0:00

So after we recorded the podcast

0:02

last week, I was

0:04

sitting in the living room and I opened up

0:07

an app on my

0:09

phone that had an advertisement in it for

0:12

a fast food place. And

0:14

of course, I was doing the beeps. My phone

0:16

was at maximum volume and the

0:18

phone was like, yo, you want

0:21

some chicken nuggets, man? We got chicken nuggets

0:23

full volume. And everybody looked at me like,

0:25

what's going on here, man? Your phone is

0:28

yelling at you. This was an app advertisement

0:30

to be clear, not like a YouTube advertisement.

0:32

This was an, I think it was probably

0:34

in Reddit if I had to guess. So

0:37

that seems illegal. I don't think

0:39

you should be able to play sounds on people's devices unsolicited,

0:41

but you know, I think there's a lot of things

0:43

you shouldn't be able to do with people's devices and

0:45

yet somehow they continue. You know what I do think

0:48

you should be able to do, uh, Brad?

0:51

What's that? Is he some absolute

0:53

garbage food on the superb owl

0:55

Sunday? Yeah. You know, I don't

0:57

care much about football, but it

0:59

does seem like a good excuse

1:01

for indulgence decadence. If you will.

1:03

Yeah. Get, get a, get a like, well, like, where,

1:05

where do you like to go? What's your starting point? What do

1:07

you kick off with? Like you like a protein

1:09

and you like a lot of carbs or what

1:11

are you, what are you, what's your strategy? Man.

1:14

Uh, I mean, it varies by event. Okay.

1:16

You know, like if it's Christmas, I mean, obviously this

1:18

is not Christmas, but like

1:20

the holidays, it's like sausage balls and

1:23

things of that nature. Like I like a, I like

1:25

a sausage ball, all the sausage ball for a football

1:27

game. I don't know. It's a different

1:29

category of stuff. You know, football game. It's like chips

1:32

and dip. It's like bad. It's worse stuff. I don't

1:34

know. Buffalo wings. Well, okay. So I guess the question

1:36

is, if you're doing a spread for a football game,

1:38

do you put plates like, is it a drive by

1:40

you just grab something and jam it in your face

1:43

or are you like putting a little plate next to this? You

1:45

can make like a little spread and then take it back to

1:48

your seat to watch the game. Yeah. I think it's, I think

1:50

it's proper to always have a little plate. Even if you don't

1:52

need it, you and I are different people. I would say plate

1:54

plates optional is what I'm going to say. It's okay. If you

1:56

just want to drive by, dip a chip and go, go for

1:59

it. If you want a plate to

2:01

catch the crumbs or whatever, I won't argue. Okay, like

2:03

in a crumb, if you're eating something that has crumbs

2:05

or like, I guess if you're doing a dip, you

2:08

have like a seven layer dip there. You want to

2:10

get a big spoonful of that and slop it down

2:12

on your plate. Oh, seven layer dip is... What

2:15

are your seven layers? It's like guac

2:17

and refried beans, sour cream, probably some

2:20

sort of cheese mix. Uh, lettuce and

2:22

tomato. Does that count as one or two layers?

2:24

I think that's each a layer. That's six. And

2:26

then maybe olives? Yes, olives. We'd say sour cream.

2:28

Man, maybe I should... So yeah, I'm sitting here

2:31

trying to think what... I'm going to be solo.

2:33

Yeah. Unless I swing by your house. I'm not

2:36

sure yet. I'm saying make a seven layer dip

2:38

and then that's like two, three meals right there.

2:40

That's true. I don't know. Did

2:42

you guys ever do the Rotel tomato

2:44

dip? Are you kidding me? Yes. Okay.

2:48

You mean you take a half a slab of Velveeta and

2:50

a can of Rotel and put it in the microwave oven

2:52

for four minutes? That's the easiest thing you can possibly make

2:54

for a party situation. There's an amount of that that you

2:56

should stop at. Like that's one of those things. Once

2:59

you... It becomes clear that it

3:01

is not real food. About

3:03

midway through a bowl of that. So that's my quandary.

3:05

If I'm going to be by myself and I make

3:07

an entire serving, like an entire

3:09

dish of that, something

3:12

bad might happen. Look, that is no one man

3:14

should concern one entire serving. And then also you're

3:16

going to have a half a slab of Velveeta

3:19

left over too, which is... It's

3:21

no longer shelf stable once you open the foil. Wait,

3:24

is that actually true? But

3:26

Velveeta is not in the chilled section of

3:28

the grocery store, Brad. It's ultra pasteurized. This

3:30

is how you know I've never had to

3:33

buy Velveeta before. So I was

3:35

thinking like a five... Seven layers is pretty good though.

3:37

Because that's how you got some like protein and the

3:39

refried beans, maybe put some black beans on top if

3:41

you want to go for an unprecedented eighth

3:43

layer. You

3:45

got dairy, you got a vegetable somewhere

3:48

in there with the guac and lettuce.

3:50

Man, you know what? You might be

3:52

on something. I was thinking just buy

3:54

a giant bag of tortilla chips, make

3:56

the Rottel Velveeta thing, maybe make some

3:58

fresh guacamole. mully to go between back

4:00

and forth, you know, not all of

4:02

the healthy to cut it with some

4:04

healthy fats. Yeah. But the seven layer

4:07

might trump all of that actually. So I've got some wild

4:09

cards for you. One is that you can do wings in

4:11

the oven real easy if you dry them off all the

4:13

way and then do salt

4:15

and a little bit of baking powder on the

4:17

outside, a little crisp off real good and like

4:19

an oven. You

4:22

want them to be super dry. There's a serious

4:24

recipe for those that's good, but cut the salt

4:26

on that is my advice. The

4:28

other one is a lucky peach

4:30

recipe from way back where they're like, just

4:33

go buy a couple

4:35

of a couple of bags of

4:37

the cheapest shrimp ramen that they

4:39

have at your grocery store and

4:41

then throw out the noodles and

4:43

take the packets and put them in a quart

4:45

of sour cream and stir it up and let

4:48

it sit overnight. And it turns

4:50

into like a French onion dip, but it's

4:52

like raw shrimp ramen dip. And it is

4:54

that in some ruffles is

4:56

unbelievable. That is the

4:59

most collegiate food recipe strategy

5:01

I have ever heard. So I was

5:03

skeptical of this. I made a

5:06

batch when we went camping with

5:08

the kiddos school friends last summer

5:10

and everybody was like,

5:12

what is this? I was like, it's shrimp dip. Just

5:14

try to, it's pretty remarkable. And everybody's like, I don't

5:17

know, shrimp dip. And

5:19

then like 45 minutes later, the entire

5:21

quart of sour cream was gone. It was

5:23

like vultures and descended on that stuff. That

5:25

sounds dangerous. Speaking of things that are not

5:27

entirely food. I'm

6:00

Will. I'm Brad. Hello. Doing this before

6:02

we eat lunch is dangerous. Yes, I'm

6:04

hungry. Is it? I just ate a

6:06

hot dog and I'm hungry again because of all the dip talk.

6:08

This is how you solve this problem. You just stop eating. I

6:11

mean, okay, I'm being a little flip. Don't

6:13

stop eating. But frankly is

6:15

half the reason I started fasting was,

6:18

man, I don't have time to eat until like

6:20

two or three o'clock every day anyway. Might

6:23

as well just make this a formal declaration.

6:25

I'm much more into slowing it turns out.

6:27

Mmm, but yeah, it's uh It's it's the

6:29

it's time for the Super Bowl. I didn't

6:31

even look at TV sales this year. Usually

6:34

I look at TV sales around Super Bowl because that's

6:36

a good time for that. Yeah, a friend of the

6:38

show, a friend of

6:40

the show recently bought a ridiculously oversized TV.

6:43

Oh How

6:45

oversized are we talking? 100 inches. Wow.

6:48

And when he told us what it cost It

6:51

was less than I paid for my Panasonic

6:53

like 10 years ago. No kidding. Yeah, I

6:56

was shocked. TV's gotten pretty cheap Yeah,

6:59

I don't I don't have a wall large enough

7:01

for a hundred inch TV though I don't think

7:03

trying to think your living room

7:05

how big zeroes now 65 65

7:08

I've decided 65 is kind of a sweet

7:10

spot 65 is pretty good Norma's

7:13

77 I think which is which is You

7:17

know substantial enough that his he also has

7:19

a ceiling so it makes a difference Yes,

7:21

if you have a foot ceiling 65 seems

7:23

like pretty much I don't think I want

7:25

to go much much bigger Yeah, I gotta

7:27

tell you I have become violently HDR pilled

7:30

Oh really like I know we've talked about it before you

7:32

don't know what you're missing I thought I knew what I

7:34

was missing I did not have you turned it on on

7:36

like I'm like the PC now you playing video games on

7:38

the PC Not as

7:41

yet. Okay, I've been playing trying to

7:43

finish that Final Fantasy 7 remake boys Is there

7:45

some bright ass stuff in that game? Oh, I

7:47

didn't play that with HDR and cuz I streamed

7:50

it It looks really good. Oh,

7:52

it's how far in are you chapter 8 or 9

7:54

currently? I've still got a ways to go. Are you

7:56

doing all the like the side stuff with the with

7:58

the VR missions and all that stuff? Uh,

8:00

I don't think they're called VR missions, but this

8:02

is a nearly three-year-old playthrough, and I have been

8:04

doing all the side stuff when I

8:06

dropped it two and a half years ago. Oh, so

8:09

you just picked it back up. You didn't start at the beginning. No, no,

8:11

no. I picked up my very old save

8:13

and just got back into it. So I might get side

8:15

stuff in the interest of just getting through it. Couple

8:17

of those, couple of those vital VR

8:20

things are pretty hard. Yeah.

8:23

It's a good game. I really enjoyed it. Having

8:25

never played those before, I was, I was,

8:27

I was enthralled. We're

8:29

not here to talk about Final Fantasy today, Brad. We

8:32

are here to talk about the ultimate VR

8:34

mission. Yes, we're here to talk about the

8:36

Final Fantasy. Yeah, the, the,

8:39

it's the spatial computing revolution. It's here,

8:41

it's now. And

8:43

with us to talk about

8:45

it is tested.com and youtube.com/Testedcom's

8:47

Norman Chan, a VR

8:49

aficionado, AR expert, and just all around

8:52

swell guy. Welcome to the show, Norm.

8:57

Okay, Norm, you're the first Vision

9:00

Pro person, bro.

9:03

I know. Vision Bro. Oh, nice.

9:05

Is that, is that, is that, is that, how do you

9:07

feel about that? Do you feel like that's an epithet or

9:09

you feel like it's a badge of honor at this point?

9:11

Um, I don't know. I don't know how I felt about

9:13

that. I mean, I, I feel like

9:16

how I felt when I first bought

9:18

the iPhone. That's how this all

9:20

feels right now. The energy, the energy within

9:23

me, the energy in the, uh,

9:25

in the community, there wasn't any Reddit back then really.

9:27

I guess there was a little bit

9:29

of Reddit. Reddit was big back then. But they didn't

9:31

really have a community. But like, you know, the internet

9:33

feels like the energy of 2007. I,

9:36

except we're all a little bit older. A little bit.

9:38

Did you, did you buy a launch iPhone? Um,

9:41

I did buy a launch iPhone and I did exactly

9:43

the same thing where I didn't pre-order. We

9:46

were working together. Well, so we were at

9:48

Maximum PC. I was really on Windows, uh,

9:51

not Windows mobile. It was CE

9:53

back then. No, it was Windows mobile by then.

9:55

It would have been. It wasn't, it was post pocket PC.

9:58

But anyway, you know, HTC had their phone. with

10:01

the keypad, the keyboard, and there you do

10:04

web browsing on that one. I was like,

10:06

oh, that's the one I want. And then

10:08

iPhone came out and literally I think the

10:10

second day I went to an AT&T store

10:12

and got a family hookup to spend the

10:14

$500 to buy the phone. And

10:17

I don't think I even had like my

10:19

own like real phone account. I had to

10:21

switch AT&T accounts, even pay for data and

10:24

get on edge network. But all

10:26

things like that. And that is very exciting.

10:29

There's a lot of new discovery, a lot

10:31

of discussion. But you could

10:33

then the entirety of this new

10:36

interface, this new form of computing, this

10:39

new form of entertainment, I

10:41

felt like I could encompass it all in

10:43

my brain. I could survey the entire landscape.

10:46

And I could follow along before

10:48

the world before

10:51

the hockey stick moment before everyone's before

10:53

a billion apps before a billion

10:56

websites, like what everyone is discovering

10:59

now with the headset ever with every

11:01

day with the community's learning about it.

11:03

With every new that nap that's coming out,

11:05

I feel like I could actually fit that

11:07

all into my brain, which is

11:09

cool. Let me ask real fast,

11:12

not to put the card before the horse here. Are you

11:15

suggesting this thing is going to be as transformational as

11:17

the iPhone was? Or are you just saying, hey, no,

11:19

no, I'm just

11:21

saying it's different enough. And it's exciting enough

11:24

that there and the people who bought

11:27

into it are

11:29

engaged with it enough. And there are

11:31

new enough things to discover with it,

11:33

that in this moment, you know, literally

11:35

one week after it's released,

11:38

the people who have it are still very

11:40

much in that honeymoon phase with it.

11:43

Are you still? Okay,

11:45

so I'm putting the card way ahead of the horse here,

11:48

but actually, let's go back because iPhone's

11:50

an interesting place. Remember the iPhone

11:52

launched with no apps, right? The only apps,

11:54

like your apps were save this

11:56

webpage as an icon on your home screen. And that,

11:59

and that was. was how you access that was, that was,

12:01

that was their whole pitch. You know, you're not going to be apps.

12:03

You have the full web on this thing. And then of course they

12:05

destroyed the web for the next 20, 15 years. So, um, I

12:09

guess two questions, uh,

12:12

which thing that we love and is

12:14

good for humanity is this going to destroy? And,

12:16

um, do you feel like there's

12:18

a hole? Like, do you feel like there's some hole in

12:20

it that's that is like, are

12:23

they going to ship a version next year with controllers? Cause they're like, yo,

12:25

we can't, it turns out you need controllers for a 3d headset. If you

12:27

want to be able to do a lot of the stuff that people want

12:29

to do. Yeah. The, the,

12:31

the biggest hole in it right now, and

12:34

they've built in some of

12:36

this, the, the backend to support this

12:38

is for more communal things to do.

12:40

Uh, share play is the protocol that

12:42

they have where people

12:44

can, if the app support

12:46

it, they can collaborate, they can have their

12:49

personas, their avatars in, you

12:51

know, whether it's in the FaceTime

12:53

windows or some, you know, without

12:55

the, without the frame border, but

12:57

floating in your virtual space so

13:00

that you can collectively

13:02

sink, you know, watching a movie,

13:04

which you can do today, but you can do that

13:06

on the iPad and the, and the Apple TV or,

13:08

or whatever. Right. Yeah. But you can't do that in

13:10

a, in a spatial way, right?

13:12

You're, when you do an iPad, you're confined

13:14

boxes in the frame of your iPad boxes

13:16

in the frame of your phone here.

13:19

It's personas in

13:21

rectangles and squares, uh,

13:23

in theoretically the endless space

13:25

of your home or whatever environment you might

13:28

be. Oh, okay. So like, if you watch

13:30

a movie and you share play with two

13:32

other people who have headsets, yes,

13:34

are like your little heads sitting or everybody's head sitting

13:36

in chairs in like a theater and their boxes are

13:38

just floating there. It's like, no, no,

13:41

right now they're floating where you put them. Okay.

13:44

So the sound of where that person is

13:46

coming from is positionally,

13:49

is, is calculated and is positioned where

13:51

you put their little window. But

13:54

the protocol does allow for a few

13:57

different collaborative

14:00

defaults where you could have an auditorium

14:03

setting where the windows are all, everyone's in

14:05

a semi-circle looking at a

14:07

shared thing, the theater equivalent, or

14:11

it could be in a circle around

14:14

an object. If you have

14:16

a jig space, it's an application where you

14:18

can do exploded diagrams of 3D models, and

14:20

that's the perfect one where they're going to

14:22

implement share play and people wearing headsets. Theoretically,

14:26

they would be around the AI. Exactly.

14:28

They would be loading the same 3D model, and

14:30

that all, the model is fixed to the back

14:32

end, so one person manipulating that model would

14:35

be sending the data for then that model to be similarly

14:38

in real time, or as close to real

14:40

time, manipulated back on that end. And

14:43

not being video is important, which is also... Oh,

14:46

yeah. We'll talk about that. That's the good stuff for saving that for

14:48

a minute. Is

14:53

there like an MCP or Emperor mode where you can

14:55

make one person's head really, really huge and everybody else's

14:57

are tiny, or is that like a per... No,

14:59

no. And honestly, you can make your... I mean,

15:02

you can grow those windows, those

15:05

persona windows, as big as, I guess, there's

15:07

a large cap tool, but you can shrink

15:09

and grow the other people's windows

15:12

to different sizes and position them

15:14

in different places. Relatively

15:16

speaking, if I move your

15:21

window to the right of me, yes,

15:23

your audio is coming into my right ear, but

15:26

it doesn't change my

15:28

audio in your virtual space. The

15:31

only thing it might change

15:33

is the camera angle from that

15:35

you see in your view of me, but the audio that you would hear

15:37

from me is

15:40

still locked to where you put that window. So

15:42

there's a bit of asymmetricality in terms of the

15:45

audio positioning. So you kind of figure out where

15:47

it is. Everyone is relative to each other. The

15:50

camera angles, you have to think of those little FaceTime windows as

15:52

like, that's where the selfie cam is. So

15:56

no mystery science theater mode for communal movie

15:58

watching just yet? Not yet. Yeah, and

16:00

I'm sure there'll be applications. Again, this is

16:02

so close to whether it's the iPhone launch

16:04

moment or the iPad. And honestly, the more

16:07

I think about it, it feels more like

16:09

the iPad moment, because so much of what

16:11

I'm doing in this headset seems to be

16:13

replacing things I would have been doing with

16:16

the iPad more than the iPhone,

16:20

watching movies, browsing the web, or

16:23

even using it as a display for a MacBook.

16:27

That's a thing that you can do with the iPad. But

16:29

it's having, as opposed to one iPad in

16:31

front of you, it's having as many iPad instances

16:34

in front of you. And yes, iPad has

16:36

some form of multitasking, but this is actually

16:39

instances of those applications running in real time. And I would

16:41

say one last thing is, remember when

16:43

the iPad launched, they also bootstrapped iOS.

16:47

And they bootstrapped a bunch of the ability to

16:49

run iPhone applications on iPad in

16:51

that small little scale window that could blow

16:53

up. So in that sense, that reminds

16:55

me a lot of how you

16:57

can pull iPad apps into Vision OS. That's

17:01

what I was gonna say, is it seems like, hey,

17:03

you can run the old apps in

17:05

a slightly janky, but still fully workable

17:07

way, is

17:10

the difference in the functionality between this and

17:13

the iPhone and the iPad launch. Okay,

17:16

so the one thing

17:18

I was surprised about by this is it seems like almost

17:20

everybody who's gotten them that I've seen write accounts

17:23

of their process, whether they did the

17:25

mail order, or the pickup

17:27

and store has ended up, like

17:29

you end up in the store no matter what it sounds like. I

17:33

don't know, it's probably not ideal for Apple's perspective. No, I'd

17:35

say all that, right? I'd say they probably wanna work that

17:37

out, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and then the reason you have to

17:39

do that is because the fit

17:42

is so important. Yeah. It's

17:45

not one size fit all. And what Apple

17:47

is doing, if people don't know, if you buy a Quest headset, there

17:51

are basically two options by

17:54

default. What size is, yeah,

17:57

depth actually, or I guess. For

18:00

the facial interface, actually, I've lost track. They

18:02

used to have different face

18:05

interfaces, which is the plastic part

18:07

with the cushion that touches your face that connects

18:09

to the headset. There are

18:11

ones that accommodate glasses with the previous Oculus

18:14

headsets. The new one, the

18:16

Quest 3, the default facial interface, you can slide

18:18

it in and out, give yourself

18:20

some extra eye relief, and you can

18:22

change out the pads. And there have been total

18:25

cottage industry of third-party companies like

18:27

VR Cover making their own interfaces

18:30

that are maybe softer, more

18:32

cushier, better conform against faces.

18:35

Sweat-resistant. Yeah, exactly. But none

18:37

of those have dramatic actual

18:40

geometry differences, structural differences, shape

18:42

differences for all the different

18:45

shapes that people have because

18:47

of how big their forehead

18:49

might be or how high their cheeks are. The

18:51

cheekbones are because

18:54

primarily you're talking about where

18:57

this headset rests relative to your forehead, your

18:59

cheeks, and the side of your eyes as

19:01

well. Those are the primary pressure points. On

19:05

the highly customizable

19:07

end, there's Big Screen Beyond, which is

19:09

the PC Steam VR base

19:12

headset. And they do a fully customized facial

19:14

interface, which uses the iPhone scanner. What do

19:16

you think, like scan your face? Oh, okay.

19:18

Like you have to go use

19:20

a web applet, and it uses an iPhone.

19:22

You have to use an iPhone, which has

19:24

the front-facing camera with the LiDAR, the Face

19:26

ID sensor. And you scan your face, you

19:28

send them that scan, and they

19:30

actually have a custom manufacturing process

19:32

that mills a silicone

19:36

face interface. So

19:38

it is perfect light ceiling, like

19:40

has every single contour. But they

19:42

are manufacturing those one

19:45

at a time for every user. And that

19:47

can scale to only as much as their

19:49

capacity to scale. It's not

19:51

necessarily a 200,000 units on day one type thing.

19:56

What Apple has done is in the middle. So you

19:58

do have to scan your face. face when

20:01

you decide to purchase this. So whether you're

20:03

going to a store or you've been the

20:05

order online in order to

20:07

put an order through, you have to scan your face.

20:10

You can do it multiple times. And

20:12

it's a matter of like looking up down

20:14

left, right, like twice. And then

20:16

based on that geometry, they put you

20:18

in one of 28 different fits. So they

20:20

have 28 different skews of

20:25

what they call the light seal. And

20:27

it's really 14 different shapes

20:30

with a narrow and wide option. So 14 times

20:32

two. But it's not just like

20:34

sizes. It's not like smallest, you know, size one

20:36

and 14 is the largest

20:38

and then a narrow and a wide option. It's

20:41

actually different contours based on how they touch your

20:43

cheeks. And I

20:45

was gonna say the interesting thing about this is Apple's

20:47

one of the few companies in the world that's actually

20:49

big enough to look at the whole spectrum of humanity

20:51

and say, okay, we can break

20:53

this is the smallest number of pieces

20:55

that we can break break the shape

20:58

of faces down into, right? So it's

21:00

kind of a scale, right? I'm sure

21:02

you get even more granular because they're

21:04

not accommodating for like no sizes, because

21:06

the no sizes, the way

21:08

the face interface touches the light seal touches your

21:10

nose is that it's just a piece of cloth.

21:13

So theoretically, you could have those 28 different

21:15

sizes for face shapes, plus times

21:17

however many different no sizes,

21:19

they've chose something that's manageable from a supply

21:21

chain and like distribution standpoint.

21:24

But to go back to your question, why

21:26

it sounds like everyone's going to the

21:29

store is that I from

21:31

my experience, the fit isn't right. Like Jeremy got

21:33

his he fitted his he was like a 21

21:35

W I'm a 23 W because it

21:38

might have lens inserts and people kind of

21:40

deciphered what those things mean. They do differ

21:42

in terms of the depth

21:44

in terms of how far your eyes

21:46

are away from the optics because they

21:48

give you there is a model that

21:50

gives you a little bit of extra depth

21:53

to accommodate for the Zeiss lens inserts. Yeah,

21:55

some people don't want that depth because they

21:57

want the widest field of view and so

21:59

they won't try to override what Apple

22:01

is recommending for their face by

22:04

going to the store and saying, I know you

22:06

told me this thing is the best fit for

22:08

me and it maybe fits well, but I want

22:10

to be as close to the lenses as possible.

22:12

So please give me the survey of like, give

22:14

me the five options I can try in the

22:16

store. And if you set up an appointment for this, and

22:19

they will literally bring out a cart with five

22:21

different facial interfaces and let you sit there

22:23

for as long as you want, at

22:26

least in this opening week and opening weekend as long

22:28

as you want and try the different

22:31

fits, try the different cushions. It's

22:33

very much like a concierge, buying

22:35

a new fancy car experience. And

22:38

then if you're happy, you pick the one you want,

22:41

you can have two weeks

22:43

to exchange the one that came

22:45

with your headset. And then you take home

22:47

the one that hopefully is the best fit for you. Can

22:49

you buy additional gaskets now if you have

22:51

like another family member or something you want?

22:53

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's 200 bucks. And

22:56

yeah, I know. Yeah, I'll tell you, it's a

22:58

first $3,500 base price headset for that's the 256 gigs, $200

23:05

for capacity. So that's 512 and then up to

23:07

a terabyte $400 extra for a terabyte. So

23:11

almost 4,000 before tax. And

23:14

then if you want new light seals

23:16

200 bucks each, if you want new

23:18

head straps, that nice knitted head strap,

23:20

that's 100 bucks. And

23:23

then new just the

23:25

light seal cushions, I believe are like 20

23:28

bucks. Yeah. So it's worth mentioning on the

23:30

light seal. There's two parts to this thing.

23:32

There's the cushion part, which is what I

23:34

was expecting from like using

23:36

vibes and rifts and all

23:39

that stuff over the years. And then that's

23:41

the padded thing it magnets onto. The light

23:43

seal is like the, it looks like the

23:45

side of the headset, basically. It's

23:48

like the part that comes out of the front

23:50

of the headset, where the headset is flat and

23:52

then goes back to where it hits your face. So

23:54

it's like a shroud basically. Yeah.

23:58

Yeah. Yeah. It's the thing that makes the head. heads that look thick. Yeah.

24:01

It's this mesh thing. It's like the

24:05

tunnel that you're looking through that connects

24:09

the thing that's your face. It's hard

24:11

to explain in an audio podcast. It's the thing that makes it

24:13

not a pair of glasses and makes it a pair of goggles.

24:16

It closes off the outside world on

24:18

your peripherals. And that whole

24:20

thing removes, which I didn't understand that from anything

24:22

that we'd seen until. So full

24:25

disclosure, I went over to Norm's house on Monday and

24:27

spent an hour in the headset. Thank

24:29

you for letting me do that, by the way, Norm. I

24:31

appreciate it. No problem. I goo-ing up your headset for you.

24:37

The straps feel really good. The one that

24:39

looks like a pair of Nikes felt really good. I

24:41

was really surprised. But the Space Age

24:44

looks like a piece of NASA equipment one,

24:46

the ridged one. Yeah, it's ridged. So

24:50

the headset does include two

24:52

straps. What they showed

24:54

last year was this knitted head

24:56

strap, which is, to

24:59

their credit, a lot better than any of

25:01

the bundled straps that come with the Oculus

25:04

headsets. The Oculus headsets come with two

25:07

pieces of like an inch and a half wide

25:12

of strapping that look like the elastic

25:14

straps, exactly elastic straps, the top strap,

25:16

and Velcro on. And

25:18

they're serviceable. But anyone buying

25:20

a Quest, I would highly recommend them looking to

25:23

a third party strap or a rigid strap, like

25:25

the, I guess, what they call

25:27

the elite strap, which is

25:29

something like $70. What

25:31

Apple decided to do is they did not

25:34

want to go with a rigid strap. They

25:37

did not want hard plastic. And I think they really know

25:39

that people are going to want to watch movies on this.

25:42

And they want people to be able to lay the

25:44

back of their head on a chair or on a

25:46

couch comfortably. So

25:49

they could have gone with just your standard

25:52

jockstrap type material. But they went with something

25:54

that widens in the back or is wider

25:56

in the back that kind of cups the

25:58

back of your head. more. And so,

26:00

you know, while it may be just like an

26:02

inch and a quarter inch and half at the

26:04

point where it connects to the side bands, by

26:07

the time it gets to the back of your head, it's like, you

26:09

know, two and a half, three inches, and it

26:11

does mesh out and they have two strings

26:13

essentially on the top of the bottom that

26:16

then tighten and loosen with a knob

26:18

on the side. And that tightening

26:20

process is super easy and comfortable.

26:22

I've been really enjoying that. It's,

26:25

it breathes. The material that you use feels like

26:27

a fly net type material for a shoe too.

26:29

So, it didn't, like at no point, even though

26:31

there was a lot of coverage on the back

26:33

of my head, did the back of my head

26:35

start feeling sweaty or anything? It was just, you

26:37

just forgot it was there after a minute. And

26:39

it accordions, right? Like, you know, when you get to

26:42

the small size, it, you know, it punches up in

26:44

just the right way. It loosens up

26:46

in just the right way. So, you get a lot

26:48

of, there's a lot, and it's three sizes of that

26:50

one too. That comes in small, medium, large, but

26:54

it's still a soft strap. And

26:56

because you don't have this rigid, you know, you don't

26:59

have a rigid or a counterweight and you don't have

27:01

a rigid strap to help support the weight of the

27:03

headset that's in front of you. And it's a relatively

27:05

heavy headset, even with the battery being outside

27:08

of it. A lot of that

27:10

glass and aluminum and display weight just droops

27:12

down in your face. And even if you

27:14

have the best fit

27:17

for the light seal and you

27:19

have the perfect fit for the

27:22

back strap, it is a hard thing

27:24

to use for more than an hour

27:26

at a time. If you are just looking

27:29

forward and not reclining, reclining, I find it much

27:31

easier to use. So I was, it's funny, I

27:33

was going to ask that I, since I was

27:35

using yours with your face seal, which, which I

27:37

had received, the machine told me I

27:39

needed a different size face seal than you had, which

27:42

is fine. But I was curious

27:44

what the, if the comfort, comfort is

27:46

better with the ideally properly fitting face

27:48

seal. And it sounds like, like

27:50

I, at the end of an hour, I was, I was

27:53

pretty good. It turns out. And

27:55

the thing that helps the most is having

27:57

some type of top strap support. And so

28:00

The second thing they included, which from

28:02

what I understand was a later

28:04

edition, maybe something that they decided

28:06

after the WWDC reception, is

28:09

kind of like your jock strap equivalent, which is a band

28:11

that goes in the back of the head and the band

28:13

that goes in the top of the head. It's

28:15

Velcro to tighten. It doesn't have

28:17

any of that fancy knit material. It doesn't have

28:19

your fancy knob to tighten, but it's like, okay,

28:22

you guys want it to top strap? Here's

28:24

what we'll include in the package for you. It's

28:28

not actually what they teased last year, which is a

28:31

top strap that you could attach to the back knit

28:34

version, which is what I wanted and what

28:36

I've cobbled together using a third

28:39

party top strap I have here. Yeah,

28:41

so I was going to say the

28:43

... This

28:47

sounds goofy, but the knob that's on

28:49

that default strap feels really

28:51

good. I don't know

28:53

if you remember when you first used the PSVR, but you

28:55

first used the PSVR and you were like, oh, I just

28:57

put this on and then I turned the thing and then

28:59

it's like, I don't have to do

29:01

any ... There's no Velcroing. I'm not Velcroing my

29:04

hair into this band. It's not a

29:06

take it off, adjust it, put it back

29:08

on kind of situation. You just put it on your

29:10

face and you twist the knob until your head's squeezed

29:12

a comfortable amount and then you're good to go. That

29:15

goes a long way. Have

29:19

you used the two strap, the jock strap

29:21

looking thing? Yeah, and then

29:23

it's better than the default

29:25

by itself. What people have

29:27

actually hacked together is they've spent the extra $100 on getting another

29:31

knit back strap and then 3D printed an

29:36

attachment so you can click that and

29:38

use a second 3D, a second knit

29:41

one with its own dial as the

29:43

top strap. So it's- Then your whole

29:45

head is just ensconced? Yeah, ensconced in

29:48

your Nike knit looking like straps. We've gone

29:50

like 30 minutes just talking about the fit

29:52

of this and there's a lot to talk

29:56

about. Okay, okay, okay. So let's do

29:58

... Let's ... I

30:00

mean the last thing is I'm waiting for some just put in

30:02

a motorcycle helmet where it's just like jamming your face in a

30:04

motorcycle home and that's all you have. I'll

30:07

tell you that the hacks that people have come up with so

30:09

far. I'm people taking off their lights

30:11

completely and operate it with my light coming in

30:13

from the side so they can get the headset

30:15

just. As close to their eyelashes

30:17

and eyeballs as possible it

30:19

works if you kind of attach it with a rubber

30:22

band or clip it to a baseball cap. Basically

30:24

the weight is on the baseball cap and

30:27

it's almost like a visor actually the lid.

30:32

The brim and I've yet

30:34

to try that but there

30:36

will be a whole ecosystem of third party accessories

30:38

and third party strap to make it more comfortable.

30:42

Well and the way the way it mounts and removes

30:44

the straps is pretty fast. Okay let's get let's let's

30:46

let's let's we got some stuff here. Actually if this

30:48

was the last time we're talking about fit I got

30:50

one fit question. Yes yes yes. Before we move on

30:53

how does it rest on your nose. I mean obviously that's going

30:56

to be dependent on which strap you're using like what sitting

30:58

you got at the store and everything. But like I have

31:00

found I don't know if people experience this a lot I

31:02

found in using VR headsets I've got

31:04

some I don't know if there's a name for

31:06

this phobia of having your nose your nostrils pinched

31:08

too much where there is no

31:10

weight on your nose. None. No

31:12

way. The weight is all either on

31:14

your forehead or chin mostly because the way it

31:17

touches your nose was just cheekbones. Yeah sorry. The

31:20

way touches the way it covers

31:22

your nose is with a piece of fabric and it's a

31:25

pretty wide piece of fabric. They're not accommodating for you

31:27

know all no sizes

31:29

with a perfect fit. It's just fabric that rests

31:31

there. The gap

31:33

for the nose is big like the place

31:36

it touched my cheekbones. It's like under my

31:38

pupils not inside close like it didn't I

31:41

didn't get any pressure on my sinuses even

31:43

with the bad fit which was unusual for

31:46

headsets. Okay. Let's

31:48

okay. So let's talk about like when you first put the

31:50

headset on the thing that struck me was the pass through

31:53

and I wasn't expecting both the

31:57

like the latency is basically non-existent it feels

31:59

like. which is new for

32:01

video. That's not something we've

32:03

typically optimized for on video processing tips. And

32:06

it handled things like, we were standing

32:08

in your living room, there's a big giant window looking outside, it

32:11

was a sunny day. It

32:13

didn't have any problems dealing with me looking out the

32:15

window, it didn't have any problems with me switching to

32:17

the dark part of the room. I was really pleasantly

32:19

surprised by, I

32:23

don't imagine myself walking down the street with

32:25

one of these things on ever, but I can understand

32:27

why people would be like, oh yeah, you can totally

32:29

do this after putting it on and having that kind

32:31

of first experience. That's something

32:34

they absolutely prioritized, was this is a pass

32:36

through first device. As much as on

32:38

the hardware side, it is a VR

32:41

headset. The VR aspect of it, putting

32:43

you in environments and

32:45

locations and games is

32:47

secondary to putting you in whatever

32:50

real space you're in through

32:52

video, of course stereo video, pre-projected video,

32:55

and then letting you place

32:58

virtual objects, window paintings. But

33:01

I mean, they're handling that stereo

33:03

video and the de-warping and the

33:05

occlusion and all that stuff, frankly

33:07

better than anything I've ever used. I

33:10

haven't spent a lot of time with Quest 3, but

33:12

other than that, the

33:14

headsets that tried to do occlusion kind of muffed it. And

33:18

in this case, when you put your hand through something,

33:20

your hand intersects it at what feels like the right

33:22

spot when you're putting your hand through a virtual object,

33:24

stuff like that. And it has this nice shimmery edge

33:26

to it when you put it through it. So

33:29

it does better, and we'll use Quest 3 as

33:31

an example, because Quest 3 is also a pass

33:33

through first headset, where by default when you put

33:35

it on, you have color stereo vision that's re-projected.

33:38

It's a perfect, at least

33:41

a spatial re-creation of what's

33:43

in your space. Like if you take the headset

33:45

off, where an object is, is

33:47

exactly where it would be, the fidelity and color

33:49

is the difference. So the difference in

33:51

the Apple Vision Pro is one

33:54

high resolution. So things are just

33:56

sharper and clearer, not as sharp and clear

33:58

as you really want. the camera or

34:00

the screen? The camera,

34:02

the camera. Both. Absolutely. But in

34:05

terms of talking the difference in the pastor,

34:07

what allows it to be better is high

34:09

resolution cameras for video input. They

34:11

have a custom shift, the R1 that allows for the lowest

34:14

latency, you know, at 90 Hertz. So I think if the

34:16

video is coming through at 90 frames a second, it's

34:19

just it's extremely responsive. Waving your hand

34:21

in front of you, your hand is

34:23

moving as fast. There's no lag between

34:25

when you feel like you're moving your

34:27

hand and what the movement of your

34:29

hand looks like through the headset.

34:32

Other thing they're doing is the the

34:36

correction of the stereo optics is

34:38

just better. One

34:40

of the big problem with pass-through video

34:42

and mixed reality is the placement

34:45

of the cameras that you use, you know, aren't

34:48

where your eyeballs are. You need them really to

34:50

be where your your eyeballs are. They're projected. They're

34:52

forward, right? Because that's just the physical design of

34:54

the headset. And so they have to do a

34:56

bunch of calculation. So warp the

34:59

image and basically re-project it to make

35:01

it look like where your

35:03

eyeballs are. So everything is stereo correct. And

35:06

the Quest does a decent job of it. But where

35:08

it really fails is in the

35:10

near field stuff that's kind of up close

35:12

to you. And that's why when you wear

35:15

a Quest, when you hold a phone overview,

35:17

you see all the kind of warping of

35:19

that phone. There's none of that here. They

35:21

really have nailed perfectly the

35:23

re-projected images coming in to

35:25

have it fit where it thinks your eyes are.

35:28

And then the last thing is that occlusion, where

35:30

it's the only system that has built in

35:32

system wide. You can't turn it off recognition

35:35

of your hands, your arms and

35:38

up to your shoulders, really. And

35:41

it's doing in a computer vision way, of course,

35:43

doing skeletal modeling for the

35:46

interaction stuff. But like Will

35:48

said, it's drawing a stenciled outline refreshing

35:50

at 90 frames a second again of your

35:52

two hands. So that regardless of what environment

35:55

you may be in, what virtual objects you

35:57

may have, when you put your hand up,

35:59

you will always. see video pass through of

36:01

your hands on top of

36:03

the objects. Well, and

36:06

it's exactly where your, where your sense of pre-oception detects

36:08

the hand. So like that, that's like, when you, when

36:10

you get close with the quest or with these other

36:12

headsets, then your hand either gets really, really big or

36:14

really, really tiny depending on how they're doing the warping.

36:17

And it, and it didn't, like, it was, it was

36:19

bonkers. How well that worked. Um,

36:22

how, how does the camera do in low

36:24

light norm? Not,

36:26

not great. Okay. It

36:28

still tracks in low light cause it's doing IR

36:30

emitters for, for the, you

36:33

know, the, the slam tracking. Um,

36:35

but you can tell, I mean, it does

36:37

exposure. Um, like you said, like it, um,

36:39

it will, it has some like, I

36:42

think a little bit of HDR built in and that it

36:44

is, the tone mapping of the

36:46

image that's coming through is balancing all the

36:48

exposure levels in the environments. Uh,

36:50

so it does do exposure shift. You can look

36:52

outside a bright window very quickly, uh,

36:55

but very noticeably will shift so you

36:57

can look at what's outside. Uh, it

37:00

was not perfect HDR where I mean, it's

37:02

kind of adjust as if your eyes would be adjusting. Um,

37:04

so you can look outside, but, uh,

37:07

outside of like a normal lit room, you

37:09

know, with, with like lights, you do see

37:11

noise. Um, we don't

37:13

see increased like judder

37:15

or, or, um, or

37:18

smearing in low light. The smear is just there

37:20

all the time also, but that may be more

37:22

a result of the, uh, the OLED panels they

37:24

have and how, right. They set those OLED panels

37:27

as a consequence, the persistence of those pixels last

37:29

a little longer. Do you have

37:31

any control at all over the pass through exposure

37:34

or is it entirely handled by that set? Okay.

37:36

Entirely automatic. Okay. Like I watched, um, I think

37:38

it was Casey Neistat's video where he did a

37:40

lot of like, here's what I'm seeing. And then

37:42

a shot, somebody else was shooting of him out

37:44

externally and the external video was so much brighter

37:46

than what he was seeing inside. And so I

37:49

guess that's just the headset thinks

37:51

it should be. Yep. Yep. Yep. And

37:53

while there was a brightness setting, like it's the

37:56

pass through brightness never gets that bright. You

37:58

never, I mean, that's just. the limitation of

38:02

how bright those panels are through the

38:04

pancake lenses, which takes away orders of

38:06

magnitudes of brightness. But the

38:08

content, the virtual content, I think I find it pretty

38:11

bright, like for movies and the

38:13

virtual content looks fantastic. Well, and

38:15

because of the light seals do a good job

38:17

of blocking out the outside light here, I adjust to

38:19

whatever the norm that the headset presents is. So like

38:22

it feels, at no point did it

38:24

feel dim inside the headset. Let's

38:27

see, did they do the foveated rendering

38:30

on the video too, or is it

38:32

just on the other stuff? Yeah,

38:34

and that's the resolution of this, right?

38:36

So, you know, while the first thing

38:38

people may notice is that it's pass-through

38:40

and it's being responsive, and people who

38:42

may not use, have never used VR

38:45

before, may feel like this should be

38:47

the baseline. And going forward, this

38:49

feels like it should be the baseline of

38:51

pass-through quality. What people

38:53

aren't thinking about, for some VR

38:55

users, is just how sharp these panels

38:57

are. Like, they're taking for granted that we've

38:59

had over 10 years of VR

39:02

without panels anywhere near

39:04

as high resolution as what they put on

39:07

here. I think a lot of the cost

39:09

and expense of the headset goes into the

39:11

display system. People, iFix

39:13

has taken it apart. So I think they've

39:15

identified that these are Sony micro OLEDs that

39:18

are about, you know, like 1.4 inches. They

39:22

looked at, with the microscope, the

39:24

individual pixels and calculated roughly,

39:26

I think I want to say 35 PPD, and

39:30

the pixel dimensions being roughly 3600 pixels by like 3400

39:32

pixels. That's

39:36

crazy. And they've tied that to, you

39:38

know, going to CES and what

39:41

Sony and other, like, display manufacturers like BOE

39:43

have showed, like, they've kind of narrowed in

39:45

on what the supply chain looks like or

39:47

what Apple may have sourced. It may not

39:50

be the exact thing because they always have

39:52

special relationships with display manufacturers. So

39:54

maybe like a variant of something. But, you

39:56

know, Sony also makes these

39:58

micro OLEDs or equivalent of available to

40:01

other partners at extreme cost. And

40:03

I don't know what the budget is. As

40:05

a comparison, big screen beyond, which is that

40:07

PC VR headset, also uses micro

40:09

OLED panels, has a per eye resolution of

40:12

2560 by 2560, which

40:15

I found best in class for

40:17

PC VR, like playing any PC VR game,

40:19

watching movies, Quest 3 is

40:21

like 2100 by 2100 equivalent. And

40:25

so this is like many millions

40:27

of more pixels per

40:30

eye. And the difference

40:32

is so noticeable.

40:35

And because they have much more graphical

40:37

horsepower on this, I think they're super

40:39

sampling. And so there's even

40:43

with windows

40:45

where you might see anti-aliasing, like I

40:48

do a pretty good job of trying to pixel peep and

40:50

trying to spot like the jaggies. You

40:53

can barely, barely, barely notice them. The most you

40:55

can notice is some of the anti-aliasing. I was

40:57

really shocked. I was able to look

41:00

at my phone through the pass-through and see the phone

41:02

screen fine. But when I was looking at windows rendered

41:04

by the device, like

41:09

you could rest your eyeballs on them in

41:12

the spatial computing area of the thing.

41:14

And you couldn't see, there was no way to

41:17

see pixels. You couldn't see pixels at all. The

41:20

only place the pixels showed up was in video. And

41:22

that was a side effect of compression, I think, probably

41:24

rather than anything else. I think the

41:26

places to look are rectangles and

41:29

hard edge rectangles, because even the

41:32

horizon line, if you turn your

41:34

head, the headset has to

41:36

compensate for that. It's no longer really

41:39

aligning with the horizontal lines of the

41:41

display panels. And if

41:43

an application doesn't have super sampling or doesn't

41:45

really put in anti-aliasing, they can start to see

41:48

that shimmering rope effect at

41:52

the edge. But they do

41:54

such a good job that you're not noticing anything

41:56

remotely that you would call screen door

41:59

and pixel. fill is complete. I

42:01

mean, it's not human

42:03

eye resolution. It's like the

42:05

PPD of what a human eye can detect, which

42:08

is like a four to 80 or 90 PPD.

42:10

But anywhere in this past like 30, 35,

42:13

you are, it's well

42:15

enough for reading, and certainly for any

42:17

type of visual media. Um,

42:19

how do you interact with this thing? There's

42:21

no controller, right? So it's it's there's a

42:24

couple of buttons on the headset, and then

42:26

there's gestures, basically. Yeah,

42:29

it's also no controllers. And I was like, one of

42:31

those other big, like, controversial

42:33

decisions they made, because we're so

42:35

used to, in traditional VR, having

42:37

motion controls that

42:40

allow for the abstraction or

42:42

like, complex action, you

42:44

know, norm rigor, phone without a physical keyboard, why

42:46

would you? That's the

42:49

you know, that's, that's, that's the analogy. So

42:53

the, the quote unquote magic, the thing they've worked

42:56

really hard at is

42:58

eye tracking on this eye

43:00

tracking and the hand modeling and

43:02

pairing those into this multimodal interface. So as

43:04

opposed to eye tracking just being used for

43:06

phobia rendering and phobia rendering is there to

43:09

answer your question in the captured

43:11

video that you can capture in the headset. You

43:14

absolutely notice this box of sharpness that's

43:16

moving across as you dart your

43:18

eyes across. It's very fast. There's a ton of

43:20

ton of eye trackers, IR eye trackers in here.

43:23

We should the phobia is rendering for people

43:25

who don't know, is the the

43:27

center of your retina has

43:30

a denser image resolution than the rest of the

43:32

eyeball. So if you can track the eye movement,

43:34

then you know where people are looking. And if

43:36

you know that, then you can only render high

43:38

resolution in the area that's directly where they're where

43:40

that where that sweet spot of your eyeball is.

43:43

And they do a job, they do such a

43:45

good job with that. I didn't even realize it

43:47

was doing like, sometimes when you do phobia rendering,

43:49

sometimes you see the edges of that and stuff

43:51

and stuff like that. If the eye tracking is

43:53

slow or lags or whatever, and I got none

43:55

of that. I don't know about you, Norm. Yeah,

43:57

and then and PSVR2 has phobia rendering.

44:00

It's really interesting because you would hear

44:02

John Carmack and Michael Eberrache kind

44:04

of downplay fovea rendering a little

44:07

bit in past meta-connect or Oculus

44:09

Connect conferences saying that back

44:11

then, three, four years ago, in their

44:13

fovea rendering tests, you'd either have

44:16

to expand the render box for it to

44:19

not be noticeable, in which case

44:21

you only get like 10%, 15% performance, or

44:24

it just wouldn't track fast enough because

44:27

your eyes are constantly fluttering

44:29

and doing these micro-movements. But

44:32

both PSVR 2 and Apple Vision Pro

44:34

really show that fovea rendering has a

44:37

great effect. I mean, neither of

44:39

these devices, unless you're really, really looking for

44:41

it, do you notice it in headset? Like,

44:44

it's where your eyes are looking at and it's moving

44:46

fast enough, those render adjustments are

44:48

moving fast enough that, you know,

44:51

and that box is big enough that

44:53

the sweet spot is always going to be sharp. Well,

44:57

that means that they can render things and they can do super

44:59

sampling and they can make the

45:01

most out of trying to get 90 FPS

45:04

onto this, something that's essentially

45:06

running an arm

45:08

chip, you know, a laptop arm chip

45:10

here, the M2. So

45:14

eye tracking is really accurate, not

45:17

perfect, but really accurate, you know, better than

45:19

any like Tobii equivalent eye tracking I've used

45:21

in the past, you went through a calibration

45:23

pass and your

45:25

input is gaze plus

45:28

a small micropinch.

45:31

You see videos of people putting their hands

45:33

out and tapping their hands together, that's completely

45:35

unnecessary. Like, they've modeled the hands where

45:37

the cameras looking at your hands have a

45:39

wide enough field of view that if you

45:41

rest your hand on your lap as comfortably

45:43

as people you do when you're maybe sitting on

45:45

the couch, just pressing on your leg and just

45:48

do the smallest tapping of your

45:50

fingers together, it will know that you've tapped

45:52

it and it will be responsive enough and

45:54

it's doing prediction, you know, in some

45:56

cases there, but then correlate that

45:59

Correspond. With. Were. you

46:01

looking at to then. Click.

46:04

On links throw the windows, move windows

46:06

and all your action is combination of

46:09

eye tracking, Plus. These smartass. this

46:11

was the part when I when I

46:13

was using it that.the most like like

46:15

some to develop new right? If I

46:17

something completely new because I was doing

46:20

I was doing things like. T.

46:22

A pinch than just doing risk flex

46:24

to to scroll through a browser window.

46:26

Now the place that it broke was

46:28

it the eye tracking for me and

46:30

I only did one calibration pass which

46:32

apparently bixby do more calibration passes. It

46:34

supposedly improves over time. I. Don't

46:36

know about that. I just knew coverage

46:38

of houses are. I would recommend them

46:40

for knocking satisfactory results, but I don't

46:42

think they can aggregate. I think of

46:44

each had a reset. Lived. I'd

46:47

visit notices there were parts of the headset

46:49

where I was looking. it's where he would

46:51

not the Iowa it would consistently to get

46:53

was looking just a little bit below where

46:55

I was looking side going to hunt or

46:57

something I've had then. yeah yeah arab very

46:59

varied as it happens. Once a day.

47:02

At this is extremely frustrated there's no mouse.

47:04

Cursor. Know what is Your only alternatives?

47:07

Try to look up slightly above the thing

47:09

that you're trying to track and that's starts

47:11

at shockingly hard to deal. With

47:13

i've read some form post but as you can use

47:15

or with magic trackpad with the thing but he can

47:17

see the integration is pretty. James. Yeah.

47:19

So about that by default they want

47:22

people use like that they are if

47:24

they really really want people to love

47:26

and use. But the. Thing they said

47:28

so much effort on which is Gays and and

47:30

tap. And. When it works like browser

47:32

web. Ah, It really does

47:34

feel special. all the Canucks hair

47:37

and effort in design and that

47:39

they fit into it into terms

47:41

of like making feel natural, adding

47:44

spryness to add, giving the windows

47:46

a feeling of a moment. Arms

47:48

like this is the stuff that

47:50

made their implementation of multi touch

47:53

feel better than. Multi.

47:55

Touch that was on other phones like Android

47:57

phones or even like this previous as old

47:59

capacity. Smartphones is like. There.

48:02

Was a if speedy this responsiveness.

48:04

To that input. Ah,

48:06

that makes their of a temptation of of

48:09

that. Just. Feel really nice either. You

48:11

noticed that well your idea like wonder what you would

48:13

would you would look at the grab bar this is

48:15

it is a grab bar in the bottom of most

48:17

windows and when you look at a kind of highlights

48:19

you pence and then you move your arm and you

48:22

can kind of just like a zoom around and it

48:24

and it's it is. It was shocking that responsiveness in

48:26

felt good. It's it felt like when I wouldn't let

48:28

go of it it put it where I wanted to

48:30

be rather than were was which was what you want

48:32

in that situation. And. So when it

48:35

feels good which most the time it's awesome

48:37

to point where you're not thinking about it

48:39

and you can set of be lazy like

48:41

you can have a beer of your die

48:43

in the chair and in wally society. Looking.

48:45

Up, you know, web browsers and moving

48:48

things around, but when it fails, it's

48:50

so frustrating because even at the strain

48:52

your eyes. He. A train them

48:54

so look where you want to click

48:57

and windows a mismatch between what you

48:59

know you're looking at and of where

49:01

it's highlighting. That's. Brace

49:03

it completely so that would overcome that is

49:05

direct us and something you can do like.

49:07

If you may go to provide for any

49:09

window I can I pad window you can

49:11

bring up close and you can poke your

49:14

finger through. This. For full plane and

49:16

use it as like a virtual button. You

49:18

can actually tough links and you can scroll

49:20

with. Your. Finger is a me to

49:22

do in the the quest. Actually love the

49:24

direct touch immunization in the class. I love

49:26

being able to grab the side of a

49:28

window and kind of move in place it

49:30

where I want. They don't have the gays

49:32

plus the pinch input and so they done

49:34

a lot of effort in their. Head.

49:36

Tracking to make direct touch feel

49:39

really good Apple seem said see

49:41

prioritize track touch you can do

49:43

it but. It's not their

49:45

preferred way of letting you. Interface.

49:48

With the has a special sauce. And

49:51

if you want to bring cursor on their

49:53

it's trackpad only. They decided to. explicitly.

49:56

Omaha Miss Bluetooth mouse you cannot

49:58

paired says no booty. Supported.

50:02

And we really try to hide in their

50:04

a magic trackpad. Hundred bucks door magic trackpad.

50:06

A huge hit. A very similar like in life, you're

50:08

using a mouse on a. On

50:10

track but on the I pad like a little

50:13

subtle that floats in the screen. And.

50:16

That. Circle. Only activates

50:18

in the screen that you looking yeah. So.

50:20

You can be looking at one screen.

50:23

And. Have your trackpad for sir. Flowed into

50:25

the other sprayed. And they don't.

50:27

They don't retain the spatial relationship. So if

50:30

you think of like windows on. Your.

50:33

Desktop Computer Your laptop computer always

50:35

thought of special Windows. You. Might

50:37

have a a window element here in a window down

50:39

and on the left them when alma, the right when

50:41

you move your cursor between them. Your. Cursor

50:44

stays. Free. In

50:46

the operating system right? you actually have

50:48

the space between the windows. A huge

50:50

friends you can us navigate through. Friday

50:53

does you click is the background. The

50:55

cursor envision a less jumps from window

50:57

the window depending on where you looking

50:59

at. So. Makes a lot of sense

51:01

to me given that the how you can place

51:04

to windows and space trades. Yeah right. exactly what

51:06

you'd like. You see like it's not like you

51:08

just placing the windows in a circle, in a

51:10

in a sphere on the inside of a sphere

51:12

around you are you can be You can actually

51:14

play some in three d space and move around.

51:16

Put him in different places if you want. I

51:18

don't. I don't know what the usability of that

51:21

is. It seems pretty minor. ah it's

51:23

it's a little both so if you're seated

51:25

in as in it are standing as Tix

51:27

location the. The

51:29

x y orientation of where the

51:32

winners are kind of marks into

51:34

the sphere. It is it snap

51:36

and that is aligned to an

51:38

imaginary sphere. In front

51:41

of you a curve he out of

51:43

a canvas. Ah, But you can also

51:45

then push back. In

51:47

the if you move out of yeah you do

51:50

that as a your range five windows he tell

51:52

them as like this auto wide screen when don't

51:54

of you it's a this curbed arrangement. You

51:57

can then move mz Death back and

51:59

there's. What kind of in this current arrangement?

52:01

grow them up size of gel ever? But

52:03

even then walk away from that and then.

52:06

Over new windows and then set em up.

52:09

And place them in another current arrangement. None.

52:11

Of that saves and then of it

52:13

snaps ser. Loras or Walls

52:16

or you know have a lines

52:18

the flat surfaces that. May.

52:20

Have your real space so they're off as

52:22

is a big him. The. Good as

52:25

like having a at least scan of. Virtual.

52:27

Desktop environment of these window I can

52:30

place. But. Really designed to be

52:32

optimized, sir to be arranged for

52:34

a stationary position, a seizure operating.

52:37

Location: How does it work for

52:39

you? Can't get up to amass? norm. We'll

52:42

be up to Mack so it mirrors your Mac

52:44

one screen and you can seize resolution on that.

52:46

He got the Five K I think out on

52:48

a depends on the processing power of the Rak.

52:50

A. Comeback Okay where that have of

52:52

the house Here I just retina

52:54

resolution. So even though the. Dp.

52:57

I render that my kids toys I

52:59

sixty by forty forty equivalence. It's actually

53:01

pixel doubling and says actually rendering at

53:04

five thousand whatever, pixels by twenty eight

53:06

eighty and see the option of rendering

53:08

up to five thousand. But whatever it

53:10

is by it's funny. A D. C.

53:13

Get high d p I know kappa. it's

53:16

only one. And you can't like

53:18

dried out of the desktop or anything like that has

53:20

long on that one window now but you can. that's

53:22

actually a one place where you can use a mouse

53:24

because you can use a mouse on your back book.

53:27

And. If you have a mouse than

53:29

than your that's actually does. Operate.

53:31

In that map of screen. and

53:34

can blow off into. Other

53:36

windows at home. So if you have a

53:38

if you have the mouse and keyboard connected

53:40

to your Mac and yeah just use the

53:42

mouse and keyboard. Texture Massive. Give a mouse

53:45

and keyboard connected to your or as you

53:47

know afro then can you use those in

53:49

that match Seward? You have to use it.

53:51

Now how they get Mack? Okay, sorry about

53:53

that. Let let certain as a mere me

53:55

rephrase us. You.

53:59

Use. Essential One. Maybe not the other way. So

54:01

Media A or. When. You

54:04

have a Mackey. If. You're with

54:06

your parents. If you've beard your Mac, you can

54:08

use the keyboard on your Mac and you can

54:10

use the track betting your mac and that will

54:12

actually let you type in. Your vision

54:14

oh us windows or when the whole visa of

54:16

I went out yes yes he didn't have been

54:19

every bit of is no us. Application.

54:21

Where? because again? But yes, And

54:24

that's what. That's the only way to bring

54:26

in mouse input. Because. Or that, ah, Be.

54:29

Able mouse input for your Mac.

54:32

If you are envisioned l S and

54:34

you pair keyboard that keyboard still works.

54:38

And. That's super, will work in your Mac window

54:40

and override your Mac keyboard. Not

54:42

bring a mouse from vision of he said.

54:45

Now. Pair mouse and then use that. but it

54:47

does. This mean the B C and your couch

54:49

upstairs and like a log into your Mac book

54:51

down to the basement and and like you know,

54:54

open a port down there and have your full

54:56

Mack Desktop going in your couch. I.

54:59

Think. So sue me away, Sit

55:01

up front yeah says it's of

55:03

yeah yeah the answer's yes because.

55:07

The. Way I've been pairing it. You

55:09

open a map in front of you, a little connect button

55:11

pops up on top of the the lead and that's like

55:13

one of the few instances worth. using. Computer

55:15

vision to recognize that. Thing

55:17

in front of you as a Macbook like a keyboard

55:19

is a Mac book and such an afloat the thing

55:21

affects only refresher that one frame a second. So Snyder.

55:24

Real. Time like alignment. A

55:27

press connect and it's in the back and and

55:29

knows you've signed into both devices. Same Apple Id

55:31

and you're on the same. Why? Five? And.

55:34

L stream. but this also works Prompt? Yes!

55:36

On the map red ensign you can force connect

55:39

to a Mac book on your network. Or.

55:41

Max Studio or Mac Mini that may not have

55:43

a display or a keyboard. Just

55:45

in don't settings and so I

55:48

believe in can remote desktop essentially

55:50

school. And use that as a warrior

55:52

user mode or sessions on your local life. I. I'm.

55:56

okay so we haven't talked about the thing where you

55:58

can basically clothes off the real world around you

56:00

at all yet. There's a there's a there's

56:02

like a knob like the one on the

56:05

Apple watch that you can spin that turns

56:07

off the world or turns the world on

56:09

basically. Yeah they call the digital crown right and

56:11

it's a knob plus a button this is actually the

56:13

only way the physical way you activate

56:16

get the home screen is by pressing

56:18

that button on the top right. I'll

56:20

give you one anecdote I find that annoying

56:22

because I want a gesture to allow

56:24

me to get the home screen like the

56:27

gaze plus tap interface is so

56:30

convenient when it works and so

56:33

untaxing like I I find myself almost

56:35

frustrated that I have to lift my

56:37

hand up to press this

56:39

button to get to the home screen.

56:42

What do you fully atrophy in your

56:44

bones start to shrink? I know. We're

56:46

one step closer to escaping this physical

56:48

form. And because you can't program

56:50

gestures and you can't say like you know I want

56:53

two taps with my fingers or taps in the middle finger or taps

56:56

to the ring finger as a way to open

56:58

up the home screen or you can't customize any of

57:00

that. You can't say Siri open the home screen. You

57:02

can say Siri open the home screen but that's

57:05

a lot of syllables. That's fewer muscles in your face

57:07

than it would take to raise your arm. Oh I

57:10

don't know man it's a lot of muscles in the

57:12

layers. What we found is an accessibility option a lot

57:15

of accessibility options you can there's

57:18

like an array of like 12

57:20

different sounds you can make and

57:23

tie those sounds to shortcuts. I've

57:26

tied clucking

57:28

so I use... Wait hang

57:30

on are these are these

57:32

user definable sounds? There's

57:35

a preset list of like generic sharp

57:37

sounds like... Exactly

57:43

and you can and there's a mode you can practice

57:45

the sounds so you can help you learn how to

57:47

make the best sounds. It's for accessibility. Sorry you don't

57:49

have to train it though it doesn't it doesn't make

57:51

you say like okay you need to collect ten times

57:54

so we can learn what your collect sounds like. That's

57:56

right you accept the train you'd have to you know

57:58

cluck the way you cluck hopefully activate the green

58:00

light that says, okay, your clock is accurate to our

58:02

model of what a clock sounds like. But

58:05

I've been pairing the clock to home screen. And

58:08

so I'm on the couch and getting because like, what the F

58:10

you cluck in all day? I'm like, I'm activated in the

58:12

home. Like I'm like, every

58:14

like 10 seconds. I'm like, and

58:17

then move my hand. You know, it

58:19

looks ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous, but I find it

58:21

more convenient than pressing the button for everyone but

58:23

you right. Thank you for confirming that it's a

58:25

tongue clock for talking about and not a chicken.

58:28

Yes. Yeah. It's a

58:30

yeah. And there's a click option and a clock

58:32

option and I honestly don't know the difference. It

58:35

only recognizes my clocks. I wonder if there's cultural

58:37

differences between like a glottal click and a glottal

58:39

clock, right? That's the, that's where we're anyway. Um,

58:43

so, but when you're in the completely

58:45

invisible mode, when you've, when you've closed off

58:47

the world around, you're sitting on the moon, you're sitting

58:49

on the top of Holly Akola and Hawaii, you're, you're,

58:52

you're, you're someplace, uh, you're, you're pooping on the top

58:54

of Mount Everest is the joke we always made in

58:56

the early VR days. Um, when

59:00

people walk up to you and look at you,

59:02

they just kind of melt into

59:04

the world in a really disconcerting way.

59:06

Like, like I don't, I

59:08

don't, I don't really know how to describe

59:10

that one. Yeah. Is it doing, is it

59:12

doing background removal on them? Oh yeah. It

59:14

has to be right. It is. How effective

59:17

is that? Too effective

59:19

actually. Uh, it speaks to Apple really think

59:21

of this, I think primarily as a, as

59:23

a mixed reality device more than a VR

59:25

device, the, the virtual

59:27

environments, which are almost akin

59:30

to like the watch faces on watchOS in that

59:32

you can't upload your own. It's like, this is

59:34

the selection that Apple has given you. And this

59:36

is the selection our partners have made. Uh,

59:39

you know, Disney has their own selection. Apple TV has

59:41

like a theater one. Um, I

59:43

don't know what that means going forward. If like every

59:45

app, every app developer can like develop their own.

59:47

Cause it's all using like, I think an ILM

59:49

based, um, uh, a model

59:51

system. It's like 3d models plus a big

59:53

Q map. Yeah, exactly. Right. So it's, it's

59:56

like the best version of photogrammetry, uh, that

59:58

you can have if you didn't. actually want to explore

1:00:01

the space. It's, you know, you remember

1:00:03

on the first vibes, they, one

1:00:05

of the valve guys went through and did

1:00:07

a bunch of photogrammetry of like Iceland and

1:00:10

Greenland, but you'd be able to teleport between

1:00:13

nodes. These virtual environments are just

1:00:15

for like the very nearest area around you.

1:00:17

So the moon, you get like rendered rocks

1:00:19

and landscape within, I want to

1:00:21

say maybe like a couple meters out from

1:00:24

you, maybe a dozen meters out from you, and

1:00:26

then off the edge of a cliff, then it's

1:00:28

all like a cube map. So it's some animation.

1:00:30

So like clouds will move in the background of

1:00:32

a mountain escape or there'll be rain coming in,

1:00:34

but they're not made to be environments

1:00:36

to walk around in. There are stationary environments

1:00:39

that kind of let you and absorb the

1:00:41

ambiance, sound and visual. They

1:00:44

work like the Cerro cube maps that Google did,

1:00:47

cause you can, like you do get perspective shifts

1:00:49

when you walk around inside that space with the

1:00:52

stuff off in the distance is beyond the 3D

1:00:54

rendering range. It's pretty neat, but like normal people

1:00:56

look at it and be like, oh yeah, that's

1:00:58

fine. Whatever. So my thinking

1:01:00

is these environments are more for like

1:01:03

comfort. If you want to be isolated

1:01:05

by design for to zen out or

1:01:07

to work in a more focused space or to watch

1:01:09

your media in a more focused environment, that's

1:01:11

the reason I'm bringing them in. They're not for

1:01:13

interaction with those spaces. It's like, it's fun to

1:01:15

watch a movie on Tatooine or on the Ventress

1:01:17

tower or on the top of the mountain or

1:01:19

on the moon. Like sure, I get that. But

1:01:23

they're really cognizant of the fact that by

1:01:26

enabling these type of fully immersive and

1:01:28

virtual environments, you're locking the viewer off

1:01:30

from the world. And that's the reason

1:01:32

they have the display on the outside,

1:01:35

as well as this then ability for

1:01:37

the system to recognize faces

1:01:39

and humans that may

1:01:42

be approaching you and on a

1:01:44

system wide level, whatever, no matter

1:01:46

what inversive immersive environment or video you may be

1:01:48

watching, it will override in a silhouette of them

1:01:50

will fade in like a ghostly

1:01:52

apparition and be in your field of view.

1:01:55

As long as you look at them. Ghostly

1:01:57

apparition is it, right? Like you, like when you did.

1:02:00

me all of a sudden I just

1:02:02

saw like Norm's eyes and glasses coming up in my

1:02:04

like you just literally melted in from the background just

1:02:06

your head and then your body came in when I

1:02:08

looked at you and we could talk for a minute

1:02:11

it was it was it was like I was seeing

1:02:13

you from beyond the grave Norm it was very disturbing

1:02:16

starting to sound like that Star Trek villain the

1:02:18

encounter that is just a floating pair of eyes

1:02:20

on a mouth in space a

1:02:23

little bit like that and it's

1:02:26

I said it works too well because you

1:02:28

can't adjust for how sensitive it is you

1:02:30

can turn it off completely there's a toggle

1:02:32

that you can have it just not show

1:02:35

people fade in but you can't say

1:02:37

I only want people to fade in if they're you

1:02:39

know like five feet from me and it

1:02:41

will recognize people who are across the room

1:02:44

who may be just like standing still and looking at

1:02:46

you they will fade in it'll I

1:02:48

think it also like you showed me in a

1:02:50

video on a video call of it picking up

1:02:52

a 2d like it seems like if you're out

1:02:55

of the 3d range it'll definitely just pick up

1:02:57

on 2d faces like an iPhone would when it's

1:02:59

doing like face recognition for focus purposes and stuff

1:03:01

like that so using the living room

1:03:03

and we have like a TV running and you

1:03:06

know the angles watching a TV show it

1:03:08

would pick up faces on the TV

1:03:10

and fade those faces and yeah

1:03:12

even though those are flat faces and

1:03:15

scaled probably incorrectly right um does it work

1:03:17

for pets to does Ripley get picked up

1:03:20

no so you can still kick the dog when you have

1:03:22

the headset on yeah but to

1:03:25

go to the the front facing or the

1:03:28

world facing display the

1:03:30

eyesight display those eyes

1:03:32

aren't there the whole time those

1:03:34

eyes only fade in and show

1:03:36

to people in

1:03:39

the real world when the system is

1:03:41

fading them into you it's a reciprocal

1:03:43

action oh so

1:03:45

that so if the people can see the eyes

1:03:48

and they then you can theoretically see the people

1:03:50

but if the eyes aren't there then there then

1:03:52

you're in your own little world exactly exactly weird

1:03:54

yeah it's like an it's like an eye contact

1:03:57

acknowledgment that so I didn't actually

1:03:59

spend any time with you really looking at you with

1:04:01

the headset on, but the eyes,

1:04:03

the moments that you had it on, the

1:04:05

eyes were disturbing at best. Like the eyes

1:04:07

are not, the eye effect is, it

1:04:10

seems like a really expensive thing to put

1:04:12

on the headset for pretty limited use. But

1:04:15

maybe if you're in a cube farm and like

1:04:17

this is just a way to pack people more

1:04:19

densely into the cubes, then having

1:04:21

the eyes so you can see when people are

1:04:23

looking at you is good. I

1:04:26

don't know. But it's been mixed experiences with it because almost

1:04:29

everyone who doesn't know what it is or

1:04:32

maybe unfamiliar with VR headsets, when they've looked at it and

1:04:34

the eyes popped in, their first

1:04:36

assumption is that those are real

1:04:38

eyes like it was an optical pass-through. And

1:04:42

the longer you scrutinize it, I mean, you clearly tell

1:04:44

that it's just rendered video,

1:04:47

but the lenticular display they're using, the

1:04:49

lenticular layer of film they're using and

1:04:51

the multi-view display. So it does

1:04:53

do stereo pairs. So you get a little bit

1:04:55

of depth and they position

1:04:57

the eyes, they position the render so

1:04:59

it looks receded. It's like the inverse

1:05:01

of where the camera position is, the

1:05:03

problem of the camera location. The

1:05:06

display isn't right on the

1:05:08

surface of the headset. It

1:05:11

makes the eyes look more receded in. There's a

1:05:14

little bit of depth there. So

1:05:16

they've done the best they could to make

1:05:18

it look convincing. And

1:05:21

for the normies out there, it gives

1:05:25

a sense of connection. It's weird, but

1:05:28

it gets, yeah. Yeah. This still

1:05:30

feels like the first thing they're going to drop when they

1:05:32

want to make a thousand dollar version of this, right? Like,

1:05:34

this is an easy feature to kill. I

1:05:37

would rather they kill this feature than release a

1:05:39

version with a lower resolution display. Yeah.

1:05:43

Let's see. I didn't notice any jitter

1:05:45

at all for Windows. Like once you play something in the

1:05:47

world, it's really static in relation to your head, which I

1:05:49

thought was really nice. No draft

1:05:51

over time. The windows are like

1:05:53

locked solid in place. Their slam

1:05:56

invitation is incredible.

1:06:00

And every other headset I've used

1:06:02

when the slam desyncs, then you

1:06:04

get like the windows move with

1:06:06

the desync. And that didn't, like

1:06:08

either this wasn't desyncing at all

1:06:11

or they

1:06:14

figured out some software mojo to make it, to

1:06:16

minimize the impact of that. Yeah, I think that's

1:06:18

the best example of this. People want to see

1:06:21

it in action is like the videos that immediately

1:06:23

emerged on Twitter on like a launch day of

1:06:25

people cooking and like placing timers over the different

1:06:27

pots for things they were cooking in the kitchen

1:06:29

and coming back to them and like they are

1:06:32

quite stable. Or windows left in the

1:06:34

bathroom, that kind of thing. The

1:06:37

places, I've seen two places where it's been

1:06:39

tricked. And one is a

1:06:42

user who had like a projector projecting

1:06:44

like a real projector in his house

1:06:46

projecting like a video. I think

1:06:48

it was Apple TV screensaver. And

1:06:51

the slow movement of the

1:06:53

screensaver tricked the headset into thinking it

1:06:55

was the world moving. And so

1:06:58

he got drift that was locked the

1:07:00

movement of the, oh, that's amazing. The

1:07:02

screensaver. The other

1:07:04

thing is using the 3d data from the

1:07:06

slam. They're also using visual vision processing. That's

1:07:08

right. They're also using CV. And the other

1:07:11

place was someone with a standing desk and

1:07:13

the activated the same desk up and down

1:07:15

and the plane and that might be geometry,

1:07:17

the plane of the standing desk moving

1:07:20

up and down shifted their windows. Because

1:07:22

that they thought that was the floor. That seems

1:07:24

like a feature. Yeah, I

1:07:26

mean, maybe right? Things like working is intended.

1:07:29

I don't know. I've known,

1:07:31

I think we could talk for another hour or two easily, but

1:07:33

we have a bunch of stuff we want to get to. So

1:07:35

let's, let's, let's do the speed round here. Does

1:07:38

it have a chaperone equivalent? No,

1:07:40

so there's you don't draw any guardian. They want

1:07:43

this in a very Apple way. They

1:07:45

have so much confidence in their slam that

1:07:47

they don't. And also it's not really designed

1:07:49

for you to, you know, to be in

1:07:52

fully immersed games or, you know, a traverse

1:07:54

environments where you're walking around. They

1:07:57

don't surface any of the guardian or

1:07:59

borders. anything. All they do is give you slow

1:08:01

fade ins when you're getting too close to objects.

1:08:03

But like at the same time, it didn't, it

1:08:06

didn't when I like when you when

1:08:08

you make it fully locked

1:08:11

in on like the moon or whatever. I can't remember what that's

1:08:13

called. But it didn't if you

1:08:15

stood up and started walking around, it didn't kick you

1:08:18

out of that. It didn't say, hey, you're not supposed

1:08:20

to be walking around while you have this on. But

1:08:22

if when I did get close to like the Ottoman

1:08:24

or something, it would it would show me the Ottoman

1:08:26

with the kind of white shimmery edges like it does

1:08:28

when a person walks in, which I thought was very

1:08:30

cool. My eyes got crazy dry inside the headset over

1:08:32

the period of an hour. I was wearing

1:08:35

contacts. I didn't have class inserts, obviously.

1:08:37

But yeah, yeah,

1:08:40

the eye strain is gonna be a thing. I

1:08:42

mean, they're working your eyes a lot to soothe

1:08:44

this gaze. I had to take breaks just because

1:08:46

I was just to

1:08:49

recalibrate literally actually just rest and

1:08:51

then recalibrate the eye tracking. But

1:08:54

you're being way more purposeful

1:08:56

with where you look. And

1:08:58

the fact that they have fans, there's no air

1:09:01

that's blowing through. But you know, there

1:09:03

is a fan. There's a little

1:09:05

error circulating. You know, you

1:09:08

do get a little bit dry. I'm unclear if

1:09:10

it was because I wasn't blinking enough because I was

1:09:13

so highly engaged or if it was there moving through.

1:09:15

But it was it was the first thing I noticed

1:09:17

when I took the headset off was Oh, wow, my

1:09:19

eyes are crazy dry. What's

1:09:23

the app situation? It seemed like all the apps that you

1:09:25

showed me with the exception of one or two kind of

1:09:27

gamey things, were mostly like just 2d

1:09:29

windows that you place in the world. There wasn't a

1:09:31

lot of 3d 3d 3d stuff. Yeah, very

1:09:34

few 3d 3d things. We said they launched with 600

1:09:36

apps, I feel like maybe a dozen

1:09:38

or two dozen of those are actually good. A

1:09:42

lot of generic stuff, it feels so much

1:09:44

like the earliest earliest of iOS app store

1:09:46

days, where you have a lot of chunk

1:09:48

apps, a lot of basic apps that might

1:09:50

be features later. But you know, you don't

1:09:53

have a complete collection

1:09:56

of your essential killer apps, your media apps,

1:09:58

you know, there's no Netflix, no Spotify. I

1:10:00

know YouTube, but you

1:10:02

can do the most basic stuff, but the most powerful thing is gonna

1:10:05

be the web browser. Our friend Jeremy

1:10:07

Williams said it felt like the first days

1:10:09

of, it felt like you were exploring a

1:10:11

new platform and everybody was figuring out what

1:10:13

to use it for, which I

1:10:15

think feels right. Is

1:10:19

it a standalone app store, I assume? I assume

1:10:21

they're not just throwing Vision Pro apps into the

1:10:23

giant iOS one. I assume the

1:10:25

search is limited to just what runs on this.

1:10:28

There's a selector, you

1:10:30

search and it will service

1:10:32

only Vision apps, but then if you tab over, then

1:10:34

it will show you the iPad compatible ones with the

1:10:37

same search string. And the iPad compatible

1:10:39

ones are basically just showing you the iPad aspect

1:10:41

ratios in a window.

1:10:44

You can do landscape, but you can't tilt them. You can't

1:10:46

like, I want, and you can resize them. You can resize

1:10:48

them all, basically the size of an iPad, but

1:10:51

what I want is like, be able to use that

1:10:53

direct touch, hand tracking interface to

1:10:56

hold them and rotate them

1:10:58

and pivot them, but all you can do is kind

1:11:00

of grow these planes and you can do multi-touch on

1:11:03

them too. It seemed like the

1:11:05

placement was always gonna be on a plane

1:11:07

that was perpendicular to the radius that starts

1:11:09

of a sphere that starts

1:11:11

at your eyeball. Right,

1:11:13

that sphere of placement. Yeah. Are

1:11:17

there any, there's no games really, right? There's no beat

1:11:19

saber or pistol lift or anything like that at this

1:11:21

point. The worse than that, the

1:11:24

games they have, again, feel very much like an

1:11:26

app ecosystem games that are bundled

1:11:28

with your operating system. There's a Cut the

1:11:30

Rope and Jetpack Joyride, which is just like

1:11:33

rendered 3D versions of looking at the screen.

1:11:35

There's, you know, there's your chess game,

1:11:37

but most of these actually are Apple Arcade

1:11:39

games. I don't know if there's even a

1:11:41

way to play these without buying

1:11:44

into the Apple Arcade subscription. I

1:11:46

have to assume if you're in a market for a

1:11:48

$3,500 headset, the

1:11:51

$5 a month subscription probably isn't gonna stop you

1:11:53

from. I've never been more compelled

1:11:55

to sign up for Apple One than after

1:11:57

this headset for exactly that. There's like this.

1:12:00

distortion field where like, well, I spent $3,500 on a headset, up to

1:12:02

$4,000. What is this

1:12:06

extra $35 a month that will give me

1:12:08

Apple Music because I don't have Spotify on

1:12:10

this, plus Apple TV+, and Apple News, and

1:12:12

Apple Arcade? I guess that's worth it. I

1:12:15

was going to say that about the exorbitant

1:12:17

pricing of the accessories also. It's like $200

1:12:20

for a case, but as a percentage

1:12:22

of the cost of the headset, it's

1:12:25

an investment in the future, Brad. The

1:12:27

flip side of that is if you decide not to buy the

1:12:30

headset, which would be my recommendation for

1:12:32

most normal people, that money

1:12:34

you would have mentally allocated to buy

1:12:36

a headset, you can buy a

1:12:38

fuck ton of things. It's like, well, I

1:12:40

didn't buy the Apple headset. Maybe I can buy

1:12:42

a new laptop and a new phone. A new

1:12:44

phone, a loaded Mac Studio or whatever. The

1:12:47

thing I like to do when I'm tempted by some

1:12:49

new Apple product that I've been burned on in the

1:12:51

past is I look at what would have

1:12:53

happened if I spent that money on Apple stock at the time.

1:12:55

I'll go out

1:12:58

and buy $3500 worth of

1:13:01

Apple stock and let you know how it goes in a year. How

1:13:04

is it for watching movies, Norm? This is the other... Incredible.

1:13:08

I mean, aside from the fact that you're watching it

1:13:10

alone and SharePlay for movies

1:13:12

is kind of limited right now. Can

1:13:14

you SharePlay it to your TV so that you can be

1:13:17

sitting in the same room as your loved ones and have

1:13:19

the same experience as them, but they

1:13:21

get the shit version and you get the good version? No.

1:13:25

Actually, that's a really question. It's something I have

1:13:27

to test. I've only done headset to headset where you can

1:13:29

SharePlay and have them load up the same movie

1:13:32

application. It seems like you guys should be able

1:13:34

to sit in the same room and you just

1:13:36

have the 80-foot iMac screen and they have the

1:13:38

65-inch Chud TV. I'm

1:13:42

sorry. Apologies. But

1:13:45

as a solo viewing experience, it

1:13:50

surpasses any media viewing

1:13:52

experience on VR unless you

1:13:57

have a $100,000 projector. like

1:14:00

feel brighter than that. It's gonna be

1:14:02

bigger than any TV, oh

1:14:04

that TV that you have in your

1:14:06

house. And it supports HDR and Adobe

1:14:09

Vision. And aside

1:14:12

from not having that in-person shared

1:14:14

experience of watching something, the only

1:14:17

downside, that's like the big downside. And

1:14:20

maybe some of the streaming service providers

1:14:22

not having the best bit rates, like

1:14:24

opening up YouTube TV or YouTube

1:14:27

and Safari browser, you're only gonna get capped

1:14:29

by what the encodes

1:14:31

are. And Disney's, as their

1:14:33

best partner, has done the best encodes

1:14:36

of their content, like their 3D movie content. Yeah,

1:14:39

I fired up Endgame and was kind of blown away by

1:14:41

it. The other thing that's interesting is, like

1:14:44

there's a fair number of movies, mostly

1:14:47

made by Christopher Nolan, that have IMAX

1:14:49

for some sequences and traditional film for

1:14:51

other sequences and aspect ratios change when

1:14:53

you're in the theater, kind of without

1:14:55

you noticing. Can

1:14:57

this handle that? Is this, can it be a hard thing

1:14:59

to do on a normal TV? So

1:15:01

it's a really good point. Like Fallout,

1:15:03

Mission Impossible Fallout's a great example where

1:15:05

there's some scenes that have full IMAX

1:15:07

expert ratio, but just like you would

1:15:09

buy the Blu-ray, the

1:15:12

4K Blu-ray, it's basically letterbox until it expands

1:15:15

to that aspect ratio. Where on a

1:15:18

big TV, you'd be like, wow, I'm wasting

1:15:20

a bunch of space. I want the entire

1:15:22

thing to be unletterboxed. And

1:15:25

I don't want pan and scan here because you can

1:15:27

virtually grow the window to any size you want. Even

1:15:30

though the black bars are there, you care less because you

1:15:33

still have a big cinema experience.

1:15:35

There's an IMAX app. And

1:15:38

IMAX is the best media demo. I mean,

1:15:40

it's the four by three aspect ratio. You're

1:15:43

sitting, you know, whatever, within

1:15:45

like three presets receipts, but it

1:15:48

is filling your entire field of view,

1:15:50

tall, high bit rate, IMAX quality

1:15:52

documentaries. I was like, I loaded that up

1:15:54

and I was blown away. Like you had

1:15:56

me watch them in a specific order. I

1:15:58

think I watched Avatar first. first, which is

1:16:00

IMAX in Disney app, but

1:16:02

has some, he does weird frame

1:16:05

rates with that based on where, what's

1:16:07

happening in the movie. And that felt

1:16:09

odd to me. Actually, the frame rates

1:16:12

bouncing around felt really weird. The Disney

1:16:14

stuff was great. And then

1:16:16

the IMAX thing blew the Disney. It

1:16:19

felt like I was in space working on the outside of the

1:16:21

space station when I loaded up

1:16:23

the IMAX app and jumped into that,

1:16:25

into that, that documentary. It was incredible.

1:16:28

I have to ask, I have mostly heard

1:16:30

about this in the context of

1:16:32

no VR porn on this thing. But

1:16:35

people seem mad there is no 3D video player, like

1:16:37

a side by side video player where you can just

1:16:39

like load your own files. Can we just assume that's

1:16:41

just an attempt to push you

1:16:43

to iTunes and Apple TV plus

1:16:45

or? You are working with

1:16:48

day old information, my friend. Oh, has

1:16:51

someone already addressed this need? Others are

1:16:53

available. The Vision Pro subreddit

1:16:55

has celebrated the release of

1:16:58

Moon Player, which allows you to, again,

1:17:00

there's no real file transfer because you're

1:17:02

not plugging this into a computer. It's

1:17:04

everything either through AirDrop or

1:17:06

the kind of limited file browser. I think you

1:17:08

can connect the... There's a files app, right? So

1:17:10

you can put that up to all your cloud

1:17:13

services or network share, whatever. Network share. You can,

1:17:15

you can sign into a network share. Okay. I

1:17:17

guess the main thing I was, I just want

1:17:19

to make sure there's like not some technical or

1:17:21

insurmountable reason that they couldn't do that. They just

1:17:23

didn't ship one. Correct.

1:17:25

They didn't ship one natively and web browsers, I

1:17:27

believe there are toggles that you can toggle to

1:17:29

allow for WebXR, which is the way you can

1:17:32

run kind of virtual reality applications through a web

1:17:34

browser. But those are manual advanced setting

1:17:37

toggles. Yeah. I was

1:17:39

really surprised that they've done... Somebody along the way

1:17:41

did parallax work that I've never seen anybody do

1:17:43

in a headset video player before. So

1:17:46

that when you like typically at a 3D movie,

1:17:48

when you tilt your head, you're getting left eye,

1:17:50

right eye. When you tilt your head, then your

1:17:52

brain gets the wrong signals because your eyes are

1:17:54

in the wrong place to get the separation at

1:17:56

that point. And they're doing something where they blend

1:17:58

the two perspectives or something. so that

1:18:00

it doesn't feel weird when you do that in

1:18:02

this headset, which I've literally never seen anyone do

1:18:04

before. So I guess good job to

1:18:06

Apple. Are

1:18:09

there any video apps that don't work? Like is

1:18:11

Max on like Max, all your small

1:18:14

niche channels, can you get Paramount? Or

1:18:17

are there people locking out on the on the

1:18:19

Vision Pro? I think

1:18:21

the only opt-outs, the big opt-outs are

1:18:23

Spotify, Netflix. There's

1:18:25

iPad equivalents for Amazon Prime,

1:18:27

native for Max, native for

1:18:30

Disney. Web browser works for,

1:18:32

in most cases, you

1:18:35

can't save web applets. It's actually funny because in

1:18:38

the Quest 3, I really love when

1:18:40

I'm not in a full VR game, I love

1:18:43

being able to open what's called a progressive web

1:18:46

apps, which are just web windows that you can

1:18:48

make short quests to. But

1:18:50

you can't bookmark, create bookmarks, progressive web

1:18:52

app bookmarks in Vision OS to have

1:18:55

them in your homepage. You have to basically open

1:18:57

Safari, go to your bookmarks or click a

1:19:00

link that opens Netflix and then

1:19:02

you place it there. How

1:19:04

does this compare? How does this compare to

1:19:06

the kind of they look like janky

1:19:10

AR glasses that you see

1:19:12

advertised on Twitter or Instagram or whatever

1:19:14

that are like, hey, watch an 80

1:19:16

inch screen on your plane ride. Like

1:19:18

this is a, obviously this

1:19:21

costs 10 times what those do

1:19:23

generally. I assume it's

1:19:25

a better experience. Much better and

1:19:27

most of those at best are three degrees

1:19:29

of freedom. They don't have full six off

1:19:31

tracking. And so here and those are limited

1:19:33

field of view, like your X real glasses.

1:19:37

Here it's feel

1:19:39

comparable to your Quest. It's

1:19:41

a little bit less, it really depends on your light

1:19:44

seal interface. But

1:19:46

it runs standalone. Like by

1:19:49

issue with big screen beyond, I love watching

1:19:51

movies on that is that I have to

1:19:53

be tethered to my PC or laptop and

1:19:55

also in proximity of my lighthouse

1:19:57

trackers here, even though the batteries

1:19:59

and that's I took it on a plane flight

1:20:02

yesterday and it opened

1:20:04

up the space of that seat. I

1:20:06

wasn't immersed in, I didn't opt to be

1:20:10

hidden away on the moon, right? Or I

1:20:13

was still passing through looking at my, you know,

1:20:15

the other passengers looking at the flight attendants. But

1:20:18

not only do I have the movie

1:20:20

I was watching in front of me

1:20:22

be a massive movie, but having other

1:20:25

windows just like Safari or even Photos

1:20:27

apps, having the ability to have other

1:20:29

windows spread out beyond the

1:20:31

confines of what would be a very tight

1:20:33

physical space of an airplane seat, that

1:20:36

allowed my brain to feel less claustrophobic. Man, that's

1:20:38

fascinating. That's a little more. Yeah, that's like, you

1:20:40

know, like you're, if you're using like a laptop

1:20:42

in an airplane seat, you know, you're just hunched

1:20:44

over this tiny tray. Yeah, your shoulders are in.

1:20:46

Yeah, like that's, wow, that's like, that just has

1:20:49

implications for just like posture and stuff like that.

1:20:52

Exactly. And it wasn't like I was even actively

1:20:54

using those apps. It was like, those are the

1:20:56

saved apps I was using like before, but

1:20:58

they popped up. And just having those

1:21:00

apps, I could, I could move them around. I

1:21:04

felt less claustrophobic. Did you, did

1:21:06

you, okay, two questions. Did you take

1:21:08

the keyboard and the trackpad so you could like do

1:21:10

work stuff on it while you were on the plane?

1:21:12

Okay. Now, just the pictures. What was

1:21:14

the reaction for the people around you? I assume they

1:21:16

were curious. This was like a

1:21:18

6am flight. No one cared. Would

1:21:23

you use this walking down the street? No,

1:21:25

absolutely not. Okay. No, no. This is

1:21:27

like the most public place I would

1:21:30

consider using it at this point is on an

1:21:32

airplane or an airport, like airport

1:21:35

countertop or something. So like, well, I mean, the

1:21:37

nice thing about the airport is you're in a

1:21:39

secure place. So you like the,

1:21:41

the likelihood of somebody grabbing it and doing a runner

1:21:43

is pretty low, I guess. What's

1:21:47

the, do

1:21:49

you think, do you think this is a work

1:21:51

device or a recreation device or is

1:21:53

like, is this a thing? The first iPhone had a

1:21:56

real specific market, which was people who like new shit

1:21:58

and have $600, right? which

1:22:00

was an insane amount of money for a phone at

1:22:02

the time. And this

1:22:04

feels very much like if I spend

1:22:06

a lot of time on international flights

1:22:08

and something that would be an absolute no-brainer

1:22:10

for me if I was doing a lot of 15-hour flights.

1:22:13

And it's kind of hard for me sitting in front

1:22:15

of three monitors and a desk using

1:22:17

a PC most of the time to think, oh yeah, this is worth

1:22:19

$3,500. It doesn't

1:22:21

replace my MacBook. It doesn't replace my desktop,

1:22:24

really. It

1:22:26

seems like a real specific niche that it

1:22:28

lives in for now. Yeah, and

1:22:30

Apple doesn't want it to replace your MacBook. They want you

1:22:32

to buy a MacBook to work with it. It doesn't replace your

1:22:34

watch or your phone. You can't make phone

1:22:36

calls on it. You can only do FaceTime calls and

1:22:38

FaceTime, oh, you can't hand off a received phone call

1:22:41

someone calling you that you could pick up on

1:22:43

your iPad. You can't pick that up in Vision

1:22:45

Pro. They'll have to add that, though. Maybe,

1:22:48

maybe it's a design decision. It

1:22:51

feels like as opposed to spending $1,000 on an iPad Pro, I

1:22:56

would invest in one of these if I was type

1:22:58

of traveler or someone who likes

1:23:01

watching movies a lot on an iPad. This

1:23:03

feels like the big step up. And they got to get

1:23:05

the price down, obviously. So

1:23:08

if you're someone who does a lot of international

1:23:10

flights or even five-hour flights domestically, then you may

1:23:12

be in the business where you can get this

1:23:14

expense. That's kind of what

1:23:16

a lot of this is for. And even

1:23:20

the new 1.1 beta has tools for IT departments to

1:23:24

do company deployment. So they know that

1:23:26

at this price point, a lot of

1:23:28

their customers are going to be businesses

1:23:30

where they already maybe had budgets set

1:23:32

aside for the R department and due

1:23:34

to training or collaboration and

1:23:37

they can sell enough of these. So those

1:23:39

people plus Apple enthusiasts to build up a

1:23:42

user base for developers to get excited about. So

1:23:45

you think they're going to make another one? You think this is the beginning

1:23:47

of a long product line? I think they're

1:23:50

committed enough. They've invested too much in

1:23:52

ecosystem and

1:23:54

engineering resources to

1:23:56

not at least try a second rev

1:23:59

of this. and also a lower price version.

1:24:02

I know this is just like a crystal ball

1:24:05

question. What do you think the cadence might be

1:24:07

for updates on this? I mean, I'm sure it's

1:24:09

definitely not gonna be annual, but like, are we

1:24:11

talking like Mac Pro length of

1:24:14

time, like five to eight years? Yeah,

1:24:16

yeah, yeah. Are they gonna read it

1:24:18

maybe every couple years? I don't know.

1:24:20

That's the kind of decision everyone who looks to spend

1:24:22

a lot of money on an Apple device has to

1:24:24

make. Like, am I buying it at the front or the

1:24:26

tail end of a product cycle? And

1:24:28

for a first gen device, you know, how many

1:24:30

people got burned with, was

1:24:33

it probably like iPhone? Yeah, they

1:24:35

got burned a little bit. Apple pad, iPhone. Watch

1:24:37

for sure. Every first gen device

1:24:40

has gotten burned, but in terms of like how

1:24:42

longevity, because of the price point of this, I

1:24:44

really don't see them launching at

1:24:46

least the equivalent of the Pro model equivalent until

1:24:49

end of 2025. Like

1:24:51

they announced this 2023 in summer, even

1:24:53

though it's been developed for a long time. I don't think it's gonna

1:24:55

be a long development cycle because the rumors

1:24:57

are that this was supposed to shift last year.

1:25:00

That's why it's wearing the M2 and not the M3. Like

1:25:03

there was a pipeline for them and said, do software

1:25:05

updates, but it feels like this first year is software

1:25:07

updates and, you know, getting an

1:25:09

ecosystem ready, figuring out what people are actually gonna do

1:25:11

with it. And

1:25:14

they probably have specked out what a version two

1:25:16

and maybe what even a lower budget version is

1:25:18

like, but to burn these early

1:25:20

adopters by releasing something, let's say the

1:25:22

earliest summer of next year to

1:25:25

make it, you know, a year and a half of

1:25:27

value is really hard to see. I

1:25:30

think, yeah. What's the, the

1:25:32

quest cadence is like two and a half or three

1:25:34

years, right? Quest is a quest two

1:25:36

and three is three years for two and three, but one

1:25:38

and two was real fast. And, and, but

1:25:41

it was real fast, like two years real fast,

1:25:44

not real fast, like 18 months. Correct.

1:25:49

It might be closer than two years. Yeah. Anyway,

1:25:51

do you feel like the M2 is fast enough? You

1:25:53

mentioned that some of the windows felt framey. I

1:25:56

feel like the 16 gigs of RAM, I feel like

1:25:58

M2 and the amount of RAM. I

1:26:01

do reach the summits and you can force quit. So even

1:26:03

though it's running, you know, you know, I

1:26:06

Something that's forked off of iPad OS or

1:26:08

iOS You can force

1:26:11

quit applications by holding down the top two

1:26:13

buttons. Yeah, you get a force close Window

1:26:16

that's very similar to your Mac OS for

1:26:19

shutdown window and I have to do that a couple

1:26:21

of times when apps become responsive or buggy When

1:26:23

scrolling in a certain app becomes slow

1:26:26

it's happened Um,

1:26:28

I feel like I for full disclosure I was

1:26:30

able to grab like two Safari windows one with

1:26:32

each hand and scroll them up and down as

1:26:34

fast as I wanted by Moving my arms like

1:26:37

a kind of like a angry toddler. So then

1:26:39

that worked. I was really surprised It was that

1:26:41

way you couldn't do that on iOS. Yeah This

1:26:44

is one of the big advantages they have not

1:26:46

only like an incredible hardware engineering team and

1:26:48

you know supply chain and and but

1:26:52

they have the silicon right then the Decade

1:26:55

long investment they've made into their

1:26:58

their fork of arm Has

1:27:00

made it so power efficient so powerful

1:27:03

that the graphics on fully rendered scenes

1:27:05

like the dinosaur scene It looks like

1:27:07

PC VR graphics. It's like far

1:27:10

and away superior. Like this is the difference

1:27:12

between a switch and a ps5 Yeah,

1:27:16

the fidelity well and then the nice thing

1:27:18

about it is because they're shipping this M2

1:27:21

version and these are

1:27:23

all distinct experiences from PC VR

1:27:25

stuff the min spec isn't Oculus

1:27:28

Oculus launched VR which is what most VR

1:27:30

developers are still working towards in a lot

1:27:32

of cases like 1080 era graphics You're actually

1:27:34

like they've kind of raised the bar for

1:27:36

this new platform, which is which is the

1:27:38

min spec platform Yeah, and if people forget

1:27:41

they they did announce that partnership with unity

1:27:44

Yeah, yeah, hopefully there are developers maybe targeting

1:27:46

some actually interesting more elaborate games here I

1:27:48

heard it's expensive though. You know, I think

1:27:50

to work in spatial for uni. It's like

1:27:52

$2,800. So it's the huge barrier entry I

1:27:56

think they still really want to push people to code

1:27:58

natively Yeah. Okay.

1:28:01

I think that's it. One

1:28:04

last thing. Can we talk about the FaceTime

1:28:06

nightmare? Norm, I know we're over time. Sure.

1:28:08

Yeah, personas, right? So you scan your face.

1:28:10

And there's a lot of philosophical questions about

1:28:13

this, like identity and what it

1:28:15

means to have an avatar that's tied

1:28:18

to yourself, but not like there's no biometric

1:28:20

keying to it. Like if I decide

1:28:22

to create a persona, but then take off the headset

1:28:24

and give it to someone else to scan, I would

1:28:26

have their face for FaceTime calls. There's

1:28:29

no outside biometric... Kind

1:28:31

of though, because it looks

1:28:33

like it's just taking video

1:28:35

or interpolating video from

1:28:37

your eye movement and your mouth movement. Like the

1:28:39

mouth just looks like video. It looks like the

1:28:41

old Conan O'Brien bit where he puts the mouth

1:28:44

on the... Oh no. It's fully rigged.

1:28:46

No, no, they're fully rigged models. Yeah, fully rigged. Yeah.

1:28:48

But like you can stick your tongue out and go

1:28:50

do all sorts of crazy stuff with your mouth and

1:28:52

it works. Everyone has the same tongue and those crazy

1:28:55

things are actually rigged. It's a model.

1:28:58

It's not a video. Wow, I had no idea. I assumed

1:29:00

it was just taking video and mapping it onto a 3D

1:29:02

surface. It's mapping textures, but

1:29:05

there is actual shape to it. And that's the

1:29:07

impressive part about it. And they're

1:29:09

making people like you can't save your persona. You

1:29:11

can't say, you know, go back to what I

1:29:13

would look like six months ago. Sucks. They

1:29:16

are forcing people to update personas with

1:29:18

every, you know, patch and every version.

1:29:20

So this is their way of just

1:29:22

kind of locking you into as accurate

1:29:24

of a representation of yourself as possible. But

1:29:27

also, okay. So the processes must be a little fiddly

1:29:29

though, because we have, I'm not going to name any

1:29:31

names here, but we have three friends. I have three

1:29:34

friends that have the headset. I've gotten on calls with

1:29:36

all of them. Some

1:29:38

people have had, let's say, dramatically better results

1:29:40

than others. Some

1:29:42

people have been firmly in the middle. Yours, I think, was

1:29:44

the best of them. The most accurate

1:29:46

representation still has a little bit of

1:29:48

an uncanny valley. Like yours

1:29:51

was a little bit creepy, whereas the other ones looked like

1:29:54

embalmed cadavers in cases, which is not what you're going for.

1:30:00

I like what's the is the process fiddly is that

1:30:02

was that what it is or is it just it's

1:30:04

just Has a hard time

1:30:06

with different people's faces. I think hard time different

1:30:09

people's faces and lighting matters a lot You can't

1:30:11

be super harsh lighting People

1:30:14

are encouraged to try and You

1:30:17

know go through the process over and

1:30:19

over again to find the best version of themselves

1:30:21

It's asking for like some basic stuff like move

1:30:23

your eyebrows up and down smile smile with teeth

1:30:26

and It's trying

1:30:29

to make that process Not

1:30:31

super laborious because it's generating a

1:30:33

pretty convincing model. I think in a really

1:30:35

short period of time And

1:30:39

it's it's like supposed to get better even the version 1.1 But

1:30:42

what people shared pictures of their personas

1:30:44

versus launch day looks much sharper and

1:30:46

more Representative of what they actually look

1:30:48

like it's unfortunate They don't let you

1:30:50

at least switch back to the last

1:30:52

one so you can see cuz like

1:30:54

I I judging by what's

1:30:56

happened With friends

1:30:58

some of them have gotten worse and some of

1:31:01

them gotten better as they've made as they've tried

1:31:03

it again And it's unfortunate it reduces my willingness

1:31:05

to take a risk and try a new one

1:31:07

if I have one that's pretty good Then

1:31:10

and then I could go back to to like what

1:31:12

one of them one of them Somebody's face was on

1:31:14

a little bit crooked like the mouth and the eyes

1:31:16

were on like it was like a 10 degree angle

1:31:19

So they look kind of like a Charlie Kirk meme or

1:31:21

something. It was it was bad Um

1:31:24

That's it and there's no customization I mean like

1:31:26

the only thing you can customize is the glasses because

1:31:29

you don't scan on classes And that's the only thing

1:31:31

that you would choose as an accessory

1:31:33

a selection of you know like 15 or so glasses

1:31:36

But you don't choose hair. It's not avatar creation

1:31:38

in an RPG. It's not like choose your ideal

1:31:40

self It's just this is what you look like

1:31:42

how does it handle beards? Have you seen anybody

1:31:44

who has a beard with the video? I haven't

1:31:46

seen anybody yet I don't think Adam

1:31:48

has a beard and his look I mean it

1:31:50

captures the ears of your hair light though Yeah,

1:31:53

I thought still frame of somebody with a very

1:31:55

large beard today and like visually look fine I

1:31:57

don't know how it moves since this was no

1:31:59

No movement on hair, no movement on beard. Yeah,

1:32:02

no. I assume, but it's not

1:32:04

like a Wii avatar beard

1:32:06

or something like that where it's like a 3D model

1:32:08

that has like hair texture on it or something nightmarish,

1:32:10

right? It's just looking like a photo of the person's

1:32:12

beard. Okay. I

1:32:15

mean, call me cautiously optimistic. Norm, thank you

1:32:17

so much for coming by and we really appreciate

1:32:19

you taking the time to go through the

1:32:21

Vision Pro with us. You're going to have

1:32:23

a video untested soon that people should all go

1:32:25

watch, I hope. Hopefully next week. I just

1:32:27

got to go get down to all my

1:32:29

thoughts and film it. Thanks

1:32:34

Norm for coming by. As always, you can

1:32:36

find Norm over on YouTube at the Tested

1:32:38

channel or at

1:32:40

tested.com on the World Wide Web, if

1:32:42

Apple hasn't killed that yet. Give it

1:32:45

time. And you should make

1:32:47

sure tomorrow, if you're listening to this today,

1:32:49

it comes out his or next

1:32:51

week, this week, next week. What

1:32:53

week is it? This coming week, perhaps in

1:32:55

the days ahead. We have

1:32:58

good information that he will have

1:33:00

a full tested review of

1:33:02

the Apple Vision Pro, which everybody should check

1:33:04

out because I think I've

1:33:06

watched a lot of Apple Vision Pro

1:33:08

reviews and none of them are as

1:33:10

thorough and comprehensive as what Norm is

1:33:13

doing over at Tested on the reg.

1:33:15

So that'll do it, I guess, for us this week.

1:33:17

Brad, we have some housekeeping first. Do we? Well,

1:33:20

we've been doing reading, both

1:33:22

of us. The Tested,

1:33:24

sorry, the TechPod book club is back

1:33:26

in effect. This time

1:33:28

you said, hey, this last summer, I think

1:33:31

you said, hey, I read this John Romero

1:33:33

book. It's really good. You

1:33:35

should read it. And I said, sure, I'll put it on my pile. And then

1:33:37

it finally came up on the pile the other day. And

1:33:40

you know what? Yes. It's

1:33:43

really good. Yes. It sounds like

1:33:45

you're quite into it. I've been up too late, two or three nights in a row

1:33:47

now because of the level of good that

1:33:49

it is. Mike, it's

1:33:51

good from the start, but especially if you're

1:33:55

nerds of a certain vintage like we are, there

1:33:58

is a point in that book where you start

1:34:00

getting into the book. the software territory where like

1:34:02

I couldn't do anything but read that book until

1:34:04

I finished. If you ever had a notifier set

1:34:06

up for plan files, this may

1:34:08

be a book you're interested in. It

1:34:11

is not at all what I was expecting. I'm

1:34:13

just at the SoftBank period when they

1:34:15

were making SoftDisk. SoftDisk period rather. SoftBank

1:34:17

is a completely different thing. SoftDisk

1:34:22

where they were making shareware basically disks. They

1:34:26

had to make a game a month. That was their job.

1:34:29

When they worked at SoftDisk, they literally made a game

1:34:31

a month. So when you

1:34:33

think about it, when you say it today, it sounds crazy.

1:34:35

But when you think about what games were

1:34:38

back then, it's not that out of

1:34:40

control. Definitely not. Also, they were just

1:34:43

like absolutely horrific about ripping

1:34:45

off other stuff that they liked at that period

1:34:47

is the other thing that's become clear. So anyway,

1:34:50

I've enjoyed it so far. We're going to read it,

1:34:52

I think next week's episode. If I power through this

1:34:54

as fast as I think I'm going to, then

1:34:57

our plan is to talk about this book next

1:34:59

week. So if you would like to read the

1:35:01

book, you can pick it up. It's available wherever

1:35:03

books are sold, get it at

1:35:05

your library, whatever. It's called Doomguy Life

1:35:08

in First Person by John Romero. Highly,

1:35:11

highly recommended. And

1:35:13

I hope everybody enjoys it. We will talk about it next

1:35:15

week. But before we get to that, you

1:35:17

know what time it is. I do know what time it is.

1:35:19

It's my favorite part of the show. We

1:35:21

have to thank the listeners. Thank you, listeners.

1:35:23

Thank you, listeners. As always,

1:35:26

Brad and Will made a TechPod is a 100% supported

1:35:29

listener supported podcast. Without you

1:35:31

all, we would not be here. So if you would like to

1:35:33

help support the show, if you would like to be

1:35:36

a part of the fabulous TechPod

1:35:38

community over on Discord, you can

1:35:40

go to patreon.com/TechPod. Again, that's patreon.com/TechPod,

1:35:42

where for as little as $5

1:35:44

a month, you gain access to

1:35:46

the Discord. You get access to

1:35:48

the patron exclusive episodes where we

1:35:50

talk about, well, like

1:35:52

the stuff that we don't talk about on this show.

1:35:54

I assume we're going to get real into dip recipes

1:35:56

this month. That's right. We get a little loose on

1:35:58

the patron episode. Like if if

1:36:01

if we were cocktail drinking people, they'd be

1:36:03

cocktails. Yeah. Oh, that's an interesting idea. Oh,

1:36:05

yeah I mean, I do have a

1:36:07

bottle of gin in there. Anyway, yeah, so Please

1:36:10

go to patreon.com/tech pod. Check it out. See if

1:36:12

you want to support the show and You

1:36:16

can help keep the tech pod going But

1:36:19

every month we like to

1:36:21

thank all of our listeners But of course, we also

1:36:23

like to thank our executive producer tier patrons Including

1:36:27

Paddle Creek Games makers of Fractured

1:36:29

Veil Andrew Slosky Jordan lipit bunny

1:36:31

fiend comma the just wedge Joel

1:36:34

Krauska twinkle Twinkie David Allen James

1:36:36

Kammack and Pantheon makers

1:36:38

of the HS3 high-speed 3d printer. Thank you

1:36:40

all for your support. We appreciate y'all. Yes,

1:36:42

we do and That'll

1:36:45

do it for us this week another note I

1:36:47

guess I should say this here promoted here But

1:36:49

if you want more technology from one of us,

1:36:51

I'm on the PC world podcast most weeks these

1:36:53

days Oh, I did not know that. Yeah, I'm

1:36:56

on the full nerd I'm doing some contract work

1:36:58

and doing some video stuff to help them out

1:37:00

while Gordon's out sick and Have

1:37:05

Had a big planning meeting with the front of the show Adam Patrick

1:37:08

Murray last week and we're gonna

1:37:10

start an earnest production next week So

1:37:13

if you want to do that, they're on YouTube you

1:37:15

can find it I think they're also where all podcasts

1:37:17

are found on on the Apple podcasts

1:37:19

and similar types of platforms So very cool.

1:37:21

If you want more if you want more

1:37:23

will in your ears, that's a place to

1:37:25

get it. Anyway We

1:37:27

will see you all next week. Thanks for listening

1:37:30

everybody, and we hope you have a lovely lovely

1:37:32

week