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Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

I was sceptical going into today that Apple were going to be able to make an AR product for $3000 that could justify that price point, especially when my XReal glasses only cost $399. I was even more sceptical when I heard they were going to be VR capable and goggles.

Well fuck me. This thing looks absolutely insane. It’s come in at $3499 and if it performs as good as those videos make out then, if anything, it’s a bargain.

I can’t believe they’ve managed to do away with controllers for everything except serious typing. I can’t believe they’ve managed to cram more pixels than a 4k TV on to the size of a postage stamp. And I can’t believe we’ll soon be reliving memories in 3d (just please put the same camera technology into the phones so the kids don’t have a childhood of staring up at goggle eyed parents until this tech become sufficiently miniaturised).

Computers this decade are going to be incredible.

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I puzzled how you can be surprised by all this. There's nothing here that wasn't well understood, expected. 95% of it is just showing things other devices have done for years.

> I can’t believe they’ve managed to do away with controllers

Meta has been shipping it for several years on the Quest line. It's now extremely good. I'm keen to hear if Apple have shipped something better and they may have, but it's hardly "can't believe" territory.

> I can’t believe they’ve managed to cram more pixels than a 4k TV on to the size of a postage stamp

You're repeating Apple marketing lines verbatim. That's just what a micro OLED display is - the tech has been around for a while. They aren't made by Apple, half a dozen other VR/AR headsets are shipping these.

Well fire the marketing departments of all those other companies then if that's true. Because I've seen their demos and none of them showed anything anywhere near what I saw today.

You can be salty if you want, but Palmer Lucky came out and said this thing is "so good" last week. He knows a thing or two about this stuff and I'm inclined to believe him.

> Well fire the marketing departments of all those other companies

Yes. Meta has been awful at it.

> You can be salty if you want

Unfortunate that you turn to that type of sentiment here. It sours otherwise interesting discussion.

> Palmer Lucky came out and said this thing is "so good" last week

You should definitely understand his history before taking what he says at face value. But nobody is saying this isn't good. It's really good. In fact it's great. But it's not surprising. It's just putting together the best quality of things we've already seen across multiple other products at a very high price.

So, like the iPhone did then? I’m not suggesting this will be a repeat, but I do remember similar commentary. VR has felt like a bunch of tech demo’s (you can see the potential, but no one’s managed to put it all together). I’m interested to see if Apple can make that ‘step change’ as they did with phones.

> like the iPhone did then?

To be fair, only one other phone had a capacitive touchscreen, and Apple provided the first OS that could really leverage it. The situation between Apple Vision and the numerous long-running incumbents with similar technology is very different to the unveiling of the iPhone.

>You should definitely understand his history before taking what he says at face value

Do you mean don't trust what he says about technology because of his political views?

I actually went and booted up my Quest 1 today to check if it had the hand tracking. It did! I logged into HN with it and browsed around for a while. It all felt startlingly futuristic after watching WWDC hype it up so much, I'll admit that much. The experience without controllers is good enough that I question the diminishing returns at $1,500 for the Quest Pro, let alone $3,500 for the Vision Pro.

> Palmer Lucky came out and said this thing is "so good" last week

While we're talking bigwigs, Mark Gurman had some stuff to say about the Quest 3 too:

> I came away impressed with the mixed-reality focus of the Quest 3, the much-improved video pass-through capabilities, the faster performance and the large content library. Assuming the device costs about $500, it would be about a fifth as much as the Apple headset — while being more than a fifth as compelling.

Make of that what you will. I'm going to go watch Avatar in bed.

That's all the validation I need. When John Carmack and Tim Sweeney said the PS5 was "so good" it was the same thing for me. You can geek out all you want on the specs but you're wasting your time. Let the experts weigh in and shut the f*ck up.

PS5 is pretty good

The Quest 2 has a PPI of 780, and the highest out right now is the HP Reverb with a 1057 PPI. The Vision Pro is 4000 PPI, a substantial jump. That’s not “just a micro OLED display.”

Arpara 5k is 3500 ppi.

> 95% of it is just showing things other devices have done for years.

The rallying cry of people being wrong about what makes Apple products successful

I went to Meta’s quest page. I see controllers everywhere. Are those optional? https://www.meta.com/quest/

Which other headsets are using this display tech?

Controllers are largely optional, but if you want to play most serious games they need a controller. I think Apple is largely ignoring the gaming segment with their headset, apart from Apple Arcade games, which sounds like they will be played with a paired Playstation or Xbox controller.

>I see controllers everywhere. Are those optional?

They are. But Oculus (fuck the Meta Quest name lol) Quest are primarily designed and aimed towards gamers, thus the controllers everywhere.

There are 4 IR cameras in Quest 2 and 10 sensors in Quest Pro to control stuff with just your hands.

The Quest Pro (~$1300) has an upgraded resolution of 2,160 x 2,160 pixels per eye. If Apple's marketing is to be believed they are offering double the pixel resolution of the Quest Pro.

I’d never heard of micro OLED before. Do other headsets ship with them?

What stood out to you that justifies the pricetag, especially in comparison to cheaper competitors?

Low latency Video pass through so that you can actually see the physical surroundings and/or your own hands to grab something that somebody is handing to you without getting motion sickness.

Have you tried a Quest Pro? I had the opportunity to use one for a bit and the latency of the passthrough was really good. Apple's implementation will undoubtedly be better but they're not even the first "mainstream" option for low latency video passthrough.

I do that now with a Quest 2. I assume Apple has done it 10x better (for 10x the price) but I wonder if you need it to be 10x better.

I'll preface this by stating that I don't like Apple products and I love my Quest 2.

We absolutely need the 10x better in VR for "spatial computing". Right now the issue with the Quest 2 for work is that it's way too heavy/bulky, is not sharp enough, has jitters that make you dizzy and the integration with your computer is always a bit hit or miss (mine has trouble connecting through AirLink half the time).

The issue with the above is that they are experience breaking. I completely "buy" what Apple is selling here because the current solutions simply fall short. If I can't read code properly or my neck hurts after 1 hour it's a deal breaker and the headset goes unused. 4k per-eye and almost ski mask thickness with the battery in my pocket might actually bridge the gap.

I won't pay 3k+ for it, but we definitely need it to be 10x better because the 1x is still pretty far from a daily driver.

I will quite happily exchange more money for higher quality and higher privacy. Meta have crossed so many ethical boundaries and caused so many societal problems why anyone still wants to give them both their data and their money is beyond me. Do you really want that company to be able to track your eye movements? Any time you browse any product website that information is going to be logged, they're going to know exactly what you want and you're going to be bombarded with adverts wherever they possibly can.

You get what you pay for. If you pay less than what it costs to develop the technology then YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.

It's so atrocious with the Quest 2 as to be virtually unusable though.

It's black and white, low-res, incredibly grainy, and there are weird seams in a bunch of transition spots because the cameras are further apart than the eyes so it's doing weird reconstruction. It's legitimately hard to grab objects using it because your arms and hands aren't quite in the right place.

What Apple looks like they're doing makes it actually useful.

I've heard this expressed a few times but I find it perfectly usable for what I need it for. It is a free feature reusing the existing IR cameras for pass through. My home space is always the pass through home because it's so useful to see your surroundings.

It's definitely not AR but for reaching out and grabbing something (as I was replying to) or walking around it's perfectly acceptable. The 3D effect is perfect so you can actually reach out and grab whatever you want.

Wow, that's really interesting that we have such different experiences with it.

I really want to use passthru as my home space but the problem is that it actually makes me nauseous after a few minutes. I have zero nausea with the Quest 2 normally because everything aligns perfectly in terms of movement and depth, but the 3D in passthru is just off enough to make me feel sick.

Maybe just different people's sensitivities to things.

I wonder if there is variation in hardware. I have a newer Quest 2. I actually do feel sick with movement in VR but I find the 3D passthru to be basically dead-on so it's fine.

I participated in another thread about this and there was the same kind split: People either thought it was great or that it was completely unusable.

I'm wondering the same thing. I bought mine the first month it came out. If they upgraded the cameras at some point that could definitely explain it.

I don’t know, but I suspect that when dealing with immersive experiences there really is a breakpoint that matters deeply. It’s sort of like “retina” screens. You can improve pixel density, but there is a point on the scale where you really stop seeing the pixels and that gives you the “ah ha” moment.

Yeah the way that woman blurred in and out of view was silky smooth.

Well for starters, this demo was so insane and full of tech that no one is even talking about the fact we’re all going to have realistic animated avatars that interpret our facial expressions in real time.

You mean something the Quest does already?

lmfao if you want to compare Zuckerberg's cartoons to a console level animation then sure.

Oscar Wilde - A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Alan Perlis - Lisp programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

TIL! Perlis was got that from Wilde? That makes it even cooler. He was pondering over the Wilde quote and realized that it can be reframed to apply to Lisp.

Plus, it makes Lisp programmers the opposite of cynics, in a way.

If you only care about the cost of every computation, but not its value, then you're a kind of code cynic.

The Quest doesn't. It's not detecting facial expressions at all, it doesn't have cameras to do so.

> just please put the same camera technology into the phones so the kids don’t have a childhood of staring up at goggle eyed parents until this tech become sufficiently miniaturised

This section of the video was just weird. The dad playing with the kids with a headset on points more to a sort of dystopian future than a groundbreaking innovation.

I think people are missing out on the point of that snippet. It was just about reliving some of the special memories of your kids, family members etc which/who you hold special. It’s most definitely not about keeping a headset tied to your head forever. But when you want to capture something, it is there.

And going by the history of digital devices anyhow, use-cases evolve drastically over a lifetime of a product. Let’s wait and see and perhaps experience first.

I didn't see that as being much different from the classic 80's and 90's dad brings huge camcorder on summer vacation. The difference being that now the person wears it as 3D goggle cameras rather than a single camera in one handheld package.

Agree the tech is incredible, it just seems like something I would use a handful of times, be like ‘that was cool’ and then never really use again

You wouldn’t watch movies or shows with this thing? I’m pretty sure this will make watching videos in tiny rectangles from our phones and TVs seem so outdated.

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