Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, having used the Oculus Quest, my primary thought on how to make VR go mainstream is to reduce the size/weight/bulk of the headset. Strapping the battery to my waist/chest/back/leg/arm would be strongly preferable to having it on my head.

It's easy and convenient to snake a power cable down my shirt and into my pocket -- I do this all the time with my corded headphones to keep the wire out of the way.

I agree that it doesn't seem very "Apple" in that it's not a sexy solution, but there may be real physical constraints to battery size here that are not surmountable without a giant breakthrough in battery technology (that would probably be bigger news than anything VR related).

View on HN

I fly FPV drones, and use a headset for that - a Skyzone 04X. It doesn't have an onboard battery, but I can plug in a Li-Po, put it in my pocket, and let the cable just kinda hang. It doesn't get in the way and is significantly more comfortable than my Quest 2.

The main problem with the Quest 1's (and Quest 2's) weight is that it's all in the front, making you feel top-heavy; you can actually make it feel "lighter" by adding weights to the back (commonly, external battery packs, but I literally strapped a ziplock bag of sand to the back and even that was an improvement)

The Quest Pro is a major improvement in this regard; despite being heavier on paper, it feels much lighter because of the weight distribution.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the waist-mounted battery pack is purely for auxiliary power for extended use, which makes sense.

Really? Having used wired VR, my primary thought on making VR go mainstream was to remove the wires. The Quest has problems, sure, but the vision of an "all-in-one" headset is simply so Apple that I'm not sure Apple can resist it. With more efficient hardware and more elaborate battery tech, Apple may well be able to brute-force these issues (especially if they're optimizing for video calls).

It's just really bizarre to read about. Its very possible that Apple is working on a headset, but these rumors just don't sound like something they'd do.

Wires by themselves are not evil, the annoying thing about what we consider "wired VR" is that the wires are attached to some fixed point in space (the computer), so you need to dedicate some spatial awareness to where the wires are and periodically untangle yourself or whatever.

In contrast, a wire between two parts of the body that don't move that much in normal operation is basically effortless, and besides the knee-jerk perception "eww wires" isn't a real issue. (By "don't move that much" I mean that the movement range of the spine, the longest section of body that the wire would span, is much more limited than, say, the arms. Controllers wired to a headset would be supreme chaos, but headset wired to a belt piece is not nearly as bad)

I tried the Magic Leap at work, and the computing and battery is off-headset, attached to your pants or something with a simple wire. It did not impair usage nearly as much as, say, my HTC Vive, which has a long wire to my computer I must take care not to step on or tangle myself.

On the other hand, when going out with VR friends, the Quest users are always the first to head off, due to their batteries running low, even though the humans would be comfortable continuing to use it. So I guess a place to put more battery, or even more computing power, (though that is rather more complicated) would not be a bad idea at all.

Generally, I agree. I played a lot of Beat Saber with wired headphones to lower the latency, and the effect of two connected headpieces wasn't too distracting. I'll even concede that tethering headsets is probably the way to go, for now.

What I don't understand is this best-of-both-worlds approach that people seem to be illustrating. If you're going to be tethered either way, why would anyone use it with the battery pack plugged in? Will the battery pack be an optional accessory altogether? Will the battery pack also have the CPU in it? Where will it plug in?

There's so many questions that just don't make sense here. Even previous shockers like the Macbook notch can be easily waived with aspect ratios and the menubar - this just makes no sense to me. Especially if they're chasing benign use-cases like office aides.

> Quest users are always the first to head off, due to their batteries running low

I'm not sure if they know this, but you can charge the Quest while using it. I use the same 20-foot USB-C cable I used for tethering and it works fine, albeit adding a bit of clunk.

There is a huge difference to being tethered to a fixed device (like a desktop computer) and having a wire running to your own body. Having a wire running to your own body, you can still do all of the spinning/ducking/jumping/whatever that all sorts of games require without worrying about getting tangled.

Running the wire down the inside of my shirt and to my hip is completely negligible. Having a wire plugged in to a stationary device / the wall is absolutely non-negligible.

> you can charge the Quest while using it

Yeah, but you need a really long cable or be restricted to sitting games. Most of my friends don't have that, only a short charging cable. (They use the WiFi linking for playing PC VR games)

And the one that does have a long cable fears using it for anything where you have to turn around, because there isn't much strain relief, and a broken USB port of a Quest in Brazil is an expensive repair.

As I recall from the article, the batteries will be swappable. That means:

1. There will be a small battery in the headset

2. Processor can't be on your waist/pocket

The most successful headset will be one that is powerful and lightweight. Right now we seem to only be able to make one of those things. If it's powerful, then it's a heavy, bulky brick strapped to your head. If it's lightweight, then it's laggy and nauseating.

Moving some of the heft to a separate module is one way to cheat and get both of those things. It's a 3rd tradeoff.

When you used wired VR in the past, was it tethered to a stationary computer? If so, then this is different at least because you're not tied to any specific spot in the room.

All that said, I agree that it's very "un-Apple-like" to have a clunky two-piece solution. But it might be a stepping stone solution to show what's possible with a lithe-but-powerful headset.

> But it might be a stepping stone solution to show what's possible with a lithe-but-powerful headset.

Like the dozens of headsets without batteries that preceded them? I think Apple has a shot at delivering a decent tethered VR experience or a decent standalone experience but not both. If they try chasing this $3,000 'worst of both worlds' solution, they'll never move more units than Oculus/Meta has (over 10 million to-date).

I'm being generous and assuming that this is misinformation, but releasing a product like this might be their biggest head-scratcher since the upside-down Magic Mouse.

I may be showing my ignorance here... Did all those previous headsets actually work with a small belt-mounted module? Or did they connect to a gaming PC?

I'm imagining that the rumored product here has a small thing you clip on your waist, not a full-blown computer with an Nvidia card and fans and stuff.

They could work with anything, really. It wasn't uncommon to see people with backpack-mounted gaming laptops or even mini PC builds connected on the other end. Point being - tethered headsets are been-there, done-that. If this rumor is true (which I seriously doubt), Apple is positioning themselves at a direct disadvantage relative to the rest of the market.

Like, if the headset's "killer app" is videoconferencing, why wouldn't you use anything else? You could use the LIDAR on your iPhone, the 6DOF tracking in a $400 Oculus Quest, the much-nicer full-body tracking of a Valve Index setup... the possibilities are limitless, and this rumor purports that Apple is choosing the worst one. I just refuse to believe something like this will ship.

> They could work with anything, really. It wasn't uncommon to see people with backpack-mounted gaming laptops or even mini PC builds connected on the other end. Point being - tethered headsets are been-there, done-that.

That's what I was thinking, and that's not what's being rumored here. It's a small battery pack, not a 2-lb mini PC or a backpack or anything like that. I'm assuming that they got the headset really light. The Quest is still over 500g, which is heavy for being strapped to your head. So imagine they targeted the headset to < 200g, and the only way they could hit that target was to take the battery and move it somewhere else. (And also charge an obscene amount of money for carbon fiber or whatnot)

I'm not going to disagree on the price points, the lack of gaming focus at first, or any of the other complaints about this strategy. It all does seem a bit weird. But I can totally see the value in taking as much weight as possible off of the head, even if that means moving it to your belt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com