The CEO of Owlchemy Labs sees Vision Pro as “one of the biggest steps towards mainstream adoption” of VR and AR.
Owlchemy Labs developed Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, and Cosmonious High. It was acquired by Google in 2017. The studio is currently working on a Vision Pro version of Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator, as well as a yet-to-be-announced game that relies solely on hand tracking.
In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Eiche was asked if he sees Vision Pro as a viable platform for the mainstream. His answer:
“I see it as one of the biggest steps towards mainstream adoption. I think there’s still a lot of things that we have to figure out to get there. But as far as friction [goes], which is one of the biggest things that we fight in XR… It’s one of the lowest friction devices. You put it on, there’s no room setup, it’s not yelling at you to draw circles or whatever, it just runs the apps. There’s no caveats to it.”
Eiche adds:
“And I think that, thinking strategically, that’s really important to have a headset that you could just put on, it auto adjusts the lenses, it logs you in, it does everything.”
Eiche sees the sole reliance on hand tracking as a strong selling point. “I think that’s the biggest step in moving VR from a specific use case to a general computing use case.”
Eiche is right that the friction of using VR is a major barrier to its adoption, and that Vision Pro removes some of the UX barriers.
I am more critical of the lack of controllers. It makes VR more intuitive to use, yes, but it also loses many of the advantages that controllers offer.
Eiche says that he sees Apple Vision Pro as a big step towards a general computing device, but you still need a keyboard and a trackpad to do serious work with it. So it didn’t really reduce the number of accessories or invent an UX that can replace existing paradigms.
Source: Mixed News
