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169 points thelastgallon | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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zmmmmm ◴[] No.45674918[source]
Kind of sad to see here on "hacker news" that 80% of the comments are low effort cheap shots.

The interesting thing here is the core of it, being Android XR and its deep AI integration, especially the spatial awareness. Devices will come and go, but the OS will be the core that stays and grows and evolves over time. I am very curious to know how much of this is all exposed as OS foundations to build on vs a monolithic app built to look like an OS by Google. This has been a large part of Meta's mistake, where the OS is not providing many of these fundamentals and any app you see doing it is mostly re-inventing it themselves or relying on 3rd party tools like Unity to do the heavy lifting.

The really impressive part of Vision Pro is actually how well thought out the OS is underneath it, exposing fundamentals of how 3D computing can work. Especially the part to do with compositing together multiple spatial apps living together in the same shared space and even interacting with each other (eg: one app can emit a lighting effect that will shade the other's rendering).

I am very curious if Google has done this kind of foundational work. Especially if that is designed (as they claim) from the ground up to interface with AI models - eg: a 3D vision language model can reason across everything in your shared space including your pass through reality and respond to it. This would be truly amazing but there's zero technical information I can see at this point to know if Google really built these foundations or not here.

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AshamedCaptain ◴[] No.45675237[source]
> Devices will come and go, but the OS will be the core that stays and grows and evolves over time.

Say that to my Google Cardboard SDK programs, or the Google VR SDK ones, or Google Daydream ones.

You couldn't have chosen a worse topic on which to dump a generic "ranting about Google abandoning projects is low effort cheap shot", because Google does abandon VR projects (including OSes and APIs, not just devices) every 5 years, almost like clockwork. What I would call "a cheap shot" is to think that this new fancy "OS" will be any different. In fact, I pity the people who still consider jumping on this particular bus _again_.

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jamesbelchamber ◴[] No.45675326[source]
Why on earth _did_ they abandon cardboard? It was really good for getting VR in the hands of.. well, everybody - and it worked quite well, too (for a bit of cardboard).

If they stuck to what they built originally they would be dominating this segment right now.

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1. ipsum2 ◴[] No.45675579[source]
People tried Cardboard once and stopped using it.
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2. asimovfan ◴[] No.45675662[source]
Cardboard was great, and except a lack of software there were no problems about it in my opinion. I remember playing flight simulator on google earth and thinking how much potential this had. I have a meta quest 2 now and it is still not clear to me whether it is really that much better than cardboard.
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3. ben_w ◴[] No.45676187[source]
I think the lack of software that really took advantage of the possibilities and cared about the limitations — that wasn't simply a normal smartphone app with a bad UX because the display was now on your face — is the main reason Cardboard disappeared.

It's like: imagine if you just run the original DOOM in DOSBox on a phone and try to play it with the on-screen keyboard — that will obviously suck. Less obviously, even something as simple as going from a NES controller to an XBox controller can radically change experiences. You have to really consider what the right way is to use a system, and instead of doing that a lot of companies clearly go for existing zeitgeist in design language. (From memory as I heard it well before GenAI, real UX experts react to such UI designs in much the same way that artists react to Stable Diffusion).

Same goes for most VR stuff: There's some good games, but selling it as that means headsets have to be priced as consoles. That excludes the Android XR, and absolutely excludes the Apple Vision Pro.