i wouldn’t normally be concerned since any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail… but it’s apple and somehow through exquisite branding and sleek design they have managed to create something that resonated with “tech reviewers” and rich folk who can afford it.
what’s really concerning is that it’s not marketed as a new VR headset, it’s marketed by apple and these “tech reviewers” as the new iphone, something you take with you everywhere and do your daily tasks in, consume content in etc…
and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.
this is why i think all these tech giants (google meta apple etc) were/are interested in the “metaverse”. it holds both your vision and your hearing hostage, you cannot do anything else when using it but to just use the thing. a 100% efficiency attention machine, completely blocking you from the outside world.
i’m not concerned about this iteration as much as people are not hyped about this iteration. just like how people are hyped about the next apple vision, i’m more worried about the next iterations with somewhat lower price tag and better software availability. i hope it flops and i know it probably won’t achieve any sort of mainstream adoption even if it’s deemed a success because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky, but the possibility is still worrying. what are your thoughts?
“pervasive, useful and inspirational”
Please provide some examples because I’ve obviously missed a lot of actually good Voice / Audio based UIs. All I’ve seen are incessant attempts to market something as the future that in reality at best is mildly helpful, normally annoying and forces you to resort to other interfaces, like your phone, and at worst are glaring privacy and security issues.
Every friend I have that buy into stuff like the Google “smart” speakers, Amazon Alexa etc are initially wowed and then it’s relegated to playing music and some small task, nothing like they revolution they envisioned and in general just plain worse than a normal GUI.
What’s even worse is that I feel it’s regressing. Google Assistant in particular is worse now than 2 years ago, I blame this on too many features being added and they make it hard for the assistant to make a good guess of which tool/feature to use. I guess that is why they cleaned some out recently.
And if you think I’m just some one shitting on stuff that I personally don’t enjoy then please know I’ve tinkered with this stuff extensively. I built my own personal voice based assistant that I integrated with Home Assistant to control lights, lock the door and check the humidity in the lizard terrarium. It’s a tricky problem and in the end I came to the realization that even if I got it “perfect” for me it still wouldn’t ever be all that useful. One thing I did that very few do is build a more conversational usage model. Typical interaction:
Me: Snips? Snips: Yes? Me: Can you turn the lights to 50% Snips: Absolutely, all lights or just one room? Me: Just the livingroom Snips: Done, anything else?
Thing is that it will always work poorly in a situation with multiple people around talking. It will always be a bit awkward talking to something incorporeal. And it will always be a computer there in the other end. Conversation and the medium of voice was built and designed for human interaction and a computer can’t provide that. A conversation is so extremely based on context and it becomes hard and forced to always be mindful to provide the full context. And while you can add tech to help, like say presence sensors to note that you are in the living room and thus ask “just in the living room, all lights or some other room?” Or just assume, its still not going to give us a speaking partner like Jarvis for a very, very long time. And even then I wonder what the point would be? By the time we have AI at that level, being able to do proper inference to deduce context and intent, we’re going to have neural interfaces and that is VASTLY more efficient and interesting. To have access to information directly in your thoughts and to control and interact with your environment in a completely seemless manner. I just don’t see Voice UI as more than a stepping stone with very little intrinsic value outside academia and challenging conventions in the UI space.