Apple Keynote WWDC2023: 'What if...'

[jbtroost]

...Nomad would come to Apple Vision Pro? Just saw the WWDC keynote, where wearing a Vision Pro while looking at a Mac's screen had the desktop (or any app screen) move to the spatial computing environment. Well, that would bring up a bunch of wish list items!

Edited June 6, 2023 by jbtroost

[Mark Aceto]

18 minutes ago, jbtroost said:

...Nomad would come to Apple Vision Pro? Just saw the WWDC keynote, where wearing a Vision Pro looking to a Mac's screen had the desktop (or any app screen) move to the spatial computing environment. Well, that would bring up a bunch of wish list items!

 

I believe this API is already built into the latest Nomad app (along with Rhino and a few others), so that seems imminent:

 

https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/roomplan/

[Dave Donley]

Nomad's 3D viewer uses Unity and this is preferred for visionOS so that's very good.  I liked the part of the demo where they had a laptop and dragged the laptop screen into the air/virtual desktop, so you could use VW verbatim that way when it launches.  Vectorworks is ARM- and Metal-native, some mix of our native code with potentially involving Unity is also possible.  The Vision Pro is like an M2 laptop, mostly, with radical UI/UX differences.  We love Apple of course, this is a very exciting new product!

 

[Mark Aceto]

4 hours ago, Dave Donley said:

Nomad's 3D viewer uses Unity

 

4 hours ago, Dave Donley said:

Vectorworks is ARM- and Metal-native

 

While the rest of the realtime rendering world moves toward Unreal Engine (vs Unity) and hardware raytracing on NVIDIA graphics cards, VW Shaded mode continues to improve. As a Mac-first user, my hope has become--kind of a 180 actually--that native VW rendering will spare us from Apple's beef with NIVIDA and Epic. You guys are killing it--thank you!

 

🙏

[Dave Donley]

15 hours ago, Mark Aceto said:

 

 

While the rest of the realtime rendering world moves toward Unreal Engine (vs Unity) and hardware raytracing on NVIDIA graphics cards, VW Shaded mode continues to improve. As a Mac-first user, my hope has become--kind of a 180 actually--that native VW rendering will spare us from Apple's beef with NIVIDA and Epic. You guys are killing it--thank you!

 

🙏

 

Thanks Mark, we are covering those as well - Twinmotion and Unreal Datasmith and other interesting connections to Unreal's ecosystem, and NVIDIA and Omniverse and USD which is a common format for NVIDIA and Apple (in the Vision Pro demo the "architect/designer" guy drags and drops a USDZ file from messages onto a virtual turntable).  Maxon is a great partner for us as they cover PC and Mac equally.

[Robert Anderson]

When I was looking at the Vision Pro "demo", I kept having deja vu to the old "Knowledge Navigator" video from 1987. I remember John Sculley, kind of sheepishly, saying at the end of the vid, that Apple wasn't ready to ship it yet. The Vision Pro is a most impressive technology stack, and it reflects Apple's typical in-depth problem discovery and anticipation of solutions. And, it will ship next year. It remains to be seen if it will be truly successful, at least until it reduces in form factor from "ski goggles" to "sunglasses" (a la WIlliam Gibson's 90s novel, Virtual Light, which came out about the same time as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I think they can be deemed co-inventors of AR.) But the amount of work that has been done, and the problems anticipated and solved, is pretty phenomenal.

[Matt Overton]

When people say the price is high I think of another Gibson Quote.

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

The Economist, December 4, 2003” 

 

I can't help but comparing this to the first laptops that really made sense the late 90's Powerbooks where the keyboard moved to the back and it all made sense. Sure it took 10 years for that cost/benefit to even out and be common but the potential was there. 

 

I guess the question is will an existing CAD vendor jump in and disrupt the market position or will a whole new player emerge from the kitchen table?

[Matt Overton]

The interesting thing with the WWDC videos is it seems in Apple's mind this is the touch screen Macbook.

They didn't make a faster horse.