New World Notes

Apple Staff Unsure About Apple's XR Goggles: I've Heard Internal Dissent Too

There was a good if unsurprising story from the New York Times last weekend which helps explain why Apple is constantly rumored to be putting out an XR headset soon... only for us to then get subsequent reports that the release has once again been delayed.

As it turns out, there's quite a lot of internal dissent within Apple about whether the company should be involved in XR at all:

[As] the company prepares to introduce the headset in June, enthusiasm at Apple has given way to skepticism, said eight current and former employees, who requested anonymity because of Apple’s policies against speaking about future products. There are concerns about the device’s roughly $3,000 price [emph mine!], doubts about its utility and worries about its unproven market.

That dissension has been a surprising change inside a company where employees have built devices — from the iPod to the Apple Watch — with the single-mindedness of a moon mission.

Some employees have defected from the project because of their doubts about its potential, three people with knowledge of the moves said. Others have been fired over the lack of progress with some aspects of the headset, including its use of Apple’s Siri voice assistant, one person said.

I say "unsurprising" partly because we've been tracking Meta Quest headset sales for the last few years, and its sub-20 million install base is really a bad sign for a larger XR market. If Meta can only move 20M units on headsets selling under $500, why would Apple think they could do well selling an HMD that is 6x that price?

I'm also unsurprised there's reported dissent at Apple, because I've heard implicit objections around XR myself while preparing my book.

For instance, an insider at Apple I spoke to echoed dana boyd's concern that VR may be inherently biased to be difficult for females to use:

Apple Hiring Junior Engineer to Help Develop "a 3D Mixed-Reality World"

Intriguing new job opening from Apple for a AR/VR Network Engineer stating "In this role you will work closely with other developers and build tools and frameworks to enable connected experiences in a 3D mixed-reality world."

I found the job listing via this Bloomberg story which interprets it in the broadest way possible:

The most interesting job listing is one that specifically calls out the development of a 3D mixed-reality world, suggesting that Apple is working on a virtual environment that is similar to the metaverse—though don’t expect Apple to embrace that term. Its marketing chief said at a recent event that metaverse is “a word I’ll never use.”

It's definitely interesting, but as with previous rumors of Apple about to go big on a mixed reality Metaverse and XR headsets, I'm still curbing my enthusiasm:

Watch: Shopify Experimenting With Mixed Reality, AI-Powered Fashion

AI is enabling some really magical experiences. 🪄

Originally planned to share this tomorrow, @sergeyglkn scooped us! 😜

Keep on eye on this space. It moves fast! 💨 pic.twitter.com/Of8PgJWZMM

— Russ Maschmeyer (@StrangeNative) September 19, 2022

This is a fun and impressive demo: Online e-commerce site Shopify prototyping AI image generation used in fashion. (Russ Maschmeyer is AR/VR head at the tech company.) It was created in collaboration with Sergey Galkin, who explains how it was made on his own Twitter thread: "The prototype was made in Snapchat Lens Studio + post-processed in Adobe After Effects. Images were generated by Dalle 2." 

They're demonstrating this for a real world clothing context, but the virtual world applications are even more obvious. (I mean how many wacky T-shirts does the average consumer really buy, versus new avatar outfits?) Being able to adjust the style, fit, and composition of the clothing item itself seems like the next obvious next step.

Excellent XR Video Effect Turns Real Life Face Into Avatar - Here's How

Hi! I’m Heather. I’ve been an interactive designer/illustrator/animator/developer (flash, web, app, & mobile games) for 15 yrs. Now, I’m using those game dev lessons in AR/VR: creating immersive art experiences that blur the line between art & audience. #WhatAGameDevLooksLike pic.twitter.com/NHyXiGvSdd

— Heather Dunaway Smith 🇺🇦 (@dunaway_smith) March 24, 2022

XR game developer Heather Dunaway Smith recently shared this seriously cool AR effect she created, where her real life face temporarily "pops" into her avatar persona. (See her video above to see what I mean.) It was created, she explains on Twitter, through a combination of Procreate, After Effects, and Spark AR. (The latter being a Facebook/Meta app, so caveat avatar.) "Yeah, you can export animations as PNG sequences (in After Effects), then bring them into SparkAR as textures, using an animation controller."

Heather even created a tutorial for creating this effect on her TikTok -- watch below:

Apple XR Headset Not Likely to Come Out in 2022 (Like I Said In 2021)

Just posted my 2022 predictions just last week, and this news already dropped this week:

Apple was reportedly planning to put the headset on sale sometime after the [June 2022] WWDC announcement.

Now, however, Apple is said to be exploring the possibility of delaying the announcement by at least a few months, or potentially pushing it back to 2023. If the iPhone maker goes forward with the plan, the device would reportedly start shipping to customers later than planned as well.

According to today’s report, Apple’s hesitance to debut the headset at WWDC in June is the result of ongoing development challenges related to the device’s software and cameras. Additionally, there are reportedly overheating issues caused by the onboard processor.

I don't doubt the hardware issues are an issue, but as I said, "I still fail to see why Apple would risk its brand on a still-niche product as yet." (If Meta announces much greater Quest 2 sales than expected, I would expect Apple's hardware challenges to get solved right quick.)

But even beyond sales, there's the other virtual shoe that hasn't dropped. If Apple has an XR headset... who is making the content for it? Because like I wrote:

Upland Now Attracting Over 100K High Active Unique Players for Its Blockchain/Tilia-Backed Virtual Real Estate MMO

Last month I estimated that Upland, the blockchain-backed mirror world real estate trading MMO, probably had about low-to-mid six figures of active users; now here's a pretty good data point of users who actually play Upland long enough to buy virtual real estate in it. A very active Upland user sent me the data above,  drawn from up2land.com, a player-driven analytics site.

"[T]hese numbers reflect only the UNIQUE players making transactions each month," my source tells me, "Either Sales, Accepted Offers, or Minting properties. It does not reflect the total number of players -- there are many [who] might go months without making a transaction - and some players may be counted each month. But it does give an indication of the trend of the game."

 

So unique players defined on those terms have ranged from 54,000 to 102,000 in recent months. My source suspects the dip in May is attributable to less advertising during that month. But these numbers likely do not include a lot of new users just playing around with the free-to-play game's starting money:

Niantic Throws Down Gauntlet Against the Virtual World Metaverse -- But Making Its "Real-World Metaverse" Will Be a Challenge

With all the hype around THE METAVERSE lately, this was bound to happen -- though I'm somewhat surprised it's coming from the CEO of AR-based virtual world creator Niantic:

A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one — or we can work to make sure that doesn’t happen. At Niantic, we choose the latter. We believe we can use technology to lean into the ‘reality’ of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, ourselves included, to stand up, walk outside, and connect with people and the world around us. This is what we humans are born to do, the result of two millions years of human evolution, and as a result those are the things that make us the happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better — not to replace them.

Once again, based on what Neal Stephenson himself told me, Snow Crash's Metaverse is not exactly a dystopian warning. (We are starting to get into "Let me tell you what Fahrenheit 451 is really about, Ray Bradbury" territory with this novel!)

In any case, I'm glad to see this debate met -- I admire Niantic's technology and design team quite a bit, and would really love to see a mixed reality virtual world become a viable model. That said, the jury's out on whether Niantic itself is the one to pull what it has in mind off -- again from the post:

Apple Is Hiring Dozens of AR/VR Developers (Which Actually Isn't Much)

Apple has posted over 40 job AR/VR openings since last August, which more than any recent rumor swirling about, convinces me that Apple is moving into the AR/VR space.

But! 40 or so employees is actually not that much amid a company with nearly 150,000 total staff. (And translates to Apple paying these new hires roughly $10 million a year, a pittance for a firm of such size to pay.) More key, competitor Oculus has 1,300 employees listed on LinkedIn, while a significant portion of Sony PlayStation's 8000 employees are dedicated on some level to developing for the VR market leader, PSVR.

My take: Apple is still in very early, prototype stages of any VR/AR headset launch it has planned, and don't expect an Apple HMD to hit the market a year or two before you see them start hiring AR/VR developers by the hundreds and hundreds.

Here's Jeri Ellsworth's Vision for AR That Helped Tilt 5 Raise $7.5M

In case you missed it last week, AR startup Tilt 5 raised $7.5 million in venture funding, a hopeful sign amid a rather bearish market for AR/VR startups. I've been following the underlying technology for Tilt 5's headset since it was spun out of Valve under the name Cast AR seven years ago. Founded by CEO Jeri Ellsworth, one reason her startup won backers is likely her focused approach to augmented reality -- not attempting to make it the Next Great Platform For Everything, but starting first with a very specific use case. As she put it to me last year:

New iPad App Uses Machine Learning to Capture Real World Objects & Convert Them Into Standard 3D Files

Caveat emptor and all that, but the iPad LIDAR Scanner just published in Beta seems seriously impressive, able to "capture" real world objects and convert them into imperfect but pretty usable 3D models. It works, says developer Laan Labs, by automatically extracting objects via machine learning (i.e. extrapolating data for unseen surfaces).

More info from iOS app page: