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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • I have used and worked on/with/owned quite a few VR headsets, yeah. Not a comprehensive reviewer-worthy amount, but I’ve been working on, or playing with, a VR headset since 2015, and I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.

    Currently I own a Valve Index and a PSVR 2 along with my Vision Pro. Those two haven’t gotten use in a long while, whereas I use my Vision Pro a lot every day.

    I don’t have a lot of experience with Quest 2, 3, or Pro, because Meta’s whole account debacle caused me to give my original quest away to a homeless friend of mine, which he sold for child support money, I think. Not a fan or Meta as a company in general.

    I am a slight fan of Apple as a company, and by lemmy standards, I qualify as a rabid lunatic fanboy of Apple, so take it with a grain of salt, but…

    The Vision Pro is a lot more of a comprehensive product than any of the other devices I’ve used, in ways that probably don’t matter to most VR enthusiasts. The surprisingly gripping features of it have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever, and everything to do with art, content, media, and productivity.

    The main hobby I’ve been using it for daily is learning how to create 3D videos using Stable Diffusion. The huge bonus for this is all of the iPad apps that mostly just work without issue out of the box sprinkled with some Vision Pro specific apps.

    Without leaving the headset or relying on an external device, I can use Draw Things to generate a high resolution image, generate up to 25 frames of video with that image as a starting point, save the image sequence out to a directory, where I can use LumaFusion to combine sequences into a video. If I need to I can use waifu2x to uprez, but that takes forever, so I usually don’t.

    I can export the video and drag and drop it into Spatial Media Toolkit, futz with the depth setting, and output an AI generated spatial video. I can use Spatialify to output a SBS video if I want to at that point, but usually just keep them as spatial videos.

    Aside from that specific workflow, It’s also the best 2D and 3D video watching headset experience. Being able to dial my environment in to drown out a the rest of a cross-country flight and watch Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D while it reflects on a lake in front of me, the size of a cinema screen, is both magical, and something that I hope even Quest users get to experience in some capacity on their platform.

    It comes in handy, too, when I want to watch or do something different than the bf is watching on the tv.

    I also am benefiting from the Apple ecosystem, since I own an m1 macbook and an iPhone 15 pro.

    I love being able to capture spatial videos and panoramas and then experience them in headset later. Airdropping files between devices also lets me offload longer video processing to them, since waifu2x and handbrake on the mac work better for uprezzing and Spatial Media Toolkit has a native-ish Mac release.

    For generative AI Draw Things is also on the mac and iPhone, but I’m learning ComfyUI since it seems way more powerful. And I use Screens 5 to vnc from my headset or phone, or I use the native virtual display if I’m by the mac itself.

    My only experience using a Quest 2 was recently when a friend came over and we spent an hour trying to get it to work, resetting and rebooting over and over, before finally just giving up on pairing one of the two controllers, and we used the ios app to launch the browser to watch some 180 stereo videos. It wasn’t a good experience, but I’m sure it would be once it’s setup.

    But I can’t really knock it too much, since trying to share the Vision Pro is the worst part of the device. The best option is to SharePlay to a mac or Apple TV, since the whole guest mode thing takes too long. And while I won’t fly without my Vision Pro again, I wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing it to a friend’s place. That thing’s expensive as hell, and I don’t want someone to drop it or for it to get stolen.




  • Watching the 3D version of Mad Max: Fury Road with it reflecting off the lake in the Mount Hood environment while flying cross country sold me on never flying without a VR headset again. It was one of the most comfortable flights I’ve had and one of the more enjoyable and memorable movie watching experiences despite having seen the movie before.

    On the way back I was able to play the inflight entertainment in headset, and the wifi was good enough to stream video so I watched RuPaul content on youtube and Wow Presents Plus while texting friends. It was also a solid experience.

    No motion sickness in either case, but also I didn’t play any games or anything that usually makes someone motion sick in VR. This was all on my Vision Pro, so hopefully it works as well on the Quest headsets.





  • In a Fortune 500 company $4,000 would not raise an eyebrow on an expense report. Companies using MR for professional use-cases aren’t likely buying a Quest. They’re likely using a Varjo, which consumers can’t even purchase, and which ranges from as expensive as the Vision Pro to more 3 times as expensive as the one.

    I think there’s a lot of Apple hate oriented opinions on the Vision Pro, and it’s unfortunate that it is so expensive that most people can’t get one who might have been on the fence. But the actual experience is pretty great, and especially so compared with what’s out there.

    I hate linking to reddit threads on lemmy but it’s marginally better than linking X. Jon Chu seems to think that video editing in the VisionPro does offer a significant advantage to the workflow:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/editors/comments/1akjeic/jon_chu_on_editing_with_apples_vision_pro/

    And the fact that you can just use the Davinci Resolve (industry-standard post-production) for iPad app as-is in the headset is pretty fantastic for jumping in there today and being productive professionally.




  • The fediverse has a built-in search engine?

    I can only comment on my experience searching for communities in lemmy and people to follow on mastadon, but in both cases I am not sure I’d say “works quite well” would describe my experience.

    But also that’s not what I think OP was talking about.

    They want a search engine for a random fact like google. It’s been long true that you need to add “reddit” to the end of any google search to find the info you needed.

    It’d be nice to have a fediverse alternative.








  • While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes

    This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.

    Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.

    BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.

    Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.

    So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.

    Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.


  • I don’t know the answer but they pointed this out further in the press release:

    However, it’s also important for us that Mastodon is one of the few, if not the only social media platform that operates out of the EU, and we would like to keep it that way.

    I’d assume that this is for a reason, too. If it were advantageous to run your company out of the EU people would probably do so sometimes.


  • You are describing the current situation in the fediverse, not a problem caused by the idea proposed.

    Allowing for federated identity would also imply allowing migration of identity, which wholly prevents what you just described.

    The current system is guaranteed to have larger instances where people won’t want to leave because doing so abandons your identity.

    If I could move around the fediverse freely I would do so, but that is not a feature that is supported so I stick to the largest instance which happens to be the one I chose. I am not unique in this. Obviously, or this instance wouldn’t be so large.

    Offering federated identity is only a better situation than today.