Not one millimeter more
There is a tendency to accept the absolute, to leave no room for anything but an irrational decision that has already been made, to go on endlessly with what we have already thought, regardless of what we have read, heard or experienced. This is the inexorable force of progress before us: everything new will always be better.
And it will be because, dammit, how can it not be better if the thing came out later and costs a little more than the previous one? It’s a little more than worth it for us to run out and grab a Quest 3, even if we have to duck under the wheels of a distribution truck, raid the Media Market while on duty, or forget how they snuck in with the Quest Pro.
https://www.filosofia.net/materiales/sofiafilia/fyc/fyc_6_5_decision.html
Based on hermeneutics, a discipline of knowledge based on giving interpretive and historical context to everything, Meta’s new viewer enters a time of terminological evolution imposed by someone other than her. Because virtual reality, despite Zuckerberg, was destroyed by augmented reality from Apple in just an hour and a half Keynote. zap. “It’s no longer yours, it’s now mine,” Vision Pro announced.
And so in a few months, any app that doesn’t involve physical reality and is sensitive to experience will be labeled as belonging to the digital Pleistocene era. Don’t have a pass in color? I’m not even close. Despite the fact that there is almost nothing to do. Although – it seems to be confirmed – the deformations in his image are rampant, and perhaps he is not even worth what we had in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1885&v=2HkOOpJV15o
For some internal reason, Meta was scared to death of Apple’s “vision” of the future, and didn’t confront it in the terrain he knows like no other – VR – he’d rather get down in the dirt and run away – because of the price and features – in impossible promises, call it Apple, Meta or Pico.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/introducing-apple-vision-pro/
For Meta, this industrial (metaphysical?) movement represents at least one more unpredictable risk to the couple she calls the Metauniverse that led to her, to the thousands she laid off, and to the few who will be left to do all the work— to year in the hells of efficiency.
You’ve been trying to create complex virtual worlds beyond simple interactions for a decade, you’re investing years and millions trying to bring order to the infernal chaos of the SDK so that developers understand what they have at hand, you’re sending viewers to the four corners of the universe and In addition , you build a legion of influencers who know how to help you sell every last screw of your latest headset… And by the time you’re halfway in control of being a major player in VR (though still very far from mainstream), you again decided to turn around and jump into the void.
Augmented reality is based on reality. Apple was well aware of the existential agony people suffer when they are taken out of their comfort zone and into VR. Because within the Metauniverse – this metauniverse that is so crude and so impossible today – there is nothing that can compete with the sentient object that lives within reach. A virtual economic entity, as shown by NFTs, is a fool of the same size as its value.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nfts-worthless-researchers-find-1234828767/
Yes, in the very closed and very structured context around a video game, a paid skin can have its appeal. But does the business live in balance? Unstable with ethics: If you’re careless, the regulator comes to slap you the size of a meteorite. Is Roblox and minors right? Epic and Fortnite right? EA and your loot boxes right?
https://es-us.finanzas.yahoo.com/noticias/problema-roblox-miente-ni%C3%B1os-200000753.html
https://www.abc.es/tecnologia/videojuegos/multa-historica-epic-games-robar-datos-menores-fortnite-20221220192744-nt.html
Back to reality, augmented mixes the synthetic with the real for a reason that is far more pragmatic and less subtle than merely conceptual. After all, your avant-garde designer table lying in the middle of the living room is not virtual, because that object is a table for which you paid more than four salaries in the real world, and surely the table and four chairs will end up as an inheritance for your children children. And there’s a stack of paperback books on the bookshelf by the entrance next to your grandmother’s Lladró figurines and all the other little treasures you’ve been hoarding from your paycheck.
If capitalism screams at you “you are what you have”, in the virtual world the cry will be “you have nothing”, because nothing exists and then you are not, and if you are not, according to modern philosophy, you are dead. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche would write seven volumes on this type of agony of virtual nothingness in the nothingness of the Metaworld. For this reason, the Extended Apple experience favors the tangible over the virtual. Because you can’t help but live in the physicality of what you’ve monetized, but you can add an extra layer to make it less depressing (and more profitable).
So we find this nascent augmented reality as the engine of everything, real and imagined. Quest 3, the viewer who comes again to change the rules of the game, arrives with a future that, thanks to the documents and the conversations of its own engineers, we know that – however – is within the iron limits of return on investment. In our programs, we talked about the concept of JND: just a noticeable difference, a minimally noticeable change. Not one millimeter more.
https://youtu.be/W5MTtgIXacE. HVEI 2023 Keynote: Display Considerations for AR/VR Systems
https://youtu.be/luePEkp-ZS4. Behemoth delayed, CREAL lightfields in 2024 and more
Ajit Neenan, chief engineer at Meta Reality Labs, documented on January 23 what many of us have guessed: modern technology lives on interest. The number of pixels, the frame rate, the millions of colors, even the velcro strap over the head in Quest 3 is determined by a cloud of statistical results with test users. Psychologically, something starts to hurt less when it is confirmed in you through the stages of grief. Some of us here have already started down that path.
What if, even if we can go further, we leave the screen resolution 4K? Ajith would ask. If 60% of the test group thinks it’s OK, so be it. What if the battery lasts three hours instead of four, but on the other hand weighs a little less? If 57% of the group confirms it, go ahead. And DisplayPort? Well, it turns out that only 10% smile. Take DP for granted. Not because of the price, but because of the perceived minimum. At least another 600 euros should be spent. But without exaggerating, we have Quest 4 instantly.
This JND-imposed fate jumps through the check applies to all modern viewers of the virtual campaign with a future goal. With Quest 2, JND was linked. Task 1 too. If we take this very obvious thread a little further, it turns out that all the viewers were a “noticeable minimum”. Why add more when the minimum is already just over 50% and we can save a couple of JNDs for the next one?
https://espanol.libretexts.org/Ciencias_Sociales/Psicologia/Libro%3A_Psicolog%C3%ADa_Introductoria_1e_(OpenStax)/05%3A_Sensaci%C3%B3n_y_Percepci%C3%B3n/5.02%3A_Sensaci%C3%B3n_versus_Percepci%C3%B3n
Quest 3 is an advanced headset in the same virtual shell as always, but with a different marketing spirit. There will be interesting things in between, however, like every virtual iteration, its concept responds to trial and error, and we are like rabbits in a maze.
Depth sensor instead of eye tracking. External color cameras instead of local dimming. Priorities that emphasize the immediate – and rather ephemeral – wow that you’ve never tasted before, and that pave the way for an expanded, that new market that has yet to be discovered, and that will definitely take a few viewers to master. In short, priorities that in no way anchor already known virtual worlds with characteristics that would make the best viewers what they were once born to do.
https://www.realovirtual.com/noticias/524/facebook-ha-comprado-oculus-vr
I don’t know what Quest 3 will be like, which some of you are already starting to get. You will decide. In my case, I understand very clearly how to deal with this new sensitive minimum that Meta took from the test user lab. Because the changes not only have to be minimally sensitive to meet the demands of the 60%, they also have to convince the other 40%. And even more so if, as we see, there is an intention to rearm to fight against Apple, which is capable of surpassing anyone. (One hundred million dollars cost Meta just one version on IOS).
In a couple of years, we’ll know if Meta was forced back into the virtual world with Quest 4, or if they succeeded in developing an entire industry in the expanded world. The problem with the Meta is that it doesn’t have a lot of ammo to spend when the AI invades everything. As a result of events, in a little less than a decade, many of its viewers will find themselves standing next to Lladró figurines on a shelf that we might be able to discern through an Apple Extended Reality device. I would like some virtual poetry.
Cover image by/with Stable Diffusion
