574: Weird Forking Scenario
15 Feb 2024We spent nearly 8 minutes talking about other topics… but, of course, this is mostly more about the Apple Vision Pro. There’s a lot to cover!
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey’s Persona Surprise
- Follow-up:
- iPad Pro 11” PPD
- A note on field of view and eye movement
- Some discussion about Mac Virtual Display fidelity
- Turning off Apple Vision Pro
- The Developer Strap (requires login) is Thunderbolt capable
- Orion (HDMI display app for iPad)
- Casey’s HDMI capture dongle
- “Real” vs. “Fake” 3D (via Matt Rigby)
- Rotoscoping
- More thoughts from friend-of-the-show Todd Vaziri
- More [now un-paywalled!] thoughts from FotS Joe Rosensteel
- iMessage will not be regulated as part of DMA
- Riley Testut of AltStore weighs in on third-party marketplaces
- What is a €1M “line of credit”, anyway?
- Apple Vision Pro
- Guest mode
- Fitts’ Law on Dithering
- ⌘-Tab
- EyeSight
- Post-show: Casey’s Vision Pro after-action report
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Chapters
- A surprise for John 🖼️
- iPad PPD correction
- FOV and eye movement
- Mac screens in Vision Pro
- “Big” screens
- How to turn it off
- Developer Strap
- ATP Membership
- 3D-movie production
- EU DMA updates
- Demoing to friends
- EyeSight
- Fitts’s Law
- Window management
- Ending theme
- Mr. Liss goes to the library
A surprise for John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you trying to do like a Vision Pro layout or what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just don’t worry about it. I needed John to be here. I waited longer than normal expecting Captain Late to be here and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, it’s you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, what is behind me? I don’t even know what that background is. Maybe does Zoom add that or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does Apple add that? I think Zoom’s doing it. I don’t even know if there’s a way to change what’s behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. So I am currently using AirPods. I am recording my real mic and I will change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as I have John freak out about how ridiculous I look and then I will turn all this off and rejoin on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. Okay. But it was worth it for the fun of it. Oh look there’s my there’s ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my hand. Nope, there it is. There it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you do like the trademark Casey thumbs up. I mean the problem is your smile doesn’t get big enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you gonna do? Ain’t nobody perfect. Hi John. What’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John Last night it was a did a podcast and I did my normal zoom recording hello scary face
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s all you get.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s all you get. It didn’t record anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thing listeners that you have to learn about trying to surprise or shock John Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will never get the reaction you want. We know this from being friends with John for what 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years or whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey been. We know this. A long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. But whatever reaction you want to get out of John. You will not receive it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I believe you got, what, about one and a half words of a reaction?
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, as I said, I’ve seen a lot of personas now. We hadn’t seen Casey’s persona. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not to say that I’m not ever surprised about things. Marco was very carefully trying to say, you won’t get the reaction you
⏹️ ▶️ John expect. So maybe I’ll be way more surprised than you expected, or way less. There you go.
iPad PPD correction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some follow-up. Apparently John does not know how to do calculations. I presume mental calculations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps arithmetic beforehand But one way or another you screwed up your PPD.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell me what PPD is and how’d you screw it up, sir?
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem wasn’t with calculations because I wasn’t doing these calculations myself It was with the little PPD calculator which
⏹️ ▶️ John is pixels per degree and we linked the calculator in last episode show notes and had a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of sliders and text fields and apparently I I messed up one of the sliders or text fields when I was doing the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro PPD Because last episode I said it was 28 PPD if I have is my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad my 11-inch iPad Pro Sitting on a pillow on my lap in the bed
⏹️ ▶️ John Measure the distance size the screen resolution enter it all in and I got 28 PPD I had one of the sliders
⏹️ ▶️ John just incorrectly set the correct number is 67 PPD
⏹️ ▶️ John so that kind of changes things because last episode I was like wow the vision Pro is 34 PPD which is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good for a headset. And the iPad that I watch my TV shows on is only 28, and that’s less than
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro. Turns out, not so much. Turns out Vision Pro, 34-ish. iPad Pro, 11-inch, 67. 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, 5 feet away, 76. Pro Display XDR, 2 feet, 100. So it’s making
⏹️ ▶️ John me feel a little bit better about my future OLED iPad Pro purchase.
FOV and eye movement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about field of view and eye movement if you don’t mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John This was something that occurred to me after recording last week’s episode. We were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John the field of view, the Vision Pro, and how it compares to other headsets and so on. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also Marco mentioned like when sometimes when he was looking at targets to like the
⏹️ ▶️ John left and right side of the field of view, it was having trouble with the eye tracking sort of at the extremities.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it occurred to me that those two things combined that when we talk about field of
⏹️ ▶️ John view and how narrow it is in the headset, as opposed to like, you know, just your eyes out in the world or even some other
⏹️ ▶️ John headsets, it’s compounded by the fact that when you do what Marco was describing, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, keep your head still, but turn your eyes to like, you know, in the Vision Pro target, some
⏹️ ▶️ John button that’s in the upper left corner of your field of view. When you do that, you know, it’s, it
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of makes sense. It’s at the extremes of the edges of the screen. you’re looking through the edges
⏹️ ▶️ John of the lenses that are in the Vision Pro, I can understand how eye tracking might be more difficult there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do that in real life, and you have your head staying still, and you move your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John to the left to see something in the upper left corner of your monitor without moving your head, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Your field of view moves with your eyeballs, but that does not happen in the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you see what I’m saying? When you shift your eyes to the left, your whole field of view is always centered
⏹️ ▶️ John on where your eyes are pointed. But when you shift your eyes to the left in Vision Pro, the field of view
⏹️ ▶️ John does not move with your eyeballs because if you’re not moving your head, the screens are in
⏹️ ▶️ John the same place. And you know, that’s obvious if you think about it, but it really does make
⏹️ ▶️ John the narrow field of view feel more narrow because as you shift
⏹️ ▶️ John your eyes, the field of view doesn’t shift with them. And I’m not saying it’s easy to do that. What are they gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do? Have little motorized screens that travel around? It’d be very difficult to do that, but it does make the field of view feel even
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow. and it is also why a lot of people who have used Vision Pro for a longer time now
⏹️ ▶️ John get into the habit of, or suggest that other people get into the habit of, moving their head more,
⏹️ ▶️ John both to avoid the Marcos issue, which is like, you know, the eye tracking seems like it’s the best kind of around the middle-ish of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also because if you do want to, for example, take in a window that you have floating to
⏹️ ▶️ John your left, merely glancing your eyes over there is not going to reveal any more of that window. It would in
⏹️ ▶️ John real life, because the center of your field of view would shift, But in Vision Pro, you actually have to turn your head
⏹️ ▶️ John to move the little screen so they know to change what they’re displaying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that’s a good point. And I also wanted to bring up, I was talking to somebody about this, and I think I know who it is, but they all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remain nameless. But I was talking to somebody about this, and I believe it was that last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you seemed very disgruntled about the idea of moving your head, really in any direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think particularly laterally, in order to use my fantasy, which is actually kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of reality, magical world where you’ve got like panels windows all around you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you seemed, and don’t let me put words in your mouth if I’m mischaracterizing what you said, I apologize,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it seemed like, John, you were very perturbed about the idea of moving your head a lot. And I was thinking about this and talking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody that we know, do you not move your head when you’re looking at that humongous XDR? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you really keep your head dead center, locked in straight ahead? Because I’ve got three 5K displays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here because I’m a weirdo and because Marco sent me one. I’m pitching my head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laterally constantly, like all the time. Granted, not up and down, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s only laterally, but I am always moving my head. Do you not do that with your XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m sure I do move my head, but considerably less. Like I’m definitely a one monitor in front of me kind of person because
⏹️ ▶️ John if I feel like, oh, I have to look over there, which I guess there’s some like a minimum amount of head
⏹️ ▶️ John movement that makes me feel like that. Like what I want to feel like is that everything is there in front of me. Now, obviously the bigger the monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets, it’s not all in front of you. And the part of your vision that is in focus is very small anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I can flick my eyes over to various, I feel like I can take in my whole XDR. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t because the way human vision works, but I feel like I can very easily flick my eyes to any corner, and when I do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure my head moves, but it doesn’t move a lot, right? Whereas if you have a second monitor, you have to make that choice
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve made in one way and probably could otherwise, which is like, do I make it so the seam between the two
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors is directly in front of me, or do I put one monitor directly in front of me and then one monitor to the side? And if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John big monitor in front of you, the monitor to the side is in head turning zone because you really have to rotate,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you want to see like the upper left corner of the monitor that is to the left of the large monitor that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John directly in front of you, you’re turning your head a lot and you’ll feel it. So I prefer obviously the one big
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor. I don’t know what the limit is. It’s not 32 inch, right? I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you when I get to it. I bet if I put my 65 inch television on my desk, that would be past the limit and I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be turning my head just to look at the Apple menu. But so far from anything that Apple has shipped that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John used with my computer, 32 inch fits within my field of view.
Mac screens in Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like, you know, when people are trying to compare the Vision Pro and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, how it might compare just to computer, you know, regular computer screens like this, or how you might be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it as a virtual computer screen, the sharpness and density, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like John was saying a minute ago about the PPD, the density of a good computer monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just way higher and it’s way sharper than the virtualized windows that you create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within the Vision Pro environment. And so what it feels like when you’re making Vision Pro Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything feels like it is larger and further away usually than how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would normally set up a computer monitor. You can pull the windows virtually closer to you in Vision Pro and you can shrink them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down so they match the size and the position and the scale, but the resolution is just not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The displays in the Vision Pro are not yet high resolution enough to be able to simulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same density we get from computer displays that are right there in front of us in the real world. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of can’t directly compare. So if you wanted, for instance, if you wanted to have the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the 32-inch Pro Display XDR be reasonably usable in the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, you would have to make the window much larger than the XDR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually appears in real life. And you’d probably then either push it back from you a little bit further
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the distance, which then of course shrinks the resolution kind of even further, because there’s only so many pixels on the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display, so that’s not really gaining you any resolution, it’s just changing the perspective, or you bring it really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to you, in which case it’s really big and you have to turn your head more. If you actually want to minimize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head turning as you’re using a computer display, the best way to do that is not in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro, it’s by using a regular high DPI external monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I think another, like not bone to pick, that’s very antagonistic, but another thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was reflecting on after our last episode that I just don’t think I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that the Mac virtual display, I think it’s perfectly fine. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really argue anything you just said, Marco, but for my eyes, which I will be the first to tell you, my eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not great. I think I have like 20, 25 or 20, 30 or something like that vision with my contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, which is basically the only way I live, but they’re not perfect. So consider your source here when I say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think the Mac virtual display is pretty darn crisp. And I think part of that may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be because I can blow it up to be hilariously large if I so desire. And again, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not arguing that the effective resolution isn’t lower than an XDR or even a 5K machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know, I’ve used Mac virtual display in the Vision Pro for a couple hours at a time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t find it off-putting or frustrating at all. It was perfectly serviceable, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not an improvement in terms of my ability to get things done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over my 14-inch display, my MacBook Pro’s onboard display. It’s not an improvement in terms of fidelity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your point, but it certainly felt like an improvement in terms of my ability to get things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done because I had so much more real estate than my little 14-inch MacBook Pro has. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know how to phrase this concisely. Like, I’m not trying to say you’re wrong by any means, but I don’t know, my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a little bit different, I guess is the best I can say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but we’re actually talking about two different things, and I think this is an important distinction. You know, what you are saying is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can use it as a Mac virtual display and it works perfectly fine. You even said the word serviceable, it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do it, it’ll improve your productivity over a built-in Mac screen maybe. You are correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve spent a little more time with it since last week’s episode. I’ve tried, again, I’ve tried different head-sealed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shapes and foam cushion shapes, and I’ve tried with and without the reading glasses. There was actually a tip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody posted on Reddit and people linked us to it. In the IPD adjustment thing, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it on and it has you hold down the crown and it goes vroom and it moves the things in, in that screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you tap the other button, like the capture button, it can scoot them manually back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So as far as I can tell, this is a single direction adjustment, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does allow some degree of manual IPD changes. And this person on Reddit had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said that this made a huge difference for them in like how sharp and clear it was to use with that iScreen and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So I thought, of course, I gotta try this. I tried a little bit, I tried a lot. It didn’t really make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any noticeable difference for me. I have gone back to not using the Zeiss reader inserts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just using it straight, like the way I had it in the lab. Sorry, I went to a lab. That’s all I can say about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still find the Vision Pro sharp enough that I’m pretty sure I’m not having eye
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems by not seeing it sharper, but the Mac screen sharing is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not nearly as sharp as a real Mac monitor. Now, this is a totally separate discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from whether you can use it, and whether it has utility, and whether some people can be totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine using it for many hours at a time. That’s a separate discussion. My claim is that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not as sharp as a real Mac monitor. The kind of sizing and positioning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and focus distance issues make it less practical for me. And if given the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice, I would take a regular Mac monitor any day. I also tried, you know, people have reported,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have the developer strap, which we’ll get to in a second, it provides, I guess, a faster connection to the Mac that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connected to, and that apparently Mac screen sharing works better with the developer strap. I tried it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honestly I noticed no difference. So I don’t know if that’s a thing or not. I could tell no difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And finally, I tried editing this podcast on it last week. And while it was interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that much screen space, I didn’t notice this when just doing like basic email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and web browser and stuff like that kind of productivity. But when I started editing the podcast in Logic, I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed lag. Just like, you know, moving the mouse around because I’m doing lots of fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouse movements and fast keyboard and everything when I’m using stuff in Logic. So the lag was actually kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal breaker for me, in addition to the fact that it’s just- Almost like you’re using screen sharing. Yeah, it’s also very awkward trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wear studio-sized headphones while using the Vision Pro. Like that also proved to be a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there are multiple issues with the Mac screen sharing that make it noticeably less good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than using an actual Mac screen. And some of those are probably just inherent to the technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of those will probably be fixed in the future or improved in the future with higher resolution screens. So if you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something that’s going to directly replace a Mac screen, this won’t do that, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can serve as a Mac screen with some compromises. And for many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will be totally fine and worth the trade-off, but it’s not a direct replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s the key, the way you ended that, that yeah, it isn’t a direct replacement. Like, I guess that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. However, it is more than serviceable. And I know I said that before, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, it to me has been pretty, pretty good. I’ve occasionally noticed lag. I’ve actually noticed more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointer lag where I think it’s a little confused if I’m trying to control a Vision OS window or the Mac window.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve noticed a little bit more pointer lag than I’ve noticed display lag, but I’m not editing, you know, stuff in Logic or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I think your point is fair that it is not better than having a dedicated monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you are ever somewhere other than your desk and you would like to have more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen real estate, I think that this is more than just acceptable. I think it’s pretty darn good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, consider your source. My eyes are not great. So it very well could be that if I had Marco’s eyes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would look at this and go, oh, this ain’t great at all. But to my eyes, which in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general, as much as I’m making fun of myself, like generally speaking in day-to-day use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my eyes, I can’t think of a better way to phrase this. Like I don’t feel like things are generally blurry, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to make it plain that my eyes are not stupendous. And so I think that the fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is fine, the crispness is fine. I think it works reasonably well. Again, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lag could be an issue if you’re editing in Logic. But for the sorts of things that I do, I think the lag is fine. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is really, really good. And I was debating if I wanted to bring this up, but I might as well do so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually did take the Vision Pro to a local library. I did this on Monday morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I booked a little conference room sort of thing, which did have a glass wall behind me. but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I booked a conference room for a couple hours, which was like a two-person study room, I guess I should call it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had my back to the outside wall, so the only thing that anyone would be able to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the weird headband behind me. I did work. I wrote code for a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hours. It was great. It was absolutely great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I then got booted from my conference room because my time was up, and I needed to spend a little time in the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desks and chairs and cubicles area, and I did not have the gumption to put the Vision Pro on at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, but for the time that I was somewhat secluded and not completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conspicuous, I thought it was wonderful. It was so much better than my rinky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dink, like what is it, like 12 or 13 inch monitor that I bring with me as like a second display. It was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better than that. So again, I’m not trying to say that anything you’ve said, Marco, was incorrect, wrong, or inaccurate. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to say is for me and my uses, it’s been great. It’s been really, really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think what you said at the beginning of that is pretty important. You were talking about like, you know, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye quality for the lack of a better word. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not that sharp a vision, you might not see the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And that’s not an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insult. That’s just the reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah. The pro—if you are accustomed to sharp vision, and you’re accustomed to the sharpness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Mac screens, when you see the virtual screen, like, one of the effects I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I almost feel like I’m getting eye strain because my eyes are trying to focus harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to resolve the detail they expect to be there, but that isn’t actually there because I’m accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to seeing a certain level of sharpness on the physical Mac displays. And so when I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Envision Pro in the Mac screen sharing mode that is a little bit soft, my eyes think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not focusing correctly and they try harder to focus on it. Similar to what I was describing last week about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I try to focus on stuff that’s out that’s in the the soft depth of field areas of a 3D movie. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking I should be able to focus on this and it kind of hurts my eyes to look at a defocused area of the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think I should be able to focus on. So it’s that same kind of effect when looking at the Mac screen. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have pretty sharp vision in the physical world, that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it more noticeable to use the Mac screen this way and to see its flaws and to potentially maybe cause some eye strain.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, Marco, about your lag when editing the podcast, you just have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision OS native version of Logic, which based on the iPad schedule, should be here in 10 short
⏹️ ▶️ John years. So hang in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the screens
⏹️ ▶️ John are probably higher resolution by then.
⏹️ ▶️ John just to be clear for people, like, oh, he’s saying there’s lag, screen sharing with the Mac. Like he’s using a Mac program to edit the podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John so he’s screen sharing with his Mac. Presumably if it was a native Vision OS version of the thing, there would be considerably less lag because
⏹️ ▶️ John the app would actually be running on the Vision Pro, which has an M2 and it would be fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would expect no lag if it was native.
“Big” screens
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Related to what you were all saying about screens. This also is one final note on the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John field of view and everything. And you were kind of both touching on it, like even before Vision Pro came
⏹️ ▶️ John out, there was lots of people speculating about like, well, you know, you have such and such
⏹️ ▶️ John size monitor on your laptop or on your desk. But once you get the Vision Pro, imagine you could
⏹️ ▶️ John make it 100 feet tall in front of you. Right. And we heard a lot of that both before the
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro was in anyone’s hand and now after when people have it, they still make statements like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And both of you were touching on as the sort of the edges of that, but it made me think about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does it mean to have a really big screen in front of you? Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John one aspect of it that we’ve discussed at length is okay, well, like how many pixels can I see? Because when you’re doing stuff with like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac screen sharing or something, what it comes down to is like, look, toolbars take up a certain number of pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I wanna see more stuff on my screen, I need to have more pixels because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really care if I can make something 100 feet if it’s 640 by 480 pixels, because there’s just not enough information density
⏹️ ▶️ John there. But it also got me thinking about things like watching movies. Oh, you know, well, you could watch
⏹️ ▶️ John movies on your little laptop on a plane, but when I’m on the plane, I can put a 20 foot
⏹️ ▶️ John screen in front of me. And there are a couple of aspects of what does it mean to look at a big
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, especially when thinking about things like movie screens. When you’re in a movie theater, let’s say the screen is 100
⏹️ ▶️ John feet diagonal or something. The screens are really big. It’s a really big movie theater. It’s not a dinky movie theater. It’s a big movie
⏹️ ▶️ John theater. That screen is really big. How that manifests in our viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John is one, how much of your field of view does it take up? And if you’re in the front row, it takes up all of your field of
⏹️ ▶️ John view, but you can’t even see the whole screen without turning your head, right? And if you’re in the back row, it takes up less, but it takes up a certain amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of your field of view. But field of view is not the only thing that makes a screen big. If it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we could take our phones and jam them up to our eyeballs, And you’ll be like, wow, my phone screen
⏹️ ▶️ John is huge. It’s taking up my almost my entire field of view because it’s touching the bridge of my nose,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Field of view is not the only thing that determines a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John a big quote unquote big screen. The second thing is how far away is it from you? And in
⏹️ ▶️ John the movie theater, if you’re watching some gigantic IMAX screen that’s hundreds of feet, right? Hundreds of feet diagonal,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a massive screen. It’s multiple stories tall. It’s also not touching the bridge
⏹️ ▶️ John of your nose. it’s probably pretty far away. Because if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be able to see anything. Again, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you were sitting in the front row and you’re cranking your neck and you can’t even see the entire screen, depending on how
⏹️ ▶️ John well the theater is laid out. Inside Vision Pro, many things conspire
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it not a good match for anything that I’ve just described. Obviously, the physical reality is
⏹️ ▶️ John there are screens like less than an inch from your eyeball or whatever, but that’s not how they work, that’s not how it feels because of the lenses.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the first thing is field of view. We know the field of view of the entire Vision Pro is like 100 degrees, the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ John movie viewing thing is like 40 degrees or whatever, field of view, you’re fine. You should be able to get something that has the same field
⏹️ ▶️ John of view as the biggest movie theater screen you’ve ever seen where you have a good seat
⏹️ ▶️ John in the theater. So I feel like we’re covered, especially for a static thing like field of view. Pixels, we already know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not quite adequate to give the kind of fidelity we expect for a Mac monitor, but it’s not awful either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then there’s distance. One of the things that makes that 100 foot screen feel like it’s 100 feet is the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s really far away from you, that it fills a lot of your field of view, but also when you try
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at it, you have to focus, I don’t know, 50 feet away or whatever, like you have to focus the distance
⏹️ ▶️ John from the middle of the giant theater to the screen. And that’s never going to happen in the current Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro because every single thing in there is 1.3 meters from you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how much of your field of view you make the television screen, the movie or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how big you make it, even if you make it like I’m sitting in the front row and I can’t even see the whole screen and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John overwhelming me. It’s still going to be 1.3 meters away as far as your eyeballs are concerned
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’ll be focusing 1.3 meters away to be able to see what’s on the screen. This is not to say that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad or good or indifferent. Sometimes having it 1.3 meters away is probably better than having
⏹️ ▶️ John it 50 feet or away. But it explains why when I was in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve experimented with like, can I make like this video really big to make it feel like I’m watching a big screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I could make it big and I can make it fill my field of view, but it never felt like I was watching an
⏹️ ▶️ John IMAX screen, and it’s because the IMAX screen is not 1.3 meters from my face. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the solution to this, other than, you know, obviously we talked about a headset that has a variable
⏹️ ▶️ John focal distance or whatever, but keep this in mind when you’re thinking about what you want
⏹️ ▶️ John out of a big screen experience. When you’re talking about the Mac, you probably want more pixels that this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t really deliver comfortably for you. When you’re talking about a movie screen, If you like the
⏹️ ▶️ John feeling of sitting in a giant movie theater, you’re not going to get that when your eyes are focusing 1.3 meters away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in Casey’s case, or if you’re on an airplane or whatever, you can definitely get a larger
⏹️ ▶️ John screen 1.3 meters away than you comfortably can in a physical environment, Either whether that means for you not carrying
⏹️ ▶️ John your XDR with you to the library to get the view that Casey was getting or bringing it onto a plane or
How to turn it off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do we turn off a Vision Pro? I don’t even remember talking about this last episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John this a point of- It was during my demo when the person was twisting the power connector to reboot the Vision Pro. Oh, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. So when the person did that, I teasingly said, oh, you know, Apple never puts power buttons on their things, because wouldn’t that be
⏹️ ▶️ John more convenient to power button? And then I suggested to the person when they were twisting the little thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and taking it off, I’m like, why don’t you just try holding down the crown and the button at the same time?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they told me, no, that’s not how it works. And then as a head to endure
⏹️ ▶️ John a week of people sending me massive messages saying, you should have just told the person to hold down these two buttons because that will
⏹️ ▶️ John show the little shutdown slider that you see in from iOS and let you turn down. So anyway, there is an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John support document explaining how you can turn off the Vision Pro. I think it’s just called how to turn off
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro. And apparently you can do any of the following. Number one, press and hold the top button in the digital
⏹️ ▶️ John crown, and then it’ll show like the little shutdown slider. Number two, go to settings general shutdown and then drag
⏹️ ▶️ John the slider. Number three, say, dingus, turn off my Apple Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And finally, take off Apple Vision Pro, place it on a secure surface like a table or desk, then disconnect the power
⏹️ ▶️ John cable. It’s amazing that they tell you that disconnecting the power cable is one of the ways you can turn it off. I mean, that’s true, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess, but that’s kind of a, let’s say, ungraceful shutdown because all of the other ones give software
⏹️ ▶️ John time to do, you know, a proper clean shutdown. Disconnecting the power does not do that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna, the power is like, oh, it’s the Apple TV reboot procedure. Just yank out the power cord.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is kind of interesting too, because like no other iOS based device has ever had this,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah, just TVOS ones. Apple TV, that like, I remember when I first got the Apple TV, it was like, surely there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John support document telling me how to like, you know, reboot it or shut it down. And it’s like, just yank the cable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although interestingly, I understand that you grabbed this from the Apple support document, not trying to argue with you, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my recollection, when you press and hold the capture in digital crown for a couple of seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that brings up a force quit menu. So maybe you have to mash it down for even longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think both UIs are in the same. So why don’t you just try it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, hold on, I’ve got to strap in again. Hold on. Strap in. Hold on, this is not fun to do with
⏹️ ▶️ John While Casey’s doing that, I will bring up another point, which is this document says you can do all of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I am suspicious about whether all of them are equivalent. I do believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that disconnecting the power will turn it off because there will be no more electricity and those capacitors will discharge eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as we know, there’s no backup battery. So turning off, disconnecting the power should turn the thing off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every other one of these things, I’m suspicious that it’s like in a deep sleep mode and it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John off, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn’t say that that’s the case here, but bottom line is when power is still attached,
⏹️ ▶️ John I always, I mean, you know, Max have done it for ages. I always wonder if it’s like, I’m mostly off, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of a little bit on, and occasionally I’ll wake up and check for a new email and stuff, which is the thing that Max had done for ages.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I give this a little bit of side eye, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, real-time follow-up, real-time follow-up. So I’m gonna press down starting now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now I got a force quit menu. Closing the force quit menu. Now I’m gonna press down starting now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why are we doing this? No, no, no. Okay, there we got slide to power off. So it was an additional one to two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say also like hot tip about powering down the Vision Pro. However you choose to do it, definitely power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down if you’re gonna be not using it for a while and it’s not plugged in because it drains its own battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you just leave it like on a countertop, not plugged in, it’ll be dead by the next morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mine wasn’t dead by the next morning, but it was like half the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John had been used up. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPods Max. Just like the AirPods Max is downloading your photos from your iPhoto library, so is your
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro. AirPods Max can’t display them, it just likes to download them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photo analysis D has to run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually do think that’s one of the things that melted my battery, because I’d done this like the second day I had it. You know, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left it somewhere, I forget where, and it was plugged into the battery pack, but the battery pack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not plugged into anything. And yeah, when I got to it the next morning, it was at like 50% or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Yeah, I mean, it’s downloading your messages, it’s syncing your notes, like it’s doing all the things. If you have a long,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, long suffering Apple ID, let’s say, it’s got a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John data. And this thing’s going to try to download it and yeah, it’s gonna eat your battery.
Developer Strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the developer strap. This we all ordered. Was it the day of release?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day after. It was sometimes soon afterwards, but you could kind of tell, like, maybe they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t want people to really talk about it, because I think they they kind of buried this announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think I’m pretty sure it was the day of release. But if not, like you said, it was the next day one way or another.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to recap, this is a three hundred dollar strap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s the white pieces on the Vision Pro that connect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Vision Pro to the back strap, and in certain cases, the top strap as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The light seal, or shield, the light shield and the little light shield
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cushion, those do not touch the strap, those touch the Vision Pro itself. But the back strap and top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strap, if applicable, connect to these white straps. And the white straps also house the ear pods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio pods, whatever they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s the right stick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. So the right-hand stick, if you get the developer, the $300, did I mention $300? The $300 developer strap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a little upset about the price maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I mean, honestly, I do, to a degree, I do get it, but whoa, golly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the $300 strap that in the same spot that on the left-hand side, you plug in power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Vision Pro, it has a very similar design, like a little nubbin, if you will. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hanging off of that nubbin is a USB-C receptacle so that you can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey USB-C in on this and USB-C in on your computer. And then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do things like have better screen sharing, allegedly. I mostly agree with you, Marco. I haven’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big difference on that. But one way or another, you can have better screen sharing, allegedly, and you can also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do much easier, faster, better, et cetera, development because you’re not relying on Wi-Fi. I got one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ordered it immediately because I was still worried about inventory and things like that. It turns out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I think, for naught. But nevertheless, I ordered immediately. It came in the Monday that I had left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to New York. So I didn’t get a chance to play with it until this past Monday, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I brought it with me to the library knowing I was going to be doing Vision Pro development. I thought to myself, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to leave this thing sealed and it was. It was actually in the shipping box at this point. I’m going to leave it sealed and hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t need it. Hopefully, it won’t be a big deal. And I connected my Vision Pro to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computer via Wi-Fi. And it did the, I forget exactly what it’s called, Marco, you probably remember, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the like downloading symbols or preparing for development, whatever it is, dance. And it was at 0%, at 2%,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And after literally like half an hour of this, I immediately opened the $300 developer strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, the hell with this, I’m gonna have to open this thing up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I opened it, I was under the impression that this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB 2.0 device. It only, only thing it does is apparently a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of magic with screen sharing, allegedly, and it lets you do debugging and whatnot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via the cable. And apparently, John, that’s not right. So what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think this is still just people speculating, but they’re pulling it up in the system information
⏹️ ▶️ John app in macOS, and you can see it listed under the Thunderbolt slash USB4 bus. You can see
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Vision Pro listed under there once you connect it with an actual Thunderbolt cable. So this is leading people to
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that this thing is Thunderbolt capable, even if none of the software that we have now is taking
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of it. And one of the things that lends credence to that is if you look at the standard little
⏹️ ▶️ John white stick that plugs in there and you take it out and you see the widest lightning connector Apple has ever made, that has 10
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts on it. And those contacts are only on one side. So it’s very odd, asymmetrical,
⏹️ ▶️ John one-sided curved lightning. The developer strap has 14 contacts or 28 14
⏹️ ▶️ John on each side, right? So that’s a lot more contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it’s just four more that’s substantial and the fact that they have them on both sides makes me think that this developer
⏹️ ▶️ John strap Is surely equipped electrically speaking to do more than USB 2.0 speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see if that speed is unlocked in the future But it sure looks like that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you might get more for your money more for your $300 than USB 2.0 speeds feeds
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when new versions of Vision OS and or Mac OS and or Xcode are released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Can you imagine if this thing could, and I mean, granted it’s dongle town all over again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but can you imagine if you could plug in like an HDMI in to this thing? You know, the same ones that, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you’ve, I’ve gotten and many people have gotten for their iPads and for their Macs, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the name of the, the app that that’s really good for HDMI input on the iPad that the Halide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people do? I’m drawing a blank now. Shoot I’ll try to remember to put it in the show notes, but anyways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you imagine having an HDMI dongle and then plugging into that HDMI dongle I don’t know like a Nintendo switch or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. That would be neat. Is that possible? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John an HDCP whatever You know handshake violation and you’ll get a black screen. So don’t worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know it would be cool if it was more capable than just doing you know The developer strap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff as it is today and I mean I am grumbly obviously about the fact that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s $300, but nevertheless, it is very convenient. And I know I haven’t done watch development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seriously. You know, I’ve dabbled as we talked about many years ago, but golly, I would pay $3,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for one of these for an Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, I would. No question. Like if there was some kind of Apple Watch developer strap, even if it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also $300 or more, I would buy it in a second because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though the Wi-Fi debugging to the Apple has gotten way less crappy than it used to be. It is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really crappy compared to any kind of wired debugging like on a phone. So yeah, no question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that. And that’s why I bought this too. It is clunky to use in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is now two cables. There’s a cable coming out of each end and that’s really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s not great. However, if you are doing like active debugging or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fast build and run cycle on the vision pro from Xcode, it is really nice to have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as fast as it can be. And that is why I bought it, because I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always like I’ve like I’ve upgraded my entire Apple watch solely because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underscore told me it would build the app a little bit faster in this build and run cycle. Like that’s how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it matters when you’re actually actively debugging and actively building and running an app in like a tight loop of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, change this, fix this, run again, like every second matters for both your productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honestly your mood. And so for me it’s very high value to try to shorten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that loop and try to make sure there’s as little friction as possible when I got to do that cycle. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though the cable situation is stupid, the price is stupid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that it was not built into the battery cable that itself has communication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocols and a USB-C port on the battery is the stupidest of them all. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll still gladly, I still did gladly buy it and use it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the debugging cycle is just that much better and it makes that much of a difference in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I really wish that you could optionally, and I get why Apple doesn’t do this because there’s 104
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons why it would be clunky, but I wish you could power this thing through the developer strap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, somehow give me one cable!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, that would be tremendous. And And I mean, USB-C can carry power.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a thing USB-C can do, but unfortunately not here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, the battery, we just, that was last week that the battery puts out a voltage that is not supported
⏹️ ▶️ John by any of the USB power delivery specs, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s weird because like, it seems like the hardware was designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without ever talking to the Xcode team. Designed in a vacuum with no one ever considering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, what about cable debugging? I mean, I’m sure they were
⏹️ ▶️ John they were using Xcode to do all the development of the vision pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so how like, okay, I don’t want to harp on this too long. But just how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did this not get integrated into the main battery cable somehow? That blows my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, real time follow up the the app that you were thinking of, apparently, according to the chat room is Orion. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s it. Thank you. Yep. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then one more thing with Margo asking about debugging on the watch, like, so the rumors are that there
⏹️ ▶️ John there is and was a thing that you connect to like a little diagnostic port behind the strap for watches
⏹️ ▶️ John internal to apple to do essentially wired debugging on the apple watch and then the rumor was that future
⏹️ ▶️ John apple watches i don’t know if that means current or still to come ones used a sort of high frequency wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John interface to do that debugging that was better than wi-fi but it’s kind of like a direct point-to-point wireless interface
⏹️ ▶️ John with some really high frequency so what we’re saying is that we’ve always heard that inside apple
⏹️ ▶️ John The build and run cycle that Marco was just complaining about for the Apple Watch is better inside Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that betterness supposedly has not yet trickled out to the regular developers.
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3D-movie production
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Rigby writes to us, many quote unquote 3D films, including the recent Star Wars trilogy, are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3D conversions. That is to say, the films are shot in 2D on a single camera, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rotoscope artists individually cut out each element of every shot, frame by frame,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise known as rotoscoping, then map these elements as textures onto rough 3D objects and render
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those objects in 3D space. Holy fart knockers. I can’t believe that that’s what people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do to make these 3D movies. That sounds terrible. But Matt links to real 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or fake 3D dot com. That is literally the URL real 3D or fake 3D dot com.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also linked in last last week’s show notes, because that’s what I was getting at when I was talking about the
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D movies and Mark I had to watch the Star Wars ones and the 3D wasn’t done very well there. And the real or fake
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D host name is, you know, obviously extreme, basically
⏹️ ▶️ John saying the thing you just read, Casey. That’s fake fake 3d because it was like well the movie was shot in 2d
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we make it 3d It’s also called like post conversion or whatever and so the real or fake 3d.com
⏹️ ▶️ John site It basically lists movies like look if you want to know if the movie you’re going to watch is real or fake
⏹️ ▶️ John 3d look It up on here And you’ll know What it is that you’re getting the implication being that you would presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John want to avoid the quote-unquote fake 3d instead of the the real one
⏹️ ▶️ John So I talked to our friend and illustrious industrial light and magic special effects
⏹️ ▶️ John artist Todd Viziri who has worked on many Star Warses and many other Star
⏹️ ▶️ John Trek’s and other movies you may have heard of about the topic of 3d and
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular the whole thing about real and fake 3d and He had an interesting take on it I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to try to summarize it here because I didn’t record our conversation and it was in
⏹️ ▶️ John Audio instead of email so I can’t quote passages from it. His take was that that shooting
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote real 3D with two cameras sitting next to each other, you’re filming stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with two cameras in 3D, so you got a right eye and a left eye thing of it, is kind of a pain in the butt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s a pain in the butt for some obvious reasons. You have two cameras, they take up more room, they’re heavier, it’s a pain
⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with two cameras to make sure they’re all working and everything. You can’t get those two cameras into the same places that you could get one camera
⏹️ ▶️ John into, you have less flexibility there, right? Also, when you’re filming with two cameras, you have to make a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of decisions when you’re filming that you don’t have to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re post converting, you can change your mind about stuff like that. So for example, the, what we were just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John the IPD, the interpupillary distance, it’s called the interaxial distance in the realm of 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John filming. When you film with two cameras, you pick that distance by putting the cameras that distance apart
⏹️ ▶️ John from each other. And it’s not easy to change that after the fact. Whereas when you film in 2D
⏹️ ▶️ John and they do that 3D conversion, you’re choosing when you do the conversion, what
⏹️ ▶️ John you want that distance to be when you do the conversion, like later after the entire film was put together.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you’re shooting in 3D, you’re kind of baking in that distance in every one of your shots that you
⏹️ ▶️ John make. And that’s important because there’s a whole bunch of guidelines for doing 3D filming
⏹️ ▶️ John that you want to try to not violate, which is like, don’t change that interaxial distance
⏹️ ▶️ John massively from one shot to the next, because if you’re cutting between them, it’ll make people’s eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John bug out, but it’s like, whoa, suddenly now my eyes they’re three feet apart. Now they’re two inches apart. Now they’re three feet apart. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re one inch apart. You know, like you don’t want to bounce that back and forth in the same way that you wouldn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John bounce back and forth lots of things in the 2D world. So you have to be have to have a lot of planning and be careful
⏹️ ▶️ John and be precise. You do have a lot of repair to do when you film in 3D because
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to sort of make the image from each of the cameras match up in a pleasing way when viewed
⏹️ ▶️ John in 3D, which involves unwrapping the lens distortion and making it so that when you actually watch it with
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D glasses or in a headset or something that it doesn’t look weird. If you get lens flares,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get different lens flares in each camera because they’re in different positions and trying to reconcile
⏹️ ▶️ John two different lens flares that you’re showing in 3D is weird because we’re all used to seeing one lens
⏹️ ▶️ John flare because the lens flares actually happen inside the lens. And when you’re shooting with one camera, you get one lens
⏹️ ▶️ John flare and that’s what we’re all used to seeing in movies. But when you shoot with two cameras, you get two lens flares
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe one, but not in the other one, depending on where the lights are. and we’re not used to seeing that, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird. That’s very, it makes filming very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult and it makes you have to sort of do like a Hitchcock style where you have everything planned out, you know exactly what you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, you shoot only what you need and you can’t change your mind easily about a lot of stuff. Whereas post-conversion,
⏹️ ▶️ John you shoot it in 2D using all the techniques and technologies that we’ve always had for 2D. And then later
⏹️ ▶️ John someone comes along and says, now I have to figure out how to make this into 3D and they can slice and dice it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it sounds like a lot of work and it is a big pain, but you can choose in
⏹️ ▶️ John each individual frame of film how you want things to look. So you’ll know that, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that scene, shot A comes after shot B comes after shot C. So I’ll make sure I don’t bounce around the interaxial distance
⏹️ ▶️ John there, right? Because you already know, the film is done. It’s already put together. You don’t have to guess, right? The people who are filming it
⏹️ ▶️ John have to, not guess, but like say, well, I hope this shot comes after this shot comes after this shot. But if we decide to change
⏹️ ▶️ John it around, it might be jarring because that shot we shot yesterday and the cameras are closer together than they are now. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a pain in the butt. And as for the Mario movie that I saw in my demo, I was asking like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, why would that look like bad 3D or fake looking
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D to me? It’s a CG rendered movie. And I kept saying they have all the depth information. And people thought what I was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John is that somehow that there was like, that I was gonna get infinite depth information in the like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the movie itself, as opposed to just a right eye and a left eye thing. What I’m saying is like, when you’re 3D rendering it, the rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John software, when it’s generating the image, knows the distance of all the pixels. So there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that things should look like they are 2D cutouts. Todd didn’t know any details
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Mario movie, but he said it’s completely plausible that someone could have a CG movie and to save money or time,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would render out either the whole thing in 2D and then slice it up and add fake 3D to a CG
⏹️ ▶️ John movie or render it out in layers and have those be composited together. And part of that is again,
⏹️ ▶️ John for cost and annoyance reasons. If you’re doing a computer animated movie like a Pixar movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do it the quote unquote real way where you render two different perspectives.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have two virtual cameras in your virtual world and you render from two different perspectives. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do that, you’ll quickly find, oh, it turns out that now one of the cameras can see around
⏹️ ▶️ John back behind a piece of geometry that I thought was hidden in the 2D version of the movie. And now I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John someplace where we didn’t fill in a texture or like Todd’s example was like, there’s a walk animation
⏹️ ▶️ John of someone doing a walk thing and they go out of view. and once they go out of view, the walk animation stops because you don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ John animate it when they’re not in view, but the other camera spots when their legs stop moving and they just start sliding
⏹️ ▶️ John along, right? So it’s harder to, it’s like building a set, right? Oh, now
⏹️ ▶️ John your set’s gonna be viewed from two slightly different perspectives. So be careful you’re not basically
⏹️ ▶️ John messing up your movie by trying to do it off two virtual cameras. Then of course, two virtual cameras means twice the rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John time because you’re not just rendering from one camera, you need twice the CPU power or twice the amount of time to render each
⏹️ ▶️ John frame. This is why tons of quote-unquote fake 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John happens in movies. And it makes sense, but it also kind of explains the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I don’t like about a lot of those is it does look like someone cut out through pieces of paper the foreground,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mid ground, and the background, and they’re sliding past each other in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t look convincingly 3D to me in the way that the cameras in the Alicia
⏹️ ▶️ John Keys studio looked convincingly 3D as if I was there because the cameras were a similar distance to my eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were shooting a real thing that was really there, and that’s all there was to it. Friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the show, Joe Rosensteil, wrote on Six Colors, and it’s a members-only post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re going to apparently steal some of. So I hope we had permission. I’m blaming John.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are excerpts from Joe’s summary of his own post. So I would recommend, subscribe to Six Colors and read
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire article, which is much longer. But here is Joe. He sent this through email. It’s him trying to condense and summarize
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the major points.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Couple of important definitions off the top. Interaxial is the distance between two stereo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras. The distance between the human eyes is fixed at about 65 millimeters, but the distance between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras can be anything. And secondly, convergence. This is where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two images converge. When they have positive parallax, they recede
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the screen, and when they have negative parallax, they stick out of the screen. So Joe writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that in mind. Everything you see with stereoscopic media, 3D stuff, is going to be different because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t just set up two cameras 65mm apart and call it a day. When I used to work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on stereoscopic movies, we would define interaxial and convergence values not just per shot, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per element of a shot, because where the objects really were would have been boring to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Films are about directing the audience’s view. A big part of depicting depth and directing the viewer’s eye
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2D requires adjusting focal distance and aperture. Elements that are extremely out of focus imply depth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2D and direct the eye. In stereoscopic films, the more something is out of focus, the more it loses any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detail that your brain can use to see disparity between the different images shown to each eye,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thus positive or negative parallax. Extremely out of focus elements will mush themselves back toward the depth of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, regardless of them being far away or extremely close.
⏹️ ▶️ John So these two points that we just went through here are fascinating. So the first is defining
⏹️ ▶️ John different, like, interaxial and convergence values for multiple things in the same shot.
⏹️ ▶️ John So basically it’s almost as if like, okay, when we shot the foreground characters, the cameras were two
⏹️ ▶️ John feet apart, but then the table that’s behind them, the cameras were six inches apart,
⏹️ ▶️ John like adjusting the parallax for the individual things, which is obviously not how our
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes work. Our eyes don’t suddenly move two feet apart when we look at one thing and then move back together when we look at another thing. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John always the same distance apart. But what he’s saying is you can’t just take two cameras or rather the way 3Ds
⏹️ ▶️ John or movies have been done hasn’t just been to take two cameras, put them human eye width apart and stick them and point them at something
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is deemed either not interesting or as he notes, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, they’re, they’re using those two tools, the interactional distance and the convergence
⏹️ ▶️ John to direct the audience’s eye towards something, which is another thing that I think distinguishes
⏹️ ▶️ John 3d movies, which I tend not to like from the Alicia keys and shark swimming towards you thing. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John are straight up two cameras, the width of your eyes. And so it feels like you’re there, right? Whereas a
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D movie, the hand of the artist or the director is more
⏹️ ▶️ John prominent because they are directing your eye and to direct your eye they’re doing things
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t exist when you’re looking at something. Like again, multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John items in the shot using different camera distances apart whether it’s real 3D or 2D, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do it in real 3D if you shot them separately and then composited them later or if it’s fake 3D they just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, separated them Differently when they were slicing the elements up and that to me looks weird and
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing is oh What about focal distance well things that are out of focus? Tend to just look like
⏹️ ▶️ John tend to like your eyes can’t tell the difference between them So they just sort of converge on the the
⏹️ ▶️ John center of the screen like it’s just at the depth of the screen Even if you made the interaxial distance huge and the parallax
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re supposed to be way far back in the screen as soon as you blur them people start to perceive them as being
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly at screen level, which is not what you want. And I also kind of feel that when I watch 3D movies
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, okay, well, they use a shallow depth of field here and the 3D things look 3D,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that blurry thing, it’s blurry in the film because, you know, it was out of focus when they filmed
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it should feel like it’s 10 feet back, but it feels to me like it’s right next to the foreground
⏹️ ▶️ John characters because it feels like it’s at the depth of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Joe continues, the 3D method used, animated, post-converted, or native stereo doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make a film good or bad. There’s a tendency to say that all post-converted films are bad or fake,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s not universally true because post-conversion can allow for a greater degree of control over the end result if it’s done well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Isn’t that what Todd just said? Conversely, native stereo and animated films are not universally more 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they captured full left and right eye views, like if they just set it near to human
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision, pushed everything behind the screen plane, and didn’t dial in the depth of field to increase what’s in focus, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So these came in independently. And I don’t know exactly when you had your conversation with Todd, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much concurrently Joe and Todd said basically the same stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Joe, Joe also works in the VFX industry and it really clarified for me why I don’t like three movies
⏹️ ▶️ John because I mean, I guess they could be done well or not well, but first of all, the Star Wars ones and the
⏹️ ▶️ John fake 3d that always bothers me for like the paper cutout thing. Like the foreground characters feel like they’re closer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like I’m there. They’re like being projected onto to a flat screen and they’re close to me. And I actually asked about that. I’m like, did they
⏹️ ▶️ John ever, especially for the foreground characters, did they ever do anything to make it so
⏹️ ▶️ John like when they’re post converting a 2D thing, the foreground characters don’t look like they’re paper dolls, right? And apparently sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they take like a rough 3D model of a head and they map the essentially texture
⏹️ ▶️ John of the 2D filmed guy’s head onto that. So his ear is closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to you than his nose when he’s sideways. You know what I mean? But that, I just look at that, I’m like, Just shoot
⏹️ ▶️ John it with two cameras, man. But like, but again, all the complexities. And the second thing is, I think there has to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John distinction between what looks good in a headset and what looks good on a movie screen. The reason I’m so wowed by the stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset is because I’m looking at screens, two screens that are eye width apart.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the video I’m looking at was shot with a camera where the two cameras were basically two eye widths apart. So it’s straight,
⏹️ ▶️ John feels like I’m in the water with the shark. Feels like I’m in the studio with Alicia Keys. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John very different than sitting in a theater seat and looking at a screen. And then having the people who made the movie
⏹️ ▶️ John decide where they want to direct your attention with some extremely unrealistic, but hopefully pleasing and interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John and exciting 3d work. And I personally really don’t like that second thing, but I really
EU DMA updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we’ve gotten a little bit of news with regard to the European Union’s Digital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Markets Act. This is the genesis of all the oddness that’s going on with the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the EU. But we’re not talking about the App Store right now. We’re talking about iMessage. And iMessage was one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the DMA people were wondering whether or not it classifies as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, what is it, a core platform service. Which is their term of art to mean, we’re gonna regulate the snot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of you. And so reading from The Verge, Apple’s iMessage is not being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designated as a quote, core platform service quote, under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the European Commission announced today, this is yesterday, the decision means the service won’t be hit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with tough new obligations, including a requirement to offer interoperability with other messaging services. The commission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also opted against designated Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search engine and advertising businesses as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey core platform services. Although iMessage has avoided the burden of complying with rules that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come with the official DMA designation, the period of regulatory scrutiny coincided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple announcing support for the cross-platform RCS messaging standard on iPhones. Meta, meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has seen two of its messaging platforms, WhatsApp and Messenger, designated as core platform services under the DMA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and has been working to make them interoperable with third-party services. Womp womp.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess like your price is like all the loser things, Microsoft Edge, the search engine that nobody uses,
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage, yeah, you’re not even big enough be regulated. Sorry. I’m sure Apple likes it, but it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I mean, this might have also been the result of like Apple lobbying for it in some way. I mean, because keep in mind, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DMA is not defining these standards in a vacuum. The DMA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco targets specific companies with specific products and services and then rationalizes it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it how it draws the lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, like it like it targets them by picking an arbitrary number. If you have more than this exact
⏹️ ▶️ John number of customers as of whatever and they just look up who has them on that date and they just…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. So like, you know, so for whatever reason, it isn’t that iMessage just doesn’t qualify. It’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they drew the lines to not include iMessage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, which I think is fair, actually, because it isn’t as dominant as the ones they are regulating.
⏹️ ▶️ John And certainly, Microsoft’s Edge is not dominant and neither is Bing. So congratulations and I’m sorry, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Riley Tested has written into us with regard to Apple’s third-party marketplace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system for the Digital Markets Act. So, Riley is the author,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genesis creator of AltStore. And so, Riley has a lot of experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is probably the most official, even though it’s very, very, very unofficial,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third party app store for the iPhone today. So, Riley writes, I’ve been pouring through the Marketplace Kit documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the past week and a half. And there’s some nuances I’ve learned from implementing this for AltStore. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any developer can choose to distribute their apps through the alternative app marketplaces regardless of where they live, once they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreed to the new business terms. Only developers building app marketplaces need to be based in the EU or have legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subsidiary in the EU. To start using marketplaces, you must first request a security token from an alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketplace, which will allow you to add that marketplace in App Store Connect. Once you’ve added a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketplace, you can then choose which apps you want to distribute with it. You can distribute any of your apps to any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey combination of marketplaces including the App Store. Users will have to delete an app before installing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same app from another marketplace though. When you’re ready to distribute your app, you submit it to Apple through Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like normal and wait until notarization finishes. Once processed, developers can automatically submit notarized apps to marketplaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through Apple, or they can manually download the notarized, quote, alternative distribution package, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or ADP, and send it directly to the marketplace themselves. It’s up to the marketplaces to choose how they want to receive their
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the most interesting thing in this email, because before we were saying, oh, everything has to go through Apple, and it does
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go through Apple, but Apple, and Apple can deliver it to the third party store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they can also just give it back to you and say, you know what, you can do this last part. I don’t know what that buys you other than more hassle
⏹️ ▶️ John because you do have to go through Apple. And so it’s not like you can bypass them. But if you wanted, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Apple, don’t send it to the store, send it to me, and then I’ll send it to the store. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John the marketplace would have its own upload portal thing where they accept them. I don’t know what the advantage of this would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s interesting that that flexibility does exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Riley continues, I fully agree that third party marketplaces only really make sense for apps that can’t exist on iOS right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, But not just for the obvious content reasons. For example, besides the fact that my app Delta isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allowed in the App Store because it’s a Nintendo emulator, it also is entirely monetized through Patreon by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey providing pre-release access to beta versions to my patrons. This business model is forbidden by the App Store despite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it being a proven way to monetize software in other markets such as indie video games. For this reason, I’ve actually added deep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Patreon integration to AltStore to encourage other indie developers to monetize apps this way, of which AltStore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey takes no commission because I genuinely believe it’s a better system for smaller developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, the other thing with the DMA is that you are required to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million euro line of credit. And what I think all of us took that to mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was you have to have a bank say, yeah, we will give you up to a million euros if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you ask for it. Like, we’ve already pre-approved you. We will do it if necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we had a couple of pieces of feedback about this. But Bobby Perotti writes, I work in commercial finance. Your discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the DMA and the required million euro, quote, standby letter of credit, quote, makes me want to clarify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what that actually is. That’s money that must be held essentially in escrow by your bank.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not a line of credit. It’s not like a line of credit. It is more akin to a minimum deposit. I think a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people assume it means you would be OK as long as you’re approved for that amount of credit from a bank, like a home equity line.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I can get a home equity line of credit, never draw on it, and not be inconvenienced much at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as I have home equity. A standby letter actually means that the bank is locking those funds up so the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beneficiary, in this case Apple, can take from it if certain conditions are met. It’s your cash,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but held, unable to be used for anything else. A good way to think about a standby letter of credit is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a check that the beneficiary, Apple, can cash at any time. Small consortiums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of indie devs, which will probably have trouble getting that kind of money together in order to control their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distribution destiny. So I really wonder what Riley’s going to do about this. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either Bobby’s understanding is incorrect. Maybe our understanding certainly sounds like it’s incorrect.
⏹️ ▶️ John He sounded pretty sure, because I went back and forth and went on it. I had to ask one more clarification, which is like, OK, do you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have that money? Because you can write a check and not have the money for it. And only when the person goes to cash it do you
⏹️ ▶️ John find out, oh, you can’t actually pay for the thing. And he said, yeah, not only do you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have that money, and pretty much all cases that he’s aware of, the institution that gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you that standby letter of credit demands that you give them the same bank that’s giving you that letter of credit.
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to give them the 1 million euros. And so it’s, you gotta have that money for realsy reals,
⏹️ ▶️ John give it to them, then they will give you that standby letter of credit, and they will hold that money, and the money’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting there, saying if Apple ever wants to take this, they can take it for whatever reasons it says in their
⏹️ ▶️ John marketplace contract or whatever, right? So you can’t get by saying, oh, we’re good for it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you gotta have that in cash, and you have to give it to the institution who then gives
⏹️ ▶️ John you this standby letter of credit. So I don’t know, maybe Altstar has a million euros hanging around
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re going to sell past this. But yeah, it’s more of a burden than we thought it was. Much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. I mean, not even close to what we thought it was. So thank you, Bobby, for writing in and telling us we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t clearly work in commercial finance. And I think this basically tells you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of entities that we should expect to actually jump through the hoops to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an alternative app store in the EU. It’s not going to be small companies and small developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be probably a very small number of pretty large entities.
Demoing to friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s talk Vision Pro. We talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a lot about this last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some more. And I think we left off last week, our heroes were about to discuss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s like to let other people try the Vision Pro. So John, it seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you had thoughts about this or you perhaps wanted to direct conversation or am I misreading you entirely?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re misreading it. You were gonna tell us, Marco wanted to tell his story of letting other people try the Vision Pro and you tell your story. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let any other people try the Vision Pro because I was just in the Apple store and it was just me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right. So what’s going on, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so I’ve, I’ve had a bunch of friends try this, um, you know, in the last whatever it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week or two. Um, I think enough people have pointed out now the guest mode that you can put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in from control center to let it, to let someone else put it on without your optic ID basically. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I would say if Apple wants to give the guest users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good impression of what it’s like to use a vision pro, um, you should probably make guest mode a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit better. It’s fairly clumsy to get started, and it’s extremely unforgiving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As many people have pointed out, if the wearer in guest mode lifts the Vision Pro off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their face for even a split second, it resets it completely and kicks it back into your mode. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if they lift it up to rub their eye or adjust the fit a little bit too much or something, once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s off their eyes, they’re out. You have to put it back on as you, re-log in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with either the optic ID or the passcode, go back into guest mode in control center and turn it back on for them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it back on. This is made especially inconvenient because every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone puts it on in guest mode they have to go through the entire eye setup. So first it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them hold the crown to align the displays as we discussed earlier then it has them go through the whole intro of like look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the dots and pinch your fingers and then make it brighter look at the dots again and pinch your fingers. So it takes a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of repetitive and cumbersome. So the guest mode experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not something that you’re gonna wanna do frequently. And I think it’s important that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re demoing for somebody else that you warn them, don’t take it off your face in the middle because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will reset it and have them have to start all over again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that’s related to, so Optic ID is like, essentially it’s like a touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ John or face ID, but for your eyeball. And I know from experience using a shared Mac in our house,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you probably know if you’ve done this on any kind of shared Mac, even a laptop, there’s a limit to how many
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch ID fingerprinty things you can store on a Mac. And that limit, I believe, is determined by essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the secure enclave and the hardware. So it doesn’t matter how big your SSD is, doesn’t matter what version of the OS you’re using,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever number of fingerprints it is, it’s like seven or eight, or I don’t know how many it is. That’s it for the whole system,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so like, for example, I wanna have like, my fingerprint work
⏹️ ▶️ John on both my wife’s account and mine and vice versa, so we don’t have to type in each other’s passwords, right? But you
⏹️ ▶️ John run out real quickly, because if the kids have their own fingerprints on their accounts, then you run out, right? So they’re not even
⏹️ ▶️ John saving the Optic ID for guests so that if you give it to a guest and they try it and they take it off and the next
⏹️ ▶️ John day they wanna try it again, it doesn’t like recognize them as a guest that it has seen before and boot them back
⏹️ ▶️ John into their guest mode or anything like that. It just doesn’t even save their Optic ID. So I wonder if A, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John storing the Optic ID in the secure enclave because it is biometric data presumably, and B, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re only storing your Optic ID. one, you know, or two, I don’t know, one for
⏹️ ▶️ John each eyeball, whatever, and that’s it. Guests don’t get anything saved about them. So every time the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro sees this person, it’s like, I have no idea who you are. You’re a guest, go through the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other major limitation I’ve run into is that one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistive tools for if you’re going to be showing someone how to use Vision Pro is you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airplay what they’re seeing to a nearby Mac or other screen. So you can, so you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have like my laptop nearby. So I will say, all right, mirror the screen of what they’re seeing to my Mac. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can see what they see, and I can kind of guide them, okay, go to this section of the Apple TV app to go find the 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco videos or whatever, you know. You can kind of walk them through what they’re seeing and what you wanna show them. The problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that breaks the DRM assumptions of the video player.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you have screen sharing enabled, they cannot watch any video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content that is DRM protected, which is all video content, basically, that you would want to show them. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Apple TV+, everything from Disney, like it’s all DRM locked, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s air playing, it basically breaks whatever DRM requirement is that you’re copying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen. And so not only can you not see it on the Mac, they can’t see it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the internal displays either. So they can’t watch 3D video content in the demo mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can see what they can see. And that is a huge limitation, in part because it just kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also because as far as I could tell I did these demos, you can’t turn off the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mirroring because they don’t have access to control center. In guest mode, there’s no control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you want to show them, the only way I could find was to take it off, reset guest mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn off screen sharing, like go through the whole process again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what you could do is like when I was demoing for some friends, we were airplane to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the TV, like to the Apple TV, I guess I should say that that was in the living room. And when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an Apple TV anyway, you can, you know, hit the back or menu or what have you button to effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancel screen sharing. Now, if you’re screen sharing to a Mac, I don’t know how that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. I’ve only ever done that like once or twice, but so you may not have the same option, but it does work pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well with an Apple TV where you can just basically cancel the screen sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should try that. And I didn’t think to try that, but anyway, so that’s, it’s just, it shows though like you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is Apple TV showing Apple’s content on two Apple devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it totally breaks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah it’s because of the stupid like I said the HTTP whatever it is
⏹️ ▶️ John high-definition copy protection I’m gonna put a link to it earlier that’s standard has all these things
⏹️ ▶️ John about like you know what it looks like is when it don’t siphon off the video off a side channel so you can record it
⏹️ ▶️ John secretly only it can only be displayed on the screen that it is handshake through through the stupid secure DRM
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol. Again, as a reminder, all of this is to make sure no one ever is able to
⏹️ ▶️ John pirate video. And we know, of course, this solved the problem of video piracy, and now it is impossible to pirate
⏹️ ▶️ John video. Thank you, copy protection, you did your job great. No, what it actually means is that
⏹️ ▶️ John A, everything is available for pirating, and B, you’re gonna wanna pirate it because the legit copy you bought, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even watch because it blacks out all your screens. Yep, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the thing is, I really wish, I don’t know, maybe I’m missing the point of how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy protection works. But I really wish that perhaps it would be impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see the black square of content that the user was seeing on AirPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the device, in the goggles, then they’re seeing everything you would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see. But the AirPlay mirroring, you’re getting blackness for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey square of content, or if you’re doing something immersive, perhaps the entire display is black or it’s like a checkerboard pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. I really wish you could at least do that because what you’ve said, Marco, is exactly accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, leaving aside whether or not you can turn off AirPlay, the first time I did this with somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, they go to go into, um, I think it was Disney Plus we were trying at the time, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were like, well, it’s not working. I’m like, what are you talking about? And then I look at the TV and I’m like, oh, you’re right, it’s not working. And it took me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few beats before I realized, oh, I bet you anything this is DRM. And so then, you know, canceling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay seemed to do the trick, if memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And only nerds would know that because there’s no error message. It just shows it as black, just black screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the same thing as when you take a screenshot on your iPad of trying to take a screenshot of a TV show, which I do all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I always am reminded, oh, yeah, this doesn’t work. And I think the reason why you can’t do it, you were suggesting, Casey, is like, oh, why don’t they
⏹️ ▶️ John just show it to the person but not show it to me? Then you got your copyright protection. I’m assuming it has to do with the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially once you do the mirroring, you have like broken the chain of trust. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do a three way chain of trust. So now nothing is trusted. You have this weird forking scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have, you know, this is not on Apple. And so far as Apple is just
⏹️ ▶️ John following these stupid industry standards that we have, the Apple kind of has to follow to work with all of the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even Apple, even if Apple didn’t want to do this with its own streaming service, which it does, but even if it didn’t want to, it has to
⏹️ ▶️ John work with all the other streamers. So they have to essentially implement this in your hardware and your everything has to be certified. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is all just so you can like watch content that’s out there and it infects every part
⏹️ ▶️ John of their system as well, because their whole video chain and system is built on it. And it’s so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb. So hopefully they’ll do something to fix this. I mean, again, especially with Apple’s own apps and own streaming platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John and own OS and device, they should be able to fix it for that, fixing it for
⏹️ ▶️ John any other streaming apps. If they ever exist on Vision Pro, ha ha, will be more tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, showing people the 3D video proved to be tough because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the DRM thing is annoying. And again, it’s like, it’s Apple’s content on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own streaming service on their devices. You know, they know someone maybe they can talk to and work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this out. Otherwise, like the, and I do suggest for Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the immersive 3D video should be easier to find in the TV app in the Vision Pro. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, that’s true of anything in any kind of streaming service where
⏹️ ▶️ John what about the thing I wanna find? It’s like, nevermind that. Have you seen these giant things that we’re advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John for the first two full screen fulls until you get down to, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s so, and it affects
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro too. Like anytime you’re like, hey, here’s a video playing app. Surely it will be easy to find the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I watch frequently. No, exact opposite. It will be intentionally hard to find the things that you want because
⏹️ ▶️ John they always want to shove something new in your face. Nevermind what you constantly watch. Nevermind anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John what you want or your favorites or your frequency. It’s all about what do we have to push on you, which is so
⏹️ ▶️ John dumb for Vision Pro where they should be allowing, There’s so little content anyway, they should
⏹️ ▶️ John just be making the same play. But again, it’s based on the same code base as the TV app and all their other platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John and it sucks everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it. Also you said a second there, there’s so little content. That part has kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprised me. Like I would have expected with the launch of Vision Pro, I would have expected there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be more of Apple’s 3D and immersive content than there actually is. There’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little of it. It’s like a few demos basically, or like one episode of something. and it’s like 12 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there. There’s not much content yet. Obviously, I’m sure Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna stage it out over the course of the year as they sell more Vision Pros and whatever else, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has a lot of power here because they are a video producer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have shown that they will make custom recording gear and record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly immersive stuff that’s custom tailored to Vision Pro. That’s great. They need to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a lot more of that because I think it’s going to be a while, if ever, before they get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large support from other producers of video. So therefore, they should step up more and produce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more stuff for this than what we’re seeing so far. So hopefully that’s in the pipeline, but I was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of surprised and a little bit disappointed that there wasn’t more immersive content available at launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s the chicken egg thing, because even Apple’s own creative wing is saying, wait a second, you want
⏹️ ▶️ John us to spend how many millions to make a show that is only possible to be watched
⏹️ ▶️ John by 500,000 people on the planet? Like those are the only people who have the capability of watching it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John let me show you how much money this is per person that you’re asking us to spend. And they’re like, oh, you don’t understand. We need to like
⏹️ ▶️ John drive people, we want people to buy the thing. I’m like, yeah, but right now they haven’t bought it and you can’t make more than this many per year. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see that conversation being difficult. Like they’re not going to make a, you know, for all mankind
⏹️ ▶️ John in headset 3D that can be watched by you and 200,000 of your closest friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John because that is not, you know, and they’re like, oh, it’s for the future. It’s for the future when we sell 10 million of these things, like, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you want us to make it today. And I can imagine that being difficult for them to square.
⏹️ ▶️ John They, I think they should make more of it because I think it’s the most compelling thing in the entire headset. But I bet what Apple is thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John is instead of that, instead of like doing what I think would be unprecedented,
⏹️ ▶️ John like trying to essentially make Alicia Keys swimming shark caliber of content
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t think has ever been made before sort of like a long form full television thing, like with that
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution and those cameras for like a regular TV show. And figuring out how to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, because I don’t think anyone knows how to do that. Well, at this point, that is much more experimental than
⏹️ ▶️ John the easier thing, which is, we should just do sports like this, we need to get a good sports contract. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as Gruber said, in those things, but when when Apple lost out for the bid for the NFL thing, he was kind of, you know, disappointed.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now that he has vision pro, he’s angry about it. Because that is a gimme. You saw in the demos how
⏹️ ▶️ John good sports looks and you don’t have to make that content They run around in the field and they make it all for you You just need to point cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John at it And you can have the cameras be eye width apart and you have 17 of those cameras and you put them in weird places
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a winner and that is a big draw and you have to pay Well, you pay way less
⏹️ ▶️ John money to make it You just have to pay money up front to get the rights to be the one who has the cameras there So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is a easier first path for apple to go with this. Like how do I make compelling content for vision pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, find a popular sport, film it in 3D, whether it’s the NBA or
⏹️ ▶️ John Major League Soccer or whatever, that seems like an easy first move. And I bet Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to do that and is going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also concerts, other events. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like live events in 3D, that seems like a big market, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports and other things, so. Honestly, anything in 3D.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, hey, sharks swimming in water, real popular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, we’re all kind of snarking, But we’re all serious. We’re all also serious. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overstate. I haven’t done a demo of the Vision Pro since the first weekend I had it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve been just exceedingly busy the last week and a half, whatever it’s been. But I think it was the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day that I had it, that I did a handful of demos for a couple of friends. The thing that unquestionably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold everyone the most was that sizzle reel, which I think we talked about quite a bit last week, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the different immersive stuff. The high, the high tight rope walking lady, the sharks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the soccer game, the rhinoceros, the Alicia keys. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you can imagine what it would be like to be watching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something, but as you twist your head, your perspective changes, right? Like that’s an obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and easy thing to imagine, but when you’re actually doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when you’re seeing the incredible fidelity of the thing that you’re watching,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this isn’t some like 480 P crappy recording because, you know, it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just can’t handle anything more.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not flickery and dim and weird, like 3d movies with the glasses that you watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I cannot overstate how incredibly impressive this stuff is. And naturally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like anything that they want to put in this immersive environment, I I’m game to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least try it. And yeah, the Alicia keys, as Mike had said, singing at you is a little bit weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was also freaking cool. Like it was so cool. I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go back and watch the whole thing, but I think I’d said last week, you know, I skipped through several minutes of it and I just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zigzagged around and it was phenomenally cool. And to build on what Marco was saying a minute ago, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would pay all the money to have a really good, you know, Dave Matthews or Mute Math or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concert that that’s been recorded with these obelisks, these white obelisks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 3D cameras. I mean, I would, I would give all the money. money. And I just, I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overstate how impressive this is as impressive as you imagine it might be like double
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or triple that because that’s how good it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the video demos, again, if we get past the DRM and the having them navigate to the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, like it is a very impressive thing. I will also say before I forget that the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the two, uh, straps that come with the vision pro, the fancy one with the crank and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the single headband around the back, the solo knit band is far better for demo purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the nice comfortable dual loop band because it’s so much faster and easier to adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. You know, the dual loop band is like, alright, you get these two velcroed straps, you got to, you know, strap, pull it, strap it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very impractical for demo purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John The hastily assembled one is less practical than the one that they clearly designed from the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Surprise! But yeah, so you want to be using the solo knit band, the one with the single loop that goes around the back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to use that for demos if you have it. First I had Tiff try it. She
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could not possibly be less interested. And you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerds out there many of you have people in your life that you try to demo technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for and maybe they will humor you and support you in your love for technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can kind of tell they’re kind of doing you a favor. They’re not their hearts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really in it. That’s how this scenario was. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, she was not impressed by the fit, was not impressed by the weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what she called the nose cape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t notice that until like, I don’t know, the second or third day I had it when it accidentally flipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downwards. So, what Marco’s talking about is there’s like this very thin, completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like flapping in the breeze material that’s good that that sits directly on top of your nose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which by default, it’s kind of like flipped upward. So it’s it’s black against the black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside of the of the vision pro. So you don’t really notice it. But then it can’t it has give to it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because just a piece of fabric and so flip down once I was like, what the hell? Oh, oh, I didn’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thing was there. Like, it took me a day or two before I even realized what the heck that was. But yes, nose cape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a very good word for it or term for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah. Yeah, so she wasn’t super pleased with the physical side of it. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s not fitted to her. Did you get her a different light shield?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and that’s a fair thing. Like, you know, obviously like everyone that I’m having try this is trying my size to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything on it. So anyway, she hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to go through the eye tracking dot pinching introductory thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was not fun. I have found also many people who try it on do not intuitively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the IPD adjustment thing where you have to like double tap the crown to confirm like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like hold it down and then double tap it like that especially since the
⏹️ ▶️ John instructions are presented to you probably in double vision because it hasn’t adjusted yet
⏹️ ▶️ John and so it wants you to look at like a diagram and understand what it wants you to do but you’re seeing double at that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well it actually for whatever maybe it’s just me even when it’s in it’s like unset state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find it fairly clear in that mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean you can close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway the funny thing is also like she’s an amazing tester of my app. She has a special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talent. I can hand her something that works perfectly and within a second she will find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way to break it. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful as a software developer. Like that’s a great quality for your spouse to have because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wonderful first stage of QA. She puts on the Vision Pro and this is this is still when I had the 1.0 software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I now have the 1.1 beta on it so I don’t know if this is fixed yet but she put it on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically immediately locked up and had to be rebooted. Oh cool. So this is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very you know very 1.0 kind of days. Anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she gets through it she basically said okay yeah it’s cool but why would I want this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait wait wait, even even after she saw the shark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she actually bailed out pretty quickly so I’ll I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had all the testers tried the diner the encounter dinosaurs quote app which is more of like a brief
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3d demo this is the thing you’ve heard about another podcast where like you hold your finger out and the butterfly lands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it so I had I had five different people try this all five of them put their finger out to have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butterfly land on it it doesn’t tell you to do that but it kind of looks like you can and so you try it and oh look the butterfly the main finger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all five people did that at some point a large dinosaur comes into your field of view which can look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat intimidating to people that I had tried including tiff as soon as the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dinosaur big dinosaur showed up they were just like no I’m out and just like took the headset off
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m done did you show did you show them the dinosaur before you showed them Alicia Keys and a tiger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know I’d have been a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t find them in the Apple TV anyway so yeah two people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noped right out of the headset as soon as the big dinosaur showed up and the other three all tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pet the big dinosaur.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you pet the dinosaur dot com? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah so anyway that’s that’s roughly you know how it went everybody was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly impressed with the 3d video content everybody was impressed by the dinosaur thing I do wish there was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more like one more 3d like interactive experience to show people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again this This will probably come with time, I assume. But it is kind of, again, I wish there was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit more of a demo, because after you watch a couple of sample things and it’s like, okay, well that’s kind of it. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can open up notes or my email if you want to see how that kind of stuff works. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit awkward, though. You know, you open up photos, oh, here’s a panorama. You can do that kind of stuff, but it’s, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do wish there was a little bit more demo content available. But again, this will probably go over
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Did you, you could have taken some spatial video of Adam with your phone and put it in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, that’s a different. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of surprised that Tiff wasn’t convinced by the birthday scene
⏹️ ▶️ John and the spatial video of people, seeing the possibilities for your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not really. Maybe she was just upset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the eye tracking and the nose cape. I don’t know. But it didn’t really sell her.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, I got some interesting input from Adam. So this is my 11-year-old son.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He is a heavy user of the Quest series of VR devices. Had a Quest 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, recently got a Quest 3. He barely cared, first of all, about using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro because there’s no games. Like for him, VR means games. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a lot of people are gonna be buying a nearly $4,000 VR headset to play games on it as the primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose, but it’s interesting, like, you know, from a kid’s point of view, how this is totally irrelevant. It’s like a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro to a kid, like, why would I want that? he barely cared. However, he did try it on, he did the dinosaur demo and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He instantly noticed that the pass-through is better than the Quest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3’s pass-through only when stationary, but it’s actually worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in motion. I have since tried his Quest 3 and he’s exactly right, he nailed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Motion in the Vision Pro, in general, gets very blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve even noticed that, like, even when using the virtual Mac screen, even when just doing computing in Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I move my head a little tiny bit, I notice the motion blur. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ideal. It’s not like a massive deal killer, but it is something that you notice. And it is yet again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the ways that I kind of felt a little eye-strainy when trying to use the Mac monitor mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over just using a real Mac monitor. There is that motion blur.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I heard a lot of people talking about that. And I do wonder, could you tell whether it is like manually
⏹️ ▶️ John created motion blur? So for example, a destiny, uh, has a setting and
⏹️ ▶️ John the settings menu that says, do you want us to do motion blur? And if you have it checked, they will, whenever the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera moves, they will. Artificially create motion blur by blending together frames, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you’re used to seeing from like, you know, cameras, like film cameras or video cameras or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you move them around, but you can turn that off and say, no, don’t pretend you’re a film camera. don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John artificially create motion blur, just show me the frames, which looks less like we expect from
⏹️ ▶️ John our life of watching filmed content. But if you’re playing an FPS game, I find that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see things better, so I turn it off. So I do wonder, is Apple adding motion blur intentionally,
⏹️ ▶️ John computationally by blending frames together to make it look more like
⏹️ ▶️ John how we expect it to look? Or is it just like, I can’t imagine it as anything else because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED screens, I imagine the response rate has to be insanely fast, like every OLED. So it’s a little bit mysterious
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, but I’ve heard this exact same complaint in many different reviews. I’m just wondering if it’s on purpose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. And I mean, like the fact that it isn’t just motion blurring your pass-through content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s also motion blurring the content of Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, Todd Vizzieri would tell you, check your motion blur. Everything has motion blur, even lens flares.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John would motion blur the pass-through, the video, like the Windows, they would motion
⏹️ ▶️ John blur everything, because that’s again, the expectation of how would it look? when you see a TV show and they pan the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, you get motion blur.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Also, for whatever it’s worth, one of the reasons why I never really spent a lot of time with the Quest 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I would get a little bit motion sick after a fairly short time. And when I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Quest 3 fairly briefly, I had the exact same problem. It is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge upgrade over the Quest 2, but it is not good enough for me to avoid motion problems, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I don’t usually have in the rest of life. but for some reason, Quest 2 VR was not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. Quest 3 VR is also not good for me. Vision Pro, I do not have that problem at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel zero motion problems with the Vision Pro. So-
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of it might have to do with the, whatever it was called. It was just something to the podcast that we’ll remember to link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John so we can find it. We’re talking about the, talking to the CEO of the company that Apple bought back in 2017,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they made an AR thing with passthrough, and their whole shtick was like, like the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John in Vision Pro and most headsets are not where your eyeballs are, so their perspective is different than your eyeball. So they have to do computational
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to sort of remap the camera’s view with like an awareness of what
⏹️ ▶️ John shape the world is so that it looks like you’re looking through your eyeballs and not like your cheeks,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is where the actual cameras are in Vision Pro. And that mapping I think is either not
⏹️ ▶️ John done as well or maybe even not done at all on things like the Quest because pass-through is not their
⏹️ ▶️ John emphasis. You know, it’s more of a game playing machine. And that could be making you sick because imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John if your eyes saw out of the center of your cheeks and you moved your head around, your brain would be like, I’m not seeing what I expect
⏹️ ▶️ John to see. And it’s, you know, get the disconnect between what you see and what you feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s possible. I mean, I, so I tried, I was using, I used the Quest 3 for about maybe 20 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of that was I tried like a full screen game and it didn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be any different. It was bad there too. So I don’t know. Yeah.
EyeSight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, speaking of eyes and eye placement, this leads me to my last point about the demo experience which was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyesight. The display of my eyes on the outside. I have now used it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough around my family that they have seen this. To most people who have seen this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is creepy as hell. So that’s interesting. What’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting is, during one of the demos I handed it to a friend and somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it stayed logged in as me. I don’t know how this happened, but somehow it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally displayed my eyes on their head actually using it, and I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see my own eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s actually kind of convenient, albeit a weird security violation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I got to see my own eyes on someone else’s head as they use it. Let me tell you, that is a strange experience to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not recommend that experience. Anyway, the eyesight though, so I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting at my kitchen island using the Vision Pro for a while with my MacBook Air, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of testing that out for a while, getting some computational stuff done over the weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Adam was hanging out nearby on his computer, down the island further, and he looks over and he’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Daddy, how are they doing that with your eyes? I was like, what do you mean? He said, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I see your eyes? I thought you were looking at screens. He was totally fooled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He thought that was actually… So it worked in the sense that it fooled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another person who didn’t realize that it was a simulation from screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it’s only 11. Yeah, so like, you know, it didn’t fool any of the adults, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did fool someone. And so I feel like it is possible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this feature better enough in the future if they want to, to maybe fool adults on a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basis. But I still don’t like it. I see why they did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, this, I mean, we’ll be talking this to death over the next three years before they finally kill it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see why they did it, to try to make this product less antisocial than it really clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. But I still don’t think it’s going to be great. But there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does seem to be enough room for improvement that maybe they can make it passable so that adults
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t think it’s too creepy. And then they can just get rid of it in a few years when they realize it’s not worth the wait and battery
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the thing about getting rid of it. Obviously the end goal is how about just make clear glasses where they can see your actual eyeballs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s what they would like to make, but we don’t have technology for it. But you know, we do have transparent OLED screens, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have the confluence of technology to be available to make something that light, that high fidelity with that bright of screens,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, yada, yada, yada. But the end stage will presumably be, they see your actual
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes and you don’t have to do all this trickery, right? Getting rid of it, we obviously think for weight and cost
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, if you have to make a low cost version of this, that’s an easy way to save money. But
⏹️ ▶️ John as weird as eyesight is and as janky as it is, and I do think it’s pretty janky because I saw a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of people doing it in the Apple store. And it’s dim, the lenticular
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses only show a couple of different images from different angles so they can’t cover them all. So sometimes your eyes don’t look
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re in the right place depending on what angle you’re on. But it serves an important function
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it so other people are aware when you can see them. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s important. That’s important for the like, how socially acceptable is this? Because we don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing people with their eyes totally blacked out. The same way it’s considered kind of rude if someone’s wearing really dark glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. And when you’re talking to them and you want to have a serious conversation, you just want to say, take off the sunglasses so you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John their eyes. It’s just an instinctive thing that we have. It’s not the end of the world. Sunglasses exist and we don’t hate everybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John wears them. But wearing dark sunglasses during an important conversation is rude, considered
⏹️ ▶️ John rude for a reason, right? or wearing dark sunglasses indoors or at night as the song goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the function, I think, they can never really, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the need for it will always be there. Until we can see your eyes, the need for it will always be there. How it’s implemented,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is some flexibility. So even if they don’t ditch it entirely for a cheaper and lighter
⏹️ ▶️ John model, you can imagine a much, much simpler version of
⏹️ ▶️ John EyeSight that shows like two big cartoon eyeballs. In fact, Apple has patents related to this exact thing Maybe they even
⏹️ ▶️ John prototyped it and thought it was dumb. But boy, you can make that way lighter if you do like two monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ John E-ink screens on the outside of the goggles that look like googly eyes that don’t even pretend to look like your eyes. Or even like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it was in their patent, like text, like a text display that says, I can currently see you
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like- Why not just put actually googly eyes on there? They’re much lighter and cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, but the thing is, you want it to be switchable because it’s trying to communicate to people,
⏹️ ▶️ John when can you see me and when can you not see me? I kind of wish they had this for AirPods where they can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John when audio is playing in them, when audio is not playing in them. And so I think that, the
⏹️ ▶️ John utility of that feature will always exist. It’s a question of how important is it? Is it important enough for you to pay X amount more for it? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it important for you to add the Y amount of weight? But I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point where we say,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no utility being able to tell when people can see you. There’s always utility in it. It’s just a question of,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the correct trade-off to get that functionality? And I think you can get a lot of the benefit, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the emotional, I can see your eyes benefit, but at the very least the binary, can this person see me or
⏹️ ▶️ John not benefit? You can get that with way less weight and way less costs than they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John currently doing. And I do wonder every time I see this, are these CG eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John that much better than monochrome googly eyes? I mean, they’re a little bit better, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think monochrome googly eyes would be easier to see at a glance. When I was seeing people do their demos in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store and you get close enough to them to be like in the person range or whatever, so you can see their eyeballs and they
⏹️ ▶️ John can see you when they’re doing the pass-through. Sometimes, if you’re not at the right angle and there’s so many like specular
⏹️ ▶️ John highlights on that stupid shiny thing, you can’t even see what the heck, you know, you can’t see the
⏹️ ▶️ John dim image on the screen through the lenticular stuff. Whereas if they were monochrome, high contrast googly
⏹️ ▶️ John eye eyeballs, well, at least I could see them from every angle and know when they’re totally immersed with the
⏹️ ▶️ John blue wavy stuff now and when they can actually see me. So I think, unlike the touch
⏹️ ▶️ John bar, which is my opinion, needed to die and be rethought. I think the things that EyeSight
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to do are worth continuing to try to do until we can see your
⏹️ ▶️ John actual eyeballs. I’m just not convinced that the way they’re trying to do it in the very first Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is the right path to be traveling down with the lenticular
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses and the really dim eyes and stuff like that. So we’ll see what they do for version 2 and if they drop it from one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them we’ll see how much that model is frowned upon because it doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature. I’m not as anti-eyesight as other people because I definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John see the point of this feature, and I think that point is always going to be relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’d actually like to build on what you said. I am pro-eyesight. Like, it’s not perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by any stretch of the imagination, but for all the reasons you enumerated, I think it’s absolutely worth it. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it is useful to get that visual cue whether or not the other person is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying any attention to you, and get that visual cue whether or not that person is in an immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey environment. Like I think these are all really useful things. Yeah. It looks janky. There’s the, both of you have said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it’s not as bright as it should be. Yeah. Occasionally it looks like your eyes are not where they’re supposed to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think this is the best that we can do right now. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Apple can make this better, I don’t think that this is a bad path to go down. Now, maybe there’s other better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paths. I’m not saying that this is definitely the winner, but I do think that they’ve gone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down the right path. I do think this juice was worth the squeeze. And I do think that it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the device that much more appealing for regular people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that includes me. Like, I think I would like this device less if it didn’t have eyesight, even knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that eyesight is janky and weird. In fact, I would argue in some ways it’s almost better that it’s drinking weird because then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can all have a good laugh about how janky and weird it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although if you think about this is another sad reality of some Apple today with its
⏹️ ▶️ John restrictive policies and what can and can’t be produced. In fact, I just saw someone get a Vision Pro app rejected because what they made
⏹️ ▶️ John looked too much like the Mac OS dock or something. So of course Apple rejected it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Vision Pro, we travel back in time and it’s the Mac of the late
⏹️ ▶️ John 80s and early 90s, there would be APIs that people would either discover or Apple would publish.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most likely people would discover for controlling that front screen. And we would have talking
⏹️ ▶️ John moose eyeballs out on the front, Yoda eyes, like, because they would hack the, they would hack
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know, they would find the API for finding where your eyes are pointing and people and people would figure out how to use that screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we would have tons of fun third party apps doing different kinds of cartoon eyeballs. And guess what, all
⏹️ ▶️ John those silly apps made by indie developers, distributed for free or just for fun,
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a perfect lab for us collectively as a community to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how does it work? Our cartoon eyeballs good? Should we try photo realistic? How do these screens work? Right? That kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of laboratory of allowing people to try things and then Apple gets to watch it all happen
⏹️ ▶️ John and then pick the winners and incorporate them into the OS is how the Mac got to where it is today
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of Apple’s post Mac platforms have been essentially denied the opportunity to allow that
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen and the only people can come up with Ideas or Apple because they keep all those APIs to themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you try to submit an app with private APIs They’ll reject it And even if you try to submit an app that doesn’t use private APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John But looks kind of like the doc that reject that but so like we haven’t thought of that yet So no, we don’t want you third-party developer
⏹️ ▶️ John to ever try anything like that. And that really annoys me because I would like to see fun things in that front.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it is a scrolling text message that says I can currently see you, I can currently see, you know, like who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what the right choice is. Obviously, Apple prototype the whole bunch of them. But again, you look at those patents, which means they did all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff internally. What they shipped is the current eyeballs. But I’m willing to believe that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are other ways to communicate some or all of that information better and more
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaply and with less weight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think though, like, you know, you mentioned AirPods earlier and how nice it would be if people could tell whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could hear them or not. But I think that also is a kind of interesting counterpoint to this even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being an achievable goal because we’ve had AirPods now for a while. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think people still don’t know when and whether you can hear them with AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it still makes people feel weird. And what we learn is that the correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of societally polite social interaction model is if you’re going to stop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to somebody while wearing AirPods, you should take them out. Even if you could hear them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should take them out just so that there’s no ambiguity, so they know you can hear them and that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not listening to something else. And I think the same thing is going to be true of Vision Pro. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people might be aware of this weird eye display on the outside and what this indicates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus not indicating. But for most people, if someone’s coming up to you and wanting your attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to have a conversation with you, the right move is to take off the Vision Pro, not to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to teach society, oh, this means I can see you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but I think there’s a big difference between the ears and the eyes, because there’s nothing to indicate
⏹️ ▶️ John whether ears are accepting sound or not, other than like you say, oh, I see things in your ears, that means you can’t hear me.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we all know that’s not true, because especially if you’re not wearing AirPods Pro, Having earbuds doesn’t mean you can’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ John anything, but we all know when someone’s looking at us because we can see their eyes pointing at us. That’s why Apple’s choice
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to do photorealistic eyes removes the need for you to understand what the googly
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes mean, or know that a green light means that the camera is on. They don’t require any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just require what your son did, which is like, hey, I see your eyes. That probably means you can see me.
⏹️ ▶️ John That requires no kind of training, but there’s no expectation that you could ever look at somebody and know
⏹️ ▶️ John by looking at their ears, whether they can hear you. That’s just, that’s just not that, but the eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you. So with the eyeballs, there’s a clear solution, which is like, just show the eyeballs. And again, the solution being, how about having
⏹️ ▶️ John clear glasses where they can literally see your eyeballs? Just show the eyeballs. Cartoon eyeballs may be a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit higher learning curve, but, and as for the AirPods, I think what society has determined based
⏹️ ▶️ John on my experience wearing AirPods is that everyone assumes that you can always hear them. That’s my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John both in and out of my house. I have AirPods on my ear. every time I take a dog walk, and not
⏹️ ▶️ John a single time has anyone even considered the fact that there might be a podcast playing, they just start talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. And this also happens inside my house, but my family doesn’t care. But like, and I’m amazed, and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, these are not small white earbuds. You can see them. There’s no hat covering them. And they’re like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just assume you can hear everything I can say. And then I have to quickly go up and pinch the thing so I can actually hear what they’re saying and
⏹️ ▶️ John pause the podcast or whatever. Ears is a much more difficult situation because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no sort of obvious way to indicate anything. It would have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be learned, but eyeballs, there’s an obvious way. We just haven’t been able to pull it off that
⏹️ ▶️ John well yet. And I think that’s probably why Apple didn’t do, you know, text or
⏹️ ▶️ John funny symbols or cartoon things. And ideally, Apple would like to make that image
⏹️ ▶️ John as realistic as possible so that someone thinks, I can faintly see your eyes through the really dark
⏹️ ▶️ John ski goggles you’re wearing outside for some reason weirdo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, there is totally a way they could do it with AirPods. They just haven’t. What they need to do is put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an OLED color screen on the outside of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John each AirPod. Show the inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of your ear. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just have it, when you’re in transparency mode, just have it show a simulated image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an ear. And so it just disappears.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of the inside of your ear. I mean, yeah. I guess the problem is even just seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s ear, you don’t know whether they can actually hear you or not. Cause they have those ear plugs that are like shoved away down in your ear
⏹️ ▶️ John canal. You know what I mean? you know, you could be hard of hearing, right? And so like, another thing with like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can kind of tell that with people who can’t see you because if they can’t see you, they’re not gonna point their eyes at you,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like the sign, if you see someone’s eyes move to you and they’re looking at you, you assume they can see you
⏹️ ▶️ John because if they couldn’t see you, they wouldn’t know where to point their eyes. You know what I’m saying? It’s just like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much less to learn there. Whereas seeing the gross waxy inside of people’s ears, I’m not sure if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much of an indicator of anything. But you could, it would be good if you had like, If you did have ear wax problems, they could put
⏹️ ▶️ John a little camera in there and you could use the AirPods. It’s one of those, what are the doctor tool called where they stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that a something-a-scope?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, probably. It’s a something-a-scope for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for watching. Bye.
Fitts’s Law
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do we want to talk about Fitts’ law?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was something that came up on Dithering, John Gruber and Ben Thompson’s podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were talking about Fitts’ law, which they insisted on pronouncing Fitz’s law because the person’s name is F-I-T-T-S.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the correct way to possessesize that, possessesize, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. Is F-I-T-T-S apostrophe S, which you would pronounce as Fitz’s law.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m sorry, I’m old, and I’ve been saying Fitz’s law for my entire life. And the Wikipedia page even says it
⏹️ ▶️ John is often cited as Fitz’s So that’s how I’m gonna say it. Anyway, Fitts’ law for those who aren’t a Mac user in the 80s is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that says that the ease of targeting something with a mouse is proportional
⏹️ ▶️ John to the size of the target which kind of makes sense if you have a big target and You time people
⏹️ ▶️ John get your mouse into this area and it’s a big giant area It’s real easy for them to get the mouse into it
⏹️ ▶️ John And if the area is like two pixels by two pixels It takes so much longer because they move the mouse over to it But then overshoot
⏹️ ▶️ John then they got it back up and you adjust and adjust and finally get it into two little pixel target But if it’s a really big area like a quarter
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen Real fast people can move the mouse cursor mouse pointer into it really quickly This is
⏹️ ▶️ John research from user interface from the 80s back when the Mac was new and they were trying to figure out the best way to define interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John and the reason it comes up in the context of the Mac is one of the things the Mac interface had from day one is the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar at the top of the screen and This is always cited as a great example of Fitts law because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just jam your cursor up against the top of the screen This is before multiple screens. Anyway, jam
⏹️ ▶️ John your cursor up against the top of the screen and You don’t have to care
⏹️ ▶️ John when the mouse cursor stops It will hit the top of the screen and the cursor won’t go off the edge And so essentially the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar has infinite height from a targeting perspective when you plug the numbers into Fitts law You just like okay the menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John is this many pixels wide How many pixels high is it don’t put in 34 pixels or however high
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar is It’s infinity pixels high Because all the person has to do is slam the mouse cursor up to
⏹️ ▶️ John the top and then they just need to worry about the x position because the y position is taken care of for them with one flick
⏹️ ▶️ John of the wrist. That’s the canonical example of Fitts’ law and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s always shown to say like what are the value of the screen edges like the dock being on the edge and how you can
⏹️ ▶️ John slam the cursor to the bottom of the dock and even though it looks like there’s a tiny little gap between the bottom of the screen and the dock that’s still clickable
⏹️ ▶️ John area because they want to take advantage of Fitts’ law. If the dock wasn’t like that and if like the bottom pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen was not clickable that would make the dock harder to target for people. So this came up in the
⏹️ ▶️ John context of to Vision Pro, both with your eyeballs and with cursors, saying, well, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar in Vision Pro. And so that’s maybe one of the reasons that all the targets seem to be a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John larger because there are no screen corners to flick a cursor into and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar at the top to slam your cursor up against. And it also came up in the context of
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeballs and saying, does Fitts’ law apply to eyeballs? Bigger targets are easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at or whatever. that might have to do with the accuracy of
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to look, right? There’s an accessibility control where you can enable a cursor that supposedly shows where your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeballs are, but I bet that is also smoothed out because the uncertainty about where
⏹️ ▶️ John your eyes are looking and how they dart around is surely even noisier than the cursor that they will show
⏹️ ▶️ John you, but they have to kind of guesstimate and smooth where you’re looking, right? So bigger targets give you a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John margin of error and that makes sense. But the key difference between your eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John and your hands and arms when controlling a mouse or a track pad, is that your limbs,
⏹️ ▶️ John because of what we use them for in daily life, are accustomed to having
⏹️ ▶️ John something that stops them. So if you’re reaching for a doorknob, you’re gonna fling your hand in the
⏹️ ▶️ John direction of the doorknob, and you’re gonna start slowing your hand down as it approaches where you think the doorknob is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you also know that once you start getting close to the doorknob and you start to feel it, the thing that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually stop your hand is the doorknob itself. You’re reaching for a light switch, You’re putting your hand on the wall. You kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of know where the wall is. Again, you slow your hand down as it approaches the wall, but you have the full expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John that eventually your fingertips are gonna touch the wall and then you’ll know where the wall is and you’ll complete
⏹️ ▶️ John the motion. And then you’ll feel the panel and the light switch and you’ll find it, whatever. Your limbs
⏹️ ▶️ John hit into things, gently, you hope, but you can rely on them
⏹️ ▶️ John finding something and that thing stopping them. The menu bar functions like that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the virtual world. You drive your arms upwards, and it doesn’t actually stop your arm. Your arm goes
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the mouse pad, but the cursor, your virtual finger, does stop. But your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John have a different job as you wander around the world. When your eyes dart from one place to another,
⏹️ ▶️ John looking over there, looking to see someone coming up your driveway, looking back at the TV, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing in the physical world that is stopping your eyeballs. Your eyeballs always have to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop on their own. If you dart your eyeballs up to the menu bar, the infinite
⏹️ ▶️ John target of the menu bar does not stop your eyeballs. Nothing stops them, except for your skull and the length
⏹️ ▶️ John of your muscles or whatever. So the job your eyeballs have done for the entire time our entire
⏹️ ▶️ John species has existed and all mammals that have eyeballs and everything, they have to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John move to a position and stop on their own. Whereas our limbs have always been able to
⏹️ ▶️ John rely on essentially making contact with something, whether it’s the ground, the
⏹️ ▶️ John wall, the light switch, pulling a fruit from a tree, whatever it is that you’re doing, your limbs
⏹️ ▶️ John have always had something that stopped them. And so it’s interesting that Vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ John is an environment in which Fitts’ law for the primary pointing device of your eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John is essentially irrelevant because your eyeballs are really, really good
⏹️ ▶️ John at going somewhere quickly and stopping on their own. And they don’t need the help of a
⏹️ ▶️ John screen edge or another thing to slam against like our hands and limbs do. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if this has any consequences for the interface. I presumably has consequences for
⏹️ ▶️ John when you use a mouse, for example, inside Vision Pro, because then you’re not using your eyeballs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now your cursor needs something to slam against. I assume when you do it in the virtual screen on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is no Vision OS window above you, it will stop at the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’ll stop at the top. It’ll stop at the top as long as your gaze remains on the virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, if I’m not mistaken. I mean, I could try this out if we really care. But suffice to say, to the best of my recollection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as you are focused somewhere on the Mac virtual display window,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are limited to keeping your mouse in that display. Now that works both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways, though, in that if you glance to say your left to look at Slack or something like that, while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re still mousing about, well, your cursor is going to try to jump over to that Slack window, even if it’s a native
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slack window, a native Vision OS Slack window. So that occasionally can be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit frustrating. I don’t know, maybe that’s a little dramatic for me to say, but a little bit off-putting maybe that I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to mouse to the upper right-hand corner of this 4K screen, which I may have made quite large in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision OS world. But then I glance to the left to look at, or the right or what have you, I glance to the left to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Vision OS native Slack, and next thing I know, my cursor is in the Slack window because as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far as Vision OS is concerned, Well, that is the active surface right now, and it’s trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use universal control to pull the mouse into what I’m looking at, which does make sense, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not exactly what you would expect. You don’t expect your cursor to just jump, I don’t know, 1,000 pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the left all of a sudden, just because you’ve moved your head and look somewhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Another one of the disparities that Vision OS brings up that a lot of people have been talking about in their reviews. We talked about last time
⏹️ ▶️ John with having to continue looking at something and not glance off somewhere else until you’ve completed the
⏹️ ▶️ John click operation, for example. And people have been generalizing that to the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John taking something that is traditionally input device, our eyeballs, we use them to take in
⏹️ ▶️ John the world around us, they are an input device, and overloading it and saying, guess what, eyeball,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re now also an output device. You now also determine the position of the cursor in a virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John world. Our eyeballs, unless you’re Superman, are not output devices. They do not shoot lasers from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t affect the world with them. Or cyclops. Cyclops too. And where you look with with them doesn’t affect
⏹️ ▶️ John future operations by, for example, your arms. It’s like, well, I looked up to the right, and then I snapped my fingers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing I was looking at burst into flames. No, that doesn’t happen anywhere, but in vision-wise, it does. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John are being asked to both use them as an input device, which is why we’re glancing all over the place to scan things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also, they are, I wouldn’t call it an output device. It’s kind of, they’re trying to use the reverse, but like what we
⏹️ ▶️ John call the mouse, we call the mouse an input device. But that’s from the perspective of the computer. It provides the computer with
⏹️ ▶️ John input. eyes are both an input device for our brain and also they are an input
⏹️ ▶️ John device for the computer and an output device for us and that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John something that we’re used to.
Window management
⏹️ ▶️ John command tab. I think people were talking about, oh, I’m in Vision OS, and I’m hitting command
⏹️ ▶️ John tab, and I wish it worked, and maybe in the next version it will, and it doesn’t do expected things. And this made me think about
⏹️ ▶️ John window layering in Vision OS. We talked about it before. Marco was like, you do not want to have a bunch of overlapping windows. It’s a big mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried it a little bit when I used Vision Pro. I tried it more in the simulator to get a feel for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was kind of surprised at how, I guess I didn’t notice this before. I had used the simulator
⏹️ ▶️ John for ages before. But I guess I hadn’t done, you know, I wanted to torture test it. Here I am on a Mac Pro, how many windows
⏹️ ▶️ John can I open? So I went in the Vision OS simulator, and I’m like, how did they implement
⏹️ ▶️ John window layering here? And so I just started opening a bunch of windows. It’s my core skill set, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wanted to see how it would handle things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so some interesting things we already know about was we discussed before. Remember we had many, many shows about before the Vision Pro was even
⏹️ ▶️ John released. We were going through the developer documentation. It was like, oh, by default in Vision OS, when you push
⏹️ ▶️ John a window far away from you, Vision OS will try to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John the same visual size, like the field of view of the window. So essentially when you push the window far away, it will make
⏹️ ▶️ John it bigger as you push it farther away, so that it fills the exact same field of
⏹️ ▶️ John view. So if it’s like, if it’s 15 degrees of your field of view, and you push it back five feet, it will still be 15
⏹️ ▶️ John degrees in your field of view, which means the window will be larger. You can override that, you can make it not do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that’s one of the behaviors they suggest for your windows. So right away, pushing windows farther
⏹️ ▶️ John away from you and pulling them towards you, they maintain the same visual size. In some ways, that’s just like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. When I have a stack of 100 windows and I bring the back one to the front, it doesn’t change size.
⏹️ ▶️ John It becomes quote unquote, the front most window. It draws in front of the other windows. It gets the big drop shadow,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t change size. And ditto, if I bury that window underneath 100 windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t shrink because it’s not getting farther away. This is what I was getting at last time about like on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have lots of windows, but we conceptually consider them to essentially be like pieces of paper.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re all pretty much at the same depth. And yeah, it’s magic because you can pull the one from the bottom up to the
⏹️ ▶️ John top. But if I was to look from the side, I would say this is a stack of paper and all the paper
⏹️ ▶️ John are touching each other. There’s no space between them, right? Which is why the magical metaphor of like, I click on the one in the
⏹️ ▶️ John back, it comes forward. Like it works for us. But it’s like, ah, it’s just kind of like, I took that piece of paper out and slipped it in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of the other ones, but I did it real quick and you didn’t see it. So the metaphor works for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John In Vision OS, if you make a big mess and have a bunch of windows and some of them are far away and some of them are close up and you got this
⏹️ ▶️ John huge stack of windows, which is the thing that you can do. And one of the windows is like, it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John in the back, like in the simulator, I was pushing it like, you can push them through the back wall, but I was trying to stay inside the room. One
⏹️ ▶️ John of them is way against the back wall and then like 17 windows between me and that window. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I want that window to quote unquote, come to the front. And I click on
⏹️ ▶️ John or tap on or whatever the hell, I’m in the simulator, so it’s weird. Activate the window that’s way in the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John What happens kind of surprises me. What doesn’t happen is that window does not suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John leap to the front in 3D space. No, it stays pinned against that back wall. It stays 10 feet away from me,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It also doesn’t just start drawing on top of the other windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would look kind of weird, but it’s the thing it can do. What it does is it draws
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of everything, but then it fades out all the windows that are
⏹️ ▶️ John ostensibly in 3D space in front of it so that you can see the
⏹️ ▶️ John window that’s against the back wall by essentially making ghosts out of all the windows that would be blocking
⏹️ ▶️ John the view, which is really weird. Like it doesn’t move the window. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make it bigger. You don’t see it animate forward and suddenly it’s two feet away from you and then it animates back,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wants to essentially bring it to the front. And this, in the context of command tab, like what would
⏹️ ▶️ John it mean to command tab? You’d be command tabbing, you’re like, Oh, suddenly the front most active window is the
⏹️ ▶️ John window that is currently buried behind seven windows and it’s five feet away from me. How does that become front most?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t walk that window up to you, go do do do do do, here comes the window, it’s walking through all the other windows, oh, now
⏹️ ▶️ John is two feet in front
⏹️ ▶️ John which they could do because of the whole size maintenance thing. The window would slowly shrink as it moves
⏹️ ▶️ John towards you, but you wouldn’t notice because it’s moving closer to you. So it would maintain the same visual size, but you’d see
⏹️ ▶️ John like the drop shadow, for example, of that window is now two feet in front of you and still against the back wall. but instead
⏹️ ▶️ John they draw that window in front of everything else and fade everybody out like they’re a ghost. So what it means is if you have a lot of windows
⏹️ ▶️ John open and you pick one of them and it is not literally physically the front most, the other windows
⏹️ ▶️ John become ghosts. The other windows fade away and you can’t see them and they become obscured. Not just
⏹️ ▶️ John the part that it’s drawing over, but even the edges of them get all fuzzy or whatever. And it’s super weird. It’s kind of like if you had a stack
⏹️ ▶️ John of a hundred text edit windows and you pulled the one in the back to the front and instead of that window just drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of them, all the other windows faded away and it became ghostly, and that one drew
⏹️ ▶️ John in its current position in the back, but with the ghost windows faded out in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is the correct approach, but this is apparently what Vision Pro does now, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it explains Marco’s warning last time was like, you don’t wanna run a bunch of windows, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that metaphor and design has no precedent
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 2D space. It’s what they’ve decided to do in 3D, and I guess maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John tried all the other ways and they were worse, but it is weird. And it does make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that having lots of windows open is much less tenable because
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t move them. It won’t, essentially, when you say bring to front in Mac parlance, it will never
⏹️ ▶️ John actually bring that window to the front, it just sort of like, it’s like plowing, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a particle beam that blows away all the other windows and fades them out and disintegrates the matter so that
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a clear shot that window that is five feet away from you on the back wall. And then when you pick a different window,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those dematerialized windows come back into being and stop being ghosts and start drawing themselves again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I find it extremely weird and not for me, at least in the simulator,
⏹️ ▶️ John a comfortable way to manage a lot of windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, when I was at the library using this thing, I put myself in the position where I had a couple of windows layered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of each other and I was seeing that ghosting and whatever. And that was the first time, because I was using Mac virtual display at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same time. That was the first time that I had the presence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mind to hit Alt-Tab, or excuse me, Command-Tab. Wow, my Windows is showing. To hit Command-Tab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and try to, you know, tab between the windows. And of course, that didn’t work for nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it took me a second to realize what I had just done and why it was wrong. But outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, you know, a bunch of windows on top of each other in 3D space and trying to move between them, I can’t say I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reached for Command-Tab for any other reason. that is the one really good way and reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, but if it did, like what it would do is fire that particle beam and plow its way
⏹️ ▶️ John through all the other windows without moving any of them. So you have a clear line of sight on the one window
⏹️ ▶️ John that is essentially going to draw in front of all the other ones, even though it is still behind them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, it’s literally behind them. Like you can get up and walk over and stand in the space between the windows. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s spatial computing, but they like, they haven’t figured
⏹️ ▶️ John out a way, you know, the fake metaphor I just said of like the paper stacked or whatever, like that’s not based
⏹️ ▶️ John in reality, but it’s close enough. Like the stack of paper analogy, like if you had a bunch of papers
⏹️ ▶️ John out and you wanted the one in the middle, you take it out from the middle of the pile and you put it on top and like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine that’s what’s going on with all these pieces of paper that are windows on your thing. But if you had a bunch of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, five foot by three foot magic glass things floating in your living room and they were all
⏹️ ▶️ John stacked and some of them are against the back wall and some of them were in the middle and some of them are real close to you and you wanted to get
⏹️ ▶️ John at the one in the back. I mean, I suppose you could have it fly
⏹️ ▶️ John towards you and pass through the other ones and now that one is the front post and then it could fly in the back but how do you maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John those positions? Would you want it to fly there? Would you want the other ones to fly out of the way and part like the Red
⏹️ ▶️ John Sea so you can see that one? Or do I guess you want all the other ones to become weird ghosts so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see through them to the one in the back? It’s really weird that their spatial computing thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, I have no respect for the spatiality of this world.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, you can position
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, but when you ask to see one of them, I am not going to move things spatially
⏹️ ▶️ John to make your view better of that thing. I am just going to dematerialize, partially
⏹️ ▶️ John dematerialize the things that are blocking your view so that I can draw that one in front of the other
⏹️ ▶️ John windows and it doesn’t feel that weird to you, but honestly, it’s pretty weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to our members who supported this entire episode. You can join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us at atp.fm. There’s lots of benefits to being a member. Please consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joining us. Once again, atp.fm. Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast
Mr. Liss goes to the library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a few times during the episode I mentioned that I’d gone to the library to do some work and I’ve also been working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, I got a little sidetracked doing some, adding some features to regular plain old call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet, which just got released, which by the way, if you’re interested in how tall actors are or, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or your name is Merlin Mann, go get the latest update because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible I show how tall actors are and Merlin seems very excited, which I’m very happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is your data source on that? Wikidata actually. So the same thing that Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses, or I don’t know the relationship between the two, but it’s part of the Wikimedia Foundation as far as I know. And yeah, Wicked Data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has some actors data, a lot, I would say, but not everyone. But anyway, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the point. The point is, outside of that distraction, I’ve been doing a lot of Vision Pro work, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that I have the Vision Pro, now that I have my hilarious $300 developer strap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been putting both to good use and trying to work on the Vision Pro native version of call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sheet. And this, you know, as an aside, we don’t need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unpack this right now because it could take hours, we’re already running long. But running a branch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re not doing a good job of keeping up to date with main, and then trying to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it back in line with main like a month or two later, not fun, my friends, not fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the point that I actually abandoned, like I still have it, but I abandoned my initial Vision Pro branch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same one that I used when I went to a lab. I have abandoned that and I’m basically manually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey replaying a lot of those changes in part because I’ve got different opinions about what I should do and in part because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though it’s only been a couple of months, there’s been such a divergence between main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this branch that it’s just a mess. It’s an absolute mess. Anyway, I keep getting myself distracted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The point is, what was my experience like doing, writing code and trying to get work done both at the library and at home?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve found that even when I’m at home, even though I’ve got 15Ks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, of screen here, it’s actually much more easy and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot less friction to write code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and run it in the Vision Pro when Xcode is also in the Vision OS world. And so I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Mac Virtual Display for that. The developer strap, like I had said on the show, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not in love with the It is worth it if you’re doing any real development because it seems to work much much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better When I was at the library, I had a very weird thing though. So I have I want to say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an anchor It’s out of out of reach from where I’m sitting, but I have one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chargers that I use I don’t use an official Apple charger. I have I think it’s an anchor charger that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one like I Don’t know maybe 100 watt USB-C port for a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a 30 watt port or thereabouts for an iPad or phone or what have you. It also happens to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB-A port. What I was doing at the library was I had plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MagSafe from the 100 watt slot to the computer, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just general USB-C connection from the 30 watts to the battery for the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then of course, I had a different USB-C cable going from the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer strap to my computer. no hubs or anything like that, that’s all it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had my AirPods in, and when I finally decided to commit to using the developer strap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was getting this incredibly odd feedback, like a very high-pitched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey humming sound that I found was only the case when I had the computer and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery pack plugged in. If I unplugged the MagSafe or if I unplugged the battery pack, it went away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this has happened since, so I don’t know if my library happens to have very dirty power or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was the weirdest thing and I noticed it several times at the library. That was weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing number one. Weird thing number two, so I really enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working in a fully immersive environment in part because the room I was in was wide but shallow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you know, it was probably, I don’t know, 10-ish feet, so a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of meters, a little bit more than a couple of meters wide and like less than a meter, you know, less than three feet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deep or maybe it was a little more than three feet. I don’t know, I don’t know, it was not a lot. It was wide, but not very deep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when you’re trying to put windows around, when you’re not immersed, you’re running into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wall. Like, it’ll do it, but it just looks weird. And so being immersed was way, way, way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. I am a pretty darn good touch typist. Many, many moons ago, you and I did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the three of us did a typing race thing, I think on the air, or maybe we did it off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the air and compared notes after the fact. But I’m a pretty good typist. I’m no Jason Snell, but I’m pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t need to look at my hands when I type. That being said, when you’re fully immersed, finding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your keyboard is harder than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. I said that last week, you’ve got hands and arms, but you don’t have a keyboard. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually kind of frustrating how difficult it is to find the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I don’t realize how much I need to glance at the keyboard until I’m trying to do that. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually do glance at a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like it was people who buy the keyboards with key caps that had nothing on them to show off. Well, how about
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even see the whole keyboard?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, that’s the problem, is to align myself with the feel of where my fingers even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. That’s where I find myself when I’m in Vision Pro kind of missing sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like they could upgrade that. So they have, obviously, the Vision Pro detects your hands and your arms.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple detecting its own keyboards, I feel like that is a solvable problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, because this was on the laptop keyboard, and actually the only other keyboard that I use is the whatever 104
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key, whatever it is, with Touch ID here at home, and those are the only keyboards I use. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, it should have been able to detect it. Like it’s a fine first worldiest of first world problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I couldn’t find the frigging keyboard. This happened not irregularly. And yes, I’m aware of the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bumps on what is it, the F and J keys. You
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta find the keyboard enough to find the bumps first though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, exactly. I could not have put it better myself. I think you are slightly kidding, but no, that’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Also quick aside, John, when did the, didn’t the bumps used to be on D and K or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple has them in different positions than other keyboards do, and I think they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John changed over the years, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I vaguely remember when I was a kid, using Apple keyboards drove me nuts because it was under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my middle fingers instead of my pointer fingers, like the little lumpies or whatever. Anyways, couldn’t find the damn keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods were having a little bit of feedback, which again, I don’t think I’ve heard since. But one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, and I don’t know if I ever linked to this in last week’s show notes, but I put up a blog post, I think I mentioned it last week, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I linked to it, But I put up a blog post shortly before the Vision Pro came out, like literally a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of days before, where I was talking about how, hey, this would be really neat if I could have this whole array
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of windows around me with native Vision OS messages, native Vision OS Slack, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safari from Vision OS and all that different, very sundry windows all around me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can do that, and it works pretty well. However, as many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people have said, and I am not the only one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPadOS native apps, and in this case, I’m picking on Slack, but it’s not just Slack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPadOS native apps kind of suck on Vision OS. And the thing of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, is I don’t know if it’s something on Apple’s side or the way the apps are designed or both.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, I’m not the first to say this, but finding the touch targets is really difficult. Particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I found on Slack in the upper left, I think I mentioned this last week, In the upper left where you choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which workspace you’re in, say relay FM or something else, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard to get Vision OS to actually activate that thing with your eyes. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that said, with universal control, it’s not so terrible because you can just mouse right up there. But the Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app on Vision OS, I am really looking forward to, and I don’t even know if they’ve announced anything, but I’m really looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward to getting that as Vision OS native because I think it’ll be much better. But yeah, overall, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great experience. It’s a little teeny bit of a bummer when I’m at home, when I’m losing, and when I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 15 Ks of real estate and at least having more than one window, it’s a bummer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring that down to one. And I think we talked about last week, you know, there’s rumblings that maybe Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do two windows on the same or, you know, two.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it seems like, especially given our, uh, the, the supposed revelations about the developer strap
⏹️ ▶️ John and the potential of higher bandwidth there, that it could be something that comes to a later version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the OS, if only for people with a developer strap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, definitely. But yeah, I would love to have a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual display. But all that being said, like, you know, there’s some things I would definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweak about this, but it’s pretty nice. I’ve really been enjoying it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t, to Marco’s point during the episode, I wouldn’t necessarily choose to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, you know, my 15 Ks of real estate. I wouldn’t necessarily choose to give up my standing desk in my situation at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home, but I do like quite a bit going somewhere else to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do work. But of course, that raises the question, if I’m sitting on Mount Hood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the library, why couldn’t I sit on Mount Hood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco at home or at my desk?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t really have a good answer for that other than the tea ceremony, if you compare it to vinyl.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The tea ceremony of going somewhere I kind of miss. I’m very thankful and lucky that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have to do that every single day. But I like to at least once a week go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere Wegmans, Publix, a library, whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this it’s it’s in some ways it’s so much nicer and better now because I feel like I’m bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know like a LG ultrafine 4k display with me without having actually having to carry very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the flip side of that is it’s almost not even necessary anymore which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a weird and odd feeling like I’ll probably still do it even if I do, you know, use the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I’m wherever I’m going. But it seems a lot less necessary now than it has ever been before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, I just thought it was interesting to discuss.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s also getting out of the house, right? Like when you’re at when you’re awake, when someone can’t yell your name and ask you to come do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s only Aaron, but your point is still fair. And I think leaving aside who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my house, you’re exactly right. For me, anyway, I really do like being able to get out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the house and go somewhere and just change my scenery and have the act of going somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that’s because I believe in superior computers that you can move very easily and don’t need to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey carrying multiple pieces. Marco, I believe you are also an enlightened individual that believes in these weird funky
⏹️ ▶️ John Multiple pieces, you’re bringing a headset with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John well, yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a I don’t have a 15 pound monitor, though. Thank you very much. But nevertheless, I believe Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are also an enlightened enlightened person that believes in these funky things called laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, he doesn’t. He’s using a desktop laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, honestly, for the purposes, obviously I share some of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need for getting out of the house sometime because we work for ourselves in our houses. And so it is nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get out in the world and work or be somewhere else on some kind of regular basis just to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself out of the house. I think using the Vision Pro to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does kind of ruin the point, but I think the answer is not stay in your house more. I think the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is go out with a laptop and don’t bring the Vision Pro sometimes. Like that’s the answer because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m gonna like go work in a coffee shop or something. Part of the joy of it is interacting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the world. Being out there, seeing people, saying hello to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they come in if you’ve seen them before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Focusing your eyes on distances other than 1.3 meters. Right. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, so part of the appeal is to be a little bit in the world. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re using Vision Pro out in a place like a coffee shop, first of all, you’re already covering your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyes and immersing yourself, et cetera. Even if you’re in pass-through mode, you are projecting the antisocial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of yourself. As we’ve mentioned, the Vision Pro speakers are very open,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so if you need any kind of audio as part of your work, if you’re watching or listening to something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you are trying to edit audio or whatever, you’re gonna need AirPods. Now you’re covering up your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your ears and sealing yourself off even more. I feel like at that point, you are not only being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely antisocial to the people around you and to the business that you’re in, but also you are then losing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a bit of the value of being there in the first place. For me, in that context, a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optionally with headphones is much better because at least then your eyesight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is totally unencumbered. You can see everything. People can see you. They know they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see you. They know you can see them as discussed earlier. I feel like you’re getting more of the environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way, even if you have AirPods in for whatever reason you need that. So again, I see the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appeal very much of Vision Pro for things like immersive entertainment. If you’re gonna watch a movie, bring it on a plane,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s a lot of arguments for that. But like working in a coffee shop or working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in public somewhere for the sake of getting out in the world and getting out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your house, I don’t think it’s working for your purposes there. I think it’s actually working against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your purposes there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t underestimate, like I said, like don’t underestimate the value, especially if you’re working on a programming problem
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, of looking out the window. And you can say, I can look out the window with Vision Pro, it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John pass-through. No, I mean looking out the window and focusing your eyes 50 feet away
⏹️ ▶️ John at the tree across the street while you think about a problem. I know you can do the thousand yard stare inside the headset but
⏹️ ▶️ John it really, if you’re working on computer for a long period of time, I feel like it does help to
⏹️ ▶️ John focus your eyes on a different distance. Even, forget about the headset, even just sitting in front of your max monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t just stare at the monitor two feet in front of you for eight hours, you will have a bad time. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John get up and walk around, look over your monitor. I used to do this at work. Look over your monitor out the windows that hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John are in your office, and out in the distance, look down the hallway, look at your neighbor seven cubicles
⏹️ ▶️ John away and wave. Like, it’s just good to focus your eyes different distances to relax
⏹️ ▶️ John and to have an environment where you can think about things. And that remains one of the weaknesses of a headset
⏹️ ▶️ John with a fixed focal length. Unless you’re doing the defocus your eyes and have a thousand yards staring, you’re not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John anything, which I suppose you can do in the headset. It’s difficult to remind yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John to focus on different distances to avoid eye strain. And honestly, you know, in my
⏹️ ▶️ John programmer head, looking off at something in the distance, like a tree across the street is
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow connected to solving programming problems and some complicated wiring that goes on when you’ve