Spacial Computing

This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.

We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.

Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

Transcript

The term spacial computing seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s within the field of geographic information systems, or GIS, which focuses on using digital technology to mess with geographic data in a variety of hopefully useful ways.

So if you were to import a bunch of maps and GPS coordinates and the locations of buildings and parks and such into a database, and then make that database searchable, plotting its points onto a digital map in an app, making something like Google Maps, that would be a practical utility of GIS research and development.

The term spacial computing refers to pulling computer-based engagement into physical spaces, allowing us to plot and use information in the real world, rather than relegating that information to flat screens like computers and smartphones.

This could be useful, it was posited, back in the early days of the term, as it would theoretically allow us to map out and see, with deep accuracy and specificity, how a proposed building would look on a particular street corner when finished, and how it would feel to walk through a house we're thinking of building, when all we have available is blueprints.

This seemed like it would be a killer application for all sorts of architectural, urban planning, and location intelligence purposes, and that meant it might someday be applicable to everyone from security services to construction workers to doctors and health researchers who are trying to figure out where a pandemic originated.

In the 1990s, though, the embryonic field of virtual reality started to become a thing, moving from research labs owned by schools and military contractors out into the real world, increasingly flogged as the next big consumer technology, useful for all sorts of practical, but also entertainment purposes, like watching movies and playing games.

During this period, VR began to serve as a stand-in for where technology was headed, and it was dropped into movies and other sorts of speculative fiction to illustrate the evolution of tech, and how the world might evolve as a consequence of that evolution, more of our lives lived within digital versions of the world, rather than in the world itself.

As a result of that popularity, especially throughout pop culture, VR overtook spacial computing as the term of art typically used to discuss this type of computational application, though the latter term also encompassed use-cases that weren't generally covered by VR, like the ability to engage with one's environment while using the requisite headsets, and the consequent capacity to use this technology out in the world, rather than exclusively at home or in the office, replicating the real world in that confined space.

The term augment reality, or AR, is generally used to refer to that other spacial computing use-case: projecting an overlay, basically, on the real world, generally using a VR-like headset or goggles or glasses to either display information onto lenses the user looks through, or serving the user video footage that is altered to include that data, rather than attempting to project the same over the real thing; the latter case more like virtual reality because users are viewing entirely digital feeds, but like AR in that those feeds include live video from the world around them.

A slew of productized spacial computing products have made it to the consumer market over the past few decades, including Microsoft's HoloLens, which is an augmented-reality headset, Google's Glass, which projects information onto a tiny screen in the corner of the the user's eyeline, and Magic Leap's self-named 1 and 2 devices, which are similar to the HoloLens.

All three of these products have had trouble making much of a dent in the market, though, and Magic Leap is in the process of retiring its first headset, though it's reportedly partnering with Meta on a new device sometime soon, Microsoft has mostly pivoted to working with companies and agencies rather than selling to consumers, though future versions of their headsets might revert back to their original intended customer base, and Google Glass was retired in 2015, replaced by enterprise editions (sold to businesses and agencies) from that point forward, though those enterprise editions were also halted in 2023.

What I'd like to talk about today is the current status of this space, which is being shaken up by two big, global players and their products: Meta with their Quest line of spacial computing devices, and Apple with it's new Apple Vision Pro.

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In 2014, the company that was at the time known as Facebook, but which is now called Meta bought a virtual reality company called Oculus for about $2 billion.

Oculus made a popular VR device, popular for VR devices in 2014, at least, that was only ever released as a development prototype, but which garnered a huge amount of attention nonetheless, blowing away its Kickstarter goal and attracting tens of millions of dollars in investment from well-known tech-world venture capitalists.

The purchase was criticized by many, as part of the appeal of Oculus was that it was independent from the big players in the space, but $2 billion is a significant amount of money, so the sale went through after regulators approved it, and Facebook, now Meta, started churning out its own headsets, initially continuing to use the Oculus branding, but it was more cohesively integrated with Meta's portfolio of offerings in 2021, redesignating this now sub-company Reality Labs, and entwining it with other Meta products like Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp—that effort culminating in 2022 with the complete retirement of the Oculus monicker, re-designating the company's products with the Quest brand, its social platforms renamed Horizon, as in Horizon Worlds.

So beginning in 2022, Meta had a fully integrated Meta Quest line of virtual reality products, including the hardware and a slew of online components, like social networks, and game, app, and other digital product stores.

The company has a long, for this space, anyway, history of now-discontinued products, including partnerships with the likes of Samsung and headsets that vary in price and power, some plugging into one's computer to provide processing heft, but most of the new ones serving as self-contained, all-in-one headset devices, which typically include little handheld controls, wired or wireless, as well.

They've also scooped up a variety of related companies, and in 2021, they attempted to buy a company called Within, which makes popular VR games like Beat Saber and Supernatural, but the FTC blocked the purchase on competition grounds; in 2023, though, the purchase was given the go-ahead, so those, and other popular VR-focused apps are now owned by Meta, as well.

Meta also partnered with glasses-maker Ray-Ban in 2021 to release a product called Ray-Ban Stories, which are glasses that have built-in cameras that can upload videos they record to social media.

So Meta has been investing heavily in this space for years, and their products are relatively well-developed, most of the teething issues faced by new products worked out, at this point, and their products are priced between a few hundred dollars on the low end, about $500 in the middle, and around $1000 at the top.

They also have a decent-sized catalog of in-VR offerings for users, and all of their products plug into all of their other products—for better and for worse, as many people who were irritated about the Oculus purchase were angered by the realization that they would need to have a Facebook account to keep using their hardware; so this is both pro and con, depending on who you are.

Despite Meta's relative success in the world of spacial computing, though, the big story in this space, as of 2024, is that Apple has released their own augmented-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, and it's similar but also distinct from Meta's spacial computing offerings.

It has bogglingly detailed screens, which are what project stuff to the user inside the headset, in terms of pixel density, it has a sophisticated hand-tracking interface that allows users to gesture in a fairly natural way to control things within their virtual environment, no separate controllers necessary, it has video pass-through, as do the Quest models, that show the real world within the user's view, but which then superimposes virtual stuff over it, and its tracking of things in the real world is quite detailed and accurate, to the point that some users have been—ill-advisedly, if not illegally—driving their cars while wearing their Vision Pros, and it even offers some possibly just experimental, somewhat creepy quality-of-life additions, like inward facing cameras that track a users face and then display that face while they're video chatting from within the headset, and which project a 3D-video feed of their eyes to the outside of the display, so folks in the world around them can see what their eyes are doing, despite their face being largely covered by this heavy, compared to Meta's headsets, anyway, VR helmet.

Apple's Vision Pro also costs $3,500, which is about 7-times the cost of Meta's entry-level, mid-tier, most popular Quest 3 headset.

So what we have here is two companies presenting different visions of what the spacial computing industry will look like.

Apple's pricing will likely come down, and some of the differences between these products, like Meta's lighter weight headsets and Apple's higher-quality screens, will almost certainly intersect at some point a few product iterations down the line, as they both figure out what's ideal in terms of the quality to price ratio.

Other attributes may disappear, like the outward-facing eye projections, which don't seem terribly effective or useful, though some, like those eye-projections, may also evolve into something that people can't live without, and which Meta and other future competitors will then go on to copy.

We're also seeing the emergence of different market positions within this space, which isn't something we've really had until this point.

Meta had been occupying the perceptual high price point, as their products were the most fleshed-out and for most consumer purposes, at least, useful, and a thousand bucks at the high end is a lot of money for what's mostly an entertaining lark, for most consumers, at this point.

Apple's entrance into this space, though, is a bit like when they stepped into the phone market in 2007 and announced a $500 iPhone: it changed the math, and recalibrated people's expectations of what they should expect to spend in the future.

$500 seems almost ridiculously cheap for a premium device that's become fundamental to so many people for so many purposes, today, and it's possible that Apple's entrance in this space will do the same, allowing Meta to position its products as the Android of the spacial computing world, cheaper, sure, but also more useful for many people, with more pricing tiers, and serving as a sort of practical, non-luxury, and non-overpriced version of what most people want to get from this type of hardware.

The reviews so far seem to support this positioning: Quest headsets are generally quite good, but that's it—they're not blowing any of the tech reviewers away, and most of what they do is passable, not magical.

Apple generally aims for magical, and a lot of its initial reviews have suggested that what the Vision Pro does well, it does VERY well; at that magical level, if not beyond it.

That said, a lot of the same reviews, and the reviews that have arrived since, after the device formally hit the market, have indicated that it has enough bugs and issues and missed opportunities to be incredible in some relatively few areas, but not worth $3,500 in most other regards; many of the stories on the device as of the week I'm recording this episode are about how many people, who enthusiastically forked over thousands of dollars for a first generation Vision Pro when it was released, are now returning their devices so as not to miss the 14-day return window.

The Vision Pro is possibly revolutionary, then, but perhaps not in the sense that it replaces everything that came before: it'll probably change the space in significant ways, but it'll take several iterations before it becomes a must-have product, and in the meantime it'll mostly be meaningful because of how it resets price-expectations, sets a new bar for quality in some regards, and stokes a new round of competition in a space that hasn't seen much in the way of competition for years.

Which is basically what happened with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other Apple-made devices, as well. They tend to be really impressive and magical-seeming right out of the gate, but not great, practically, until the third or fourth generation, at which point they're just astoundingly good by most metrics.

There's a chance that this product will find its feet eventually, too, then, though Meta seems keen to give them a run for their money on this, as their long-held desire to own a hardware product category now seems within reach, their past attempts at making their own watch and phone having been incredible failures.

Their pivot to the metaverse, which has been put on hold a little bit because of the advent of generative AI technologies and all the big tech companies trying to figure out what their next steps should be, considering how influential those technologies have turned out to be, those technologies now seem likely to make that metaverse aspiration more viable in the long-term, and these headsets, especially if they can keep making them smaller and lighter and more useable in more contexts, seem like they could be the best entry-point for a Meta-owned network of metaversal platforms, all sorts of content generated on the fly by AI, keeping folks engaged longer, but only if they can maintain their lead over competitors while they build-out those virtual worlds, and as they attempt to grab more relevant companies and refine the relevant hardware, in the meantime.

It's still an open question, though, despite this flurry of hype and investment, whether anyone will really want to use these sorts of devices on a regular basis, beyond those with more money than they can spend and people who are super-enthused about any new tech gizmo.

Some analysts contend that the best access-point for the metaverse, whatever it eventually evolves into, remains and will remain the screens we have on all of our gadgets, and that the idea of face-based computing is a little bit silly and too cumbersome to ever become mainstream.

Others have suggested, though, that we long assumed the same about pocketable computing, and wearing such devices on our wrists—which is something many of us now do, because smartwatches—a field that was for a long time super niche and weird and rare—became incredibly popular after Apple introduced its Apple Watch and then iterated the thing until it was useful, a slew of other companies, including those that were working in this space long-before Apple stepped in, all upgrading and refining their own products, in turn, making the smartwatch world a lot richer and more useful and popular, as a consequence.

If these headsets become lighter, cheaper, and possibly even evolve into goggles or glasses, rather than headsets, that could make them a lot more accessible and useable by many people who, today, struggle to understand why they should care, and what possible use they might have for this kind of device, when their smartphones and computer screens seem to work just fine, and with less neck-strain.

So we could be looking at a flash in the pan movement, or we could be living through the emergence of a new, mainstream, perhaps even universal computing-related product type; but there's a good chance we won't know which for several more years.

Show Notes

https://stratechery.com/2024/the-apple-vision-pro/

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/02/our-unbiased-take-on-mark-zuckerbergs-biased-apple-vision-pro-review/

https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-price

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24058318/apple-vision-pro-sharing-difficulties

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-instagram-facebook-meta-posting-era-vision-pro-quest-2024-2

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/13/24072413/mark-zuckerberg-apple-vision-pro-review-quest-3

https://www.theverge.com/24074795/vision-pro-returns-xbox-future-gemini-open-ai-vergecast

https://fortune.com/2023/02/06/meta-buying-vr-startup-within-unlimited-after-ftc-battle/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_computing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HoloLens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24010787/microsoft-windows-mixed-reality-deprecated

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