Kharis O'Connell

Isn’t iPhone mirroring the most truly useless feature ever? It never works - asks me to unlock the phone, then when unlocked it’s ‘in use’ and unavailable. Then I leave it to time out back to sleep and then it can’t connect. What a terrible idea made real.

Isn't the ultra an $800 watch with a 2 day battery life?

We are living in the dumbest timeline humanly possible.

I’ve got to say @ShopifySupport is the worst customer experience I’ve had with any online store. It’s all just canned dead AI responses, even when escalated. 30 mins of meaningless runaround. God I miss humans.

@djmarkfarina This would be great Techno EP cover art

@alexqgb Isnt it all just truly terrible?

This vid is excellent—everyone in the VR industry should watch. Thoughts: 1. It is ridiculous that comfort options aren’t handled at the OS level. I like snap turn, no vignette, smooth locomotion. Why can’t that be in my user preferences and pulled by every application I open?

Silicon Valley (the series) is so back

I’m not interested in another personality riding alongside me, chatting. I’m interested in sensory extension and augmentation

Apple's new "Crush" ad (let's call it "2024") is a visual & metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad. 1984: Monochome, conformist, industrial world exploded by colourful, vibrant human 2024: Colourful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome, conformist industrial press

The Vision Pro’s Spatial Personas are great - but it’s really similar to the old Spatial app that I was running with colleagues in 2020 back on Magic Leap 1s. We were doing *this* exact kind of collaboration in AR years ago - so it’s a cathartic feeling #visionpro

@_rygo6 Spot on analysis Ryan - as usual!

TBH, I'm in such a disarray about the state of the VR industry right now because I feel like I know more about what's going on than pretty much anyone. Me not being in one big tech company, but instead being in a position that sits in the middle of all the big tech companies, I have good sense of what's going on. I also have very good friends and prior colleagues nestled deep somewhere in multiple major VR related companies. I also talk to lots of people, individuals, small companies and startups, pretty openly and candidly too. So, I have a good ground level sense of things happening out in the wild. As well as being very engaged in Social VR. With all those qualities I'm also in a smaller subset of the more deeply technical people who can understand it all not just at a high-level, but at a low-level. With all of that insight, I can't help but feel it's running in circles at this point, and I don't see any clear way for it break through to the next threshold. I don't see anywhere having all the necessary ingredients. All the big companies are gatekept by people just not engaged to the degree they need to be. I do think Meta and Apple's hardware teams are top-tier awesome, couldn't show enough respect to them, but when it comes to the software design and product decisions, not so much. The big missing piece, they need to be VR degens. They need to have spent hundreds, ideally thousands, of hours in something like VRChat or other. Spent tons of time with all the fancy PVCR hardware. Really deep dive into all that's happening, but that kind of knowledge and predisposition is just too "out there" right now. So, you have people with more generic corporate backgrounds being the ultimate gatkeepers of everything in the big companies that just don't fundamentally "get it". The unfortunate thing I've learned is, you can't really explain it either. It's too different for there to be appropriate prior experiences for someone to develop the proper image in their mind when simply told. So, there is no hope to PowerPoint your way into appropriately affecting such companies. They also tend to be way too preoccupied with owning the whole damn thing or even just having it too explicitly tied to their business side with profit expectations. Which just mucks up everything. I honestly don't believe computing as we know it would have happened if this mentality had been there since the beginning. Like imagine Dennis Richie trying to conceive of putting innate mechanics into Unix or C to ensure Bell Labs had appropriate business leverage over any who use it. Or Tim Berners Lee trying to make the WorldWideWeb and hypertext be innately intertwined with some proprietary walled garden. Or Douglas Engelbart lopping off, and limiting, chunks of "The Mother Of All Demos" because it couldn't be appropriately controlled by some corporate demands. Or Linus Torvalds putting out the Linux kernel NOT as FOSS but under some proprietary business license. That type of thinking is just not the domain of those who do the most foundational of work. Then outside of that, you do have a good amount of people, smaller companies and startups that ARE appropriately nestled deep in VR with necessary experience in VR. Many also aren't as preoccupied with owning the whole thing either. Unfortunately, I find they just aren't technical enough. So many are Unity developers, and come from a very starry-eyed Unity background, and while I do believe Unity is a great choice for many VR games. When we come to the notion of Social VR platforms, these things ultimately are destined to be more like an OS Shell, or a browser. It needs lower-level engineering solutions. In this way you need engineers, a team, a company, who do not think like Unity game developers, or really game developers in general. I find too great a hesitance, and even phobia, of not only leaving the constraints of Unity, but digging into some rather novel deeper-level approaches. It's not just Unity, this is an area where I don't even think Unreal, or Godot is proper perspective. Current concepts of game engine architecture are fundamentally not designed in ways that are optimal for an OS-Shell-like or Browser-like layer of some "Spatial Social Ecosystem". Staying in the architectural conception of any existing game engine is just going to keep compounding weird quirky work-around that only half-manages to do it optimally, on top of other weird quirky work-around. While such issues could just simply be solved at a lower level. Truly, just solved. Unfortunately, there is just not a lot of people who are comfortable, or who get excited about, leaving the playpen of well-defined high-level packages. I've also found, unfortunately, the more business-types you have in decision-making positions, the more phobia there is to this. As it feels to them like they are just throwing it over the fence into some incomprehensible grey-area then sitting on the sideline wondering and hoping. Then of course there are some out there who are completely comfortable, and have already done some awesome things, but funding. It's just like, damn. Does the whole VR industry need to really rest on a few dozen pseudonyms across the web slowly poking at this stuff over the next decade? It just seems stupid to me but that's how these have always gone. Or people could just be more open-minded, listen more, accept you need more wandering in the grey-area and be more apt to put more into high-risk explorations. Unfortunately, that's very antithetical to typical corporate business attitude that wants to always create the illusion of being in control, with high predictability and high certainty. It makes me think how other sciences have funds for exploration and research, often from public sources, irrelevant of it looping back into a business model. Unfortunately, so much of software has to be explicitly pitched as having some predictable ROI in some explicit business model in order to be permitted any funding. I literally see some programmers doing the most amazing of fundamental work out there but then they just have a few dozen GitHub sponsors. Some do get grants and that is great too, but I can't help but think we aren't going to have a very good time and future as long as that's the norm. Software isn't a factory line production, it's as much an exploration into the unknown as it is anything else. Then with the whole VR thing it is very much like trying to chart some new unexplored virtual territory.

My god - the Vision Pro App Store is bad. I’m not talking about the apps - I mean the actual interaction/navigation is TERRIBLE. The back-stepping behavior is enough for me to never open it again.

The saddest thing about Google Prematurely leaving XR is they actually had all the ingredients to make a killer app: a social VR app with a physical interaction engine by the makers of Job Sim, with a UGC tool by the makers of TiltBrush and pre-populated with Google Earth data

I’ve noticed that nearly *every* iPhone/ipad app I’ve ever bought works in the #AppleVisionPro Went and bought Dusk, then realized that the iPad X app works perfectly….

It's definitely time for a new Koyaanisqatsi. It almost already exists, by accident. So many videos of human behavior with the Hans Zimmer/Interstellar music floating around.

Something that anyone working on XR at Apple, Meta, Varjo, HTC, Microsoft, Magic Leap, and others know: XR/Spatial computing is a really, really hard system design and engineering problem. It makes mortals out of anyone who wants to wrestle with that particular bear.

Observation: a lot of the "Steve Jobs would never have released this!" comments on the Vision Pro really show how far Apple is now perceived as a 'safe, boring' tech company. Just the sheer AUDACITY for Apple to release the AVP has blown peoples mental model of the company. Yay!

I’m starting to realize that the term ‘Spatial Computing’ is sadly shrinking into simply having standard floating 2d windows in front of you. This is not actually Spatial Computing.

I’ve thought a lot about how new tech promises to ‘free’ us from prior ‘bad practices’ - only to realize it’s always the same result as before fastcompany.com/91017998/cutti…