Thinking About What Comes Next After Attending visionOS TC and LODGE XR Tech Talk #2
I personally felt that visionOS TC 2025, held on December 6 and 7, and LODGE XR Tech Talk #2 - visionOS, held on the 9th, were continuous events for me. I attended both, so I will write about what I thought during them.
visionOS TC uses a proposal-based system to broadly recruit speakers, and as I wrote in this entry, my proposal did not make it to the final selection.
LODGE XR Tech Talk #2 - visionOS was an event where people could hear sessions that could not be heard at visionOS TC, and thankfully, I was given the opportunity to speak. I cannot be grateful enough that the talk did not stay shelved. I will write about that later.
Actually, before visionOS TC, XR Kaigi was held from December 1 to 3, and I went there as well. One thing that stood out was that there were unexpectedly few exhibits using Vision Pro.
Meta Quest-related devices are strong after all. Vision Pro is expensive, but perhaps people have judged that solutions for visionOS are not much of a business yet. In any case, there were very few. That is my impression after going around almost all the booths in the form of reporting.
One presentation that left an impression at visionOS TC was organizer Hattori-san's message, "Does Apple Vision Pro Have a Future?" From a business standpoint, I think there are probably quite a few people who do not feel much future there. Android XR has also appeared as a powerful rival.
Still, I personally plan to keep pushing visionOS. I will write a little about why.
The devices I personally support right now are Vision Pro and Even G1. My impression is that "Vision Pro has the specs of the currently imaginable ideal form of XR, and someday other devices will likely have specs like Vision Pro, but reality is not there yet." In any case, I think Vision Pro is the most suitable place to pursue what the ideal XR user experience is.
Conversely, I see Even G1 as "a realistic answer for a display-equipped XR device with an ideal body that lasts a full day on battery and is almost indistinguishable from ordinary glasses." If you pursue the ideal as hardware, smartphone integration is unavoidable, and it is also realistically unavoidable that the display becomes monochrome.
In a sense, both are charging toward ideals, and I also think neither is probably a mass-adoption type. Still, there is no doubt that eventually XR devices will appear with a body like Even G1 and performance like Vision Pro.
I Successfully Spoke at LODGE XR Tech Talk #2 - visionOS
While I was thinking about those things at visionOS TC, around the day before the event, the organizer of LODGE XR Tech Talk asked whether I would speak on the LT topic I had submitted as a proposal. It was a very welcome offer, so of course I happily accepted.
The presentation slides are below.
The EOS R50 V and R5 Mark II covered in this talk are Canon cameras, and I had bought one other Canon camera before.
It is a professional video camera called the XH-A1. The video camera on the tripod in this photo is that camera.
If my memory is correct, this model released in 2006 sold fairly well and was used in many places. I bought mine around 2008. I used it for streaming Ustream programs and other things, but after that it stayed buried deep in my room and had not seen the light of day until this week.
As a personal feeling, I wanted to hold a proper retirement ceremony for it too, so I decided to place the camera next to me for this occasion. It might be the last time I ever do a session about Canon cameras. In the session, as a comparison with the R5 Mark II, which can shoot in 8K, I introduced the story by saying that the first camera I bought recorded in a standard called HDV (1440 x 1080).
This camera was active when I bought it, but after a while I stopped using it. There were any number of opportunities and ways to make use of it. Personally, I think that was because I did not persistently and deeply use it. If you keep jumping to the next thing whenever something new appears, you can never dig deeply.
I think both VR180 video and photos on Vision Pro are still in a developing stage. And if you want to see the latest form of this field, Apple TV Immersive may be the best place to look. The distributed programs are becoming more elaborate with each installment. If we are thinking about the present state of the future, I think it may be Vision Pro. And I myself will dig deeper with the devices I currently have.