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.
[AppStore]
I’m not the one making this very big claim. That’d be Hugo Barra, former VP of Android and head of Oculus. Go check out his in-depth blog about his Vision Pro experience. It’s a great read overall, but this bit stood out:
Intentionally making the Vision Pro optics blurry is a clever move by Apple because it results in way smoother graphics across the board by hiding the screen door effect (which in practice means that you won’t see pixelation artifacts).
I’ve been hopping between both headsets and... I see what he’s saying!
An alternate game feed on ESPN Plus, Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Plus will present today’s Bruins vs. Penguins matchup as the NHL Big City Greens Classic 2. It goes beyond Nickelodeon’s slime-filled Super Bowl feed by using NHL EDGE positional data and Hawk-Eye optical tracking to turn real action into an animated version.
Sportico explains that to control their animated avatars, commentators have replaced the motion-capture suits they wore for the first game with Meta Quest Pro 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.
[Threads]
Here’s the story behind that photo of a bride giving her new Vision Pro-wearing husband the stink eye. Speaking to Futurism, the now notorious groom says:
“My wife was like, ‘We’re not taking photos in the Vision Pro,’ but I told her it was just for the meme.”
The bride says she wasn’t actually mad and gave the okay after everyone else left. That said, the Vision Pro “was the last thing [she] wanted pictures of.”
At least it wasn’t during the ceremony.
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?
The premiere episode of “Faceless Lady” will debut on April 4th at 5 pm PT on Meta’s social VR platform, with the remaining five episodes dropping every Thursday, Variety reports. This is the third scripted VR original that Roth and Crypt TV have made for Meta, following 2022’s “Haunted House: Trick-VR-Treat” and “Be Mine.”
Those without a Meta Quest headset can catch the first two episodes on Crypt TV’s Facebook page.
It wasn’t just Meta’s social networks that went down yesterday — internet-connected Quest headsets, which should be able to work offline, showed an error message that prevented their main interface from loading, making them useless, as UploadVR detailed today.
Mark Rabkin, Meta’s VP of VR, blamed a login server bug yesterday, adding that Meta will try to make sure Quest devices are “more resilient.”
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.
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?
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.”
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.
[christianselig.com]
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
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.
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.
ESPN will start feeding VR content to the Meta Quest Xtadium app soon. That includes “immersive 180-degree VR” sports highlights from NCAA basketball and football games, interviews, and other content.
ESPN also says it will launch a Meta Horizon Worlds experience this summer. Whatever it is, it’s bound to make more sense than the ESPN phone.
Since the Vision Pro launched, we all knew intrepid first adopters would take the headset into the real world. However, the San Diego Police Department issued a safety reminder on Instagram that perhaps not every situation is suited for mixed reality.
“Keep those virtual experiences on the sidewalk, folks, and let’s cross streets the old-fashioned way — with our eyes wide open to the real world, unobstructed and without distractions!”
Nobody tell them about the dude wearing the Vision Pro in the Cybertruck.
Apple doesn’t sell a stand for the Vision Pro, so developer Christian Selig took it upon himself to create one — just like the unofficial YouTube app he made for the headset, too.
This stand allows the headset to hang vertically, making it take up a bit less space on your desk as opposed to some other storage options out there. Selig has uploaded all the design files onto MakerWorld, so you can 3D print the stand for yourself.
To celebrate the anniversary of GBA4iOS its developer, Riley Testut, has released a new Game Boy emulator for the Vision Pro, GBA4vOS. It currently supports emulation for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance.
The emulator lets you control WarioWare mini games by just rotating the window. And if you always thought the buttons on the Game Boy Advance SP were too small? There’s a giant solution for that too.
In this interview for the Voices of VR podcast, Apollo developer Christian Selig shares his experience creating Juno, an unofficial YouTube player he created for the Vision Pro in only a week’s time.
Despite the small number of people who own the headset, he says he’s earned enough from it to buy “multiple” Vision Pros.
I keep a pretty bushy mustache, and it seems to prevent the headset’s downward-facing cameras from seeing and translating what my mouth is doing to my Persona’s real-time expressions during a Vision Pro FaceTime call. Apparently, I’m not alone.
In fairness, Persona is still a beta feature. Maybe visionOS 1.1 will save my friends from this horror show.
While many people are excitedly entering Apple’s spatial computing future, some Vision Pro early adopters have already packed the devices up and sent them back for a refund. Reasons we’ve heard include eye fatigue, few useful apps available so far, and a lack of window / workspace persistence.
If you bought one on day one, the return window is closing now, so let us know if you’re deciding to keep your headset and why.
Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator are both making their way to Apple’s headset, developers Owlchemy Labs announced. They don’t say when the games will arrive, but they should offer a welcome stress reliever for whenever you’re not filling out spreadsheets or attending Zoom calls.
XR designer Greg Madison has created this chrome ball as a fun way to visualize how Apple’s headset can reflect lighting in augmented reality based on your real environment.
Reflection mapping is hardly new or unique to the Vision Pro, but Madison’s experiment is commendably easy to play with — just open the file in this Google Drive link while you’re wearing the headset.
Call me pessimistic, but I was sure Google would immediately slam the breaks on Christian Selig’s third-party YouTube app (especially now the company plans to make a YouTube app of its own). But Juno is still going strong, and Selig has just released its 1.1 version update. Improvements include a playback quality selector, drag and drop support, bug fixes, and other performance and UI tweaks.
[christianselig.com]
Valve Prism: the standalone Valve VR headset we’ve been waiting for? This convincing-at-first-glance site shows a chunky, heavy (850 grams!) headset with Vision Pro-caliber Micro OLED displays and claims of untethered PC-like graphics performance.
A quick jaunt into the site’s HTML code, though, repeatedly suggests the name of the company is “VaIve.” As in Vaive. As in, it includes a sans-serif letter that rhymes with “eye.”
The website also claims it offers “50-point lips, jaw, teeth, and tongue tracking.”
Update, 7:30PM ET: “Nope, this is NOT us,” Valve confirms.
