TE
科技回声
首页24小时热榜最新最佳问答展示工作
GitHubTwitter
首页

科技回声

基于 Next.js 构建的科技新闻平台,提供全球科技新闻和讨论内容。

GitHubTwitter

首页

首页最新最佳问答展示工作

资源链接

HackerNews API原版 HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 科技回声. 版权所有。

Why is Apple asleep at the wheel with VR?

29 点作者 codybrown大约 9 年前

19 条评论

jballanc大约 9 年前
Does no one remember the Eee PC? The whole &quot;netbook&quot; craze? It was at <i>least</i> 2-3 years that each quarterly earnings call some analyst would ask, like clockwork, why Apple was letting the netbook market get away from them.<p>Officially, the answer that Apple repeatedly gave was that they &quot;weren&#x27;t impressed with any of the current offerings&quot; and that they would not &quot;rush to market with a product we&#x27;re not proud of&quot; (not exact quotes, but probably close enough). The unspoken truth of the matter was that the margins on existing netbooks were <i>razor</i> thin. When Apple finally did introduce the MacBook Air, it was more powerful and with better economics than anything else on the market by far.<p>The Eee PC was discontinued in 2013. The MacBook Air (and now MacBook) are still going strong today. Of course, this shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise, Apple did the exact same thing with the MP3 player.<p>I suspect that something similar is going on with VR (and a whole host of other technologies). Until the first products hit the market and Apple has a sense for how the price&#x2F;features&#x2F;demand equation balances out, they&#x27;ll be more than happy to sit on the sidelines. So no, I <i>don&#x27;t</i> think there is a skunkworks team fashioning an end-to-end solution. This isn&#x27;t about Apple not wanting to accommodate third party parts&#x2F;devices. It&#x27;s about building something that is good and makes money.
评论 #11337122 未加载
Mithaldu大约 9 年前
Apple doesn&#x27;t innovate. It combines proven technologies into polished products.<p>When VR has proven itself, with R&amp;D investments of other companies, Apple will release a near-perfect refinement of all things VR and everyone will hail them as the savior who brought VR to the world.
评论 #11337115 未加载
评论 #11337017 未加载
评论 #11337009 未加载
Loque大约 9 年前
VR is not yet &#x27;here&#x27; and is not currently delivering, but it is promising a lot.<p>The form factor alone has challenges which the public will not be willing to sacrifice for the experience, which could turn out to be mostly a gimmick. Some things people don&#x27;t think about;<p>-) looking at your keyboard&#x2F;input device whilst wearing a VR headset<p>-) being the same room as other people for prolonged periods of time with a headset<p>-) sharing experiences with other people close to you<p>-) what are you going to experience on VR, that needs VR so bad? Who is going to pay&#x2F;develop and what is this content going to be... can it actually deliver, making good immersive software is incredibly hard.<p>-) and then cost...
评论 #11337207 未加载
评论 #11336803 未加载
评论 #11336784 未加载
评论 #11337020 未加载
评论 #11336797 未加载
mattnewport大约 9 年前
It also doesn&#x27;t help Apple&#x27;s VR prospects that many VR developers are coming from games, even if they aren&#x27;t working on gaming VR applications, and from high end 3D games in particular because of the skill set overlap. Apple has never really embraced games and particularly not high end desktop games and my experience at a major AAA game developer (I&#x27;m now a freelance VR dev) was that Apple was by far the worst partner to work with of any of the platform holders (and we worked with pretty much all of them).<p>Apple gets a lot less love overall from game developers than from web developers because they don&#x27;t appear to care about games and don&#x27;t give the kind of developer support game devs are used to from other platform holders and hardware companies. Even if they were to announce something in the VR space it would take a lot of changes to their approach for that to change I feel.
djrogers大约 9 年前
On Oct 22nd, 2001 Apple was asleep at the wheel with MP3 players.<p>On June 28th 2007, Apple was asleep at the wheel with smartphones.<p>On January 26th, 2010, Apple was asleep at the wheel with tablets.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to claim Apple is definitely in VR, but if you don&#x27;t know by now that Apple is committed to not announcing products that aren&#x27;t ready to show&#x2F;sell, then you haven&#x27;t been paying attention.<p>*edit formatting
PinguTS大约 9 年前
VR has its use cases. But the question is, will it be like 3D for mass market? Everybody praised 3D when it started a few years back. But now 3D seems to be dead, with the few exceptions like movie cinemas. Even most of the TV manufacturers seems to get rid of it.<p>So what about VR? Only a hype by the tech savvy community and the lost and forgotten in a few years when it should be ready for mass market?
评论 #11336962 未加载
评论 #11337229 未加载
评论 #11336992 未加载
muglug大约 9 年前
I just bought my first Windows PC in 13 years to power a VR headset.<p>And after removing all the unnecessary HP crapware, driver installation headaches and navigating the weird hybrid UI, I was reminded of how much I haven&#x27;t missed.
bryanlarsen大约 9 年前
&quot;I’m willing to bet there is a high stress team in the basement of Apple working on an End to End VR solution but it could be years before it sees the light of day.&quot;<p>Sure, that sucks for developers and us on the bleeding edge, but it doesn&#x27;t hurt Apple one bit. At the most optimistic, it&#x27;ll take 2-3 years for VR to become mainstream, and as long as Apple comes out with a polished Apple-like solution by then, they won&#x27;t miss out on the market. If their offering is compelling then content will be ported to it.<p>If they wait much longer than 2-3 years competing solutions may achieve critical mass.<p>At this point, releasing any solution before nVidia&#x27;s Pascal and&#x2F;or AMD&#x27;s Arctic Islands is available would be just silly. Maybe we&#x27;ll see something in September.
BuckRogers大约 9 年前
Myopic article and bad clickbait where the author doesn&#x27;t attempt to think big at all. How do you know they&#x27;re sleeping at the wheel? Because they haven&#x27;t enabled OSX VR?<p>I don&#x27;t believe that console&#x2F;PC VR will be the VR that makes it in the end. Small tablet (mobile phone) VR is where it will land and reach massive success.<p>The industry needs to keep the phone upgrade cycle working, people already reduced their reliance on their PC and laptop with their phones.<p>Samsung is nailing it with GearVR. High res, high powered phones are going to iterate until people simply put their phone in a $100 headset and experience VR that way. It&#x27;ll be cheap to become a social experience, watching sports in 3D and as much gaming as people will want in that mode.
greenspot大约 9 年前
I still do not see any significant added value from VR except a bit higher immersion at the cost of more head movement.<p>But the head movement will be limited, nobody wants to do 180-360 degree turns in their living room and walk around. The key of video games <i>is</i> to sit and barely move and still be able to control a muscle packed fighter or whatever. Looking around can be fun but at the end I will do only small 5-20 degree turns (left , right, up, down) and then a big screen creates a similar level of immersion with no movement required.<p>Maybe we haven&#x27;t find the killer use case yet but I assume it will be like with 3D screens, the added value of a 3D screen to a normal screen is so small that nobody will care.
codybrown大约 9 年前
Don&#x27;t know if this comment will make a difference but its worth saying, before you make a comment here, to mention some context on what VR hardware you&#x27;ve tried.<p>I&#x27;ve tried the consumer Oculus, the HTC Vive, and the Hololens.
Cshelton大约 9 年前
Note: Have not read article, going from title.<p>Apple is usually not a first to market type. They are a first to market with an amazing, polished, product type. They&#x27;ll wait to see what gets proved in the market and what doesn&#x27;t.
评论 #11337025 未加载
minalecs大约 9 年前
As someone that works in the VR industry where I think Apple can make the biggest difference would be in the self contained headset using their mobile components. Google is reportedly already doing this, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;google-is-reportedly-building-a-standalone-vr-headset-not-powered-by-a-pc-or-smartphone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;google-is-reportedly-buildi...</a>.<p>Think something like the Samsung Gear but an all in one headset thats nicely designed. Out of all the current available headsets, I think the PS is the best designed and best fitting. I think Apple could do better.
mikhailt大约 9 年前
The article doesn&#x27;t go into details as to why Apple should be doing anything with VR that isn&#x27;t a) a proven technology nor is it b) anything more than a fad.<p>I&#x27;ve heard of the same thing being said about 3D TV, it quickly died a few years. I have a 3d Projector but never used it. I&#x27;ve tried a few 3D movies but prefer the standard vision.<p>In addition, we went through the VR fed back in the 90s, just like 3D TV, it died out after a few years.<p>Google Glass itself died out very quickly as well.<p>I have zero intentions of wearing a VR headset all day long, so this is ruled out for general computations. Gaming? I&#x27;ve stopped gaming many years ago. So, what is the purpose of VR or even AR for me?<p>The one single benefit that could convince me to wear an AR glass (Google Glass style) all day long if it comes with closed captioning support for real life, that to me as a hard of hearing person would provide so much benefits.
评论 #11337492 未加载
评论 #11337136 未加载
评论 #11337142 未加载
nilkn大约 9 年前
I&#x27;m really surprised at how much skepticism there is here towards VR. I have a feeling a large majority of the commenters here have simply never tried the latest offerings and&#x2F;or are not up-to-date on where the field is.<p>The consumer versions of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive are both <i>very</i> good. In particular, Oculus has very much already taken the Apple approach to VR. The final Rift has a high-end, premium design, including a lot of quality-of-life enhancements that feel like they came straight from Steve Jobs, like an obsession with making the cable as thin and lightweight as possible.<p>Oculus is pushing hard for a completely vertically integrated product. They&#x27;re designing the software and the hardware specifically for each other and aren&#x27;t very interested in supporting anything outside their ecosystem. They&#x27;re having developers produce titles specifically for the Rift to maximize the quality of the user&#x27;s experience.<p>Even the box they&#x27;re shipping the Rift in is premium: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dprint.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;box1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dprint.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;box1.jpg</a><p>The Touch motion controllers, expected to ship later this year, are similarly premium, and they don&#x27;t just track their own locations in space but also offer basic finger and gesture recognition. They also have a small, lightweight design, enabling fine interactions with virtual objects.<p>Frankly, I can&#x27;t think of what Apple could bring to this space even if they tried. Oculus has already done all the classic things that Apple does, and Apple is extremely inexperienced with game development.<p>With regard to the HTC Vive, I would argue that it&#x27;s a little less polished and premium than the Rift, but it&#x27;s also the first mover for fully tracked motion controllers, so I regard it as one of the most innovative products of the last five years. It&#x27;s highly unlikely Apple is going to find a way to be more innovative, and even then by the time they enter the market the Vive and Rift will have moved on and both will be equally premium by that point.<p>IMHO, Apple has absolutely no chance in VR outside of smartphones, because Oculus has already played all of Apple&#x27;s traditional tricks and Apple has no experience with games. Mobile VR is an area where they might excel, though the screens in the current iPhones are not nearly good enough to compete with the S7 and Gear VR, so at the very least they&#x27;d need to design future iPhone screens with VR in mind. This would mean both increasing the resolution and trying to maximize the pixel fill ratio.<p>Then there&#x27;s the problem of positionally and wirelessly tracking the smartphone user&#x27;s location in 3D space, a problem that Oculus and Google are already tackling. Google has Project Tango and Oculus has John Carmack working on this problem. Once they achieve this goal, Apple will be even further behind with even smartphone VR.
评论 #11337749 未加载
评论 #11337410 未加载
codybrown大约 9 年前
How did this post drop from the front page to the 7th page in less than a few minutes?
评论 #11338288 未加载
评论 #11339315 未加载
tangue大约 9 年前
Apple created Quicktime VR before sunsetting it, in a sense they <i>pioneered</i> VR
评论 #11337435 未加载
ebbv大约 9 年前
If I was running Apple I wouldn&#x27;t be wasting my money going into VR either. It&#x27;s nothing but hype right now, and frankly I don&#x27;t see it going much beyond that with any of the products that are on the horizon.
anonyfox大约 9 年前
Personally I don&#x27;t care much for VR in general. It&#x27;s more like the new opium for the masses once it&#x27;s affordable. While VR promotes escaping in virtual realities (hence, the name), Apple is looking for ways to improve your actual world with it&#x27;s products (no marketing intended). This is where AR will matter, not VR. Google kinda pioneered here with Glass, Apple gave it a shot with it&#x27;s wearable devive (watch), and I&#x27;m super excited what will come next!<p>Alone glasses that don&#x27;t suck visually (people shouldn&#x27;t notice the difference from a distance) and an all-day-battery-life would be features I&#x27;d spend $1000 upwards on, just because.
评论 #11337233 未加载
评论 #11337328 未加载
评论 #11336820 未加载