Steve Troughton-SmithEverything I've seen about gaming on visionOS so far sounds like a ‘shit sandwich’ situation; I'm kinda worried that they've built a system that just has no appeal to the kinds of people working on innovative gaming experiences on VR headsets. The Alan Dye 'this is not a toy; it's a real computer' comment definitely rubbed me up the wrong way — it feels like this statement encapsulates the kind of corporate sentiment that has destroyed Apple's credibility in the gaming scene over the past decade
If Vision Pro didn't have a captive ecosystem of App Store app developers to fall back on, that product would be DOA 😶
I could be wrong, but to me it seems that telling game developers the only way to render mixed reality content in visionOS is with RealityKit is like telling app developers the only way to make apps is with WatchKit 😅 Unity's ‘PolySpatial’ SDK underscores that; virtually nobody else is going to go to this effort of supporting visionOS, and Unity tells us they worked on this for two years in private with Apple’s direct help
Alex Rosenberg@stroughtonsmith Content in the Shared Space is the result of a merged scene graph among all the apps. It has to be done with security in mind because of evil companies seeking to farm any PII they can.
Immersive apps can render any way they want.
@alexr oh I understand that there are reasons for how visionOS got here, just like how watchOS had reasons to render apps on an iPhone and beam them over bluetooth. I do think that makes shared space adoption by major game engines if not impossible, improbable. And it certainly rules out anything designed to be cross-platform
@stroughtonsmith Vision Pro isn't for games. It also isn't for porn. Those are the two most popular uses of the Oculus products and there's serious money in enabling those industries. If Apple cared about that stuff, they'd have different management in the Vision Products Group.
Jake flecher@alexr @stroughtonsmith none of these two things is what’s being affected here. VisionOS is perfect for most sorts of gaming, and WebXR support means Porn apps that Apple has no way of preventing.
They are pushing it as a mixed reality headset but they are putting more limits on that than anything else.
I’m almost certain that Apple will have to revise those limitations eventually, because honestly their “vision” for the vision is set up to fail if they continue on this path.
They are pushing it as a mixed reality headset but they are putting more limits on that than anything else.
I’m almost certain that Apple will have to revise those limitations eventually, because honestly their “vision” for the vision is set up to fail if they continue on this path.
@Jake_flecher @stroughtonsmith Disagree that visionOS is “perfect for most sorts of gaming.” Only suitable for low-fidelity casual gaming. RealityKit is hampered by in-fighting among management across the company. Perhaps 30% performance overhead structuring the scene graph data for Metal, restructuring it in the driver for submission to the GPU frontend, then again the actual formats used in the hardware.
I have low faith in WebXR, but perhaps it may enable some additional forms of content.
@stroughtonsmith Also, without a standard controller, the platform is dead for many types of games, just as AppleTV was.
Shared Space casual games make plenty of sense, and Unity does have a way to enable that. Those games rarely need the rendering performance that would come from a more direct-to-hardware approach. What concerns me is that most Unity games have invasive ads that do not belong in the Shared Space.
@alexr a future of computing without games is no future at all
@stroughtonsmith I dunno, iOS seems to be doing pretty well with a terrible games strategy.
AXIØM apps/games @ Derk.io@alexr @stroughtonsmith Vision Pro will allow game-controller-only titles on day one unlike Apple TV where I believe that misstep singlehandedly introduced too much confusion to recover from, plus the Apple TV does not have what appears to be the world's best hand tracking.
All that being said, Meta has lost billions selling Quests only to get 500 apps, most of which are games, that no one plays a few months after purchase.
Vision Pro will be part of people's daily lives, games will follow.