Apple's $3500 Headset: The Ultimate '90s NPC Simulator
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from Tom Warren (@tomwarren), a well-known tech journalist. The tweet reads, 'Apple's $3,500 Vision Pro headset turns everyone into a '90s NPC on FaceTime calls 😂'. Below the text are two side-by-side images taken from video reviews. The images show the digital 'Personas' created by the Apple Vision Pro for FaceTime calls. These avatars appear as slightly blurry, computer-generated floating heads and torsos within semi-transparent rounded rectangles. The lighting and texture give them an artificial, slightly unnerving look, characteristic of the 'uncanny valley.' The watermarks credit Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) and Joanna Stern / Wall Street Journal as the sources. The meme humorously critiques the graphical fidelity of this key feature on a very expensive, cutting-edge piece of hardware, comparing the result to the non-player characters (NPCs) found in 1990s video games, which are known for their primitive, low-polygon graphics
Comments
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For $3500, the Vision Pro's 'Persona' feature successfully solves the uncanny valley problem by landing you squarely in the '90s video game cutscene valley instead
Nothing like spending $3.5k on spatial computing just to rediscover that real-time volumetric video still renders at ‘Quake II-quality’ when the network budget is the real boss fight
After 20 years of optimizing video codecs and building ML models for facial recognition, we've finally achieved the dream: making $3,500 hardware that renders humans with the same emotional range as a Goldeneye 64 guard who just noticed you're not supposed to be in the facility
When your $3,500 spatial computing headset renders you with worse fidelity than a PlayStation 2 character, you've successfully achieved what we call 'negative ROI on polygon count.' It's the hardware equivalent of spending six sprints building a microservice architecture only to discover your monolith had better latency - except here, Apple shipped the technical debt as a feature and called it 'Persona.'
Vision Pro Personas are the CAP theorem for faces: realism, low latency, and battery life - pick two; v1 partitioned realism
Two chips (M2 + R1) and a Neural Engine later, and my face still compiles to PS1-era geometry - guess that’s the cost of meeting the motion‑to‑photon SLO
Vision Pro Personas: Apple's genius optimization - zero facial meshes for sub-1ms latency, at the cost of looking like a Quake 1 reject texture
Door Kickers 2 operator avatars Comment deleted
explain this person that games back in 90s looked like this Comment deleted
it’s 80s Comment deleted
thats remake, here is original Comment deleted
don't blame the devs they had to calculate normals and vertices on cpu Comment deleted
he's not wrong but that's like mid-2000s territory. Maybe Oblivion or something Comment deleted
Honestly, it is reminiscent of that time you got prerendered box art and maybe cutscenes - but the game itself could handle like 250 triangles at a time. Comment deleted
'90s? don't modern games also give those boxes? Comment deleted
https://yt.cdaut.de/watch?v=NsL32y--h00 This is exactly what I mean. Around the Y2k the difference was really striking. And the renders looked kinda like those faces. Comment deleted
thanks for the huge flashing, really helps with my headache /s 🥺 Comment deleted
https://yt.cdaut.de/watch?v=JMe0XeWI1zo Another example Comment deleted
not quite 90s, but more like early 00s, even in late 00s (ig after 2005) games with high quality visuals started emerging. Spare me if I'm wrong Comment deleted
Spar me if you're right. Comment deleted
lmao exactly what I was thinking of when I saw that meme XD Comment deleted