Author | Zheng Yue
Edit | Jing Yu
On the last weekend of the end of March, the Wangjing Beijing Civil Aviation International Conference Center had the highest concentration of Visionpro in the country.
This is the world's first developer conference since the launch of Apple VisionPro, where hundreds of people come to exchange the latest news about current VisionOS application development.
There are now more than 1,300 vos native apps and more than 1.5 million apps compatible with iPhone and iPad. Meta has been doing it for 10 years and currently doesn't have that many apps.
What do these people from home and abroad who are most concerned about VisionOS talk about? Although everyone is almost cocooned when they hear the word "killer app", no one doesn't care: what is that app?
Contains Visionpro in a variety of concentrations
As soon as I entered the venue, I saw two people holding "magic wands" in the void in their hands, gesturing and reciting words, and a circle of people around me to take pictures. The sharing in the venue and the display of the booth were carried out simultaneously, and the venue was full, and you had to queue up in front of the booth to experience popular apps.
Let's Visionpro Event Live Wand PK | Image Credit: Geek Park
The queue in front of the Inspaze booth developed by Zhiwen Group is always the longest, and when you ask everyone which apps are worth experiencing, almost everyone will recommend it, and there are many hot people in the circle who say that it is the "killer app" of the current VP.
Inspaze is a social app that brings a whole new level of imagination to social networking in VPs. Inspaze combines real-time voice translation, persona, spatial audio, social games, and more to provide a space that belongs to you, while supporting social networking on iPhone and VP. Friends can come to your space and listen to your music and play chess together in your living room.
Socializing in virtual spaces is not uncommon in the VR era. However, with the limitations of hardware shipments and computing power, the previous classic social applications did not work well.
Inspaze Effect | Image source: Zhiwen Group
And since VP's spatial effect is unmatched on previous devices, on Inspaze, I think I'd like to go to someone else's "QQ Zone" sofa and sit around, surrounded by butterflies and vinyl music, play board games, and chat. At the very least, this app will make me regret that VP is too expensive, otherwise I would have liked to play more.
This application also has a special background, which is currently the only VisionOS application built from scratch by an Internet company in China without relying on any original business.
In fact, Inspaze is one of the most fancy apps, with more applications focused on lightweight, functional applications. After all, in the early desert virtual space, the first batch of developers must have come to do the infrastructure, and the application development in the era of spatial computing should step on the shoulders of giants in the 2D era.
Even though the VP version has not yet been released, the enthusiasm of developers and consumers in China for Apple Vision Pro is very high, and it can even be said that Chinese developers are the most enthusiastic VP developers.
However, Chinese users will find that visionOS does not provide Chinese input methods and voice recognition. Of course, Chinese developers can't afford to do anything about it, and Dino is an app that solves this problem right away, and it's very chic in terms of interaction design.
With Dino, you can enter Chinese by voice when you are offline, and when the input is finished, Dino will automatically add the text content to the clipboard, and you can also drag and drop it into any text box.
Dino interaction: When you pinch the voice input with two fingers, the dialog box tilts slightly, like "prick up your ears to listen"| Image Credit: Geek Park
Talking to some VP users who have been using it for a while, I found that the most used function is to watch videos on the ceiling, lying motionless on the bed, which can greatly reduce weight bearing and dizziness, and painless immersion.
Then the player is a rigid need, Moon Player is an all-round player for Apple Vision Pro, which supports playing videos in various formats and provides a stable and smooth viewing experience. The Moon team also has a product, Moon Portal, which allows users to freely decorate the space, explore the AI world, and various 3D scenes.
In VP, the weather forecast function will also be much more enjoyable than in the 2D era. Seaons, a spatial simulator app, is an AVP-based immersive weather app that includes 34 immersive weather atmospheres and spatial audio that allows you to feel the weather, snow and fog in TA's place after asking "What's the weather like there?" Developer Cosmo said that in the future, there will be more imagination and new products from this app.
If you don't catch up with the iPhone moment, catch up with the VP moment
Developers are in a vibrant state, and everyone may have some expectations that they may be able to catch up with the same "VP moment" as the "iPhone moment".
Now is perhaps the best time for XR application development, and for VOS developers. VP has just arrived, and the freedom of the application development environment has not yet reached the point of life and death, and the support of the entire ecological chain is very rich.
Developers at the scene talked about the obvious advantages of Vision OS development, Apple provides a complete set of solutions for UI and interaction, as well as a complete human-machine interface guide to guide developers on the right design approach. And Vision OS was developed with Swift UI rather than Unity, which means it's a framework or platform designed for apps, not games. It also has a low learning barrier to develop, allowing for both iOS and Vision S versions and adding unique 3D experiences to Vision.
It is foreseeable that spatial computing will also enter the next era along with the productivity revolution brought about by AI. If you want to build more in spatial computing, AI will definitely play a bigger role in the future. There was also a lot of sharing about the combination of AI and spatial computing at this conference.
Many people want AI to be used in 3D content asset generation, but unfortunately it hasn't worked well yet. However, at present, the efficiency of AI-generated 3D assets has been improved, but the quality is very low and cannot be used as PGC, but can it be used as a UGC tool?
He has developed a combat-based AI-generated game with a very simple gameplay in which one element battles another, and the winning element merges the other. As you can see in the picture above, the panda blends into a table.
Behind the protagonists of this conference, there is also an ecological chain that considers to provide them with support and subsequent commercialization.
Morden Chen, Senior Director of Monetization at Moloco Greater China, a machine learning company, shared his views on how new hardware is taking up users' time and how the B-side can be commercialized in it. He said, "In the future, when wearable devices enter the market, we have to consider how much time it can occupy, who is behind the time, is it a young person who has no spending power, or is it someone who has spending power? These factors will finally fall to the perspective of commercialization. Machine learning capabilities can help better commercialize applications. 」
"Killer apps aren't found"
Having talked to everyone, it is generally believed that it seems that it is not yet the time for the Vision Pro killer app to appear. In terms of hardware shipments, the iPhone 4 sold 100 million units when it made a big wave, and it is generally believed that XR device shipments will not have to be 10 million units to have a certain order of magnitude of feedback.
Hardware shipments can mean that new interaction methods can be popularized to a certain extent, and when a certain number of people are familiar with the new interactive experience, they can get entertainment experience from it. It's like learning to tap and swipe the screen to cut a watermelon and fight an angry bird. Nowadays, people need to change from multi-touch to hand-eye interaction, and they are familiar with the interaction methods such as gaze click in VP, finger click and grab and place in space, etc., in fact, it is the same as swiping the screen, which is a natural interaction that can be learned as soon as you learn.
Vision Pro Fruit Ninja | Image source: Apple's official website
Judging from the rapid growth of the number of applications, all kinds of small applications can make this device really integrate into life and work scenes, rather than attracting heavy users of game consoles in the large-scale 3D absorption.
The content ecology and hardware shipments have always been a chicken-and-egg problem, and no matter how many XR devices are shipped that lie at home and "eat ashes", they will not be able to complete the subversive mission, and killer applications will not appear.
Behind the current lack of immersion and 3D experience in the Vision OS ecosystem, Apple may pay more attention to application richness, rather than just the immersive interactive experience of headsets and large-scale games. Apple's idea may be to move the iPad to the Vision Pro first, so that people can feel familiar, and then slowly 3D it into real spatial computing.
Another factor holding back the emergence of killer apps is cost. While the cost of developing XR content for VOS has decreased compared to other platforms, it is still high, resulting in a high percentage of paid apps in VOS.
According to Appfigures, most apps on the Vision Pro platform are currently available as direct paid downloads, rather than free downloads followed by in-app purchases. The average price of Vision Pro-exclusive apps is US$5.67 (currently about 41 RMB), of which a whopping 53% are paid downloads, compared to apps on other platforms on the App Store as a whole, and only 5% are paid for directly.
The developers say that the most talkative killer apps are investors and the media, but no killer apps are found. Xu Wu Jinge Fund Investment Partner talked in the podcast that the next 3 years will be the "fool's window period" for VP application entrepreneurship, and the industry will form a value consensus, and in the next 6-7 years, there will be a significant increase in hardware and ecology to reach the breaking point. After 10 years, the consumer will feel it very strongly.
According to the news, the Vision Pro will be launched in China in April and May this year. After holding the world's first developer conference in China, Vision Pro's killer app is still far away.