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- Hacker News
- Norris's dodge on iPhone scanning is telling—processing on-device keeps it secure and magical, but imagine Personas popping up in FaceTime cameos or ARKit bridges to iPads. How soon until we see cross-device ecosystems like Microsoft's Mesh, but with Apple's polish? Eager for that affordability leap; until then, thanks for the vivid demo, Scott—now I need a Vision Pro buddy just to test this out.by kilibe
- How's the latency? Latency is what makes Zoom et al painful for me now - it ruins the ability to politely interject, give confirmatiom, etc. Does Apple do a better job of this than Google/Zoom? In theory you could get 20-30ms (just spitballing numbers I used to get playing shooters!) but i've never got anywhere near that with vid conferencing.
Even so, latency-in-zoom kind of becomes an attribute of the medium and you learn to adapt. How does it feel with the Vision Pro though? The article talks about a really convincing sense of being in the same place with someone - how does latency affect that? (And does it differ based on if you're all physically in Silicon Valley or not?)
by akdor1154 - > latency-in-zoom kind of becomes an attribute of the medium and you learn to adapt.
To some degree but not fully. When you adapt your brain is still doing extra work to compensate, similarly to how you don’t «hear» jet engine noise after acclimating to an airplane but it will still tire you to some degree.
I had Zoom and Teams meetings daily during Covid, and personal FaceTime calls almost daily for a while. I still get «Zoom fatigue» if a call goes on for over an hour, if I need to talk face to face during the call (i.e. no screen sharing, can’t disable video and look at something else, etc.) I’m fine if I don’t look at people’s faces but rather people’s screen sharing.
by setopt - The laws of physics means that the longer the path for your network packet, the higher the latency.
One way latency on the Internet across fiber is about 4μs to 5μs per kilometer in my experience.
For example, SF to Paris is ~40ms one way (it used to be 60ms 15y ago, latency and jitter have really improved).
Double those values for the round trip allowing you to interject in a conversation.
Add wifi, which has terrible latency with a lot of jitter (1ms to 400ms jitter is not uncommon). Wi-Fi 7 should reduce the jitter and latency in theory. We shall see improvements in the coming decade. Cellphone 5G did improve latency for me, so I don't doubt WiFi will eventually deliver.
In other words you need to be within 3Mm (3000km) away to get a chance at a 30ms roundtrip. And that's assuming peer to peer without wifi nor slow devices.
For a conference call, everybody connects to a central server acting as the relay. So now the latency budget is halved already.
by bombela - I would assume any added latency is negligible -- the sensors + interpretation + rendering should be very fast.
But you've still got all the network latency including Wi-Fi latency on both ends. And you always need a small audio buffer so discrete network packets can be assembled into continuous audio without gaps.
So I wouldn't expect this latency to be any different from regular videoconferencing.
by crazygringo - TLDR Gaussian splatting.
What is missing from the article is that creating a model from a few pictures is not that hard (well it is to do well, but hear me out)
The difficult part is animating it realistically with the sensors you have, in real time.
Extracting signal from eye-gaze cameras with a sighlty wider field of view, that allows realistic not not uncanny valley animation is quite hard to do on the general public Peoples faces are all different sizes and shapes, to the point that even getting accraute gaze vectors is hard, let alone smile and check position (those are done with different cameras, not just eye gaze. )
by KaiserPro - This is what fascinates me as well. I have to assume there's a neural net that effectively learns all of the possible muscles in the face. The limited sensor data gets fed in, and it's able to infer the full face shape. It seems perfectly plausible in theory, but I'm still impressed it seems to work so well in practice.by crazygringo
- Came this close to buying an AVP, before learning that they only mirror a single screen with no virtual monitors.
Like, guize, c'mon. Virtual desktop can do three. For 3.5k you gotta do better. I don't particularly need a virtual me in space as much as I need more screens that can do, like, actual work.
by pksebben - is this still the case even with the new M5? if so, wtf appleby bytesandbits
- I've always used 2-3 monitors pretty comfortably but with high latency AI agents adding more concurrency to my workflows I'm feeling very crowded. I would love a VR experience with an arbitrary number of screens/windows as well as more clearly separated environments (like having a visually different virtual office per project) that I can quickly switch between.by efsavage
- For those who have had Persona conversations, how does varying audio latency affect immersion? Is there a recommended chat service?by 1123581321
- I don't use it very frequently but when from the few times I did I can't recall any imperceptible lag via Apple iMessage.by utopiah
- What audio latency?
There's regular latency due to distance, just like on a phone call if you're chatting with someone halfway across the world.
But on a normal connection, audio and the persona should always be in sync, the same way audio and video are over Zoom or FaceTime.
There shouldn't be any extra latency for the audio only.
by crazygringo - There's a video version of the article linked partway down which actually works better than the text one for seeing the thing in action a bit.by stevage
- Tested talked similar about Personas. https://youtu.be/LzZ2j9CAcww?si=IRvxNaNZeBQp7WLVby october8140
- I'm usually a fan of Norm's videos, but this might be the first time I've seen a Tested video that felt more like paid-promotion than an actual unbiased review. I don't keep up with it though.by samplatt
- On last SIGGRAPH there was actually a company which makes dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting videos now rather than static scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/live/ucRukZM0d1s?t=1h1m50s
https://zju3dv.github.io/freetimegs/
The videos can be played back in real-time, though they require multiple cameras to capture.
by cubefox - It’s amazing tech, it’s just a solution looking for a problem.
It feels a bit like the original Segway’s over-engineered solution versus cheap Chinese hoverboards, then the scooters and e-bikes that took over afterwards.
Why would I be paying all this money for this realistic telepresence when my shitbox HP laptop from Walmart has a perfectly serviceable webcam?
by dangus - yes and to a degree which i find particularly interesting. its never going to happen because of your example
i prefer working in my vp and see a possible world where vp makes my remote team collaborate as if were in the office, from the comfort of the most ergonomic location in my house
it solves this problem and 0.0001% of people are dorks like me who try and say, "they did it" while the rest of the world keeps going to work as before
all of the tech problems were solvable. people simply dont want to put a thing on their face and i think thats unsolvable
by boogieknite - I'm curious about practical application in everyday life of these avatars - but in the real life, not examples provided by marketing department. With that price Vision Pro still feels like a toy for wealthy people, or perhaps for CEOs of companies who can afford conferences in virtual environment. But then exactly, why? Majority of world tested during pandemic video calls, conferences and all sorts of other activities like virtual crowds for tv programs (pretty sure British panel shows shown grids of people as a substitute for studio audience). News services were inviting their guests by video calls when Skype was still around.by pndy
- I always viewed the current generations of 'cheap Chinese hovebords' etc being a direct descendant of the Segway, and that Kamen and his believers weren't quite as ridiculous as we thought them at the time - they were just ahead of their time and expecting too much from too low a point in the technology curve.by detritus
- I live half way across the world from my folks so I don’t see them often. I’d love something that gives me a greater sense of presence than a video call can give.by osaariki
- Why do we have video call meetings when people mostly just listen and the information is carried via audio?
Why do we have 4K monitors when 1920x1080 is perfectly fine for 99.999% of use cases?
If you look at the world through this lens called "serviceability" you'll think everything is a solution looking for a problem.
by raincole - I disagree, because it answers a pretty simple question: How to be present in a video call when you're using the headset.
To me it would be a shortcoming of the device if I couldn't show me and the thing I'm working on at the same time.
by quitit - Many use cases come to mind. If (retinal?) identities were private, encrypted, and “anonymized” in handshake:
web browsing without captchas, anubis, bot tests, etc. (“human only” internet, maybe like Berners-Lee’s “semantic web” idea [1][2])
Non “anonymized”:
non-jury court and arbitration appearances (with expansion of judges to clear backlogs [3])
medical checkups and social care (eg neurocognitive checkups for elderly, social services checkins esp. children, checkins for depressed or isolated needing offwork social interactions, etc.)
bureaucratic appointments (customer service by humans, DMV, building permits, licenses, etc.)
web browsing for routine tasks without logins (banks, email, etc)
[1] <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/06/tim-berners-le...> [2] <https://newtfire.org/courses/introDH/BrnrsLeeIntrnt-Lucas-Nw...> [3] <https://nysfocus.com/2025/05/30/uncap-justice-act-new-york-c...>
by atcon - I used my VP extensively recently when working remotely. It's not glamorous, but I used Screen Sharing with a Macbook that grants you a virtual ultrawide monitor.
Once you're already in VR, it's nice to not have to break out for a meeting, and that's where Personas fit in.
It's not a killer app carrying the product, it's a necessary feature making sure there's not a gap in workflow.
by AceJohnny2 - There's a bit more of a conversation / demo here which is pretty impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbZfbqHeJNU.by _kb
- The floating heads in a room having a meeting reminds me of terrible sci fi.by Mistletoe
- Oh man that was weird; I opened the video in a private browsing thing to not pollute my watch history and the version I got was automatically translated to Dutch, including voiceover which I presume is AI driven to try and match the tone of the original video. Still a bit robotic though.
While I have my browser configured to prefer Dutch, the second one is English; I wish I could tell it / them that I don't want them to translate anything if it's in one of those languages.
by Cthulhu_ - CorridorDigital recently used the tech to assist in remaking the rooftop bullet-time scene from The Matrix. It's used for making the environment instead of modeling it from scratch.by Stalker_Aloy