574: Weird Forking Scenario

38:30So please consider doing it. We would really appreciate it. ATP.fm slash join. Once again, eight bucks a month, ATP.fm slash join. Thank you so much for your consideration. And now back to the show.

38:46Matt Rigby writes to us, many quote unquote 3D films, including the recent Star Wars trilogy, are actually 3D conversions. That is to say, the films are shot in 2D on a single camera and then rotoscope artists individually cut out each element of every shot frame by frame otherwise known as rotoscoping then map these elements as textures onto rough 3d objects and render those objects in 3d space holy fart knockers i can't believe that that's what people do to make these 3d movies that sounds terrible but matt links to uh real 3d or fake 3d.com that is literally the url real 3d or fake 3d.com also linked in last uh last week's show notes uh because that's what i was trying getting at when i was talking about uh the 3d movies and marco had watched the star wars ones and the 3d wasn't done very well there and the real or fake 3d host name is you know obviously uh extreme basically saying the thing you just read casey that's fake fake 3d because it was like well the movie was shot in 2d and then we make it 3d it's also called like post conversion or whatever and so the real or fake 3d.com site it basically lists movies like look if you want to know if the movie you're going to watch is real or fake 3d look it up on here and you'll know what it is that you're getting the implication being that you would presumably want to avoid the quote-unquote fake 3d instead of the the real one um so i talked to our friend and illustrious industrial light and magic special effects artist todd viziri who has worked on many star wars's uh and many other star treks and other movies you may have heard of about the topic of 3d and in particular the whole thing about real and fake 3d and he had an interesting take on it i'm going to try to summarize it here because i didn't uh record our conversation and it was uh in audio instead of email so i can't quote passages from it his take was that shooting quote-unquote real 3d with two cameras sitting next to each other you're filming stuff with two cameras in 3d so you got a right eye and a left eye thing of it is kind of a pain in the butt now it's pain in the butt for some obvious reasons you have two cameras they take up more room they're heavier it's pain to deal with two cameras to make sure they're all working and everything you can't get those two cameras into the same places that you get one camera into you have less flexibility there right also when you're filming with two cameras you have to make a bunch of decisions when you're filming uh that you don't have to you know when you're post-converting you can change your mind about stuff like that so for example the uh what we were saying the ipd the interpupillary distance is called the interaxial distance in the realm of 3d filming when you film with two cameras you pick that distance by putting the cameras that distance apart from each other and it's not easy to change that after the fact whereas when you film in 2d and they do that 3d conversion you're choosing when you do the conversion what you want that distance to be when when you do the conversion like later after the entire film is put together but when you're shooting in 3d you're kind of baking in that distance in every every one of your shots that you make and that's important because there's a whole bunch of guidelines for doing 3d filming that you want to try to not violate which is like don't change that interaxial distance massively from one shot to the next because if you're cutting between them it'll make people's eyes bug out but it's like whoa suddenly now my eyes are three feet apart now they're two inches apart now they're three feet apart now they're one inch apart you know like you don't want to bounce that back and forth in the same way that you wouldn't want to bounce back and forth lots of things in the 2d world so you have to be have to have a lot of planning and be careful and be precise you do have a lot of repair to do when you film in 3d because you have to sort of make the image from each of the cameras match up in a pleasing way when viewed in 3D, which involves unwarping the lens distortion and making it so that when you actually watch it with 3D glasses or in a headset or something that it doesn't look weird.

42:32If you get lens flares, you'll get different lens flares in each camera because they're in different positions and trying to reconcile two different lens flares that you're showing in 3D is weird because we're all used to seeing one lens flare because the lens flares actually happen inside the lens and when you're shooting with one camera you get one lens flare and that's what we're all used to seeing in movies but when you shoot with two cameras you get two lens flares or maybe one but not in the other one depending on where the lights are and we're not used to seeing that so it's weird that's very it makes filming very difficult and it makes you have to sort of do like a hitchcock style where you have everything planned out you know exactly what you want you shoot only what you need and you can't change your mind easily about a lot of stuff whereas post-conversion you shoot it in 2d using all the techniques and technologies that we've always had for 2d and then later someone comes along and says now i have to figure out how to make this into 3d and they can slice and dice it and you know it sounds like a lot of work and it is a big pain but you can choose in each individual frame of film how you want things to look so you'll know that okay we know that scene shot a comes after shot b comes after shot c so i'll make sure i don't bounce around the interaxial distance there right because you already know the film is done it's already put together you don't have to guess right the people who are filming it have to not guess but like say well i hope this shot comes after this shot comes after this shot but if we decide to change it around it might be jarring because that shot we shot yesterday and the cameras are closer together than they are now it's kind of a pain in the butt and as for the mario movie that i saw in my demo i was asking like you know why would that look like bad 3d or fake looking 3d to me it's a cg rendered movie and i kept saying they have all the depth information and people thought what i was saying is that somehow that there was like that i was going to get infinite depth information in the like in the movie itself as opposed to just a right eye and a left eye thing what i'm saying is like when you're 3d rendering it the rendering software when it's generating the image knows the distance of all the pixels so there's no reason that it would that things should look like they are 2d cutouts um and todd didn't know any details about the mirror movie but he said it's completely plausible that someone could have a cg movie and And to save money or time, they would render out either the whole thing in 2D and then slice it up and add fake 3D to a CG movie or render it out in layers and have those be composited together.

44:49And part of that is, again, for cost and annoyance reasons. If you're doing a computer animated movie like a Pixar movie, you can do it the quote unquote real way where you render two different perspectives. You have two virtual cameras in your virtual world and you render from two different perspectives. but when you do that you quickly find oh it turns out that now one of the cameras can see around back behind a piece of geometry that i thought was hidden in the 2d version of the movie and now i can see some place where we didn't fill in a texture or like todd's example was like there's a walk animation of someone doing a walk thing and they go out of view and once they go out of view the walk animation stops because you don't need to animate it when they're not in view but the other camera spots when their legs stop moving and they just start sliding along right so that you have it's harder to it's like building a set right oh now your set's going to be viewed from two slightly different perspectives so be careful you're not basically messing up your movie by trying to do it with two virtual cameras then of course two virtual cameras means twice the rendering time because you're not just rendering from one camera you need twice the cpu power or twice the amount of time to render each frame this is why tons of quote-unquote fake 3d happens in movies and it it makes sense but it also kind of explains the uh the thing that i don't like about a lot of those is it does look like someone cut out three pieces of paper the foreground the mid-ground in the background and they're sliding past each other in a way that that doesn't doesn't look convincingly 3d to me in the way that the cameras in you know the alicia keys studio looked convincingly 3d as if i was there because the cameras were similar distance to my eyes and that was and they were shooting a real thing that was really there and that's all there was to it A friend of the show, Joe Rosenstiel, wrote on Six Colors, and it's a members-only post that we're going to apparently steal some of.

46:35So I hope we had permission on blaming John. These are excerpts from Joe's summary of his own post. So I would recommend subscribing to Six Colors and read the entire article, which is much longer. But here is Joe. He sent this through email. It's him trying to condense and summarize some of the major points. A couple of important definitions off the top. Interaxial is the distance between two stereo cameras. The distance between the human eyes is fixed at about 65 millimeters, but the distance between cameras can be anything. And secondly, convergence. This is where the two images converge. When they have positive parallax, they recede into the screen, and when they have negative parallax, they stick out of the screen.

47:15So Joe writes with that in mind, everything you see with stereoscopic media, 3D stuff, is going to be different because you can't just set up two cameras 65 millimeters apart and call it a day. When I used to work on stereoscopic movies, we would define interaxial and convergence values, not just per shot, but per element of a shot. Because where the objects really were would have been boring to look at. Films are about directing the audience's view. A big part of depicting depth and directing the viewer's eye in 2D requires adjusting focal distance and aperture. Elements that are extremely out of focus imply depth in 2D and direct the eye.

47:48In stereoscopic films, the more something is out of focus, the more it loses any detail that your brain can use to see disparity between the different images shown to each eye and thus positive or negative parallax extremely out of focus elements will mush themselves back toward the depth of the screen regardless of them being far away or extremely close so these these two points that we just went through here are fascinating so the first is defining different like interaxial and convergence values for multiple things in the same shot so basically it's almost as if like okay when we shot the foreground characters the cameras were two feet apart but then the table there's the that's behind them the cameras were six inches apart like adjusting the parallax for the individual things which is obviously not how our eyes work our eyes don't suddenly move two feet apart when we look at one thing and then move back together when we look at another thing they're always the same distance apart but what he's saying is you can't just take two cameras or rather he through the way 3ds or movies have been done hasn't just been to take two cameras put them human eye width apart and stick them and point them at something because that is deemed either are not interesting or as he notes like the they're they're using those two tools the interactual distance and the convergence to direct the audience's eye towards something which is another thing that i think uh distinguishes 3d movies which i tend not to like from the alicia keys and shark swimming towards you thing those are straight up two cameras the width of your eyes and so it feels like you're there right whereas a 3d movie the hand of the artist to the director is more prominent because they are directing your eye and to direct your eye they're doing things that don't exist when you're looking at something like again multiple items in the shot using different camera distances apart whether it's real 3d or 2d you know because you could do it in real 3d if you shot them separately and then composited them later or if it's fake 3d they just you know separated them differently when they were slicing the elements up and that to me looks weird and the other thing is oh what about focal distance well things that are out of focus tend to just look like tend to like your eyes can't tell the difference between them so they just sort of converge on the the center of the screen like it's just at the depth of the screen even if you made the interaxial distance huge and the parallax they're supposed to be way far back in the screen as soon as you blur them people start to perceive them as being exactly at screen level which is not what you want and i also kind of feel that when i watch 3d movies where it's like okay well they they use a shallow depth of field here and the 3d things look 3d but that blurry thing it's blurry in the film because you know they it was out of focus when they filmed it but it should feel like it's 10 feet back but it feels to me like it's right next to the foreground characters because it feels like it's at the depth of the screen so joe continues the 3d method used animated post-converted or native stereo doesn't really make a film good or bad there's a tendency to say that all post-converted films are bad or fake, but that's not universally true because post-conversion can allow for a greater degree of control over the end result if it's done well.

50:46Isn't that what Todd just said? Conversely, native stereo and animated films are not universally more 3D because they captured full left and right eye views. Like if they just set it near to human vision, pushed everything behind the screen plane, and didn't dial in the depth of field to increase what's in focus, etc. So these came in independently, and I don't know exactly when you had your conversation with todd but i think pretty much concurrently joe and todd said basically the same stuff yeah joe joe also works in the vfx industry and it really clarified for me why i don't like three movies because i mean i guess they could be done well or not well but first of all the star wars ones and the fake 3d that always bothers me for like the paper cutout thing like the foreground characters feel like they're closer but they feel like i'm they're they're like being projected onto a flat screen and they're close to me and i actually asked about that i'm like did they ever especially for the foreground characters do they ever make do anything to make it so like when they're post converting a 2d thing the foreground characters don't look like the paper dolls right and apparently sometimes they take like a rough 3d model of a head and they map the essentially texture of the 2d filmed guy's head onto that so so his ear is closer to you than his nose when he's side you know what i mean like but that i just look at that i'm like just shoot it with two cameras man but like but again all the complexities and the second thing is i think there has to be a distinction between what looks good in a headset and what looks good on a movie screen the reason i'm so wowed by the stuff in the headset is because i'm looking at screens two screens that are eye width apart and the video i'm looking at was shot with a camera where the two cameras were basically two eye widths apart so it's straight feels like i'm in the water with the shark feels like i'm in the studio with leisha keys that is very different than sitting in a theater scene and looking at a screen and then having the people who made the movie decide where they want to direct your attention with some extremely unrealistic but hopefully pleasing and interesting and exciting 3d work and i personally really don't like that second thing but i really like the shark fair enough all right we've gotten a little bit of news with regard to the european union's digital markets act uh this is the genesis of all the oddness that's going on with the app store in the eu but we're not talking about the app store right now we're talking about iMessage.

52:55And iMessage was one of those things that the DMA people were wondering whether or not it classifies as a, what is it, a core platform service, which is their term of art to mean, we're going to regulate the snot out of you. And so reading from The Verge, Apple's iMessage is not being designated as a, quote, core platform service, quote, under the European Union's Digital Markets Act. The European Commission announced today, this was yesterday, the decision means the service won't be hit with tough new obligations, including a requirement to offer interoperability with other messaging services.

53:27The commission also opted against designated Microsoft's Edge browser, Bing search engine, and advertising businesses as core platform services. Although iMessage has avoided the burden of complying with rules that come with the official DMA designation, the period of regulatory scrutiny coincided with Apple announcing support for the cross-platform RCS messaging standard on iPhones. Meta, meanwhile, has seen two of its messaging platforms, WhatsApp and Messenger, designated as core platform services under the dma and has been working to make them interoperable with third-party services womp i guess like your price is like all the loser things microsoft edge the search engine that nobody uses i message yeah you're not even big enough to be regulated sorry i'm sure apple likes it but it's kind of you know well i mean this might have also been the result of like apple lobbying for it in some way i mean because keep in mind like the dma is not defining these standards in a vacuum.

54:20The DMA targets specific companies with specific products and services and then rationalizes it with how it draws the lines. Yeah, yeah. Like it targets them by picking an arbitrary number. If you have more than this exact number of customers as of whatever date, and they just look up who has them on that date and they just... Exactly. So for whatever reason, it isn't that iMessage just doesn't qualify. It's that they drew the lines to not include iMessage. Yeah, which I think is fair, actually, because it isn't as dominant as the ones they are regulating. And certainly Microsoft Edge is not dominant and neither is Bing.

54:54So congratulations and I'm sorry, I guess. And then Riley Testit has written in to us with regard to Apple's third party marketplace system for the Digital Markets Act. So Riley is the author, Genesis creator of Alt Store. and so Riley has a lot of experience with what is probably the most official, even though it's very, very, very unofficial, third-party app store for the iPhone today. So Riley writes, I've been poring through the Marketplace Kit documentation for the past week and a half and there's some nuances I've learned from implementing this for AltStore. First of all, any developer can choose to distribute their apps to the alternative app marketplaces regardless of where they live once they've agreed to the new business terms.

55:35Only developers building app marketplaces need to be based in the EU or have legal subsidiary in the EU. To start using marketplaces, you must first request a security token from an alternative marketplace, which will allow you to add that marketplace in App Store Connect. Once you've added a marketplace, you can then choose which apps you want to distribute with it. You can distribute any of your apps to any combination of marketplaces, including the App Store. Users will have to delete an app before installing the same app from another marketplace, though. When you're ready to distribute your app, you submit it to Apple through Xcode like normal and wait until notarization finishes.

56:06Once processed, developers can automatically submit notarized apps to marketplaces through Apple, or they can manually download the notarized, quote, alternative distribution package, quote, or ADP, and send it directly to the marketplace themselves. It's up to the marketplaces to choose how they want to receive their apps. That's the most interesting thing in this email, because before we were saying, oh, everything has to go through Apple. And it does have to go through Apple. But Apple and Apple can deliver it to the third party store, but they can also just give it back to you and say, you know what, you can do this last part.

56:34I don't know what that buys you other than more hassle because you do have to go through Apple. And so it's not like you can bypass them. But if you wanted, you can say, Apple, don't send it to the store. Send it to me and then I'll send it to the store. And I guess the marketplace would have its own upload portal thing where they accept them. I don't know what the advantage of this would be, but it's interesting that that flexibility does exist. Riley continues, I fully agree that third party marketplaces only really make sense for apps that can't exist on iOS right now, but not just for the obvious content reasons.

57:02For example, besides the fact that my app Delta isn't allowed in the App Store because it's a Nintendo emulator, it also is entirely monetized through Patreon by providing pre-release access to beta versions to my patrons. This business model is forbidden by the App Store despite it being a proven way to monetize software in other markets such as indie video games. For this reason, I've actually added deep Patreon integration to Alt Store to encourage other indie developers to monetize apps this way, of which Alt Store takes no commission. Because I genuinely believe it's a better system for smaller developers.

57:31Now, the other thing with the DMA is that you are required to have a million euro line of credit. And what I think all of us took that to mean was you have to have a bank say, yeah, we will give you up to a million euros if you ask for it. Like, we've already pre-approved you. We will do it if necessary. And we had a couple of pieces of feedback about this. But Bobby Perotti writes, I work in commercial finance. Your discussion of the DMA and the required million euro, quote, standby letter of credit, quote, makes me want to clarify what that actually is. That's money that must be held essentially in escrow by your bank.

58:07It's not a line of credit. It's not like a line of credit. It is more akin to a minimum deposit. I think a lot of people assume it means you would be OK as long as you're approved for that amount of credit from a bank, like a home equity line. But I can get a home equity line of credit, never draw on it, and not be inconvenienced much at all, as long as I have home equity. A standby letter actually means that the bank is locking those funds up so the beneficiary, in this case Apple, can take from it if certain conditions are met. It's your cash but held, unable to be used for anything else. A good way to think about a standby letter of credit is basically a check that the beneficiary, Apple, can cash at any time.

58:43Small consortiums of indie devs, which will probably have trouble getting that kind of money together in order to control their own distribution destiny. destiny so i really wonder what riley's going to do about this maybe maybe either maybe bobby's understanding is incorrect maybe our understanding certainly sounds like it's incorrect he sounded pretty sure because i went back and forth around a lot of that i asked one more clarification which is like okay do you actually have to have that money because you can write a check and not have the money for it and only when the person goes to cash it do you find out oh you can't actually you know pay for the thing uh and he said yeah you not only do you have to have that money in pretty much all cases that he's aware of, the institution that gives you that standby letter of credit demands that you give them the same bank that's giving you that letter of credit.

59:25You have to give them the 1 million euros. And so you've got to have that money for Reelsy Reels, give it to them, then they will give you that standby letter of credit and they will hold that money and the money is basically sitting there saying if Apple ever wants to take this, they can take it for whatever reasons it says in their marketplace contract or whatever. right so you can't get by saying oh we're good for it or whatever no you've got to have that in cash and you have to give it to the institution who then gives you this standby letter of credit so i don't know maybe alt star has a million euros hanging around and they're going to sail past this but uh yeah it's uh it's more of a burden than we thought it was yeah much more i mean not even close to what we thought it was so thank you bobby for writing and telling us we don't clearly work in commercial finance.

1:00:09And I think this basically tells you the kind of entities that we should expect to actually jump through the hoops to run an alternative app store in the EU. It's not going to be small companies and small developers. It's going to be probably a very small number of pretty large entities. Yeah. All right. So let's talk Vision Pro. We talked a lot about this last week. Let's do some more. and I think we left off last week our heroes were about to discuss what it's like to let other people try the Vision Pro. So, John, it seemed like you had thoughts about this or you perhaps wanted to direct conversation or am I misreading you entirely?

1:00:50You're misreading. You were going to tell us, Marco wanted to tell his story of letting other people try the Vision Pro and you tell your story. I didn't let any other people try the Vision Pro because I was just in the Apple store and it was just me. Fair enough. All right, so what's going on, Marco? Well, so I've had a bunch of friends try this in the last, whatever it's been, week or two. I think enough people have pointed out now the guest mode that you can put it in from Control Center to let someone else put it on without your optic ID, basically. It's fine. I would say if Apple wants to give the guest users a good impression of what it's like to use a Vision Pro, you should probably make guest mode a little bit better.

1:01:27it's fairly clumsy to get started and it's extremely unforgiving as many people pointed out if the wearer in guest mode lifts the vision pro off their face for even a split second it resets it completely and kicks it back into your mode so even if they like lift up like rub their eye or adjust the fit a little bit too much or something once it's off their eyes they're out you have to put it back on as you re-log in like with either epic id or the passcode go back into guest mode in control center and turn it back on for them to put it back on this is made especially inconvenient because every time someone puts it on in guest mode they have to go through the entire eye setup so first it has them you know hold the crown to align the displays as we discussed earlier then it has them go through the whole intro of like look at the dots and pinch your fingers and then let me make it brighter look at the dots again pinch your fingers so it takes a while and it's and it's kind of you know repetitive and cumbersome so the guest mode experience is not something that you're going to want to do frequently and i think it's important that if you're demoing for somebody else that you warn them don't take it off your face in the middle because it will reset it and have them have to start all over again i wonder if that's related to uh so optic id is like essentially it's like it's like a touch id or face id but for your eyeball um and i know from experience using a shared mac in our house and you probably know if you've done this on any kind of shared mac even a laptop there's a limit to how many touch id fingerprinty things you can store on a mac and that limit i believe is determined by essentially the secure enclave and the hardware so it doesn't matter how big your ssd is doesn't matter what version of the os you're using whatever number of fingerprints it is it's like seven or eight or i don't know however many it is that's it for the whole system right um and and so like for example i want to have like my fingerprint work on both my wife's account and mine and vice versa because so we don't have to type in each other's passwords, right?

1:03:19But you run out real quickly because if the kids have their own fingerprints on their accounts, you know, you run out, right? So they're not even saving the optic ID for guests so that if you give it to a guest and they try it and they take it off and the next day they want to try it again, it doesn't like recognize them as a guest that had a seen before and boot them back into their guest mode or anything like that. It just doesn't even save their optic ID. So I wonder if A, they're storing the optic ID in the secure enclave because it is biometric data, presumably. And B, apparently they're only storing your optic ID one you know or two I don't know one for each eyeball whatever and that's it guests don't get anything saved about them so every time the vision pro sees this person it's like I have no idea who you are you're a guest to go through the whole thing the other major limitation I've run into is that one of the best assistive tools for if you're going to be showing someone how to use vision pro is you can airplay what they're seeing to a nearby mac or or other screen so you can so you know i'll have like my laptop nearby so i will say all right mirror the screen of what they're seeing to my mac and then i can see what they see and i can kind of guide them okay go to this section of the apple tv app to go find the 3d videos or whatever you know you can kind of walk them through what they're seeing and what you want to show them the problem is that breaks the drm assumptions of the video player so you so if you have screen sharing enabled they cannot watch any video content that is drm protected which is all video content basically that you would want to show them everything from apple tv plus everything from disney like it's all drm locked and so if it's air playing it basically you know breaks whatever drm requirement is that you're copying the screen and so not only can you not see it on the mac they can't see it on the internal displays either so they can't watch 3d video content in the demo mode if you can see what they can see and that is a huge limitation in part because it just kind of sucks also because as far as i could tell when i did these demos you can't turn off the screen mirroring because they don't have access to control center in guest mode there's no control center so if you want to show them the only way i could find was to take it off reset guest mode turn off screen sharing like go through the whole process again well what you could do is like when i was demoing for some friends, we were air playing to the TV, like to the Apple TV, I guess I should say that was in the living room.

1:05:43And when you're on an Apple TV anyway, you can, you know, hit the back or menu or what have you button to effectively cancel screen sharing. Now, if you're screen sharing to a Mac, I don't know how that would work. I've only ever done that like once or twice. So you may not have the same option, but it does work pretty well with an Apple TV where you can just basically cancel the screen sharing. Oh, I should try that. And I didn't think to try that, but anyway so that's it just it shows though like you know like this is apple tv showing apple's content on two apple devices and it totally breaks yeah it's because of the stupid like i said the hdcp whatever it is the yeah high definition copy protection someone put a link to it earlier that's standard has all these things about like you know what it looks like is when it don't siphon off the video off a side channel so you can record it secretly only it can only be displayed on the screen that it is handshaked through through the stupid secure drm protocol again as a reminder all this is to make sure no one ever ever is able to pirate video and we know of course this solved the problem of video piracy and now it is impossible to private pirate video thank you copy protection you did your job great no what it actually means is that a everything is available for pirating and b you're going to want to pirate it because the legit copy you bought you can't even watch because it blacks out all your screens yeah and the thing is, I really wish, I don't know, maybe I'm missing the point of how copy protection works, but I really wish that perhaps it would be impossible to see the black square of content that the user was seeing on AirPlay.

1:07:15So in the device, in the goggles, then they're seeing everything you would expect to see. But the AirPlay mirroring, you're getting blackness for the square of content, or if you're doing something immersive, perhaps the entire display is black or it's like a checkerboard pattern or something like that. I really wish you could at least do that because what you've said, Marco, is exactly accurate. Like leaving aside whether or not you can turn off AirPlay, the first time I did this with somebody, you know, they go to go into, I think it was Disney Plus we were trying at the time and they were like, well, it's not working.

1:07:47What are you talking about? And then I look at the TV and I'm like, oh, you're right, it's not working. And it took me a few beats before I realized, oh, I bet you anything this DRM. And so then, you know, canceling airplay seemed to do the trick, if memory serves. And only nerds would know that, because there's no error message. It just shows it as black. Just black screen. Yeah, the same thing as when you take a screenshot on your iPad, trying to take a screenshot of a TV show, which I do all the time, and I always am reminded, oh yeah, this doesn't work. And I think the reason why you can't do it, you were suggesting, Casey, is like, oh, why don't they just show it to the person, but not show it to me?

1:08:16Then you've got your copy protection. I'm assuming it has to do with the fact that, essentially, once you do the mirroring, you have, like, broken the chain of trust. like there's no way to do a three-way chain of trust so now nothing is trusted you have this weird forking scenario and you have you know this is not on apple insofar as apple is just following these stupid industry standards that we have that apple kind of has to follow to work with all of the other even apple even if apple didn't want to do this with its own streaming service which it does but even if it didn't want to it has to work with all the other streaming so they have to essentially implement this and your hardware and your everything has to be certified so this is all just so you can like watch content that's out there and it it infects every part of their system as well because their whole video chain and system is built on it and it's so incredibly dumb so hopefully they'll do something to fix this i mean again especially with apple's own apps and own streaming platforms and own os and device they should be able to fix it for that uh fixing it for any other streaming apps if they ever exist on vision pro haha will be more tricky yeah so anyway uh the showing people the 3d video proved to be tough because you know the drm thing is annoying and again it's like it's apple's content on their own streaming service on their devices you know they know someone maybe they can talk to and work this out otherwise like the and i i do suggest for apple the immersive 3d video should be easier to find in the tv app in the vision pro oh my gosh yes well i mean that's true of anything in any kind of streaming service where it's like what about the thing i want to find it's like never mind that have you seen these giant things that we're advertising for the first two full screen fulls until you get down to so it affects vision pro too like anytime you're like hey here's a video playing app surely it will be easy to find the things that i watch frequently no exact opposite it will be intentionally hard to find the things that you want because they always want to shove something new in your face never mind what you constantly watch never mind anything about what you want or your favorites or your frequency it's all about what do we have to push on you which is so dumb for vision pro where they should be allowing there's so little content anyway they should just be you know making the same play but again it's based on the same code base as the tv app and all their other platforms and it sucks everywhere that's the also you said a second there's so little content that part has kind of surprised me like i i would have expected with the launch of vision pro i would have expected there to be more of apple's 3d and immersive content than there actually is there's actually very little of it it's like a few demos basically or like you know one episode of something and it's like you know 12 minutes here and there like there there's not much content yet obviously i'm sure apple is going to like stage it out you know over the course of the year as they sell more vision pros and whatever else but apple has has a lot of power here because they are a video producer and they have shown that they will make custom recording gear and record perfectly immersive stuff that's custom tailored to Vision Pro.

1:11:16That's great. They need to be doing a lot more of that because I think it's going to be a while, if ever, before they get large support from other producers of video. So therefore, they should step up more and produce a lot more stuff for this than what we're seeing so far. So hopefully that's in the pipeline. but I was kind of surprised and a little bit disappointed that there wasn't more immersive content available at launch. Well, it's the chicken egg thing because even Apple's own like, you know, creative wing is saying, wait a second, you want us to spend how many millions to make a show that is only possible to be watched by 500 ,000 people on the planet?

1:11:52Like those are the only people who have the capability of watching it. And you want, like, let me show you how much money this is per person that you're asking us to spend. And they're like, well, you don't understand. We need to like drive people. We want people to buy the thing like yeah but right now they haven't bought it and you can't make more than this many per year and so i can see that conversation being difficult like they're not going to make a you know for all mankind in headset 3d that can be watched by you and 200 000 of your closest friends because that is not you know and they're like oh it's for the future it's for the future when we sell 10 million of these things like yeah but you want us to make it today and i can imagine that being difficult for them to square uh they i think they should make more of it because i think it's the most compelling thing in the entire headset but i bet what apple is thinking is instead of that instead of like doing what i think would be unprecedented like trying to essentially make alicia keys swimming shark caliber of content that i don't think has ever been made before and sort of like a long form full television thing like with that resolution and those cameras for like a regular tv show uh and figuring out how to do that because i don't think anyone knows how to do that well at this point that is much more experimental than the easier thing which is we should just do sports like this we need to get a good sports contract and as gruber said in those things but when when apple lost out for the bid for the nfl thing he was kind of you know disappointed but now that he has vision pro he's angry about it because that is a gimme uh you saw in the demos how good sports looks and you don't have to make that content they run around in the field and they make it all for you you just need to point cameras at it and you can have the cameras be eye width apart and you have 17 of those cameras and you put them in weird places and that is a winner and that is a big draw and you have to pay well you pay way less money to make it you just have to pay money up front to get the rights to be the one who has the cameras there so i think that is a easier first path for apple to go with this like how do i make compelling content for vision pro find a popular sport film it in 3d whether it's the nba or major league soccer or whatever uh that seems like an easy first move and i bet apple wants to do that and is going to do that yeah also concerts you know other events like that's yeah you see like you know live events in 3d that seems like a big market uh including sports and other things so honestly anything yeah hey sharks swimming in water real popular i mean i i we're all kind of snarking but i we're all serious we're all also serious like i cannot overstate you know i haven't done a demo of the vision pro since you know the first weekend i had it because we've been just exceedingly busy the last week and a half, whatever it's been.

1:14:21But that first, I think it was the first day that I had it, that I did a handful of demos for a couple of friends. The thing that unquestionably sold everyone the most was that like sizzle reel, which I think we talked about quite a bit last week, of all the different like immersive stuff. The high tightrope walking lady, the sharks, the soccer game, the rhinoceros, the Alicia Keys. Like I know you can imagine what it would be like to be watching something but as you twist your head your perspective changes right like that's obvious an easy thing to imagine but when you're actually doing it and when you're seeing the incredible fidelity of the thing that you're watching like this isn't some like 480p crappy recording because you know it just can't handle anything more.

1:15:12And it's not flickery and dim and weird like 3D movies with the glasses that you watch. Right. I cannot overstate how incredibly impressive this stuff is. And naturally, like anything that they want to put in this immersive environment, I'm game to at least try it. And yeah, the Alicia Keys, as Mike had said, singing at you is a little bit weird, but it was also freaking cool. It was so cool. I actually have to go back and watch the whole but I think I had said last week, you know, I skipped through several minutes of it and I just kind of zigzagged around and it was phenomenally cool. And to build on what Marco was saying a minute ago, like I would pay all the money to have a really good, you know, Dave Matthews or whatever concert that that's been recorded with these obelisks, these white obelisks of 3d cameras.

1:16:00I mean, I would, I would give all the money and I just, I cannot overstate how impressive this is as impressive as you imagine it might be, like double or triple that because that's how good it is. So the video demos, again, if we get past the DRM and having them navigate to the Apple TV app, it is a very impressive thing. I will also say before I forget that of the two straps that come with the Vision Pro, the fancy one with the crank and the single headband around the back, the solo knit band, is far better for demo purposes than the nice comfortable dual loop band because it's so much faster and easier to adjust it.

1:16:40You know, the dual loop band is like, all right, you get these two Velcroed straps, you got to, you know, strap, pull it, strap it down. Like that's very impractical for demo purposes. The hastily assembled one is less practical than the one that they clearly designed from the beginning. Surprise. Yeah, yeah. So you want to be using the solo knit band, the one with the single loop that goes around the back. You want to use that for demos if you have it. First, I had Tiff try it. She could not possibly be less interested. And you know, nerds out there, many of you have people in your life that you try to demo technology for.

1:17:17And maybe they will humor you and support you in your love for technology. But you can kind of tell they're kind of doing you a favor. Their heart's not really in it. That's how this scenario was. uh so she you know she she didn't she was not impressed by the the fit was not impressed by the weird uh what she called the nose cape i didn't notice that until like i don't know the second or third day i had it when it accidentally flipped downward so what marco's talking about is there's like this very thin completely like flapping in the breeze material that's good that that sits directly on top of your nose, which by default, it's kind of like flipped upward.

1:18:01So it's, it's black against the black inside of the, of the vision pro. So you don't really notice it, but then it can't, it has give to it cause it's just a piece of fabric. And so it flipped down once and I was like, what the hell? Oh, oh, I didn't even know that thing was there. Like it took me a day or two before I even realized what the heck that was. But yes, nose cape is a very good word for it or term for it. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, so she wasn't super pleased with the physical side of it it was you know heavy on her i mean it's not fitted to her did you get her a different light shield no it's and that's and that's a fair thing like you know obviously like everyone that i'm having try this is trying my size to everything on it uh so anyway she hated having to go through the the eye tracking dot pinching uh introductory thing that was not fun um i have found also many people who try it on do not intuitively get the ipd adjustment thing where you have to like double tap the crown to confirm like you you know it's like hold it down and then double tap it like that especially since the instructions are presented to you uh probably in double vision because it hasn't adjusted yet and so it wants you to look at like a diagram and understand what it wants you to do but you're seeing double at that point well it actually for whatever maybe it's just me even when it's in its like unset state i find it fairly clear in in that mode i mean you can close one eye obviously oh yeah anyway the funny thing is also like she's an amazing tester of my app she has a special talent i can hand her something that works perfectly and within a second she will find a way to break it which is actually wonderful as a software developer like that's a great quality for your spouse to have because it's a wonderful first stage of qa she puts on the vision pro and this is this is still when i had the 1.0 uh software i now have the 1.1 beta on it so i don't know if this is fixed yet but she she put it on and it basically immediately locked up and had to be rebooted oh cool so this is still very you know very 1.0 kind of days um but anyway so she gets through it she basically said okay yeah it's cool but why would i want this wait wait even even after she saw the shark uh she actually bailed out pretty quickly uh so i'll i uh i had all the testers try the dine the encounter dinosaurs quote app which is more of like a brief 3d demo this is the thing you've heard about another podcast where like you hold your finger out and the butterfly lands on it so i had i had five different people try this all five of them put their finger out to have the butterfly land on it it doesn't tell you to do that but it kind of looks like you can and so you try it and oh look the butterfly lands on my finger all five people did that at some point a large dinosaur comes into your field of view which can look somewhat intimidating two people that i had tried including tiff as soon as the big dinosaur big dinosaur showed up they were just like nope i'm out and just like took the headset off that was it that was the end of the demo i'm done did you show did you show them the dinosaur before you showed the militia keys and the tightrope walker yes i did i know i'd have been a mistake i couldn't find them in the apple tv app anyway um so yeah two people like noped right out of the headset as soon as the big dinosaur showed up and the other three all tried to pet the big dinosaur can you pet the dinosaur.com yeah yeah so anyway that's that's roughly you know how it went everybody was fairly impressed with the 3d video content everybody was impressed by the dinosaur thing i do wish there was like a little bit more like one more 3d like interactive experience to show people again this will probably come with time i assume but it is it is kind of again it's i wish there was a little bit more demo because after you watch a couple of sample things and it's like okay well that's kind of it like you know you can open up notes or my email if you want to see how that kind of stuff works it's a little bit it's a little bit awkward though you open up photos oh here's a panorama you know you can do that kind of stuff but it's i do wish there was a little bit more demo content available um but again this will probably go over time did you you could have taken some spatial video of adam with your phone and put it in there like i did i'm kind of surprised that uh tiff wasn't convinced by like the birthday scene and like the you know the spatial video of people you know like seeing the possibilities for your own content like that not really um i i mean maybe maybe she was upset with the eye tracking and the nose cape it was i don't know but it wasn't it didn't really sell her and then finally i got some interesting input from adam so this is my 11 year old son he is a heavy user of the quest series of vr devices had a quest 2 for a while he recently got a quest 3 he barely cared first of all about using the vision pro because there's no games like for him vr means games yeah yeah obviously not a lot of people are going to be buying a nearly four thousand dollar vr headset to play games on it as the primary purpose um but it's interesting like you know from a kid's point of view how this is totally irrelevant it's like a mac pro to a kid like why would i want that uh he barely cared however he did try it on he did the dinosaur demo and everything he instantly noticed that the pass-through is better than the quest 3's pass-through only when stationary but it's actually worse in motion i have since tried his quest 3 and he's exactly right he nailed it motion in the vision pro in general gets very blurry i've even noticed that like even when using the virtual mac screen even when just doing computing in vision pro if i move my head a little tiny bit i notice the motion blur and it's it's not ideal it's not like a massive deal killer but it is something that you notice and it is yet again one of the ways that i kind of felt a little eye strainy when trying to use the mac monitor mode over just using a real mac monitor there is that motion blur yeah i heard a lot of people talking about that and i do wonder could you tell whether it is like manually created motion blur so So, for example, Destiny has a setting in the settings menu that says, do you want us to do motion blur?

1:23:56And if you have it checked, they will, whenever the camera moves, they will artificially create motion blur by blending together frames, because that's what you're used to seeing from like, you know, cameras like film cameras or video cameras or whatever when you move them around. But you can turn that off and say, no, don't pretend you're a film camera. don't artificially create motion blur just show me the frames which looks less like we expect from our life of watching filmed content but if you're playing an fps game i i find it you can see things better so i turn it off so i do wonder is apple adding motion blur intentionally computationally by blending frames together to make it look more like how we expect it to look because or is it just like i can't imagine it's anything else because their oled screens i imagine the response rate has to be insanely fast like every OLED so it's a little bit mysterious to me but I've heard this exact same complaint in many different reviews I'm just wondering if if it's on purpose or not yeah I don't know and I mean like the fact that it isn't just motion blurring your pass-through content but it's also motion blurring the content of windows yeah well Tom Vaziri would tell you check your motion blur everything has motion blur even lens flares so yeah they would motion blur the pass-through the video like the windows that they would motion blur everything because that's again the expectation of how would it look how when you see a tv show and they pan the camera you get motion blur yeah also for whatever it's worth one of the reasons why i never really spent a lot of time with the quest 2 is that i would get a little bit motion sick after a fairly short time and i when i when i tried the quest 3 fairly briefly um i had the exact same problem it is obviously a huge upgrade over the quest 2 um but it is not good enough for for me to avoid motion problems which i again i don't usually have in the rest of life uh but for some reason quest 2 vr was not good for me quest 3 vr is also not good for me vision pro i do not have that problem at all i have i feel zero motion problems with vision pro so a lot of it might have to do with the uh whatever it was called there was just a little podcast that we'll remember to link in the show notes so you can find it we're talking about the talking to the ceo of the company that apple bought back in 2017 and they made an ar thing with pass-through and their whole shtick was like like the cameras in vision pro and most headsets are not where your eyeballs are so their perspective is different than your eyeballs so they have to do computational stuff to sort of remap the camera's view with like an awareness of what shape the world is so that it looks like you're looking through your eyeballs and not like your cheeks which is where the actual cameras are in vision pro and that mapping i think is either not done as well or maybe even not done at all on things like the quest because pass-through is not their emphasis you know it's more of a game playing machine and that could be making you sick because imagine if your eyes saw out of the center of your cheeks and you moved your head around your brain would be like i'm not seeing what i expect to see and it's you know get the disconnect between what you see and what you feel that's possible i mean i so i tried i i was used i used the quest 3 for about maybe 20 minutes and part of that was i tried um like a full screen game and it didn't seem to be any different it was bad there too so i don't know yeah uh anyway so But speaking of eyes and eye placement, this leads me to my last point about the demo experience, which was eyesight, the display of my eyes on the outside.

1:27:11I have now used it enough around my family that they have seen this. To most people who have seen this, it is creepy as hell. And so that's interesting. What's also interesting is during one of the demos, I handed it to a friend and somehow it stayed logged in as me. I don't know how this happened, but somehow it accidentally displayed my eyes on their head actually using it, and I got to see my own eyes. Oh, that's actually kind of convenient, albeit a weird security violation. Yeah, so I got to see my own eyes on someone else's head as they use it. Let me tell you, that is a strange experience to see.

1:27:52I do not recommend that experience. anyway the eyesight though so i was i was sitting at my kitchen island uh using the vision pro for a while with my macbook uh air just kind of testing that out for a while getting some computational you know stuff done uh over the weekend and adam was hanging out like nearby on his computer like down the island further and he looks over and he's like daddy how are they doing that with your eyes i was like what do you mean he said how how can i see your eyes i thought you're looking at screens he was totally fooled he thought that that was actually so it worked in the sense that it fooled another person who didn't realize that it was a simulation from screens so it's only 11 yeah so like you know it didn't fool any of the adults um but it did fool someone and so i feel like it is possible to make this feature better enough in the future if they want to to maybe fool adults on a regular basis.

1:28:52But I still don't like it. I see why they did it. You know, we'll be talking this to death over the next three years before they finally kill it. But I see why they did it to try to make this product less antisocial than it really clearly is. But I still don't think it's going to be great. But there does seem to be enough room for improvement that maybe they can make it passable so the adults won't think it's too creepy and then they can just get rid of it in a few years when they realize it's not worth the weight and battery savings well so here's the thing about getting rid of it obviously the end goal is how about just make clear glasses where they can see your actual eyeballs like that's what they would like to make but we don't have technology for it but you know we do have transparent oled screens but we we don't have the confluence of technology to be available to make something that light that high fidelity with that brightest screens yada yada yada but the end stage will presumably be they see your actual eyes and you don't have dwelling is trickery right getting rid of it we obviously think for weight and cost reasons if you have to make a low-cost version of this that's an easy way to save money but i as weird as eyesight is and as janky as it is and i do think it's pretty janky because i saw a lot of people doing it in the apple store and you know it's it's dim the lenticular lenses only show a couple different images from different angles so they can't cover them all so sometimes your eyes don't look like they're in the right place depending on what angle you're on but it serves an important function to make it so other people are aware when you can see them like that's that's important that's important for the like how socially acceptable is this because we don't like seeing people with their eyes totally blacked out the same way it's considered kind of rude if someone's wearing really dark glasses all the time and when you're talking to them and you want to have a serious conversation you just want to say take off the sunglasses so you can see their eyes it's just an instinctive thing that we have it's not the end of the world sunglasses exist and we don't hate everybody who wears them but wearing dark sunglasses during an important conversation is rude considered rude for a reason right or wearing dark sunglasses indoors or at night as the song goes um so the function i think they can never really like the need for it will always be there until we can see your eyes the need for it will always be there how it's implemented there is some flexibility so even if they don't ditch it entirely for a cheaper and lighter model you can imagine a much much simpler version of eyesight that shows like two big cartoon eyeballs in fact apple has patents related to this exact thing and maybe they even prototyped it and thought it was dumb but boy you can make that way lighter if you do like two monochrome e-ink screens on the outside of the goggles look like googly eyes that don't even pretend to look like your eyes or even like i mean i think it was in their patent like text like a text display that says i can currently see you or whatever you know what i mean like why don't just put actually google google eyes on there it's they're much lighter and cheaper yeah well you know but but the thing is you want it to be switchable because you you it's trying to communicate to people when can you see me and when can you not see me i kind of wish they had this for airpods where they can tell when when audio is playing them when audio is not playing in them and so i think that that the utility of that feature will always exist there's a question of how important is it is it important enough for you to pay x amount more for it is important for you to add the y amount of weight but i don't think we'll ever get to a point where we say there is no utility being able to tell when people can see you there's always utility in it it's just a question of what is the correct trade-off to get that functionality and i think you can get a lot of the benefit not the emotional i can see your eyes benefit but at the very least the binary can this person see me or not uh benefit you can get that with way less weight and way less cost than they're currently doing and i do wonder every time I see this is the are these cgi's that much better than monochrome googly eyes I mean they're a little bit better but I think monochrome googly eyes would be easier to see at a glance when I was seeing people do their demos in the apple store and you get close enough to them to be like in the person range or whatever so you can see their eyeballs and they can see you when they're doing the pass-through sometimes if you're not at the right angle and there's so many like specular highlights on that stupid shiny thing you can't even see what the heck you know you can't see the dim image on the screen through the lenticular stuff whereas if they were monochrome high contrast googly eye eyeballs at least i could see them from every angle and know when they're totally immersed with the blue wavy stuff now and when they can actually see me so i think unlike the touch bar which is my opinion needed to die and be rethought i think the the things that eyesight is trying to do are worth continuing to try to do until we can see your actual eyeballs i'm just not convinced that the way they're trying to do it in the very first vision pro is the right path to be traveling down with the lenticular lenses and the really dim eyes and stuff like that so we'll see what they do for version two and if they drop it from one of them we'll see how much that model is uh frowned upon because it doesn't have that feature uh but i'm i'm not as anti-eyesight as other people because i definitely see the point of this feature and i think that point is always going to be relevant.

1:33:52Yeah, I'd actually like to build on what you said. I am pro eyesight. Like, it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But for all the reasons you enumerated, I think it's absolutely worth it. Like, I think it is useful to get that visual cue whether or not the other person is paying any attention to you. And get that visual cue whether or not that person is in an immersive environment. Like, I think these are all really useful things. Yeah, it looks janky, as both of you have said. Yeah, it's not as bright as it should be. Yeah, occasionally, it looks like your eyes are not where they're supposed to be.

1:34:22But I think this is the best that we can do right now. And I don't think if Apple can make this better, I don't think that this is a bad path to go down. Now, maybe there's other better paths. I'm not saying that this is definitely the winner, but I do think that they've gone down the right path. I do think this juice was worth the squeeze. And I do think that it makes the device that much more appealing for regular people and that includes me like i i think i would like this device less if it didn't have eyesight even knowing that eyesight is janky and weird in fact i would argue in some ways it's almost better that it's janky and weird because then we can all have a good laugh about how janky and weird it is well if you think about this is another sad reality of so apple today with its restrictive policies and what can and can't be produced in fact i just saw someone get division pro app rejected because what they made look too much like the mac os doc or something so of course apple rejected it anyway uh if if vision pro uh we travel back in time and it's the mac of the late 80s and early 90s there would be apis that people would either discover or apple would publish most likely people would discover for controlling that front screen and we would have talking moose eyeballs out on the front yoda eyes like because they would hack the they would hack the you know they would find the apis for finding where your eyes are pointing and people and people would figure out how to use that screen and we would have tons of fun third-party apps doing different kinds of cartoon eyeballs and guess what all of those silly apps made by indie developers distributed for free or just for fun would be a perfect lab for us collectively as a community to figure out how does it work are cartoon eyeballs good should we try photorealistic how do these screens work right that kind of sort of laboratory of allowing people to try things and then apple gets to watch it all happen and then pick the winners and incorporate them into the os is how the mac got to where it is today and all of apple's post mac platforms have been essentially denied the opportunity to allow that to happen and the only people who can come up with ideas are apple because they keep all those apis to themselves and if you try to submit an app with private apis they'll reject it and even if you try to submit an app that doesn't use private apis but looks kind of like the doc they'll reject that but they're like we haven't thought of that yet so no we don't want you third-party developer to ever try anything like that and that really annoys me because I would like to see fun things in that front screen, even if it is a scrolling text message that says, I can currently see you, I can currently see, you know, like who knows what the right choice is.

1:36:48Obviously, Apple prototyped a whole bunch of them. Again, you look at those patents, which means they did all that stuff internally. What they shipped is the current eyeballs, but I'm willing to believe that there are other ways to communicate some or all of that information better and more cheaply and with less weight. Do you think though, like, you know, you mentioned AirPods earlier and how nice it would be if people could tell whether you could hear them or not. But I think that also is a kind of interesting counterpoint to this even being an achievable goal because we've had AirPods now for a while.

1:37:18I think people still don't know when and whether you can hear them with AirPods, and it still makes people feel weird. And what we learn is that the correct kind of societally polite social interaction model is if you're going to stop and talk to somebody while wearing AirPods, you should take them out. Even if you could hear them, you should take them out just so that there's no ambiguity, so they know you can hear them and that you're not listening to something else. And I think the same thing is going to be true of Vision Pro. Maybe some people might be aware of this weird eye display on the outside and what this indicates versus not indicating, but for most people, if someone's coming up to you and wanting your attention or to have a conversation with you, the right move is to take off the Vision Pro, not to try to teach society, oh, this means I can see you.

1:38:11Well, but I think there's a big difference between the ears and the eyes because there's nothing to indicate whether ears are accepting sound other than like you say, oh, I see things in your ears. That means you can't hear me. But we all know that's not true because especially if you're not wearing AirPods Pro, having earbuds doesn't mean you can't hear anything. But we all know when someone's looking at us because we can see their eyes pointing at us. That's why Apple's choice to try to do photorealistic eyes removes the need for you to understand what the googly eyes mean or know that a green light means that the camera is on.

1:38:41Like they don't require any of that. They just require what your son did, which is like, hey, I see your eyes. That probably means you can see me. That requires no kind of training. But there's no there's no expectation that you can ever look at somebody and know by looking at their ears whether they can hear you. That's just that's just not that. But the eyeballs tell you. So with the eyeballs, there's a clear solution, which is like, just show the eyeballs. And again, the solution being, how about having clear glasses where they can literally see your eyeballs? Just show the eyeballs. Cartoon eyeballs may be a little bit higher learning curve.

1:39:10But and as for the AirPods, I think what society has determined based on my experience wearing AirPods is that everyone assumes that you can always hear them. That's my experience both in and out of my house. I have AirPods on my ear every time I take a dog walk. And not a single time has anyone even considered the fact that there might be a podcast playing. they just start talking to me and this also happens inside my house but my family doesn't care but but like and i'm amazed and like you these are not small white earbuds you can see them there's no hat covering them and they're like i just assume you can hear everything i can say and then i have to quickly go up and pinch the thing so i can actually hear what they're saying and turn and pause the podcast or whatever the ears is a much more difficult situation because there's no sort of obvious way to indicate anything it would have to be learned but eyeballs there's an obvious way we just haven't been able to pull it off that well yet and i think that i think that's probably why apple didn't do you know text or funny symbols or cartoon things and they're ideally apple would like to make that image as realistic as possible so that someone thinks i can faintly see your eyes through the really dark ski goggles you're wearing outside for some reason weirdo by the way there is totally a way they could do it with airpods they just haven't what they need to do is put an oled color screen on the outside of each air pod and yeah and just have it when you're in transparency mode just have it show a simulated image of an ear and so it just disappears of the inside of your ear i mean i mean yeah you know like the i guess the problem is even just seeing someone's ear you don't know whether they can actually hear you or not because they have those ear earplugs that are like shoved away down in your ear canal you know what i mean or you know you could be hard of hearing right and so that's another thing with like you can kind of tell that with people who can't see you because they're if they can't see you they're not going to point their eyes at you which is like the sign if you see someone's eyes move to you and they're looking at you you assume they can see you because if they couldn't see you they wouldn't know where to point their eyes you know what i'm saying it's just like there's much less to learn there uh whereas seeing the gross waxy inside of people's ears i'm not sure if that's much of an indicator of anything but you could it'd be good if you had like if you did have earwax problems they could put a little camera in there and you could use the air pods it's one of those uh were the doctor tool call where they stick in your ear is that a something a scope is it yeah probably it's a something a scope for sure all right so do we want to talk about fitz law yeah this was an uh something that came up on dithering uh john gruberman thompson's podcast uh and they were talking about fitz law which they insisted on pronouncing fitz's law because the person's name is f-i-t-t-s and the correct way to possess a size that possess a size that's it uh is f-i-t-t-s apostrophe s which you would pronounce as fitz's law but i'm sorry i'm old and i've been saying fitz's law for my entire life and the wikipedia page even says it is often cited as fitz's law so that's how i'm gonna say it anyway fitz's law for those who aren't a mac user in the 80s is a thing that says that the ease of targeting something with a mouse is proportional to the size of the target which kind of makes sense if you have a big target and you time people get your mouse into this area and it's a big giant area it's real easy for them to get the mouse into it and if the area is like two pixels by two pixels it takes so much longer because they move the mouse over to it but then overshoot then they got to back up and you adjust and just and finally get into the two little pixel target but if it's a really big area like a quarter of the screen real fast people can move the mouse cursor mouse pointer into it really quickly this is research from user interface from the 80s back when the mac was new and they were trying to figure out the best way to define interfaces.

1:42:40And the reason it comes up in the context of the Mac is one of the things the Mac interface had from day one is the menu bar at the top of the screen. And this is always cited as a great example of Fitts' law because you can just jam your cursor up against the top of the screen. This is before multiple screens. Anyway, jam your cursor up against the top of the screen and you don't have to care when the mouse cursor stops. It will hit the top of the screen and the cursor won't go off the edge. And so essentially the menu bar has infinite height from a targeting perspective when you plug the numbers into fitz law you're just like okay the menu bar is this many pixels wide how many pixels high is it don't put in 34 pixels or however high the menu bar is it's infinity pixels high because all the person has to do is slam the mouse cursor up to the top and then they just need to worry about the x position because the y position is taken care of for them with one flick of the wrist that's the canonical example of fitz law and uh it's always shown to say like what are the value of the screen edges like the dock being on the edge and how you can slam the cursor to the bottom of the dock.

1:43:39And even though it looks like there's a tiny little gap between the bottom of the screen and the dock, that's still clickable area because they want to take advantage of Fitts Law. If the dock wasn't like that, and if like the bottom pixel of the screen was not clickable, that would make the dock harder to target for people. So this came up in the context of Vision Pro, both with your eyeballs and with cursors saying, well, there's no menu bar in Vision Pro. And so that's maybe one of the reasons that all the targets need to be a little bit larger because there are no screen corners to flick a cursor into uh and there's no menu bar at the top to slam your cursor up against and it also came up in the context of eyeballs uh and saying does fitz law apply to eyeballs bigger targets are easier to you know to look at or whatever that might have to do with the accuracy of being able to look like there's there's an accessibility control where you can enable a cursor that supposedly shows where your eyeballs are but i but that is also smoothed out because the uncertainty about where your eyes are looking and how they dart around is surely even noisier than the cursor that they will show you.

1:44:40But they have to kind of guesstimate and smooth where you're looking, right? So bigger targets give you a bigger margin of error, and that makes sense. But the key difference between your eyeballs and your hands and arms when controlling a mouse or a trackpad is that your limbs, because of what we use them for in daily life are accustomed to having something that stops them. So if you're reaching for a doorknob, you're going to fling your hand in the direction of the doorknob and you're going to start slowing your hand down as it approaches where you think the doorknob is. But you also know that once you start getting close to the doorknob and you start to feel it, the thing that will eventually stop your hand is the doorknob itself.

1:45:18You're reaching for a light switch. You're putting your hand on the wall. You kind of know where the wall is. again you slow your hand down as it approaches the wall but you have the full expectation that eventually your fingertips are going to touch the wall and then you'll know where the wall is and you'll complete the motion and then you'll you'll feel the panel on the light switch and you'll find it wherever your limbs hit into things gently you hope but you can rely on them finding something and that thing stopping them the menu bar functions like that in the virtual world you drive your arms upwards and it doesn't actually stop your arm your arm goes up on the mouse pad but the cursor your virtual finger does stop but your eyes have a different job as you wander around the world when your eyes dart from one place to another looking over there looking to see someone coming up your driveway looking back at the tv there's nothing in the physical world that is stopping your eyeballs your eyeballs always have to stop on their own if they if you dart your eyeballs up to the menu bar the infinite target of the menu bar does not stop your eyeballs nothing stops them except for your skull and the length of your muscles or whatever so the job your eyeballs have done for the entire time you've our entire species has existed and all mammals that have eyeballs and everything they have to be able to move to position and stop on their own whereas our limbs have always been able to rely on essentially making contact with something whether it's the ground, the wall, the light switch, pulling a fruit from a tree, whatever it is that you're doing, your limbs have always had something that stopped them.

1:46:51And so it's interesting that Vision OS is an environment in which Fitz law for the primary pointing device of your eyeballs is essentially irrelevant because your eyeballs are really, really good at going somewhere quickly and stopping on their own. And they don't need the help of a screen edge or another thing to slam against like our hands and limbs do i don't know if this has any consequences for the interface presumably has consequences for when you use a mouse for example inside vision pro because then you're not using your eyeballs but now your cursor needs something to slam against but i assume when you do it in the virtual screen on the mac if there is no vision os window above you it will stop at the top well it'll stop at the top it'll stop at the top as long as your gaze remains on the virtual display, if I'm not mistaken.

1:47:43I mean, I could try this out if I really care. But suffice to say, to the best of my recollection, as long as you are focused somewhere on the Mac virtual display window, you are limited to keeping your mouse in that display. Now, that works both ways, though, in that if you glance to, say, your left to look at Slack or something like that while you're still mousing about, well, your cursor is going to try to jump over to that Slack window, even if it's a native Slack window, a native Vision OS Slack window. And so that occasionally can be a little bit frustrating. I don't know, maybe that's a little dramatic of me to say, but a little bit off-putting maybe that, you know, I'm trying to mouse to the upper right-hand corner of this 4K screen, which, you know, I may have made quite large in my Vision OS world, but then I glance to the left to look at, or the right or what have you, I glance to the left to look at the Vision OS native Slack, and next thing I know, my cursor is in the Slack window because as far as Vision OS is concerned, well that is the active surface right now and it's trying to use universal control to pull the mouse into what i'm looking at which does make sense but it's not exactly what you would expect you don't expect your cursor to just jump you know i don't know a thousand pixels to the left all of a sudden just because you moved your head and look somewhere else yeah another one of the disparities that division os brings up that a lot of people have been talking about in their reviews i mean we talked about last time with like having to continue looking at something and not glance off somewhere else until you've completed the click operation for example uh and people have been generalizing that to the idea of taking something that is traditionally input device our eyeballs we use them to take in the world around us they are an input device and overloading it and saying guess what eyeball you're now also an output device you now also determine the position of the cursor in a virtual world our eyeballs unless you're superman are not output devices they do not shoot lasers from them you can't you can't affect the world with them or cyclops and and where you look with them doesn't affect future operations by for example your arms it's like well i looked up to the right and then i snapped my fingers and the thing i was looking at bursts into flames no that doesn't happen anywhere but in vision always it does so we are being asked to both use them as an input device which is why we're glancing all over the place to scan things or whatever but also they are i wouldn't call it an output device it's kind of they're trying to use the reverse but like what we call the mouse we call the mouse an input device but that's from the perspective of the computer it provides the computer with input so our eyes are both an input device for our brain and also they are an input device for the computer and an output device for us and that is not something that we're used to uh tell me about command tab i don't think people were talking about oh i'm on envision os and i'm hitting command tab and i wish it worked and maybe in the next version it will and it doesn't do expected things and this made me think about window layering in vision os we talked about it before marco was like you do not want to have a bunch of overlapping windows it's a big mess i tried it a little bit when i used vision pro i tried it more in the simulator to get a feel for it and i was kind of surprised at how i guess i didn't notice this before i had used the simulator for ages before but i guess i hadn't done you know i wanted to torture test it you know here i am on my mac pro how many windows can open so i went went in the vision os simulator i'm like how how did they implement window layering here and so i just started opening a bunch of windows it's my core skill set apparently uh and i wanted to see how it would handle things uh and you know so some interesting things we already know about as we discussed before remember we many many shows about before the vision pro was even released we were going through the developer documentation it was like oh by default in vision os when you push a window far away from you it uh vision os will try to maintain the same visual size like the field of view of the window so essentially when you push the window far away it will make it bigger as you push it farther away so that so that it fills the exact same field of view so if it's like if it's 15 degrees of your field of view and you push it back five feet it will still be 15 degrees in your field of view which means the window will be larger that you can override that you can make it not do that right but that's one of the behaviors they suggest for your windows so right away pushing windows farther away from you and pulling them towards you they maintain the same visual size in some ways that's just like the mac when i have a stack of 100 windows and i bring the back one to the front it doesn't change size it becomes quote unquote the front most window it draws in front of the other windows it gets the big drop shadow but it doesn't change size and ditto if i bury that window underneath 100 windows it doesn't shrink because it's not getting farther away this is what i was getting at last time about like on the mac we have lots of windows but we conceptually consider them to essentially be like pieces of paper like they're all pretty much at the same depth and yeah it's magic because you can pull the one from the bottom up to the top but if i was to look from the side i would say this is a stack of paper and all the paper are touching each other there's no space between them right which is why the magical metaphor of like i click on the when the back comes forward like it works for us because like ah it's just kind of like i took that piece of paper out and slipped it in front of the other ones but i did it real quick and you didn't see it so the metaphor works for us envision os if you make a big mess and have a bunch of windows and some of them are far away and some of them are close up and you got this huge stack of windows which is a thing that you can do and one of the windows is like it's way in the back like in the simulator i was pushing it like you can push them through the back wall but i was trying to stay inside the room one of them is way against the back wall and then like 17 windows between me and that window and i want that window to quote unquote come to the front and I click on or tap on or whatever the hell, I'm in the simulator, so it's weird, activate the window that's way in the back.

1:53:10What happens kind of surprises me. What doesn't happen is that window does not suddenly leap to the front in 3D space. No, it stays pinned against that back wall. It stays 10 feet away from me, right? It also doesn't just start drawing on top of the other windows, which would look kind of weird, but it's a thing it can do what it does is it draws in front of everything but then it fades out all the windows that are ostensibly in 3d play space in front of it so that you can see the window that's against the back wall by essentially making ghosts out of all the windows that would be blocking the view which is really weird like it doesn't move the window it doesn't make it bigger you don't see it animate forward and suddenly it's two feet away from you and then it animates back but it wants to essentially bring it to the front and this in the context of command tab like what would it mean to command tab you'd be command tabbing you're like oh suddenly the wind the front most active window is the window that is currently buried behind seven windows and it's five feet away from me how does that become front most and they don't walk that window up to you go do do do do here comes the window it's walking through all the other windows oh now that window is two feet in front of you which they could do because the whole size maintenance thing the window would slowly shrink as it moves towards you but you wouldn't notice because it's moving closer to you.

1:54:27So it would maintain the same visual size, but you'd see like the drop shadow, for example, of that window is now two feet in front of you instead of against the back wall. But instead they draw that window in front of everything else and fade everybody out like they're a ghost. So what it means is if you have a lot of windows open and you pick one of them and it is not literally physically the front most, the other windows become ghosts. The other windows fade away and you can't see them and they come up with a skirt, not just the part that it's drawing over, but even the edges of them get all fuzzy or whatever.

1:54:54And it's super weird. It's kind of like if you had a stack of 100 text edit windows and you pulled the one in the back to the front. And instead of that window just drawing in front of them, all the other windows faded away and became ghostly. And that one drew in its current position in the back. But the ghost windows faded out in front of it. I don't know if this is if this is the correct approach, but this is apparently what Vision Pro does now. And it explains Marco's warning last time was like, you don't want to run a bunch of windows because that metaphor. and design is has no precedent in the 2d space it's what they've decided to do in 3d and i guess maybe they tried all the other ways and they were worse but it is weird and it does make it so that having lots of windows open is much less tenable because it won't move them it won't essentially when you say bring to front and Mac parlance it will never actually bring that window to the front it just sort of like it's like plowing it's like a particle beam that blows away all the other windows and fades them out and disintegrates their matter so that you have a clear shot at that window that is five feet away from you on the back wall and then when you pick a different window all those dematerialized windows come back into being and stop being ghosts and start drawing themselves again and i find it extremely weird and not for me at least in the simulator, a comfortable way to manage a lot of windows.

1:56:17Yeah, when I was at the library using this thing, I put myself in the position where I had a couple of windows layered on top of each other, and I was seeing that ghosting and whatever. And that was the first time, because I was using Mac virtual display at the same time, that was the first time that I had the presence of mind to hit alt tab, or excuse me, command tab. Wow, my windows are showing. To hit command tab and try to, you know, tab between the windows. And of course, that didn't work for nothing. And it took me a second to realize what I had just done and why it was wrong. But outside of, you know, a bunch of windows on top of each other in 3D space and trying to move between them, I can't say I've ever reached for command tab for any other reason.

1:56:57But that is the one really good way and reason to use it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to do anything. But if it did, like what it would do is fire that particle beam and plow its way through all the other windows without moving any of them so you have a clear line of sight on the one window that is essentially going to draw in front of all the other ones even though it is still behind them and like it's literally behind them like you can get up and walk over and stand in the space between the windows like it's spatial computing but they like they haven't figured out a way you know the fake metaphor i just said of like the paper stacked or whatever like that's not based in reality but but it's close enough.

1:57:36Like the stack of paper analogy, like if you had a bunch of papers out and you wanted the one in the middle, you take it out from the middle of the pile and you put it on top. And like, you can imagine that's what's going on with all these pieces of paper that are windows on your thing. But if you had a bunch of, you know, five foot by three foot magic glass things floating in your living room and they were all stacked and some of them were against the back wall and some of them were in the middle and some of them were real close to you and you wanted to get at the one in the back. I mean, I suppose you could have it fly towards you and pass through the other ones and now that one is the front post and then it could fly in the back but how do you maintain those positions would you want it to fly there would you want the other ones to fly out of the way and part like the red sea so you can see that one or do i guess you want all the other ones to become weird ghosts so you can see through them to the one in the back it's really weird that their spatial computing thing is like i have no respect for the spatiality of this world yes you can position windows but when you ask to see one of them, I am not going to move things spatially to make your view better of that thing.

1:58:37I am just going to dematerialize, partially dematerialize the things that are blocking your view so that I can draw that one in front of the other windows and it doesn't feel that weird to you, but honestly, it's pretty weird. Thank you so much to our members who supported this entire episode. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. There's lots of benefits to being a member. Please consider joining us once again atp.fm slash join thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental Accidental Who is accidental Accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T-Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech podcast so long So a few times during the episode I mentioned that I had gone to the library to do some work and I've also been working on I got a little sidetrack adding some features to regular plain old call sheet which just got released which by the way if you're interested in how tall actors are and or your name is Merlin Mann, go get the latest update because where possible, I show how tall actors are and Merlin seems very excited, which I'm very happy about.

2:00:33What is your data source on that? Wicked Data, actually. So the same thing that Wikipedia uses, or I don't know the relationship between the two, but it's part of the Wikimedia Foundation as far as I know. And yeah, Wicked Data has some actors' data, a lot, I would say, but not everyone. But anyway, that's not the point. The point is, outside of that distraction, I've been doing a lot of Vision Pro work because now that I have the Vision Pro and now that I have my hilarious$300 developer strap, I've been putting both to good use and trying to work on the Vision Pro native version of Call Sheet.

2:01:05And this is, you know, as an aside, we don't need to unpack this right now because it could take hours. We're already running long. But running a branch that you're not doing a good job of keeping up to date with main and then trying to bring it back in line with main like a month or two later not fun my friends not fun to the point that i actually abandoned like i still have it but i abandoned my initial vision pro branch the same one that i used when i went to a lab uh i have abandoned that and basically manually replaying a lot of those changes in part because i've got different opinions about what i should do and in part because even even though it's only been a couple of months there's been such a divergence between main and this branch that it's just, it's a mess.

2:01:49It's an absolute mess. Anyway, I keep getting myself distracted. The point is, what was my experience like doing, you know, writing code and trying to get work done both at the library and at home? Because I've found that even when I'm at home, even though I've got, you know, 15 Ks, if you will, of screen here, it's actually much more easy and there's a lot less friction to write code and run it in the Vision Pro when Xcode is also in the Vision OS world. And so I've been using Mac Virtual Display for that. The developer strap, like I had said on the show, even though I am not in love with the price, it is worth it if you're doing any real development because it seems to work much, much, much better.

2:02:30When I was at the library, I had a very weird thing though. So I have, I want to say it's an anchor. It's out of reach from where I'm sitting. But I have one of those chargers that I use. I don't use an official Apple charger. I have, I think it's an Anker charger that has one, like, I don't know, maybe a hundred watt USB-C port for a computer, like a 30 watt port or thereabouts for an iPad or phone or what have you. And it also happens to have a USB-A port. And what I was doing at the library was I had plugged MagSafe from the 100 watt slot to the computer, a just general USB-C connection from the 30-watt to the battery for the Vision Pro.

2:03:12And then, of course, I had a different USB-C cable going from the Vision Pro developer strap to my computer. No hubs or anything like that. That's all it was. And I had my AirPods in. And when I finally decided to commit to using the developer strap, I was getting this incredibly odd feedback, like a very high-pitched humming sound that I found was only the case when I had the computer and the battery pack plugged in. And if I unplugged the MagSafe or if I unplugged the battery pack, it went away. I don't think this has happened since, so I don't know if my library happens to have very dirty power or something like that, but it was the weirdest thing.

2:03:50And I noticed it several times at the library. That was weird thing number one. Weird thing number two, So I really enjoyed working in a fully immersive environment, in part because the room I was in was wide but shallow. So, you know, it was probably, I don't know, 10-ish feet, so a couple of meters, a little bit more than a couple of meters wide, and like less than a meter, you know, less than three feet deep, or maybe it was a little more than three feet. I don't know. It was not a lot. It was, you know, wide but not very deep. And when you're trying to put windows around, when you're not immersed, you're running into the wall.

2:04:26Like it'll do it, but it just looks weird. And so being immersed was way, way, way better. I am a pretty darn good touch typist. Many, many moons ago, you and I did, or the three of us did a, uh, like a typing race thing. Well, I think on the air, maybe we did it off the air and compared notes after the fact, but I'm a pretty good typist. I'm no Jason Snell, but I'm pretty good. Uh, I don't need to look at my, my hands when I type that being said, when you're fully immersed, finding your keyboard is harder than you think. Yes. I said that last week. You've got hands and arms, but you don't have a keyboard.

2:04:58Right. It's actually kind of frustrating how difficult it is to find the keyboard. Yeah, like I don't realize how much I need to glance at the keyboard until I'm trying to do that. And then I realize, oh man, I actually do glance at a lot. It's like those people who buy the keyboards with keycaps that have nothing on them to show off. Well, how about you can't even see the whole keyboard? No, yeah, because that's the problem is like to like align myself with the feel of what, you know, where my fingers even go. that's where i found myself when i'm in vision pro kind of missing sometimes yeah i feel like that's that they could upgrade that like so they have obviously the vision pro detects your hands and your arms uh apple detecting its own keyboards i feel like that is a solvable problem yeah yeah because this was on the laptop keyboard and actually the only other keyboard that i use is the um the whatever 104 key whatever it is with touch id here at home and those are the only keyboards i use so yes it should have been able to detect it like it's a fine first worldiest of first world problems but i couldn't find the freaking keyboard this happened not irregularly and yes i'm aware of the little bumps on what is it the f and j keys you got to find the keyboard enough to find the bumps first though exactly exactly i could not have put it better myself i think you are slightly kidding but no that's exactly right also quick aside john when did the didn't the bumps used to be on d and k or something like that years ago apple apple have them has them in different positions than other uh keyboards do and i think they've changed over the years but yeah because I vaguely remember when I was a kid using Apple keyboards drove me nuts because it was under my middle fingers instead of my pointer fingers like the little lumpies or whatever anyways couldn't find the damn keyboard airpods were having a little bit of feedback which again I don't think I've heard since uh but one of the things is and I I don't know if I ever linked to this in the last week's show notes but I put up a blog post short I think I mentioned it last week I don't know if I linked to it but I put up a blog post shortly before um before the vision pro came out like literally a couple of days before where I was talking about how hey this would be really need if I could have this whole array of windows around me with native Vision OS messages, native Vision OS Slack, and Safari from Vision OS, and all that different very sundry windows all around me.

2:07:01And I can do that, and it works pretty well. However, as many people have said, and I am not the only one, the iPadOS native apps, and in this case, I'm picking on Slack, but it's not just Slack. iPadOS native apps kind of suck on Vision OS. And the thing of it is, is I don't know if it's something on Apple's side or the way the apps are designed or both. And again, I'm not the first to say this, but finding the touch targets is really difficult. Particularly, I found on Slack, in the upper left, I think I mentioned this last week, in the upper left where you choose which workspace you're in, you know, say Real AFM or something else, it's really hard to get Vision OS to actually activate that thing with your eyes.

2:07:50Now, with that said, with universal control, it's not so terrible because you can just mouse right up there. But the Slack app on VisionOS, I am really looking forward to, and I don't even know if they've announced anything, but I'm really looking forward to getting that as VisionOS native because I think it'll be much better. But yeah, overall, really great experience. It's a little teeny bit of a bummer when I'm at home, when I'm losing, and when I'm going from 15Ks of real estate and at least having more than one window. It's a bummer to bring that down to one. And I think we talked about last week, you know, there's rumblings that maybe Apple can do two windows on the same, or, you know, two.

2:08:25Anyway, it seems like, especially given our, the supposed revelations about the developer strap and the potential of higher bandwidth there, that it could be something that comes to a later version of the OS, if only for people with a developer strap. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But yeah, I would love to have a second virtual display but all that being said, there's some things I would definitely tweak about this but it's pretty nice. I've really been enjoying it and I wouldn't, to Marco's point during the episode, I wouldn't necessarily choose to give up my 15Ks of real estate. I wouldn't necessarily choose to give up my standing desk and my situation at home but I do like quite a bit going somewhere else to do work but of course that raises the question if I'm sitting on Mount Hood in the library, why couldn't I sit on Mount Hood at home or at my desk?

2:09:19And I don't really have a good answer for that other than the tea ceremony, if you compare it to vinyl. The tea ceremony of going somewhere, I kind of miss. I'm very thankful and lucky that I don't have to do that every single day. But I like to, at least once a week, go somewhere. Wegmans, Publix, a library, whatever. and this it's it's in some ways it's so much nicer and better now because i feel like i'm bringing you know like a lg ultra fine 4k display with me without having actually having to carry very much but the flip side of that is it's almost not even necessary anymore which is a weird and odd feeling like i'll probably still do it even if i do you know use the vision pro when i'm wherever i'm going but it seems a lot less necessary now than it has ever been before so anyway i just thought But it was interesting to discuss.

2:10:09It's also getting out of the house, right? Like when you're at Wegman, someone can't yell your name and ask you to come do something. Well, it's only Aaron, but your point is still fair. And I think leaving aside who is at my house, you're exactly right. For me anyway, I really do like being able to get out of the house and go somewhere and just change my scenery and have the act of going somewhere. Now, that's because I believe in superior computers that you can move very easily and don't need to worry about carrying multiple pieces. Marco, I believe you are also an enlightened individual that believes in these weird, funky things.

2:10:42Multiple pieces. You're bringing a headset with you. Ah, well, sure. But I don't have a 15-pound monitor, though. Thank you very much. But nevertheless, I believe, Marco, you are also an enlightened person that believes in these funky things called laptops. No, he doesn't. He's using a desktop laptop. No, I mean, honestly, for the purposes, obviously, I share some of your need for getting out of the house sometime because we work for ourselves in our houses. And so it is nice to get out in the world and work or be somewhere else, you know, on some kind of regular basis just to get yourself out of the house.

2:11:15I think using the Vision Pro to do that does kind of ruin the point. But I think the answer is not stay in your house more. I think the answer is go out with a laptop and don't bring the Vision Pro sometimes. Like that's that's the answer, because, yeah, like I'm going to like, you know, go work in a coffee shop or something. Part of the joy of it is interacting with the world. being out there, seeing people, saying hello to people when they come in, if you've seen them before. Focusing your eyes on distances other than 1.3 meters. Right. So part of the appeal is to be a little bit in the world.

2:11:50Now, if you're using Vision Pro out in a place like a coffee shop, first of all, you're already covering your eyes and immersing yourself, etc. Even if you're in pass-through mode, you are projecting the antisocial version of yourself. As we've mentioned, the Vision Pro speakers are very open. And so if you need any kind of audio as part of your work, if you're watching or listening to something, or if you are trying to edit audio or whatever, you're going to need AirPods. Now you're covering up your eyes and your ears and sealing yourself off even more. I feel like at that point, you are not only being extremely antisocial to the people around you and to the business that you're in, but also you are then losing quite a bit of the value of being there in the first place.

2:12:32For me, in that context, a laptop, optionally with headphones, is much better because at least then your eyesight is totally unencumbered. You can see everything. People can see you. They know they can see you. They know you can see them, as discussed earlier. I feel like you're getting more of the environment that way, even if you have AirPods in for whatever reason you need that. So again, I see the appeal very much to Vision Pro for things like immersive entertainment. If you're going to watch a movie, bringing it on a plane i think there's a lot of arguments for that but like working in a coffee shop or working in you know out in public somewhere for the sake of getting out in the world and you know getting out of your house i i don't think it's working for your purposes there i think it's actually working against your purposes there yeah don't underestimate like i said like don't underestimate the value especially if you're working on a programming problem or whatever of looking out the window and you can say i can look out the window with vision pro it's got pass through no i mean looking out the window and focusing your eyes 50 feet away at the tree across the street while you think about a problem i know you can do the thousand yard stare inside the headset but it really for if you're working on computer for a long period of time i feel like it does help to focus your eyes on a different distance even forget about the headset even just sitting in front of your max monitor don't just stare at the monitor two feet in front of you for eight hours you will have a bad time like get up and walk around look over your monitor i used to do this at work look over your monitor out the windows that hopefully are in your office and out in the distance look down the hallway look at your neighbor seven cubicles away and wave like it's just good to to focus your eyes at different distances to relax and to have an environment where you can think about things and that that remains one of the weaknesses of a headset with a fixed focal length unless you're doing the defocus your eyes and have a thousand yard stare and you're not looking anything which i suppose you can do in the headset it's difficult to remind yourself to focus on different distances to avoid eye strain and honestly you know in my programmer head uh looking off at something in a distance like a tree across the street is somehow connected to solving programming problems and some complicated wiring that goes on when you've been a programmer for 20 something years