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Testing the New Apple Vision Pro Spatial Persona
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AVP should do a whole body scan for the persona's well-being.
As of this week, Apple Vision Pro users can set up a spatial Persona, which is a new version of a Persona that's designed to make it feel like you're interfacing with other people right in the same room. We thought we'd test out the spatial Persona feature to see how it works and whether it's an improvement over the regular Persona option.
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Spatial Personas have a translucent background and include the head, hands, and top part of the torso to provide a more natural feel so that it seems like the people in the conversation are in the same physical room with one another. With spatial Personas, people can move about in their real world space, and that's reflected in the virtual setting. Persona location is the same for all people on a call, so if there are five participants, each one has a different location just as they would sitting together in a room.
If you look at or point to someone on the call, the other participants can see where you are looking or pointing. Voices are also directional relative to where each person is at.
Standard Personas show only a person's face and are limited to a small tile, but spatial Personas have a much more immersive feel. Apple has been improving Personas since the Vision Pro headset launched, and while there's still an uncanny valley feel to them, the visuals are much improved and overall less creepy.
Spatial Personas can be used for watching movies and TV shows together, FaceTime and other video calls, using apps like Freeform, playing games, and more.
As of right now, spatial Personas are live in visionOS in a beta capacity, with the visionOS 1.1 update required. Spatial Personas work with up to five participants.
Article Link: Testing the New Apple Vision Pro Spatial Persona
Agree with the iPhone but definitely disagree with the iPad.
I remember coming home on launch day with the first iPad and after a few hours of use really felt it was just an iPhone in a bigger form factor. It took some time before apps that really took advantage of the iPad were released. The hardware was there at launch, but took a while for software
I’ve personally found AVP to be more useful as something new at launch than I did with the iPad at launch all those years ago.
Sorry to disappoint you. A device is as useful as its user wants it to be.
If you are not a Carpenter, don't bother to buy a professional hammer; just get one from the Dollar Store.
Leave the Pro Tools to the Pros. I'm already putting my AVP for good use for work, studying and entertainment.
And here's a very good example:
Vision Pro-assisted surgery likely to become commonplace
We’ve already seen at least two examples of a Vision Pro headset assisting with surgery, and another first has now...
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It’s been out for 2 months. Are you being serious when you say you’re impressed they’re still selling it? Did you really think it was possible that they’d stop within 2 months? If not, what’s the point of saying this sort of thing?
Oh, totally understand. It just also conveniently highlights the way that the march of technology leaves some people without solutions they prefer. Folks that highly value in person or zoom/webex 2d type interactions (or command line swiftness or the tactile response of physical keyboards) will, over time, find fewer and fewer products designed for them. Not because their use cases aren’t valid, but primarily because the vendors find success in marketing to that see and desire products with those new features.
I’ve never had to wear either* of those things on my head, though, so be honest with yourself and realise it’s not even remotely the same comparison.
And what do you do when meeting in person would cost thousands of dollars in flights/hotels per visit? Like essentially every remote company?
This is different, because the issue with other headsets is that they sucked for productivity tasks. Sure you could meet in them, but then you are looking at a 720p desktop and a cartoony video game avatar of the person you are talking to.
Today, it still isn't great as everyone needs a $3.5k headset, but in a few years this will be a commodity product, more apps will support it, and having "spatial" meetings will become more normalized. This isn't built to replace in person meetings and hanging out with friends. It is to replace standard work zoom calls with something more compelling, because you can point to things and interact with the same apps at the same time.
Spatial persona is starting to look really good. Multiple people interacting with the same display object is cool. 👏
Apple clearly doesn't see the Vision Pro as a gaming device at all since they literally haven't talked about that AT ALL. If you want to play games buy a Meta or Sony headset.
Meanwhile, your competitors will be using this feature to engage with vendors, customers and developers all over the world. You can book flights for face to face meetings or try FaceTime or Zoom but those solutions have just as many barriers and are expensive and time consuming.
Freeform is a very cool piece of software...that nobody will ever use...
And I work in the creative industry, so I kinda know what I'm saying.
The main reason is that it doesn't allow to share boards without logging into an apple account.
This means that you constantly have to ask the email of collaborators, and ask if they have a mac or ipad.
This just doesn't work....
The second Freeform will (hopefully) introduce this feature I'll ditch Milanote (which is amazing, but I want to pay less money, if I can) and fully move to Freeform.
For those confused, I'm talking about freeform as it was mentioned in the video.
And I work in the creative industry, so I kinda know what I'm saying.
The main reason is that it doesn't allow to share boards without logging into an apple account.
This means that you constantly have to ask the email of collaborators, and ask if they have a mac or ipad.
This just doesn't work....
The second Freeform will (hopefully) introduce this feature I'll ditch Milanote (which is amazing, but I want to pay less money, if I can) and fully move to Freeform.
For those confused, I'm talking about freeform as it was mentioned in the video.
Sure. I'll just spend hundreds/thousands of dollars to hang out with my family to fly them across from different cities to meet me to watch a movie.
And I definitely want to drive an hour in traffic to my office to meet my coworkers whenever I want to show them something or interact with them.
I'm always on mine. The laptop mirroring is amazing. A nice 100" monitor I can use while lying down on my bed.Wait. People still use their AVP?
This article doesn’t help much with imagining how this feature works.
“Persona location is the same for all people on a call, so if there are five participants, each one has a different location just as they would sitting together in a room.”
So is each persona stuck in one position? Does each person’s view reflect their position or do they all see the same thing? Who’s room are they in? In the preceding paragraph it says they can move about their own spaces and it is reflected in the virtual room. Which is it? And why use an example of five participants with no other reference as to why five would matter vs 2 or 3?
“Persona location is the same for all people on a call, so if there are five participants, each one has a different location just as they would sitting together in a room.”
So is each persona stuck in one position? Does each person’s view reflect their position or do they all see the same thing? Who’s room are they in? In the preceding paragraph it says they can move about their own spaces and it is reflected in the virtual room. Which is it? And why use an example of five participants with no other reference as to why five would matter vs 2 or 3?
I’m not on VRChat, but I’ve seen videos on YouTube of groups of friends interacting in it and it’s intriguing. The main difference between the thousands of folks there and the thousands of folks that have access to Spatial Personas is that Spatial Personas are FAR less “inventive”.
But, they ARE a low effort way for someone to end up with an “ok” avatar for connecting with friends.There are indeed a lot of folks that don’t currently use avatars like this and don’t expect to ever use avatars like this or in this way. For those that currently DO use headset enabled social VR engagement like this (or are interested in it), “fully replacing the original” is very likely one of the last things on their list of requirements. They’d much rather be their favorite game or fantasy or animated character, anyway.
Even when just using goofy looking avatars, I find that sharing a virtual space with spatial audio can feel more personal/natural than a video call, especially as you add more participants.
Of course, not many people actually have Reality Pros, or even other VR headsets, so most people won't be able to use this feature with people they know in real life.
With the original implementation each participant could arrange the position of other participants freely. So person X could put the window for person Y 15 feet away and 10 feet above the ground, but person Y could simultaneously freely position the window for person X to be 5 feet away at a more natural height.
With spatial personas, everyone has the same relative position to other people. Person X and Y both see each other as 10 feet away. If person X steps three feet closer in the real world towards where they see virtual person Y, person Y will now see person X at a distance of seven feet. This is especially important when you have three or more participants, because then you can see other participants face each other when they talk. Person X can see Y look towards Z when Y is addressing Z.
Also, you can point at objects in the virtual world, and everything lines up correctly.
<attempting to suppress my snark reflex>
This is a product that is going to take a few years to build out the ecosystem and for more affordable models to come out. In the meantime, it will be an interesting but niche product that appeals to some and is out of consideration for others. I assume you are in the "others" bucket.
Tried it last night, this is a friggin’ blast to use. Can’t wait for everyone to experience it. This will be huge when more people have the ability to use it.
