Notes on Vision Pro
Metadata
- Author: firloop
- Full Title: Notes on Vision Pro
- URL: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Vision%20Pro
Highlights
I was surprised to see that the interface paradigm is classic WIMP. At a high level, the pitch is not that this is a new kind of dynamic medium, but rather that Vision Pro gives you a way to use (roughly) 2D iPad app UIs on a very large, spatial display (View Highlight)
Based on my experiences with hand-tracking systems, this is a much more plausible vision for the use of hands, at least until we get great haptic gloves or similar (View Highlight)
This is not a someday-maybe tech demo of a future paradigm; it’s (mostly) today’s paradigm, transliterated to new display and input technology. Apple is not (yet) trying to lead the way by demonstrating visionary “killer apps” native to the spatial interface paradigm. But, unlike Meta, they’ll build their device with ultra high-resolution displays and suffer the premium costs, so that you can do mundane-but-central tasks like reading your email and browsing the web comfortably. (View Highlight)
Huge, persistent infospaces: I love this photo of Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn. He’s in a focused workspace, surrounded by hundreds of photos and 3”x5” cards on both horizontal and vertical surfaces. It’s a common trope among writers: both to “pickle” yourself in the base material and to spread printed manuscript drafts across every available surface (View Highlight)review
And you could swap between persistent room-scale infospaces for different projects. (View Highlight)
Another form of Digital Workspace
Particularly exciting will be to create this kind of “togetherness” over distance. I think a “minimum viable killer app” for this platform will be: I can stand at my whiteboard, and draw (with a physical marker!), and I see you next to me, writing on the “same surface”—even though you’re a thousand miles away, drawing on your own whiteboard. FaceTime and Freeform windows floating in my field of view don’t excite me very much as an approximation, particularly since the latter requires “drawing in the air.” (View Highlight)
So, what if interactive elements were not white but “digital white”—i.e. the material would be somehow dynamic, perhaps interacting visually with their surroundings (View Highlight)