New World Notes

Vision Pro Usage Survey: Only a Minority of Early Adopters Are Daily Users

Interesting post from XR influencer Gabriele Romagnoli, summarizing the results of a survey he took of Vision Pro users. Among the 108 owners of Apple's headset he polled -- actually a pretty good data sample, for a device with a user base roughly under 250,000 -- a strong majority of almost 60% report using the device very sporadically throughout the week. Only a minority of 41% report daily use.

This is fairly surprising, because by definition, the first people to purchase the first edition of the headset costing $3500+  are the most dedicated XR/Apple enthusiasts with the most incentive to use the device -- even attempting to use it up 8 hours a day, like it was an alternate to a Mac Pro for work. (As I thought it would be.)

Having finally tried the Vision Pro at Augmented World Expo last week, I can definitely understand why not to use to on a regular basis: My immediate, overwhelming reaction is marveling just. How. Heavy. It is. But I'm not a dedicated XR/Apple enthusiast who just paid $3500, and is trying to at least get my money's worth. It's almost equivalent to spending the same amount of money for a glamorous weekend in Paris, and then mostly staying in the hotel to watch old American TV shows.

That analogy might seem like a stretch, until you read further in the survey, and find that 70% of Vision Pro users polled are mainly using the HMD to... watch videos:

Successful Mixed Reality Social Experiences Need a Shared Virtual Workspace (Comment of the Week)

Good points from reader Martin K., riffing off Skarredghost's design thoughts for creating powerful mixed reality experiences for the Apple Vision Pro:

What each app needs to do is to establish what is known in the research on "Computer-Supported Cooperative Work" (CSCW) as a "shared workspace", e.g. a shared virtual 3D model, a shared virtual movie screen, a shared virtual projection screen for a shared slide show, a shared whiteboard, a shared virtual tabletop game, etc. It's not a new topic; some people have spent decades researching it in CSCW.

If an app allows to align the shared virtual screen with a real wall in your room or the shared virtual tabletop game with the surface of a real table in your room, then the app gets extra points for immersion, but that's not necessary. (And if the app requires this alignment, it might introduce additional friction for users.)

This scenario is what Skarredghost labels "You want to have a social AR experience about an element in particular"; according to them, it "was the theme of 80% of the social videos of the Vision Pro on X." I'm not surprised and would assume that an even higher percentage of successful MR apps will have some kind of "shared workspace" - at least that's what you would expect from CSCW research.

Where Martin disagrees is the idea that a good social mixed reality experience should model the real life space of a select member in it:

Designing Good Mixed Reality Social Experiences With Vision Pro's Ghostly Personas

XR developer and blogger Skarredghost has a good long look at the challenges of creating effective mixed reality social experiences with Vision Pro. The challenge is the Vision Pro doesn't use traditional virtual world avatars, but "Personas" which are ultra-realistic maps of the users real life face. As I've written, there's already challenges with real life avatars -- for many reasons, people generally prefer avatars which do not look like them in a virtual space -- and they're made even more challenging when these personas don't even have arms or legs. 

Though these ghostly personas do have some advantages which avoid the usual Uncanny Valley problem, as Skarred points out:

Watch: Running Rec Room on Apple Vision Pro (via iVRy Driver for SteamVR)

Like life, the Metaverse finds a way. While the long-awaited, official Rec Room app for Vision Pro is still in development (the company's partnership was announced last June), here's a Rec Room streamer already unofficially exploring the virtual world with Apple's HMD.

This is possible, as "Grizzly" explains, via the iVRy Driver for SteamVR, an app which enables you to run an application from iPhone and other devices as a VR headset application from your PC -- and to run Steam VR on Vision Pro. And thus, run Rec Room on Apple's headset. Watch above!

As Grizzly notes, hand-tracking is a bit kludgy, but otherwise, looks like it runs pretty well -- maybe not well enough to play most live action Rec Room games, but at least decent enough for basic exploring/social interaction.

This is hardly the first instance of a metaverse platform running on Vision Pro (see below), which suggests a strong desire by VR enthusiasts to connect Apple's headset to various multi-user, avatar-driven virtual worlds. (Notwithstanding Apple's Spatial Computing, non-avatar Persona model.) 

Best 3D Engine for Creating in Vision Pro? An XR Engineer Compares/Contrasts Unreal to Unity's PolySpatial

This is a pretty cool Vision Pro demo built in Unity PolySpatial, a suite of technologies for Apple's headset. "It's basically play-in-reality," as the creator Michael Becker enthuses.

It's also a glimpse into the state of virtual world/game development on Apple Vision Pro. While Unity seems to be the most powerful engine for Vision Pro, Unreal and the open source Godot engine show promise -- though those two don't have mixed reality capabilities.

I was recently chatting with a colleague who's a developer with a top game publisher, and is experimenting with these engines for projects on the Apple Vision Pro; they have some guarded enthusiasm for Unreal on AVP down the road.

The basic TL;DR is Unreal has quite a lot of potential, but Unity PolySpatial is the current preference by far for most Vision Pro applications. For the full download, strap in, this gets pretty technical:

Friday Fun Watch: Tim Apple Explores Second Life Wearing a Vision Pro

Tech! Kit! For Friday fun, watch this pretty hypnotically hilarious video, featuring YouTuber Creamy and his pal Tim Apple randomly bopping around Second Life in their Apple Vision Pros, marveling at the virtual world and all the assorted avatars in it. 

 Side note: If "trolling" is interrupting a virtual social space to be an a-hole, what do you call it when trickster goofballs interrupt to sprinkle some genial weirdness? How about "elf-ing"?

Anyway, you can actually access Second Life with a Vision Pro (kinda sorta), but not as Tim Apple:

Despite Warnings from Top Researcher, Meta Has Not Seriously Researched VR's Strong Propensity to Cause Females Nausea (Far As I Can Tell)

"With Vision Pro launched, companies must talk about XR, nausea and gender" is a new Gamesbeat editorial that's an expanded excerpt of my new book, highlighting the most shocking thing I discovered while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters:

Meta, from what I can tell -- and I've brought this up with several senior executives, including former Oculus CTO John Carmack -- has not done any substantial research into a gender component around VR and nausea, first raised by danah boyd and backed up by several subsequent studies.

Specifically: that females have a strong propensity to get nauseous in VR.

I cannot overstress how flummoxing an oversight this is on Meta’s part, and for the tech world as a whole. Meta paid $2 billion for a piece of technology intended for a mass consumer market, even though reputable research suggested it tends to make half the population literally vomit.

My hope is tech reporters with large publications pursue this question with executives at Meta and other companies in XR (including now Apple). Anytime an article or news segment features images of women and girls happily enjoying an HMD experience, the media outlet is actively helping to obscure this extremely important, live topic.

Interestingly, there's some Linden Lab overlap to this question. Avi Bar-Zeev was a very early Linden (and most recently, helped develop the Vision Pro for Apple), and Meta's entrance into VR was driven by Second Life's co-founder:

Running VRChat in Apple Vision Pro (Kinda Sorta) -- Here's How!

Inevitably, VRChat can already be accessed through Apple Vision Pro (kinda sorta). There's no official optimized app yet -- and the official Rec Room app for Vision Pro hasn't launched yet either -- but if you're willing to do some workarounds, you can. Here's details from top VR YouTuber Bradley Lynch, who got this going:

• First, get ALVR for Vision OS, and experimental visionOS client for running SteamVR on Apple Vision Pro!
• Follow these install instructions

Whatever you do, be careful, this is seriously not tested stuff, and maybe check your Vision Pro warranty/TOS first. 

"It works great for me," Brad tells me. "I started getting used to using finger gestures to move around and stuff. It works great for me. I started getting used to using finger gestures to move around and stuff."

The fact that Vision Pro can run both AR passthrough and a VR app like VRChat leads to some cool new interactions -- watch:

Official Second Life App Optimized for Vision Pro? Here Are Some Pros and Cons (Comment of the Week)

Brian Aviator exploring Second Life in his Vision Pro while also reading New World Notes on the web

While it's possible to run the iOS version of Second Life on Apple's Vision Pro, what would an optimized Vision Pro version of Second Life be like? In Comments, longtime virtual worlds developer/theorist/educator Gwyneth Llewelyn considers the possibilities:

Granted, one cannot expect the same level of quality as a specially-developed VR environment for the Apple Vision Pro. SL, after all, lags — and that will be very confusing, or probably even worse than that: inducing motion sickness, for instance. SL doesn't behave like the real world when you abruptly turn your head; all those textures coming in sight will need to be downloaded first. This is not going to change.

Also, there is a question of resolution: will the CPUs of the Vision Pro be able to render a full 360º environment at an acceptable FPS to be 'usable'? I have certainly seen videos of people (some of them my students, streaming live) who had at least 4K screens, rendering SL at sub-Ultra quality at 45 FPS.

Will that be enough? Will the Apple Vision Pro manage that as well as a top-of-the-line beefed-up PC, carefully built from scratch by a professional eSports athlete? (BTW, that's what my students were.) Maybe. The whole point is that it's not that far-fetched as it seems.

Gwyn goes on to make the case that Second Life would have an advantage on Vision Pro that other metaverse platforms would not:

Second Life Running in Apple Vision Pro! Here's How to Enter the Longest-Running Metaverse Platform Through the Newest Computing Device.

Here's the world's newest VR/AR headset accessing the longest-running metaverse platform: That's right, a playable version of Second Life in Apple Vision Pro! 

This comes courtesy of Brian Aviator, who's in the closed Alpha testing group for Second Life's upcoming iOS app, and got it to run in his new Vision Pro. (Direction on doing that yourself below.)

And yes, it's playable:

"Using the iPad virtual controls through touch/eye controls were not as smooth as on the iPad itself," Brian Aviator allows, "but it worked well enough to get around and look around without issue."

Brian tells me he'd like a version of Second Life optimized for Vision Pro:

"I would certainly use it, particularly if it offered a full immersion mode as an option to take advantage of the spatial aspects of the device. Otherwise as a windowed application I see the use case to be similar to my use case on my iPad or iPhone -- checking in to IM someone, or to respond to people or issues in one of my museums/educational spaces in Second Life." (Brian owns and manages three history museums in the virtual world.)

Expect to see more like this in the future: While Rec Room is expected to launch an official, optimized Vision Pro app, there are several existing virtual world iPad apps that can also run in Vision Pro. (Including Rec Room for iOS, as reader Trilo Byte notes.)  

More screenshots courtesy Brian after the break. As you'll notice, the Second Life images have a unique look due to the Vision Pro: