Widths on the Apple TV: Live Video Chat on Apple TV and iPadOS 17, Along With An Updated Photostream of Apple Videos, Games, and Notes

Apple will allow you to use video chat on Apple TV. You can now use your phone as a substitute for aWebcam as you see and chat with people from your TV, thanks to the new capability on the Continuity Camera. It will make sure you are in the frame using Center Stage.

As you can see from the above announcements, widgets were pretty big 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.

Apple is also introducing a new “game mode” for macOS that will prioritize the GPU and CPU while gaming on a Mac and offers lowered audio latency on AirPods. 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 announced some visual upgrades to macOS Sonoma, which will now support widgets that you can add to your desktop, along with new moving screensavers that you can also use as your 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.

There are more updates coming with iPadOS 17. It’s going to have a personalized lock screen, similar to that found on the iPhone, and will come with the Health app.

With iPadOS 17 Apple is adding new interactive tools that will allow you to quickly access 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 also let you work with others in real time to organize and annotate PDFs.

A new safety focused Check In feature is one of the new features iniOS 17 that will allow you to share your email address or phone number with another user. Oh, and Apple’s dropping the “Hey” portion of its “Hey, Siri” trigger phrase.

Along with a new journaling app, Apple revealed a number of new features for iOS 17. 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.

Apple has a new app for iOS, and it’s called Journal. As its name implies, Journal will encourage you to log your thoughts about recent activities or trips. Apple says that the app is secured with end-to-end security and you can keep your logs on your device. The app will be available 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

Apple’s New $3,499 Vision Pro headset: Why it feels good to be compared to Disney’s Demo of the Virtual Reality Experiences

The M2 Max or M2 Ultra chips can be found in the Mac Studio which will come with them. There’s only one chip available in the Mac Pro and that is the M2 Ultra chip. The Mac Pro starts at $9,999 and the Mac Studio is $1,999.

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. You can place an order for it today at $1,299, and it will be available next week.

Apple showed a new MacBook Air that has a 15.3-inch display as well as the Vision Pro headset. That’s a pretty big upgrade to its MacBook Air lineup, which has only featured 13-inch displays up until now.

I just walked out of a long demo session with Apple’s new $3,499 Vision Pro headset, which the company announced at WWDC 2023 as “the world’s most advanced consumer electronics device.” It’s… a really really nice VR headset with impressive displays and video passthrough. And I mean incredibly impressive displays and video passthrough: I was happily using my phone to take notes while wearing the Vision Pro, something no other headset can realistically allow.

The device is powered by two chips: the M2 and a new R1 chip for real-time sensor processing. The Vision Pro has a strip of glass on the front, along with a digital crown that lets you switch in and out of augmented and virtual reality. It comes with built-in speakers and an external battery pack that is capable of lasting two hours with a single charge.

A partnership with Disney is huge for a new 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. That said, take Disney’s “demonstration” with a pinch of salt — we have no way of knowing how accurately it will actually reflect on the Vision Pro’s capabilities when it arrives sometime next year.

The Vision Pro headset was mentioned in Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter as a feature that could be used to watch sports games in virtual reality. The first example is a regular 2D football game surrounded by useful information in boxes, like the score, win probability, and player statistics. Another example involves a 3D top-down view of a basketball game projected onto a coffee table in the user’s lounge, allowing them to see a courtview replay of the match from every angle.

Was Vision Pro’s superior hardware the reason for all this? Without question. But was it made more compelling? I don’t know and I’m not sure if I can tell when I’m wearing it. I do know that wearing this thing felt oddly lonely. How do you watch a movie with other people in a Vision Pro? What if you want to collaborate with people in the room with you and people on FaceTime? What does it mean that Apple wants you to wear a headset at a 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.

All of this was basically a greatest hits reel of VR demos, including some old standbys: Apple showed off 180-degree 3D videos with spatial audio in something called the Apple Immersive Video Format, which the company apparently shot with proprietary cameras it may or may not release. We have been seeing VR demos that looked like 3D videos. I looked at a 3D photo of some cute kids shot by the headset’s cameras and watched a 3D video of those kids blowing out a birthday candle. Same. I did a one minute meditation in the dark where a voice told me to be thankful as a sphere of colorful triangles expanded around me. Supernatural exists with millions of users on the Quest and has offered guided meditation since 2020. One of the oldest virtual reality demos ever was shown in what appeared to be a movie theater.

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 appear onscreen as something that kind of looks like a Memoji, but photorealistic and even more horrifying.

The passthrough was also very impressive. It was clear and sharp, and appeared with zero latency. I happily talked to others, walked around the room, and even took notes on my phone while wearing the headset — something I would never be able to do with something like the Meta Quest Pro. That said, it’s still video passthrough. I could observe intense compression and loss of detail as peoples’ faces were moved into shadows. I could see the IR light on the front of my iPhone futilely blink as it attempted to unlock with FaceID to no avail. The room’s dimmer display made it hard for me to adjust to how bright it was when I removed the headset.

The display is crazy: a 4K display for each eye that has a small number of particles in size. I tried it for a short time and it was convenient for reading text in Safari, staring at photos, and watching movies. I have never seen a display like that before. 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. It will be interesting to see when it actually ships.

The Vision Pro’s front-facing display was gently pulsing with light, which will be the indication that someone is in the headset but can’t see out; we weren’t able to see the other view, in which the wearer’s eyes are projected through that front screen. That view will either be innovative or horrifying. We’ll see.

The top of the Vision Pro has a button on the left that serves as a shutter button to take 3D videos and photos, which I didn’t get to try. 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 inquired why anyone would want a different set of levels, and it seems that Apple is thinking of the middle set as a sort of workspace for your apps while you’ll be able to chat with your coworkers.

The small bumps you see on the sides of the Vision Pro’s band are where the built-in audio lives. Thetial audio is one of the selling points of the device. Most of the other sensors and cameras are housed under the front-facing glass, and you can see some of the cameras from the headset. The cheese grater-style vent runs underneath both eyes, presumably to push all the processor’s hot air down onto your cheeks.

The design language is brushed aluminum, shiny glass and soft fabrics and the vibe is very similar to the one of the 6th century. A curved glass front makes for an impressive display, but it also serves an appropriate lens for the camera and the screen that shows your eyes when you are looking at people. I didn’t get to try EyeSight, the feature it’s called.

The Fieldhouse: An AR/VR VR Headset that isn’t just a Bluetooth Headset, but a Battery Pack that’s Integrated into the Real World

The headset is little more than a pound, with a braided white power cable and a silver battery pack you can use for about two hours. The headset cable is permanently connected to the battery pack after it detaches from the headset. If you want to plug into the wall you plug a USB-C adapter into the battery pack.

Apple built a white cube-shaped building called the Fieldhouse to hold Vision Pro demos. I got an Apple phone for a quick setup process that included a face scanning that looked at my ears and a turn-your- face-in-a-circle Scan, similar to Face ID, which determined what size mask to use. 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 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 headset itself is quite thin and the shield around it and the band around the back weigh more than the device as a whole. The goggles are fairly thin and should cover most faces fairly well. The whole thing is a nice silvery color, down to the cable coming out the left side and the iPhone-sized battery pack at the bottom that provides its two hours of battery life.

“They worked hard to make this headset as integrated into the real world as current technology allows, but it’s still a headset,” said the analyst, who nonetheless called it a “fairly mind-blowing presentation.”

Is the Metaverse a Ghost Town? The Story of Apple’s First Year on the iOS App Store: Revisiting Mobile Virtual Reality with Contact Posters and Name Drop

A lot of updates foriOS 17 are coming later this year. New Contact Posters can be found on the front and center of the phone. This is a customizable design you can create for yourself, and it’ll show up on the caller’s screen when you call them. The Contact Posters of your friends live in the Contacts app, so when you pull a person’s information up or communicate with them anywhere in iOS, you see the images they’ve chosen to represent themselves. Contact Posters also come into play when you trigger another new feature: NameDrop.

The report seems to be Minority Report using the headset. It does not use hand controllers, instead registering 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.

By comparison, Apple sells more than 200 million of its marquee iPhones 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.

Magic Leap, a startup that stirred excitement with previews of a mixed-reality technology that could conjure the spectacle of a whale breaching through a gymnasium floor, had so much trouble marketing its first headset to consumers in 2018 that it has since shifted its focus to industrial, health care and emergency uses.

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 avoided referring to the metaverse in their presentations, describing the Vision Pro as the company’s first leap into “spatial computing” instead.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been describing these alternate three-dimensional realities as the “metaverse.” He tried to push the idea into the mainstream by changing his company’s name to Meta Platforms in 2021 and spending billions of dollars on improving the virtual technology.

Apple Moves into Virtual Reality With a Headset That Will Cost You More Than 3-0: Tom Forte’s Comment on “Apple’s Vision Pro is Coming Soon”

The Vision Pro will not be a big hit right away according to analysts. It’s mostly due to the hefty price, but also because a lot of people don’t see a reason to wear something for a long period of time.

Although Vision Pro won’t require physical controllers that can be clunky to use, the goggles will have to either be plugged into a power outlet or a portable battery tethered to the headset — a factor that 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 that the experience will not cause nausea and headaches like previous devices have. The company created a technology to make a three-dimensional rendering of each user in a video conference.

The company pointed out that it draws on its past decades of product design during the years that it spent working on the Vision Pro.

In 1984 Jobs put out the first Macintosh computer, followed by the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the Apple Watch in 2014).

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.

Tom Forte wrote in a Monday research note that they do not think consumers would pay a similar amount for an augmented or virtual reality headset as they would for a combination of those products.

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

What I Saw in the Homescreen of the Apple App in AR at the Apple Reactor Display During June 11 Meets Technicolor

“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 more interesting part was how 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 a couple fingers to scroll the web pages. I opened Messages, too, though audio interactions aren’t ready yet apparently, and I wasn’t able to record or send a Message. Most of the content I saw wasn’t fully volumetric, nor could I pinch the apps to scale up, or bring myself into them. An Apple representative said that app makers are able to build things in the future.

In home mode a dock of Apple applications was in front of me. I could still see the living room. The homescreen of Apple’s app in AR is just as bland 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 where they were.

A case study of the sound quality of an external battery for polarized acoustic headsets with a hefty orb

I assumed this external battery pack meant the headset itself would feel as light as a feather, but it still felt hefty. I went through another process of calibrating after I adjusted the larger back and top soft strap. The orb was in the middle distance, but it was not visible during my demo.