Weird Forking Scenario
Casey:
are you trying to do like a vision pro layout or what just just don't worry about it i needed john to be here i waited longer than normal expecting captain late to be here and i'm wrong oh my god it's you wait what is behind me i don't even know what that background is maybe does zoom add that or does apple add that i think i think zoom's doing it is i don't even know if there's a way to change what's behind me
Casey:
so i i am currently using airpods i am recording my real mic and i will change as soon as i have john freak out about how ridiculous i look and then i will turn all this off and rejoin on my computer okay but it was worth it for the fun of it oh look there's my there's ish my hand nope nope there it is there it is yeah you do like the trademark casey thumbs up i mean the problem is your smile doesn't get big enough well what are you gonna do ain't nobody perfect hi john oh
Casey:
What's going on?
John:
Last night, I did a podcast and I did my normal Zoom recording.
John:
Hello, scary face.
John:
And that's all you get.
John:
It didn't record anything.
Marco:
The thing, listeners, that you have to learn about trying to surprise or shock John Syracuse is
Marco:
You will never get the reaction you want.
Marco:
We know this from being friends with John for, what, 13 years or whatever it's been.
Marco:
We know this.
Marco:
But whatever reaction you want to get out of John, you will not receive it.
Marco:
Like, I believe you got, what, about one and a half words of a reaction?
John:
As I said, I've seen a lot of personas now.
John:
We hadn't seen Casey's persona.
John:
Anyway, that's not to say that I'm not ever surprised about things, Mark.
John:
I was very carefully trying to say you won't get the reaction you expect.
John:
So maybe I'll be way more surprised than you expected or way less.
John:
There you go.
Casey:
We have some follow up.
Casey:
Apparently, John does not know how to do calculations.
Casey:
I presume mental calculations or perhaps arithmetic beforehand.
Casey:
But one way or another, you screwed up your PPD.
Casey:
So tell me what PPD is and how you screwed up, sir.
John:
The problem wasn't with calculations because I wasn't doing these calculations myself.
John:
It was with the little PPD calculator, which is pixels per degree.
John:
And we link the calculator in last episode show notes.
John:
And it had a bunch of sliders and text fields.
John:
And apparently I messed up one of the sliders or text fields when I was doing the iPad Pro PPD because last episode I said it was 28 PPD.
John:
If I have my iPad, my 11 inch iPad Pro sitting on a pillow on my lap in the bed, measure the distance, size the screen, resolution, enter it all in.
John:
And I got 28 PPD.
John:
I had one of the sliders just incorrectly set.
John:
The correct number is 67 PPD.
John:
So that kind of changes things, because last episode I was like, wow, the Vision Pro is 34 PPD, which is pretty good for a headset.
John:
And the iPad that I watch my TV shows on is only 28, and that's less than the Vision Pro.
John:
Turns out not so much.
John:
Turns out Vision Pro 34-ish, iPad Pro 11-inch 67, 4K TV 5 feet away 76, Pro Display XDR 2 feet 100.
John:
So it's making me feel a little bit better about my future OLED iPad Pro purchase.
Casey:
Tell me about field of view and eye movement, if you don't mind.
John:
This was something that occurred to me after recording last week's episode.
John:
We were talking about the field of view, the Vision Pro, and how it compares to other headsets and so on.
John:
And also, Marco mentioned sometimes when he was looking at targets to the left and right side of the field of view, it was having trouble with the eye tracking sort of at the extremities.
John:
And it occurred to me that those two things combined, that when we talk about...
John:
Yeah.
John:
When you do that, it kind of makes sense.
John:
It's at the extremes of the edges of the screen.
John:
You're looking through the edges of the lenses that are in the Vision Pro.
John:
I can understand how eye tracking might be more difficult there.
John:
But when you do that in real life and you have your head staying still and you move your eyes to the left to see something in the upper left corner of your monitor without moving your head...
John:
Guess what?
John:
Your field of view moves with your eyeballs.
John:
But that does not happen in the Vision Pro.
John:
So you see what I'm saying?
John:
When you shift your eyes to the left, your whole field of view is always centered on where your eyes are pointed.
John:
But when you shift your eyes to the left in Vision Pro, the field of view does not move with your eyeballs.
John:
Because if you're not moving your head, the screens are in the same place.
John:
And, you know, that's...
John:
obvious if you think about it but it really does make the narrow field of view feel more narrow because as you shift your eyes the field of view doesn't shift with them and i'm not saying it's easy to do that what are they going to have little motorized screens that travel around it'd be very difficult to do that but it does make the field of view feel even narrower and it is also why a lot of people who have used vision pro
John:
for a longer time now, get into the habit of or suggest that other people get into the habit of moving their head more, both to avoid Marco's issue, which is like, you know, the eye tracking seems like it's the best kind of around the middle-ish of the screen.
John:
And also because if you do want to, for example, take in a window that you have floating to your left, merely glancing your eyes over there is not going to reveal any more of that window.
John:
It would in real life because the center of your field of view would shift.
John:
But in Vision Pro, you actually have to turn your head to move the little screen so they know to change what they're displaying.
Casey:
You know, that's a good point.
Casey:
And I also wanted to bring up, I was talking to somebody about this, and I think I know who it is, but they all remain nameless.
Casey:
But I was talking to somebody about this, and I believe it was that last episode that you seemed very...
Casey:
very disgruntled about the idea of moving your head really in any direction, but I think particularly laterally in order to, you know, use my fantasy, which is actually kind of reality, a magical world where you've got like panels of windows all around you.
Casey:
And you seemed, and don't let me put words in your mouth.
Casey:
If I'm mischaracterizing what you said, I apologize.
Casey:
But it seemed like, John, you were very perturbed about the idea of moving your head a lot.
Casey:
And I was thinking about this and talking to somebody that we know
Casey:
Do you not move your head when you're looking at that humongous XDR?
Casey:
Like, do you really keep your head dead center, locked in straight ahead?
Casey:
Because I've got three 5K displays here because I'm a weirdo and because Marco sent me one.
Casey:
And I'm pitching my head laterally constantly, like all the time.
Casey:
Granted, not up and down, but it's only laterally.
Casey:
But I am always moving my head.
Casey:
Do you not do that with your XDRs?
John:
I mean, I'm sure I do move my head, but considerably less like I'm definitely a one monitor in front of me kind of person, because if I if I feel like, oh, I have to look over there, which I guess is there's some like a minimum amount of head movement that makes me feel like that.
John:
Like what I want to feel like is that everything is there in front of me.
John:
Now, obviously, the bigger the monitor gets, it's not all in front of you.
John:
And the part of your vision that is in focus is very small anyway.
John:
But I can flick my eyes over to various, I feel like I can take in my whole XDR.
John:
Obviously, I can't because the way human vision works, but I feel like I can very easily flick my eyes to any corner.
John:
And when I do that, I'm sure my head moves, but it doesn't move a lot, right?
John:
Whereas if you have a second monitor, you have to make that choice that you've made in one way and otherwise, which is like, do I make it so the seam between the two monitors is directly in front of me?
John:
Or do I put one monitor directly in front of me and then one monitor to the side?
John:
And if you have a big monitor in front of you, that monitor to the side is in head turning zone because you really have to rotate, especially if you want to see like the upper left corner of the monitor that is to the left of the large monitor that's directly in front of you.
John:
You're turning your head a lot and you'll feel it.
John:
So I prefer obviously the one big monitor.
John:
I don't know what the limit is.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's not 32 inch, right?
John:
I'll tell you when I get to it.
John:
I bet if I put my 65 inch television on my desk, that would be past the limit and I'd be turning my head just to look at the Apple menu.
John:
But so far from anything that Apple has shipped that I've used with my computer, 32 inch fits within my field of view.
Marco:
Also, when people are trying to compare the Vision Pro and how it might compare to regular computer screens like this, or how you might be able to use it as a virtual computer screen, the sharpness and density, like what John was saying a minute ago about the PPD...
Marco:
the density of a good computer monitor is just way higher and it's way sharper than the virtualized windows that you create within the vision pro environment.
Marco:
And so what it feels like when you, when you're making vision pro windows, everything feels like it is larger and further away usually than how you would normally set up a computer monitor.
Marco:
You can pull the windows virtually closer to you in vision pro and you can shrink them down.
Marco:
So they like match the size and the position and the scale.
Marco:
But,
Marco:
But the resolution is just not there.
Marco:
The displays in the Vision Pro are not yet high resolution enough to be able to simulate the same density we get from computer displays that are right there in front of us in the real world.
Marco:
So you kind of can't directly compare.
Marco:
So if you wanted, for instance, if you wanted to have the resolution of the 32-inch Pro Display XDR...
Marco:
be reasonably usable in the vision pro you would have to make the window much larger than the than the xdr actually appears in real life and you probably then either you know push it back from you a little bit further in the distance which then of course you know shrinks the resolution kind of even further because there's only so many pixels on the on the physical displays so that's not really gaining any resolution it's just changing the perspective
Marco:
Or you bring it really close to you, in which case it's really big and you have to turn your head more.
Marco:
If you actually want to minimize head turning as you're using a computer display, the best way to do that is not in the Vision Pro.
Marco:
It's by using a regular high DPI external monitor.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I think another, like, not bone to pick, that's very antagonistic, but another thing that I was reflecting on after our last episode that I just don't think I agree is that, you know, the Mac virtual display, I think it's perfectly fine.
Casey:
Like, I don't really argue anything you just said, Marco, but for my eyes, which I will be the first to tell you, my eyes are not great.
Casey:
I think I have, like...
Casey:
2025 or 2030 or something like that vision with my contacts in, which is basically the only way I live, but they're not perfect.
Casey:
So consider your source here when I say that I think the Mac virtual display is pretty darn crisp.
Casey:
And I think part of that may be because I can blow it up to be hilariously large if I so desire.
Casey:
And again, I'm not arguing that the effective resolution isn't lower than an XDR or even a 5K machine, but
Casey:
I don't know, I've used Mac Virtual Display in the Vision Pro for a couple hours at a time, and I didn't find it off-putting or frustrating at all.
Casey:
It was perfectly serviceable, if not an improvement in terms of my ability to get things done over my 14-inch display, my MacBook Pro's onboard display.
Casey:
It's not an improvement in terms of fidelity, to your point, but it certainly felt like an improvement in terms of my ability to get things done because I had so much more real estate than my little 14-inch MacBook Pro had.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know how to phrase this concisely.
Casey:
Like I'm not trying to say you're wrong by any means, but I don't know.
Casey:
My experience was a little bit different, I guess is the best I can say.
Marco:
Well, but we're actually talking about two different things.
Marco:
And I think this is an important distinction.
Marco:
You know, what you are saying is you can use it as a Mac virtual display and it works perfectly fine.
Marco:
And, you know, you even said the word serviceable, like it works.
Marco:
You can do it.
Marco:
Yeah, it'll improve your productivity over a built in Mac screen.
Marco:
Maybe like you are correct.
Marco:
I and I spent a little more time with it since last week's episode.
Marco:
I've tried again.
Marco:
I've tried different, you know, head sealed shapes and foam cushion shapes.
Marco:
And I've tried with and without the reading glasses.
Marco:
I even there was actually a tip.
Marco:
Somebody posted on Reddit and people linked to link us to it.
Marco:
In the IPD adjustment thing, like when you put it on and it has you hold down the crown and it goes and it moves the things in.
Marco:
In that screen, if you tap the other button, like the capture button, it can scoot them manually back out.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell, this is a single direction adjustment, but it does allow some degree of manual IPD changes.
Marco:
And this person on Reddit had said that this made a huge difference for them and like how sharp and clear it was to use without eye strain.
Marco:
So I thought, of course, I got to try this.
Marco:
I tried a little bit.
Marco:
I tried a lot.
Marco:
It didn't really make any noticeable difference for me.
Marco:
I have gone back to not using the Zeiss reader inserts, to just using it straight like the way I had it in the lab.
Marco:
Sorry, I went to a lab.
Marco:
That's all I can say about that.
Marco:
But I still find the Vision Pro sharp enough that I'm pretty sure I'm not having eye problems by not seeing it sharper.
Marco:
But the Mac screen sharing is still not nearly as sharp as a real Mac monitor.
Marco:
Now, this is a totally separate discussion from whether you can use it and whether it has utility and whether some people can be totally fine using it for many hours at a time.
Marco:
That's a separate discussion.
Marco:
My claim is that it is not as sharp as a real Mac monitor.
Marco:
The kind of sizing and positioning and focus distance issues make it less practical for me.
Marco:
And if given the choice, I would take a regular Mac monitor any day.
Marco:
I also tried, you know, people have reported if you have the developer strap, which we'll get to in a second, it provides, I guess, a faster connection to the Mac that it's connected to.
Marco:
And that apparently Mac screen sharing works better with the developer strap.
Marco:
I tried it, and honestly, I noticed no difference.
Marco:
So I don't know if that's a thing or not.
Marco:
I could tell no difference.
Marco:
And finally, I tried editing this podcast on it last week.
Marco:
And while it was interesting to have that much screen space, I didn't notice this when just doing basic email and web browser and stuff like that kind of productivity.
Marco:
But when I started editing the podcast in Logic, I immediately noticed lag.
Marco:
just like you know moving the mouse around because i'm doing lots of fast mouse movements and fast keyboard and everything when i'm doing when i'm using stuff in logic so the lag was actually kind of a deal breaker for me in addition to the fact that it's almost like you're using screen sharing yeah it's also very awkward trying to like wear studio sized headphones while using the vision pro like that also proved to be a problem but there are multiple issues with the mac screen sharing that make it noticeably less good than using an actual mac screen and
Marco:
And some of those are probably just inherent to the technology.
Marco:
Some of those will probably be fixed in the future or improved in the future with higher resolution screens.
Marco:
So if you're looking for something that's going to directly replace a Mac screen, this won't do that.
Marco:
But this can serve as a Mac screen with some compromises.
Marco:
And for many people, that will be totally fine and worth the tradeoff.
Marco:
But it's not a direct replacement.
Casey:
I think that's the key, the way you ended that, that, yeah, it isn't a direct replacement.
Casey:
Like, I guess that's true.
Casey:
However, it is more than serviceable.
Casey:
And I know I said that before, but like it was, it to me has been pretty, pretty good.
Casey:
I've occasionally noticed lag.
Casey:
I've actually noticed more pointer lag where I think it's a little confused if I'm trying to control a vision OS window or the Mac window.
Casey:
I've noticed a little bit more pointer lag than I've noticed display lag, but I'm not editing, you know, stuff in logic or whatever.
Casey:
But I think your point is fair that it is not better than having a dedicated monitor.
Casey:
But if you are ever somewhere other than your desk and you would like to have more screen real estate, I think that this is more than just acceptable.
Casey:
I think it's pretty darn good.
Casey:
Again, consider your source.
Casey:
My eyes are not great.
Casey:
So it very well could be that if I had Marco's eyes that I would look at this and go, oh, this ain't great at all.
Casey:
But to my eyes, which in general, as much as I'm making fun of myself, like generally speaking in day to day, you know,
Casey:
use of my eyes i can't think of a better way to phrase this like i don't feel like things are generally blurry but i i want to make it plain that my eyes are not stupendous and so i think that like the fidelity is fine the crispness is fine uh i think it works reasonably well i i again i mean lag could be an issue if you're editing in logic but for the sorts of things that i do i think the lag is fine
Casey:
Like, I think this is really, really good.
Casey:
And I was debating if I wanted to bring this up, but I might as well do so.
Casey:
I actually did take the Vision Pro to a local library.
Casey:
I did this on Monday morning.
Casey:
I booked a little conference room sort of thing, which did have a glass wall behind me.
Casey:
I booked a conference room for a couple hours, which was like a two-person study room, I guess I should call it.
Casey:
And I had my back to the outside wall.
Casey:
So the only thing that anyone would be able to see is the weird headband behind me.
Casey:
And I did work.
Casey:
I wrote code for a couple of hours.
Casey:
And it was great.
Casey:
It was absolutely great.
Casey:
I then got booted from my conference room because my time was up and I needed to spend a little time in the regular desks and chairs and cubicles area.
Casey:
And I did not have the gumption to put the Vision Pro on at that point.
Casey:
But for the time that I was somewhat secluded and not completely conspicuous, I thought it was wonderful.
Casey:
It was so much better than my rinky-dink, like, what is it, like 12 or 13-inch monitor that I bring with me as like a second display?
Casey:
It was so much better than that.
Casey:
So again, I'm not trying to say that anything you've said, Marco, was incorrect, wrong, or inaccurate.
Casey:
All I'm trying to say is, for me and my uses, it's been great.
Casey:
It's been really, really good.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think what you said at the beginning of that is pretty important.
Marco:
You were talking about, like, you know, your eye quality, for the lack of a better word.
Marco:
If you are accustomed to not that sharp a vision, you might not see the difference.
Marco:
It's possible.
Marco:
That's not an insult.
Marco:
That's just the reality.
Marco:
If you are accustomed to sharp vision and you're accustomed to the sharpness of Mac screens, when you see the virtual screen, one of the effects I get is I almost feel like I'm getting eye strain because my eyes are trying to focus harder to resolve the detail they expect to be there, but that isn't actually there.
Marco:
Because I'm accustomed to seeing a certain level of sharpness on the physical Mac displays.
Marco:
And so when I'm viewing something in Vision Pro, like in the Mac screen sharing mode that is a little bit soft, my eyes think they're not focusing correctly.
Marco:
And they try harder to focus on it.
Marco:
Similar to what I was describing last week about when I try to focus on stuff that's in the soft depth of field areas of a 3D movie.
Marco:
I'm thinking I should be able to focus on this.
Marco:
And it kind of hurts my eyes to look at a defocused area of the video that I think I should be able to focus on.
Marco:
So it's that same kind of effect when looking at the Mac screen.
Marco:
Like if you have, you know, pretty sharp vision in the physical world, that I think makes it more noticeable to use the Mac screen this way and to see its flaws and to potentially maybe cause some eye strain.
John:
You know, Marco, about your lag in when editing the podcast, you just have to wait for the Vision OS native version of Logic, which based on the iPad schedule should be here in 10 short years.
John:
So hang in there.
John:
I mean, the screens are probably higher resolution by then.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just to be clear for people like, oh, he's saying there's lag.
John:
Screen sharing with the Mac.
John:
Like he's using a Mac program to edit the podcast.
John:
So he's screen sharing with his Mac.
John:
And presumably if it was a native Vision OS version of the thing, there would be considerable less lag because the app would actually be running on the Vision Pro, which has an M2 and it would be fine.
Marco:
Oh, I would expect no lag if it was native.
John:
right related to what you were all saying about screens this also is one uh final note on the whole uh field of view and everything and you were kind of both touching on it like even before vision pro came out there was lots of people speculating about like well you know uh you have such and such size monitor on your laptop or on your desk but once you get to vision pro imagine you could make it 100 feet tall in front of you right and we heard a lot of that
John:
both before the Vision Pro was in anyone's hand and now after when people have it, they still make statements like that.
John:
And what both of you were touching on is the sort of the edges of that, but it made me think about like, what does it mean to have a really big screen in front of you?
John:
Uh, obviously one aspect of it that we've discussed at length is okay.
John:
Well, like how many pixels can I see?
John:
Because when you're doing stuff with like, you know, max screen sharing or something, what it comes down to is like, look, you know, toolbars take up a certain number of pixels.
John:
Uh, and if I want to see more stuff on my screen, uh,
John:
I need to have more pixels because I don't really care if I can make something 100 feet if it's 640 by 40 pixels because there's just not enough information density there.
John:
But it also got me thinking about things like watching movies.
John:
Oh, you know, well, you could watch movies on your little laptop on a plane, but when I'm on the plane, I can put a 20-foot screen in front of me.
John:
And there are a couple of aspects of what does it mean to look at a big screen, especially when thinking about things like movie screens.
John:
When you're in a movie theater, let's say the screen is 100 feet diagonal or something.
John:
The screens are really big.
John:
It's a really big movie theater.
John:
It's not a dinky movie theater.
John:
It's a big movie theater.
John:
That screen is really big.
John:
How that manifests in our viewing is, one, how much of your field of view does it take up?
John:
And if you're in the front row, it takes up all of your field of view because you can't even see the whole screen without turning your head, right?
John:
And if you're in the back row, it takes up less, but it takes up a certain amount of your field of view.
John:
But field of view is not the only thing that makes a screen big.
John:
If it was, we could take our phones and jam them up to our eyeballs and be like, wow, my phone screen is huge.
John:
It's taking up almost my entire field of view because it's touching the bridge of my nose, right?
John:
Right.
John:
Field of view is not the only thing that determines a screen, a big, quote unquote, big screen.
John:
The second thing is, how far away is it from you?
John:
And in the movie theater, if you're watching some gigantic IMAX screen that's hundreds of feet, right?
John:
Hundreds of feet diagonal.
John:
It's just a massive screen that's multiple stories tall.
John:
It's also not touching the bridge of your nose.
John:
It's probably pretty far away because if it wasn't, you wouldn't be able to see anything.
John:
Again, if you were sitting in the front row and you're craning your neck and you can't even see the entire screen, depending on how well the theater is laid out.
John:
inside vision pro many things conspire to make it not a good match for anything that i've just described obviously the physical reality is there are screens like less than an inch from your eyeball or whatever but that's not how they work because that's not how it feels because of the lenses um so the first thing is field of view we know the field of view of the entire vision pro is like 100 degrees the ideal movie viewing thing is like 40 degrees or whatever field of view you're fine you should be able to get something that has the same field of view as a
John:
as the biggest movie theater screen you've ever seen where you have a good seat in the theater.
John:
So I feel like we're covered, especially for a static thing like field of view.
John:
Pixels, we already know.
John:
It's not quite adequate to give the kind of fidelity we expect from a Mac monitor, but it's not awful either.
John:
Then there's distance.
John:
One of the things that makes that 100 foot screen feel like it's 100 feet is the fact that it's really far away from you, that it fills a lot of your field of view.
John:
But also when you try to look at it, you have to focus, I don't know, 50 feet away or whatever, like you have to focus the distance from the middle of the giant theater to the screen.
John:
And that's never going to happen in the current Vision Pro because every single thing in there is 1.3 meters from you.
John:
So no matter how much of your field of view you make the television screen, the movie or whatever, no matter how big you make it, even if you make it like I'm sitting in the front row and I can't even see the whole screen and it's just overwhelming me, it's still going to be 1.3 meters away as far as your eyeballs are concerned because you'll be focusing 1.3 meters away to be able to see what's on the screen.
John:
This is not to say that it's bad or good or indifferent.
John:
Sometimes having it 1.3 meters away is probably better than having it 50 feet or away.
John:
But it explains why when I was in there, I've experimented with like, can I make like this video really big to make it feel like I'm watching a big screen?
John:
And I could make it big and I can make it fill my field of view, but it never felt like I was watching an IMAX screen.
John:
And it's because the IMAX screen is not 1.3 meters from my face.
John:
So I don't know what the solution to this other than, you know, obviously we talked about a headset that has a variable focal distance or whatever, but keep this in mind when you're thinking about what you want out of a big screen experience.
John:
When you're talking about the Mac, you probably want more pixels.
John:
that this thing can't really deliver comfortably for you.
John:
When you're talking about a movie screen, if you like the feeling of sitting in a giant movie theater, you're not going to get that when your eyes are focusing 1.3 meters away.
John:
But in Casey's case, or if you're on an airplane or whatever, you can definitely get a larger screen 1.3 meters away than you comfortably can in a physical environment, either whether that means you're not carrying your XDR with you to the library to get the view that Casey was getting or bring it onto a plane or whatever.
Casey:
How do we turn off a Vision Pro?
Casey:
I don't even remember talking about this last episode.
John:
It was during my demo when the person was twisting the power connector to reboot the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
So when the person did that, I teasingly said, oh, you know, Apple never puts power buttons on their things because wouldn't that be more convenient to a power button?
John:
And then I suggested to the person when they were twisting the little thing and taking it off, I'm like, why don't you just try holding down the crown and the button at the same time?
John:
And they told me, no, that's not how it works.
John:
And then I had to endure a week of people sending me Macedon messages saying, you should have just told the person to hold down these two buttons because that will show the little shutdown slider that you see from iOS and let you turn down.
John:
So anyway, there is an Apple support document explaining how
John:
how you can turn off the Vision Pro.
John:
I think it's just called how to turn off the Vision Pro.
John:
And apparently you can do any of the following.
John:
Number one, press and hold the top button in the digital crown, and then it'll show like the little shutdown slider.
John:
Number two, go to Settings General Shutdown, and then drag the slider.
John:
Number three, say...
John:
Dingus, turn off my Apple Vision Pro.
John:
And finally, take off Apple Vision Pro, place it on a secure surface like a table or desk, then disconnect the power cable.
John:
It's amazing that they tell you that disconnecting the power cable is one of the ways you can turn it off.
John:
I mean, that's true, I guess, but that's kind of a, let's say, ungraceful shutdown because all the other ones give software time to do, you know, a proper clean shutdown.
John:
Disconnecting the power does not do that.
John:
it's just gonna power it's like oh it's the apple tv reboot procedure just yank out the power cord which is kind of interesting too because like no other ios based device has ever had this right yeah just tv just tvs ones all the apple tv that like i remember when i first got the apple tv it's like surely there's a support document telling me how to like you know reboot it or shut it down and it's like just yank the cable
Casey:
Although, interestingly, I understand that you grabbed this from the Apple support document, not trying to argue with you, but to my recollection, when you press and hold the capture in Digital Crown for a couple of seconds, then that brings up a force quit menu.
Casey:
So maybe you have to mash it down for even longer seconds.
John:
Yeah, I think both UIs are in the same thing.
John:
Why don't you just try it?
Casey:
Now I've got to strap in again.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Strap in.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
This is not fun to do with headphones on.
John:
I told you.
John:
While Casey's doing that, I will bring up another point, which is this document says you can do all these things, but I am suspicious about whether all of them are equivalent.
John:
i do believe that disconnecting the power will turn it off because there will be no more electricity and those capacitors will discharge eventually and as far as we know there's no backup battery so turning up disconnecting the power should turn the thing off every other one of these things i'm suspicious that it's like in a deep sleep mode and it's not really off you know what i mean like yeah it doesn't say that that's the case here but bottom line is when power is still attached i always i mean you know max have done it for ages i always wonder if it's like
John:
I'm mostly off, but I'm kind of a little bit on, and occasionally I'll wake up and check for a new email and stuff, which is a thing that Macs have done for ages.
John:
So I give this a little bit of side eye.
Casey:
All right, real-time follow-up, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
So I'm going to press down starting now, and now I've got a force quit menu.
Casey:
Closing the force quit menu.
Casey:
Now I'm going to press down starting now.
Casey:
Why are we doing this?
Casey:
Okay, there we got slide to power off.
Casey:
So it was an additional one to two seconds.
Marco:
I will say also like hot tip about powering down the Vision Pro.
Marco:
However you choose to do it, definitely power it down if you're going to be not using it for a while and it's not plugged in because it drains its own battery.
Marco:
If you just leave it like on a countertop, not plugged in, it'll be dead by the next morning.
Casey:
Mine wasn't dead by the next morning, but it was like half the battery had been used.
John:
It's like the AirPods Max.
John:
Just like the AirPods Max is downloading your photos from your iPhoto library, so is your Vision Pro.
John:
AirPods Max can't display them.
John:
It just likes to download them.
Marco:
Photo analysis D has to run.
John:
Right?
Right.
Casey:
I actually do think that's one of the things that melted my battery because I had done this like the second day I had it, you know, I'd left it somewhere, I forget where, and it was plugged into the battery pack, but the battery pack was not plugged into anything.
Casey:
And yeah, when I got to it the next morning, it was at like 50% or something like that.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's downloading your messages, it's syncing your notes, like it's doing all the things.
John:
If you have a long, you know, long-suffering Apple ID, let's say, it's got a lot of data and this thing's going to try to download it and yeah, it's going to eat your battery.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about the developer strap.
Casey:
This we all ordered, was it the day of release, I believe, Marco?
Marco:
It was like the day after.
Marco:
It was sometime soon afterwards, but you could kind of tell like maybe they just didn't want people to really talk about it because I think they kind of buried this announcement.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the day of release.
Casey:
But if not, like you said, it was the next day, one way or another.
Casey:
So to recap, this is a $300 strap.
Casey:
So it's the white pieces on the Vision Pro that connect the Vision Pro to the back strap, and in certain cases, the top strap as well.
Casey:
The light shield and the little...
Casey:
light shield cushion those do not touch the strap those touch the vision pro itself but the back strap and top strap strap if applicable connect to these white straps and the white straps also house the ear pods audio pods whatever they're called yeah it's the right stick that's right and so the right hand stick if you get the developer the 300 did i mention 300 the 300 developer are you are you a
Casey:
Like, I mean, honestly, I do, to a degree, I do get it, but whoa, golly.
Casey:
So this is the $300 strap that in the same spot that on the left-hand side you plug in power to the Vision Pro, it has a very similar design, like a little nubbin, if you will, and hanging off of that nubbin is a USB-C receptacle.
Casey:
So that you can plug USB-C in on this and USB-C in on your computer.
Casey:
And then you can do things like have better screen sharing, allegedly.
Casey:
I mostly agree with you, Marco.
Casey:
I haven't really noticed a big difference on that.
Casey:
But one way or another, you can have better screen sharing, allegedly.
Casey:
And you can also do much easier, faster, better, etc.
Casey:
development because you're not relying on Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Uh, I got one of these, I ordered it immediately because I was still worried about, um, uh, inventory and things like that.
Casey:
It turns out that was, I think for not, but nevertheless, I ordered it immediately.
Casey:
It came in the Monday that I had left to go to New York.
Casey:
Uh, so I didn't get a chance to play with it until this past Monday when I brought it with me to the library, knowing I was going to be doing vision pro development.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, you know what, I'm going to leave this thing sealed.
Casey:
And it was, it was actually in the shipping box at this point.
Casey:
I'm gonna leave it sealed and hopefully I won't need it.
Casey:
You know, hopefully it won't be a big deal.
Casey:
And I connected my Vision Pro to my computer via Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And it did the, I forget exactly what it's called, Marco, you probably remember, but the like downloading symbols or preparing for development, whatever it is, dance.
Casey:
And it was at 0%, at 2%, at 4%.
Casey:
At 6%.
Casey:
And after literally like half an hour of this, I immediately opened the $300 developer strap and said, the hell with this.
Casey:
I'm going to have to open this thing up.
Casey:
And when I opened it, I was under the impression that this was a USB 2.0 device.
Casey:
The only thing it does is apparently a little bit of magic with screen sharing, allegedly.
Casey:
And it lets you do debugging and whatnot via the cable.
Casey:
And apparently, John...
Casey:
That's not right.
Casey:
So what's going on here?
John:
Yeah, I think this is still just people speculating, but they're pulling it up in the system information app in macOS, and you can see it listed under the Thunderbolt slash USB 4 bus.
John:
You can see the Apple Vision Pro listed under there once you connect it with an actual Thunderbolt cable.
John:
So this is leading people to believe that this thing is Thunderbolt capable, even if none of the software that we have now is taking advantage of it.
John:
And one of the things that lends credence to that is if you look at the standard little white stick that plugs in there and you take it out and you see the widest lightning connector Apple has ever made, that has 10 contacts on it.
John:
And those contacts are only on one side.
John:
So it's very odd, asymmetrical, one-sided curved lightning.
John:
The Develbra strap has 14 contacts on it.
John:
Or 28, 14 on each side, right?
John:
So that's a lot more contacts.
John:
Even if it's just four more, that's substantial.
John:
And the fact that they have them on both sides makes me think that this developer strap is surely equipped, electrically speaking, to do more than USB 2.0 speeds.
John:
We'll see if that speed is unlocked in the future, but it sure looks like that maybe you might get more for your money, more for your $300 than USB 2.0 speeds.
John:
if and when new versions of Vision OS and or Mac OS and or Xcode are released.
Casey:
Yeah, can you imagine if this thing could, and I mean, granted, it's dongle town all over again, but can you imagine if you could plug in like an HDMI in to this thing, you know, the same ones that, you know, I've gotten and many people have gotten for their iPads and for their Macs, especially what's the name of the app that's really good for HDMI input on the iPad that the Halide people do?
Casey:
I'm drawing a blank now.
Casey:
Shoot, I'll have to try to remember to put it in the show notes.
Casey:
But anyways, yeah, you imagine having an HDMI dongle and then plugging into that HDMI dongle, I don't know, like a Nintendo Switch or something like that.
Casey:
That would be neat.
Casey:
Is that possible?
Casey:
Who knows?
John:
Probably be an HDCP, whatever, you know, handshake violation.
John:
You just get a black screen.
John:
So don't worry about it.
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It would be cool if it was more capable than just doing, you know, the developer strap stuff as it is today.
Casey:
And I'm not, I mean, I am grumbly obviously about the fact that it's $300, but nevertheless it is very convenient.
Casey:
And I know I haven't done watch development seriously.
Casey:
You know, I've dabbled as we talked about many years ago, but golly, I would pay $3,000 for one of these for an Apple watch.
Marco:
oh my god i would no question like if there was some kind of apple watch developer strap even if it was also 300 or more i would buy it in a second because even though the wi-fi debugging to the apple watch has gotten way less crappy than it used to be it is still really crappy compared to any kind of wired debugging like on a phone so yeah no question like that and that's why i bought this too
Marco:
It is clunky to use in the sense that it is now two cables.
Marco:
There's a cable coming out of each end, and that's really great.
Marco:
Yeah, that's not great.
Marco:
However, if you are doing active debugging or a fast build and run cycle on the Vision Pro from Xcode, it is really nice to have that be as fast as it can be.
Marco:
And that is why I bought it, because I knew...
Marco:
I've upgraded my entire Apple Watch solely because Underscore told me it would build the app a little bit faster in this build and run cycle.
Marco:
That's how much it matters when you're actually actively debugging and actively building and running an app in a tight loop of...
Marco:
all right change this fix this run again like every second matters for both your productivity and honestly your mood and so for me it's very high value to try to shorten that loop and try to make make sure there's a little friction as possible when i got to do that cycle and even though the cable situation is stupid the price is stupid
Marco:
The fact that it was not built into the battery cable that itself has communication protocols and a USB-C port on the battery is the stupidest of them all.
Marco:
However, I still did gladly buy it and use it because the debugging cycle is just that much better and it makes that much of a difference in my life.
Casey:
Yeah, I really wish that you could optionally, and I get why Apple doesn't do this, because there's 104 reasons why it would be clunky, but I wish you could power this thing through the developer strap.
Marco:
Yes, somehow, give me one cable.
Casey:
Right, that would be tremendous.
Casey:
And I mean, USB-C can carry power.
Casey:
That is a thing USB-C can do, but unfortunately not here.
John:
But I mean, the battery, we just established last week that the battery puts out a voltage that is not...
John:
supported by any of the USB power delivery specs, I believe.
Marco:
It's weird because it seems like the hardware was designed without ever talking to the Xcode team.
Marco:
Designed in a vacuum with no one ever considering, hey, what about cable debugging?
John:
I mean, I'm sure they were using Xcode to all the development of the Vision Pro.
Marco:
So how... Okay, I don't want to harp on this too long, but just how...
Marco:
Did this not get integrated into the main battery cable somehow?
Marco:
That blows my mind.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Real-time follow-up, the app that you were thinking of, apparently, according to the chat room, is Orion.
John:
Is that right?
Casey:
Yes, that's it.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Yep, yep, yep.
Casey:
Thank you.
John:
And then one more thing with Marco asking about debugging on the watch.
John:
So the rumors are that they're
John:
is and was a thing that you connect to like the little diagnostic port behind the strap for watches internal to apple to do essentially wired debugging on the apple watch and then the rumor was that future apple watches i don't know if that means current or still to come ones used a sort of high frequency wireless interface to do that debugging that was better than wi-fi but it was kind of like a direct point-to-point wireless interface with some really high frequency so what we're saying is that we've always heard that inside apple
John:
The build and run cycle that Marco was just complaining about for the Apple Watch is better inside Apple, but that betterness supposedly has not yet trickled out to the regular developers.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Matt Rigby writes to us, many quote-unquote 3D films, including the recent Star Wars trilogy, are actually 3D conversions.
Casey:
That is to say, the films are shot in 2D on a single camera.
Casey:
And then rotoscope artists individually cut out each element of every shot, frame by frame, otherwise known as rotoscoping, then map these elements as textures onto rough 3D objects and render those objects in 3D space whole.
Casey:
Holy fart knockers, I can't believe that that's what people do to make these 3D movies.
Casey:
That sounds terrible, but Matt links to real3dorfake3d.com.
Casey:
That is literally the URL, real3dorfake3d.com.
John:
It's also linked in last week's show notes because that's what I was getting at when I was talking about the 3D movies and Marco had watched the Star Wars ones and the 3D wasn't done very well there.
John:
And the real or fake 3D host name is, you know, obviously...
John:
uh extreme basically saying the thing you just read casey that's fake fake 3d because it was like well the movie was shot in 2d and then we make it 3d it's also called like post conversion or whatever and so the real or fake 3d.com site it basically lists movies like look if you want to know if the movie you're going to watch is real or fake 3d look it up on here and you'll know what it is that you're getting the implication being that you would presumably want to avoid the quote-unquote fake 3d instead of the the real one um
John:
So I talked to our friend and illustrious industrial light and magic special effects artist Todd Vaziri, who has worked on many Star Warses and many other Star Treks and other movies you may have heard of about the topic of 3D and in particular the whole thing about real and fake 3D.
John:
And he had an interesting take on it.
John:
I'm going to try to summarize it here because I didn't...
John:
Record our conversation and it was in audio instead of email.
John:
So I can't quote passages from it.
John:
His take was that shooting quote unquote real 3D with two cameras sitting next to each other.
John:
You're filming stuff with two cameras in 3D.
John:
So you got a right eye and a left eye thing of it.
John:
is kind of a pain in the butt.
John:
Now it's pain in the butt for some obvious reasons.
John:
You have two cameras, they take up more room, they're heavier.
John:
It's pain to deal with two cameras to make sure they're all working and everything.
John:
You can't get those two cameras into the same places that you can get one camera into.
John:
You have less flexibility there, right?
John:
Also, when you're filming with two cameras, you have to make a bunch of decisions when you're filming
John:
uh that you don't have to you know when you're post converting you can change your mind about stuff like that so for example the uh what we were saying the ipd the interpupillary distance is called the interaxial distance in the realm of 3d filming when you film with two cameras you pick that distance by putting the cameras that distance apart from each other and it's not easy to change that after the fact whereas when you film in 2d and they do that 3d conversion you're choosing when you do the conversion
John:
what you want that distance to be when when you do the conversion like later after the entire film is put together but when you're shooting in 3d you're kind of baking in that distance in every every one of your shots that you make and that's important because there's a whole bunch of guidelines for doing 3d filming that you want to try to not violate which is like
John:
don't change that interaxial distance massively from one shot to the next because if you're cutting between them it'll make people's eyes bug out but it's like whoa suddenly now my eyes are three feet apart now they're two inches apart now they're three feet apart now they're one inch apart you know like you don't want to bounce that back and forth in the same way that you wouldn't want to bounce back and forth lots of things in the 2d world so you have to be have to have a lot of planning and be careful and be precise
John:
You do have a lot of repair to do when you film in 3D because you have to sort of make the image from each of the cameras match up in a pleasing way when viewed in 3D, which involves unwarping the lens distortion and making it so that when you actually watch it with 3D glasses or in a headset or something that it
John:
Doesn't look weird.
John:
If you get lens flares, you'll get different lens flares in each camera because they're in different positions.
John:
And trying to reconcile two different lens flares that you're showing in 3D is weird because we're all used to seeing one lens flare because the lens flares actually happen inside the lens.
John:
And when you're shooting with one camera, you get one lens flare.
John:
And that's what we're all used to seeing in movies.
John:
But when you shoot with two cameras, you get two lens flares or maybe one, but not in the other one, depending on where the lights are.
John:
And we're not used to seeing that.
John:
So it's weird.
John:
that's very it makes filming very difficult and it makes you have to sort of do like a hitchcock style where you have everything planned out you know exactly what you want you shoot only what you need and you can't change your mind easily about a lot of stuff whereas post-conversion you shoot it in 2d using all the techniques and technologies that we've always had for 2d and then later someone comes along and says now i have to figure out how to make this into 3d and they can slice and dice it and you know it sounds like a
John:
in each individual frame of film how you want things to look so you'll know that okay we know that scene shot a comes after shot b comes after shot c so i'll make sure i don't bounce around the interaxial distance there right because you already know the film is done it's already put together you don't have to guess right the people who are filming it have to not guess but like say well i hope this shot comes after this shot comes after this shot but if we decide to change it around it might be jarring because that shot we shot yesterday and the cameras are closer together than they are now it's kind of a pain in the butt
John:
Uh, and as for the Mario movie that I saw in my demo, I was asking like, you know, why would that look like bad 3d or fake looking 3d to me?
John:
It's a CG rendered movie.
John:
And I kept saying they have all the depth information and people thought what I was saying is that somehow that there was like, that I was going to get infinite depth information in the like, uh,
John:
In the movie itself, as opposed to just a right eye and a left eye thing, what I'm saying is when you're 3D rendering it, the rendering software, when it's generating the image, knows the distance of all the pixels.
John:
So there's no reason that things should look like they are 2D cutouts.
John:
Todd didn't know any details about the Mario movie, but he said it's completely plausible that someone could have a CG movie, and to save money or time...
John:
They would render out either the whole thing in 2D and then slice it up and add fake 3D to a CG movie or render it out in layers and have those be composited together.
John:
And part of that is, again, for cost and annoyance reasons.
John:
If you're doing a computer animated movie like a Pixar movie, you can do it the quote unquote real way where you render two different perspectives.
John:
You have two virtual cameras in your virtual world and you render from two different perspectives.
John:
but when you do that you quickly find oh it turns out that now one of the cameras can see around back behind a piece of geometry that i thought was hidden in the 2d version of the movie and now i can see some place where we didn't fill in a texture or like todd's example was like there's a walk animation of someone doing a walk thing and they go out of view and once they go out of view the walk animation stops because you don't need to animate it when they're not in view but the other camera spots when their legs stop moving and they just start sliding along right so that
John:
you have it's harder to it's like building a set right oh now your set's going to be viewed from two slightly different perspectives so be careful you're not basically messing up your movie by trying to do it with two virtual cameras then of course two virtual cameras means twice the rendering time because you're not just rendering from one camera you need twice the cpu power or twice the amount of time to render each frame
John:
This is why tons of quote-unquote fake 3D happens in movies, and it makes sense, but it also kind of explains the thing that I don't like about a lot of those is it does look like someone cut out three pieces of paper, the foreground, the mid-ground, and the background, and they're sliding past each other in a way that doesn't
John:
Doesn't look convincingly 3D to me in the way that the cameras in, you know, the Alicia Keys studio looked convincingly 3D as if I was there because the cameras were similar distance to my eyes.
John:
And that was and they were shooting a real thing that was really there.
John:
And that's all there was to it.
Casey:
Friend of the show, Joe Rosenstiel, wrote on Six Colors and it's a members only post that we're going to apparently steal some of.
Casey:
So I hope we had permission on blaming John.
John:
These are excerpts from Joe's summary of his own post.
John:
So I would recommend subscribing to Six Colors and read the entire article, which is much longer.
John:
But here is Joe.
John:
He sent this through email.
John:
It's him trying to condense and summarize some of the major points.
Casey:
A couple of important definitions off the top.
Casey:
Interaxial is the distance between two stereo cameras.
Casey:
The distance between the human eyes is fixed at about 65 millimeters, but the distance between cameras can be anything.
Casey:
And secondly, convergence.
Casey:
This is where the two images converge.
Casey:
When they have positive parallax, they recede into the screen.
Casey:
And when they have negative parallax, they stick out of the screen.
Casey:
So Joe writes with that in mind, everything you see with stereoscopic media, 3D stuff, is going to be different because you can't just set up two cameras 65 millimeters apart and call it a day.
Casey:
When I used to work on stereoscopic movies, we would define interaxial and convergence values, not just per shot, but per element of a shot.
Casey:
Because where the objects really were would have been boring to look at.
Casey:
Films are about directing the audience's view.
Casey:
A big part of depicting depth and directing the viewer's eye in 2D requires adjusting focal distance and aperture.
Casey:
Elements that are extremely out of focus imply depth in 2D and direct the eye.
Casey:
In stereoscopic films, the more something is out of focus, the more it loses any detail that your brain can use to see disparity between the different images shown to each eye.
Casey:
And thus, positive or negative parallax.
Casey:
Extremely out of focus elements will mush themselves back toward the depth of the screen, regardless of them being far away or extremely close.
John:
So these two points that we just went through here are fascinating.
John:
So the first is...
John:
defining different like interaxial and convergence values for multiple things in the same shot so basically it's almost as if like okay when we shot the foreground characters the cameras were two feet apart but then the table there's the that's behind them the cameras were six inches apart like adjusting the parallax for the individual things which is
John:
obviously not how our eyes work our eyes don't suddenly move two feet apart when we look at one thing and then move back together when we look at another thing they're always the same distance apart but what he's saying is you can't just take two cameras or rather he through the way 3ds or movies have been done hasn't just been to take two cameras put them human eye width apart and stick them and point them at something because that is deemed
John:
either not interesting or as he notes, like the, they're, they're using those two tools, the interactional distance and the convergence to direct the audience's eye towards something, which is another thing that I think distinguishes 3d movies, which I tend not to like from the Alicia keys and shark swimming towards you thing.
John:
Those are straight up two cameras, the width of your eyes.
John:
And so it feels like you're there, right?
John:
Whereas a 3d movie, uh,
John:
the hand of the artist or the director is more prominent because they are directing your eye and to direct your eye they're doing things that don't exist when you're looking at something like again multiple items in the shot using different camera distances apart whether it's real 3d or two you know because you could do it in real 3d if you shot them separately and then composited them later or if it's fake 3d they just you know separated them differently when they were slicing the elements up
John:
And that, to me, looks weird.
John:
And the other thing is, oh, what about focal distance?
John:
Well, things that are out of focus tend to just look like, tend to like, your eyes can't tell the difference between them.
John:
So they just sort of converge on the center of the screen.
John:
Like, it's just at the depth of the screen.
John:
Even if you made the interaxial distance huge and the parallax, they're supposed to be way far back in the screen.
John:
As soon as you blur them, people start to perceive them as being exactly at screen level, which is...
John:
not what you want and i also kind of feel that when i watch 3d movies where it's like okay well they they use a shallow depth of field here and the 3d things look 3d but that blurry thing it's blurry in the film because you know they it was out of focus when they filmed it but it should feel like it's 10 feet back but it feels to me like it's right next to the foreground characters because it it feels like it's at the depth of the screen
Casey:
So Joe continues, the 3D method used, animated, post-converted, or native stereo, doesn't really make a film good or bad.
Casey:
There's a tendency to say that all post-converted films are bad or fake, but that's not universally true because post-conversion can allow for a greater degree of control over the end result if it's done well.
Casey:
Isn't that what Todd just said?
Casey:
Conversely, native stereo and animated films are not universally more 3D because they captured full left and right eye views.
Casey:
Like if they just set it near to human vision, pushed everything behind the screen plane, and didn't dial in the depth of field to increase what's in focus, etc.
Casey:
So these came in independently, and I don't know exactly when you had your conversation with Todd, but I think pretty much concurrently, Joe and Todd said basically the same stuff.
John:
Yeah, Joe also works in the VFX industry.
John:
And it really clarified for me why I don't like 3D movies.
John:
Because, I mean, I guess they could be done well or not well.
John:
But first of all, the Star Wars ones and the fake 3D, that always bothers me for, like, the paper cutout thing.
John:
Like, the foreground characters feel like they're closer, but they feel like they're, like, being projected onto a flat screen and they're close to me.
John:
And I actually asked about that.
John:
I'm like, did they ever, especially for the foreground characters...
John:
do they ever make do anything to make it so like when they're post converting a 2d thing the foreground characters don't look like the paper dolls right and apparently sometimes they take like a rough 3d model of a head and they map the essentially texture of the 2d filmed guy's head onto that so it so his ear is closer to you than his nose when he's side you know what i mean like but that i just look at that i'm like just shoot it with two cameras man but like but again all the complexities and the second thing is
John:
I think there has to be a distinction between what looks good in a headset and what looks good on a movie screen.
John:
The reason I'm so wowed by the stuff in the headset is because I'm looking at screens, two screens that are eye width apart.
John:
And the video I'm looking at was shot with a camera, where the two cameras were basically two eye widths apart.
John:
So it's straight, feels like I'm in the water with the shark, feels like I'm in the studio with Leisha Keys.
John:
That is very different than sitting in a theater seat and looking at a screen.
John:
And then having the people who made the movie decide where they want to direct your attention with some extremely unrealistic, but hopefully pleasing and interesting and exciting 3D work.
John:
And I personally really don't like that second thing, but I really like the shark.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, we've gotten a little bit of news with regard to the European Union's Digital Markets Act.
Casey:
This is the genesis of all the oddness that's going on with the App Store in the EU.
Casey:
But we're not talking about the App Store right now.
Casey:
We're talking about iMessage.
Casey:
And iMessage was one of those things that the DMA people were wondering whether or not it classifies as a, what is it, a core platform service, which is their term of art to mean we're going to regulate the snot out of you.
Casey:
And so reading from The Verge,
Casey:
Apple's iMessage is not being designated as a, quote, core platform service, quote, under the European Union's Digital Markets Act.
Casey:
The European Commission announced today, this is yesterday, the decision means the service won't be hit with tough new obligations, including a requirement to offer interoperability with other messaging services.
Casey:
The commission also opted against designated Microsoft's Edge browser, Bing search engine and advertising businesses as core platform services.
Casey:
Although iMessage has avoided the burden of complying with rules that come with the official DMA designation, the period of regulatory scrutiny coincided with Apple announcing support for the cross-platform RCS messaging standard on iPhones.
Casey:
Meta, meanwhile, has seen two of its messaging platforms, WhatsApp and Messenger, designated as core platform services under the DMA and has been working to make them interoperable with third-party services.
Casey:
Womp on.
Marco:
i guess like your price is like all the loser things microsoft edge the search engine that nobody uses ims edge yeah you're not even big enough to be regulated sorry i'm sure apple likes it but it's kind of you know well i mean this might have also been the result of like apple lobbying for it in some way i mean because keep in mind like the dma is not defining these standards in a vacuum the dma targets specific companies with specific products and services and then rationalizes it with how it how it draws the lines and
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
It targets them by picking an arbitrary number.
John:
If you have more than this exact number of customers as of whatever date, and they just look up who has them on that date, and they just... Exactly.
Marco:
So for whatever reason, it isn't that iMessage just doesn't qualify.
Marco:
It's that they drew the lines to not include iMessage.
John:
Yeah, which I think is fair, actually, because it isn't as dominant as the ones they are regulating.
John:
And certainly Microsoft Edge is not dominant and neither is Bing.
John:
So congratulations.
John:
And I'm sorry, I guess.
Casey:
And then Riley Testit has written in to us with regard to Apple's third party marketplace system for the Digital Markets Act.
Casey:
So Riley is the author, Genesis, creator of Alt Store.
Casey:
And so Riley has a lot of experience with what is probably the most official, even though it's very, very, very unofficial, third-party app store for the iPhone today.
Casey:
So Riley writes,
Casey:
To start using marketplaces, you must first request a security token from an alternative marketplace, which will allow you to add that marketplace in App Store Connect.
Casey:
Once you've added a marketplace, you can then choose which apps you want to distribute with it.
Casey:
You can distribute any of your apps to any combination of marketplaces, including the App Store.
Casey:
Users will have to delete an app before installing the same app from another marketplace, though.
Casey:
When you're ready to distribute your app, you submit it to Apple through Xcode like normal and wait until notarization finishes.
Casey:
Once processed, developers can automatically submit notarized apps to marketplaces through Apple, or they can manually download the notarized, quote, alternative distribution package, quote, or ADP, and send it directly to the marketplace themselves.
Casey:
It's up to the marketplaces to choose how they want to receive their apps.
John:
That's the most interesting thing in this email, because before we were saying, oh, everything has to go through Apple, and
John:
It does have to go through Apple, but Apple and Apple can deliver it to the third party store, but they can also just give it back to you and say, you know what?
John:
You can do this last part.
John:
I don't know what that buys you other than more hassle because you do have to go through Apple.
John:
And so it's not like you can bypass them.
John:
But if you wanted, you can say, Apple, don't send it to the store.
John:
Send it to me and then I'll send it to the store.
John:
And I guess the marketplace would have its own upload portal thing where they accept them.
John:
I don't know what the advantage of this would be, but it's interesting that that flexibility does exist.
Casey:
Riley continues, I fully agree that third-party marketplaces only really make sense for apps that can't exist on iOS right now, but not just for the obvious content reasons.
Casey:
For example, besides the fact that my app Delta isn't allowed in the App Store because it's a Nintendo emulator, it also is entirely monetized through Patreon by providing pre-release access to beta versions to my patrons.
Casey:
This business model is forbidden by the App Store despite it being a proven way to monetize software in other markets such as indie video games.
Casey:
For this reason, I've actually added deep Patreon integration to AltStore to encourage other indie developers to monetize apps this way, of which AltStore takes no commission.
Casey:
Because I genuinely believe it's a better system for smaller developers.
Casey:
Now, the other thing with the DMA is that you are required to have a million euro line of credit.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
What I think all of us took that to mean was you have to have a bank say, yeah, we will give you up to a million euros if you ask for it.
Casey:
We've already pre-approved you.
Casey:
We will do it if necessary.
Casey:
And we had a couple of pieces of feedback about this.
Casey:
But Bobby Perotti writes, I work in commercial finance.
Casey:
Your discussion of the DMA and the required million euro, quote, standby letter of credit, quote, makes me want to clarify what that actually is.
Casey:
That's money that must be held essentially in escrow by your bank.
Casey:
It's not a line of credit.
Casey:
It's not like a line of credit.
Casey:
It is more akin to a minimum deposit.
Casey:
I think a lot of people assume it means you would be okay as long as you're approved for that amount of credit from a bank, like a home equity line.
Casey:
But I can get a home equity line of credit, never draw on it, and not be inconvenienced much at all, as long as I have home equity.
Casey:
A standby letter actually means that the bank is locking those funds up so the beneficiary, in this case Apple, can take from it if certain conditions are met.
Casey:
It's your cash, but held, unable to be used for anything else.
Casey:
A good way to think about a standby letter of credit is basically a check that the beneficiary, Apple, can cash at any time.
Casey:
Small consortiums of indie devs, which will probably have trouble getting that kind of money together,
Casey:
in order to control their own distribution destiny.
Casey:
So I really wonder what Riley's going to do about this.
Casey:
Maybe Bobby's understanding is incorrect.
Casey:
Maybe our understanding certainly sounds like it's incorrect.
John:
He sounded pretty sure because I went back and forth and run a lot of that.
John:
I asked one more clarification, which is like, okay, do you actually have to have that money?
John:
Because you can write a check and not have the money for it.
John:
And only when the person goes to cash it, do you find out, oh, you can't actually pay for the thing.
John:
And he said, yeah, not only do you have to have that money,
John:
And pretty much all cases that he's aware of the institution that gives you that standby letter of credit demands that you give them the same bank that's giving you that letter of credit.
John:
You have to give them the 1 million euros.
John:
And so it's, you got to have that money for realsy reels, give it to them.
John:
Then they will give you that standby letter of credit and they will hold that money.
John:
And the money's basically sitting there saying, if Apple ever wants to take this, they can take it for whatever reasons it says in their, you know, marketplace contract or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So you can't get by saying, oh, we're good for it or whatever.
John:
No, you've got to have that in cash and you have to give it to the institution who then gives you this standby letter of credit.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Maybe Altstar has a million euros hanging around and they're going to sail past this.
John:
But yeah.
John:
Yeah, it's more of a burden than we thought it was.
Marco:
Yeah, much more.
Marco:
I mean, not even close to what we thought it was.
Marco:
So thank you, Bobby, for writing in and telling us we don't clearly work in commercial finance.
Marco:
And I think this basically tells you the kind of entities that we should expect to actually jump through the hoops to run an alternative app store in the EU.
Marco:
It's not going to be small companies and small developers.
Marco:
It's going to be probably a very small number of pretty large entities.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's talk Vision Pro.
Casey:
We talked a lot about this last week.
Casey:
Let's do some more.
Casey:
And I think we left off last week.
Casey:
Our heroes were about to discuss what it's like to let other people try the Vision Pro.
Casey:
So, John, it seemed like you had thoughts about this or you perhaps wanted to direct conversation or am I misreading you entirely?
John:
You're misreading.
John:
You were going to tell us.
John:
So Marco wanted to tell his story of letting other people try the Vision Pro and you tell your story.
John:
I didn't let any other people try the Vision Pro because I was just in the Apple store and it was just me.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what's going on, Marco?
Marco:
Well, so I've had a bunch of friends try this, you know, in the last whatever it's been week or two.
Marco:
I think enough people have pointed out now the guest mode that you can put it in from Control Center to let someone else put it on without your optic ID, basically.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I would say if Apple wants to give the guest users a good impression of what it's like to use a Vision Pro, you should probably make guest mode a little bit better.
Marco:
It's fairly clumsy to get started, and it's extremely unforgiving.
Marco:
As many people have pointed out, if the wearer in guest mode lifts the Vision Pro off their face for even a split second, it resets it completely and kicks it back into your mode.
Marco:
So even if they lift it up to rub their eye or adjust the fit a little bit too much or something...
Marco:
Once it's off their eyes, they're out.
Marco:
You have to put it back on as you re log in like with either optic ID or the passcode, go back into guest mode and control center and turn it back on for them to put it back on.
Marco:
This is made especially inconvenient because every time someone puts it on in guest mode, they have to go through the entire eye setup.
Marco:
So first it has them, you know, hold the crown to align the displays as we discussed earlier.
Marco:
Then it has them go through the whole intro of like, look at the dots and pinch your fingers and then make it brighter.
Marco:
Look at the dots again, pinch your fingers.
Marco:
So it takes a while and it's and it's kind of repetitive and cumbersome.
Marco:
So the guest mode experience is not something that you're going to want to do frequently.
Marco:
And I think it's important that if you're demoing for somebody else that you warn them, don't take it off your face in the middle because it will reset it and have them have to start all over again.
John:
I wonder if that's related to... So optic ID is like... Essentially, it's like a touch ID or face ID, but for your eyeball.
John:
And I know from experience using a shared Mac in our house, and you probably know if you've done this on any kind of shared Mac, even a laptop, there's a limit to how many...
John:
touch id fingerprinty things you can store on a mac and that limit i believe is determined by essentially the secure enclave and the hardware so it doesn't matter how big your ssd is doesn't matter what version of the os you're using whatever number of fingerprints it is it's like seven or eight or i don't know however many it is that's it for the whole system right um and so like for example i want to have like
John:
my fingerprint work on both my wife's account and mine and vice versa, so we don't have to type in each other's passwords, right?
John:
But you run out real quickly, because if the kids have their own fingerprints on their accounts, you know, you run out, right?
John:
So they're not even saving the optic ID for guests, so that if you give it to a guest and they try it and they take it off, and the next day they want to try it again,
John:
it doesn't like recognize them as a guest that had a scene before and boot them back into their guest mode or anything like that.
John:
It just doesn't even save their optic ID.
John:
So I wonder if A, they're storing the optic ID in the secure enclave because it is biometric data, presumably.
John:
And B, apparently they're only storing your optic ID.
John:
One, you know, or two, I don't know, one for each eyeball, whatever.
John:
And that's it.
John:
Guests don't get anything saved about them.
John:
So every time the Vision Pro sees this person, it's like, I have no idea who you are.
John:
You're a guest to go through the whole thing.
Marco:
The other major limitation I've run into is that one of the best assistive tools for if you're going to be showing someone how to use Vision Pro is you can airplay what they are seeing to a nearby Mac or other screen.
Marco:
So you can, you know, I'll have like my laptop nearby.
Marco:
So I will say, all right, mirror the screen of what they're seeing to my Mac.
Marco:
And then I can see what they see and I can kind of guide them.
Marco:
Okay, go to this section of the Apple TV app.
Marco:
to go find the 3D videos or whatever.
Marco:
You can kind of walk them through what they're seeing and what you want to show them.
Marco:
The problem is that breaks the DRM assumptions of the video player.
Marco:
So if you have screen sharing enabled...
Marco:
They cannot watch any video content that is DRM protected, which is all video content basically that you would want to show them.
Marco:
Everything from Apple TV+, everything from Disney, it's all DRM locked.
Marco:
And so if it's air playing, it basically breaks whatever DRM requirement is that you're copying the screen.
Marco:
And so not only can you not see it on the Mac, they can't see it on the internal displays either.
Marco:
So they can't watch 3D video content in the demo mode if you can see what they can see.
Marco:
and that is a huge limitation in part because it just kind of sucks also because as far as i could tell when i did these demos you can't turn off the screen mirroring because they don't have access to control center in guest mode there's no control center so if you want to show them the only way i could find was to take it off reset guest mode turn off screen sharing like go through the whole process again
Casey:
Well, what you could do is like when I was demoing for some friends, we were air playing to the TV, like to the Apple TV, I guess I should say, that was in the living room.
Casey:
And when you're on an Apple TV anyway, you can hit the back or menu or what have you button to effectively cancel screen sharing.
Casey:
Now, if you're screen sharing to a Mac, I don't know how that would work.
Casey:
I've only ever done that like once or twice.
Casey:
So you may not have the same option, but it does work pretty well with an Apple TV where you can just basically cancel the screen sharing.
Marco:
oh i should try that and i didn't think to try that but anyway so that's it just it shows though like you know like this is apple tv showing apple's content on two apple devices and it totally breaks yeah it's because of the stupid like i said the hdcp whatever it is the yeah high definition copy protection someone put a link to it earlier
John:
That standard has all these things about like, you know, what it looks like is when it don't siphon off the video off a side channel so you can record it secretly.
John:
It can only be displayed on the screen that it is handshaked through through the stupid secure DRM protocol.
John:
Again, as a reminder, all of this is to make sure no one ever is able to pirate video.
John:
And we know, of course, this solved the problem of video piracy and now it is impossible to pirate video.
John:
pirate video, thank you, copy protection, you did your job, great.
John:
No, what it actually means is that A, everything is available for pirating, and B, you're going to want to pirate it because the legit copy you bought, you can't even watch because it blacks out all your screens.
Casey:
And the thing is, I really wish...
Casey:
I don't know, maybe I'm missing the point of how copy protection works.
Casey:
But I really wish that perhaps it would be impossible to see the black square of content that the user was seeing on AirPlay.
Casey:
So in the device, in the goggles, then they're seeing everything you would expect to see.
Casey:
But the AirPlay mirroring, you're getting blackness for the square of content.
Casey:
Or if you're doing something immersive, perhaps the entire display is black or it's like a checkerboard pattern or something like that.
Casey:
i really wish you could at least do that because what you've said marco is exactly accurate like leaving aside whether or not you can turn off airplay the first time i did this with somebody you know they go to go into um i think it was disney plus we were trying at the time and they were like well it's not working what are you talking about and then i look at this the tv and i'm like oh you're right it's not working and it took me a few beats before i realized oh i bet you anything this is drm and so then you know canceling canceling airplay seemed to do the
Marco:
And only nerds would know that because there's no error message.
Marco:
It just shows it as black.
Marco:
Just black screen.
John:
Yeah, the same thing as when you take a screenshot on your iPad trying to take a screenshot of a TV show, which I do all the time.
John:
And I always am reminded, oh, yeah, this doesn't work.
John:
And I think the reason why you can't do it, you were suggesting, Casey, is like, oh, why don't they just show it to the person but not show it to me?
John:
Then you got your copy protection.
John:
I'm assuming it has to do with the fact that essentially once you do the mirroring, you have, like, broken the chain of trust.
John:
Like, there's no way to do a three-way chain of trust.
John:
So now nothing is trusted.
John:
You have this weird forking scenario and you have, you know...
John:
This is not on Apple insofar as Apple is just following these stupid industry standards that we have that Apple kind of has to follow to work with all of the other... Even if Apple didn't want to do this with its own streaming service, which it does, but even if it didn't want to, it has to work with all the other streamers.
John:
So they have to essentially implement this and your hardware and everything has to be certified.
John:
So this is all just so you can like...
John:
watch content that's out there and it infects every part of their system as well because their whole video chain and system is built on it and it's so incredibly dumb so hopefully they'll do something to fix this i mean again especially with apple's own apps and own streaming platforms and own os and device they should be able to fix it for that uh fixing it for any other streaming apps if they ever exist on vision pro haha will be more tricky
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, showing people the 3D video proved to be tough because the DRM thing is annoying.
Marco:
And again, it's Apple's content on their own streaming service on their devices.
Marco:
They know someone maybe they can talk to and work this out.
Marco:
Otherwise, like the, and I do suggest for Apple, the immersive 3D video should be easier to find in the TV app in the Vision Pro.
John:
Oh my gosh, yes.
John:
Well, I mean, that's true of anything in any kind of streaming service where it's like, what about the thing I want to find?
John:
It's like, never mind that.
John:
Have you seen these giant things that we're advertising for the first two full screen fulls until you get down to...
John:
So it affects Vision Pro, too.
John:
Like anytime you're like, hey, here's a video playing app.
John:
Surely it will be easy to find the things that I watch frequently.
John:
No, exact opposite.
John:
It will be intentionally hard to find the things that you want because they always want to shove something new in your face.
John:
Never mind what you constantly watch.
John:
Never mind anything about what you want or your favorites or your frequency.
John:
It's all about what do we have to push on you, which is so dumb for Vision Pro where...
John:
They should be allowing... There's so little content anyway.
John:
They should just be making the same... But again, it's based on the same code base as the TV app and all their other platforms, and it sucks everywhere.
Marco:
Also, you said a second ago.
Marco:
There's so little content.
Marco:
That part has kind of surprised me.
Marco:
I would have expected...
Marco:
With the launch of Vision Pro, I would have expected there to be more of Apple's 3D and immersive content than there actually is.
Marco:
There's actually very little of it.
Marco:
It's like a few demos, basically, or one episode of something.
Marco:
It's like 12 minutes here and there.
Marco:
There's not much content content.
Marco:
Obviously, I'm sure Apple is going to stage it out over the course of the year as they sell more Vision Pros and whatever else.
Marco:
But Apple has a lot of power here because they are a video producer.
Marco:
And they have shown that they will make custom recording gear and record perfectly immersive stuff that's custom tailored to Vision Pro.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
They need to be doing a lot more of that because I think it's going to be a while, if ever, before they get large support from other producers of video.
Marco:
So therefore, they should step up more and produce a lot more stuff for this than what we're seeing so far.
Marco:
So hopefully that's in the pipeline.
Marco:
But I was kind of surprised and a little bit disappointed that there wasn't more immersive content available at launch.
John:
Well, it's the chicken egg thing, because even Apple's own, like, you know, creative wing is saying, wait a second, you want us to spend how many millions to make a show that is only possible to be watched by 500,000 people on the planet?
John:
Like, those are the only people who have the capability of watching it, and you want...
John:
Like, let me show you how much money this is per person that you're asking us to spend.
John:
And they're like, oh, you don't understand.
John:
We need to, like, drive people.
John:
We want people to buy the thing.
John:
I'm like, yeah, but right now they haven't bought it and you can't make more than this many per year.
John:
And so I can see that conversation being difficult.
John:
Like, they're not going to make a, you know, for all mankind in headset 3D that can be watched by you and 200,000 of your closest friends.
Yeah.
John:
Because that is not, you know, and they're like, oh, it's for the future.
John:
It's for the future when we sell 10 million of these things.
John:
Like, yeah, but you want us to make it today.
John:
And I can imagine that being difficult for them to square.
John:
I think they should make more of it because I think it's the most compelling thing in the entire headset.
John:
But I bet what Apple is thinking is instead of that, instead of like...
John:
Doing what I think would be unprecedented, like trying to essentially make Alicia Keys swimming shark caliber of content that I don't think has ever been made before.
John:
And sort of like a long form full television thing, like with that resolution and those cameras for like a regular TV show and figuring out how to do that, because I don't think anyone knows how to do that well at this point.
John:
That is much more experimental than the easier thing, which is we should just do sports like this.
John:
We need to get a good sports contract.
John:
And as Gruber said in those things, when Apple lost out for the bid for the NFL thing, he was kind of disappointed.
John:
But now that he has Vision Pro, he's angry about it because that is a gimme.
John:
You saw in the demos how good sports looks, and you don't have to make that content.
John:
They run around in the field, and they make it all for you.
John:
You just need to point cameras at it, and you can have the cameras be eye-width apart, and you have 17 of those cameras, and you put them in weird places, and that is a winner, and that is a big draw, and you have to pay way less money to make it.
John:
You just have to pay money up front to get the rights to be the one who has the cameras there.
John:
So I think that is an easier first path for Apple to go with this.
John:
Like, how do I make compelling content for Vision Pro?
John:
find a popular sport film it in 3d whether it's the nba or major league soccer or whatever uh that seems like an easy first move and i bet apple wants to do that and is going to do that yeah also concerts you know other events like that's you see like you know live events in 3d that seems like a big market uh including sports and other things so honestly anything yeah hey sharks swimming in water real popular yeah
Casey:
I mean, we're all kind of snarking, but we're all also serious.
Casey:
Like, I cannot overstate, you know, I haven't done a demo of the Vision Pro since, you know, the first weekend I had it because we've been just exceedingly busy the last week and a half, whatever it's been.
Casey:
But that first, I think it was the first day that I had it that I did a handful of demos for a couple of friends.
Casey:
The thing that unquestionably sold everyone the most was that sizzle reel, which I think we talked about quite a bit last week, of all the different immersive stuff.
Casey:
The high tightrope walking lady, the sharks, the soccer game, the rhinoceros, the Alicia Keys.
Casey:
I know you can imagine what it would be like to be watching something, but as you twist your head, your perspective changes, right?
Casey:
Like that's an obvious and easy thing to imagine.
Casey:
But when you're actually doing it and when you're seeing the incredible fidelity of the thing that you're watching, like this isn't some like 480p crappy recording because, you know, it just can't handle anything more.
John:
And it's not 480p.
Casey:
flickery and dim and weird like 3d movies with the glasses that you watch right i cannot overstate how incredibly impressive this stuff is and naturally like anything that they want to put in this immersive environment i'm game to at least try it and yeah the alicia keys as mike had said singing at you is a little bit weird but it was also freaking cool like it was so cool
Casey:
I actually have to go back and watch the whole thing, but I think I had said last week, you know, I skipped through several minutes of it, and I just kind of zigzagged around.
Casey:
And it was phenomenally cool.
Casey:
And to build on what Marco was saying a minute ago, like, I would pay all the money to have a really good, you know, Dave Matthews or Mute Math or whatever concert that's been recorded with these obelisks, these white obelisks of 3D cameras.
Casey:
I mean, I would give all the money.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I cannot overstate how impressive this is.
Casey:
As impressive as you imagine it might be, double or triple that because that's how good it is.
Marco:
So the video demos, again, if we get past the DRM and having them navigate to the Apple TV app, it is a very impressive thing.
Marco:
I will also say before I forget that of the two straps that come with the Vision Pro, the fancy one with the crank and the single headband around the back, the solo knit band, is far better for demo purposes than the nice comfortable dual loop band because it's so much faster and easier to adjust it.
Marco:
You know, the dual loop band is like, all right, you get these two Velcroed straps.
Marco:
You got to, you know, strap, pull it, strap it down.
Marco:
Like that's very impractical for demo purposes.
John:
The hastily assembled one is less practical than the one that they clearly designed from the beginning.
Marco:
Surprise.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So you want to be using the solo knit band, the one with the single loop that goes around the back.
Marco:
You want to use that for demos if you have it.
Marco:
First, I had Tiff try it.
Marco:
she could not possibly be less interested and you know nerds out there many of you have people in your life that you try to demo technology for and maybe they will humor you and support you in your love for technology but you can kind of tell they're kind of doing you a favor
Marco:
Their heart's not really in it.
Marco:
That's how this scenario was.
Marco:
So, you know, she was not impressed by the fit, was not impressed by the weird, what she called the nose cape.
Yeah.
Casey:
I didn't notice that until like, I don't know, the second or third day I had it when it accidentally flipped downward.
Casey:
So what Marco's talking about is there's like this very thin, completely like flapping in the breeze material that sits directly on top of your nose, which by default, it's kind of like flipped upward.
Casey:
So it's black against the black inside of the Vision Pro.
Casey:
So you don't really notice it, but then it has give to it because it's just a piece of fabric.
Casey:
And so it flipped down once and I was like, what the hell?
Casey:
oh oh oh i didn't even know that thing was there like it took me a day or two before i even realized what the heck that was but yes nose cape is a very good word for it or term for it yeah um yeah so so she wasn't super pleased with the physical side of it it was you know heavy on her and
Marco:
i mean it's not fitted to her did you get her a different light shield no it's and that's and that's a fair thing like you know obviously like everyone that i'm having try this is trying my size to everything on it uh so anyway she hated having to go through the the eye tracking dot pinching uh introductory thing that was not fun um
Marco:
I have found also many people who try it on do not intuitively get the IPD adjustment thing where you have to like double tap the crown to confirm.
Marco:
It's like hold it down and then double tap it like that.
John:
Especially since the instructions are presented to you probably in double vision because it hasn't adjusted yet.
John:
And so it wants you to look at like a diagram and understand what it wants you to do, but you're seeing double at that point?
Marco:
Well, it actually, for whatever, maybe it's just me, even when it's in its like unset state, I find it fairly clear in that mode.
John:
I mean, you can close one eye, obviously.
Marco:
Anyway, the funny thing is also like,
Marco:
She's an amazing tester of my apps.
Marco:
She has a special talent.
Marco:
I can hand her something that works perfectly, and within a second, she will find a way to break it, which is actually wonderful as a software developer.
Marco:
That's a great quality for your spouse to have because it's a wonderful first stage of QA.
Marco:
She puts on the Vision Pro, and this is still when I had the 1.0 software.
Marco:
I now have the 1.1 beta on it, so I don't know if this is fixed yet, but she put it on, and it basically immediately locked up and had to be rebooted.
Marco:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
So this is still very, you know, very 1.0 kind of days.
Marco:
But anyway, so she gets through it.
Marco:
She basically said, okay, yeah, it's cool, but why would I want this?
John:
Wait, wait, wait.
John:
Even after she saw the shark...
Marco:
She actually bailed out pretty quickly.
Marco:
So I had all the testers try the Encounter Dinosaurs quote app, which is more of like a brief 3D demo.
Marco:
This is the thing you've heard about on other podcasts where like you hold your finger out and the butterfly lands on it.
Marco:
So I had five different people try this.
Marco:
All five of them put their finger out to have the butterfly land on it.
Marco:
It doesn't tell you to do that, but it kind of looks like you can.
Marco:
And so you try it and oh, look, the butterfly lands on my finger.
Marco:
All five people did that.
Marco:
at some point a large dinosaur comes into your field of view which can look somewhat intimidating two people that i had tried including tiff as soon as the big dinosaur big dinosaur showed up they were just like nope i'm out and just like took the headset off that was it that was the end of the demo i'm done did you show did you show them the dinosaur before you showed the militia keys and the tightrope walker
Marco:
yes i know i'd have been a mistake i couldn't find them in the apple tv anyway um so yeah two people like noped right out of the headset as soon as the big dinosaur showed up and the other three all tried to pet the big dinosaur
John:
Can you pet the dinosaur dot com?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, that's that's roughly how it went.
Marco:
Everybody was fairly impressed with the 3D video content.
Marco:
Everybody was impressed by the dinosaur thing.
Marco:
I do wish there was like a little bit more like one more 3D like interactive experience to show people.
Marco:
Again, this will probably come with time, I assume.
Marco:
But it is it is kind of again, it's I wish there was a little bit more demo because after you watch a couple of sample things and it's like, OK, well, that's kind of it.
Marco:
Like, you know, you can open up
John:
notes or my email if you want to see how that kind of stuff works it's a little bit it's a little bit awkward though you open up photos oh here's a panorama you know you can do that kind of stuff but it's I do wish there was a little bit more demo content available but again this will probably go over time did you you could have taken some spatial video of Adam with your phone and put it in there like I did I'm kind of surprised that Tiff wasn't convinced by like the birthday scene and like the you know the spatial video of people you know like seeing the possibilities for your own content like that
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
Maybe she was upset with the eye tracking and the nose cape.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it didn't really sell her.
Marco:
And then finally, I got some interesting input from Adam.
Marco:
So this is my 11-year-old son.
Marco:
He is a heavy user of the Quest series of VR devices.
Marco:
Had a Quest 2 for a while.
Marco:
Recently got a Quest 3.
Marco:
He barely cared, first of all, about using the Vision Pro because there's no games.
Marco:
Like, for him, VR means games.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Obviously, not a lot of people are going to be buying a nearly $4,000 VR headset to play games on it as the primary purpose.
Marco:
But it's interesting, like, you know, from a kid's point of view, how this is totally irrelevant.
Marco:
It's like a Mac Pro to a kid.
Marco:
Like, why would I want that?
Marco:
He barely cared.
Marco:
However, he did try it on.
Marco:
He did the dinosaur demo and everything.
Marco:
He instantly noticed that the pass-through...
Marco:
is better than the Quest 3's pass-through only when stationary, but it's actually worse in motion.
Marco:
I have since tried his Quest 3, and he's exactly right.
Marco:
He nailed it.
Marco:
Motion in the Vision Pro, in general, gets very blurry.
Marco:
I've even noticed that even when using the virtual Mac screen, even when just doing computing in Vision Pro...
Marco:
if I move my head a little tiny bit, I notice the motion blur and it's, it's not ideal.
Marco:
It's not like a massive deal killer, but it is something that you notice.
Marco:
And it is yet again, one of the ways that I kind of felt a little eye strainy when trying to use the Mac monitor mode over just using a real Mac monitor.
Marco:
There is that motion blur.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I heard a lot of people talking about that.
John:
And I do wonder, could you tell whether it is like manually created motion blur?
John:
So for example, a destiny, uh,
John:
has a setting in the settings menu that says do you want us to do motion blur and if you have it checked they will whenever the camera moves they will artificially create motion blur by blending together frames because that's what you're used to seeing from like you know cameras like film cameras or video cameras or whatever when you move them around but you can turn that off and say no don't pretend you're a film camera don't artificially create motion blur just show me the frames which looks
John:
Less like we expect from our life of watching filmed content, but if you're playing an FPS game, I find you can see things better, so I turn it off.
John:
So I do wonder, is Apple adding motion blur intentionally, computationally, by blending frames together to make it look more...
John:
like how we expect it to look big or is it just like i can't imagine that it's anything else because their oled screens i imagine the response rate has to be insanely fast like every oled so it's a little bit mysterious to me but i have heard this exact same complaint in many different reviews i'm just wondering if if it's on purpose or not
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
And I mean, like the fact that it isn't just motion blurring your pass-through content, but it's also motion blurring the content of Windows.
John:
Yeah, well, Todd Vaziri would tell you, check your motion blur.
John:
Everything has motion blur, even lens flares.
John:
So yeah, they would motion blur the pass-through, the video, like the Windows.
John:
They would motion blur everything because that's, again, the expectation of how would it look when you see a TV show and they pan the camera, you get motion blur.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Also, for whatever it's worth, one of the reasons why I never really spent a lot of time with the Quest 2 is that I would get a little bit motion sick after a fairly short time.
Marco:
And when I tried the Quest 3 fairly briefly, I had the exact same problem.
Marco:
It is obviously a huge upgrade over the Quest 2, but it is not good enough for me to avoid motion problems, which, again, I don't usually have in the rest of life.
Marco:
But for some reason, Quest 2 VR was not good for me.
Marco:
Quest 3 VR is also not good for me.
Marco:
Vision Pro, I do not have that problem at all.
Marco:
I feel zero motion problems with the Vision Pro.
John:
A lot of it might have to do with the whatever it was called.
John:
I just listened to the podcast that we'll remember to link in the show notes so we can find it.
John:
We're talking to the CEO of the company that Apple bought back in 2017, and they made an AR thing with pass-through, and their whole shtick was like the cameras in Vision Pro and most headsets are not where your eyeballs are, so their perspective is different than your eyeballs, so they have to do computational stuff to sort of remap the camera's view with an awareness of what shape the world is.
John:
so that it looks like you're looking through your eyeballs and not like your cheeks, which is where the actual cameras are in Vision Pro.
John:
And that mapping, I think, is either not done as well or maybe even not done at all on things like the quest because pass-through is not their emphasis.
John:
You know, it's more of a game-playing machine.
John:
And that could be making you sick because imagine if your eyes saw out of the center of your cheeks and you moved your head around, your brain would be like, I'm not seeing what I expect to see.
John:
And it's, you know, get the disconnect between what you see and what you feel.
Marco:
That's possible.
Marco:
I mean, so I tried... I used the Quest 3 for about maybe 20 minutes, and part of that was I tried, like, a full-screen game, and it didn't seem to be any different.
Marco:
It was bad there, too, so I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, but speaking of eyes and eye placement, this leads me to my last point about the demo experience, which was eyesight, the display of my eyes on the outside.
Marco:
I have now used it enough around my family that they have seen this,
Marco:
to to most people who have seen this it is creepy as hell and uh so that's that's interesting what's also interesting is once i during one of the demos i i handed it to a friend and somehow it stayed logged in as me i don't know how this happened um but somehow it's it like accidentally displayed my eyes on their head actually using it and i got to see my own eyes oh
Casey:
That's actually kind of convenient, albeit a weird security violation.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I get to see my own eyes on someone else's head as they use it.
Marco:
Let me tell you, that is a strange experience to see.
Marco:
I do not recommend that experience.
Marco:
Anyway, the eyesight, though.
Marco:
So I was sitting at my kitchen island using the Vision Pro for a while with my MacBook Air, testing that out for a while, getting some computational stuff done over the weekend.
Marco:
And Adam was hanging out nearby on his computer down the island further.
Marco:
And he looks over and he's like, Daddy, how are they doing that with your eyes?
Marco:
I was like, what do you mean?
Marco:
He said, how can I see your eyes?
Marco:
I thought you were looking at screens.
Marco:
He was totally fooled.
Marco:
He thought that that was actually... So it worked in the sense that it fooled another person who didn't realize that it was a simulation from screens.
Marco:
He's only 11.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, so it didn't fool any of the adults, but it did fool someone.
Marco:
And so I feel like it is possible to make this feature better enough in the future if they want to, to maybe fool adults on a regular basis.
Marco:
But I still don't like it.
Marco:
I see why they did it.
Marco:
I mean, we'll be talking this to death over the next three years before they finally kill it.
Marco:
But I see why they did it to try to make this product less antisocial than it really clearly is.
Marco:
But I still don't think it's going to be great.
John:
but there does seem to be enough room for improvement that maybe they can make it passable so the adults won't think it's too creepy and they can just get rid of it in a few years when they realize it's not worth the weight and battery savings well so here's the thing about getting rid of it obviously the end goal is how about just make clear glasses where they can see your actual eyeballs like that's what they would like to make but we don't have technology for it but you know we do have transparent oled screens but we we don't have the confluence of technology to be available to make something that light that high fidelity with that brightest screens you know yada yada yada but
John:
the end stage will presumably be they see your actual eyes and you don't have to do all this trickery, right?
John:
Getting rid of it.
John:
We obviously think for weight and cost reasons, if you have to make a low cost version of this, that's an easy way to save money.
John:
But, uh,
John:
i as weird as eyesight is and as janky as it is and i do think it's pretty janky because i saw a lot of people doing it in the apple store and you know it's it's dim the lenticular lenses only show a couple different images from different angles so they can't cover them all so sometimes your eyes don't look like they're in the right place depending on what angle you're on but it serves an important function to make it so other people are aware when you can see them and
John:
like that's that's important that's important for the like how socially acceptable is this because we don't like seeing people with their eyes totally blacked out the same way it's considered kind of rude if someone's wearing really dark glasses all the time and when you're talking to them and you want to have a serious conversation you just want to take off the sunglasses so you can see their eyes it's just an instinctive thing that we have it's not the end of the world sunglasses exist and we don't hate everybody who wears them
John:
But wearing dark sunglasses during an important conversation is rude, considered rude for a reason, right?
John:
Or wearing dark sunglasses indoors or at night as the song goes.
John:
So the function, I think, they can never really, like, the need for it will always be there.
John:
Until we can see your eyes, the need for it will always be there.
John:
How it's implemented, there is some flexibility.
John:
So even if they don't ditch it entirely for a cheaper and lighter model, you can imagine a
John:
much much simpler version of eyesight that shows like two big cartoon eyeballs in fact apple has patents related to this exact thing and maybe they even prototyped it and thought it was dumb but boy you can make that way lighter if you do like two monochrome e-ink screens on the outside of the goggles look like googly eyes that don't even pretend to look like your eyes or even like i mean i think it was in their patent like text like a text display that says i can currently see you or whatever you know what i mean like why don't just put actually google google eyes on there it's they're much lighter and cheaper yeah well
John:
But the thing is, you want it to be switchable because it's trying to communicate to people, when can you see me and when can you not see me?
John:
I kind of wish they had this for AirPods where they can tell when audio is playing in them and when audio is not playing in them.
John:
And so I think the utility of that feature will always exist.
John:
It's a question of how important is it?
John:
Is it important enough for you to pay X amount more for it?
John:
Is it important for you to add the Y amount of weight?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I don't think we'll ever get to a point where we say there is no utility being able to tell when people can see you.
John:
There's always utility in it.
John:
It's just a question of what is the correct tradeoff to get that functionality.
John:
And I think you can get a lot of the benefit, not the emotional.
John:
I can see your eyes benefit, but at the very least, the binary.
John:
Can this person see me or not benefit?
John:
You can get that with way less weight and way less costs than they're currently doing.
John:
And I do wonder every time I see this.
John:
Are these CG eyes that much better than monochrome googly eyes?
John:
I mean, they're a little bit better, but I think monochrome googly eyes would be easier to see at a glance when I was seeing people do their demos in the Apple store and you get close enough to them to be like in the person range or whatever.
John:
So you can see their eyeballs and they can see you when they're doing the pass through.
John:
sometimes if you're not at the right angle and there's so many like specular highlights on that stupid shiny thing you can't even see what the heck you know you can't see the dim image on the screen through the lenticular stuff whereas if they were monochrome high contrast googly eye eyeballs at least i could see them from every angle and know when they're totally immersed with the blue wavy stuff now and when they can actually see me so
John:
I think, unlike the touch bar, which, in my opinion, needed to die and be rethought, I think the things that Eyesight is trying to do are worth continuing to try to do until we can see your actual eyeballs.
John:
I'm just not convinced that the way they're trying to do it in the very first Vision Pro...
John:
is the right path to be traveling down with the lenticular lenses and the really dim eyes and stuff like that so we'll see what they do for version two and if they drop it from one of them we'll see how much that model is uh frowned upon because it doesn't have that feature uh but i'm i'm not as anti-eyesight as other people because i definitely see the point of this feature and i think that point is always going to be relevant
Casey:
I'd actually like to build on what you said.
Casey:
I am pro-eyesight.
Casey:
It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but for all the reasons you enumerated, I think it's absolutely worth it.
Casey:
I think it is useful to get that visual cue whether or not the other person is paying any attention to you and get that visual cue whether or not that person is in an immersive environment.
Casey:
I think these are all really useful things.
Casey:
Yeah, it looks janky, as both of you have said.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it's not as bright as it should be.
Casey:
Yeah, occasionally it looks like your eyes are not where they're supposed to be.
Casey:
But I think this is the best that we can do right now.
Casey:
And I don't think, if Apple can make this better, I don't think that this is a bad path to go down.
Casey:
Now, maybe there's other better paths.
Casey:
I'm not saying that this is definitely the winner.
Casey:
But I do think that they've gone down the right path.
Casey:
I do think this juice was worth the squeeze.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I do think that it makes the device that much more appealing for regular people.
Casey:
And that includes me.
Casey:
Like, I think I would like this device less if it didn't have eyesight, even knowing that eyesight is janky and weird.
Casey:
In fact, I would argue in some ways it's almost better that it's janky and weird because then we can all have a good laugh about how janky and weird it is.
John:
Although, if you think about it, this is another sad reality.
John:
So, Apple today with its restrictive policies and what can and can't be produced.
John:
In fact, I just saw someone get a Vision Pro app rejected because what they made looked too much like the macOS dock or something.
John:
So, of course, Apple rejected it.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
Anyway, if Vision Pro, we travel back in time and it's the Mac of the late 80s and early 90s.
John:
there would be APIs that people would either discover or Apple would publish, most likely people would discover, for controlling that front screen.
John:
And we would have talking moose eyeballs out on the front, Yoda eyes, because they would find the APIs for finding where your eyes are pointing, and people would figure out how to use that screen, and we would have tons of fun third-party apps doing different kinds of cartoon eyeballs.
John:
And guess what?
John:
All of those silly apps made by indie developers, distributed for free or just for fun,
John:
would be a perfect lab for us collectively as a community to figure out how does it work are cartoon eyeballs good should we try photorealistic how do these screens work right that kind of sort of laboratory of allowing people to try things and then apple gets to watch it all happen and then pick the winners and incorporate them into the os is how the mac got to where it is today and all of apple's post mac platforms have been essentially denied the opportunity to allow that to happen and the only people who can come up with ideas are
John:
Apple because they keep all those APIs to themselves and if you try to submit an app with private APIs they'll reject it and even if you try to submit an app that doesn't use private APIs but looks kind of like the doc they'll reject that but they're like we haven't thought of that yet so no we don't want you third party developer to ever try anything like that and that really annoys me because
John:
I would like to see fun things in that front screen, even if it is a scrolling text message that says I can currently see you.
John:
I can currently see, you know, like who knows what the right choice is.
John:
Obviously, Apple prototyped a whole bunch of them.
John:
Again, you look at those patents, which means they did all that stuff internally.
John:
What they shipped is the current eyeballs.
John:
But I'm willing to believe that there are other ways to communicate some or all of that information better and more cheaply and with less weight.
Marco:
Do you think, though, like, you know, you mentioned AirPods earlier and how nice it would be if people could tell whether you could hear them or not.
Marco:
But I think that also is a kind of interesting counterpoint to this even being an achievable goal because we've had AirPods now for a while.
Marco:
I think people still don't know when and whether you can hear them with AirPods, and it still makes people feel weird.
Marco:
And what we learn is that the correct kind of societally polite social interaction model is if you're going to stop and talk to somebody while wearing AirPods, you should take them out.
Marco:
Even if you could hear them, you should take them out just so that there's no ambiguity, so they know you can hear them and that you're not listening to something else.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
The same thing is going to be true of Vision Pro.
Marco:
Maybe some people might be aware of this weird eye display on the outside and what this indicates versus not indicating.
Marco:
But for most people, if someone's coming up to you and wanting your attention or to have a conversation with you, the right move is to take off the Vision Pro, not to try to teach society, oh, this means I can see you.
John:
Well, but I think there's a big difference between the ears and the eyes because there's nothing to indicate whether ears are accepting sound or not other than like you say, oh, I see things in your ears.
John:
That means you can't hear me.
John:
But we all know that's not true because especially if you're not wearing AirPods Pro, having earbuds doesn't mean you can't hear anything.
John:
But we all know when someone's looking at us because we can see their eyes pointing at us.
John:
That's why Apple's choice to try to do photorealistic eyes removes the need for you to understand what the googly eyes mean or know that a green light means that the camera is on or like they don't require any of that.
John:
They just require what your son did, which is like, hey, I see your eyes.
John:
That probably means you can see me.
John:
that requires no kind of training.
John:
But there's no expectation that you can ever look at somebody and know by looking at their ears whether they can hear you.
John:
That's just not that.
John:
But the eyeballs tell you.
John:
So with the eyeballs, there's a clear solution, which is like, just show the eyeballs.
John:
And again, the solution being, how about having clear glasses where they can literally see your eyeballs?
John:
Just show the eyeballs.
John:
Cartoon eyeballs may be a little bit higher learning curve, but...
John:
Uh, and as for the AirPods, I think what society has determined based on my experience wearing AirPods is that everyone assumes that you can always hear them.
John:
That's my experience both in and out of my house.
John:
I have AirPods on my ear every time I take a dog walk and not a single time has anyone even considered the fact that there might be a podcast playing.
John:
They just start talking to me.
John:
And this also happens inside my house, but my family doesn't care.
John:
And I'm amazed.
John:
These are not small white earbuds.
John:
You can see them.
John:
There's no hat covering them.
John:
And they're like, I just assume you can hear everything I can say.
John:
And then I have to quickly go up and pinch the thing so I can actually hear what they're saying and pause the podcast or whatever.
John:
The ears is a much more difficult situation because there's no sort of obvious way to indicate anything.
John:
It would have to be learned.
John:
But eyeballs, there's an obvious way.
John:
We just haven't been able to pull it off that well yet.
John:
And I think that's probably why Apple didn't do...
John:
you know, text or funny symbols or cartoon things.
John:
And ideally, Apple would like to make that image as realistic as possible so that someone thinks, I can faintly see your eyes through the really dark ski goggles you're wearing outside for some reason, weirdo.
Marco:
by the way there is totally a way they could do it with airpods they just haven't what they need to do is put an oled color screen on the outside of each airpod and yeah and just have it when you're in transparency mode just have it show a simulated image of an ear and so it just disappears of the inside of your ear i mean i mean yeah you know like the i guess the problem is even just seeing someone's ear you don't know whether they can actually hear you or not because they have those ear earplugs that are like shoved away down in your ear canal you know what i mean
John:
Or, you know, you could be hard of hearing.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's another thing with like, you can kind of tell that with people who can't see you because they're, if they can't see you, they're not going to point their eyes at you, which is like the sign.
John:
If you see someone's eyes move to you and they're looking at you, you assume they can see you because if they couldn't see you, they wouldn't know where to point their eyes.
John:
You know what I'm saying?
John:
It's just like, there's much less to learn there.
John:
Whereas seeing the gross waxy inside of people's ears, I'm not sure if that's much of an indicator of anything.
Yeah.
John:
But it would be good if you had, like, if you did have earwax problems, they could put a little camera in there, and you could use the AirPods.
John:
It's one of those, what do the doctor tool call where they stick in your ear?
Marco:
Is that a something-a-scope?
Marco:
Yeah, probably.
John:
It's a something-a-scope, for sure.
Casey:
All right, so do we want to talk about Fitz Law?
John:
Yeah, this was something that came up on Dithering, John Gruberman Thompson's podcast.
John:
And they were talking about Fitts' law, which they insisted on pronouncing Fitts' law because the person's name is F-I-T-T-S and the correct way to possess a size that possess a size.
John:
That's it.
John:
Is F-I-T-T-S apostrophe S which you would pronounce as Fitz's law, but I'm sorry I'm old and I've been saying Fitz law for my entire life and the Wikipedia page even says it is often cited as Fitz law So that's how I'm gonna say it anyway Fitz law for those who aren't a Mac user in the 80s is a thing that says that the ease of targeting something with a mouse is Proportional to the size of the target which kind of makes sense if you have a big target
John:
and you time people, get your mouse into this area, and it's a big giant area, it's real easy for them to get the mouse into it.
John:
And if the area is like two pixels by two pixels, it takes them much longer because they move the mouse over to it, but then overshoot, then they got to back up and you adjust and adjust and finally get into the two little pixel target.
John:
But if it's a really big area, like a quarter of the screen,
John:
real fast people can move the mouse cursor mouse pointer into it really quickly this is research from user interface from the 80s back when the mac was new and they were trying to figure out the best way to define interfaces and the reason it comes up in the context of the mac is one of the things the mac interface had from day one is the menu bar at the top of the screen and this is always cited as a great example of fitz's law because you can just jam your cursor up against the top of the screen this is before multiple screens anyway jam your cursor up against the top of the screen and
John:
and you don't have to care when the mouse cursor stops it will hit the top of the screen and the cursor won't go off the edge and so essentially the menu bar has infinite height from a targeting perspective when you plug the numbers into fits the law you're just like okay the menu bar is this many pixels wide how many pixels high is it don't put in 34 pixels or however high the menu bar is it's infinity pixels high because all the person has to do is slam the mouse cursor up to the top and then they just need to worry about the x position because the y position is taken care of for them with one flick of the wrist
John:
That's the canonical example of Fitts' law.
John:
And it's always shown to say, like, what are the value of the screen edges, like the dock being on the edge and how you can slam the cursor to the bottom of the dock.
John:
And even though it looks like there's a tiny little gap between the bottom of the screen and the dock, that's still clickable area because they want to take advantage of Fitts' law.
John:
If the dock wasn't like that, and if like the bottom pixel of the screen was not clickable, that would make the dock harder to target for people.
John:
So this came up in the context of Vision Pro, both with your eyeballs and with cursors saying, well, there's no menu bar in Vision Pro.
John:
And so that's maybe one of the reasons that all the targets need to be a little bit larger, because there are no screen corners to flick a cursor into.
John:
And there's no menu bar at the top to slam your cursor up against.
John:
And it also came up in the context of eyeballs and saying, does Fitts' law apply to eyeballs?
John:
Bigger targets are easier to look at or whatever.
John:
That might have to do with the accuracy of being able to look.
John:
There's an accessibility control where you can enable a cursor that supposedly shows where your eyeballs are.
John:
But I bet that is also smoothed out because the uncertainty about where your eyes are looking and how they dart around is surely even noisier than the cursor that they will show you.
John:
But they have to kind of guesstimate and smooth where you're looking, right?
John:
So bigger targets give you a bigger margin of error, and that makes sense.
John:
But the key difference between your eyeballs and your hands and arms when controlling a mouse or a trackpad is that your limbs, because of what we use them for in daily life,
John:
are accustomed to having something that stops them.
John:
So if you're reaching for a doorknob, you're going to fling your hand in the direction of the doorknob and you're going to start slowing your hand down as it approaches where you think the doorknob is.
John:
But you also know that once you start getting close to the doorknob and you start to feel it,
John:
The thing that will eventually stop your hand is the doorknob itself.
John:
You're reaching for a light switch.
John:
You're putting your hand on the wall.
John:
You kind of know where the wall is.
John:
Again, you slow your hand down as it approaches the wall, but you have the full expectation that eventually your fingertips are going to touch the wall, and then you'll know where the wall is, and you'll complete the motion.
John:
Then you'll feel the panel on the light switch, and you'll find it wherever.
John:
Your limbs...
John:
hit into things gently you hope but you can rely on them finding something and that thing stopping them the menu bar functions like that in the virtual world you drive your arms upwards and it doesn't actually stop your arm your arm goes up on the mouse pad but the cursor your virtual finger does stop but your eyes have a different job as you wander around the world
John:
When your eyes dart from one place to another, looking over there, looking to see someone coming up your driveway, looking back at the TV, there's nothing in the physical world that is stopping your eyeballs.
John:
Your eyeballs always have to stop on their own.
John:
If you dart your eyeballs up to the menu bar...
John:
The infinite target of the menu bar does not stop your eyeballs.
John:
Nothing stops them except for your skull and the length of your muscles or whatever.
John:
So the job your eyeballs have done for the entire time our entire species has existed and all mammals that have eyeballs and everything, they have to be able to move to a position and stop on their own.
John:
Whereas our limbs have always been able to rely on...
John:
essentially making contact with something, whether it's the ground, the wall, the light switch, pulling a fruit from a tree, whatever it is that you're doing, your limbs have always had something that stopped them.
John:
And so it's interesting that Vision OS is an environment in which
John:
fitz law for the primary pointing device of your eyeballs is essentially irrelevant because your eyeballs are really really good at going somewhere quickly and stopping on their own and they don't need the help of a screen edge or another thing to slam against like our hands and limbs do i don't know if this has any consequences for the interface presumably has consequences for when you use a mouse for example inside vision pro
John:
Because then you're not using your eyeballs, but now your cursor needs something to slam against.
John:
I assume when you do it in the virtual screen on the Mac, if there is no Vision OS window above you, it will stop at the top?
Casey:
Well, it'll stop at the top.
Casey:
It'll stop at the top as long as your gaze remains on the virtual display, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
I mean, I could try this out if I really care.
Casey:
But suffice to say, to the best of my recollection...
Casey:
as long as you are focused somewhere on the Mac virtual display window, you are limited to keeping your mouse in that display.
Casey:
Now, that works both ways, though, in that if you glance to, say, your left to look at Slack or something like that while you're still mousing about, well, your cursor is going to try to jump over to that Slack window, even if it's a native Slack window, a native Visual West Slack window.
Casey:
And so that occasionally can be
Casey:
a little bit frustrating, I don't know, maybe that's a little dramatic of me to say, but a little bit off-putting maybe that, you know, I'm trying to mouse to the upper right-hand corner of this 4K screen, which, you know, I may have made quite large in my Vision OS world, but then I glance to the left to look at, or the right or what have you, I glance to the left to look at the Vision OS native Slack,
Casey:
And next thing I know, my cursor is in the Slack window because as far as Vision OS is concerned, well, that is the active surface right now.
Casey:
And it's trying to use universal control to pull the mouse into what I'm looking at, which does make sense, but it's not exactly what you would expect.
Casey:
You don't expect your cursor to just jump, you know, I don't know, a thousand pixels to the left all of a sudden just because you've moved your head and looked somewhere else.
John:
another one of the disparities that division os brings up that a lot of people have been talking about in their reviews and we talked about last time with like having to continue looking at something and not glance off somewhere else until you've completed the click operation for example uh and people have been generalizing that to the idea of uh taking something that is traditionally input device our eyeballs we use them to take in the world around us they are an input device and
John:
overloading it and saying, guess what, eyeball?
John:
You're now also an output device.
John:
You now also determine the position of the cursor in a virtual world.
John:
Our eyeballs, unless you're Superman, are not output devices.
John:
They do not shoot lasers from them.
John:
You can't affect the world with them.
John:
Or Cyclops.
John:
And where you look with them doesn't affect future operations by, for example, your arms.
John:
It's like, well, I looked up to the right, and then I snapped my fingers, and the thing I was looking at bursts into flames.
John:
No, that doesn't happen anywhere, but in vision-wise, it does.
John:
So we are being asked to both use them as an input device, which is why we're glancing all over the place to scan things or whatever.
John:
But also, they are... I wouldn't call it an output device.
John:
It's kind of...
John:
they're trying to use the reverse but like what we call the mouse we call the mouse an input device but that's from the perspective of the computer it provides the computer with input so our eyes are both an input device for our brain and also they are an input device for the computer and an output device for us and that is not something that we're used to
John:
uh tell me about command tab i think people were talking about oh i'm on vision os and i'm hitting command tab and i wish it worked and maybe in the next version it will and it doesn't do expected things and this made me think about uh window layering in vision os we talked about it before marco was like you do not want to have a bunch of overlapping windows it's a big mess i tried it a little bit when i used vision pro i tried it more in the simulator to get a feel for it and i was kind of surprised at how uh
John:
I guess I didn't notice this before.
John:
I had used the simulator for ages before, but I guess I hadn't done, you know, I wanted to torture test it.
John:
You know, here I am on a Mac Pro.
John:
How many windows can open?
John:
So I went in the Vision OS simulator.
John:
I'm like, how did they implement window layering here?
John:
And so I just started opening a bunch of windows.
John:
It's my core skill set, apparently.
John:
And I wanted to see how it would handle things.
John:
And, you know, so some interesting things we already know about, as we discussed before, many, many shows about before the video was even released.
John:
We were going through the developer documentation.
John:
It was like, oh, by default in vision OS, when you push a window far away from you, it vision OS will try to maintain the same visual size, like the field of view of the window.
John:
So essentially, when you push the window far away, it will make it bigger.
John:
as you push it farther away so that so that it fills the exact same field of view so if it's like if it's 15 degrees of your field of view and you push it back five feet it will still be 15 degrees in your field of view which means the window will be larger that you can override that you can make it not do that right but that's one of the behaviors they suggest for your windows so right away pushing windows farther away from you and pulling them towards you they maintain the same visual size in some ways that's just like the mac
John:
When I have a stack of 100 windows and I bring the back one to the front, it doesn't change size.
John:
It becomes, quote unquote, the front most window.
John:
It draws in front of the other windows.
John:
It gets the big drop shadow, but it doesn't change size.
John:
And ditto, if I bury that window underneath 100 windows, it doesn't shrink because it's not getting farther away.
John:
This is what I was getting at last time about like on the Mac.
John:
we have lots of windows, but we conceptually consider them to essentially be like pieces of paper.
John:
Like they're all pretty much at the same depth.
John:
And yeah, it's magic because you can pull the one from the bottom up to the top.
John:
But if I was to look from the side, I would say, this is a stack of paper and all the paper are touching each other.
John:
There's no space between them.
John:
Right.
John:
Which is why the magical metaphor of like, I click on the button, the back comes forward.
John:
Like it works for us.
John:
It's like, ah, it's just kind of like I took that piece of paper out and slipped it in front of the other ones, but I did it real quick and you didn't see it.
John:
So it's,
John:
the metaphor works for us envision os if you make a big mess and have a bunch of windows and some of them are far away and some of them are close up and you have this huge stack of windows which is a thing that you can do
John:
And one of the windows is like it's way in the back.
John:
Like in the simulator, I was pushing it like you can push them through the back wall.
John:
But I was trying to stay inside the room.
John:
One of them is way against the back wall.
John:
And then like 17 windows between me and that window.
John:
And I want that window to, quote unquote, come to the front.
John:
And I click on or tap on or whatever the hell I'm in the simulator.
John:
So it's weird.
John:
Activate the window that's way in the back.
John:
What happens kind of surprises me.
John:
What doesn't happen is that window does not suddenly leap to the front in 3D space.
John:
No, it stays pinned against that back wall.
John:
It stays 10 feet away from me, right?
John:
It also doesn't just start drawing on top of the other windows, which would look kind of weird, but it's a thing it can do.
John:
What it does is it draws in front of everything, but then it fades out all the windows that are ostensibly in 3D space in front of it so that you can see the window that's against the back wall by essentially making ghosts out of all the windows that would be blocking the view, which is really weird.
John:
Like it doesn't move the window.
John:
It doesn't make it bigger.
John:
You don't see it animate forward and suddenly it's two feet away from you and then it animates back.
John:
But it wants to essentially bring it to the front.
John:
And this in the context of command tab, like what would it mean to command tab?
John:
You'd be command tab and you're like, oh, suddenly the front most active window is the window that is currently buried behind seven windows and it's five feet away from me.
John:
How does that become front most?
John:
And they don't walk that window up to you, go do, do, do, do, do.
John:
Here comes the window.
John:
It's walking through all the other windows.
John:
Oh, now that window is two feet in front of you, which they could do because of the whole size maintenance thing.
John:
The window would slowly shrink as it moves towards you, but you wouldn't notice because it's moving closer to you.
John:
So it would maintain the same visual size.
John:
But you'd see like the drop shadow, for example, of that window is now two feet in front of you instead of against the back wall.
John:
But instead, they draw that window in front of everything else and fade everybody out like they're a ghost.
John:
So what it means is if you have a lot of windows open and you pick one of them and it is not literally physically the front most, the other windows become ghosts.
John:
The other windows fade away and you can't see them.
John:
And they come up with not just the part that it's drawing over, but even the edges of them get all fuzzy or whatever.
John:
And it's super weird.
John:
It's kind of like if you had a stack of 100 text edit windows and you pulled the one in the back to the front.
John:
And instead of that window just drawing in front of them, all the other windows faded away and became ghostly.
John:
And that one drew in its current position in the back.
John:
But the ghost windows faded out in front of it.
John:
I don't know if this is if this is the correct approach, but this is apparently what Vision Pro does now.
John:
And it explains Marco's warning last time was like, you don't want to run a bunch of windows because that metaphor and design is has no precedent in the 2D space.
John:
It's what they've decided to do in 3D, and I guess maybe they tried all the other ways and they were worse.
John:
But it is weird, and it does make it so that having lots of windows open is much less tenable because...
John:
it won't move them it won't essentially when you say bring to front in mac parlance it will never actually bring that window to the front it just sort of like it's like plowing it's like a particle beam that blows away all the other windows and fades them out and disintegrates their matter so that you have a clear shot at that window that is five feet away from you on the back wall and then when you pick a different window all those dematerialized windows come back into being and stop being ghosts and start drawing themselves again
John:
And I find it extremely weird and not for me, at least in the simulator, a comfortable way to manage a lot of windows.
Casey:
Yeah, when I was at the library using this thing, I put myself in the position where I had a couple of windows layered on top of each other and I was seeing that ghosting and whatever.
Casey:
And that was the first time because I was using Mac virtual display at the same time.
Casey:
That was the first time that I had the presence of mind to hit alt tab or excuse me, command tab.
Casey:
Wow, my windows are showing.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
to hit command tab and try to, you know, tab between the windows.
Casey:
And of course, that didn't work for nothing.
Casey:
And it took me a second to realize what I had just done and why it was wrong.
Casey:
But outside of, you know, a bunch of windows on top of each other in 3D space and trying to move between them, I can't say I've ever reached for command tab for any other reason.
Casey:
But that is the one really good way and reason to use it.
Casey:
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do anything.
John:
But if it did, like, what it would do is fire that particle beam and plow its way through all the other windows without moving any of them so you have a clear line of sight on the one window that is essentially going to draw in front of all the other ones, even though it is still behind them.
John:
And, like, it's literally behind them.
John:
Like, you can get up and walk over and stand in the space between the windows.
John:
Like, it's spatial computing, but they, like...
John:
They haven't figured out a way, you know, the fake metaphor I just said of like the paper stacked or whatever, like that's not based in reality, but it's close enough.
John:
Like the stack of paper analogy, like if you had a bunch of papers out and you wanted the one in the middle, you take it out from the middle of the pile and you put it on top.
John:
And like you can imagine that's what's going on with all these pieces of paper that are windows on your thing.
John:
But if you had a bunch of, you know, five foot by three foot magic glass things floating in your living room and they were all stacked and some of them are against the back wall and some of them are in the middle and some of them are real close to you and you wanted to get at the one in the back.
John:
I mean, I suppose you could have it.
John:
fly towards you and pass through the other ones.
John:
And now that one is the front post and then it could fly in the back.
John:
But how do you maintain those positions?
John:
Would you want it to fly there?
John:
Would you want the other ones to fly out of the way and part like the Red Sea so you can see that one?
John:
Or do I guess you want all the other ones to become weird ghosts so you can see through them to the one in the back?
John:
It's really weird that their spatial computing thing is like, I have no respect for the spatiality of this world.
John:
Yes, you can position windows, but when you ask to see one of them,
John:
I am not going to move things spatially to make your view better of that thing.
John:
I am just going to dematerialize, partially dematerialize the things that are blocking your view so that I can draw that one in front of the other windows and it doesn't feel that weird to you.
John:
But honestly, it's pretty weird.
Marco:
Thank you so much to our members who supported this entire episode.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
There's lots of benefits to being a member.
Marco:
Please consider joining us.
Marco:
Once again, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
so a few times during the episode i mentioned that i had gone to the library to do some work and i've also been working on i got a little sidetrack doing uh some adding some features to regular plain old call sheet uh which just got released uh which by the way if you're interested in how tall actors are or and or your name is merlin mann
Casey:
Go get the latest update, because where possible, I show how tall actors are, and Merlin seems very excited, which I'm very happy about.
Casey:
What is your data source on that?
Casey:
Wikidata, actually.
Casey:
So the same thing that Wikipedia uses, or I don't know the relationship between the two, but it's part of the Wikimedia Foundation, as far as I know.
Casey:
And yeah, Wikidata has some actors' data, a lot, I would say, but not everyone.
Casey:
But anyway, that's not the point.
Casey:
The point is, outside of that distraction, I've been doing a lot of Vision Pro work because now that I have the Vision Pro, now that I have my hilarious $300 developer strap, I've been putting both to good use and trying to work on the Vision Pro native version of Call Sheet.
Casey:
And this is, you know, as an aside, we don't need to unpack this right now because it could take hours.
Casey:
We're already running long.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Running a branch that you're not doing a good job of keeping up to date with Maine and then trying to bring it back in line with Maine like a month or two later.
Casey:
Not fun, my friends.
Casey:
Not fun.
Casey:
To the point that I actually abandoned, like I still have it, but I abandoned my initial Vision Pro branch, the same one that I used when I went to a lab.
Casey:
I have abandoned that and I'm basically manually replaying a lot of those changes in part because I've got different opinions about what I should do and in part because even though it's only been a couple of months, there's been such a divergence between main and this branch that it's just a mess.
Casey:
It's an absolute mess.
Casey:
Anyway, I keep getting myself distracted.
Casey:
The point is, what was my experience like writing code and trying to get work done both at the library and at home?
Casey:
Because I've found that even when I'm at home, even though I've got, you know, 15Ks, if you will, of screen here, it's actually much more easy and there's a lot less friction to use.
Casey:
write code and run it in the Vision Pro when Xcode is also in the Vision OS world.
Casey:
And so I've been using Mac Virtual Display for that.
Casey:
The developer strap, like I had said on the show, even though I am not in love with the price, it is worth it if you're doing any real development because it seems to work much, much, much better.
Casey:
When I was at the library, I had a very weird thing, though.
Casey:
So I have... I want to say it's an anchor.
Casey:
It's out of reach from where I'm sitting.
Casey:
But I have one of those...
Casey:
chargers that I use I don't use an official Apple charger I have I think it's an anchor charger that has one like I don't know maybe 100 watt USB-C port for a computer like a 30 watt port or thereabouts for an iPad or phone or what have you and it also happens to have a USB-A port
Casey:
And what I was doing at the library was I had plugged MagSafe from the 100-watt slot to the computer, a just general USB-C connection from the 30-watt to the battery for the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And then, of course, I had a different USB-C cable going from the Vision Pro developer strap to my computer.
Casey:
No hubs or anything like that.
Casey:
That's all it was.
Casey:
And I had my AirPods in.
Casey:
And when I finally decided to commit to using the developer strap, I was getting this incredibly odd feedback, like a very high-pitched humming sound that I found was only the case when I had the computer and the battery pack plugged in.
Casey:
And if I unplugged the MagSafe or if I unplugged the battery pack, it went away.
Casey:
I don't think this has happened since.
Casey:
So I don't know if my library happens to have very dirty power or something like that.
Casey:
But it was the weirdest thing.
Casey:
And I noticed it several times at the library.
Casey:
That was weird thing number one.
Casey:
Weird thing number two.
Casey:
So I really enjoyed working in a fully immersive environment, in part because the room I was in was wide but shallow.
Casey:
So it was probably, I don't know, 10-ish feet, so a couple of meters, a little bit more than a couple of meters wide, and less than a meter, less than three feet deep.
Casey:
Or maybe it was a little more than three feet.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It was not a lot.
Casey:
It was wide but not very deep.
Casey:
And when you're trying to put windows around, when you're not immersed, you're running into the wall.
Casey:
It'll do it, but it just looks weird.
Casey:
And so being immersed was way, way, way better.
Casey:
I am a pretty darn good touch typist.
Casey:
Many, many moons ago, you and I did, or the three of us did a typing race thing, I think on the air.
Casey:
Maybe we did it off the air and compared notes after the fact.
Casey:
But I'm a pretty good typist.
Casey:
I'm no Jason Snell, but I'm pretty good.
Casey:
I don't need to look at my hands when I type.
Casey:
That being said, when you're fully immersed, finding your keyboard is harder than you think.
John:
Yes.
John:
I said that last week.
John:
You've got hands and arms, but you don't have a keyboard.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It's actually kind of frustrating how difficult it is to find the keyboard.
Marco:
Yeah, like I don't realize how much I need to glance at the keyboard until I'm trying to do that.
Marco:
And then I realize, oh, man, I actually do glance at a lot.
John:
It's like those people who buy the keyboards with keycaps that have nothing on them to show off.
John:
Well, how about how about you can't even see the whole keyboard?
Marco:
No, yeah, because that's the problem is like to like align myself with the feel of what, you know, where my fingers even go.
Marco:
That's where I found myself when I'm in Vision Pro kind of missing sometimes.
John:
Yeah, I feel like they could upgrade that.
John:
So they have, obviously, the Vision Pro detects your hands and your arms.
John:
Apple detecting its own keyboards, I feel like that is a solvable problem.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Because this was on the laptop keyboard, and actually the only other keyboard that I use is the...
Casey:
whatever 104 key whatever it is with touch id here at home and those are the only keyboards i use so yes it should have been able to detect it like it's a fine first worldiest of first world problems but i couldn't find the freaking keyboard this happened not irregularly and yes i'm aware of the little bumps on what is it the f and j keys you got to find the keyboard enough to find the bumps first though and
Casey:
Exactly, exactly.
Casey:
I could not have put it better myself.
Casey:
I think you are slightly kidding, but no, that's exactly right.
Casey:
Also, quick aside, John, didn't the bumps used to be on D and K or something like that years ago?
John:
Yeah, Apple has them in different positions than other keyboards do, and I think they've changed over the years, but yeah.
Casey:
Because I vaguely remember when I was a kid, using Apple keyboards drove me nuts because it was under my middle fingers instead of my pointer fingers, like the little lumpies or whatever.
Casey:
Anyways, couldn't find the damn keyboard.
Casey:
AirPods were having a little bit of feedback, which again, I don't think I've heard since.
Casey:
But one of the things is, and I don't know if I ever linked to this in the last week's show notes, but I put up a blog post.
Casey:
I think I mentioned it last week.
Casey:
I don't know if I linked to it.
Casey:
But I put up a blog post shortly before the Vision Pro came out, like literally a couple of days before, where I was talking about how, hey, this would be really neat if I could have this whole array of Windows around me with native Vision OS messages, native Vision OS Slack, and Safari from Vision OS, and all that different very sundry Windows all around me.
Casey:
And I can do that, and it works pretty well.
Casey:
However, as many people have said, and I am not the only one, the iPadOS native apps, and in this case I'm picking on Slack, but it's not just Slack, iPadOS native apps kind of suck.
Casey:
On Vision OS.
Casey:
And the thing of it is, is I don't know if it's something on Apple's side or the way the apps are designed or both.
Casey:
And again, I'm not the first to say this, but finding the touch targets is really difficult.
Casey:
Particularly, I found on Slack, in the upper left, I think I mentioned this last week, in the upper left where you choose which workspace you're in, you know, say Real AFM or something else,
Casey:
It's really hard to get Vision OS to actually activate that thing with your eyes.
Casey:
Now, with that said, with universal control, it's not so terrible because you can just mouse right up there.
Casey:
But the Slack app on Vision OS, I am really looking forward to, and I don't even know if they've announced anything, but I'm really looking forward to getting that as Vision OS native because I think it'll be much better.
Casey:
But yeah, overall, really great experience.
Casey:
It's a little teeny bit of a bummer when I'm at home, when I'm losing and when I'm going from 15 Ks of real estate and at least having more than one window.
Casey:
It's a bummer to bring that down to one.
Casey:
And I think we talked about last week, you know, there's rumblings that maybe Apple can do two windows on the same or, you know, two windows.
John:
Anyway, it seems like, especially given the supposed revelations about the developer strap and the potential of higher bandwidth there, that it could be something that comes to a later version of the OS, if only for people with a developer strap.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Casey:
But yeah, I would love to have a second virtual display, but...
Casey:
But all that being said, like, you know, there's some things I would definitely tweak about this, but it's pretty nice.
Casey:
I've really been enjoying it.
Casey:
And I wouldn't, to Marco's point during the episode, I wouldn't necessarily choose to give up, you know, my 15Ks of real estate.
Casey:
I wouldn't necessarily choose to give up my standing desk and my situation at home.
Casey:
But I do like quite a bit...
Casey:
going somewhere else to do work.
Casey:
But of course, that raises the question, if I'm sitting on Mount Hood in the library, why couldn't I sit on Mount Hood at home or at my desk?
Casey:
And I don't really have a good answer for that other than the tea ceremony, if you compare it to vinyl.
Casey:
The tea ceremony of going somewhere, I kind of miss.
Casey:
I'm very thankful and lucky that I don't have to do that every single day.
Casey:
But I like to, at least once a week,
Casey:
Go somewhere.
Casey:
Wegmans, Publix, a library, whatever.
Casey:
And in some ways, it's so much nicer and better now because I feel like I'm bringing an LG UltraFine 4K display with me without actually having to carry very much.
Casey:
But the flip side of that is...
Casey:
It's almost not even necessary anymore, which is a weird and odd feeling.
Casey:
Like I'll probably still do it, even if I do, you know, use the Vision Pro when I'm wherever I'm going.
Casey:
But it seems a lot less necessary now than it has ever been before.
Casey:
So anyway, I just thought it was interesting to discuss.
John:
It's also getting out of the house, right?
John:
Like when you're at Wegman, someone can't yell your name and ask you to come do something.
Casey:
Well, it's only Aaron, but your point is still fair.
Casey:
And I think leaving aside who is at my house, you're exactly right.
Casey:
For me, anyway, I really do like being able to get out of the house and go somewhere and just change my scenery and have the act of going somewhere.
Casey:
Now, that's because I believe in superior computers that you can move very easily and don't need to worry about carrying multiple pieces.
Casey:
Marco, I believe you are also an enlightened individual that believes in these weird, funky things.
John:
Multiple pieces.
John:
You're bringing a headset with you.
Casey:
Ah, well, sure.
Casey:
But I don't have a 15-pound monitor, though.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I believe, Marco, you are also an enlightened person that believes in these funky things called laptops.
John:
No, he doesn't.
John:
He's using a desktop laptop.
Marco:
No, I mean, honestly, for the purposes, you know, obviously...
Marco:
I share some of your need for getting out of the house sometime because we work for ourselves in our houses.
Marco:
And so it is nice to get out in the world and work or be somewhere else on some kind of regular basis just to get yourself out of the house.
Marco:
I think using the Vision Pro to do that
Marco:
does kind of ruin the point, but I think the answer is not stay in your house more.
Marco:
I think the answer is go out with a laptop and don't bring the Vision Pro sometimes.
Marco:
Like, that's the answer, because if I'm going to go work in a coffee shop or something, part of the joy of it is interacting with the world.
Marco:
Being out there, seeing people, saying hello to people when they come in, if you've seen them before.
John:
Focusing your eyes on distances other than 1.3 meters.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So part of the appeal is to be a little bit in the world.
Marco:
Now, if you're using Vision Pro out in a place like a coffee shop, first of all, you're already covering your eyes and immersing yourself, etc.
Marco:
Even if you're in pass-through mode, you are projecting the antisocial version of yourself.
Marco:
As we've mentioned, the Vision Pro speakers are very open, and so if you need any kind of audio as part of your work, if you're watching or listening to something, or if you are trying to edit audio or whatever, you're going to need AirPods.
Marco:
Now you're covering up your eyes and your ears and sealing yourself off even more
Marco:
I feel like at that point you are not only being extremely antisocial to the people around you and to the business that you're in, but also you are then losing quite a bit of the value of being there in the first place.
Marco:
For me, in that context, a laptop, optionally with headphones, is much better because at least then your eyesight is totally unencumbered.
Marco:
You can see everything.
Marco:
People can see you.
Marco:
They know they can see you.
Marco:
I feel like you're getting more of the environment that way, even if you have AirPods in for whatever reason you need that.
Marco:
So again, I see the appeal very much of vision pro for things like immersive entertainment.
Marco:
If you're going to watch a movie, bring it on a plane.
Marco:
I think there's a lot of arguments for that, but like working in a coffee shop or working in, you know, out in public somewhere for the sake of getting out in the world and, you know, getting out of your house.
Marco:
I don't think it's working for your purposes there.
Marco:
I think it's actually working against your purposes there.
John:
Don't underestimate.
John:
Like I said, don't underestimate the value, especially if you're working on a programming problem or whatever, of looking out the window.
John:
And you can say, I can look out the window with Vision Pro.
John:
It's got pass-through.
John:
No, I mean looking out the window and focusing your eyes 50 feet away at the tree across the street while you think about a problem.
John:
I know you can do the thousand-yard stare inside the headset, but if you're working on a computer for a long period of time, I feel like it does help to...
John:
focus your eyes on a different distance even forget about the headset even just sitting in front of your max monitor don't just stare at the monitor two feet in front of you for eight hours you will have a bad time like get up and walk around look over your monitor i used to do this at work look over your monitor out the windows that hopefully are in your office and out in the distance look down the hallway look at your neighbor seven cubicles away and wave like it's just good to to focus your eyes at different distances to relax and to have an environment where you can think about things and that
John:
That remains one of the weaknesses of a headset with a fixed focal length.
John:
Unless you're doing the defocus your eyes and have a thousand yard stare and you're not looking at anything, which I suppose you can do in the headset, it's difficult to remind yourself to focus on different distances to avoid eye strain.
John:
And honestly, you know, in my programmer head, looking off at something in a distance like a tree across the street is somehow connected to solving programming problems in some complicated wiring that goes on when you've been a programmer for decades.
John:
20-something years.