Standard glasses rest on your nose, and even the weight of normal glasses can get uncomfortable.
Face-wearables - will any survive or thrive (Rift / Glass / HoloLens / Vive / Apple Vision etc)?
- Thread starter neye_eve
- Start date
I think it has to be an economically viable one by definition. If it costs too much for potential customers, there's no fit. The market is not there. If it costs more to make and deliver than customers will pay for it, there's no product.
How many other devices and products from the dawn of computing until today could be described as "it's kind of like a computer/laptop, but ...." and were complete market flops because they never found a sustainable market?
Interesting summary of PMF for those (like me!) who’d not really heard of it before this thread:
www.sequoiacap.com
The Arc PMF framework
This framework outlines three distinct archetypes of PMF which help you understand your product’s place in the market and determine how your company operates.
www.sequoiacap.com
Let's say that someone comes out with the perfect form factor, not heavier or bulkier than glasses, has plenty of power and battery.
It's something out of science fiction.
Does it cause people to replace all their other computing devices or entertainment devices?
I can see it being supplemental but not replacement.
Just don't think people will ever put something over their eyes and face all the time when they need to do something that current computing and gaming devices provide.
How many people for instance are exclusively gaming in VR or AR now? I would think very few. Problem isn't just the technology per se but the whole draw of immersion isn't going to replace everything else.
For instance, FPS may be the most popular gaming genre (not sure if it is but for argument's sake) but does it follow that everyone who plays FPS games are going to get these HMDs and use them exclusively?
Maybe the perfect HMD will still sell high tens of millions or low hundreds of millions. But still a subset of mobile device sales.
I guess that would be highly successful if one HMD can ship those kinds of volumes.
But "perfect" seems a long ways away if not almost impossible.
It's something out of science fiction.
Does it cause people to replace all their other computing devices or entertainment devices?
I can see it being supplemental but not replacement.
Just don't think people will ever put something over their eyes and face all the time when they need to do something that current computing and gaming devices provide.
How many people for instance are exclusively gaming in VR or AR now? I would think very few. Problem isn't just the technology per se but the whole draw of immersion isn't going to replace everything else.
For instance, FPS may be the most popular gaming genre (not sure if it is but for argument's sake) but does it follow that everyone who plays FPS games are going to get these HMDs and use them exclusively?
Maybe the perfect HMD will still sell high tens of millions or low hundreds of millions. But still a subset of mobile device sales.
I guess that would be highly successful if one HMD can ship those kinds of volumes.
But "perfect" seems a long ways away if not almost impossible.
Kind of like iPad? Except for when that eventually started replacing computers — not so much for those that already had them, but for those who were growing up and had never owned a computer…
How many of those that "replaced computers" had a keyboard attached which at that time just makes them a laptop?
Well...if it were not heavier or bulker than glasses, people who wear glasses all day would probably just replace their glasses with them. Not sure how much it would get rid of other stuff, but there would start to be a real chance of it.
And it wouldn't mean people would get rid of their TV...you would still want that if you are watching with other people. But you'd probably use it less. and probably your laptop/desktop less, and your tablet less and your phone less. So when it came time to replace them, some wouldn't get replaced because they weren't used enough.
That's true, some younger generations may only use a phone.
Or in the developing world, they only own phones and occasionally go to cyber cafes to use a desktop or to print something.
Hell in some cases, they don't even have reliable electricity so they charge their phones once a week or something by traveling from some remote village to a small town.
But there may also be people in industrialized world who grew up with phones or tablets, like those belonging to their parents that they played with as toddlers.
Other than at school, they might not have access or interest in larger devices.
So maybe in the future, little kids grow up with HMDs and that's all they end up using for years.
If transcription is so good that they never bother to learn to type or text fast, they just dictate to AI.
Or in the developing world, they only own phones and occasionally go to cyber cafes to use a desktop or to print something.
Hell in some cases, they don't even have reliable electricity so they charge their phones once a week or something by traveling from some remote village to a small town.
But there may also be people in industrialized world who grew up with phones or tablets, like those belonging to their parents that they played with as toddlers.
Other than at school, they might not have access or interest in larger devices.
So maybe in the future, little kids grow up with HMDs and that's all they end up using for years.
If transcription is so good that they never bother to learn to type or text fast, they just dictate to AI.
This is a good question, and I've thought about this too. I think that it really depends - if we have this magical tech for glasses, we also have it for other mobile devices. Additionally, it also depends on what the glasses can do on their own - like if they're purely displays with a little onboard capability but mostly offboard the heavy lifting to a phone/cloud/computer/etc. vs if they're so magical, they're as powerful as full gaming PCs in a glasses form factor.
I think about shared experiences like movies. These magical glasses could replace the movie screen, sure, but would a bunch of people all sit down in a theater to watch a movie together now, even if it looked just like watching a movie traditionally?
I also think about tactile experiences - keyboards and whatnot - input in AR sucks. Voice is the best, and that's disruptive. So you'll need keyboards and probably touchpads or mice. Not terrible if you can just sit down and your magic glasses put a screen in front of your real keyboard and mouse. For replacing your phone, tougher, unless you carry a flat piece of plastic in your pocket you can type on.
For current glasses wearers, maybe? With the magical glasses, you can pick up a controller, sit down, and play games wherever, with very low friction (getting the controller out) - that's lower than the game streaming friction today (get the phone out, get the controller out), and people do do that.
But with the magic glasses, you don't need immersion, you can have regular 2d experiences, just anywhere. Even in a more realistic scenario where the visuals come from a computer or console, I could see this if the displays were so good as to be able to create a virtual TV.
If they're HMD exclusive, no. If they're multiplat, sure, why not?
So if you're gonna use AVP with a keyboard, that just makes it a Mac?
Have you ever used an iPad, pray tell? (Actually, don't. It's a rhetorical question.)
This is simultaneously awesome and sad to me.
Yes I have. And if it were going to replace my laptop, I'd need a keyboard. Typing on the screen is painful...I mean..have you ever used an iPad?
I've been using them for about twelve years, now, yes.
But since you believe (or are willing to argue, at least) that adding a keyboard to an iPad just makes it a laptop, there really isn't any point arguing about the novelty and usefulness of different interface paradigms with you, is there.
Well, I know you’ve met Echohead, looks like not much has changed.
It’s taking a bit of new coordination to type on the AVP virtual keypad for sure. I think adding a real one isn’t going to change anything beyond the actual keyboard really. Definitely not turning anything into a Mac.
Unless it’s a Mac with a workspace bigger than the room, among other things.
I don’t disagree. It’s interesting to take off the eye shade and just hold the hardwear in glasses position to see what that might be like. It would work very well I think.
Once HMDs are more like glasses and can fit in a pocket, phone + HMD is a very natural pairing. Drive the glasses from the phone so you don't need to cram as much hardware into them. For simple, brief interactions, just use the phone directly. For anything more involved — anything you'd currently do on a tablet, laptop, TV — put on the glasses. If such glasses were slim and cheap enough, you wouldn't need them to have much new functionality over what AVP already offers for this to become fairly widespread. Say, to sell glasses to 25% of developed-world smartphone users.
Over time, though, there is going to be additional functionality, and it'll lead to more and more people just wearing HMDs continuously. One thing to watch for here is uptake of AI assistants. If these start to work well over the next few years and people find value in them, why restrict them to the digital world? With an HMD, an AI assistant can see and hear what you do, note anything you might want to remember, automatically surface contextually relevant info. What smartphones do, abstractly, is provide more transparent, ubiquitous access to information. That seems to have been a hit with the market. This is a further improvement along the same axis.
Over time, though, there is going to be additional functionality, and it'll lead to more and more people just wearing HMDs continuously. One thing to watch for here is uptake of AI assistants. If these start to work well over the next few years and people find value in them, why restrict them to the digital world? With an HMD, an AI assistant can see and hear what you do, note anything you might want to remember, automatically surface contextually relevant info. What smartphones do, abstractly, is provide more transparent, ubiquitous access to information. That seems to have been a hit with the market. This is a further improvement along the same axis.
HoloLens had the same problem Windows tablets did. Platforms are defined by input and output methods, get those wrong and you're building the wrong thing.
I really, really don't get the insistence that some new functionality is required here. Again, HMDs just seem like laptops to me in this respect. Laptops didn't need to find some 'direction' (in your sense) to PMF, because they simply provided the market-validated functionality of desktops + the self-evident benefits of portability. The Vision platform provides the market-validated functionality of an iPad + the self-evident benefits of an HMD (as extensively detailed elsewhere).
Sure, maybe. Really though, a big part of the reason to aim to be early isn't to actually be early, it's to hedge against the possibility that if you try to time your entry more precisely, you could miscalculate and end up being late. It's like buying insurance. You expect to look back and see that you spent a bunch of money on premiums and didn't get anything in return. Yet this doesn't mean it's a mistake to buy insurance.
Add a keyboard to it makes it like many a touchscreen laptops. Surface is one that has detachable keyboard. But plenty other touchscreen laptops. Or "convertables". Not sure why that is a crazy notion to you. I guess because Apple still doesn't have touchscreen laptops?
I seem to remember this argument shrouded by the mists of time. The "iPad is just a big iPhone" version is behind us, of course, but this newer take depends how you specify it: "like many a touchscreen laptop" isn't too much of a stretch, compared to "just makes them a laptop" per your earlier post, so you're on safer ground imho (iPads don't run Apple's desktop OS, so maybe it's a small stretch, and a distinction that Apple reinforces).
Not important for this thread though. The analogous question would be whether a Vision Pro with a keyboard and trackpad is just like another Mac. Or just an iPad you strap to your face. As AVP runs a version of iPadOS and a handy virtual view of macOS you could argue it's both. Plus a gigantic monitor. And an AR headset (although this is mostly promise at the current status of the hardware iteration and the software offerings).
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Interesting summary of PMF for those (like me!) who’d not really heard of it before this thread:
The Arc PMF framework
This framework outlines three distinct archetypes of PMF which help you understand your product’s place in the market and determine how your company operates.
Thanks very much for that, Horatio's posts are a little less arcane now! There's some useful insight in that framework for sure. But like a lot of pop-psy-ish delineation it rests somewhat on metaphors being stretched into (marketing) laws, and if economics is ever a dismal science, marketing is its cousin with BPD.
I think one critical difference is that Apple isn't an "early-stage startup" per the framework. This has at least two important implications: Apple has the resources to play both short and long games wrt their hardware+software iteration and the market, and Apple has a broad offering of 'ecosystem'-based use-value that AVP extends.
The former is of course how Apple could deliver hardware+software that works as well as it does in this application, and not rely entirely on the short-term market response. Apple won't fail (technically) and fold (financially) like that wearable AI pin offering we saw recently. That despite the still-large difference between today's AVP and the ideal form of the device (or the ideal mass-market profit-maximising price). The latter is why I would buy this when I've had no previous interest in offerings from other headset makers. I can basically pick it up and start using my stuff (and somewhat advantageously, compared to the pre-existing range of device offerings).
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With wco81's magic glasses, I think for the shortest interactions like handling notifications, glasses are the first thing you'd use, so like if you get a text, and the quick replies are fine or you can dictate a reply, do it on glasses, but fit sightly longer interactions like if you need to type, switch to phone.
This 100% requires consent and an external warning light. The glasshole problem will present itself here. I've thought about this feature a lot in the past and while I kinda want it, it's really problematic. I proposed an audio only version called "win every argument" which quickly got "sponsored by divorce attorneys" tacked on.
Hololens had 2 input modes (I think - mine is gathering dust in my office) - gaze/pinch "AirTap" and direct manipulation. They worked fine. I don't think that's why it didn't do well.
Hang on. You've got this fundamentally wrong. Product categories don't seek PMF products and product lines do, so you can't talk about laptops finding PMF. And yes, when a new laptop enters the market it does need to find PMF.
You can also combine the validated functionality of a toaster with the self evident benefits of a fridge, but the combo might not work out...
I would venture that Apple does not put in the tremendous amount of work required to launch something like this with the attitude, "whelp, if all else fails at least we bought insurance against being too late". This is "Apple can only succeed" thinking, unmoored from their ethos and history.
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HoloLens navigation basics?
Or a video version.
I assume the windows didn't bounce/judder like this in actual use? But (not to overly disparage earlier efforts) if all that "works fine" then AVP look+pinch UI/UX is comparatively sublime.
Or a video version.
I assume the windows didn't bounce/judder like this in actual use? But (not to overly disparage earlier efforts) if all that "works fine" then AVP look+pinch UI/UX is comparatively sublime.
I though that the point was that Apple literally does use PMF framework. That its core to how they choose and evaluate success for their products.
So, in order to understand what Apple is actually thinking, you need to apply it.
It certainly is possible that with AVP they are not, but to me, the question to then ask yourself is what are they using and why would they change models for this product?
I agree with Horatio. There's some "apple cannot fail" logic going on in this thread combined with a lot of armwaving.
Apple must not be using PMF, because if they were using PMF then AVP would not have found PMF and that would mean it failed and apple made a mistake. But Apple can't have made a mistake. So they cannot be using PMF.
PMF isn't a framework. It's a concept like profit or margin. What I've been talking about is Apple's pre-PMF playbook that helps them make product decisions for new products. That's unique to Apple and I think it's because Apple product management is that good that while they can't predict the future, they have shown they can reliably narrow it down.
I don't quite get the iPad mini, nor the iPod touch when they made it. Sure the "iPad laptop" has a different OS...but saying that doesn't make it a laptop is kind of like saying a linux laptop isn't a laptop because it has a different OS.
I wasn't the person who suggested that AVP+keyboard is just a Mac.
For the record: I wasn't suggesting that. I was saying that it's an analogous argument.
If many people are using or interpreting a term incorrectly, I'd think the term should be defined (or linked to a definition) by its champions so everyone can reach common understanding.
Where’s the fun in just arguing over the applicability of a concept when you can argue over its meaning at the same time as arguing over its applicability? I mean that’s the foundation of the Battlefront…
Well, I have stated what PMF is in this thread a few times, and people who were confused could have just asked instead of pretending they understood it.
I did have to google it. It seems pretty straightforward to me.
Well, And I chose the word "framework" somewhat arbitrarily. Though a brief goo....err DDG search shows that plenty of people talk about it as a framework. So mea culpa.
The point is. PMF is a concept used in the tech industry. Apple has a specific Pre-PMF playbook that they have followed successfully many if not all their current successful product launches.
Applying that playbook to AVP leads to some red flags lets say?
So, if you are trying to spin a story where AVP is where Apple wants it to be, expected it to be, or generally isn't disappointed with the results, then you have to justify why they chose not to follow their own typical practices. OR, you have to suggest that Horatio's interpretation of those practices is incorrect.
My question is, has Apple released the specifics of their playbook for all of us to read? There's plenty of info out there about PMF in general. This or that VC fund's PMF "framework" etc etc. I'm not sure I saw it. If it was already posted I apologize.
The point is. PMF is a concept used in the tech industry. Apple has a specific Pre-PMF playbook that they have followed successfully many if not all their current successful product launches.
Applying that playbook to AVP leads to some red flags lets say?
So, if you are trying to spin a story where AVP is where Apple wants it to be, expected it to be, or generally isn't disappointed with the results, then you have to justify why they chose not to follow their own typical practices. OR, you have to suggest that Horatio's interpretation of those practices is incorrect.
My question is, has Apple released the specifics of their playbook for all of us to read? There's plenty of info out there about PMF in general. This or that VC fund's PMF "framework" etc etc. I'm not sure I saw it. If it was already posted I apologize.
Sure, obviously once the glasses are unobtrusive enough that you can wear them all the time, things flip and they're the first thing you use. I don't think you'd really ever 'switch to the phone' at that point. You might fish it out of your pocket to type on, but the glasses would still be your primary display. Humorously, we might see a return of physical keyboards if phones are mostly used as input devices.
The idea here wouldn't be to record or fully transcribe conversations, but to process audio/video immediately through a local multimodal LLM. It would create a reminder when you told someone you'd do something, add a calendar entry when you agreed to meet someone, automatically pop up travel instructions when your left your house (based on its inferences about where you were going), notice when you were in a store where you could buy an item you were running out of, etc.
HoloLens 2 offered half a dozen input methods ranging from controllers to eye tracking, exposed them all through APIs, and mostly let developers fend for themselves. It could have implemented something like the visionOS 'eye gaze to focus, tap to activate' interaction model, but as far as I know didn't do so throughout system UI and certainly didn't commit to this as the canonical interaction method.
There's also the 'output' part of the equation, where the low resolution and small FoV offered by HoloLens functionally ruled out entire use cases, like simulating large-screen media viewing.
Per previous discussions of the Mac Portable, I'm talking about early laptops. The distinction you're drawing here makes sense for already-validated product categories, but it's perfectly valid to talk about a category as a whole seeking PMF if no products within that category have found it yet.
The benefits of a fridge don't meaningfully interact with toaster functionality. Whereas e.g. unbounded volumetric display capability has obvious relevance to the functionality of a general-purpose computing platform.
I don't think it makes sense to insist on such a rigid model of Apple's behavior based on extrapolation from what they did in much less (obviously) consequential markets as a much smaller company.
This would be an absolute social disaster. It will get people beaten or killed, fired, divorced, and kicked out of any number of venues.
I’m already at the point where if you gave me a big red button and said “pressing this will instantly and permanently destroy any and all social media, and any and all generative AI and LLM systems”, I’d press it before you got to the end of the sentence.
Having said ruination of mankind strapped to peoples’ faces with a bit of tape over the warning LED? Hard pass.
I guess it isn't super obvious to me. Why is it such a huge thing over current methods?
Did you see the black mirror episode where they had this thing in their head that recorded everything they saw/heard? They could go back to see things. It was interesting.
iPad was anything BUT obvious. Heck, to this day, people are still harping on about how iPad is just an expensive media consumption device. And some of the touted tentpole features never really defined the product (iBooks?).
Apple Watch is another example of a new product category that didn't really find its market until a few years after it was out.
I've been around long enough to have a pile of aluminium (in the form of Power Macs, Mac Pros, big screens and such) that I'll one day drag to the recycling. So something that does those things and stows away in a hat box is definitely cool vs recent methods. I'm still waiting for the Zeiss inserts to arrive, so I haven't given the virtual Mac screen mode a really good rum. The forthcoming visionOS 2 implementation looks good though. I may not buy another big monitor, we'll see.
Whether that's "huge" depends on your tolerance for larger physical objects. But if huge is a thing, the TV I'd need to approximate the immersive cinema mode would be way out of budget (it would have to be a dedicated home cinema room really). And I prefer the big screen as direct extension of computing platform vs eg "smart" TV so that's also a plus. But it's a solo thing so far, certainly a limitation.
While I'm enjoying AVP as is, I'm not always sanguine about our Black Mirror future (good episode though).