remain skeptical VR could get even 25% stake of the computing market (that'd be great!), and Apple certainly seems to have less than zero mass market ambitions. The question remains of what software really works & makes sense here, & we barely have guesses it feels like. The product might be excellent, and Luckey is lucky to have such an excellent company with such cachet shooting so stratospherically high market. Of course he'll promote this. Hopefully we figure out the use cases, some day.
> "Enthusiast" undersells for sure, but is still a true statement.
It's like calling Steve Jobs "a computing enthusiast" — it's ridiculous by omission (unless Palmer's Wikipedia entry is wrong). Clearly he was designing for the mass market, and in his roles as creator and designer was a proxy for that market.
There's the notion of "What hat am I wearing". If you are a CTO or whatever but just want to talk tech with your people, put on the "tech enthusiast" hat & take off the "I run this shit" hat. The roles we assume are fluid & sometimes our most defining aspects are not the best descriptions of our current speaking role, especially if everyone already knows it's Steve Jobs/Palmer Luckey.
Hats is an internal motivational thinking device. Publicly, he'll always be the founder of Oculus, and his comments filtered through that lense. For better or worse he doesn't get the luxury of taking that "hat" off so whatever hat he's thinks he's wearing, it's the founder of Oculus hat, with all the acclaim, but also baggage that brings along.
Other people always only being able to interpret your through a single lens is other people's weakness and greatly to their detriment. What real authority they're using is an active question we should, as audiences, be considering.
Having it be explicitly swappable in internal use is a huge benefit. But all external communication also implicitly has hats. Whether we are smart enough to perceive that or too blunted to see.
Product creator and designer, since I believe those are the lenses through which he views potential Oculus killers. What hat do you think he was wearing?
"Promoter" is my sly but real take; he's promoting his own industry & legacy here. "Industry Insider Enthusiast" might be a nicer take, a fittingly general hat to toot from here.
> Do you not think the Rift was designed with the mass market as its target?
I mean, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, who knows. It certainly didn't achieve that, though. VR remains the most enthusiast-y of enthusiast-y things, despite various efforts.
The rift might have been intended as a mass market device but it certainly wasn’t one in practice: it demonstrably didn’t have the features and use case(s) necessary to reach mass market acceptance.
> designer of the Oculus Rift
Cough Valve and Abrash. You presumably do know the famous “Oculus” demo that got Zuckerberg’s investment was given at Valve using all of Valve’s headset and software, right? All that IP just handed to Oculus.
Say what you like about the guy but at least base it on facts.
He was designing it on his own and did a good enough job to get Carmack interested and promoting it through forum interactions: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa8kirsUfg
I share this view. Not to any hate on Palmer, but enthusiasts often have a very different product perspective and the products he's led are demonstrations of this. Again, not in a negative way, they just failed to capture public attention due to the tradeoffs.
The fact that it's Apple is what makes me less cynical about the hype. If Apple, a company predominantly focused on mass public adoption, is able to get an enthusiast hyped about one of their products... maybe they hit a good balance.
Yup, my take as well. "Oh, look, person who dedicated his life to VR glasses likes VR glasses." Oculus was also going to be a revolution but it stayed a niche. May these folks who explore alternate tech be blessed, but so far I see zero great uses of this tech, aside from simulation for training medics, military, police officers and so on. But those uses require much better latency, resolution & so on and there are already companies serving those niches with devices decidedly more expensive than any consumer can afford.
I'm honestly a bit surprised that someone who's seen it would comment publicly. I know this is a short and generic tweet and Palmer is established enough to say whatever he wants but still. This feels different than the anonymous leaks that we've been hearing about the headset which is to be expected before a big Apple hardware launch.
Curious why you think he “has every reason to stick it to Zuck.” Zuck gave him an exit that never would have given him the notoriety he has now.
I was one of the first 200 to kickstart the Rift back in the day and there is a very real chance that Oculus would be dead now if not for the Facebook/Meta acquisition.
He got his money, which he rolled into a meme company and a defense technology company. Other than petty spite or ego, why does he feel the need to “stick it to Zuck” now?
[Edit: Just realized he was fired by Facebook. So I guess it’s just a petty personal vendetta.]
>[Edit: Just realized he was fired by Facebook. So I guess it’s just a petty personal vendetta.]
Here's an interview he did with Aarthi and Sriram from a16z ~6 months ago ([0] Palmer Luckey: selling Oculus for $2b and what he saw in the Ukraine war).
Some of the early Apple leaks scared me off from early adoption — external battery/compute, talk of only producing 300k units to satisfy enthusiasts only, etc. I’m excited that Apple is taking the leap but it seems like the headset is unlike the iPad/watch/iPhone in that it’s not intended for mass adoption. I was content to be part of the second wave.
If some credible folks attest to this being excellent, why not? Strong initial reviews would swing me towards buying a first unit.