My guess is that they saw how nicely Apple made basic app development (read 2.5D planes with list views and spatial UX) and they are gonna try their best to shape their “app framework” in a similar fashion.
Some contrast to this comment: this is steamVR data which is not only specific to steam (which as pointed out in the article, is not representative of the entire market) but also mostly biased towards gaming.
Now I will concede that VR has mostly been “successful” with that demographic (gaming), in fact, oculus (now quest) is mostly making money solely on that sort of content… some people at Meta while I was there would even argue that this product should limit its ambition to be the “Nintendo switch of VR”.
Apple on the contrary has been setting expectations much more clearly that gaming is not in the forefront (but not excluded).
Whether it will be successful is another story, but we should still welcome new challengers in an industry / product category.
What happened to the excitement in tech everyone :-)
oculus always wanted the walled garden approach, but steamvr had so much more content that users were unhappy that their vr display device wouldn't play steamvr games even though it technically was possible (in fact people hacked it in before it was officially enabled).
Now that oculus has made the device cheaper so more non pc gamers are playing I'm sure they're selling more software themselves. Valve also hasn't launched a headset in a while and wasn't targeting low budget headsets at all.
I'm not sure 6 million MAU is really "successful" when game consoles are approaching 400 million MAU and they're still mostly nerd boxes. Let's reserve "successful" for products that break 10 million MAU or perhaps 100 million MAU. A few hundred thousand devices, as Apple will sell this year, or a few million devices, as Meta has deployed successfully over the last decade, that's just not mainstream and not even close to any other Apple release in terms of sales or fashion factor (AVP is actually anti-fashion, a real departure for Apple.)
From talking to people working on this project, there's always been some sort of interesting paradox in terms of dealing with the potential of bad PR due to accidents and fatalities linked to self driving versus one of Apple’s most valuable asset: its brand.
Perhaps they will be some calculated outcome in whatever product comes out of that org, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up pivoting to high quality cars with assisted driving (at best).
I think I would be quite happy to see them as a technology provider. Like cars have Bose or B&O sound, but for the full infotainment, cabin controls, etc.
However I would expect the auto maker to ensure they don’t go too low on buttons.
I honestly have no idea where all this is going. I’m curious. I think it would also make sense if they came up with good self driving stuff to just license that out to people, but that’s not the kind of thing Apple does. At least until now.
I agree with you that Apple would not want the headlines about their cars killing people. The way Tesla has had to deal with (right or wrong).
I don't think an automaker or Apple would ever consider that arrangement. Both of them want to be the primary intermediaries between customers and everyone else, because that's where the money is and it's a rare event when either are institutionally capable of ceding or sharing control of that relationship with others.
That’s what everyone from Alcatel to Nokia said back in 2004: “We are good with programming the UI for our phones, plus we understand our customers better, because we are people persons. We know that our customers want feature phones with more WAP with locked apps from their operator.”
I’m not keen on having to choose between an Apple or Android type of car, but better than the current state of OEM central consoles.
I think they would have to allow android auto similar to the way that cars with android automotive allow CarPlay to be used unless the car maker interferes.
Would they do that? I would hope so. But I honestly don’t know.
I miss the Bose electromagnetic suspension. I absolutely loathe that they just turned the tech into a truck seat. Who cares if it's slightly more expensive? So's modern-day air suspension.
Headlines skewing reality is a fascinating topic. Average Joe now thinks EVs are more likely to explode than ICEs, but their newly formed intuition is off by an order of magnitude in the wrong direction.
100% this, the lack of a clear 3rd party integration path does raise alarm bells in terms of breaking into mainstream as a customer product. Curious to see where they are going with their “we don’t do apps” LLM ecosystem.
Was there anything shared on how they achieved these results? One big hurdle for prompt to 3D is usually the super long generation time while they (seem) to do it in seconds.
Totally agree, I wish they would at least offer some minimal amount of credits for legit (non-winning/non-spam) answers.
But I guess it’s also good PR for them to say they did this initiative ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
