By Joe Rosensteel

June 26, 2023 9:00 AM PT

Vision Pro and the challenge of 3D movies

No matter what you think of the Vision Pro headset or 3D movies, it’s become apparent over the last few weeks that a lot of people need a primer on 3D, stereoscopic movies. Love them or hate them, there’s no escaping that they’re going to be a subject of conversation again, just as they were more than a decade ago.

Captive audience

Back in the 2000s there was a push to increase movie ticket prices without making major alterations to seating. Stereoscopic movies were an interesting possibility. Sure, they were more difficult and expensive to make, but the advent of digital projectors meant that theaters could be adapted to show them relatively easily. And of course, a 3D blockbuster with impressive visual effects that would give audiences a reason to pay a bit more.

Most 3D theaters are set up with a digital projector and a polarizer set up in front of the projector from a company called RealD. Left and right images would be projected onto the screen at the same time, and special glasses worn by the audience would filter the polarized light to display separate images in both eyes. It’s the same principle as polarized sunglasses or circular polarizer filters for cameras. (Extremely bright or contrasty parts of the image might bleed through from one eye to the other, creating “ghosting.”)

The problem with this approach is that the single projector can still only output an image at its maximum brightness, which is then cut in half by the polarizing glasses. The result is that 3D movies often seem dim. There are also the gross plastic glasses, which would also have to fit over any prescription lenses you might need to wear.

So to recap: They wanted you to pay more in order to see a movie that wasn’t as bright or clear, and you’d need to wear some weird glasses for the privilege.

Continue reading “Vision Pro and the challenge of 3D movies”…

By John Moltz

June 23, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: The mode less traveled

Apple and Reddit’s relationship with those who deal with their users continues to be a rocky road. Meanwhile, visionOS hits the streets.

Toward a more perfect union

They say both that no news is good news and that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but if Apple’s relationship with its labor force is any example, the former is more accurate than the latter. Sadly, instead of improving, Apple’s stance on unions seems to have entered what experts in spiraling destructive thought call “irascible Facebook uncle mode.”

Apple Inc “coercively interrogated” retail employees about their pro-union sympathies…

They strap an Apple Vision Pro to your head, play Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice is Gray and repeatedly ask “Is it safe?” Truly barbaric.

…and restricted the circulation of union flyers…

Ironic that throwing that “1984” ad back in Apple’s face got played out years ago over important stuff like non-replaceable batteries and not allowing Flash on iOS.

The company somehow still seems to think that this is a winning move. Indeed, an unnamed Apple TV+ executive even admitted that the company is in favor of a hard line against the striking writers’ union, partly because a good outcome for writers “encourages industries in some countries to unionize in order to make more money.”

It’s OK for us to make more money, we just don’t want you to make more money.

You can argue that Apple is a business and that’s what businesses do. They’re in the business of doing business. But Apple does a lot of good things that aren’t obviously tied to the bottom line—like sustainability, privacy protection, and accessibility—and it could likewise choose to have a better relationship with its workers. If Microsoft can do it, so can Apple.

Reddit is going great

Thanks for asking.

“Reddit’s average daily traffic fell during blackout, according to third-party data”

Well, that’s just a small decrease. Surely when this blows over all will be well and…

“Some subreddits are now filled with porn to protest Reddit”

Now when your mom finds you looking at porn on your computer you can just say it’s to protest costly APIs.

Reddit communities are switching to NSFW to create some friction…

I see what you did there.

…and rob Reddit of ad revenue.

Reddit has since cracked down on this practice, removing moderators of forums that had voted to switch to NSFW. Some mods have since stepped down.

The r/formula1 mod is stepping down, citing “the admin handling of the API changes, the tone Huffman elected to use in every single interview, and because of the whole approach of u/ModCodeOfConduct.”

Apart from forcing beloved apps like Apollo out of business, Huffman’s attitude is not exactly making things better.

“It is really demoralizing,” Bucky said. Being a Reddit moderator and dealing with users is already difficult, he said. “‘I take all this abuse for you, and keep your website clean, and this is how you repay us?’”

Maybe Reddit moderators need a union, too.

Moving to stay still

Apple released the software development kit for visionOS this week, allowing developers to begin to experiment with the new platform. The new operating system includes a number of different environments, so if you’ve ever wanted to do spreadsheets on the moon, you’re going to love this.

Notable features include Guest Mode, which is how you’ll deign to let others try using your Vision Pro—when you surely get one—without allowing them access to all that stuff you’ve been posting to Reddit forums lately. It also features a Travel Mode which, ironically, “ensures that you’re stationary while you’re wearing the Vision Pro.”

In order to be traveling, you must be motionless. This is some real Zen stuff.

The “frosted glass” aesthetic of recent releases of macOS starts to make more sense when you see it in visionOS. Seeing the hint of a Finder window behind the window in front might have been annoying but seeing the outline of a kitchen countertop or desk or sinkhole can be a safety affordance.

We never knew doing spreadsheets could be so dangerous until we were walking around doing spreadsheets.

Developers will have their work cut out for them determining the best way to balance their user interfaces for this new environment, but as Commander Adama said in that Star Trek movie, this is where the fun begins.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]

By John Moltz

June 16, 2023 3:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Fractionally cheaper

Get our your notebooks because we’re about to learn a valuable lesson in the relationship between output and cost. It will be on the final. Speaking of textbook cases, Reddit provides another while Apple continues to struggle with greasing the wheels of the game business.

Startling revelations about economies of scale

Wait! Don’t buy the Apple Vision Pro yet!

First of all, you can’t, so if you think you’re buying one right now you’re probably being scammed. Is it Carl? It’s probably Carl. Tell him I told you to tell him to call me because he has my Dead Milkmen CD.

Second, WERE YOU AWARE that a cheaper version will be coming later?!

Huge. If true.

Yes, according to Mark Gurman (why haven’t I already set up a shortcut for that attribution?), a cheaper Apple Vision something will be coming before 2026. Which leads to the question: what could they take out to make it cheaper? Removing the eyeballs (the virtual ones, not your real ones, that would probably be even more expensive) would seem like the obvious choice, and one that a lot of people might actually want. But Apple seems to consider that a key feature. A super creepy key feature.

Gurman believes Apple could “knock several hundred dollars off the price” just by making more of them, removing automatic lens adjustment and the 3D camera, and using a cheaper frame.

Is “several hundred dollars” enough to make a dent in a device costing $3,499? If the Apple Vision Air is $2,999, it’s still [checks bank account] $2,987 more than I have to spend on it.

As someone who gets queasy in VR, I hope Apple doesn’t skimp on resolution. If I do throw up from using one, at least I’ll be paying “several hundred dollars” less for the privilege.

Love it or Reddit

They say that if you find yourself in a hole you should stop digging. What they apparently didn’t tell Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is that if you’re in a hole you should also stop blasting with dynamite.

Facing criticism for imposing high fees and short timelines on apps using Reddit’s API—changes that have caused several third-party app makers to stop development—Huffman has doubled down on the company’s actions.

“It is essential for us to be a sustainable business, whether or not we go public,” Huffman said. “Now, we would like to be a public company.”

“Would I like to win the Wall Street lottery? Sure. Enough to destroy the community we built? Same answer.”

Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”

Yes, there is nothing that says “huge passive income generation” like having the highly lucrative job of… let me just put on the ol’ reading glasses here… “Reddit forum moderator”. Certainly they are the ones to compare to foppish, handkerchief-waving 17th century land barons, as opposed to the guy who’s actually doing all this to make gobs of money, whether it’s from going public or forcing AI companies to pony up for Reddit’s grist for their large language model mills.

Reddit went on to send a threatening note to moderators of forums that closed to protest the company’s API changes, suggesting lower moderators who wanted to reopen could have them removed. Can we all agree that as a CEO it just makes sense to get into a huge argument with… let me just put another pair of reading glasses on on top of the previous ones… “the people who love your platform the most”? Definitely the smart takeaway from the last 12 months.

Speaking of which, no one is probably more thankful for Huffman’s continued public tantrum than new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino. Her vapid introductory tweet thread paying lip service to free speech just days before banning a prominent Tesla critic would probably have been bigger news if not for Huffman’s burning desire to be bean CEO. She should send him a nice fruit basket.

Hunting big game

One of the less-discussed pieces of news coming out of WWDC was Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit. By providing DirectX 12 support, the company is allowing developers to more easily test and port their games to macOS. This is terrific news and, as Christina Warren notes, could be—yes, literally and figuratively—a real game-changer for the Mac’s position in the game market.

Of course, despite the fact that Apple has made it much, much easier for developers to port games to the Mac, it does still require work. Worse, it requires work in Xcode, which is like telling a pour-over nut they now have to make their coffee in an AeroPress.

Like an animal.

Will this move the needle for games on macOS? Probably some, but maybe not as much as you’d hope.

But as long as we’re on games, if Bungie could bring back Myth, that’d be great. TIA.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]