Apple’s New MacOS: Including FaceTime, Continuity Camera, and Personalized Lock Screens for a Smarter, More Engaging World
Apple will soon let you use FaceTime on Apple TV. The new capability allows you to use your iPhone as a substitute for a webcam while you chat from your TV, and it comes with the Continuity Camera. It will make you be in the frame using Center Stage.
You can see from those announcements that the amount ofWidgets was large at this year’s WWDC. They’re even coming to watchOS 10, which you can browse through for an at-a-glance look at various information by turning your watch’s digital crown. Apple is also adding several new watch faces, a way to measure how much time you spend in the daylight, cycling features, and trailhead information for hikers.
A new game mode for macOS will help you maximize the performance of the processor while also offering lowered audio latency on headphones. As part of Apple’s push into gaming, developer Hideo Kojima also announced that Death Stranding (and some of his other games) will arrive on macOS.
Apple has made some changes to the macOS Sonoma, which will allow you to add extra features to your desktop, as well as new moving screensavers that can be used as their wallpaper. There are some new features for Safari as well, which let you create and pin web apps to your Dock, as well as make profiles for different browsing sessions.
Those aren’t the only updates coming with iPadOS 17. It will also come with a Health app and have a personalized lock screen, the same one that has been found on the iPhone.
With iPadOS 17, Apple is adding new interactive widgets that let you quickly access apps and features from the homescreen. There are also updates for the device’s Notes app, which will now be capable of detecting the fields in a PDF. It will allow you to work with others in real time.
Additionally, iOS 17 will support transcription for voice messages, have a new safety-focused Check In feature that lets you share your location with someone you’re meeting, and come with a NameDrop feature that allows you to easily share your email address or phone number with another iPhone user. The part of the phrase that says “Hey” is no longer being used by Apple.
There are a number of new features in the next version of the operating system. Most notably, that includes a new StandBy feature that turns your iPhone’s screen into a smart home-like display when it’s tilted horizontally while charging, allowing it to display essential information, like the time and date.
Journal is a new app that Apple has for mobile devices. Journal encourages you to diary your thoughts about recent activities. The Apple app is secured with end-to-end encryption and you have the ability to store logs on your device. The app will arrive later this year.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23749243/apple-wwdc-2023-biggest-announcements-vision-pro-macbook-air-15-inch-ios-17
A Story about Disney’s new Virtual Reality Headset and How it Can Be Used To View Sports on a Football and Basketball Courtside (Extended Abstract)
Both the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio are getting new software. During WWDC, Apple announced that its latest versions of the two desktop devices will have the new M2 Ultra chip, a component that has an up to 24-core CPU and up to 76-core GPU.
Apple is marketing the device as the “world’s thinnest” 15-inch laptop and says it weighs just a little over three pounds. The device comes with up to 18 hours of battery life, 500 nits of brightness, and a 1080p webcam. It is available tomorrow for $1,299, and will be available next week.
Apple also released a new MacBook Air that has a 15.3-inch display. It’s a huge upgrade to its MacBook Air lineup, which only has 13-inch displays.
We have a story about Apple’s new headset called Vision Pro. In short, it costs $3,499 (to start!) It looks like a pair of ski goggles. It’s an augmented reality experience in a VR head-box form factor. The cable that Apple describes as “supple” was used to attach the headset to the battery pack. Apple doesn’t say how much battery life the headset will have.
The device has 12 cameras, five sensors, six microphones and a new R1 chip from Apple that the company says keeps track of all of them. Vision Pro will be available next year.
A partnership with Disney is very important for a device like this. The virtual reality experiences teased in Iger’s Disney Plus showcase are exactly the kind of premium content Meta hasn’t been able to get for its own Quest VR headsets, and its Metaverse project isn’t exactly looking very hot these days. We don’t know how accurately Disney’s demonstration of the Vision Pro will reflect on the abilities when it arrives sometime next year.
Disney Plus users will be able to use the Vision Pro headset to watch sports in virtual reality, a feature that Mark Gurman mentioned in his Power On newsletter in April. It’s demonstrated in several ways, the first being a football game that is surrounded by useful information in boxes, such as score, win probability and player statistics. Another example is that of a basketball game in which a 3D top-down view can be seen on a coffee table, allowing them to see the entire match from every angle.
Was all this made better by the wildly superior Vision Pro hardware? Without question. But was it made more compelling? I don’t know, but I’m not sure if I can say with a short time wearing the headset. I do know that wearing this thing felt oddly lonely. How do you see a movie with other people? What if you want to collaborate with people in the room with you and people on FaceTime? How is it that Apple wants you to wear a headset at your child’s birthday party? There are just more questions than answers here, and some of those questions get at the very nature of what it means for our lives to be literally mediated by screens.
Yet what Apple demonstrated on Monday were mostly immersive versions of apps like FaceTime and Safari, as well as 3-D photos and video, rather than a wholly VR experience. Here’s what early testers had to say:
Apple is pitching the device as a tool for both work and play, with features meant for streaming video, playing games, and taking business meetings all in one device. Its take on 3D avatars for virtual presence is unique: a setting called VisionOS scans your face to make a deepfake of you that it then projects to other people on the call. You look like something from a film like Memoji, but it’s more horrifying.
The video passthrough was very good. It appeared with zero latency and was sharp, crisp and clear. I was able to take notes on my phone while I was wearing the headset, but I wouldn’t be able to do it with the Meta Quest Pro. That is, it is still video passthrough. When people moved their faces into shadows I was able to see intense compression and loss of detail. I could see the IR light on the front of my iPhone futilely blink as it attempted to unlock with FaceID to no avail. And the display was dimmer than the room itself, so when I took the headset off my eyes had to adjust to how much brighter the room was in reality.
The display is crazy: a 4K display with just 23 microns in size for each eye. In the short time I tried it, it was totally workable for reading text in Safari (I loaded The Verge, of course), looking at photos, and watching movies. It is easily the highest-resolution display that I have ever seen. There was some green and purple fringing around the edges of the lenses, but I can’t say for certain if that was down to the quick fitment or early demo nature of the device or something else entirely. We’ll have to see when it actually ships.
The light that was emitted from the front screen of the Vision Pro indicated that someone is wearing a headset, but can’t see out, while the other view was projected through the wearer’s eyes. That view will either be exciting or frightening. We will see.
I didn’t get to try the shutter button that is on the left of the Vision Pro, but it does allow for taking 3D videos and photos. The Digital Crown is on the right; clicking it brings up the home screen of app icons, while turning it changes the level of VR immersion in certain modes. I asked why anyone would want to set the immersion level anywhere other than all-on or all-off, and it appears Apple is thinking of the middle immersion setting as a sort of adjustable desktop workspace for apps while leaving the sides open for you to talk to your colleagues.
A TrueDepth camera, IR flood illuminators and 12 cameras surround the headset to make sure the cameras can see your hands in dark environments. The Apple M2 and the new R1 have generated a fair amount of heat. The Vision Pro vent heat by pulling air through the bottom of the device, and then putting it out the top.
EyeSight: A Small, Light-Thin AR/VR Headset for a Small, Easy, and Light-Efficient Device
The design language is all brushed aluminum, shiny glass, and soft fabrics, with a vibe that is similar to the one enjoyed by the iPhone 6. The front glass is a complex piece of optical engineering, it is curved but still used as an appropriate lens for the cameras and the display that shows your eyes. I didn’t get a chance to try the feature, called EyeSight.
The headset itself weighs a little less than a pound — it’s connected by a braided white power cable to a silver battery pack that offers about two hours of use. The headset cable is connected to the battery pack after detaching from it. If you want to plug into the wall you plug a USB-C adapter into the battery pack.
Apple held Vision Pro demos in a large white cube-shaped building it built for WWDC called the Fieldhouse. Upon entry, I was handed an iPhone for a quick setup process: a turn-your-face-in-a-circle scan (very much like the Face ID setup that determined what size face mask to use), and then another side-to-side face scan that looked at my ears to calibrate spatial audio. After that, Apple had me visit an “vision specialist” who asked if I wore glasses — I was wearing my contacts, but glasses-wearers had a quick prescription check so Apple could fit the Vision Pros with the appropriate lenses. (The lenses are made by Zeiss; Apple needed a partner that can legally sell prescription lenses. They snap in magnetically and will be sold separately at launch.)
Based on the little bit we’ve seen, it’s a dramatically better-looking device than any other AR or VR headset we’ve seen. The actual headset itself is quite thin, and most of the device’s heft and size is from the fabricky shield around it and the big, plushy band around the back. The goggles are slightly curved and should wrap around most faces fairly nicely. The silvery color of the device is a nice contrast to the Apple-sized battery pack that provides two hours of battery life.
Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference today. The big news is that Apple finally launched its mixed reality headset. The very expensive device may have overshadowed the other news from the event, but the company announced a whole host of other stuff, including new Mac computers and updates to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
Apple’s big leap into mixed reality: The case for a virtual reality headset, not the “metaverse” Zuckerberg’s Facebook
Apple plans to update its operating system in later this year. New Contact Posters can be seen front and center during phone calls. You can make your own designs, and they will show up on the caller’s screen when you call them. When you pull a person’s information up or communicate with them in the Contacts app, you see the images they have chosen to represent themselves. Contact Posters come into play when you create a new feature: NameDrop.
Using the headset seems very Minority Report. It uses gesture controls from your fingers and eye movements to control the virtual interface. A physical dial on the headset lets you adjust how much of the digital screen occupies your vision, and visual pass through lets you see the room around you in real time as well.
200 million is the number of phones Apple sells a year. But the iPhone wasn’t an immediate sensation, with sales of fewer than 12 million units in its first full year on the market.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives estimated Apple will sell just 150,000 of the headsets during its first year on the market before escalating to 1 million headsets sold during the second year — a volume that would make the goggles a mere speck in the company’s portfolio.
With a focus on health care and emergency use, Magic Leap shifted its focus from mixed-reality technology to something else after it had trouble getting consumers to buy its first headset.
But the metaverse largely remains a digital ghost town, although Meta’s virtual reality headset, the Quest, remains the top-selling device in a category that so far has mostly appealed to video game players looking for even more immersive experiences. Cook and other Apple executives didn’t refer to the metaverse in their presentations, instead describing the Vision Pro as the company’s first leap into spatial computing.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been describing these alternate three-dimensional realities as the “metaverse.” He changed the name of his socialnetworking company to Meta Platforms and then poured billions of dollars into improving virtual technology to push the concept into the mainstream.
Apple Moves Into Virtual Reality With a Headset That Will Cost You More Than 3-0: A Preliminary Apple Research Note
Even so, analysts are not expecting the Vision Pro to be a big hit right away. It’s largely because of the high price, but also because most people don’t think wearing something wrapped around their face for a long time is worth it.
Vision Pro won’t require controllers that can be difficult to use, but it will require plugged in goggles or a portable battery to work, which could make it less attractive for some users.
The headset will be equipped with 12 cameras, six microphones and variety of sensors that will allow users to control it and various apps with just their eyes and hand gestures. Apple said the experience will not cause recurring nausea and headaches similar to what happened in the past. The technology was used to create a three-dimensional picture of the user for video conferencing.
The company emphasized that it drew upon its past decades of product design during the years it spent working on the Vision Pro, which Apple said involved more than 5,000 different patents.
The Apple Watch was the most recent in a line of breakthrough products that started with a bow-tied Jobs peddling the first Macintosh in 1984.
Despite such skepticism, the headset could become another milestone in Apple’s lore of releasing game-changing technology, even though the company hasn’t always been the first to try its hand at making a particular device.
It is a stretch, even for Apple, to think consumers would pay the same amount for an augmented and virtual reality headset as they would for a combination of those products, according to a Monday research note.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/06/1180362331/apple-moves-into-virtual-reality-with-a-headset-that-will-cost-you-more-than-3-0
Vision Pro: The Beginning of the Virtual Reality Journey? Speculations and Implications for Metaverse-related Startups and Machine Learning
“It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it was almost like a tease,” said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. “It looked like the beginning of a very long journey.”
Although Apple executives provided an extensive preview of the headset’s capabilities during the final half hour of Monday’s event, consumers will have to wait before they can get their hands on the device and prepare to pay a hefty price to boot. Vision Pro will sell for $3,500 once it’s released in stores early next year.
The initial reviews were mixed and skeptics questioned whether even Apple could make virtual reality anything more than a niche technology. If a company can make it mainstream, it’s Apple, because it has two billion users of its products.
I took off the headset at the end of the demo and thought it was very cool. 2) Did I just do drugs?” wrote Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal.
These are tough times for virtual reality. Enthusiasm for virtual worlds, often called the metaverse, rose during the pandemic, but waned as lockdowns eased. Investors also appear to have moved onto shinier new technologies like artificial intelligence: Metaverse-related start-ups raised about $664 million in the first five months of 2023, down 77 percent year on year, according to PitchBook.
How I Expanded, Touched and Captured Apps in the Virtual Dock of Apple, and What I Missed
The more interesting portion was the way I interacted with them. I opened Photos by pinching my forefinger and thumb together, scrolled through photos by “grabbing” each image and swiping to the left, expanded panoramic photos by staring and tapping at the “Expand” option. I used my eyes and fingers to scroll the web pages. The audio chats are not ready yet and I am not able to record or send a message. I could not pinch the apps to scale up, or bring myself into them, as most content I saw was not fully volumetric. An Apple representative said that the app makers can build these experiences in the future.
There was a virtual dock of Apple apps in front of me. I could still see the real-life living room surroundings. An AR home screen of Apple apps in AR is as vanilla as it sounds. The app containers themselves were certainly not reinvented, and their icons were not little grabble globules or anything else that conferred volume. They were just … there.
The headset felt heavy but I assumed it was light because of the external battery pack. I went through another calibration process after adjusting the back straps, which ended with an audible chime of approval. (Still, a light orb appeared in the middle distance throughout my demo.)
“People’s tolerance for wearing something on their head for an extended period of time is limited,” says Leo Gebbie, a VR analyst at CCS Insights. “If it’s something that people are going to wear all day, it needs to be slim and light and comfortable. No one has achieved that yet in the virtual reality world.
Also, the screens we already use every day aren’t totally reliable. When you first try to take a photo or video of something, the image won’t look right, or the app won’t work. Now imagine that happening with your entire field of vision.