Engadget: “Apple Vision Pro hands-on, redux: Immersive Video, Disney+ app, floating keyboard and a little screaming”

Dana: Sitting up close in the center of Apple Immersive and spatial videos reminded me of Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s A Wonderful Life: I was both an insider and outsider at the same time. In one demo, we saw Alicia Keys performing the most special of performances: just for us, in a living room. In a different series of videos — these meant to demonstrate spatial video — we saw the same family at mealtime, and a mother and daughter outside, playing with bubbles.

As I watched these clips, particularly the family home videos that reminded me of my own toddler, I felt immersed, yes, but also excluded; no one in the videos sees you or interacts with you, obviously. You are a ghost. I imagined myself years from now, peering in from the future on bygone videos of my daughter, and felt verklempt. I did not expect to get teary-eyed during a routine Apple briefing.

Cherlynn Low & Dana Wollman

Apple’s Vision Pro is nearing launch, and last week we saw another round of hands-on reporting from various tech journalists. I enjoyed this one from Engadget the most, as I think it hits the main points of contention in terms of user experience:

Los Angeles Times: “Forget the metaverse. For $3,500, Apple offers a new way to be alone”

Apple’s pitch? This may be virtual reality, but it’s anything but the metaverse. This is brand new technology for you, the consumer, to be enjoyed inside Apple’s famous walled garden. Its demo was all about watching huge virtual movie screens in your living room and disappearing in beautiful simulated natural environments. It’s a high-tech home theater for your face. Unlike other headsets, there are no handheld controllers — you navigate the digital world by looking at the objects of interest and pinching your fingers. You are immersed, you are entertained, and you are very much alone.

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That these kinds of immersive digital worlds, whether closed or open, would rise to prominence was always a dystopian idea, one that originated in cyberpunk fiction, premised on the notion that conditions in the real world were so bad that users had to abandon their actual lives completely and escape into a more poorly rendered simulacrum.

This is precisely why Karpf thinks that computers-on-your-face might have a future after all. If the world keeps getting worse, he says, this will eventually have a lot of appeal.

If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.

Brian Merchant

This article gets to the core of the issue of Apple’s recently announced mixed-reality headset, an issue it shares with a whole category of VR goggles: these devices are ultimately designed to be used in isolation, with few or preferably no other people around. I’m not convinced it’s an impact of the recent pandemic and the associated social distancing; Big Tech has always been in the business of creating tools to disintermediate and monetize human interactions, and the Apple Vision Pro represents a pinnacle of that evolution.

Reuters: “Tuvalu turns to the metaverse as rising seas threaten existence”

Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe told the COP27 climate summit it was time to look at alternative solutions for his country’s survival and this included Tuvalu becoming the first digitised nation in the metaverse – an online realm that uses augmented and virtual reality (VR) to help users interact.

Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud, he said in the video that sees him standing on a digital replica of an islet threatened by rising sea levels.

Lucy Craymer

Can’t decide what’s sadder about this story: that the world has done so little to address global warming that outlandish plans such as the virtualization of an entire nation are even being considered, or that anyone would genuinely think that a virtual recreation could ever replace the original. Not to mention that VR technology is still in its infancy; it doesn’t have mass adoption, nor industry-wide standards, so any current project might become incompatible with future hardware and software solutions, effectively erasing it from existence.

CNBC: “Mark Zuckerberg envisions 1 billion people in the metaverse”

We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall, he said.

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But the company’s investment in augmented reality and virtual reality dates back to 2014, when it paid $2 billion for headset maker Oculus VR. Shipments of headsets have failed to outnumber shipments of PCs or smartphones. Zuckerberg expressed optimism about the performance of its current-generation Meta Quest 2, which starts at $299.

Quest 2 has been a hit, Zuckerberg told the “Mad Money” host.

I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone. It has exceeded my expectations. But I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there. So that’s the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today.

Experiences in the metaverse can be more immersive than text, photos or videos, which are pervasive on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and so it will be a big theme for Meta over the next decade, Zuckerberg said.

Jordan Novet

Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not committed to this plan, I’ll give him that.

The New Yorker: “Money in the Metaverse”

It is hard to know what anyone else really wants, and I think of this man often. I thought of him most recently while watching Mark Zuckerberg deliver an hour-long presentation on Facebook’s rebrand—it is now called Meta—and its newfound focus on building the “metaverse”: a vast and integrated virtual world. Watching Zuckerberg stroll through a blandly monied virtual set, appointed, as if from a drop-down menu, with books and trinkets and unused-looking sports equipment, I wondered if there were people who wanted this, or would find this vision exciting. Then I reminded myself: FarmVille. I think it is useful, in attempts to forecast the future, to be humble about the enormous mystery of other people’s desires.

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These days, people spend more than eighty billion dollars a year on virtual goods sold in video games. Game-studies scholars have long argued that gaming allows players to experiment with new identities and modes of being: Virtual games simulate identities as citizen-soldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg adventurers, and corporate criminals, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter write. Virtual play trains flexible personalities for flexible jobs, shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun. Virtual worlds, it seems, also train players to be eager, expectant, and constant consumers.

Anna Wiener

The discussion around money in the metaverse shares a lot of characteristics with Bitcoin mania and NFTs: basically, you don’t own anything tangible, with real world utility, only a set of digital instructions accessible only inside the platform where you spent money on it. It’s good business for the platform owner, who can create virtual goods endlessly at almost no cost, while relying on fake scarcity to sell them at a premium, marketing each as ‘unique’ or ‘limited editions’. I fail to see how this works for consumers though, and current global events are a sober reminder that some (most) things cannot be solved by going virtual – and that nation states still hold considerable control over financial transactions.

The Verge: “Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss on making The Matrix Awakens with Epic Games”

A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy. We really believe strongly in big, massive open worlds not just for games, he tells The Verge. You want to be able to navigate massive, huge spaces just like you can in our world. So we’ve made that a lot easier to do in the engine.

The main sandbox experience in The Matrix Awakens isn’t a game as much as it’s a tech demo that Epic plans to release for developers to build on and replicate. Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer “this sort of niche art form”.

Alex Heath, Vjeran Pavic & Phil Esposito

Judging from the demo video, the rendering does look impressive. The cityscapes, buildings, highways, cars, and so on, looked indistinguishable from real-world footage to me – at least at that resolution. People’s movements and faces still have a noticeable artificial quality though – perhaps a reflection of our human perception, which is more sensitive to minute changes in facial expressions.

Fast Company: “Niantic’s CEO believes the metaverse could be a ‘dystopian nightmare’”

You talk a lot about how your games encourage people to get out in the world and walk around.

Over the past few years of working on AR at Niantic, I’ve gotten pretty deep into the science around walking and the brain. [Walking] is so wired into our neural pathways from evolution. Our brain comes alive in a number of ways when we’re out moving through the world in a three-dimensional environment. That’s real, and it’s more than just a visual perception thing. There’s this whole debate over whether your mind is just in your brain or is it in your whole body. And there’s a very strong argument to be made that really your neural sensing and cognition happens throughout your entire body.

So the notion that you can just slap on a headset and shoot some photons into your eyes and somehow that takes the place of that whole-body experience that you have in the world—it’s false.

Mark Sullivan

This interview predates Facebook’s big Meta metamorphosis by a couple of months, but it does make some valid points about emulating the real-world experience in a virtual environment versus simply augmenting the world around us with digital overlays. While VR is aiming to replicate and reinvent the visual aspects of daily lives, it leaves out the subtler clues contributing to human perception, such as smells, touch, and our sense of equilibrium and motion. The latter is probably the hardest to recreate, and the source of the confusion many people experience while using VR headsets: the eyes show movement and motion, while the inner ear tells us we’re stationary.