Apple Vision Pro Turns One: Spatial Reality Check
en
January 29, 2025
TLDR: This week's podcast discusses experiences of actual developers using Apple Vision Pro after a year, featuring Gregoire (Piano App) and Cihat (Posters App). They share their likes and dislikes about developing apps for the device.

In a recent episode of the Waveform podcast, host Ellis Rovin, joined by co-hosts Andrew and David, celebrated the first anniversary of the Apple Vision Pro. They engaged with two developers, Grégoire Lemoulant and Cihat Gündüz, to discuss their experiences and insights about building applications for this innovative device. With the Vision Pro still finding its footing in the tech landscape, the group explored the device's unique features, challenges, and potential future.
Key Takeaways from the Episode
A Year of Apple Vision Pro
- The Apple Vision Pro launched nearly a year ago, stirring excitement and curiosity in the tech community.
- Does it serve any practical purpose? Opinions vary, with some users expressing enthusiasm despite its limitations.
- The podcast examines the mixed reception among users and developers, highlighting a lack of widespread adoption and sales.
Developers' Perspectives
Grégoire Lemoulant: Piano Flowing Tiles
- Grégoire developed "Piano Flowing Tiles," a unique interactive app designed to enhance music learning in AR.
- He praised Vision Pro's spatial capabilities, emphasizing the precision of object placement and interaction compared to other VR systems.
- Stable anchor points are crucial for the app's functionality, allowing users to interact seamlessly with their real-world environment.
Cihat Gündüz: Posters
- Cihat focused on his app "Posters," aimed at curating digital content in mixed reality spaces.
- He discussed challenges developers face, notably the lack of persistence in augmented reality, where virtual creations disappear after disconnection.
- Both developers agreed that innovative apps are essential for attracting users but noted that the high price point of the Vision Pro restricts broader adoption.
User Experience and Adoption Challenges
- Despite the device’s high initial price of $3,500, users expressed a desire for compelling reasons to invest.
- The podcast guests shared anecdotes about early adopters using the device for gaming and content consumption but highlighted a lack of killer apps that justify the expense.
- Despite the fascinating experiences the Vision Pro provides, many users still don't see a significant innovation or necessity compared to existing devices.
The Need for a Killer App
- The recurring question became: What is the "killer app" that could justify the purchase of a Vision Pro?
- Suggestions included:
- Immersive Sports Experiences: Some developers believe that offering a fully immersive way to watch live sports could be a massive selling point.
- Productivity Enhancements: Features that allow seamless multitasking and a truly immersive work environment could attract professionals.
- Entertainment Options: Beyond gaming, there’s a desire for apps that enhance movie watching or provide unique user experiences that can’t be replicated elsewhere.
Surveys and Sales Numbers
- The sales estimates for the first year suggest that Apple sold between 220,000 and 500,000 units, indicating limited market penetration.
- Developers noted that without a larger user base, there is little financial incentive for other developers to create content, perpetuating a cycle of low investment and low innovative application development.
Future of Vision Pro
- Looking ahead, the team speculated about potential new models, including a cheaper version to broaden accessibility.
- Developers believe that Apple may explore ways to refine the form factor and improve comfort to appeal to a larger audience.
- There are hopes for future iterations of VisionOS that could offer more development tools and APIs, allowing for richer augmented experiences and creative applications.
Conclusion
The discussion surrounding the Apple Vision Pro underscores a pivotal moment in the tech landscape—one filled with innovation but also equipped with significant challenges. With feedback from developers and potential users alike, it’s clear that while the Vision Pro has established itself as a technological marvel, the key to its success lies in lowering barriers for developers and consumers alike. As the tech community watches closely, the next phase for Apple’s vision of augmented reality is just beginning.
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All this being said, I wanted to ask you guys next. How many people in real life blood in their veins, human beings? Zero. I know you're going with those. How many people do you know that spent their money on a vision pro? Zero.
What is up, people of the internet? No, it is not Marquez, it is your typical producer. Today host, Ellis Rovin, and I'm joined by two lovely co-hosts, Andrew and David, and it is time for another waveform bonus episode. Are you guys ready? I am. I'm ready to party.
The HVAC is also broken in this room right now, so we are wearing jackets. It is very cold, but we will do anything. I'm so cold. It is to make a really cool episode for you all. It's a degrees Fahrenheit outside. Single digits outside this table, this metal table. It's actually cool.
My computer's not plugged in. I think it might die. I'm jealous of you people washing the dishes because your hands are probably warm right now. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. If we had a sink and some dirty dishes in here right now, like going at it. I'd be so happy. Oh, yeah. Anywho, guys, today I want to talk about one of my favorite products, favorite products. Do you want to take a guess at what it is? I think I know what it is. I already know what it is. You already know what it is. Well, you both already know what it is? Yeah, because you guys
Told us what the episode was. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I kind of know. I helped collaborate a couple. Well, you know, many of my favorite products like like books, Palma, Honda, Moto, Compacto, Diet Coke. Right. So this one fits perfectly in line with all three of those. Uh-huh.
Apple Vision Pro, because actually Apple Vision Pro is not like any of those products at all. It's really expensive, doesn't do a whole lot, and yet I just think it rules. I just think it really rules. And so for those of you that are not psychopaths like me, you probably didn't know that Apple Vision Pro is gonna turn one soon in early February. That will be... Man, it feels like it's been out for longer.
Really? Well, I guess it got announced six months before it came out. Yeah. And there was some testing. So it's been talked about for over a year, but like it is officially a year old now. That's true. And it was teased and rumored for even longer. Yeah, for a long time. Back when it was just like Apple's working on ski goggles that you could play Beat Saber on question mark.
But yeah, abolition-prosy year old and I wanted to talk about it because I feel like it's in this sort of interesting place. It hasn't really been adopted, but some people are full-send on it. You have crazy people like me who love this thing and can't really express why. It's the most advanced technology I've ever used, even if it doesn't really have much of a purpose.
It's one of those things that like blew your mind when you're using it. And then I put it down and never yearned for it ever again. Right. No, so this is a great way. This is a great segue. I want to hear before we dive in, how much of you guys used Vision Pro? What have been your thoughts? What are your favorite things? What are your least favorite things? Let me know.
So, I mean, the technology in general is just so interesting, like it's fun to use your eyes to select things and the fact that you can basically have your hands anywhere as long as the cameras can see them and the tapping gestures, like all that stuff's really great.
I love the spatial stuff. I love the spacial pinning. It's so fine and it doesn't wiggle like a lot of the other VR headsets do. I did use it a little bit more when they updated the
Mac virtual display thing that you can have with it. You can have it in ultra-wide mode. I thought that was cool. I still yearn for many displays because for some reason I like multiple displays more than I like a single long display.
Okay, in that case, it's not some reason. Yeah, but it's still a big, heavy thing on your face that makes my iPads, but not the Apple iPad, the face red marks on my face. Wait, can I ask a quick question that hopefully won't derail us too much? You actually got to use it at Apple Campus when you went. I did. Oh, that's right. Compared to the demo that you got versus when we got one in here and you were actually using it. Were there any major differences that struck you?
Not really. I mean, in the demo situations, they do things that try to make your brain go wow. So for example, they did the dinosaur demo in there, which is where a hole opens up in the wall. And you can see into this Jurassic world, and then the T-Rex comes out. And it's sort of this crazy sense of scale thing, which gave me the same feeling as the first time I ever tried an HTC Vive, because I did a demo at a Microsoft store called The Blue, where you're on a pirate ship underwater.
that had sank and then there's a whale that like swims over near you and it makes your heart start racing. That was back in like 2015 or something obviously, but
Yeah, they, um, not really. I would say, uh, it's more advanced now. Like they had less functionality back then. Uh, and I think especially with the stuff with the personas, like being able to have multiple people in a room interacting on the same thing is useful. So I'm glad they updated it, but it's still a little bit far off from our needs to be. Okay. Andrew, what about you?
I just think how easy and natural it was to get in the headset and just do what you wanted to do. VR is this magical experience, and I call it one of the things that non-techy people, when you show it to them, it's like...
The coolest thing they've ever seen like we're all in this space and we see stuff like this and maybe we're a little jaded but like when I put my mom in a VR headset she freaked out when I put like a little cousin in a VR headset they freak out so this just took that extra step of being like natural to use which is awesome but again agree with David.
It's so heavy and so uncomfortable in long periods of time. I felt like if I were to actually use it day to day, I would have to have like one of those lean back chairs from like a grandma's boy or whatever it is where the guys programming lean back. I would have to have my head supported all the time. Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong, Andrew, but you prefer to do things the ocky way, meaning you prefer oculus.
Oh, the Oculus or I like playing the Oculus anymore. Yeah. I thought it was. It's the meta Oculus. I like the stuff I like the most about VR is playing games. I don't see it as a productivity thing quite yet. And I think that's where most of these are going. So like, I like to play beat saber. I like to do virtual reality experiences and that quest focus.
Envision Pro games are lacking right now. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact, too, that a lot of the games that are more immersive, you move a lot, and you shouldn't be moving a lot with this on your face because it's so heavy. That's a neck brace. Yeah, for sure. It's a one-way ticket to neck brace now.
Also, because they are trying to get the hand gestures to be the main interaction point with this device, it's a little difficult for developers to figure out, okay, how do we use our hands instead of a controller? Because most of the quest games and stuff have been used with the controller being a pointer, so it's difficult. They came out with Fruit Ninja, which was a throwback, but besides that, there hasn't been a lot of interesting games for it.
No, and it's funny that you guys brought that up out the rip because we will totally be diving into that. But before we dive into that, sort of the exposition of why we're here today is Adam and I got in touch with two developers who made apps for Appalachian Pro, one of whom was really into it and really thinks this is like a great platform to develop for great platform in general.
The other actually fully abandoned working on Vision Pro. He was just like, I don't see a path forward in its current state for like being a developer. And it was really interesting to see the things that they agreed on, the things that they disagreed on. Obviously, there's no one answer. It's this giant complicated.
behemoth of a platform. So we're gonna show some clips from those interviews. We're gonna talk about it. We're gonna get some of your opinions and we're gonna have a lot of fun. But before we dive in, let's introduce
the two developers we spoke to who are not actually here. The way I said that made it sound like it was like, bring them in, boy. It's like, no, it's not that. The first time we talked to a quick side note, my new year's resolution for the year was to stop doing that thing that podcasters do a lot where they're like, sorry if I'm not pronouncing this right.
Okay. Because every time I hear a podcast to do that, I'm like, well, you didn't want to Google it. You know what I mean? Or ask them. I spent a lot of time Googling the pronunciation of this first guy's name, Greg Gua. He's French. After practicing that in the mirror a lot, he was like, you can call me Greg.
And I was like, hey, you took the effort for it. Yeah. Good job. Thank you. That's all I wanted to hear, guys. So Greg is a developer behind one of the most popular VisionOS apps. It's called Piano Flowing Tiles. We've seen a version of this on a lot of different headsets, but this is the one that people say works. I've tried similar apps on Oculus, and I think I tried one on five years ago and it just
It was close, but it didn't actually work. From what I know, it's similar. It's basically like guitar hero, but on a real piano. Bingo. That is exactly Bingo. Let's go, baby. Yeah. So that that's kind of the gist of it. And what's really interesting is that it is one of the few actual like AR true.
AR, you are interacting with reality, and it is being augmented by the headset. The other guy we talked to was this really cool dude named Chihat, who is an indie developer, spends most of his time in the iOS world, has also done a few Mac apps. I don't know if it's his most popular app, but the one we ended up talking about the most was this thing called posters, and it's just this idea of you have a space. You want to put stuff on the wall?
bada bing bada boom. Very simple. Or you would think it's very simple, but actually getting it to work turned out to be a little trickier. That's a great idea, by the way. Like I didn't thought about it, but if you're going to be sitting in these virtual spaces, why not be able to flare it up? Right. And especially because, you know, this is going to sound crazy. My favorite vision pro feature, like obviously, most of the time I use it, I'm doing remote desktop.
And I love the environments. And I specifically love that you can scale the environments. You can have full and know and everything in between. And every environment, if you've never used the Vision Pro, has a time of day setting. You can be in Hawaii at day, or you can be in Hawaii at night.
And when you scale up with the knob, the digital crown, I don't know if they call it a crown. Digital crown, yeah, yeah. When you use the digital crown to sort of scale up the environment, it starts in front of you, and then the more you scale it up, the more it wraps around you. But, so if you have it in 50%, it sort of is 180 degree Hawaii, and then behind you Turner.
I just turn away from the mic for forgetting I'm on a podcast. If you turn away from the mic or turn away from the front of you, God, I'm so good at this. If you turn around, that's what I'm trying to say.
If you turn around, you're still, it's your normal world behind you. But if you choose the nighttime option, it changes the light behind you so that it's still your office. It's still, I'm still in the studio, but it's nighttime in the studio. And to me, that is the thing that makes it truly immersive. Like when I met my desk in the studio, noise canceling headphones on, Vision Pro on, no one can bother me.
and I turn around and I see Tim working in the heart of darkness. I'm just like, this is it. This is it, baby. So yeah, the idea of augmenting these spaces that you're still in while you're using it. Amazing. Jihat also builds a lot of dev tools. He runs a really great blog for developers. Very cool guy. I really hope we get to do more stuff with him in the future. So I want to kick off this by saying both of these developers
tried Apple Vision Pro for the first time at these things called developer labs in Europe. Are you guys familiar with these? Yeah, really? You want to shoot? I believe that basically Apple set up these labs for developers to go and try to experience the Vision Pro and understand how to build for them early. Exactly. The gist of it is you bring a Mac, your personal Mac,
you bring your code and there will be someone there who is a Vision Pro expert and will help you get your code running. And so a lot of people were bringing iPad apps that they wanted to run on Vision Pro because if you don't know, you can run a lot of iPad apps just at the box.
It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's nothing to write home about. Too bad Instagram doesn't have an iPad app. So real. Neither of them had had much of a major interest in VR prior to Apple Vision Pro. Greg said that he had tried the Quest
was not impressed, didn't, wasn't interested in it, did not put on another headset until Vision Pro. Jihat had never worn a headset.
disclaimer, I am not going to differentiate between VR and AR headsets in this episode. Because we're comparing flagship headsets. We're comparing Quest, Vision Pro, Vive. Do not come at me saying, this is an AR headset. We're talking about us two screens in front of your eyeballs with some cameras and some motion tracking ability and a whole lot of chips.
and it's not worth our time here. They're also all converging now anyway. Quest 3S has upgraded the color pass through and now it has higher fidelity, higher firmware. They're all trying to be Vision Pro and Vision Pro is like, how do we shrink?
If I truly upset you by not delineating these things, write to me on blue sky. Let's start an argument. We can get into it for the world to see. So if I call Vision Pro a VR headset, and for some reason that is not accurate,
Excuse me. It's spatial computer. Oh god. Do you listen to Apple when they talk? Does AR stand for Apple reality? Like are we are we there yet? Don't give him that idea. I mean AI. They're probably gonna do it. You know, Apple intelligence Apple reality. Yeah, I can see it. Anyway, anyway, yes. Anyway, so I was like too hot. That's crazy. You are a tech dude. You write code. You've never worn
A headset before Vision Pro. Even I had done that. And I, for the long time, a long time, was like the most anti-VR person in the world. I was like, this is apocalyptic and scary and dumb. You still kind of are when you're not wearing it. I know. But it's so real. I'm like, get these headsets off. And then I put it on. I'm like, I love it on my face.
Don't stick it away. I know. And it's funny. Everyone else flips to everyone else is like, Oh my God, I love you. Like these headsets are so great. And then they come in the office and they see me sitting at my desk with the blue eyes on and they go, this is so weird. I hate this. What time Mark has just walked by me and I heard him say under his breath, he was like, God, this is the world now.
I mean, I think that that kind of highlights the fact that these headsets are made for just solo interaction, you know? This is the whole thing that people have talked about, especially with the Vision Pro. It's a lonely experience. It's a cool experience, but it's not made to be interacted with with other people in the real world. No, totally. Which is part of the dystopian part about it. Part of the reason I wear it is because we have a kind of a chaotic studio, and I got some work to do. You gotta zone out. Zone in. I gotta focus. What's the thing that was?
But if you don't lock in, you'll spend the rest of your life clocking in. You're like that one, grind set, bros. That one's for you. No! Anyway. Sponsored by Severn season two. Yeah, I asked you hot. I was like, how did this happen? Why? And he said it kind of exactly what you brought up to the beginning of the episode, Andrew. Basically the reason why I didn't ever wear a headset like VR headset before is because I'm not interested in VR gaming.
I am a gamer, I would say, I play games from time to time, not a hardcore gamer, but I was never really interested in VR gaming and all other headsets to me where we are gaming headsets. And this was the first one where I also knew like, okay, this is really focusing on apps and things with UI that are not necessarily games. And he did not see any existing headset as anything other than a gaming device.
And obviously, you can virtual desktop on the Quest. The Quest actually has some really cool virtual desktop features, my favorite of which being the desk cutout, that you can have lots of peripherals and controllers that are still accessible to you in the Quest. And in the Vision Pro, actually- Well, the Vision Pro only with the magic keyboard and the magic mouse. Yes, which is like super messed up. I mean, not gonna lie,
This might be the year of the magic keyboard for me. I really love my magic keyboard. As long as you don't use the mouse, we're fine. I'm a trackpad guy. And it's not even about the fact that I charged from the bottom. It's just a bad mouse. Wow. Yeah, I said it.
I will say blue sky me. It's going to be hard to switch at work because Andrew built me just like the Lexus of keyboards. This thing is like that's true. It's butter for us is the Lexus for him. It's like a Honda Civic Lexus works. I'm just right.
I swear to God, you could bake a croissant with how buttery this thing is. Yeah, and so it made sense, right? Like Vision Pro, like we said, is too heavy to play Beat Saber on. It just doesn't work well as a gaming headset. And I thought that was sort of an interesting thing about it. I had never thought about it this way, but I don't know anyone who owns a quest that didn't buy it for gaming.
Actually, I take that back. I know one dude. His name's Tim and he is a very unique character. Not our Tim. Not our Tim. Because all that applies to our Tim. It is hilarious. My Tim is a graphic designer as well. Interesting. It must be the name. It must be. Yeah, but I would say that most people definitely buy these for gaming. All of the ads that meta releases around the quest are primarily gaming focused ads. Right. As of late, they're trying to push that, but
They're definitely trying to go more the productivity route. I think they're edging into the productivity zone because they're trying to eat apples lunch. They're like, this is $500 and apples is $3,500. But the problem with using Quest, the problem that I had using Quest as a productivity tool,
is another thing, or touches on another thing that both of these developers, Chiat and Greg, agreed on, which is the best part about the Vision Pro is how intuitive it is. It feels so intuitively, you put your headset on and you already know how to use it. Sure, there's maybe like 15 seconds where you're like, whoa, whoa, I have to know where my eyes are pointed.
Yeah. And then after that, you're just in it. The touching feels natural, where you put your hands feels natural, everything just begins to click. And that's what makes it such a cool productivity device. All this being said, I wanted to ask you guys next. How many people in real life blood in their veins, human beings? Zero.
I know where you're going with those. How many people do you know that spent their money on a Vision Pro? Zero.
I might know why. Marques doesn't count. Marques does not count. That's not true. I do know a couple, yeah. I know one person who just buys pretty much everything that's Apple that comes out. Okay. I want to dive into your answer first. I also know one. I know not much more after that. That's perfect. But it's sort of like this person, every time there's a new Apple. New iPhone every time, new Apple watch every time. Okay. And you think that is the biggest reason they bought this thing.
Oh, of people I know outside of our tech worlds, but like there's really only, they only sold so many. There's not that many people outside of our tech worlds that I, there's like none that I know personally. Yeah. My friend Ramses who I played a dodo with, he lives in Egypt. I was going to say that's a fire Egyptian name. It is.
And you said he lives in Egypt. He lives in Egypt. Nice. All right, Swag. He bought a Vision Pro 1 because he just really likes technology stuff and 2 because he wanted to play Dota 2 in a virtual environment with a giant display, giant virtual display.
and he was hounding me because his M1 Max MacBook Pro was dropping frames while playing it on the Vision Pro version. So he was like, please test the M4 Pro so I can see if I bought a new laptop, it would work and he said it does. Really? Yeah.
He mostly uses it for that, though. Primarily to play Dota 2 on a massive virtual display. That sounds awesome. That's kind of sick. I tried it. It was awesome. Really? Yeah. I really tried to game with the virtual display, and I could not get a single game to even open. Really? Dota 2 is like 15 years old, so. That is true. Also, it runs on the Mac.
And it's just like, you're mirroring your Mac in the Vision Pro is what I'm saying. No, same, but every single time I would try to do it, there would be some graphics error. Oh, really? I'd get the scary window that had this red circle with the exclamation point, and it would be a critical graphics error. Oh, weird. You're done, bro. No. But I mean, Valve specifically tries to make all of their games run on every platform seamlessly, and Dota 2 is Mac native as well as Windows native as well as Linux native, so. Interesting. Yeah.
Interesting. Well, you're not alone. Greg and she hot also do not know. Many anyone that a single person who purchased it, which is.
crazy. And I tried to look up the actual sales numbers. It's Apple, which confused me. I thought publicly traded companies had to sort of publish this stuff, but they group it into categories. So that's how they do it. Found some estimates that in this first year of Vision Pro sales, they sold as low as 220,000 units. I saw some estimates that they sold as high as half a million units.
That's not very many. There's not that many people out there with this headset. I mean, there is no killer feature. It's a fun party trick. It's super fun party trick, but for $3,500, you can buy a nice MacBook Pro for that price. Okay, and Chee Hot totally agrees with you. Firstly, Price, and everyone who puts it on. I think there's one reason people I know would actually buy it.
because everyone who has seen those, for example, the soccer, the football video with the short one, everyone who's seen that and who likes to watch football,
really, really wants to have the device with live sports events. They would buy it immediately if there were live sports football of their favorite team or something like that, because it's the best experience you can watch it from your home. It's sometimes like some people think it's better than actually being there because you can change the camera perspective, which you can't do when you're sitting there and you just have your one angle. And I think that's the reason people could buy it, but currently it's just too expensive and too heavy.
I think the only pain point is the price. Really? Yeah. I think it's very, very easy to develop on it. It's very intuitive. So I think the only pain point is the price. But before I dive in at the next point, I wrote this in the script. Do we still say killer app? Do I sound like a boomer when I say killer app?
Really? Like if I say Killer App, like the Silicon Valley Bros. aren't gonna be like, no one's talking about Killer Apps anymore. No, what they say, they say product market fit. You don't have to say that, but... Please, I'll say that. Killer App, Killer App is still a valid. I think for a new category, it definitely is valid. Right? It's not... I just figured, because it's such a 2010 thing to say, like, dude, I think Urban Spoon is the Killer App. You know, you guys remember Urban Spoon. Boy, were they wearing dew.
I loved urban spoon, but this is not about urban spoon. Well, it actually specifically applies to this because it needs a singular app that makes it worth buying. But there just isn't a singular app that has been released that's like, I buy Vision Pro for that app. You know what I'm saying? Like Marquez buys MacBooks for Final Cut. He could really care less. I mean, I'm sure he likes the integration with the other Apple stuff he has.
But he would be much more open to using a Windows computer if Windows ran Final Cut. This is a lot of talk about something that's not here right now. I would agree with me. I don't know. I know that. I'm not going to not going to speak on Marques when he's not here, but I don't know, bro. I don't know about that one.
Andrew, what do you think? If Mark has to use Windows, he used to. But would he switch back if Final Cut wasn't going along with Windows? I'm not saying he would switch back. I'm saying he'd be open to using it. I think he'd be open to using it. Interesting. Fascinating. Who knows? Both Greg and Chihat agree. That Mark has to be open to you.
I knew you were going to see it. Yes, no. But this price is such an issue to getting people adopt. And it creates this vicious cycle, right? High price, low adoption, low adoption. There's not an incentive for devs to start making stuff for this thing.
And of course, content is missing as well. And content isn't arriving because the big players don't want to invest because they're not enough users. And they're not enough users because the big players don't invest. So this is like a chicken and egg problem. And one thing that Chihat said that really got my thinking gears turning was he used the term invest. He said, there are not enough users and these big players are not interested in investing their time and money. Because when you're a big development studio,
You move, you're like a big ship. You move slowly and expensively. And that sort of is where indie developers are supposed to come in, right? They can move faster, they can invest faster, they can get these things moving. And yet, we don't see that. And I was super curious.
why we're not seeing that. And the answer was kind of interesting. Like neither of them said developers are not being supported by Apple. Totally. But it all comes back to this user base cyclical issue.
I think the main problem is the user base not being big because then you don't have the big motivation to also, like usually you release an app, you bring out the first version and then you iterate, you improve it, improve it and you have more features, more ideas and that's not really something that motivates something on Vision Pro because they're not so many users and you can't really make a lot of money with it. So most people who are on it really have to just
poker and you say like maybe there will be the users at some point and then I will have my app ready. Now I understand that stands from indie developers too because say you're an indie developer and you're not working for some big studio and you want to like build out your skills right. The reason a lot of indie developers make apps is because they're just like oh this like hones my development skills and it's just a fun project.
But why would you make a fun project if nobody's going to use it? You know what I mean? There's also there's also that like magical moment where you just like make a fun app in many cases a task app and then you just tweet about it randomly and then all of a sudden people on the internet just go, oh, I want to try that out and then you mean me. Adam.
And then randomly, they either get really popular or they have this big stage. But there's nobody to actually use this vision. And you're spending this time learning how to code for Vision Pro, but you don't have faith that they're going to expand the ecosystem to where people are still going to be using VisionOS in the future. And with that high price tag,
I don't know if an indie developer wants to buy one. Yes. Totally. And think about how amazing an experience an indie developer and indie team would have to make to justify a $4,000 piece of hardware for some app. They could buy one of those Nvidia AI computer mini PC things for that price.
Dude, you could just like $3,000. You could buy like an entire like room in your house full of six stuff for $4,000. You know what I mean? We got to go cut to a commercial break. But when we get back, we're going to talk about the experience of actually writing code and developing on this thing and what it's been like to despite the price, despite the low user base to forge ahead and try and write programs in Vision Pro. But until then, we'll be right back.
Welcome back. We're talking about Vision Pro. We're talking to developers. We're talking code. We're talking $4,000 price tags, all of it. One interesting thing Chihat said to me.
is, and I think I mentioned this to you in passing Andrew, but I asked both Greg and she hot, what do you do in Vision Pro when you're not developing for it? Because you both own one for development purposes, but you also use it. Greg gave me very normal answer. I like to watch movies in it.
It's great for watching movies. Big screen, your house, your couch. It's kind of hard to drink a beverage without a straw in Vision Pro as someone who drinks a lot of coffee. Feeling the coffee mug clink against the glass is like pretty scary. I can't imagine the hot steam coming up onto the glass is not just absolutely weird. It had the issue where it was on the bottom too. I haven't seen it. It was splitting though, too, remember?
Yeah. Well, the one that I, the one in the office has not split. It did. Oh, Brandon's Brandon's. Brandon's. But I, I be clinking. I be clinking that thing. Um, but what do you think Chihat's favorite thing to do in Vision Pro was? Because it really surprised me and it is the first time I had heard someone give this answer when I asked you the question. Do black flips.
Do backflips that is exactly correct. It's funny like that the weight of it actually sort of creates this center point of mass that you can whip your body around like really no it probably would you said he doesn't game right does not game and it's not movies. The first thing I would like think of.
that would actually be beneficial to have something, some sort of 3D rendering or modeling, so you can see things in a 3D space. Interesting, but not what he said. What else can you do in this thing? He said he loves it for reading manga.
And I was like, if you're looking at a page, doesn't the foveated rendering ruin that experience? Only the thing you're looking at is in focus, really, and the rest of it's unrendered gobbledygook? What a thing about manga, specifically, is that most of the things are drawn. It's like pictures, and the text is quite big.
I can also read other stuff, but I wouldn't necessarily read a book in it. But for manga, it's perfect because you mostly look at the pictures and read the text for it. And then you just swipe every 15 seconds or so. And then you don't have to hold anything. It's really awesome. Enough about manga. Never. Never. Yeah, you're so right. I don't read any manga. I barely know anything about it. But I want to talk about developing on VisionOS because have you been in the App Store on VisionOS?
not a very long time it is like going to a mall in 2025 there is like the lights are out the lights are out it's it there's dripping from the ceiling yeah there's like three stores and they're all like half open yeah there's always one Coles attached to like the side of it that is still open exactly got to get that blue light special that's Coles right I don't know
I told this not. Anyone here? No, I'm talking about the blue light special. One of those old timey stores would, there'd be like this thing where like in the middle of the day. Kmart. Kmart. This blue light would come on and it would signify like an ultra deal and you'd have to like run to one part of the store and like. Wow. I hate everything about that story. Before Fortnite, real life was actually kind of like Fortnite. I don't know if you guys do this. Anyway. Interesting.
Ellis 2025 before Fortnite continued. So both of them said developing for Apple Vision Pro is not particularly difficult if you're already coming from traditional Mac app slash iOS app. And one of the reason that is is because over the years, Apple has actually made
developing for iOS and developing for Mac more and more similar with Swift. And I think that's a really cool thing, especially now that both devices are running on Apple Silicon. Obviously, the M series and the A series are very different chips, but they're more similar than, you know,
We're not going to use the word Intel around here, but you don't even. And so they both said, if you're used to using Apple's APIs, you can kind of get started pretty easily. And that is actually where their perspectives began to differ. And one thing, Greg has this really complicated.
AR app. You need to model a piano but not really display it because you need to be able to see the actual piano you're sitting at and then that needs to be pinned to a physical location in the world and they need to be generating these objects that fall linearly and they need to land on the right keys because if they're even a little bit off the app is useless. You're not getting useful information for playing this piano.
And he found the Apple APIs to be pretty useful for that purpose. He said he had to model the piano himself, which took a little bit of time. But after that, things like the spheres that represent the notes, there's an API for that, getting them to like stream down. There's an API for that. And Chihat actually had sort of an opposite experience.
So the interesting thing about the Vision Pro is there are two different worlds within the Vision Pro. One world is you open your app and you say, my app is the only app that can run now. All other apps have to be gone. And when you enter that mode, you get access to more functionality. You get access to things that the camera is tracking, like the walls, the surfaces, the tables that the device is finding in your room. So you can do more.
In that case, you can actually do a lot of stuff. You could do skeletal tracking, you could do many things. But that goes back to basically how I see the Vision Pro as a VR device right now. Because that, I would call that the VR mode. Because you only have this one app that can do something. And even if it does augment a reality augmentation stuff, it can't do it together with other end-ups. That also may be augmenting or trying to augment reality.
That's technically, that's called the full space for apps. If you run it in the full space, then you can have access to all those. But if you run it in the other one, in the shared space where all the apps can be open, where you can have a window here, a window there, and move them around, you can't access any of these APIs. That's the thing that I think makes this device really interesting as an AR device, if you can open multiple apps and do things with those.
This was so interesting to hear because the ability to multitask this like spatial computing environment was to me the signature selling point of the Vision Pro. And the fact that it's actually sort of harder to develop in that mode really like was not something I expected to hear. The thing that the core I'm thinking that it's mostly lacking is the airport. Like there's space. I personally don't see the very pro as an AR device yet because the software is missing.
Really? Wait, okay. Wow, okay. Damn, you're really giving me a lot here. What's missing from the AR part of it?
Well, what is augmenting reality? It means you can augment reality by adding stuff to your reality, right? So when I want to add stuff to my reality, like I have an app where you can basically open posters and pin them to your walls. And then that's like augmenting reality. You can do that. It works like my app is there. But as soon as you switch the device off and turn it back on, the augmenting of the reality is gone.
So I would state that the augmentation of reality is just temporary right now. It's not persistent and this doesn't make it really in the ER device because I can't really augment my room. I can't really augment my place. Just imagine if I was basically creating a new dimension of worlds where I have different kinds of things in my home
And I can switch it on and off whenever I want. And maybe I have multiple different ones. I have one for work, one for leisure time, and one for like when I pass it on to guests. So that's the kind of AR that I'm imagining and seeing as AR. And that's completely missing right now.
That's something that the Quest does well, actually, is your home space that you have on the Quest. You can customize and it can be very personalized to you so that every time you turn it on, if you land in the home space by default, then you have all your stuff and it's in the same space, right? Remind me, is the Quest's home space? Is it, are you referring to the boundary that you've drawn? Quest, it's called Quest Home or something? But are you referring to the weird sort of
room that you can choose or it's not a pass-through experience. It's a very different thing. It is different versus AR.
Yes, VR versus AR, but I do think you raised this really good point that persistence is so important in manufacturing any reality, whether it's an augmented version of our existing reality or it's a complete virtual reality. I will say like one of the huge things that multiple people have brought up many times is that I would love to use this thing sitting in front of my computer
But the problem is that when I want to pin windows around me and do all this setup so that, oh, in my kitchen, it has this really amazing thing where you can keep things in other rooms. But the fact that when you turn it off and then turn it back on, all of that is gone.
It makes it really difficult to use this thing redundantly. It's like beneficial, like, oh, I'm going to use it in my living room now. Oh, I'm going to use it in my kitchen now. I'm going to use it in my bedroom now. Without that persistence, it's so much effort to just set things up every single time. Yes, and that...
Just to me, just feels like this giant blind spot that's almost worse than the price. It's not worse than the price. $4,000 is so much money. But seriously, it's like a huge blind spot. As even as someone who only uses this thing at my desk at work, literally not a single other time,
Having to reset all my windows every time I get to work sucks. It sucks so bad. And when this thing got announced, I remember all these commercials where it's like, you can pin your cooking instructions, do toaster. And then it'll be, and it's like, what's the point of that? It's like picture the real world version of that, where every time you leave a sticky note somewhere in your house and then you leave your house, it's gone.
No, it's all back in a stack and you have to re-stick it. Yeah. Oh, that's like even worse. Yeah. Somehow. Yeah. So naturally, I had a great analogy. Yeah. So naturally I had to ask, right? But VisionOS 2.
Well, that's already out. I know, but it fixed this, right? Like they fixed it. Like they added the necessary APIs. They sort of like, you know, fixed it. No, no. And she hot once again. And this is his opinion. This is not like based on like hardcore reporting, but he sort of enlightened me with
this. VisionOS 2, in my point of view, was like an update that basically fixed or filled gaps more or less, that developers already expected to be there from day one. So, VisionOS 2
I don't, I wouldn't say it brought any new APIs, new functionalities, new tools that enable developers to do new stuff. They just felt like that they just listened to the developer feedback who said like, hey, this is missing, this is buggy, this is that kind of stuff that was important too. But in my point of view, VisionOS 3 is going to be the first post feedback release of VisionOS.
To me, it was crazy that they called it VisionOS 2 in the first place because they really kind of just improved on things that were obviously missing. Like the big thing about it was they kind of just took the feedback from reviewers and people that were buying it that were like, it's very hard to recommend without these very obvious features and they tried to add those in as quick as possible. But they didn't like change, like add APIs, like you said, and like totally change how you use the device.
I think that would be a real 2.0, so it's pretty wild that they didn't just call it 1.5.
happens. I can't remember if that was the developer beta or the public beta, but it's like developer. They're not going to be adding crazy new features once the beta is out. It's pretty, I mean, unless I fundamentally misunderstand how to develop software. Like he said, it really feels like VisionOS 3 is going to be the first real new thing we get. Does he have a wish list of things that he wants to see in VisionOS 3? Oh, David, I'm so happy you asked.
Not only does he have a wish list, but it is beautifully written, unbelievably clear, and on his blog, fline.dev, f-l-i-n-e.dev, and an article called, Why I Stopped Building for VisionOS, and what could bring me back. And his wish list, number one, magnetically pinning windows and objects to surfaces.
This sort of exists, right? Like it does recognize services. You can sort of put stuff up against them kind of. It's a little bit messier than that, but still isn't persistent. Doesn't really accomplish like a full mixed reality experience. Number two, advanced room scanning with editable 3D models.
And he's talking about a hybrid API that combines the power of room plan and the 3D scanner. Apple clearly has a lot of experience with LiDAR at this point. Lots of Apple devices have LiDAR. Number three, skeletal recognition for fun AR interactions. I'll be real.
I don't understand rigging in 3D stuff. Not a developer. I don't know if you knew this. So I'm not even going to try to explain how skeletal stuff works, but it has something to do with rigging. Or maybe not. Oops. And then more interactive.
immersive video experiences. Like we should be able to have a 3D video that you can more walk around, maybe, I don't know. Like Apple Maps, like he says. Exactly. Like an Apple Maps. And we actually had a really funny conversation about Apple Maps because I am an avid Microsoft Flight Simulator player. And are you guys familiar with the big maps integration? No.
Really? I didn't even know that was a problem. I didn't know there was big maps. So big maps exists. Microsoft owns all of this map data. They also own Azure, the cloud computing platform, and they have this big partnership.
with a little company. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. OpenAI. I don't actually know if OpenAI's models are part of this, but I would assume it's part of this just sort of extended family of nonsense. But when you're playing Microsoft Flight Simulator,
they leverage open source map data and Bing Maps data with an AI running on Azure Cloud to recreate the entire world in 3D. To the point, because they're using real up-to-date satellite maps from Bing Maps, if you fly over your house, not only will you be like, hey, that's my house. I recognize it. You'll be like, that's my car parked outside.
Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome. So when you're like flying around the neighborhood you grew up in, you can use like real landmarks to navigate or like when I'm flying around Los Angeles where I grew up. It's like amazing. I can be like, there's my, there's actually something really beautiful about being in the sky and seeing your entire childhood neighborhood at once and being like, that's the park where I played baseball. That's my elementary school. And like,
like a decade of memories being experienced. It's amazing. Anyway, this is all to say, this is possible. We have the technology. It's in a stupid video game.
Yeah. So G-Hot was really frustrated. He felt like he didn't have the APIs necessary to truly make the AR experiences of his dreams. Meanwhile, Greg's experience was actually way more rewarding. He found the new workflows of coding on a Mac, putting on the headset, writing a few more lines of code in the headset, testing it out, taking it off, challenging, but rewarding, and something to think about.
And he also said something that I thought was really cool, which is that when you write iOS apps, you're constantly thinking about how do I put everything in this box, this rectangle, in a way that makes the most sense. And then when you're working with Vision Pro apps, all of a sudden you have, in theory, limitless amounts of space.
And what do you do with that? How do you not overload the user, but also how do you not underwhelm the user? And I was just like, wow, that is such a fun brain shift to get to do. But once again, like Apple are really helping and how to how to design stuff in 3D and
And I think it's so cool, like when you build an app on the iOS, you have to think in a small rectangle, you have to... Here you have all the space around you to bring information, and it's so cool. And that's why I wanted, like, from my app on the piano.
The notes are falling from the sky and it's cool to see. Greg also said that he found VisionOS 2 to have some really meaningful improvements specifically for the Piano app. Anchor points are much more stable.
You know, when you put an anchor in the real world, you want it to be very stable, for example, for the panel application. I don't want it to shift, like even some millimeters, it will show the room nut, for example, on the panel. So I really want it to be very accurate. And I think with vision or as Tuesday,
Improve it a little bit. It's very, very good accuracy. When you put an encore on the real one, it will stick. When you say, hey, in the real world, this point is here. There's a lot less jitter, which, as I'm sure you could imagine for something like the piano app, is a lot better. Kind of important.
It's also funny because that sounds like a 1.x update, not a 2.0 update because it's less, it's fixed, right? It's a thing that exists that was. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So one thing that I was really curious about as someone who doesn't develop is how different is coding for iOS versus Macintosh? God, I feel sort of saying Macintosh, but I'm going to say it. How different is iOS and Macintosh? And then how different are those two things from Vision Pro from a developer's perspective?
And one thing that both of these devs brought up is that over the years, Apple has really pushed these sort of semantic solutions, right? Where back in the day, if you were coding for Mac and you wanted to put a search bar in a specific place, you would enter in coordinates. Sometimes they're UV coordinates and those are other kind of coordinates. You would pin it to that location. You'd start to build your layout, right? Over the years, Apple has really made it such as that they know
where the best place for search bar is in an iOS app. It's not going to be buried in a hamburger menu. It's not going to be at the lower left-hand side of the screen. You know where the magnifying glass is supposed to go. Yeah, at the bottom of the Safari window.
And so when you're writing Swift code, oftentimes what you're saying is not put the search bar at the top of the screen. You're saying put the search bar in the search bar place. One thing that definitely is different on VisionOS than on macOS or iOS is that it didn't have that old system where you could describe like, I want to have a button at this coordinate and it looks exactly like it just doesn't have that.
Same as the watchOS, by the way, on watchOS, you can't also do that. On iOS, because we had this old system before 2019, there was this old system, and on the Mac, it's still there. You can still use it, and you can always fall back to it. Apple didn't drop support for that old system. It's still there. You can use the new one, which had these baked in functionalities, or you can choose to use the old one. But on VisionOS, we don't have it.
They basically, when they introduce new platforms nowadays, they say, OK, we only introduce a new system. You have to use it. And the new system is more restricted. And you can't like UI-wise, there are things you can't really control yourself in detail. So it's a bit different. But still, you can make a lot of custom stuff still when it comes to like window UIs and stuff like that.
I would see the limitations more on the parts that are not just buttons and dual elements like you have on iPad, etc. and other platforms, but the stuff that Division Pro should actually excel at being AR and VR. Which, on the one hand, at first I was like,
That sounds not fun. That sounds like Apple is telling you how to do things. And both Greg and Chihat responded, they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not like that, bro. Obviously, sometimes it's fun to have freedom as far as your user interface goes. But for the most part, when you're making an app,
The user interface is not creative expression. Like you need it to be intuitive so that people can actually use your dang thing. And it can bog you down, like having to write all of this code. But something really interesting that they mentioned is that on both Mac OS and iOS.
You can always fall back on the old system. You can always override the prescribed semantics. You can always go back to the coordinates. That is not true on Vision Pro. It's because there's no legacy system that Vision Pro is building upon. Technically, it's a fork of iPadOS, but at the same time, you don't get any of those old tools. I thought that was a really interesting
thing as a developer because VisionOS is different from Mac OS and iPad OS where with or iOS. iOS has been around since 2007.
We know the best place. I'm gonna use the search, but we know where it is. We've figured it out, we've gone through the fire, but we don't know these things yet for Vision Pro. We have an idea of what's probably gonna work well, and it seems like it's going all right. We all agree that this thing is very intuitive, but also,
I don't know, I sort of think we should have the freedom to get a little messy. We're new in this thing. I mean, I think no one will ever be upset with more freedom. But one thing, I mean, we all agree that the thing Apple nailed with Vision Pro was the intuitiveness. So that means they probably found out quite a few things correctly as like, do you trust them? Do you not trust them? It sounds like
I mean, I know it's over a decade of research of iOS stuff knowing where certain things are supposed to go, and this is fairly new, but they seem to have hit it pretty well off the bat. I think the other with the interaction stuff, but I think that in terms of the way that apps should work and how they should be pinned and how you should interact with the actual UI elements, I think that's maybe something that might be interesting for developers to kind of mess around with.
It's always interesting, I totally agree with that. I don't know, using it feels really intuitive. It feels like that's the thing they nailed. There's also the delineation between interfacing with a floating window versus interfacing with an object or something like that. A window, I think Apple knows what they're doing, but something else entirely might be
might be different. Do you think once more developers or once there's more people on board with this, they'll revert back to a grid system? No. You don't think they'll give the freedom once people are like, oh, we're used to this. We get it now. It's been five, 10 years of spatial OS, whatever it's called. And then be like, OK, here's a little bit more freedom now that we kind of know where everything is. Or this is them just like,
This is where it goes. That's fine. I mean, it's possible that Apple, it feels like Apple wants to have more and more and more control moving forward in general. Yeah. And it seems like maybe because the iPhone and the Mac have been out for so long, they can't necessarily just flip a switch and say, we're taking away all your control, but for a completely new paradigm, they feel more emboldened to do that.
Well, I know it also got the impression that Apple views the those the court system is just like one example, right? But a lot of these sort of you do everything from scratch as sort of a legacy way of building these things. And Apple does not seem like the kind of company that is going to fall back on a legacy. And I'd also like to raise
There's another really common development platform. He's not looking at me. There's another really common development platform that works like this. Not exactly like put this in the best place. But this is sort of how HTML works. It works a bit like HTML on the web where you more describe what you want to have. And then the browser decides how it renders it. And this time the system now decides how it's rendered. So I think being a developer for the Apple vision Pro, you're in this very weird place where you have all of these tools.
And yet, in order to realize this device as sort of what Apple advertised, you're actually missing a bunch of key tools. And there's no guarantee anyone's actually going to give you any money for that, this stuff. You know, Jiopp brought up this really good point that when the Veggie Pro first came out, he was like, there's going to be this gold rush moment. It's going to be like the iPhone where like people are paying a dollar for the beer app, you know.
And it was sort of like that for a week, but he said after a week, it was just like, well, just sort of stopped. Anyway, we're going to take another break. When we get back from the break, we are going to try our best to look to the future and see what's in store for this magical piece of garbage. And until then, am I wrong? Am I wrong? David, David, David, you and I were in the same boat, right?
We live in New York, we're around lots of people, they know we're tech folk, and we get asked, should I buy a Vision Pro? We know.
Well, I say go to an Apple store and experience it because it's very fun and then you don't need to buy it. Exactly. Yeah. It's a magical piece of garbage going a little bit far. I don't think so. I don't think so. It's magical. You put it on and you go, Jihat said something. Jihat was like after I gave it to some of my older family members and they took it off.
they got kind of freaked out because they were like, how do I know I'm not wearing the headset right now? Oh, no, we can't go down this rabbit hole. No, but all I'm saying is that is magic. And personally, personally, I really hate that thing that people say where they're like, any sufficiently advanced piece of technology is indistinguishable from magic. And hit the wrong button for me. Yeah, I hate that one. And we can get into that at another time. But Apple Vision Pro is magic.
undeniably, and it also doesn't do anything. Ergo, it is a magical piece of garbage. I'm not gonna take any, I love Vision Pro. I'm like the biggest Vision Pro guy in the office, and I firmly believe magic trash. And without giving many of my hosts a chance to respond, I'm gonna take it to commercial.
Welcome back to the Freezer, aka the Waveform Studio. We're cold and I'm Ellis and we're gonna be talking about the future of Vision Pro and where we think it's heading. And I poked and prodded these developers as hard as I could to try to be like speculate, speculate, speculate, and they just wouldn't. They were like, I don't know. So that's our job as your resident morons. I would like to go first with my speculation. I am doubtful
Cheaper Vision Pro will come out. I want it to. I see it as pretty much the only way this platform is going to survive. You mean like ever or like soon, like in the next year or two?
I don't want to say ever because it's not, look, we had this big year this year where both meta and snap unveiled these tiny glasses. They're not even 1% as powerful as Vision Pro. They don't have as high a resolution. They don't work as well in almost every way. That being said,
the degree to which the form factor was scaled down is nuts. It's very compelling. It's super compelling. And if I were Apple, I would at least be thinking, maybe this is where this is going and not a big giant headset. And you already have this really powerful base that is VisionOS.
I could see not spending money developing a cheaper slimmer headset, going back to hardcore research mode, cultivating VisionOS into something that will eventually run on glasses, and just waiting for other people to do the necessary research to make these things. I don't think that's what's going to happen. You don't think that's what's going to happen. No. What do you, David and Mel, think is going to happen?
I think that they are going to try to make it slimmer. They're absolutely going to try to make it cheaper. There might even be a situation where they subsidize the price a little bit. It costs Google $50 more than it cost them to make the Nexus 7.
to sell it because they just needed to adopt Google Play users. And that works very well for them. So what Apple needs to do is they need to make it less annoying to wear. They need to make it cheaper and they need to make a killer app that actually makes people want to use it every day.
Or just enhance the work features where you do have permanent spatial pinning and that kind of stuff and I think that Considering chipsets are like getting faster and lower power and all this kind of stuff They could even like I don't know switch to an a series chip at some point It probably doesn't need to run an M series chip. I don't know
I mean, a lot of the stuff is getting easier to run. The chipsets are getting faster. The node size is shrinking. I think that they could potentially put it on a smaller chip later down the line. But yeah, I think the build quality.
is allowed to take a hit if it means it can go smaller. And if they could sell it for $1,500 or less, I think that that could be a winner. But they need to make it cheaper. If you go on Vision Pro or slash Vision Pro, I think that's what it's called. You almost always see people bragging. They were like, I just finished my Vision Pro setup. And it's always Mac Mini, Magic Keyboard, Apple Vision Pro, no monitor. That is the thing people are most stoked about.
And I don't really, I like that you said $1,500 because the alternative to a Vision Pro in that setup is a studio display. Right. Which is also overpriced. Yep, definitely. Why? Absolutely. I think the idea of your building an at-home desktop setup, Vision Pro versus studio display,
Yeah, actually kind of makes sense. Both have speakers, both have a webcam. It just sort of depends, you know, what your vibe is. I was going to take the very common Andrew Rowan goes somewhere in between both. Wow. I kind of like agree with both of you. I think we all agree that the Metaglasses and the Vision Pro are the two far ends of the spectrum and they're both battling to the middle of that.
and they just started at different routes. The form factor is better on meta-glasses. If you can create that, but the computing power is nothing, or the form factor is they just focused way too much on over-quality controlling it, and it's just not comfortable to wear, but the computer power is insane.
I like what David said of like this think of how the quest heads like the quest three another quest 3s Like I don't I don't know what they would call it because it wouldn't be vision pro would be like vision se would be that like thousand dollar Version that's maybe a little more plastic which yeah
It's funny to think plastic is lower quality, but will be so much more comfortable on my head. So something like that, I think we totally see it because they need to keep developing inside a vision. And we're already seeing if one of our two developers we talk to is like, I'm not doing this anymore. Not a great route for developers. So they need something to keep them around and they need something that
you know, you need the research of how people are using it. So if you make it 4,000, yeah, if you make it way too expensive, you need to make it accessible. Yeah. So I also agree with subsidizing some and then they're going to work down towards the better form factor. But I think we are, you know, as impressive as snap and meta R with their glasses, we are just so far away from that being the form factor of like actually producing what you want to use in everyday life and being able to afford it. And it seems like
the what you need to make a budget version of this. Whatever I talk to engineers, not just Apple, but meta snap all over the place who are working on these problems, I get wildly different answers. Like I was talking, I'm not going to name any names, but I was talking to engineers at one company who were like, yeah, you know, getting a stable image to both of your eyes.
is really tough because you have almost no tolerance for any flex. As soon as one of the displays moves ever so slightly, all of a sudden, your brain is struggling to combine them into a stereoscopic image.
I then asked that to another company, and they were like, sounds like a skill issue. And I was just like, I don't know what to believe, man. There's no standard in this, and I think all the companies are working. And we've had them admit that, too. They're like, this is what we want with this. We think it's going to be the standard, but we're also ready to switch gears and move to the thing that universally becomes a standard.
No, I mean, I think some people believe that like a smaller field of view and higher resolution is more important than meta's wider field of view and lower resolution, you know what I mean? Yeah. And there's just two, there's just a lot of different competing camps on how this is going to go. And this goes, this is almost a protocol question because there's just a lot of competing standards until eventually people figure it out. I know. You know, it's really funny that you brought up that dichotomy because it really does actually make the Vision Pro make a little bit more sense because
The Apple solution to do we go with higher resolution or do we go with more field of view is yes, both and make it insane. Yeah. That's something else that I was thinking about. I think that they know that they need to make this like cheaper and lighter and made it more plastic.
Apple has entered a stage in their company's lifespan where everything they make is jewelry. They don't really sell a product that isn't supposed to be jewelry. You know what I mean? What do you mean by jewelry? Expand on that? Like the fit and finish and the build equality and everything is just like insane. Material qualities, the materials, titanium, like freaking everything they make is just like
So I think that they're scared of making something that feels like it could be a little bit cheaper, whereas meta is just like, I don't know, dude, throw it at the wall, like figure it out. It doesn't really matter if it's plastic. It doesn't mean we're just trying to like advance the technology. And we're trying to put this people's hands. We're trying to put this, excuse me, we're trying to put this on people's heads.
Yeah. Who's doing that, though? Meta. Meta. The funny thing is, though, it really solidifies my original thought, and I think a lot of us agreed with this, of the Apple Vision Pro feels like it was a dev kit that they sold to consumers, and the consumer aspect of it didn't work out quite as well.
It's a technology advancing prototype that they fixed the fit and finish on to sell it to people who are willing to spend a lot of money. And arguably made it worse to do that? Yes, I know. And it's like, as someone who really uses it a lot.
It's one of the few tech products I've used in the past year that really just like lights a fire in me. I would kill for a fire right now. I would treasure for you though, Ellis. Yeah. You're using the studio's unit. No.
Absolutely, I would never buy this thing. There was one, there was one, it's a magic piece of trash and I love it and it's the best thing you can buy and it's not worth it and like every
No, once or twice, I've gone on eBay. You can get a used one. It's like 2,600 or something. Cheaper, like 22. Still a lot of money. Even that is too much for me because it's like I could buy, oh, they're lower. I'm seeing them for 18. Go to sold listings. Yeah, let's go to sold listings. How do I do that? Cheapest one, 13, 1389. Was it broken?
No, sealed Apple vision pro. Whoa, that's not a great book, but it might be it's a 21 medium. I don't know if they that's like oh you little little small head guy one third of the value in one year. I'm seeing 14. I'm seeing 26. I'm seeing 31 interesting. Okay. Seems like they're selling all over this place clearly various. I'm not gonna lie, dude
If someone came up to me on the street and was like for 13 for 13, I might. Yeah, I might see you considering that for 13. I think I think I might do it actually for 13, but I think anyway, now what if it was made of plastic entirely and still worth and still cost $1,300, but it still had the same experience and was lighter.
That sounds better. That's what I'm saying. But it's nice. It is. I just learned something about myself. You like jewelry? Because I was like, yeah. Because I was like, I don't know about that. Like, I don't want it plastic. And this is probably what Apple was thinking too, but I think they're wrong. Damn. So, are people like me just impossible to satisfy? Yes. Yep. Well, before we go, I wanted to ask you guys a question.
What is the killer app that you think would ignite the Vision Pro's sales? That would make you go $4,000? Nothing. I love flat screens and I love my laptop.
I don't know. I don't need to. It's great. It's fun. It's awesome. But the way I see it, you're just doing the same thing in a different paradigm. I'm not a sculptor. I could see from a 3D modeler's point of view how this could be really incredible if you really had tactile feedback or something and it actually felt you were sculpting something.
For me, I write words. I consume articles. I don't need to do that in 3D space versus on a flat display. Yeah, I think I just really don't see myself in a position of using it. It would have to be productivity-wise because entertainment-wise, I think there's still something weird about...
You know, I live in a house with my wife and a kid now being inside of a vision pro feels really weird if they're in the same room as I am. So like maybe if I was single in an apartment and really liked watching a lot of sports and stuff like that, maybe there's some cool exterior sports apps that could fit in there, but uh,
Chihat brought up a really good point that if they nailed the soccer football experience, oh my god, this thing would fly off the shelf. I also want to note that the reason a lot of people love the Quest is because they can have a YouTube video playing on the side while they're doing their dishes.
All comes back to the decision. No, there's so many times I've like been on a FaceTime call with someone in Vision Pro and then I'll just send them a screenshot and it'll be like the FaceTime call like, you know, a pretty normal size and then I'll have like a 70 foot family guy funniest moments compilation like right next I'll be like, great call.
So I got to focus our energy. We need to be paying more attention to what we're doing at any time. No, no, no, no, no, no. We need family guy, funniest moments, populations. I think my killer app, killer experience, I mean, on top of my absolutely hilarious productivity app idea that I'm still waiting for someone to implement, where your tasks chase you around the house and the more important tasks move faster and are scarier.
Yeah, literally a killer app. Literally. Nice. Now, I would like to see I, so I am in this sort of unique space where I am one of the few audio professionals who works more in headphones than on speakers. That's like a pretty not normal thing for audio folk.
And if I could get really killer audio integration, like if I could, if there was a headphone check and I could like fully like use it as like a sound card and have like truly no latency direct, like, I mean, I guess I can already do that out of my interface, but then I still have to have like this headphone core, I don't know. Like to me, that's where it comes in super clutches. Like when I'm in a mix and I'm wearing my headphones and I just want to like lock
It's a good point. You're using the Vision Pro as your main computer to do the... Right now, I'm using it in remote desktop. Same difference. I've talked to a bunch of mix engineers who all say, man, I want to mix in this thing.
audio nerd moment. One of the ways we tell what we're hearing is our brain is constantly comparing the information we have between our two ears. Part of the way sound makes it to our ears is it comes across our nose and our cheekbones and is actually like directed across our face to our ears. When you have a big thing right here, it makes it, it makes stuff sound different.
And sometimes it can be harder to have a clear, perceive a clear stereo image with ski goggles on your face. You guys are missing the one thing that would make this instantly fly off the shelves, even at $4,000. I said soccer better.
GTA 6. If it had an exclusive game, dude, that would be too much. People would just solve it. Do you remember how that was a problem? No, but do you guys remember how gnarly it was when GTA 5 came out on next gen, quote unquote, next gen consoles Xbox one? And they added the first person mode, which wasn't in the 360 release. And everyone was like, wait.
I don't like this. No, there was this moment where everyone is like GTA, it's like fun to be a reverend in GTA, but all of a sudden in first person feels super real. Yeah, it's like this is less fun now. I think in VR it would be way too real. When the vibe was the most popular headset in 2015, there was a game that came out that was basically like Call of Duty, but first person and people loved it.
I'm going to close with this because I had a really interesting experience last weekend that I didn't think about Vision Pro, but now I'm thinking about it as a pertains to Vision Pro. If you live in one of the cities where this movie is screening, I highly suggest you go see it. It's a movie called Grand Theft Hamlet. Have you guys heard of this?
No, you guys went to it. Grand Theft Hamlet is a staging of Hamlet entirely within Grand Theft Auto. And when Mariah put it in Slack, I was like, this sounds stupid. I'll go see it. It was so beautiful. And I cannot stop thinking about this movie after seeing it. And that would be a pretty cool thing for Vision Pro if I could actually
If this existed and the community existed, this might be the thing, because I'm kind of interested in exploring theater, especially after seeing this movie. And I don't want to go to a place. I don't have time. So if I could wear this thing and use my creepy apple persona as a character on a stage and read a soliloquy. So live events.
I guess I'm thinking specifically like theater, like something that you have multiple people and you're interacting and you're playing and...
and you like kick a ball and it goes into a net. No, well, maybe. Maybe for, yeah. All right. My co-hosts are freezing. I'm somehow doing fine. Normally, I'm the cold one. This is weird. Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up here. I want to give a big, big thank you to Jihat and Greg for coming on the show. You can find Jihat on Blue Sky, Twitter, Mastodon. We'll put his links in the show notes. And if you're watching the video, it'll be somewhere on the screen.
Gregor, is there anything that you would like to share about yourself, about developing ForVision Pro, something that you feel like people might not know without you telling them anything before you wrap up the call? Yeah, just one thing. I know there are a lot of developers who develop iOS app, and I really encourage them to step into 3D world.
It's not that hard, and they are able to build stuff in 2D. It's okay in 3D. And Greg is also on Twitter. Also, don't forget, if you are a dev, if you're interested in indie development, I highly recommend checking out Chihat's blog. That is f-l-i-n-e.dev. Again, thank you guys so much for speaking with us. You were so helpful, so informative.
and probably a little annoyed talking to someone who knows as little about the stuff as I do. Anyway, I'm Ellis, that's Andrew, that's David, Adam's over there, we're freezing, we're gonna wrap.
What does Marquesne do? He does peace. Catch you guys in the next one. Yeah. Catch you guys in the next one. That sounds so important. Elis out. Keep this. Elis out. Wait for him to produce by Adam Alina and Elis Rovin. We're partnering with Vox Media podcast number and our trash room music was created by Vainsel.
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