8/15/2023 0 Comments Mac os preview ditheringI’ll come back to that last paragraph later on I don’t think it’s quite right, in part because Apple Vision shows that the first part of the excerpt wasn’t right either. And, I’d add, it’s why platform companies like Microsoft and Google have focused on augmented, not virtual, reality, and why the mysterious Magic Leap has raised well over a billion dollars to-date always in your vision is even more compelling than always in your pocket (as is always on your wrist). Thus, when thinking about the question of what might displace the smartphone, I suspect what we today think of a “spoke” will be a good place to start. I highlight that timing reference because it’s worth remembering that smartphones were originally conceived of as a spoke around the PC hub it turned out, though, that by virtue of their mobility - by being useful in more places, and thus capable of augmenting more experiences - smartphones displaced the PC as the hub. It’s the same story with watches and wearables generally, at least for now. Small wonder, then, that all of the big virtual reality announcements are expected to be video game and movie related.Īugmentation is more interesting: for the most part it seems that augmentation products are best suited as spokes around a hub a car’s infotainment system, for example, is very much a device that is focused on the current reality of the car’s occupants, and as evinced by Ford’s announcement, the future here is to accommodate the smartphone. Movies and videogames are about different realities productivity software and devices like smartphones are about augmenting the present. This is more than a semantic distinction about different types of headsets: you can divide nearly all of consumer technology along this axis. Just look at the names: “virtual” reality is about an immersive experience completely disconnected from one’s current reality, while “augmented” reality is about, well, augmenting the reality in which one is already present. I think it’s useful to make a distinction between virtual and augmented reality. I have, for as long as I have written about the space, highlighted the differences between VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). The societal impacts, though, are much more complicated. What surprised me is that Apple exceeded my expectations on both counts: the hardware and experience were better than I thought possible, and the potential for Vision is larger than I anticipated. The high expectations came from the fact that not only was this product being built by Apple, the undisputed best hardware maker in the world, but also because I am, unlike many, relatively optimistic about VR. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years - but not forgotten! I was able to email Bill Atkinson in January, 2003 and inquire about the details of the algorithm he was kind enough to respond with a brief write up of the routine - 15 minutes later I had it up and running.It’s far better than I expected, and I had high expectations. The dither matrix was implemented as an option in Apple's long-lost HyperScan software (A HyperCard stack with some XCMDs/XFCNs) that would connect an early Mac to a flatbed scanner. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or "Error-diffusion" filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop). Years ago, during the development of the first Mac, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & now nature photography fame) discovered a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. Specifically, HyperDither implements the ?Atkinson? dithering filter. HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine.
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