Vomit Inducing VR

Apple released its new headset "Vision Pro" which they presented as being a regular household and work device. However, VR (virtual reality) has been making people want to vomit, including Jack. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So Apple officially announcing I guess their new Vision Pro
VR headset thinging. Actually it's part of a giant announcement yesterday.
You know, Apple does at least once every year. They're
a whole new operating system thing that runs your your iPad,
your phone, your watch, your you know, air thingy whatever,

(00:25):
whatever you do, whatever Apple product. You've got biggest update
to the operating system for the watch since it came out,
and supposed to be a big deal whatever. But the
thing that's getting the most attention is this new headset
thing VR. And is this the point at which VR
is actually going to take off and become something?

Speaker 2 (00:44):
It's it's been a rocky road for VR.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
I mean like I got my kids the Oculus thing
and they loved it for a couple of days and
then they use it a little lesson. I don't remember
the last time it's been touched. And that seems to
be the way a lot of VR stuff go. Oh,
it's like really cool. And while this is novel, but
it doesn't hook people for whatever reason, the way these

(01:08):
companies were hoping. For instance, it says in this Wall
Street Journal article about the new Apple headset, none of
the players in the VR space. That would be Meta Facebook,
you know, at the Oculus thing. In all these different
companies have been able to drive widespread adoption of the technology.
Headset shipments were down more than fifty percent in the

(01:29):
first quarter of twenty twenty three compared the same time
a year ago. So as the technology has gotten better
and a little bit cheaper in some cases, the demand
has gone way down with enough people I think probably
saying yeah, I got one and I don't really use it.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
So well, I am going to pat myself on the
back that when Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of Facebook
to Meta and said the future is instead of being
in a meeting with people, you'll put on the headset
and you'll all have cartoon avatars there in the meeting.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Like I said, that's stupid. Nobody wants that. You still
don't think that's a future, Huh. I think that. I
do think that is gonna happen.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
But anyway, so iPhone or I mean Apple's new version
is the Vision Pro headset, and it looks like you're
wearing giant thick ski goggles and then I don't know
what they feel like to have on your head, but
they're really big, and so that's kind of weird looking,
and it's got to be weird feeling. And then it
goes down to a battery pack with about a two

(02:34):
hour life, and it's expensive. It costs thirty five hundred dollars,
which is seven times as much as like the best
oculus that's out there, So it's a lot more expensive,
although it does a lot more things. And I watched
the Wall Street Journals video explaining the various things you
could do with it. The least convincing to me was

(02:55):
they had a dad on the floor in the living
room and they got the fireplace going, and his two
little kids are playing with blocks, and he's wearing his
headset and they do something cute and just with the
touch of a button on his headset, he's now taking
pictures or recording video or whatever. And I just the
idea of me wearing this big face covering headset as
I'm on the floor with my two year old is

(03:17):
disgusting to me.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
I mean, at last, that's incredibly off putting. I think
I reacted exactly the same way. I was, like, what
are you wearing your bug eyes for? You're gonna scare
your kids? If you want to pitch or pick up
your damn phone.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
The examples they use that seemed more appealing to me
were business setting stuff, which they think is where it
will take off first, in that you can be sitting
at your desk and you've got as many screens as
you want in super high resolution, as opposed to actually
having computer screens. You've got them raid however you want,
just keep adding screens that you can look at zoom in.

(03:53):
It also has the ability to like you're looking through
whatever you're seeing, so you can see the reworld and this,
and we talked about that a week or so ago,
just the idea of you can you can have you
can be talking to Jim and accounting and then have
the screen in front of you with all the information
on it. And I guess he's wearing the headset too, and.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
I don't know. I don't know how that's freaking gonna
work well.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
As we reported earlier, they've got quite the problem with
nausea people wearing these things that they're working on, But
the longer you wear it, the more you feel like
you get a puke.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
VR in general has that problem. Tim Cook with Apple
claims that they've fixed that with some sort of latency
issue with the new Apple headset. I don't know if
that's true or not, but that is here's a.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Question for you, because I'm thinking about it and getting queasy, which.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Is weird, but me too, that is weird.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
Aren't you focusing on something just a couple of inches
from your your retina, from your cornea, or an inch
or two in the glasses? I mean definition, I understand
how it appears that you're not, but you are. You know,
I might be missing something completely. And I don't know
very much about this at all, but it strikes me
that you're looking at a screen that's extremely close to you.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
I've gotten hell nauseous doing VR stuff. The Simpson's ride
at Universal Studios made me want to vomit within a
minute start in the dang thing. I had to close
my eyes and concentrate and convince. I'd like, keep telling myself,
you're actually not actually on a ride. You're not really
on a ride, You're just sitting here. It's not real.

(05:26):
After I close my eyes because I thought I was
gonna vomit everywhere, and it was really cool. But they
use an example here of a bunch of people in
a room and instead of putting the presentation up on
a screen the PowerPoint, everybody's got it in front of them,
but you got way more options with sound and video
and charts and flipping around from charts and everybody's looking
at the same thing.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
I could see how that could happen. Yeah, I was this.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
How about you just give me like an iPad and
I don't vomit.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Well, you're kind of hung up on the vomiting thing.
I'm assuming.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Well, if people start vomiting, you'll be hung up on
it too. It's hard to hold a meeting when the
floor is slick with vomit. Jim, I noticed this first quarter. Yeah,
but the third corner. I'm sorry, could you repeat that.
I couldn't hear you overheads vomiting.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
I'm assuming for this discussion that they're gonna get past
the vomit issues somehow.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
They're gonna figure out sooner or later.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Your stomach's empty for one thing, so then you can
really start the meeting.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Yes, every meeting ends up being like the Family Guy
scene where they yes, Michael, remember three dtvs and they
wanted people to wear three D glasses and that never
caught on.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
I don't think people want to put stuff on their head.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
It's that simple. No matter how good the technology is,
people don't want to wear things.

Speaker 1 (06:47):
You could be right, it could be that simple that
the idea of wearing something in your head is just
never gonna catch on. Like one example they used was
watching movies, so you know the popularity of getting bigger
and bigger screens, or people that have gone to projectors
so that you can having him a bigger screen, Well
you can have eight K resolution their full field of

(07:10):
vision if you're wearing this headset, you know, and you
and your wife and kids are all wearing headsets sitting
on the couch, or you wouldn't have to be in the
same room watching the movie together, and it's as perfect
as perfect can be. But yeah, you do have to
get over the hump of do people want to wear
something on their head?

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Can I just get this out, Peter, hold my ears
right right? Sorry, family guy reference