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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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.

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?

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