Monday, 15 July, 2024 UTC
Summary
Multitasking on Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro shows that we've moved on from "there's an app for that" and entered a new era:
"Where did I put my apps?"
The video embedded below shows roughly one minute of video captured directly on headsets from Apple and Meta. Each VR headset is shown running the same four pieces of software:
- Apple Music
- Steam Link
- A Web browser running YouTube.com
- An avatar mirror
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Vision Pro and Quest 3 are the first headsets truly capable of multitasking just like you do on your existing computers. Have you ever enjoyed music on your phone or laptop while reading something or working on a document? Before 2024, that wasn't really doable on a standalone headset – at least not as smoothly as you see depicted here. Now, you can do it with a headset priced between $500 and $3500.
Meta sold tens of millions of VR headsets, but some of them end up in disuse partially because users are thirsty for more impactful VR games while also starved of all their traditional content that's been locked up inside iOS and Android apps over the last 15 years. Now, Apple and Meta are openly inviting the rest of the world onto their new personal computing platforms, and that includes 2D app developers.
Steve Jobs heralded the "post-PC" world as iPhone paved the way for iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook are kicking off the era that comes after phones. This is the time of headsets and glasses. Meta's top researcher made clear to us in 2022 that, one day, headsets would replace desktops and laptops while glasses would replace phones.
Absorb this. It's happening.
What's Next?A band or watch (why not one of each?) worn on the wrist can sense the signals your brain sends your hand through your arm before a headset can see your hand move with its cameras. The idea could imply major revolutions incoming for input and haptics in the near-future. Mark Zuckerberg told me he sees such technology being faster than typing on a keyboard by the end of the decade. And taking control of a third arm, fully virtual, to manipulate a bunch of tools floating in front of you? That isn't out of the question either.
"When children grow up in a world in which they can literally draw in the air, and can show each other visual ideas with a wave of their hand, then those children will spontaneously evolve natural language itself to incorporate these new and greater powers of expression," researcher Ken Perlin wrote to me nearly a decade ago now. "After all, natural language is really the great superpower of our species. All of our other powers are outgrowths of that one. So evolving natural language to becoming even more powerful is perhaps the most important thing we can do.”
What is an "app" when you can accidentally leave one floating in your bedroom?
When you put on your glasses to leave the house, what is a "phone" when you no longer need to look at a handheld slab to see someone with you?
What is a "game" when everything you see and do is scored?
The answers to these questions are not abstract philosophical ideas. These are actual areas where products are being developed presently which attempt to answer these questions in compelling ways. The next couple decades of consumer services, software, and hardware will flow from glasses and headsets the same way the last couple flowed from our phones.
"My interest is not really in VR. It's in the future of reality, or rather, what reality will become after everybody is ‘wearing’. That is, when all children grow up in a world where everyone either has cyber-contact lenses or cyber-lens implants," Perlin wrote. “That will be the dawn of what I think of as the coming age of computer graphics: A time when the visual reality itself that everybody sees is mediated by computer graphics."
I think the children of the 21st century are starting to develop that language inside VRChat right now. For those of us who got our start in the 20th century, though, Steam Link and our 2D apps are necessary portals to familiarity and satisfaction.
If software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen put it, what exactly happens when software is your world? Meta & Apple show us that you have a lot of space around you to adorn with apps and, even when you launch a completely new computing platform, Steam is still one of the most important apps to include.