Wes Davis
The best worst way to play Metroid Prime.
I have finally justified my Vision Pro purchase with the iOS version of the Delta emulator.
AR
Sean Hollister
Meta is losing a billion dollars on VR and AR every single month.
GamesIndustry.biz did the math to put it in perspective: Zuck’s Reality Labs has burned a billion dollars every month since June 2022, and plans to spend even more: “We continue to expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year,” CFO Susan Li said on the Q1 earnings call.
Meta is plenty profitable overall, though: it raked in $12 billion last quarter alone.
Meta loses another $3.8 billion on VR/AR
[GamesIndustry.biz]
Richard Lawler
Best Buy launches an augmented reality shopping app for the Vision Pro.
Apple’s headset doesn’t have an official Netflix app, but MacRumors mentions Best Buy’s app has arrived.
Just put on your Vision Pro, open the Best Buy Envision app and scroll through hundreds of options to see them appear digitally, right in front your eyes, in your physical space.
Now, all we need is a Netflix app for those virtual TVs.
AR effects have become a key part of entrances and other aspects of WWE TV over the last several years — far outlasting the company’s experiments with VR.
Chris Welch
Wes Davis
Apple’s next immersive video is another Prehistoric Planet episode.
The second episode of Prehistoric Planet Immersive will be available on April 19th, according to the Apple TV Plus page for the series.
The first episode was a pretty demonstration of the Vision Pro, rather than the David Attenborough-narrated, pretend nature documentary that Prehistoric Planet is. But the younger version of me that saw Jurassic Park and Prehysteria in theaters welcomes it, anyway.
Victoria Song
Do I feel less lonely in the Vision Pro?
That’s what I kept asking myself when testing out spatial Personas with Wes. The short of it is your ghostly Personas are now free to interact in any SharePlay enabled app, so you can watch movies, play games, and collaborate on projects. It’s neat — and you can interact more with other people. But seeing Wes’ head just float in my office also reminded me he really wasn’t there.
Victoria Song
Meta’s been tinkering with mixed reality for 10 years now.
This video is a fun speedrun through all the VR headsets and AR glasses that Meta’s been tinkering with over the last decade. There’s a mention of Project Aria, and you even get a glimpse of some experimental smartwatch like controls. It’s a neat highlight reel, but I did chortle at how fast the video glosses over Ray-Ban Stories.
Wes Davis
The Vision Pro bathes your eyeballs in infrared light.
You can see that in this Slow Mo Guys YouTube Short showing the flashing of the invisible-to-the-human-eye IR illuminators of Apple’s face computer, both on the front and around the lenses’ edges.
At 1,000fps, the Guys show the Vision Pro’s very fancy micro-OLED displays alternating between images and black frames, with a ring of IR lights popping on during the dark moments to help track where your eyes are looking.
Wes Davis
Is the MLB’s Vision Pro app ready for the big leagues?
Jason Snell of Six Colors details his experience with the MLB’s visionOS app now that the season is underway. Of the Gameday feature that puts a 3D-animated baseball field in your space during a game, he writes:
I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.
Ah, the early days of the Vision Pro’s app ecosystem.
MLB for visionOS strikes out on Opening Day
[Six Colors]
Wes Davis
The Vision Pro is getting some new Apple Arcade games.
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and Spire Blast will each get Vision Pro “spatial” apps tomorrow, Apple shared in a release emailed to The Verge.
Also, rhythm game Synth Riders — aka the only game I’ve been coming back to besides bullet hell shooter Void-X — has been updated with Game Center leaderboards and a pass-the-headset Party Mode.
First adopters are ambassadors for the future. Glassholes need not apply.
Victoria Song
Wes Davis
Angry Birds VR gets a mixed reality mode on the Quest.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs now uses video passthrough on Meta Quest headsets (and the Pico) to project your target for destruction onto a real-life table or whatever.
If you don’t have a VR headset with passthrough though, there’s been standalone version of the game on smartphones for years.
Wes Davis
Where in the world will the Vision Pro launch this year?
Apple CEO Tim Cook told press at the China Development Forum in Beijing that China will get it this year, according to Reuters this morning, citing a Chinese state media Weibo post.
MacRumors notes that this is the first time an Apple executive has confirmed where the Vision Pro will launch outside the US this year. Rumors have also suggested Apple will prioritize UK and Canadian launches.
Wes Davis
You can now browse Vision Pro apps on the web.
It’s essentially the same thing you’d see if you were browsing the store in the Vision Pro itself — a few curated lists of native apps here, some recommended iPad apps there.
But at least there’s a way to casually cruise those sweet spatial apps without popping the headset on now.
Vision Pro Apps and Games - App Store
[AppStore]
Victoria Song
Hey Meta, what’s that building?
This is the sort of thing Zuck’s hoping you’ll ask the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. The company’s finally rolled out landmark recognition for its multimodal AI beta. You can watch it (and a few other demos) in Zuck’s latest Instagram post. Though, unlike Zuck, I don’t recommend asking AI to rate your onesies collection.
Richard Lawler
Mark Zuckerberg has more to say about the Vision Pro and how much worse it is than his Quest headsets.
Once Apple released the Vision Pro, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with a video saying his company’s Quest 3 headset is “the better product, period.”
Now he’s back with more takes, posting this on Threads in response to a post that said, “Apple is selling pretty much the device Meta wants to reach in 3-5 years.”
I don’t think we’re saying the devices are the same. We’re saying Quest is better. If our devices weigh as much as theirs in 3-5 years, or have the motion blur theirs has, or the lack of precision inputs, etc, then that means we’ll have regressed significantly.
Yes, their resolution is higher, but they paid for that with many other product tradeoffs that make their device worse in most ways. That’s not what we aspire to.
Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) on Threads
[Threads]
Victoria Song
Is my Persona better?
There’s a new Vision Pro update out, and visionOS 1.1 supposedly improves everybody’s favorite feature, Personas. But I think it’s still the stuff of nightmares. I FaceTimed my friend, and according to her: I still look too sleepy, my mouth moves more, and my eyes are better but not quite right.
“It looks more like you, but it’s still not you.” What do y’all think?
1/3My first persona
Wes Davis
Apparently Foxtrot is still going?
As a nerd kid, this was one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. But I haven’t looked at the funny pages in many years, and had assumed this one had long since expired.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw a Foxtrot strip referencing Apple’s recently-launched Vision Pro.
Sean Hollister
VR / XR / AR shots fired.
Meta’s CTO says there are reasons Meta thumbed its nose at Google re: AndroidXR (something The Info reported this morning). He suggests Google’s talking shit about Meta behind its back and demanding “restrictive terms.”
I can see why Google might try: Oculus was once so willing to partner, it left Samsung and Xiaomi in charge of its mobile fate — and Google has a long, successful history of tying up partners with contracts in exchange for Google apps and a cut of search revenue. But does Meta need Google, or the other way round?
Wes Davis
What’s the Vision Pro like after a month?
Joanna Stern writes in The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s face computer isn’t so great for work, but serves well as an escape from day-to-day life. You know, like a VR headset.
Still, even if the Vision Pro isn’t always magic, she finds it handy for focusing “on a single task, like writing a column.”
Wes Davis
This is why we can’t have nice [360-degree YouTube videos on the Vision Pro].
It’s about codecs and resolution. 4K-and-up videos only use either YouTube’s VP9 codec or the royalty-free AV1. Christian Selig, developer of the Juno YouTube app, writes that 360 video of the former can’t work because it requires Apple’s blessing. And the Vision Pro’s M2 chip has no AV1 hardware decoder, so that’s out, too.
Why not 1080p, he asks? Because it looks like doo-doo.
Trials and tribulations of 360° video in Juno
[christianselig.com]
Victoria Song
Oppo just busted out AI smart glasses at MWC.
Oppo’s Air Glass 3 look like an ordinary pair of glasses, but it connects to Oppo smartphones to access the company’s AndesGPT LLM. Like other smart glasses, you tap the sides for controls and it can play music, display information, and take voice calls.
So far, it sounds similar to what Meta is trying to do with the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, where you can ask an AI assistant to deliver more context about the things you actually see. The catch is it won’t be available outside of China — and this is only a prototype in any case.
Image: Oppo
Wes Davis
Another rumor suggests that Meta and LG are partnering for a Vision Pro competitor.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is South Korea-bound this week to discuss shipping a headset that incorporates webOS in 2025, Korean Economic Daily is reporting.
It’s not the first rumor that the companies might tag team the Vision Pro, and last month, LG confirmed that it was working on a new headset
Wes Davis
It’s a party in the AVP.
The San Francisco Standard documents some parties where attendees are encouraged to shake their butts while wearing the Vision Pro (from pictures, it seems like most didn’t go along with the ask).
Before you dismiss the idea, consider this: If you don’t have a kid or a dog, “I gotta go; my Vision Pro died” could be a great excuse to leave a party early.
Wes Davis
Escape your friends’ escape room plans with Meta’s new MR escape room game.
Meta announced Cryptic Cabinet on Thursday. The “open-source mixed reality showcase” serves as a reference app for developers who want to use its source code to make mixed reality games for the Quest headsets.
But it’s also a standalone game that generates furniture and other escape room puzzle elements in players’ environments. It’s available on the App Lab.
Andru Marino
You can watch TV on a CRT in the Vision Pro.
If you miss the kitchen TV, then this Television app for Apple’s headset has got your back. You’re able to watch videos (even spatial ones, if you like) on a whole bunch of different 3D models of TVs, from a portable CRT to a Samsung Frame lookalike.
I want to watch iCarly on a big bulky silver 2000s console.