Asklemmy

and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.

I don't see any difference to an iPhone there. If they wanted to, they could already track whether you're looking at the ad (using the camera) or whether you muted it. You can turn off an iPhone, you can take off a Vision Pro. Apple hasn't exactly been known for intrusive ads either.

imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple

WUT? Apple is very focused on privacy and the idea that a user can't mute or install Adblock is… weird. Safari has good ad-blocking options as well as built-in anti-tracking features to protect users, applications can't usually prevent the system from muting content and Apple doesn't really sell ads outside of the App Store.

If you want to worry about that stuff I'd suggest focusing on the Meta VR goggles or god forbid Google starts making goggles, both of those companies survive on ad revenue and have an incentive to enshitify their experience in ways that the Apple we know today would never do. Of course companies can change over time, but the ethic at Apple is to only make products they feel comfortable with their families using.

I’ve not really seen any overly positive reviews. Most reviews I’ve seen talk about it like it’s this neat thing that doesn’t really have much to do in it now and are saying you’d probably only use it 1/2 hr at a time because of the hefty weight, unless you’re sitting/laying on a couch. It’s kind of a confused piece of tech because Apple is desperate to call it “spatial computing” and market it like it’s AR, but really it’s a VR headset. Yet they’re really not taking advantage of the VR aspect.

It's true that devices like these can gather a lot more data about you than a phone can. The amount of sensors that are always on and look at you and your environment should be a concern.

Luckily Apple isn't directly interested in ad revenue, but more into what apps you use and their biggest interest was always to provide a friction free user experience so you actually want to use their products and are happy to spend so much money on them.

I personally am not a fan of Apple, because I'm not a friend of golden cages. So I'm just waiting for the Android version of the experience. Since this first iteration will be from Google as they would need to update their OS to really accomodate AR applications, that's where my concern lies: How do we know that they are going to handle our data responsibly? Also AR does require quite some infrastructure to provide an interesting experience. Something Apple cannot do, is provide you with a shared experience with other users and to provide location specific, persistent content. There are many examples for such content, but for this discussion, let's say a location specific ad in a fixed location somewhere in the city adjusted to your preferences.

Of course the virtual ad sucks, but such content could also be amazingly awesome and very useful. You no longer need to set up real-life signs, you just update what the virtual sign says in AR. Doesn't need to be an ad, could be something interesting and useful.

But to provide location-specific, persistent content you need infrastructure. Infrastructure only Google and other tech giants have (see for instance the AR mode in Google maps that gives you directions). This is where I'm worried. It's no longer enough to just get internet via a SIM card, maybe add your personal VPN on top to be safer. You now need direct connection to Google's localization API and they'll always know where all their AR devices are and because you wear it, they always know where you are, how you are, where you look etc.. This should leave us worried.

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