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cheerioty
yreg
This is a great idea even if the hardware was quite different. I honestly can't imagine developing for visionOS armed only with a simulator. And since Apple afaik doesn't have a hardware devkit, this sounds miles better.
gardaani
Apple Vision Pro hardware dev kits will be available later this year: https://developer.apple.com/visionos/work-with-apple/
yreg
Good to know, thanks.
bugglebeetle
Yeah, it seems fully in the spirit of the “hacker” part of Hacker News. I thought it was cool.
freedomben
You don't think Apple will have a problem with running their OS and software on non Apple hardware? I would expect this to be "fixed" soon.
outworlder
> You don't think Apple will have a problem with running their OS and software on non Apple hardware?
That's not what's happening here. It's just streaming data.
audunw
This is like fancy VNC. Apple doesn't have any problem with VNC, in fact they explicitly support it.
I think Apple can feel fairly safe that the experience will always be so hacky and low quality that it's not going to be a threat to Vision Pro. In the meantime it helps developers get a head start developing for Vision Pro which is only good for Apple.
zmmmmm
If you imagine a scenario where this works well enough that it's a viable alternative to actually buying a Vision Pro for development ... I can forsee it being a problem for them in terms of (a) direct sales - I could easily see shops fitting out their dev team for 1/4 the cost with Quest Pros instead of Vision Pros but more importantly (b) concern that it will lead to crappy apps being developed. That is, devs using non-Apple hardware will naturally curtail what they build to things that actually work in the dev hardware they are using. That means advanced features of the real Vision Pro won't get properly supported (or omitted altogether).
Of course, that is still miles away from where this is now. But it seems tantalising that it could possibly go there.
vaxman
They have three trillion reasons to protect their IP from appearing on the lenses of a Meta Quest or an HTC Vive. All it takes is for the wrong person to post on Threads or Twitter and a pontificator to bloviate into the wrong podcast and it all winds up on a Bloomberg terminal. AAPL has a lot riding on this.
saagarjha
This is the simulator, not the actual OS.
langsoul-com
I think Zuckerberg did mention they already explored the same things. Must have made a conscious decision not to due to production costs.
Only Apple can charge a high premium and still have others pay
monero-xmr
They can charge a premium because they never sacrificed quality in any systemic way (obviously you can comment with your pet issues but the bottom line is that Apple has kept the quality bar very high for decades). That trust is earned and they charge accordingly.
Some immediately jump to Harvard MBA teachings that caused such widespread lack of quality, or capitalism, whatever. In my opinion a deep focus on quality is rare in any business. It is very hard to scale and keep in a business’s DNA. One reason small businesses continue to be formed and attract customers (beyond “buy local” pandering) is that solid small businesses are run by dictators that create an entity that is an extension of themselves, sacrificing nothing. Therefore they can charge a premium. Extending that to large companies is very difficult and requires solving an incentives and reputation puzzle to make each layer of the organization focus on quality.
I patronize businesses that maintain their quality and I pay for it. Life is too short and I have too much spare cash not to. Apple achieves such standards. You may have to upgrade hardware every few years but that’s part of the price.
It’s the “longtermism” mindset that goes against the grain of human behavior. Eating well, working out, maintaining friendships, putting in consistent effort - the fundamentals of quality. These are values that are hard and I try and notice it when anyone does it - people or businesses.
as_bntd
Sorry but could you mention some of these other business you talked about?
throw47474777j
> the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar)
I find this questionable given the reviews people have given Vision Pro. I have used quest pro, and it is pretty good as a high end gaming style headset but nowhere near the experience people describe from Vision Pro.
scyzoryk_xyz
I don’t know about how this will play out between them, but I agree that these sorts of hacks are never a bad thing.
croes
Apple has problems with anyone referencing an apple, so I wouldn't count on that.
jimmySixDOF
There is also a free to download Vision Pro UI panel simulator made by Nova, who have an excellent UI dev package on the Unity Asset Store. The demo is for the Quest Pro and source code with APK is on GitHub.
https://github.com/NovaUI-Unity/AppleXRConcept/releases/tag/...
trafficante
I was extremely impressed at how well this demo functioned on my Quest Pro. Obviously I haven’t used the Apple HMD, but I was able to easily eye-select nearly every UI element in the demo (resize boxes were a bit wonky) and could even do the whole “pinch with hand in lap” thing from the Apple reveal.
Surprisingly enough, I came away preferring where Meta is going with the whole “Direct Touch” thing (Quest users should have it under the Experimental tab in Settings). Lack of physical feedback (when using hand tracking only) is definitely an issue, but treating the virtual displays like physical touchscreens actually isn’t too bad. It’s definitely my preferred control scheme when I’m not using the controllers.
I can even sorta type at a reasonable enough speed for emails/instant messaging - though nowhere near good enough for coding. Essentially you input text like a Boomer on an iPad (ie: slow one finger pecking) but at twice the speed because you can use two hands.
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ozten
jakecopp
Also on Mastodon without a possible login wall at https://notnow.dev/notice/AXXN5FibZ01OTCjtnE
Comments won't show on Twitter either.
vaxman
[flagged]
justsomeadvice0
This strikes me as a very strange opinion, especially now when Threads has 100M users 5 days out and is expected to support ActivityPub. In any case: since the beginning, pointing and laughing at Mastodon (a single AP implementation) was always like saying "Yahoo Mail will never win the electronic messages war!!" - it misses the point, like, entirely.
breakpointalpha
I just bought a Quest Pro this weekend and was hoping to get something like this running.
Apple should do the right thing and support early VisionOS development using the Quest Pro.
candiddevmike
You must be new to the Apple developer ecosystem? It'll take an anti-trust judgement to get them to allow development on non-Apple platforms.
ChuckNorris89
Yeah, I'd love to see the day when I could build iOS apps on Windows and on Linux, just like I can for Android.
scarface_74
Yes, the government should force Apple to release an SDK for other platforms.
ChrisMarshallNY
I'm assuming that this was </s>?
Releasing supported SDKs is expensive as hell.
If anyone insists on forcing me to run myself into penury and put myself in legal jeopardy, just to support my competitors, then I would close up shop.
However, Apple has a wee bit more clout than I do. I suspect that it would not happen.
giantrobot
That sounds like compelling speech. That is a very slippery slope.
andsoitis
> right thing and support early VisionOS development using the Quest Pro
Why would that be the right thing?
Quest Pro doesn’t have the same capabilities as Vision.
cowsup
Neither does a Mac, yet it's the only device that's allowed to develop for the headset.
andsoitis
But the simulator is designed to help you test your app, just like iOS apps that require touch/gestures/low battery/etc. can be tested on a macOS machine. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t voel their building tools that run on Quest in order to test your Vision app. What would be the point? It seems like such an opportunity cost that’s better spent on other things.
audunw
> Neither does a Mac, yet it's the only device that's allowed to develop for the headset.
I'm willing to bet that you can develop a prototype for an app in Unreal Engine right now, and I'm willing to bet that Unreal Engine will be ported to Vision OS and that you can get that code running on there pretty quickly after release.
I don't see how this is very much different from how it'd be to develop Windows or Xbox applications. I might use be able to develop some core code with .NET core, or even a full game using cross-platform tools like Unreal or Unity.. but if I'm actually shipping a product I can't expect to get far without using Microsofts officially supported toolchain.
I'd say it's reasonable to be annoyed that you're not allowed to run Mac OS on non-apple hardware. But it's not reasonable to be annoyed that Apple isn't spending millions on officially supporting an SDK for their devices on other OS's, just for a very small niche set of users.
MikusR
The only thing Quest Pro lacks is lidar.
chaostheory
…and a depth sensor. Not sure why they cut it last minute
asadm
What was your reasons for buying it. Just curious.
foxandmouse
I disagree it's the right thing to do, why do you think it is?
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ZiiS
Because it solves the chicken and egg allowing none Apple software at launch.
dagmx
Not really a chicken and egg scenario imho.
1. It runs iOS and iPad apps.
2. The simulator is available and several devs have already ported and added visionOS specific feature support with it.
3. They’re supposedly making developer units available to applicants starting sometime this month.
4. They’ve already had several third party developers they’ve showed in their press releases
—-
Which is to say , I don’t think they will necessarily have a chicken and egg problem at launch which is still months away.
So there’s no real motivation to open up their development to competing platforms.
jbverschoor
Ah you mean your quest is useless because it has no useful apps
ArtWomb
I am hear to lend support for "build once, run everywhere". But I already feel the divide: Quest for Games. Apple for Minority Report ;)
soligern
That’s not the right thing at all, why would they do that?
actionfromafar
NEVER cross the streams
jansan
Additionally get holographic stickers of a pair of eyes, attach them to the front side of your Meta Quest and you are 99% there.
OptoContrarian
Even better https://youtu.be/po6piXWU1TI
dag11
Is this stereoscopic? I don't see any mention in the readme or demo video link but based on the description of hooking the compositor, unless it's translating rapidly for left/right eyes or the simulator gives left+right textures in real time, this would be monoscopic right?
coder543
The description of the repo: “Take 3D stereoscopic screenshots in the visionOS emulator.”
joshstrange
Honestly Apple should have considered something like this and supported it from day 1. It's only upside for them.
dagmx
What upsides are there to promote a competing platform as a development story for their own platform?
joshstrange
It's not like anyone who wants to develop for the Vision Pro is going to get a Meta Pro and decide they don't care about the Vision Pro. Also it opens the door to people who already have Meta Pros who want to develop/port apps to the Vision Pro.
If I was serious about developing for the Vision Pro I'd eat the difference between a Meta Pro now and then selling it after the Vision Pro ships.
mensetmanusman
Home brew devs will certainly work with 10x cheaper hardware, compile on the mini, and ship.
If you can get something working this way, it might be a good paradigm because you know it would run smooth as butter on the VP.
dagmx
but what’s the upside still? They’ll have developer units available this month supposedly so availability isn’t the big barrier.
It’s like saying they should enable iOS development on windows. It doesn’t make brand sense to do it. The slight upside of a few devs who won’t buy a Mac isn’t worth the deterioration of brand prestige by pushing people to multiple platforms.
Also there’s a not insignificant cost associated with maintaining tooling on multiple platforms when they rely so significantly on the vertical stack
madeofpalk
I think by limiting the simulator to an obviously non-realistic output, they avoid the uncanny valley and unrealistic-judgement of using their operating system in lower-speced hardware.
bredren
I’d guess Meta has better reasons to shut this down than Apple does.
The project reinforces the idea that the Quest products are of low quality (evidenced by comments here).
It also improves the developer experience the ecosystem of Meta’s competitor.
Thus, providing greater pre-release momentum to the Vision Pro at Facebook’s cost.
smoldesu
Meta can't shut this down. Sideloading has been a feature of the Quest since the start, stopping this would represent a paradigm shift for developers of the platform.
> The project reinforces the idea that the Quest products are of low quality (evidenced by comments here).
They are. That's why they cost $400 (game console territory) instead of $3,500 (OLED TV or iMac territory).
"Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
throwawaymobule
You still do need to make an account and give them a phone number/credit card to get into developer mode and enable adb. They'd be dumb to, but stopping people is entirely within their ability.
Really wish sideloading was a thing you could do on your own/offline like most other android devices.
georgespencer
> "Comments here" will tell you the Quest is a failed product after 20 million units sold. The people on this website have never been representative of the market at-large.
It's amazing how many people miss this crucial point. Apple and Meta share a high level ambition – to dominate the next wave of computing platform -- but that's pretty much the only similarity between them.
If you look at Quest and Vision Pro and think about the constraints placed on the teams building them it seems like:
1. Apple's teams are given the constraint of producing an amazing user experience in terms of screens, gesture control, etc. Price flexes upwards to deliver this.
2. Meta's teams are given the constraint of achieving a mass market price, and the quality of the product flexes down to achieve this.
Apple's position makes sense to me. They are no longer an underdog[^1] and can fast follow anyone who has a more compelling vision for AR/VR which launches before they get theirs out the door.
Meta needed to get this going before Apple for obvious reasons. That's why, for example, of the 20 million units you referred to as being sold, 5 million of them (!) had safety recall notices because the fabric of one of the components caused such serious skin irritation that some number of users were hospitalised.
Meta can move fast and break things (& people), but Apple can't do that any more. (No judgement of either company.)
That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time. E.g. autofocus in cameras began life on the giant cameras which sports photographers used to use, but over time it became cheap enough to manufacture that all cameras shipped with it.
Do you think Meta genuinely thought they were just a few years away from delivering a mass market-ready device (for playing BeatSabre and talking to cartoon versions of your friends)?
My guess is that Meta saw themselves as being curators of the best bits of the existing AR/VR proposition: tie all the best bits of the existing field of hardware and software companies and put them into a package at a $400 price point. Just iterate on the existing ideas a bit and focus on getting the price down.
Apple seems to have looked at the existing ideas around UX (input and screen quality especially) and scope (what do I use this for?) and decided that there needed to be dramatically different (better, in Apple's view) solutions.
Given Meta's internal rhetoric about Quest not retaining users, I'd say Apple was wise to approach this from first principles. But I really don't know what Meta has been working on for so long?
If I think back to the original iPhone launch, it made literally every other phone on the market look preposterously antiquated (to the point that RIM execs famously believed it was "impossible" for Apple to actually be delivering the phone they demoed). Vision Pro does that to the Vive Pro gathering dust in my cupboard, but I'll need to use one to say for sure whether it does the same to the Quest 3. My hunch is that the disparity isn't as huge as it was with cell phones, but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.
Wdyt?
[^1]: Inside Apple around the time iTV / Apple TV was introduced, it was characterised as a "foot in the door": Steve Jobs kept calling it a "hobby" in public, and the strategy changed around a lot. Since then they've introduced several products which have either seen strategy shift over time (iPadOS multi tasking…) or which were known to be a "foot in the door" (Apple Watch), but they don't acknowledge them as such, they just pretend that the plan all along was for Apple Watch to be a fitness tracker, and that they did not in fact spend 30 minutes of the keynote talking about sending digital heartbeats to each other as if it was the most meaningful thing ever.
yyyk
>That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down? I don't know of any complex consumer electronics or hardware companies which don't take the approach of launching massively expensive "pro" hardware which is the beachhead for driving down price over time.
The entire PC 'revolution' and Intel/x86 dominance was based on going from the lower end up. ARM later entered the picture again going from the low end up. Both strategies are viable depending on the business in question.
smoldesu
> That all makes sense… but the bit I can't fathom is why Facebook didn't take the approach of building from the high end down?
High end VR already existed. There were dozens of Windows headsets that lifted the performance ceiling far beyond what the Quest or even the Reality Pro will ever be capable of. The harder challenge is pushing in the other direction - building a minimum viable product that doesn't suck and can make it to mass market. Meta has proven they can do that, Apple cannot. You're right to highlight that the pressure is on them to do better, but maybe they should have considered that before announcing a headset this early. Apple's history is rife with visionary products that were too early and too expensive: the Lisa, the Newton, the 12" Macbook, the list goes on. I won't chide them for their ambition, but that won't save them from their fated failure.
Imagine if Steve Jobs' "phone, iPod, and internet communicator" moment culminated in a product that cost more than all 3 of those things combined. That's what the Vision Pro's announcement felt like.
> but it doesn't seem like Facebook can simply ignore Vision Pro and continue with their current product roadmap: I would bet on Apple (a hardware company with a lot of scale advantages) figuring out how to make the baseline experience achieved with Vision Pro cheaper for a consumer device much faster and more easily than Facebook will figure out how to achieve that same baseline experience starting from their $400 price point.
I guess I just fundamentally disagree. The high-end market for VR is not desirable yet, and there's no indication it ever will be. Low-end VR sells like hotcakes though, and Apple will struggle with that more than Meta will with retina graphics or eye tracking. If the leaked BOM for Reality Pro is real, Apple would need to cut costs by 8x to maintain their current margins and beat Meta in pricing. That's ludicrous; meeting Apple at their price point is comparatively trivial.
It will ultimately depend on where market forces lie. I think most people will see the Vision Pro as redundant if they already own an iPhone though.
makomk
That'd be a little tricky and probably have undesirable collateral damage. The Oculus side of this is a general-purpose streaming VR app called ALVR that's mainly designed to stream desktop VR apps running under SteamVR (which Oculus do dislike enought that it has to be sideloaded, but there's not really a clean way to do the same with the desktop Oculus runtime). This also means that in theory you should be able to stream to other headsets like the Pico or even an Android phone used Cardboard-style, though the set up and compatibility on that last option is a bit of a pain.
mensetmanusman
Something 10x cheaper better be lower quality.
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zmmmmm
Amazing work!
Very curious what the limits on performance would be for it. Could it ultimately offer a way to run Vision OS apps in a realistic way without having the hardware? Quest 3 could make a super compelling package for it (admittedly, not having the eye tracking is a big problem).
I guess we can't really know yet how Apple will handle it, but does seem unlikely that Apple will allow the simulator to install arbitrary apps from the app store.
naillo
I wonder what the latency is
nomel
For wireless VR stuff, it's usually 25-40ms range. I believe the encoder hardware is the bottleneck at this point. New Quest 3 is supposed to have better hardware accelerators.
I don't notice, with a couple virtual screens.
jayd16
There's also the specifics of how this is grabbing the simulator output and copies it out to the ALVR server. So possibly another frame or two of lag is introduced.
nomel
I'm talking desktop screen to VR eye, with desktop streaming. So yes, that, plus simulator latency. I would think input latency should be pretty small.
trafficante
Quest 3 will (hopefully) allow for higher bitrates and maybe AV1 support but I don’t see it having a huge impact on overall wireless latency. Decode time on the old SoC is only a few ms with h264 and really the only thing h265 brings to the table on a bandwidth unconstrained local network is 10bit color.
nomel
Here are some latency measurements, showing you are correct: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jgfoco/oculus_link_...
I guess my notebook is the bottleneck, at higher bitrates, not the Quest!
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throwawaymobule
The headset itself does the reprojection, IIRC. Which is way more noticable than most measures of latency.
Never got alvr working, myself.
langsoul-com
Now all I want is quest with better resolution and eye tracking. Ie fusion of quest pro and Apple vision
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224 points and not single positive comment in the comments, sigh.
I think this is awesome, as the Quest Pro is almost on par with the features of the Vision Pro (except Lidar), e.g. hand & eye tracking + color passthrough. Sure, these might be not of the same quality (especially when it comes to passthrough), but this allows people to verify their experiences/concepts for the Vision Pro before they actually get their hands on one.
I don't think that Meta, nor Apple will have a problem with this tbh. Maybe because of the assets/icons used in the HUD, but those can easily be replaced if needed.