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Outside of competitive e-sports, I struggle to see how physical fitness would come to play a significant role in outcomes.
Even in VR/AR, the best way to input text is either speech or typing on a virtual keyboard, or even a real one if the system supports it.
Add in eventual brain-machine interfaces and you won't even need to do anything at all beyond think.
If the latter sounds speculative, the Vision Pro is already a crude BCI, its developers have boasted about being able to track dozens of metrics through cameras and other sensors, especially the anticipatory dilation of the pupil, to predict user input before it's made. It literally reads your mind, albeit imperfectly.
And then there's more explicit stuff that Valve is cooking in the oven, I suspect the successor to the Index will display some.
At any rate, Apple is one of the few companies capable of dragging the future into existence, kicking and screaming in the process, and with a massive price tag attached. Nobody else had the chutzpah to offer a mass market product at 3.5k, even if mainly for businesses and developers, and know the latter are immediately preparing for the consumer version that's going to come out in a year or two. The Hololens never stood a chance, it was born too early with too little to show for it.
Now, I've gone from being a massive VR enthusiast, from the old Oculus prototype days, to being mildly jaded about VR as it currently stands.
I bought a Quest 2, and use it primarily tethered, and have found it's a fun toy worth using for maybe an hour at a stretch before it becomes uncomfortable. In fact, I mainly play a single video game, H3VR, and leave a dozen titles I picked up on sale languishing there because I simply can't be arsed.
I have discovered I am simply too lazy to enjoy most VR, and I prefer playing seated when possible.
In order for me to invest further into the tech, the optics need to get a lot better and the headsets a lot lighter. Perhaps some advancement in peripherals, in addition to hand tracking.
I am aware that most of those things exist, but not all once in a convenient form factor.
In this sense, Apple's product is heartening for the slumbering evangelist in me, as it shows that we'll get there sooner or later. Of course, I'm still terminally lazy, so I'm hoping for BCIs to just let me play by thinking instead of something so quaint as physical motion. Still 5 or 6 years away from that at a minimum.
Yep I strongly agree with this, I see the VisionOS as the first step in the move towards BCI. I just think we already have the technology to at least augment KB+M input in specific areas, so I'm excited to see it happening.
Keep that sleeping evangelist alive! If anyone can do it, it's Apple.
Apple only does (good) things years after they've been done by others. They still don't have a foldable, for example. They will not be the ones to first do BCI, if they ever do it.
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