Dozens of engineers laid off at Apple headquarters
SFGATE
Dozens of engineers laid off at Apple headquarters
The company announced 147 layoffs, largely engineers at its Cupertino headquarters.
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So the software engineers who worked on the failed product get laid off, but not the people who decided to make the thing and directed its development. Cool cool cool
Shit flows down, not up.
We used to say “shit rolls downhill” in the military
That’s a lot of shit if it’s rolling.
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I thought the (former) VP in charge of it left for OpenAI not long ago.
They are surprised VR isn’t really taking off with inflation through the roof huh?
Every few years for over half a century, someone decides that VR is finally going to be a big thing, spends a bucketload of cash on it, only to learn the exact same lesson: VR doesn’t actually solve any kind of practical problem anyone ever had, but it does create a whole bunch of new ones.
Fundamentally they believe 3D will take off. Recall the 3D tv hype?
People don’t want any of that.
I do want 3D, but the implementations just have too many drawbacks.
If the nearest store still has one, do a demo of it. It is quite impressive. You can see where they’re trying to get ready for whatever comes after smartphones
The manufacturers and the marketplaces need us to buy a new thing otherwise we would just enjoy the thing that we have until the wheels fall off. TVs had to get innovative to keep fueling replacements.
CRT’s still minimally existed in consumer spaces when 3D TVs were being crammed down our throats. I was grateful when the DLP versus plasma versus LCD wars were over.
But there always has to be a new product platform around the corner for businesses that are requiring endless growth will die. Consider the InstantPot as an object lesson, and then look at the absolutely ludicrous ecosystem of kitchen branded appliances that the Ninja Bullet spawned.
Those of us that bought into vr, and then bought into it again. And then again. Like it or believe in it for reasons that clearly aren’t going to make us profit.
I do not anticipate any AR Revolution, after both Microsoft and Google drink deeply from that goblet and clearly lost. I don’t think meta is new project in that space will be ultimately useful for anyone but perverts and con artists.
I’m increasingly skeptical of growth and Innovation for growth and Innovations sake. I kind of just want to play, now. And also I would do crimes for a refrigerator and a washing machine that was supposed to last 20+ years of continuous operation like our grandparents had.
I don’t recall any hype around it at all except that it was a thing that companies made. Most of them require glasses so I really don’t understand how they thought that would ever catch on.
Before goldeneye there was no 3d Nintendo gaming.
Mario 64 was first
Star Fox was before that (released 1993). And Pilotwings was even earlier than that (1990). Mario 64 was released in 1996. There was also a Gameboy game, X, released in 1992.
Pilotwings might bring up some argument about whether it was really 3D because it was done purely using 2D graphics tricks, which the SNES was very good at. But it was different from the FF VI/III map view because they did have an internal 3D model that was a part of the render, while FF just stuck a sprite in the middle of the screen that looked like it added height to the flat map it was “standing on”. In Pilotwings you could climb and dive.
But X and Star Fox did use actual rasterization to render their views. Star Fox had an additional chip in the cartridge that expanded the SNES’ processing power to handle 3d rendering, kinda like an early GPU (except this was just attached to a single game).
I’d argue that both are really 3D, just that Pilotwings used a rendering technique that has since been abandoned while Star Fox used a (very simple) version of the 3D renderer pipeline that is still used today.
Mario 64 greatly increased the polygon count, added textures, dynamic lighting, improved z-buffering, and took the camera off the rails that Star Fox forced (but Pilotwings didn’t).
Oh yeah. Starfox had the special SuperFX 3D chip in its cartridge.
Well damn, I just got taken to school 😆
Yup you’re absolutely right. I totally forgot about Starfox (I will argue that Pilotwings was 2D 😜)
Funny because I always blame that game for making me an inverted Y axis guy.
VirtualBoy
It does allow for some awesome games though.
You’d think, and yet all the gamers I know who own a headset has it gathering dust on the shelf.
You’re not wrong, and I’m included in that because I’m a dumbass who bought an Oculus Rift (i.e. not a Vive) some 6 years ago or so, and I’ve since gone 100% Linux. But man was it a magical upgrade for my sim racing setup. In many ways better than a triple screen setup, but occupies less space.
My headset was extremely immersive for DCS and IL-2, but I could never use the keyboard well enough with it on.
That’s because it doesn’t take very long to blow through all the great games. They exist, just not that many.
Guilty as charged…
Which one? Beat saber or beat saber?
Half life Alyx. Superhot VR. Walkabout mini golf. VR boxing. Any VR flight/racing sim.
I really liked the “I Expect you to Die” series. Basically VR escape rooms.
VR’s ability to control the atmosphere more could make for some next level horror games, too. Like something where there’s a reason the player can’t run, like they are wheelchair bound or sailing through a lake of lava.
It’s pretty great for socializing at home, so if someome can’t get out they can still have something similar avaliable. Otherwise there isn’t really a killer feature.
See that’s the thing, it sounds like it should be good for that, but really it doesn’t facilitate any kind of social interaction you weren’t able to get from your PC, and at the same time makes a bunch of other stuff more awkward.
VR is more about having fun than practical solutions.
AR will bring the practical applications.
By the same token, AR is no longer new technology. Every AR app I’ve ever had on my phone got used a couple of times at the start, and have since been auto-offloaded from disuse. There might be some edge case stuff relating to accessibility tools, but companies like Apple weren’t the ones leading research into those in the first place.
In fact now I come to think of it, the most successful AR app I’m aware of is Pokemon Go…
In fairness, though, an app on your smartphone is basically the worst form AR. It forces you to try to look at the world around you through a tiny screen, you can only interact with the app by touching that screen while keeping the camera pointed at the right thing, and you absolutely can’t use your phone for any of the other things you’d normally use it for.
Clunky headsets are better, but only good for use in private spaces and IMO if you’re only going to use the headset in one place, that seems like a better candidate for VR anyways.
IMO the best case for AR basically is a pair of glasses or contacts. Something that takes little to no effort to use and has the ability to augment any area of your vision. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen so far, assholes and perverts seem all too happy to take any device with a camera in it and ruin things for the rest of us.
For a HUD on AR glasses, cameras are not required at all.
That’s true! Though doing anything especially interesting or interactive to actually “augment reality” would be challenging without any camera. I’d be very interested in any type of lightweight AR glasses that don’t use a camera, though. Maybe LIDAR?
LIDAR is too chunky at the moment for head mounts, but i definitely see an industrial application for a Lidar backpack module.
Well you say that but it’s a lot easier to get into for people than a traditional desktop, the concept of depth helps a lot with figuring out which window is on top, and you don’t have to learn to associate a cursor with your hand, because your hand is your cursor. There’s a lot of abstractions that we’ve made when creating PCs that can be done away with in VR.
Yes, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, the lack of many buttons does mean the ways of interacting with content are heavily limited, but it definitely has huge applications, and it’s why it still sees use in areas of discipline that benefit from the 3d of it, like surgeons or architects, because It’s one thing to see a flat scan of a heart, and another to be able to move a 3d representation of it around in front of you.
Those are reasonable use cases, but they’re not the ones companies like Apple were ever doing research into. Pretty much every major advancement in professional applications for VR was done in academia.
www.imdb.com/title/tt4242868/
I mean, what did they expect? People have been trying to make VR a thing since the 80s.
Really: what did they expect. Most of the companies who saw the device coming thought of it as a foot in the door more than anything else. If Apple wants to compete with others in the space it can’t release a heavy version of the Quest and think it’ll just work out. Meta now has the Raybans and think of them what you want, but they at least seem to sell. Apple should want to go there, VR is just a stepping stone’
My guess is that it’s an excuse, not the actual reason.
Good point, maybe there is a market after all.
Yeah, but not for half a kilo strapped to your forehead. That was kinda obvious. Even Hololens balanced the weight on the head.
Exactly.
Dozens, ya say?
From a company that has 164,000 employees?
OK. I mean, that sucks for them, but that’s about it.
Now would be the time for Valve to pick some of them up.
They did with that one woman.