Apple nonchalantly released iOS 18 with a new feature that’s about to change the lives of a huge part of the population. Vehicle Motion Cues is an accessibility feature that’s on by default and activates when your iPhone detects a moving vehicle around you.

It works by layering a bunch of animated dots on top of the content you’re looking at. When the device detects changes in the vehicle’s motion, it animates the dots accordingly, tricking your brain into thinking everything is fine instead of making you feel like you need to puke because the real-life physics engine stopped working.

I’ve struggled with motion sickness and haven’t read a book in a car or bus in 29 years. I didn’t find it very convincing that showing little circles on top of everything else would help, but yesterday, I spent 24 minutes on a bus, reading a whole chapter, and I was completely fine.

That never happened before.

Vehicle Motion Cues works, and it literally changed my life.

Comparing the current Quest ecosystem to the very first iteration of Apple's Vision Pro doesn't make sense. This isn't because it wouldn't be a fair comparison, given that Vision Pro is still in its infancy, but rather because the Quest lacks an app ecosystem.

The word and definition of "app" do the heavy lifting in that sentence.

The Quest has a plethora of amazing experiences. It's the best platform for diving into literal virtual reality and shared (mostly gaming) experiences. While these are technically applications, they're not what people commonly think about as apps.

Spatial Computing

If you go ahead and browse through Meta's Quest Store, you'll find everything from drawing in the space around you, to virtual meeting spaces, to ways to learn piano and even a handful of solutions for those who want to work out while wearing their headset, for whatever reason. What you won't find are Slack, Discord, any kind of note-taking app, a way to write down tasks, or anything else you'd expect from your computer.

That's where Spatial Computing comes into play. The term is more than Apple slapping their branding magic onto something that was already available. Spatial Computing is computing. You, using a computer, in the space around you.

Let's consider the Xbox. Yes, tEcHniCalLy the Xbox is a computer but only pedants would call it that. It's a console and does a great job at being one. Sure, you can open a web browser on it but there's really no reason to do so on a regular basis. The Quest is more like a console than a computer.

A shared design language

As far as I know, there's not even a UI framework for Quest development. Most of it happens in Unity, which is notoriously bad when it comes to creating 2D interfaces. There are a handful of other solutions to get something running on Quest but there's no chance of Quest apps actually getting to a point where the system as a whole has a unified design language.

Which is fine for games/experiences, there's no unified design language between Fortnite and Assassin's Creed either. It doesn't matter, because they're unique experiences.

This is not fine for an operating system of a computing platform.

It might feel like a small and obvious thing that Apple allows iPad apps to run on Vision Pro but it isn't. On day one of Vision Pro, there were more apps to manage your calendar than after years and years of Quest's existence. Which makes sense, since one of them is a game console and the other is a computer. One of them more or less requires you to start your development in a game engine, the other allows you to create a good-looking, albeit basic todo app with 30 lines of code.

Can Meta massage Quest into becoming an app platform?

I guess?!

It would be a long way to get there and you'll arrive at the same "quality" of apps Android can try to boast about but it's possible in theory. Can Vision Pro be used for VR experiences? Sure. It's already possible, with the only caveat being that there are no available controllers at the moment.

Quest and Vision Pro only share one similarity: People strap displays to their heads to interact with software. Everything else is fundamentally different. It can be compared but there's not really a good reason to do so.

It’s the Mac’s 40th birthday, and people on Mastodon are sharing their very first Macs.

Mine was a Mac Mini G4. I didn’t even realize that I actually had started using Macs before the Intel transition happened until I read the Wikipedia article about it just now. The hardware specifics didn’t interest me back then. Fifteen-year-old me wanted to become a designer and knew that all the designers he looked up to used Macs, so there was really no choice.

My previous computer was a very old and very slow PC that didn’t even run the games all my friends were playing together online. Let’s not even talk about the performance of my pirated copy of Photoshop CS2.

Unboxing and placing the Mac Mini on top of my weird glass corner desk felt like receiving a ticket into a whole new world. I finally could do the things I saw designers do online. OS X felt like it was a gift from the gods. Everything was pretty, worked well, and instilled in me an appreciation for excellence that I hadn’t felt before and that is still going strong.

Looking back, that Mac Mini G4 wasn’t just a piece of tech; it was the starting point of my design journey. It turned my aspirations into real projects and set the standard for what I expect from technology. As the Mac celebrates its 40th, I realize it’s not just about the machine but about the doors it opened for me. It’s funny how a small box can play such a big part in your story.

Disclaimer: This is going to sound extremely petty. Poor baby is frustrated because he logistically can’t spend €4000, oh no!

Attentive readers know that I’ve been talking about how VR and AR are going to be the future of interfaces for years. One of the main reasons for me finally getting into coding was knowing that I had to be able to manipulate real interfaces directly, especially when interface design is entering the third dimension.

Apple’s Vision Pro announcement came quite a few years after I first pronounced XR to be the future of computing. I immediately put the required money into a budget meant for Vision Pro as soon as it would become available. It was my goal to be there, on day one, playing around with the hardware, writing software, and experiencing the new frontier of interface design firsthand.

Well, that didn’t quite work out. I somehow didn’t expect Apple to only sell it in the US at first. That, combined with the fact that you need to go to an Apple Store to have your face and eyes measured for the device to be properly set up, creates a logistical hurdle that I’m not willing to jump over. I won’t fly to the US just to buy a device.

So, this is me, frustrated that I have to sit on the sidelines, watching other people discover a device I’ve been waiting for for years. This is obviously irrational because I’m not actually losing anything, except perhaps for a head start in spatial computing experience but still… it hurts a little.

At least it’s a good exercise in patience.