technology – Page 4 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

June 6, 2023

TechScape: Is Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro more than just another tech toy for the rich?

There’s a disconnect between the eye-watering price of Apple’s new ‘spatial computing’ gadget and the promise of it – but it has some genuinely novel features

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Yesterday, Apple finally confirmed the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley, and announced the Vision Pro, its $3,499 virtual reality headset. From our story:

The headset allows users to interact with “apps and experiences”, the Apple vice-president of human interface design, Alan Dye, said, in an augmented reality (AR) version of their own surroundings or in a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) space.

“Apple Vision Pro relies solely on your eyes, hands and voice,” Dye said. “You browse the system simply by looking. App icons come to life when you look at them; simply tap your fingers together to select, and gently flick to scroll.”

EyeSight, which sounded so ridiculous, could actually … work? A curved, outward-facing OLED screen displays the wearer’s eyes to the outside world, giving the impression of the headset as a simple piece of translucent glass. The screen mists over if the wearer is in a fully immersive VR space, while allowing people to have (simulated, at least) eye contact when in AR mode.

An array of downward and outward-pointing IR cameras let the headset keep track of your position and gestures at all times, allowing the company to build a controller-free experience without requiring the wearer to hold their hands in their eye-line when using the headset.

An AI-powered “persona” (don’t call it an avatar) stands in for you when you make a video call using the Vision Pro. It’s a photorealistic attempt to animate a real picture of you, using the data the headset captures of your eye, mouth and hand movements while you talk. Even in the staged demos, it looked slightly uncanny, but it seems a far smaller hurdle to introduce into the world than trying to encourage people to have business meetings with their Memoji.

Should VR headsets have a bulky battery mounted on your head, or should they rely on a tethered cable to a separate PC? Apple thinks there’s a third option: slip the bulky battery in your back pocket, and run the cable up to a lighter, more comfortable set of goggles. It could work. Or it could be the worst of both worlds: a cable that still inhibits movement and comfort, with none of the power of a real tethered VR system. Hey, not all novelty is a slam-dunk.

June 5, 2023

Apple reveals Vision Pro AR headset at its worldwide developers conference

$3,500 headset allows users to ‘browse the system simply by looking’ and tapping their fingers to select, says Apple

Apple has lifted the lid on the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley and revealed the Vision Pro, a $3,499 VR headset.

“With Vision Pro, you’re no longer limited by a display. Your surroundings become an infinite canvas,” the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, said. “Vision Pro blends digital content into the space around us. It will introduce us to Spatial Computing.”

May 30, 2023

TechScape: Will Apple’s new VR headset be the one to finally catch on?

In this week’s newsletter: The $3,000 product could be the next Apple gamechanger – or just another cool toy for those who can afford it

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Next Monday will see Apple’s worldwide developers conference kick off, and with it one of the company’s two most important annual press events.

Typically, the keynote at WWDC (or “dub dub”) is a software-focused affair, previewing the next versions of iOS, macOS and so on for an audience of developers who need to get to grips with the updates before their launch in the autumn. It’s balanced out by the hardware-focused events oriented around each year’s iPhone launch, since Apple still likes to play the game of announcing and shipping its top-tier products in short order.

A tethered battery pack, designed to sit in the user’s back pocket, to ease the tradeoff between power and performance on the one hand and weight and comfort on the other.

A screen on the front of the headset, designed solely to show the user’s expressions to the outside world, with the goal of making it more comfortable to interact with people wearing the device.

A focus on “passthrough” use, where a camera on the front of the screen shows the outside world to the wearer, with apps and features superimposed on top.

And, most importantly of all, a price tag of about $3,000.

May 21, 2023

Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision is over. Can Apple save it?

The CEO of the social media giant has spent billions on his virtual reality dream – and still no one understands the idea. Now the world’s richest firm could change the game

In Meta’s quarterly earnings call in April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive. The metaverse, the vision of a globe-spanning virtual reality that he had literally bet his multibillion-dollar empire on creating, had been usurped as the new hot thing by the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI).

Critics had even noticed Meta itself changing its tune, highlighting the difference between a November statement from Zuckerberg, in which he described the project as a “high-priority growth area” and a March note that instead focused on how “advancing AI” was the company’s “single largest investment”.

May 13, 2023

A moment’s silence, please, for the death of the Metaverse

Meta sank tens of billions into its CEO’s virtual reality dream, but what will he do next?

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the metaverse, which was quietly laid to rest a few weeks ago by its grieving adoptive parent, one Mark Zuckerberg. Those of you with long memories will remember how, in October 2021, Zuck (as he is known to his friends) excitedly announced the arrival of his new adoptee, to which he had playfully assigned the nickname “The Future”.

So delighted was he that he had even renamed his family home in her honour. Henceforth, what was formerly called “Facebook” would be known as “Meta”. In a presentation at the company’s annual conference, Zuckerberg announced the name change and detailed how his child would grow up to be a new version of cyberspace. She “will be the successor to the mobile internet”, he told a stunned audience of credulous hacks and cynical Wall Street analysts. “We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.” And no expense would be spared in ensuring that his child would fulfil her destiny.

March 23, 2023

Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’

The godfather of virtual reality has worked beside the web’s visionaries and power-brokers – but likes nothing more than to show the flaws of technology. He discusses how we can make AI work for us, how the internet takes away choice – and why he would ban TikTok

Jaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality and the sage of all things web, is nicknamed the Dismal Optimist. And there has never been a time we’ve needed his dismal optimism more. It’s hard to read an article or listen to a podcast these days without doomsayers telling us we’ve pushed our luck with artificial intelligence, our hubris is coming back to haunt us and robots are taking over the world. There are stories of chatbots becoming best friends, declaring their love, trying to disrupt stable marriages, and threatening chaos on a global scale.

Is AI really capable of outsmarting us and taking over the world? “OK! Well, your question makes no sense,” Lanier says in his gentle sing-song voice. “You’ve just used the set of terms that to me are fictions. I’m sorry to respond that way, but it’s ridiculous … it’s unreal.” This is the stuff of sci-fi movies such as The Matrix and Terminator, he says.

February 22, 2023

Pushing Buttons: The PlayStation VR 2 might be the next big thing, if you can handle the nausea – and the cost

In this week’s newsletter: Though costly, the PSVR2 is the most usable virtual gaming device yet – even for sceptics like me

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In 2016, when the first wave of virtual reality headsets hit the market after years of hype, I was sceptical. I was totally sold on VR, having had my mind blown playing a space dogfighting sim the previous year at internet-spaceship convention Eve Fanfest. But the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive were just so unwieldy. They needed too many cables and so much space to operate that you had to dedicate a small room to them (which some of my more techy friends happily did). They were expensive, as were the PCs that you needed to run them. And having already played with VR several times at trade shows, the novelty was wearing off fast. Cool, sure, but the future of gaming? Nah.

The original PlayStation VR headset was the least technically powerful of that first wave of home VR tech, and also the least annoying to use. I was obsessed with Tetris Effect, which is a transcendental experience in VR, and its music-game cousin Rez. I played Moss, a charming storybook-style adventure about a mouse. But then PSVR went back in my Bottomless Drawer of Video Game Peripherals, and I never felt the urge to get it out again.

Crazy Taxi fans will be charmed by this solo developer’s quest to create his dream tribute to the game, entirely on his own.

Some of the American games sites interviewed the world’s most famous game designer Shigeru Miyamoto at the opening of Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World theme park in LA. I’m not jealous at all. IGN’s interview has lots of lovely details about the park and Miyamoto’s influence on it.

Microsoft has signed a “binding” 10-year contract with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to its consoles, which strikes me as a very odd thing to do with a series of games that you do not yet actually own. (Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft’s merger is still pending, and presumably the company will be hoping that this helps sweeten the regulators who’ve put the brakes on the deal.)

Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund keeps on upping its stake in Nintendo. It now owns over 8% of the company. It also owns close to 6% of EA, and nearly 7% of Take-Two.

February 10, 2023

Regional theatres are on their knees – support your local one | Tim Crouch

Covid cut off the communal experience of live performance and venues have taken a battering. Let’s return and reconnect

Imagine a man at the end of his rope. Imagine someone says to him: “Here, put this virtual reality headset on; it will help you.” The software in the headset transports the man to the edge of a cliff. Near Dover maybe. The immaculately rendered landscape overwhelms his senses: the surge of the sea far below him, a boat in the distance, the vertigo. Imagine that some part of the man is healed by this immersion. He takes the headset off and returns to reality with renewed resilience and hope.

Shakespeare pulls a version of this trick on the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear. Not with VR but with words. The blinded Gloucester is made to think he’s a footstep away from oblivion – rocks beneath him, birds wheeling below. He’s taken over the edge of despair and back again. And the lesson he learns from the experience is to endure. And yes, the lesson we all learn from watching him is also to endure. But we also learn a thousand other things about ourselves, there in that audience, watching that play, at that moment.

January 13, 2023

Scary monsters: how virtual reality could help people cope with anxiety

Guardian science correspondent is put to the test in the panic-inducing VR world of a game that teaches breathing technique

Tethered to a chair, in a gloomy basement, I’m doing my best not to panic – by breathing in for four seconds, holding for seven, and slowly releasing for eight. But when a bloodthirsty monster appears at my feet and starts crawling towards me, I don’t need a dial to tell me that my heart is pounding, and I’m in imminent mortal danger.

Welcome to the future of anxiety treatment: a virtual reality (VR) game that teaches you a breathing technique to help calm your nerves, and then pits you against a monstrous humanoid that wants to eat you, to practise deploying it in genuinely panic-inducing situations.

December 7, 2022

‘The metaverse will be our slow death!’ Is Facebook losing its $100bn gamble on virtual reality?

The company now known as Meta has spent staggering amounts on creating an immersive successor to the traditional 2D internet. But what has it got to show for it, apart from 11,000 job losses?

What a difference a year makes. Last October, Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg could barely wait to show the world what he was up to. “Today, we’re going to talk about the metaverse,” he enthused in a slick video presentation. “I want to share what we imagine is possible.” Transitioning almost seamlessly from his real self into a computer-generated avatar, Zuckerberg guided us through his vision for the virtual-reality future: playing poker in space with your buddies; sharing cool stuff; having work meetings and birthday parties with people on the other side of the world; customising your avatar (the avatars had no legs, which was weird). Zuckerberg was so all-in on the metaverse, he even rechristened his company Meta.

This month, we saw a more subdued Zuckerberg on display: “I wanna say upfront that I take full responsibility for this decision,” he told employees morosely. “This was ultimately my call and it was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company.” Meta was laying off 11,000 people – 13% of its workforce. Poor third-quarter results had seen Meta’s share price drop by 25%, wiping $80bn off the company’s value. Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse division, had lost $3.7bn in the past three months, with worse expected to come. It wasn’t all bad news, though: Zuckerberg announced last month that Meta avatars would at last be getting legs.