About ducking time: Apple to tweak iPhone autocorrect function https://t.co/ow78vl5CMr pic.twitter.com/DvyalKCAz6
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 5, 2023
Speaking of useful technological upgrades… yeah, I’m not gonna spend $3,500 for special goggles to improve the Zoom experience, either (if only because I’ve never used Apple products). But I found the following arguments quite interesting:
A lot of people are dunking on the Apple AR headset for looking goofy, but that won't matter much if it's useful. If it actually works as intended and boosts productivity, what it looks like will matter about as much as the aesthetics of a welding mask https://t.co/AIQOtbB8tR
— Profile Name (@CIevarUsername) June 5, 2023
Apple's #VisionPro isn't like a traditional VR rig. Instead, it's designed to project apps into the space around you. #WWDC23
📹: Apple pic.twitter.com/WIobrgt7TY
— WIRED (@WIRED) June 5, 2023
here's the thing: this exists today, and i know it does, because i've worked on it. it's just very clumsy and limited right now. apple constantly gets dunked on for just doing something someone else does better, but this is tech with a million miles of room for improvement. https://t.co/UQJEbS87DY
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 5, 2023
real-time point of view streaming. hard to hold an oil filter and turn an oil wrench with one hand holding your phone. first-person perspective allows the expert to go "no, dummy, i told you to turn it left"
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 5, 2023
here's the elephant in the room when it comes to AR in manufacturing / assembly / field tech jobs; every second of every day, another boomer is punching out for the last time, and there are nowhere near enough people going into the field to replace them.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 5, 2023
these are jobs that take a long time to train people for, they’re jobs that often require a lot of on-the-job experience to do well, and they often carry a much higher degree of physical risk to workers (or everyone else!) if done poorly.
plus, the jobs are getting more complicated. repairing almost anything made in the last ten years is going to be a *lot* more complicated than repairing something made twenty or thirty years ago.
there are going to *have* to be advances in the tools that all of these different workers use in order to do their jobs, because there are not going to be enough skilled workers left to train them all and look over their work.
the potential for AR tools is not that they will replace existing workers — those workers are already leaving the job! — it’s that they can shorten the training time and improve the work product/quality of new people entering the jobs.
people keep fearmongering about how tech like this is going to take people’s jobs, and it’s like, no, no man, you deeply and fundamentally misunderstand the looming labor crunch that assembly / manufacturing / repair / service industries are *already* facing *today*
and these aren’t minimum wage jobs, a ton of them are already unionized. these are very good jobs, they’re just not, like, software development jobs. i’d worry a hell of a lot more about the prospects of software devs with AI than all of these other jobs and AR.
this is also one of the many good arguments for increasing the number of immigrants we allow into the country by exponential numbers
okay, like, five of you have told me you don't understand who AR is for, so here's a quick summary of my view of it, which is influenced by having worked in the industry a bit. it's not comprehensive and not definitive, just a take, but a somewhat-informed one. https://t.co/2y3ezq5Jz2
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 5, 2023
first off, you have to remember that assisted reality has very different uses if you’re talking about consumer electronics vs. business/industry tools, and my experience is in the latter, i can’t speak much to the former.
within manufacturing, across multiple industries, factories, tools, products and processes are all accelerating much faster than worker skills have been able to keep up. the EV manufacturing industry in particular has seen a lot of this.
employers *hate* spending money on training, but they love spending money on technology, and even if you did value training, tech’s on a breakneck pace that training has a hard time keeping up with, even if they’re willing to pay for it.
this is where tools and technology comes in; assisted reality can — and does, there are many white papers in the field today, i’ve helped write a couple — help workers bridge the gap between where their current skills are and what they need to know in order to assemble/repair.
an awful lot of field service and manufacturing jobs are jobs that need you to have your hands free to work on something. tablets are better than laptops, but both are a pain in the ass when you’re trying to, like, assemble a product.
what industry has been looking for is a device that:
a. keeps worker hands free
b. provides real-time, contextual instructions
c. allows the worker to get help/assistance without delay
d. verifies the work that’s being doneplenty of this in the medical field, too, especially in training medical students, though i’m not as familiar with that. but during early covid, our customers were using our devices to scan people at-a-glance with thermal cameras for high temperatures.
the reason that i think apple’s on the edge of a breakthrough is that — according to the demos — they’re solving one of the main problems every AR device has had so far, which is user input.
whether you’re using voice control or gesture recognition, every other solution up to this point has been pretty clumsy or unnatural. none of them have worked well, hololens was probably the best of the bad.
if apple actually *has* solved this through a combination of eye tracking and better gesture recognition (and they’ve been focusing on the latter for more than a decade), then they’ve probably cracked the code for serious breakthroughs.
the big money in AR is not really in the consumer space, at least, not right now. but the consumer space is where you’re going to get a ton of useful data for improvement. the big money is in B2B/enterprise/industrial applications, where big tech investments are already baked in.
like, we had a customer whose business was big rig inspections. just using an AR workflow app for completing inspections both increased their productivity for new employees and decreased their defect rates *significantly*.
also, apple has been pretty aggressively moving into the enterprise hardware space for years now, and they’ve got a mature ecosystem for third-party software development. they’re not at windows-level ubiquity yet, but they’ve been gaining ground for years.
when it comes to AR/wearables, right now, google glass can’t even pass google’s own enterprise requirements for wearables without cheating and cutting a bunch of corners. MSFT has abandoned the field entirely, at least in public.
the whole entire competitive field for this has been cleared, because the science and the tech just haven’t been good enough to make it worth it. but if you’re making your own *incredibly* powerful chips, that’s one huge, enormous problem solved.
that's the thing, apple doesn't have to fill it spectacularly, there are already industry software companies who do that, apple just provides the hardware.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 5, 2023
1. i agree, because the consumer market is where you get hype *and* where you can get a lot of useful feedback and data (enterprises are much stricter about what they'll share).
2. yes, $3500/unit is not even expensive for inferior competitors that are already in the field.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) June 5, 2023
cope
Six hundred bucks for the first iPhone when it came out. We should never have sold our Apple stock 15 years ago.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Apple seem to know what they’re doing.
Baud
To me, Apple products look better when advertised than when I’m actually using one. But my experience is limited to iphones and ipads.
Alison Rose
I need these to help me ID birds outside my window. They move too damn fast for me to get good photos!
Here’s a happy thing for Californians with little kiddos:
Click through for a quick video with Dolly being the cutest, as she always is. What an angel.
PsiFighter37
The concept of AR/VR is cool. I still remember going to a shop in the local mall where I grew up, putting on some goggles, and playing a VR game while I was on something resembling an elliptical machine. That was over 25 years ago.
I’m not convinced that there’s a business case to be made for why VR/AR is so great unless it actually resembles what is portayed in ‘Ready Player One’. And if that happens, we will be living in a truly dystopian future.
Percysowner
Ohio Republican speaking out against the anti-transgender bill being debated in Ohio. Of course this compassion comes because he has a transgender son. OTOH, he loves his transgender son and supports him, which makes him one up an a lot of people.
Edmund dantes
To further the point about this stuff already being out there, I swear I was just reading the other day about the military complaining about Microsoft’s HoloLens not working properly or the way they wanted.
geg6
I cannot imagine ever using these. I tried some AI device owned by one of our psych profs who is doing research on something to do with it. Horrible, heavy and just awkward in every way. I was nauseous for an hour afterward after having them on for less than five minutes. No thanks.
PsiFighter37
@Percysowner: Sounds like he is reading from the Rob Portman playbook. It will be for naught and he will be primaried in his next election.
PsiFighter37
@geg6: That was the main issue when I tried Oculus a couple years back. I played some video game in it and got so dizzy that I had to lie down and ended up sleeping for a couple hours. The immersive experience was interesting but I felt absolutely terrible in the near-immediate future.
Baud
I bet it makes everyone crosseyed like in The Jerk.
C Stars
Stars spouse works in a research lab that adapts various VR/AR devices in engineering/prototyping processes. It’s been happening for a few years at least, not really new, although every time a new product comes out they try to figure out how to develop it for their purposes. They’re all super excited about the Apple goggles tech.
RSA
@Edmund dantes: To further the point even further, people have been building augmented reality applications targeted at repair, maintenance, and related tasks for over 30 years, even if the work remained in research laboratories. Here’s one introduction to the state of the art, in 1993:
Apple has historically been great on the user experience side of things, though not so much since the 2000s. If they can pull this off, though, it could be a big win for industry. But the basic ideas are very, very familiar.
Cameron
How quickly humans are moving from merely “assisted living” to “assisted reality.” Though I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising. We’ve had “assisted transcendence” ever since our ancestors popped their first magic mushrooms.
Baud
@Cameron:
Soon we will all be powering the Matrix.
lowtechcyclist
Might want to mention toward the top of the article that AR stands for ‘assisted reality.’ I had to get near the bottom of the post before I learned that.
mrmoshpotato
OT – Go O’s! Go Cubs!
SpaceUnit
Going out on a limb and suggesting that the biggest niche for this technology will be in the field of “adult entertainment”.
Manyakitty
@SpaceUnit: it always ends up that way.
Gvg
Funny, I would swear it was one of the apple founders complaining years ago that the school systems weren’t training students to know how to work for his company and my dad yelling it’s not the schools responsibility to train YOUR WORKERS to use your proprietary systems and invent your future products and profits. You are supposed to do worker training all their employment years! And went on to list all the classes he attended in house and also taught in house to junior engineers at the companies he worked at. It used to be understood. Of course, he was a computer engineer whose degree was electrical engineering because computers didn’t exist really when he went to college and the field created itself….but still, companies used to train all the time.
It’s part of the MBA cost cutting tax cutting shareholders rule short term thinking that has led to this debacle.
I really think it was Steve Jobs, but I guess he’s dead and someone else is in charge now.
Baud
@SpaceUnit:
Feelies are coming.
hells littlest angel
We are going to become the Laputans, except anti-intellectual.
PsiFighter37
@SpaceUnit: There are likely some other…aspects of AR/VR that would need to be built out for this to be successful.
AnonPhenom
Gaming.
It’ll be used primarily for gaming and be one more *brick in the wall* keeping misanthropic individuals locked in their basements and feeding their reactionary vision of the world.
Geminid
@PsiFighter37:
@PsiFighter37: The Republican legislator may be primaried next year, but will he be defeated? Republicans in his district might not care about this issue by then.
I’m not sure they care about it now. This trans-panic does not seem to me to be driven by the grass roots.
Marc
I once was a programmer at a well known CAD company, and a lot of folks there were convinced that the VR googles we had in the lab were going to be the next big thing . . . . . in 1990.
twbrandt
I’m somewhat intrigued by the Apple goggles. I’m very much not intrigued by $3500.
SpaceUnit
@Baud:
I was initially afraid to click on that link.
PsiFighter37
@Gvg: It was probably Steve Jobs. Someone noted that he got a meeting with Obama and was basically pushing the whole anti-public school trope about why increased funding for charter schools was needed.
I happened to see Steve Jobs at a restaurant in Silicon Valley when I was having brunch with a good buddy of mine and his friends about six months before he died. The man was fucking rail-thin, thinner than I’d ever seen a human being who wasn’t confined to bed and on death’s door. I have to think that those people are simply constructed different mentally, because if I had half a year to live, the last thing I’d want to do – especially after reading just how private Jobs was about his life – is to eat brunch in the middle of one of the most crowded spots in Palo Alto. That said, I do think he was far more of an innovator than Tim Cook or whomever else is left at Apple. And from a financial perspective, as someone who works in finance, I respected the fact that he never issued debt, never bought back stock, and never even took a real salary. Unlike pretty much every one else in that industry, by the time he came back to Apple, I don’t think he gave two shits about making more money than he already had. He just cared about creating really cool shit. And he succeeded on that front, even if he was a bit (or a lot) of a shit human being.
Ripley
@SpaceUnit:
I did some tech web work for a porn site 10+ years ago (good money! highly recommend) and I can’t imagine the programming that would go into setting up something like this.
The UX testing would be… something else. Perhaps more than most consumers could handle, and that’s saying something.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Can it help me with my parent’s remote control?
Ivan X
@Alison Rose: Merlin Bird ID for iPhone is amazing. It’s like Shazam for chirps.
mrmoshpotato
@SpaceUnit:
Fixed. 😁
Also, my occasional reminder that we can say “penis” on the new site.
Penis!
gene108
Phpppttt…who cares about VR/AR, when they still haven’t perfected X-ray glasses…we’ve been promised life changing experiences with X-Ray glasses longer than I’ve been alive…
Jay
LMAO,
talked to Gary today, to see how he was doing.
Gary was a guy I trained until the Orange fired my ass.
Orange then fired Gary, mostly because he was pissed that they hired a wanker for $5 more an hour, rather than give him a raise.
So, when I worked at the Orange, and even more during covid, we couldn’t get parts. So everything useful, including 18 running engines, I prepped for long term storage, in storage cases. Kept them in the outside cage.
I got nothing but “shit” for that, from Corporate all the way down to my DS.
So Gary, used the “do not copy” key, to copy the key on the “Copy a key” kiosk.
Sold the contents of the cage on ebay for $24,250.
So he’s good.
There are security camera’s that don’t work, lighting that doesn’t work and we have been bitching about it for 3 years plus.
gene108
Phpppttt…who cares about VR/AR, when they still haven’t perfected X-ray glasses…
we’ve been promised life changing experiences with X-Ray glasses longer than I’ve been alive…
Jerzy Russian
@mrmoshpotato:
Can we please call it a tallywhacker?
Somewhat related, we can also write “porn” on the upgraded site. Porn!
SpaceUnit
@Ripley:
I have a full confidence in humanity’s capacity for innovation where this sort of thing is involved.
Geminid
@Geminid: Now I see that Mr. Colby is not a Republican legislator. He’s a private citizen, a self-described conservative Republican, who testified at an Ohio legislature hearing
The story was reported by the Ohio Capital Journal on May 25.
rekoob
At the risk of going overboard on this, I’ll say that the Vision Pro moves closer to what I’ve been thinking about for decades — an immersive Visual Display of Quantitative Information (thank you, Edward Tufte). In my line of work, modeling existing states (what has been and what is) informs potential states. For example, historical yield curves (government bond yields from 30 days to 30 years) and their variance over time can provide some background that can be used in forecasting. Being able to *visualize*, as a supplement to calculating, different scenarios (what does a bond portfolio look like if interest rates go up precipitously?/ what if there’s an exogenous shock?) could be useful in presenting information to other analysts or people who aren’t thinking about this stuff every day.
I believe there are plenty of applications in the social sciences that would benefit from the enhanced visualization capabilities the Vision Pro indicates.
For what it’s worth, the initial reviews — Marques Brownlee, Financial Times (limited gift link) — are pretty interesting.
C Stars
@Old Dan and Little Ann: 😂
Omnes Omnibus
@Old Dan and Little Ann: No, nothing can.
Jackie
@mrmoshpotato: Also OT: Nancy Smash threw the Ceremonial 1st Pitch at tonight’s Nats game celebrating Pride Month.
I haven’t seen any video yet.
Suzanne
@geg6: We’ve done some cool stuff with using virtual reality headsets to show clients our buildings. It helps convey scale for people who can’t read architectural drawings. But I’m a glasses wearer and so the headset is uncomfortable, and I also experience the queasiness.
Cameron
@SpaceUnit: I think they’re still working on the “Toobin Enhancement.”
SpaceUnit
@Cameron:
His endorsement will be much sought after.
FastEdD
One of the awful things about lockdown is that online learning just killed any hands on subjects, like engineering. “Draw a picture of your invention and hold it up to the camera.” NO! I can really see how this would help in so many ways, especially for medical students. One expert using a “dummy” on the other side of the world helping someone with the identical model in 3D. If anybody can make this work, I’m sure it is Apple.
Another Scott
I didn’t watch any of the videos.
[curmudgeon]
1) If you want people to work in your field for the jobs you need, then pay them.
2) Diagnostic tools are much better than they were 10-20 years ago. Stuff being harder to fix is often because it’s designed not to be fixable – it’s designed to be thrown away. Because MBAs have decided that people, like repair people, are only a cost.
3) Why are people leaving their jobs? Because they love the stress and hassle and uncertainty of starting fresh somewhere else? Or, maybe, because their existing situation is too stressful, pays too little, has too little flexibility for them to continue working there? Also, see #1.
4) Why on Earth would someone on the other side of the world in Canberra, OZ, who presumably would be sleeping while I’m calling her to find out how to turn a wrench the correct way, want to take my VR/AR/whatever call? Who’s going to pay for her $3500 goggles? Maybe someone who is a great expert in repair[ing] valve tappets on a ’32 Cord isn’t interested in dropping everything to take my call?
5) Where are companies going to get the money to buy these $3500 goggles from Apple when there are no people is earning any money to provide their corporate income? Ford got huge making cars that people could afford, and paying people to make them. Cord and Duesenberg and all the rest that catered to the few millionaires went away.
[/curmudgeon]
There are no doubt use cases for this stuff, but saying “we gotta have this new VR/AR hardware because there aren’t enough skilled people” is the same argument used a few years ago that “we gotta have this full self-driving stuff because there aren’t enough truck drivers”. I remember the similar scare stories about “we don’t have enough engineers”, while people I knew from EE grad school were having trouble getting jobs. It didn’t make sense then, it doesn’t make sense now.
I’m a great fan of technological progress. 100 years from now, successors to these things will probably be as common as sunglasses. But I’m a greater fan of people being able to make a living. Automating jobs has costs in addition to improving efficiency for corporations. If you automate away repair jobs because “there aren’t enough skilled workers”, then even fewer people are going to go into training to repair your other widgets, and the machines that make your VR/AR/whatever gizmos. Landfills will continue to fill up at unsustainable rates, there will still be too many people working multiple part-time jobs because companies refuse to hire full-time people, etc., etc. People need to be able to earn a living.
tl;dr – Pay people and train people and your manpower issues go away. Yeah, it’s hard. It would be easier if you lobbied Congress for sensible laws that don’t punish full-time employment (as opposed to contractors, part-time, “gig-workers”, etc.), rather than singing the praises of giant corporations that are trying to horn into every area of commerce to keep up their growth numbers (e.g. Apple trying to be a bank).
Grr…,
Scott.
Redshift
@lowtechcyclist:
In my experience, it more commonly stands for “augmented reality.” I’ve never heard “assisted reality” before.
mrmoshpotato
@Jay:
And he didn’t get arrested?
mrmoshpotato
@Jerzy Russian: Call it whatever you like. Penis!
Omnes Omnibus
@mrmoshpotato:
$24,250 in Loonies is only like US $6.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Jackie: Pelosi’s’ first pitch via twitter
mrmoshpotato
@Jackie: Woo hoo! Unfortunately, the Nats lost.
Cubs are up 4-0 against the Angels though! Woo hoo!
mrmoshpotato
@Omnes Omnibus: Hahaha!
Redshift
@PsiFighter37:
I read about some research a few years ago on a solution for that. They found that if you adjust the video to make it less in focus where it’s moving quickly across the screen (like if you’re turning your head, or the part in your peripheral vision in a driving simulation), it doesn’t cause simulator sickness.
I’ve never heard of any product making use of that technique, though.
James E Powell
@Jay:
What is the Orange?
mrmoshpotato
@James E Powell: It’s the only word that rhymes with Sporange.
bkw
If you’ve ever been under your car with a wrench in your hand, grease all over you, staring at a part that doesn’t look quite like you remember it from the manual, thinking “how do I get this other bit, whatever it is, out of the way . . .” trying to decide how much you have to clean up to go back inside and type in a search after you boot your kid off Minecraft (my own “average consumer” experience) and will you even have time to go back out and finish before it gets dark, the potential and value of this at scale seems pretty obvious.
Jackie
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Oh THANKS!😊
She makes wearing a jersey classy! And the perfect lob into the catcher’s mitt!🥰🥰
eta: I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen her in sneakers vs her heels lol
Alison Rose
@mrmoshpotato: Not according to Eminem.
eversor
I’m not impressed. A couple things on this.
I have VR at home and I’ve been at companies that employed VR and AR. None of it has really worked out. In the case of at home VR largely failed for gaming outside of dumb stuff like Beat Saber. For work the AR and VR stuff rapidly turned into “toys for the developers” but none of the stuff that was developed around it could be sold to other companies. The solutions just weren’t good. That’s not to say the hardware wasn’t good, it was great, it just wasn’t better at solving the problem. It was cool to work on, but it wasn’t cool to use.
For all the talk of industrial this and industrial that apple is largely a non player in those spaces. The reality is that apples products suck at the enterprise or serious computing level. There are edge cases like macbooks being pretty good only because they have a unix terminal but these are always backed up with a Windows installation on them as well and the heavy lifting is done by a linux desktop and even then a minority of people use them.
It’s cool. I want one and I want this to work out. Not going to buy this itteration of it though that’s for sure. To me this seems more like a developer kit and they are throwing out there hoping other people make the killer apps for it. That may happen, it may not. Apples had more than their share of disasters and wins. And in some cases those wins, the iPhone, came about because of 3rd party developers going crazy with it.
Jay
@Another Scott:
yeah,
Worked on a 60’s pipe threader one day.
Nobody wanted to touch it.
Electrical was fine, but there were 6 robotic arms that grabbed the pipe, centered it, and then fed it into the lubricated cutting head.
No manuals, no specs.
Fixed it,
Because I am curious about how it works,
Clever enough to fix it,
Smart enough to hide all the parts left over, where nobody will ever find them.
Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
given no lights, no cameras and the fact they now have 98 dead tools hidden away in cargo containers, not so much.
If anything. they would be more pissed off about the storage boxes I wrote off.
Morons.
Jackie
“House GOP rules vote on gas stoves goes up in flames”
“House Republican leaders hoping to pass a rule Monday to set up floor votes on a bill to constrain the government’s ability to regulate gas stoves saw their efforts go up in flames after House Freedom Caucus (HFC) members, who are among the most conservative lawmakers in Congress, joined Democrats in opposing the rule.”
“The final vote for the rule was 206-220. A dozen Republicans opposed the rule — 11 of the members voting no were House Freedom Caucus members or allies.”
This was Payback to Kevin assisting Biden paying off the Debt.🤭
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gas-stoves-house-rules-vote-goes-up-in-flames/
eversor
@Redshift:
It’s more than that. For a lot of people the way VR works just causes motion sickness and it can’t be fixed. For some people it will also never properly work. There was also the huge Oculus fiasco where it was invented and built up by a bunch of men and suprise mens vision often works differently from women which created the realization that maybe they should have a bunch of women on the team. All of this culiminating in the realization that making a device that’s good for everyone is impossible, and making a device that’s great for some people means it’s horrible for everyone else.
Real time spatial/3d audio has run into similar hurdles with equally disasterous results resulting in even the working version of it being a giant “meh”.
Maybe one day it can all be fixed with a device that can AI adapt itself to you. But for now when watching videos you’re better off with a 4k OLED and a dedicated 7.1 atmos system over a reciever than using all these cheap tricks. Also why gamers swear by high 240hz+ refresh rate screens and stereo headphones.
Matt McIrvin
The first time I ever used a VR rig was around 1990 or so, when an admiral friend of mine got me a tour of the Naval Research Laboratory. There was a guy there who was working on virtual reality. The headset was this hulking thing that was heavy enough that it had to be supported by a jointed mechanical arm with a counterweight. It had CRTs in it, which were color but with a two-color system: red and green phosphors, so it could make colors in the red-yellow-green range but not outside that.
But, sure enough, I could put that on and move around a little in a virtual space that had, like, red and green geometric solids in it. Saw a little bit of the future. I guess.
Another Scott
@Jay: A guy at work has a very high performance optical spectrometer on a piece of equipment. It was probably made in the early ’80s. The company has changed hands a few times. One of the circuit boards keeps blowing a fuse. He wants to get the repair manual for it and fix it. The successor company refuses to provide that information, claiming it’s proprietary or something. For something they don’t make any more…
Yeah, humans are clever and can puzzle things out, but they work much better with time and support. You can support humans in doing those things.
Or you can say “OMG, it’s old! Get rid of it! You’re too expensive to be working on stuff like that!! Buy a new one (that is too expensive, too fragile, and can’t be fixed because you can’t get repair parts or information or a tech to come fix it)!! Write up an order and get it submitted and maybe you’ll have it by this time next year given the supply chain issues…”
Grr…,
Scott.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Ivan X: Yes! It comes from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I have it for an Android smartphone via Google Play. Wonderful app (although not perfect of course). A couple of days ago I started using the Sound ID function and it is my new best toy. Start recording and it identifies all the birds it hears singing and/or calling nearby. So you don’t have to see the warbler, you just need to hear the warbler!
My only problem is getting it to accept some birds on my life list. It has to suggest possible birds from the criteria you provide and if it doesn’t consider the bird you saw as a possibility for the date and location, it’s not going on your life list.
Alison Rose
@Ivan X: But I want photos! I use the Audubon app and you can keep track of your sightings and I like having my own pics :P Even though they always suck because I’m using my iPhone zoomed in through the dirty window while the little things flit around like they just did a bump of coke
Jackie
Moms For Liberty labeled as an extremist group:
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is for the first time labeling Florida-headquartered Moms for Liberty and 11 other right-wing “parents’ rights” groups as extremist groups in its annual report, released today.”
”Moms for Liberty and the other organizations are being designated as “anti-government extremist groups,” based on longstanding criteria, explained SPLC Intelligence Project Director Susan Corke. Corke said the grassroots conservative groups are part of a new front in the battle against inclusivity in schools, though they are drawing from ideas rooted in age-old white supremacy.”
“[The movement] is primarily aimed at not wanting to include our hard history, topics of racism, and a very strong push against teaching anything having to do with LGBTQ topics in schools,” Corke said. ”We saw this as a very deliberate strategy to go to the local level.”
”The new designations are detailed in the SPLC’s annual 2022 Year in Hate and Extremism report.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2023/06/06/splc-moms-for-liberty-anti-government-extremist-group/70289379007/
mrmoshpotato
@Jay: I see.
Steeplejack
@James E Powell:
I think it’s Home Depot.
cain
@gene108:
Didn’t buy one of those from the comics in the 70s?
RandomMonster
I’ve only been thinking about the consumer market, where a $3500 gee whiz gadget that looks goofy on your head seems ridiculous. But thinking now about the business applications—I can totally see how augmented reality would be incredibly useful.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Most electronics work these days is done using a microscope. The tech bros evangelist want to tell us how this VR googles will work while using a microscope?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@James E Powell: I’m thinking it’s Home Depot
frosty
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I love Sound ID. I use it as soon as I hear the singing in order to find out what I need to be looking for.
I’m a purist; I don’t want to put it on my life list unless I see it. There are a couple of vireos that I’ve made an exception for when the bird walk leaders say they’ve see the 3 or 4 times out of a hundred encounters.
I don’t like adding a Merlin ID to a checklist either. I’m trying to learn the sounds myself so I can ID them without Merlin. Getting there – a know a few more than a crow and a mourning dove now.
Marc
That sounds like one of the original VR rigs created by Ivan Sutherland in the late 60s. The ones we had in 1990 used LCDs, but the resolution was only 640×480 (VGA). They also had primitive magnetic head position sensors.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Alison Rose: There is also a Photo ID feature where it matches your photo to a bird (or birds). Haven’t tried it so don’t know how well it works.
frosty
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Photo ID is useful but not as good as Sound ID (IMHO). For both of them, they’re good for giving you a few birds to start with. Sometimes, though, I just have to give up – the one I saw isn’t one of these so it just goes into the unidentified pile.
Hotspot barcharts are good too. I saw a juvenile duck yesterday that could have been either a Mallard or Wood Duck. Mallards were seen frequently, Wood Ducks not so much so I went with Mallard on the checklist.
Another Scott
@Alison Rose: Camera software keeps getting better. It might be possible to “unblur” your bird photos – if not now, then maybe soon.
TechRadar:
All good software functions are eventually copied. Eventually can be quite a while though.
Cheers,
Scott.
dmsilev
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Im hardly a ‘tech bro evangelist’, but that’s an easy one to answer. Many microscopes have cameras installed; pipe the output of that into the VR goggles. With the UI that Apple was demoing, it’d show up as a sheet or something, just like a movie or other video feed.
Jay
Yeah, the Orange is what everybody said it was.
Full disclosure, up to my ass in Orange lawyers, just because they lied in firing me.
Kharma, they are trying to currently trying to hire their 6th tool tech since they fired me. It’s been a year. I busted my ass, worked through covid.
All I want in my next job, is a living wage and not to work for morons.
Sister Golden Bear
@geg6: @PsiFighter37: VR-induced nausea is a known problem — although I forgot what percentage of people are affected. It’s caused by the mismatch between the moment you’re seeing in the VR googles vs. what your body is telling your (i.e. that you’re not moving).
In theory AR shouldn’t be as prone to these problems, since it’s merely overlaying stuff over what you’re actually seeing — equivalent to the “view this in your room” functionality on furniture retail sites — so your visual/body inputs stay in sync. AR glasses are already being used in industry, Boeing uses it a lot in assembling planes. But I’m assuming Apple’s googles are potentially much more robust — although whether it’s sufficiently more advanced than existing solutions will determine whether it succeeds in the B2B market.
Sister Golden Bear
@Another Scott: Similar unblur apps are available on desktop — and are amazingly good thanks to AI that figures out the corrections — so it’s just a matter of making it work on iOS and non-Google Android devices.
cope
@eversor: If my old memory is correct, I once read that our brains discern 3-D two ways: focal distance based on how the lenses of our eyes see something and the parallax angle between the two eyes. Problems with “virtual” 3-D arise when it forces our brain to assimilate signals in which these two mechanisms are in conflict.
I could certainly be wrong but my limited personal experience with such technologies has included all the disorienting sensations described by others.
Eolirin
Man, it’s like everyone forgot HoloLens exists, has been using similar input and UX patterns, including hand and eye tracking for a few years, and is, in fact, already catering to the audience that people are claiming this to be best suited for, with custom built solutions that meet those industries’ needs that Apple’s device doesn’t have like hardhat variants with proper certifications so they can be used on construction sites.
I don’t see how Apple’s going to break into those markets unless they get serious about stuff they’ve historically been extremely terrible about doing well, even if they have a better display technology.
eversor
@cope:
Part of the problem is we aren’t all the same. This lead to an infamous NIH study where the conclusion that VR tech itself was sexist. As women had more motion sickness than men with it because we don’t process spatial stuff the same. Of course adjusting for that made the VR less VR. Then there are edge cases of people who just have a really bad time.
It’s really a case of there being massive differences between people to the point where good VR is going to have to be customized around that user. That’s not really possible now. It’s something that they are looking to AI to fix. Also if you need glasses or have certain vision issues it’s a hot mess.
There’s also the issue that to reduce the “vomit commet” aspect of it you need high refresh low latency displays. But those aren’t cheap, and as resolution goes up refresh generally goes down. Most crap is 60hz, and that won’t work. Stupidly expensive gaming displays can hit 144hz (if you can pump out the frames) at 4k or 480hz at 1080p. But the graphics card alone to push this with fancy graphics is a shoe box sized monster that clocks in at 1700-2200 just for a graphics card, the rest of the computer is extra.
I’m sure all the issues in VR/AR/XR will be worked out through a mixture of disocvery and error, improved tech, and developer focus but right now they are all a hot mess.
I’ve still got a holo lense from a work project and it’s kinda cool but still stupid. I’ve got an Oculus rift that while fun for racing sims is largely the nieces to be playing beat saber on it.
The worst thing about all of that is it instantly makes you an asshole. If you have one with a group of people over only you can really experience it, and then you have to recalibrate the fucking thing for the next person which sucks. It’s funny when you are watching your drunk sisters in law to be crash into the coffee table but outside of that it’s outright anti social. It’s good for a laugh or so and then it’s all “or we could turn on the Switch and all play Mario Kart on the 75 inch OLED with 7.1 atmos sound, perhaps watch a movie” which is a vastly more social engagement.
frosty
I lucked out and got that in my last two jobs and stayed with them for 14 and 20 years. The first ones I had that lasted longer than three years. Good luck!
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Golden Bear: A weird sidelight discovered some years back was that if you put VR goggles on riders in a roller coaster, and make the motion through the virtual space exactly match the real motions of the roller coaster, they don’t get motion sickness.
So it led to this novelty at various theme parks, mostly in the Six Flags chain, where they gave riders on some coasters the option to wear goggles and fly through a VR world. But they were cheapo rigs based on Android phones and the virtual experience wasn’t that interesting compared to the real-world experience of riding without goggles, and the mechanics of getting the things on and off the riders, doing safety checks, etc., was awful and slowed down operations to a crawl, leading to agonizing long lines. So I think the experiment is mostly dead.
RSA
This is correct; it’s called the vergence-accommodation conflict. Roughly, vergence is about your two eyes triangulating on an object to see it as a single object, while accommodation is about the lens changing shape to focus on it. The conflict with AR systems is that vergence works on the visual scene (computer graphics showing synthetic objects, for example) while accommodation works on physical surfaces (the screen very close to your eyes). The mismatch can cause nausea, and it’s not something that can be fixed easily.
lowtechcyclist
@SpaceUnit:
@Manyakitty:
Avenue Q – “The Internet is for porn” – YouTube
Kirk
Late to this but want to note that ar in the form of Google glass almost meets need fo a chunk of the logistics market, particularly large warehouses with small items inventories. In some cases it still does and is used. Tentatively, what I’m seeing in this device from Apple may fill that gap.
Example. If you key the smart device to recognize subtle differences such as pill shape and color or chip patterns then they can signal when what you pick up does or does not match what is supposed to be picked up.
That’s a huge advantage in the whole error control process in logistics. It won’t be immediately worth it for all logistics but where the dollar or safety issues are kind of high it will. And as they’re more successful the device cost will come down which will in turn make it cost effective for the next tier to use.