Your concerns are completely nonsensical. It's clearly being marketed as a healthcare tool for people with debilitating injuries that preclude the use of hand-powered wheelchair controls, severe situations where there's no neck-down control and users would be limited to controls like head-tilt or mouth actuated systems. These people obviously require daily care to simply get them out of bed and into the chair and back again every single day - their nurse could just put on their Vision Pro for them! This seems like an incredible leap forward for people in this situation, if they iterate on this and it gets better then this could be a very viable wheelchair control system in the future.
With all due respect, my concerns are not nonsensical but borne of my daily use with Apple Vision Pro and my awareness of the limitations of dwell control.
Iterating on this idea with a device lighter than Apple Vision Pro and improvements to dwell control would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations of disabled users, but that is not what is depicted in the video.
My sense is that the possibility of an accessibility affordance with people who are severely disabled is driving opinions in this case more than the reality of what’s available.
To my mind, much of these AX announcements are reminiscent of the circumstance that led John Gruber to author “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”, which is that these are not shipping features but ones slated for “some time later this year”.
I’m a huge AX fan and work directly in the domain space, but something about that video in particular coupled with my near-daily use of Apple Vision Pro doesn’t feel right.
You are correct, the driving controls in AVP don’t use dwell, that is the wrong (and dangerous) approach. They use something more akin to hover activation.
It’s the hardware I designed coupling the power wheelchair to the AVP, and I’ve driven it myself.
That still doesn't make sense. "improvements... would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations" so what? Are they claiming that everyone everywhere should use this immediately?
"possibility of an accessibility affordance" what do you mean possibility, that is literally the case. Even if it's not perfect (which nothing truly is, obviously), it is undeniably a novel control system for its target audience.
"doesn’t feel right" So your point is simply that your subjective opinion is that it 'doesn't feel right'? What does that even mean? I'm not saying, and the announcement is not saying, that this is some platonic ideal of accessibility controls. Not sure what you are getting at at all.
I probably won't. Everyone is busy discussing how amazing is this collection of markdown files for Claude... which Claude is known to randomly ignore. And it's generally known that LLMs "hallucinate" court cases and quotes, and this has already happened several times in various jurisdictions.
And yet here we are. I get downvoted for not being excited enough.
By this logic, we wouldn't have some of the breakthroughs made throughout history. Outsiders have made some pretty interesting leaps (later honed by experts). Expertise is great, but it can exist outside of formal education, and it isn't the only metric.
That's a lazy argument. Obviously tools are tools. But if tool A revolutionized human society and has massively advanced technology (and CAN be used for harm), where tool B's positive impact is a drop in the bucket by comparison and has the potential for an outsized amount of harm, obviously tool B is comparatively a bad tool.
That is an insane take. So according to you, for example, it wouldn't have been justifiable for jews to carry out violent acts against the Nazi regime during WW2? Or any other oppressed people do so?
That's an absurd statement. By your logic, you can't just say that we have the smallpox vaccine "because of Edward Jenner". Because you would also "have to prove we could not do it without Edward Jenner". What does that even mean??
I can’t elaborate on your example as I’m not very knowledge-able on the smallpox vaccine bit that depends on how close we were to inventing the vaccine anyway - I’ll take your word on we were not and Edward Jenner had a revolutionary advancement. Then we can say we have the vaccine thanks to him.
But when it comes to space technology, if it was possible to produce the same technology by targeting the required technology directly, we can’t say it was because of war only because some of the inventions of war were re-used. It eould be like saying we have a 45th president thanks to Trump - it would be absurd as we’d have a 45th president anyway.
So I do not think there is enough grounds to attribute this mission’s success to war - with some of the war’s budget, NASA could have invented the required technology anyway.
reply