Tag: Matthew Ball

UPDATED! A Review of the Apple Vision Pro at the Three-Week Mark: What Apps and Experiences I Have Used the Most (and what Matthew Ball Thinks of the AVP After Six Months)

UPDATE 10:37 p.m.: I actually wriote this review in two parts, and reading it back, I can see now it reads a bit disjointedly for that reason, so I am including a separator between the two parts to make it clearer. Also, I had misnamed the Encounter Dinosaurs experience, an error which I have now corrected. Thanks!

I have also added a link to a blogpost by metaverse blogger Matthew Ball, with his opinions after using the Apple Vision Pro for six months.

Since I received my prescription lenses for my Apple Vision Pro on July 29th, I am nearing the end of my third week using the device almost every day, usually for an hour or two each day. The prescription lenses are magnetically attached to the AVP, so I can very easily remove them if and when I decide to start giving demonstrations of the Apple Vision Pro to other people!

I’m still getting used to the device myself, and I want to make sure that I am comfortable enough with it before I start giving demos to other people. Also, I will be reviewing documentation that other AVP users have already written up (like this example), so I can make sure that I give demos in such a way that I (and the person who receives a demo!) don’t accidentally damage my very expensive device!

For example, you have to remember to tell new users not to pick up the device by the facial shield, because it (like my prescription lenses) is only magnetically attached to the actual, glass-and-metal Apple Vision Pro itself, and it will detach when you pick it up by that! You have to remember to pick it up by holding onto the edges of the actual, curved-glass-and-metal device itself. I’m probably going to have to write up detailed, step-by-step instructions, so that any staff who work in the University of Manitoba’s future virtual reality lab will be able to help university faculty, staff, and students have their first AVP experience!

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: I am so blown away by what I experienced these past three weeks (more details below), that I am 100% certain that, in addition to the Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 3, I will be asking the Libraries to purchase an Apple Vision Pro to make available to faculty, staff, and students at my university, to use for teaching, learning, and research purposes. In three short weeks, I have become an Apple Vision Pro evangelist! Come hell or high water, we are getting one. It’s just that good. I will repeat what I said in an earlier blogpost, written during my first week of using my Apple Vision Pro:

The Apple Vision Pro makes every single VR headset I have used to date feel like one of those red plastic View-Masters I used to play with as a kid in the 1960s. The “screen door” effect so evident in earlier VR headsets (where you can see individual pixels, making everything slightly blurry) is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY gone.

In fact, the Apple Vision Pro is such a leap forward in terms of technology, that it is going to be hard to go back to the once-formerly-state-of-the-art displays of the Meta Quest 3, and especially the Vive Pro 2, afterwards!

Anyway, let’s get back to the reason I wanted to write this blogpost: I wanted to talk about some of the apps and experiences I have had in my new Apple Vision Pro over the past three weeks, as well as give some more first impressions of the device itself.

Apple has lavished its usual slavish attention to style and construction on the Apple Vision Pro headset. It is beautiful to look at as well as to use! The front is one piece of custom curved glass, attached to a sleek, rounded metal frame, and it is the smallest VR headset that I have ever tried on (not as small as the Bigscreen Beyond, which I wrote about previously here, but then again, I have never tried that device).

Having worn other, bulkier, VR headsets, I found that the Apple Vision Pro sits higher on my cheeks, which feels strange at first, but you quickly get used to it. The AVP has many internal sensors and cameras, and it is smart enough to warn you when you are wearing the device too high or too low on your face, so you can adjust it accordingly for the best experience. Also, when you give somebody else a demonstration using the built-in guest mode, it automatically calculates the correct interpupillary distance (IPD; i.e. the distance between the pupils of your left and right eyes) so that you have an optimal view. (When giving demos on the Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 3 VR headsets, I now have a special app on my work iPad Pro 11 to measure someone’s IPD so I can dial in the correct value before they put on the headset.)

When you place your order for an AVP from the Apple website (or, if you were to purchase one in your local Apple Store), you will have to use a FaceID-enabled iPhone or iPad to do a scan of your face to determine the correct size of facial shield. The facial shield is highly customized to your face and your needs. For example, because I need prescription lenses, the facial shield has to be somewhat deeper to accommodate them (if I were to wear soft contact lenses instead to correct my vision, then I would need to purchase a separate, less deep facial shield, and my field of view would be a little bit wider than it would be with the prescription lenses).

Which brings me to something that I wish was better: the field of view. While I have found that the up-and-down field of view to be pretty good, I was less impressed with the side-to-side field of view. In particular, when recording spatial videos, it is disappointing when playing them back to see just how constrained they are. While they do offer you a wider-screen, “immersive” playback option for spatial videos, that, too, has its limitations, as the video tends to blur at the edges, instead of the crisp edges you would see when watching the video in a regular (small) window. But I have no doubt that this aspect of the technology will improve over time.

There are actually two different kinds of 3D videos that you can play in the Apple Vision Pro: spatial videos and immersive videos. The videos you can record and share using the Apple Vision Pro or a later-model iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models with iOS 17.2 or later) are called spatial videos; that is, you can clearly see the 3D effect, but it is not immersive. Immersive videos are recorded using more expensive equipoment, and the results are truly spectacular—you watch the video, and you feel like you are actually present!

In fact, one of the apps I signed up for is a monthly subscription service called Explore POV (Point of View), where I can download and play high-quality immersive videos, recorded in 180-degree 3D 16K resolution. The creators visit various locations around the world, and record either one long video scene, or an edited series of scenes in one video. For example, one Explore POV video is simply the videographer walking along a beach in New Zealand, watching the surf pound onto the sand under a blue sky. When you watch it, it actually is so realistic that it feels as if you are actually there—and when you lift your hand and look at it, it is superimposed on the video! Here is the Explore POV website if you want to learn more, and here’s a recent video by the creator himself:

Separate from spatial and immersive videos are the Apple Vision Pro’s built-in 360-degree Environments, which you can turn on and adjust using a knob on the upper-right of the AVP. Turn the knob all the way clockwise, and it completely replaces your space with a selected virtual-reality Environment. Turn it all the way counter-clockwise, you are in full augmented-reality mode, where your icons and app windows hover in and over your physical environment. You can also adjust the knob to somewhere in the middle, where your central view has an Environment, which fades away at the edges to your real world. It’s one of those things which is hard to describe but easy to experience, but Apple Vision Pro Environments in themselves are so well-done and so realistic, that I consider them, alone, to be a “killer app” for the Apple Vision Pro! Quite often, I will simply close all my apps and just sit and meditate (or listen to tunes from my Apple Music library) while sitting peacefully in front of Mount Hood, or halfway up Haleakalā volcano in Hawaii, watching the sun set behind the clouds.

Given this ability to surround you in various realistic environments, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the many use cases for the Apple Vision Pro is as a device to assist in calming, centering, and meditation. There are already numerous spatial meditation apps in the Apple Vision Pro Store, but the one that I have found myself using the most is called Tripp. Tripp’s main menu has five sections (Focus, Calm, Breathe, Ascend, and Sleep) where you can select from many different kinds of guided meditations, or mix and match pieces to create a customized meditation. The Ascend section features a truly psychedelic mini-documentary on the life journey of Ram Dass, the American psychologist and popularizer of Eastern spirituality and yoga, which everybody should try out, at least once!

And, of course, there is already a lot of video content to enjoy in the Apple TV+ app and the Disney+ app, including a small but growing selection of 3D videos. There is a short but extremely well-done app called Encounter Dinosaurs which really should be something anyone who tries on an Apple Vision Pro should experience! It’s definitely a showcase for the cutting-edge capabilities of the technology, where you feel you can almost reach out and touch a real, living dinosaur! Always a good demo.

And, speaking of demos, I finally gave my first demonstration of the Apple Vision Pro to another person, my brother. And this is where I have to say, things did not go so well.

I had difficulties in getting mirroring to work (that is, being able to cast what the other person was seeing in the AVP to another device, such as a MacOS desktop, iPad, or iPhone). Once I got that working, then I was able to set it up so that I could help talk my brother through how to use the Apple Vision Pro—only to forget that I had to turn mirroring off before he could watch any content on Apple TV+ and Disney+ apps! (At least he got to try out Encounter Dinosaurs.)

All in all, trying to give a demo to another user via the AVP’s Guest Mode was highly frustrating. Perhaps I have been too quick to judge the usefulness of the Apple Vision Pro for a multi-user environment like the virtual reality lab that I am currently working on setting up for my university library system. We’ll see what happens as I give other people their first taste of the device.

P.S. I forgot to mention that I have also made five or six forays into InSpaze, the Apple Vision Pro’s premier social app, and had some wonderful conversations with people from around the world! I will save that report for a later blogpost on my blog. In the meantime, you can read what I wrote earlier about InSpaze here (before I got my hot little hands on my own Apple Vision Prto!).

UPDATE 10:30 p.m.: I just discovered that Matthew Ball (whom I have written about before on this blog) has written up a blogpost titled 9 Takeaways from the Vision Pro after 6 months, so I have linked to it from my blog. I very much appreciate Matthew’s take on things, and I wanted to share what he said with you as well, as a sort of counterpoint to my own, obviously more limited, thoughts and impressions. (By the way, I agree 100% with Matthew’s take on the EyeSight feature of the AVP. While it’s cool, I also feel it’s a bit gimmicky.)

I agree with Matthew Ball; the Apple Vision Pro’s EyeSight feature (where you can see the user’s eyes while they are wearing the AVP, as shown here) is a cool gimmick, but, in my opinion, not really necessary.

Book Review: The Metaverse, and How It Will Revolutionize Everything, by Matthew Ball

I am on holidays this week, and today I decided to set aside a couple of days to read through—and write a review of—a recently published book by the venture capitalist Matthew Ball, author of the Metaverse Primer and lead creator of the Ball Metaverse Index (whom I have written about before on this blog). The title of his new book is The Metaverse: and How It Will Revolutionize Everything.

Matthew Ball’s new metaverse book (image source)

As Matthew Ball writes in the introduction to his book:

In 2018, I began writing a series of online essays on the Metaverse, then an obscure and fringe concept. In the years since, these essays have been read by millions of people as the Metaverse has transitioned from the world of paperback science fiction to the front page of the New York Times and corporate strategy reports around the world.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything updates, expands, and recasts everything I’ve previously written on the Metaverse. The book’s core purpose is to offer a clear, comprehensive, and authoritative definition of this still inchoate idea. Yet my ambitions are broader: I hope to help you understand what’s required to realize the Metaverse, why entire generations will eventually move to and live inside it, and how it will forever alter our daily lives, our work, and how we think.

Yes, Ball capitalizes “Metaverse” throughout his book, which I find unnecessary and annoying. However, “Internet” was also usually capitalized in its earliest years of existence before most people settled on lower-case-i internet, so there is some precedent here.

It is not until chapter three, after a brief historical and philosophical discussion of the concept, that Matthew Ball provides his own definition of the metaverse (smartly leaving aside a discussion of blockchain until later on in the book):

A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.

After laying the groundwork with history and definitions in the first four chapters, in Part II of his book Matthew Ball discusses in seven chapters the various components which he feels go into the building of a metaverse: networking, computing, virtual world engines, interoperability, hardware, payment systems, and blockchain technology.

In chapter 5 (Networking), Ball uses popular games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator to explain concepts such as network bandwidth and latency, and how game and metaverse companies work around such limitations. Chapter 6 covers the computational requirements and trade-offs in building the metaverse, while chapter 7 looks at virtual world engines such as Unreal and Unity. Chapter 8 addresses the thorny issue of metaverse interoperability and standards (i.e., the ability to take your avatar and its possessions from one virtual world to another). In chapter 9, Ball offers a concise overview of VR and AR hardware, calling it “the hardest technology challenge of our time”. Chapter 10 discusses a key component of the current and future metaverse, payment rails (e.g. credit cards, PayPal, Venmo) and the associated economics of buying and selling on metaverse platforms.

Finally, in chapter 11, Matthew Ball addresses the controversial and contentious issue of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), stating “some observers today believe that blockchain is structurally required for the metaverse to become a reality, while others find that claim absurd.” Obviously, this book was written well before the current crypto crash, but Ball attempts to write a balanced take on the subject, including an entire section about the various obstacles currently facing the blockchain. He wraps up this chapter by stating:

How much of the blockchain remains hype versus how much is (potential) reality remains uncertain—not unlike the current state of the Metaverse. However, one of the central lessons of the computing era is that the platforms that best serve developers and users will win. Blockchains have a long way to go, but many see their immutability and transparency as the best way to ensure the interests of these two constituencies [i.e., platforms and developers] remain prioritized as the Metaverse economy grows.

The real meat of this book is in Part III, subtitled “How the Metaverse Will Revolutionize Everything”. In it, Matthew looks into his crystal ball and makes some predictions about how the metaverse will develop and be used across a range of industries, including education, entertainment, fashion and advertising, lifestyle businesses—even sex and sex work!

Chapter 12 is a discussion of when the metaverse is going to arrive, which of course is entirely dependent upon the definition of a “metaverse”; as I have often said, Second Life (which does get a few passing mentions in this book) is the perfect model of a fully-evolved metaverse, which the newer companies building platforms would be wise to study, emulate, and learn lessons from. However, Ball tends to lean towards the assertion that the metaverse is not yet truly upon us, despite these early platforms.

In a subsection of Chapter 14 titled “Why Trust Matters More Than Ever”, in a discussion of corporate strategies, Matthew Ball writes the following:

My great hope for the Metaverse is that it will produce a “race to trust.” To attract developers, the major platforms are investing billions to make it easier, cheaper, and faster to build better and more profitable virtual goods, spaces, and worlds. But they’re also showing a renewed interest in proving—through policy— that they deserve to be a partner, not just a publisher or platform. This has always been a good business strategy, but the enormity of the investment required to build the Metaverse, and the trust it requires from developers, has placed this strategy front and centre.

In the final chapter of his book (Metaversal Existence), Ball broadens his view to discuss how the metaverse will impact society, and what policies might be necessary to address that impact. Matthew warns:

Misinformation and election tampering will likely increase, making our current-day complications of out-of-context sound bites, trolling tweets, and faulty scientific claims feel quaint. Decentralization, often seen as the solution to many of the problems created by the tech giants, will also make moderation more difficult, malcontents harder to stop, and illicit fundraising far less difficult. Even when limited primarily to text, photos, and videos, harassment has been a seemingly unstoppable blight in the digital world—one that has already ruined many lives and harmed many more. There are several hypothesized strategies to minimize “Metaverse abuse.” For example, users may need to give other users explicit levels of permission to interact in given spaces (e.g., for motion capture, the ability to interact via haptics, etc.), and platforms will also automatically block certain capabilities (“no-touch zones”). However, novel forms of harassment will doubtlessly emerge. We are right to be terrified by what “revenge porn” might look like in the Metaverse, powered by high-fidelity avatars, deepfakes, synthetic voice construction, motion capture, and other emergent virtual and physical technologies.

He adds, “for the same reasons the metaverse is so disruptive—it’s unpredictable, recursive, and still vague—it is impossible to know what problems will emerge, how best to solve those which already exist, and how best to steer it.”

Matthew’s book is packed full of interesting anecdotes, such as the following tidbit from chapter one:

Not long after Tencent publicly unveiled its vision of hyper-digital reality, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began its biggest-ever crackdown of its domestic gaming industry. Among several new policies was a prohibition on minors playing video games Monday through Thursday that also limited their play from 8 pm. to 9 pm. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (in other words, it was impossible for a minor to play a video game for more than three hours per week). In addition, companies such as Tencent would use their facial recognition software and a player’s national ID to periodically ensure that these rules were not being skirted by a gamer borrowing an older user’s device. Tencent also pledged $15 billion in aid for “sustainable social value,” which Bloomberg said would be focused on “areas like increasing incomes for the poor, improving medical assistance, promoting rural economic efficiency and subsidizing education programs.” Alibaba, China’s second-largest company, committed a similar amount only two weeks later. The message from the CCP was clear: look to your countrymen and women, not virtual avatars.

The CCP’s concerns about the growing role of gaming content and platforms in public life became more explicit in August, when the state-owned Security Times warned its readers that the Metaverse is a “grand and illusionary concept” and
“blindly investing [in it] will ultimately come back to bite you?“

While Ball sprinkles footnotes throughout his book, there were not nearly enough to satisfy this librarian! As I tell my students when doing information literacy training, footnotes are useful to find what sources the author refers to, so you can look them up yourself. For example, in chapter one he writes the following tantalizing but non-footnoted sentence, without further explanation:

Stephenson’s novels have been cited as the inspiration for various cryptocurrency projects and non-cryptographic efforts to build decentralized computer networks, as well as the production of CGI-based movies which are watched at home but generated live through the motion-captured performance of actors that might be tens of thousands of miles away.

Now, after reading that, wouldn’t you also like to know the source of this information, and the names of such productions? More footnotes, please! (Also, I’m not sure that “cryptographic” is the correct adjective here, as Ball seems to be using the term to refer to non-blockchain or non-cryptocurrency projects in this sentence.)

Also, while Ball is quick to use popular games such as Fortnite and Roblox to explain various terms and concepts throughout the book, I found it rather frustrating that he was not nearly as quick in drawing examples from the many metaverse platforms which already exist (e.g. VRChat, Rec Room, Sansar, NeosVR). I mean, this is a book about the metaverse; why not use more examples from existing social VR and virtual worlds? I know he’s a busy venture capitalist, but it makes me wonder how many metaverse platforms Matthew actually visited in his pre-writing travels. The book would have greatly benefited from that extra virtual legwork, if not by him then by his research assistants!

But these are picky little quibbles; overall, the book is an excellent introduction to the metaverse, and an informative overview for users new to the concept and wondering what all the recent fuss is about. Even those readers who have many years of experience with the metaverse will learn some new things which they did not know before. I can recommend this book, and I look forward to Matthew Ball’s future writing on the topic.

Thank you to the person who gifted me a copy of Matthew Ball’s book!

Video: Matthew Ball Talks About the Metaverse Road Map in Breakroom

On Thursday, October 21st, Matthew Ball, author of the influential Metaverse Primer and lead creator of the Ball Metaverse Index, was joined by Gene Park of the Washington Post and virtual world blogger Wagner James Au for a fireside chat in the virtual world of Breakroom. The chat covered a wide range of topics, including key trends to watch for, the mainstream adoption of the Metaverse, and the broader impact on society. Near the end, metaverse pioneer Philip Rosedale was also invited up on stage. You can read more about the event here.

Matthew Ball is a well-informed, articulate, and insightful speaker about the metaverse, and I highly recommend you watch the following 50-minute video of the well-attended event:

Please note that, as you watch this video, both Adam Frisby and Rohan Freeman of Sine Wave Entertainment, senior executives of the company who make Breakroom and Sinespace, were the ones responsible for spawning the dizzying array of items on and around the stage as the panel members spoke to the assembled audience.

I certainly don’t blame Adam and Rohan for wanting to flex the dynamic editing capabilities of their platform, especially in front of an audience full of big names in the metaverse! However, at first I thought it was a griefer attack! (I even DM’ed Adam to report the “griefer”, not knowing that it was him! How embarrassing.)

Anyways, I learned a lot from Matthew’s talk, and there were some great questions afterward from the audience, so I thought I’d share the video here with you. Stay tuned for news of the next in this free series of Fireside Chats in Breakroom!

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here). 

Sinespace/Breakroom News: Matthew Ball Metaverse Road Map Event Today; Pictures from Last Night’s Zombie Ball

Don’t forget that venture capitalist and metaverse writer Matthew Ball will be speaking at an event in Breakroom (Sinespace’s corporate cousin) today, Thursday, October 21st, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time/GMT or noon Pacific Standard Time/PST. You can register for the event here, through EventBrite (it’s free). When you register, you will receive an email message with a special link you must click on to load the web-based Breakroom app in your web browser (which works surprisingly well, based on past Fireside Chats in the series!). More details here.

Here are some pictures I took this morning of the venue; the first shot shows you the user interface, which I think you’ll find very similar to the layout of the Sinespace client. (One of the things I like the most about Sinespace/Breakroom is that I can adjust my avatar’s shape to more closely resemble the real-world Ryan Schultz!)

Your intrepid embedded reporter also attended the Zombie Ball last night in Sinespace—and won 1,000 Gold (Sinespace’s currency) in a random draw! Here are some pictures I took at the event; please click on each thumbnail to see it in a larger size:

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).