Hunter Harris

Vision3D with full Muse support update is now live on the App Store.

Everyone is asking how Apple competes in the AI wearable race without compromising on privacy. This might be the answer. Not a camera that watches you. A spatial engine that understands you. There is a meaningful difference and Apple may be the only company positioned to build it.

AirPods with cameras pointed at the world around you, running ARKit on device, understanding your environment through detected surfaces and spatial data rather than stored images. No photos leaving your ears. No privacy compromise. Just contextual awareness that makes every AI response genuinely grounded in where you are and what you are doing.

AirPods with cameras sounds ridiculous until you think about what Apple could actually do with them. Then it sounds like the most obvious thing they have ever built. Apple’s entire AI wearable problem is privacy. Every competitor is sending photos and video of your surroundings to a server to generate a response. That is not a product Apple can ship with a straight face. But ARKit does not need photos. It needs surfaces, geometry, and spatial anchors. Scene understanding without ever capturing an image.

@_minglin_ It looks nice, glad it’s available! Excited to see what the community can build with it.

@hunter_spatial What’s do you think about the developer SDK?

Meta dropped the Ray-Ban Display developer SDK less than a month before WWDC. I am not saying Apple has something massive coming. I am just saying Meta does not panic in public for no reason.

No one writes this many think pieces about a dead product. No one tracks the sales numbers this obsessively about something that does not matter. The attention itself is the tell. Vision Pro lives in their heads rent free and they cannot figure out why.

ARKit is not a feature. It is nearly a decade of relentless iteration that no competitor has been able to replicate. World tracking, scene reconstruction, occlusion, LiDAR integration, RealityKit on top of Metal. The framework understands physical space at a level that makes everything else look like it is still figuring out the basics. Most developers are still learning how to design for what this hardware is actually capable of.

Everyone wants Vision Pro to be dead so badly. The cope is reaching levels I have never seen before. You want to know why? Because nothing else comes close and they know it. Let’s talk about hand tracking. Vision Pro’s hand tracking is not just the best in the industry. It is not even a competition. The precision, the latency, the way it reads intent. No headset on the market is having that conversation right now. Not one.

Spatial computing is not a Meta vs Apple debate anymore. It is a platform war. And platform wars are won by whoever controls the developer ecosystem. Apple has been building that ecosystem for 20 years. Meta just opened a beta toolkit. I know which side I am building on.

This is actually the most bullish sign for Apple smart glasses that you could possibly ask for. When your biggest competitor rushes an SDK to market specifically to front-run your keynote, they are telling you exactly what they are afraid of. Fear is the most honest signal in tech.

The window to understand what spatial computing becomes before it becomes obvious is closing. Some people will look back at this moment and realize they were standing right next to something historic and chose to laugh at it.

The critics calling Vision Pro a failure today are the same archetype of person who in 1997 thought the internet was for academics and weirdos. Not stupid people necessarily. Just people whose imagination is bounded by what already exists. That is a very comfortable place to live until it isn’t.

The iPhone era will look quaint in 20 years. Not unimportant. Quaint. A glowing rectangle you stared down at. Spatial computing puts information in the world around you. That is not an upgrade. That is a different relationship with reality entirely.

So when someone tells me Apple doesn’t innovate, I genuinely want to understand what innovation looks like to them. Because building the next computing platform from scratch, in public, in real time, while the whole world watches and criticizes, sounds a lot like innovation to me.

These are the same people who said the original iPhone was a toy because it had no physical keyboard. The same crowd that called the iPad a big iPod. Every single time Apple opens a new frontier, this crowd shows up to explain why it will fail.

Spatial computing will not be defined by a single form factor. Vision Pro and smart glasses are two ends of the same continuum, both maturing in parallel. Apple is not simply selling a headset. They are establishing the foundation for an entirely new relationship between humans and digital information. 🧵

@AlexTench Cool idea man! Nice work

This was inspired by visiting Apple Park and seeing what they did in the visitor centre. youtube.com/shorts/6WZUstI…

@bozoid Wow 72k tweets. 🤭

appletards living their 2018 VR trough of disillusion after initial hype