Of the handful of developers I've talked to over the past week, all but one say they're planning to get a Vision Pro specifically with the intent to create software for it. I'm curious whether folks here feel similarly.

to add some nuance to my response — I’m not intending to get one (I mean, honestly, because I’m cheap as hell) because I’m unclear if it’ll mesh with personal accessibility needs

I'm tempted but it looks like it's only going to work with Macs, which I don't work with anymore.

It's funny that this (at time of writing) landslide against buying one was exactly what my first instinct said would happen here in this future-oriented forum. From a foundational standpoint, fancy new outputs are not that interesting (at least to me, though I admit weird inputs still have their pull). And to a large extent this is a foundations-oriented bunch of people. Half the time we're still trying to finish learning the lessons of 30 years ago. Would everyone stop with the skyscraper projects up there? We're still trying to shore up the mines all this stuff is built on... (FWIW I second guessed myself a lot before getting as far as parsing the actual poll output, so no real life points for a good prediction.)

@Andrew F All my projects tend to assume that the CPU is nothing, and what to do about side effects (particularly I/O) is the whole ballgame.

@Kartik Agaram that's not wrong, effects are what make the CPU more than a heater. But would swapping out a VR headset for a screen upend your architecture? Hopefully not. Of making many I/O modes there is no end, so I'm looking for methods to handle the churn. Among other things.

I don't consider myself all too interested in redoing the foundations upon which our software runs. Whereas, I'm extremely interested in reimagining the interfaces through which we write code (or, ideally, getting away from things that could even resemble "code"). So I think this all tracks.

It's not necessarily replacing Windows, but getting rid of recognizable "code" is still an endeavor in theoretical foundations, as I parse it. It's just taking a run at our knowledge stack of what computation is, rather than today's concrete tech stack.

With respect to price, I'm reminded of Alan Kay's argument that if you want to predict 30 years into the future, you can go 10 years by spending a lot of money, 10 years by (can't remember the rest of the quote, also I'm already broke and haven't even bought this expensive headset yet, but dammit if I'm not determined to build a new spatial programming interface if it costs me all my kidneys)

I used to find these sorts of things exciting. More and more I find them depressing. Hard to separate the different parts of it. I think I'm excited about the technology, but not excited about the novel ways it'll be misused by people and

orgs

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My response is similar to @Lu Wilson's. This is exciting technology, but it's also technology for technology's sake. It will create new opportunities, but also new perceived needs (-> consumption -> resource use -> environmental degradation ...) and new ways to do harm. I think humanity should explore such new ways, but slowly and constantly watching out for unintended and unsuspected side effects. In summary: I hope the VisionPro will remain very expensive for quite a while. The really motivated people can then play with it, but the rest of us can safely go on with their lives. BTW, this is also my view on LLMs. Research and development, yes. Mass deployment, no. But since research and development is currently financed by mass deployment in an extractive economy, we can't have one without the other.

We’ll likely get one to share at our lab (despite the custom fit). Leaving aside the obvious display stuff, I’m actually more interested in experimenting with the collection of input methods they’ve combined in this device. OTOH there’s a good chance it’ll induce too much nausea for me to use it for more than 20 minutes at a time.