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Vision Pro to Get Even More Human-Like 'Spatial Personas' for FaceTime
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It is indeed. I guess we all find a way to escape from reality. Some watch a movie, some surf the web, some go on holiday.
But do these things work?
maybe it’s just the time I grew up in but something else comes to mind when I see this…This is an impressive forward-thinking technology but I'm not a fan of 3D Spatial Personas'. It just looks creepy. No matter who it's going to be. It will always remind me of Zuckerberg.
😂
I mean the cameras are always running, and just by nature of using it, it's constantly taking footage of you and everything and everyone around you. You're essentially viewing a 3D version of life through screens. But even with some of the creepiest features being opt in, I can't imagine anyone deciding to drop $3500 and not taking full advantage of everything these goggles have to offer.
Sorry to tell you this, but no one really cares about your personal life.
No one at Meta or Apple is sitting at their desk watching over you.
Big tech only cares about your interests to display suitable ads to you.
There was a part of the keynote where a dad was taking a spacial video of his kid's birthday celebration. Who would be like "hold on, sweetie, before you blow those candles, let daddy get his space goggles on so he can take a spacial video of you." Most humans would just choose to be there in the moment with their child, not watch it through a face computer.
The "Steve Jobs would never have approved this" is a cliche now, but it's undeniable that when Steve was running Apple there was a relentless focus on human-friendly design in every product. He uniquely understood how regular people would use those devices. I fear that's the biggest thing we lost with his passing. Vision Pro is an engineering marvel but it feels like a product made by engineers, not regular humans.
This is the future people. It's by far more social and interactive than a Zoom call.
And about the 3d birthday demo... it was a demo, use your judgment, you're grownups.
And about the 3d birthday demo... it was a demo, use your judgment, you're grownups.
Right? Why does Apple feel the need to recreate a digital version of a user when there is a much easier solution…let the user themselves do a FaceTime call with others who are also actually/physically on the call too. This solution is creating complexity where there was none, just so you can have the person being in a floating window within a user’s AR world.
If we have to move towards talking to digital versions of people, I’d much rather have Apple work on a hologram projector and 3D camera system that doesn’t require wearing ridiculously large goggles.
Zoinks Scooby! Its a g-g-ghost!
Apple's new Vision Pro headset can scan a user's face and use advanced machine learning to create a photorealistic "Persona" of them for video calls. And in a future visionOS update, these avatars will become even more realistic.
Spatial Persona on Vision Pro
In its Platforms State of the Union video for developers this week, Apple announced that it is working on "Spatial Personas" that will allow Vision Pro users to "break out of the familiar FaceTime tile and feel more present, like they are gathered in the same physical space." Spatial Personas will have a transparent background and be able to display more movement and body language for a more lifelike experience.
A regular Persona on Vision Pro
Spatial Personas will be available on FaceTime calls, including for SharePlay sessions.
"In a SharePlay session, Spatial Personas let you feel present with others in a way technology has never enabled before," said Apple, in a related WWDC video. "You can look your friends in the eye, express yourself naturally with movement and body language, and best of all, enjoy a shared activity together using your app."
Apple said a developer preview of Spatial Personas will be available later this year, but it did not indicate when the feature will be publicly released. Vision Pro does not launch until early 2024 in the U.S. and will be priced at $3,499.
Article Link: Vision Pro to Get Even More Human-Like 'Spatial Personas' for FaceTime
While I have been critical of this product, watching the WWDC video reminds me that Apple has really taken this (VisionPro/OS) very seriously. For that, I think they do deserve credit.
So how is this any different from Daddy deciding to take a picture or video of this birthday celebration and whips out his iPhone or video camera and starts to film? It isn't any different. It's a way to preserve the moment. If iPhone video and Vision Pro don't fit into your philosophy of life and child rearing, don't use the devices. But please don't tell me I'm destroying my kid's life by stopping "human interaction" by recording the event. That's so absurd to me.
And you have NO idea of what Jobs would have thought about this. I wish people would stop usurping Job's philosophy by pretending to know what he would and wouldn't do. For all I know, if he could have imagined this years ago, he would have heartily approved.
And how would "regular humans", as opposed to engineers, would have designed this. If you can't answer this question, your whole argument goes down the drain.
But Apple's taking the opposite approach by and large... Zuckerberg's miscalculation was in trying to get everyone to the metaverse, instead of the other way around. Ernest Cline is a nerd like me, you, but he's not a futurist... Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, who wrote both WarGames and Sneakers had it right:
Cosmo: "Don't you know all the places we could go with this?"
Martin: "Yeah, I do. There's nobody there."
And that's exactly what happened to Meta. They quietly decided to shift focus.
What is the point of having a virtual existence you can't bring into the real world? The entire reason for Apple's personas is simply a workaround, not a solution. The closest analogy is those 360º car views that are generated by cameras from the center out that are remapped by inverting the orientation of wide angle imagery. It's not ideal... but it gives a representation of something through indirect observation.
It isn't a real solution to the underlying problem, and it's not a problem that necessarily needed solving in the first place... we have FaceTime and yet people use text messaging a lot more to intentionally put some distance between themselves and the person they're talking to. That this has almost entirely replaced talking to friends on the phone is a testament to the versatility of transmitting and consuming information via text.
So what's the real selling point, exactly, of a virtual existence? What can I actually do better there than in the real world, other than using my imagination to virtually be someone I'm not (which you can do on any social media platform without any special hardware, really; trolls do it all the time)?
Virtual presence, to me, has two potential selling points that are not yet realized and don't have a visible path to being realized:
1. Being in many actual places virtually at the same time.
2. Getting many real things done simultaneously.
If you look at the business model on which Apple built its resurgence, the main selling point was convenience, or, put another way, time. That's the most valuable commodity in the world. Limewire, Kazaa, Napster were all free but the small transactional premium for superior indexing, search and sheer catalog size, made iPod and then iPhone the dominant mobile experience for two decades.
That's how you have to think about selling virtual presence to people who aren't interested in or don't have the time to be wowed by the "#first" novelty of it... they get there and then what?
It's the "and then what" that needs figuring out.
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Ever heard of uncanny valley? Pretty much everyone using this thing expressed the same opinion. The avatar-persona IS creepy. Denying it is just intellectually dishonest.
Uncanny valley - Wikipedia
Not really. Humans have been interacting via text for millennia, there is nothing weird about it. It is well known that if you interact via in intermediary it has to be human or not human at all. Human-like things creep us out.
People don’t have to come up with anything. People are people, not a trillion dollars company. Apple is proposing a product, THEY have to convince the world it’s worth buying. If there is no viable way to use FaceTime with that thing on then perhaps FaceTime shouldn’t be part of it.
You answered your own question in your post it seems like. To be able to be in another place without having to travel is an end in itself because time is a valuable resource that only increases in value as one gets older (because you have less and less of it).
Zuckerberg's metaverse failed not because he didn't figure out the "what" for people already in the metaverse but because there is a disconnect between what goes on in the metaverse and reality (as you so aptly put it). On the contrary, Facebook succeeded because what goes on on Facebook can have a real and significant impact on a user's reality.
Apple and Meta are approaching VR from the opposite direction but they're heading towards the same destination. Apple's approach is rooted in, as you said, convenience, and by extension, reality. It tries to create a virtual homologue of things that already exist in reality, e.g., Spatial Personas and Personal Voice. Meta is going about it as it went about it with Facebook: create a virtual world → get people into the said virtual world → have them stay there. But ultimately, with enough people in the metaverse, it will start to have a real-world impact as people interact, exchange ideas, and make connections. The same goes for Apple. When there are enough homologous traits of you, e.g., face and voice, to essentially duplicate your presence in the virtual world, people will start to yearn for a "metaverse". It might even arise organically.
Sometime around 2043 to 2046. But it’ll just be a copy of your brain scan. The “you” that you are now will still be in that skull.
I don't want to look more realistic, I want to look 20 years younger.
....And in a future visionOS update, these avatars will become even more realistic.