My review of Marvel’s What If…?

I tried Marvel’s much hyped What If…? An Immersive Story for visionOS and while it has impressive aspects, it leaves a lot to be desired 😔. Save yourself an hour and watch my full video review above or read below.

The Good

• I love that this is the first major Vision Pro app to use Unreal Engine; it makes the art & character design shine.

• Having life-size characters make eye contact with me creates a great sense of presence.

• Transitioning between mixed reality and fully immersive scenes is excellent!

• Watching a video clip and then going into a fully CG version of the world is a clever mechanic I’d love to see more of.

The Bad

• 50% of the experience is watching boring clips of flat video. If I wanted to watch that, I would have opened Disney+.

• Interactive elements feel unnecessary & undeveloped, like a very low budget video game.

• Without the ability to die as a player, there are no stakes. For example, nothing happens if I allow the enemies to shoot me.

• A series of fragmented vignettes, the story is convoluted, disjointed, and boring!

• There are also issues that apply to all visionOS experience, for which I’m more forgiving: low frame rate hand tracking, characters intersecting with items in my room, and the app fading in and out as I move around.

The Opportunity

I would prefer a fully immersive non-interactive episode instead of a series of disconnected semi-interactive vignettes. Ultimately, the opportunity to create a great game engine based interactive movie is still available for someone to claim. I explored this with Mindshow many years ago.

I’d love to hear what you think about “What If…?”. Reply to this email and let me know!

Apple introduces iOS 18 with Apple Intelligence, visionOS 2

WWDC 24 was juicy! We hosted the first four-room SpaceTime watch party with Spatial Personas in Vision Pro. It was a great way to make watching the keynote a social event.

Key Takeaways:

• visionOS 2 is a pretty minor update with mostly quality of life improvements that were left out of the initial version. My favorite new feature is the home button and control center gesture.

• Apple Intelligence brings a slew of new AI features to the Apple ecosystem with a focus on privacy and personal context. Genmoji and a more useful Siri (with it’s sexy animation) are the standouts.

• The ChatGPT integration felt like an awkward appendage to Apple’s narrative about how great Apple Intelligence is.

• Smart Script and Math Notes stole the show on iPadOS.

Nvidia passes Apple in market cap

A sign of the times: Nvidia passed Apple last Wednesday to become the second-most valuable public company in the US. Powering the AI revolution, it’s the the third US company to ever reach that milestone.

In other news, have you seen Jensen Huang’s keynote at Computex? This supercut is well worth a watch because you will know what the future looks like years before everyone else.

Key takeaways:

• Digital humans and AI-powered robots will be ubiquitous in our lifetimes.

• NIMS is a set of inference microservices that package 400 AI technologies into a single “AI in a box”.

• Earth-2 is a digital twin of earth that can simulate climate and weather patterns down to the street level.

Nvidia is positioned phenomenally well for our AI-powered future, but I can’t help but wonder how us humans will fare after the robopocalypse. Jensen celebrates the numerous use cases for robots and digital humans, but the negative impact of this new industrial revolution on humans casts a shadow on the entire keynote.

Meta Quest v66 update improves passthrough

Did Vision Pro light a fire under Meta? It’s great to see new updates coming in hot (meanwhile, over in Apple land, two environments are still “coming soon” months after launch). v66 brings less wobbly passthrough, background audio, and experimental wrist buttons. Sweet!

Sony announces PC adapter for PSVR 2

Did you see this coming? Come August 7th, you’ll be able to use your PSVR 2 headset on PC. My take: Sony fumbled the ball with PSVR 2 and failed to deliver a strong content library. This adapter is an apology of sorts, allowing PSVR 2 customers to get a bit more value from a dying platform.

I welcome a more open hardware ecosystem, and in that vein, it would be awesome for Sony to make their controllers compatible with Apple Vision Pro next (if that were possible)!

InflatableBots offers novel solution for VR haptics

Wow, this is clever! Ryo Suzuki from the University of Calgary combines mobile robots with fan-based inflatable structures for a highly versatile and safe way to feel virtual reality. The ability for the objects to simultaneously move and change height is pure brilliance!

I’m generally in favor of less VR accessories and grateful for the availability of standalone headsets, but this seems like a viable answer to the very tricky challenge of providing haptic feedback in VR.

Video of the Week

Thrill does an excellent job of breaking down the challenges with VR design and why visionOS works as great as it does. It’s a well produced and informative video! That said, we still have a long way to go for truly accessible spatial devices.

Image of the Week

Mobbed by fans at Computex, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signs the chest of a female fan. Tech CEOs are the new rockstars.