I never did finish Outer Wilds and still think about it a lot! I need to go start it again because it is genuinely spectacular, but I struggle with my constraint of only being able to put short-ish play sessions into it.

Playing Ocarina of Time with my son was an epic journey I treasure. It completely captured his imagination, and I was along for that ride.

Grim Fandango was, and continues to be, a dream for me.

While I’m there, Full Throttle also executed its style so well that some of its moments still serve as cultural/stylistic landmarks in my mind.

Mass Effect 2 had several moments where the atmosphere and universe totally hit the mark (Going into the Afterlife Club… come on!).

Red Dead Redemption connected me to that setting in ways movies can’t reach.

Great trailer! Reminds me how I wish No Man’s Sky could keep its hooks in me for longer. I like so much about it, but think I need a little more of a thread to pull me along to stick with it.

How do you get to the point where you’re accusing Christian of blackmailing you in this situation? You’re the 500lb gorilla who’s driving all these app developers out of business. Even if you really feel like these app developers have been free riding on your largesse, how do you have so little perspective to be this petty and spiteful?

The Vision product is a more like a monitor than AR glasses you wear all day. It makes nods to the practicality of strapping a monitor to your face: you can unplug, slide the battery in your pocket, stand up and walk into a different room to get something without disengaging from the monitor. If someone wants to chat, you can fade in reality and let them see your eyes so that the two of you can more comfortably (we’ll see about this!) exchange a few words.

Without things like that, strapping a monitor to your face to get great eye tracking, immersive photos/video, and the giant digital canvas for your application windows might prove too inconvenient. For example, needing to pull the goggles off to answer a quick question from someone else in the room could make the whole endeavor not worth the hassle in some settings. If those settings turn out to be popular (e.g. using this at work in an office), then Apple is one step ahead.

I think that AR glasses you wear when out and about will be a different product. Admittedly, the photography aspect of Vision is a tentative move in this direction. I think it’s being positioned more as a thing where you’d pull it out to capture a particular scene, then put it away again, rather than something you’d wear for an entire outing (the battery life largely precludes such a use, after all). I don’t think it’s a great fit for this now as it seems like it’d require the equivalent of a camera bag to bring with you, but undoubtedly some people will capture some amazing images.

Agreed! I think there’s also genuine uncertainty about what uses will be popular, much like the early Apple Watch iterations involved some amount of flailing to figure out what works.

The spare-no-expense approach can be seen as an effort to not close off avenues of exploration before they know what works. When optimizing for cost, decisions will be made to save money at the expense of ruling out some potential appeal, but right now nobody knows what will have appeal. The EyeSight feature seems like a prime example of something that very few would include in a product today because the appeal is uncertain while the cost is high. It might turn out to be a home run of a feature, and this luxury version of the Apple Vision product is how they can gain experience with it. If the response is instead that it looks like googly eyes, makes people uncomfortable, or doesn’t achieve the goal of letting people use Vision while in the presence of others, then maybe it would find itself on the chopping block to get costs down.

This is such a wild product unveiling. The dystopian scenes of a dad photographing his playing children through the mask that separates him from those same children; the FaceTime with an avatar that looks merely okay, making the idea of FaceTiming with an avatar on both ends of the call seem oddly pointless; the high cost; … and then the fact that it does look like an incredible piece of technology. The subtle hand gestures, the almost trope-y at this point potential to have a giant screen wherever you are, the reality dial, etc. all looked amazing. But then again, the size, intrusiveness, battery life, etc. It was an unveiling with incredible downsides to go with seemingly every bit of appeal.

I like that it has those highs and lows. Maybe it’s not for me, but it’s a real swing at something.

IRC, for sure. Having a group of people with whom I’d chat every day while working was such an emotional boost.

Not if I care about the result. The UX is very appealing in that you phrase a question however you’d like and get back a plausible answer. However the need to attach to that answer a rider saying, “Or maybe this is totally not true” is a bit rough. Of course the Internet itself had this same problem back when Wikipedia vs printed encyclopedias was a debate, so I expect things to change over time.

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. If you find yourself interacting with anyone in particular, it can be nice to follow them to broaden your interactions, but that’s not required to get something out of it.

Tears of the Kingdom with my son! He is Mr. Random Adventure, while I tend to steer us to objectives. It’s a good combo.

Apollo on iOS and macOS!