colin

I'm excited to buy the 3rd gen apple headset in six years

with all seriousness, I think they're going in a far more viable and appealing direction than anyone else - yes the computer hat is silly conceptually but if it's going to work then it's going to be because the software ecosystem for it is dialled towards productivity & lifestyle stuff, not primarily gaming or metaverse horseshit, which is what every other hardware platform has done

no longer feeling optimistic about this (warning: i have embedded a tweet from an NFT dipshit who happened to work on the apple vision headset)

yeah, despite showing a little bit of interest in the vision pro yesterday, I consider its heavy focus on using eye tracking as a fundamental part of the human-machine interface to make it a complete non-starter for this reason; advertisers and people running ad platforms alike have been saying for more than a decade that they want to use it to infer the state of your unconscious mind to sell you shit more effectively.¹ this was one of the things that excited them about selling in-game ads (you can tell when the player's camera frustum includes your billboard!), it was one of the things that excited them about kinect (we can build bus stop ad boxes that can tell when someone's looking at them!), and it's been a recurring drum beat of hype with every new generation of VR and AR tech.

and the horrible possibilities for biofeedback systems are only enhanced by the fact that a lot of people wearing vision pros on their face will also be wearing apple watches, which have integrated heart rate sensors -- not that they even necessarily need them, since a future revision of the vision pro itself could easily point another IR camera at your forehead and read the same data.

1. "it'll be privacy preserving!" great, so the advertisers will know that user 0xbb1a45693a2f79 involuntarily looked at that ad for cheetos even if they don't have my home address

from a footnote on the page that seems to have no actual referent:

Valid prescription required. Not all prescriptions are supported. Vision correction accessories are sold separately.

1. sold separately of course, lmao
2. wondering whether "not all prescriptions" just means "bifocals" -- which afaik there would be no way to account for in VR without adaptive optics -- and they're going to make lenses to order, or whether they're planning to do corrective lenses Foster Grants style and only sell low-index, spherical lenses produced in bulk, maybe also providing whatever information is required for trained opticians to produce custom ones