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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with.

It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?

> In many cases it literally hurt to do so. Not with the Apple Vision Pro – text is super crisp and legible at all sizes and at far “distances” within your space.

That's the part I was most intrigued with, and on one size given the 4K resolution per eye, text being readable was expected, but I can't wait to have more details on how "crisp and legible at all sizes" it is. I have no idea of what's M.Panzerino's threshold is for "crisp", hope it's better than just Full HD level.

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> > Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with.

> It was mentionned in the keynote as well...should Apple really brag about their patent minefield in a field that is in need of more players and more efforts to push it forward ?

That I didn't understood. Should that be a message to the competition? What should that tell me as a developer? What should that message tell me as a consumer?

As a consumer may I don't care how many patents are there. Because I don't have a benefit at all.

As a developer may it means, that a develop for a consumer base, but it is hard to predict how big that will be. Competition needs to work around those patents or will not exists at all because of possible licensing fees. So, should I start development or not?

The message is to shareholder/investors;"This is defensible, We have moat".

Having a patent moat is also a message to the consumer. Apple has had promised features pulled because it ran into somebody else’s patent minefield and it can affect device price considerably. Having a software update pull features for legal reasons is also a terrible experience.

Many non software folks I meet look at patents as a sign of ingenuity, a reward, and evidence of successful creations / engineering. Its not viewed as a negative. It also suggests Apple's version will be better than others, for a long time, because all of the good parts are patented.

(It makes me sick to the stomach personally)

They advertise the "4K per eye" as some kind of an advantage. They need to do this to have 3D vision, but it doesn't improve the resolution, it's still just 4K.

And the 4K is across your whole FOV, I would like to see a comparison with some standard monitors (4K at 27" and 32") at particular distances from your eyes.

I suppose because they didn't publish anything it is still significantly worse than hi-res monitors (just better than all previous headsets).

At 90-100 degrees, a 4K/eye display will likely end up being around 35-40 PPD (pixels per degree). This is about equivalent to what a FHD display would like like (27" monitor at 60cm: https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/).

There are a lot of other factors like fill factor (screen door effect) and there are definitely some optical designs that can increase PPD as well. Apple bought Limbak recently, btw, it's possible they use a similar design as what is described here: https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/

Could you expand on your numbers a little?

Assuming 4k resolution per eye and 120 degree FoV would give 3840*2/120 = 64 ppd.

Using the link that you gave a 4k screen at 60cm is 73 ppd, so it is reasonably close.

Apple haven't said what the FoV is yet, so I'm guessing 120 based on the pi-max and an early impressions video from mkbd. The horizontal range isn't clear either: 23 megapixels would be about three 4k screens so it depends on the overlap region between the eyes.

It's not that far off 4k, and when sitting that close to a 28" 4k screen I find the pixels barely noticeable, i.e. I can see them if they are aliased but would not notice them when the colour gradient is smooth.

With stereoscopic displays you don't get to multiply by 2, so your calculation is 32pp°.

If you think about a monitor in front, each pixel is seen by both eyes, but the headset is giving one 4k display to each eye.

Since your brain fuses the images from both eyes, you'll get a slightly higher effective resolution from the two displays than from a single display.

It depends on the amount of binocular overlap: https://www.roadtovr.com/understanding-binocular-overlap-and...

The correct number is somewhere between a multiplier of 1 and 2 depending on the setup of the display. But 2x 4k screens is only 16 megapixels, and so it also depends on where the other 7 megapixels are.

I can't edit this comment after 5 days but anybody coming along and find this - the multiplier is very close to 1. Go up a bit and find the sibling comment with the four links. Very good explanation of the difference between the monocular binocular FoV is buried within.

Based on your followup post, I think you're confused. Binocular overlap doesn't magically give you double the perceived resolution. If it worked that way, everyone would have a way higher PPD, but it doesn't and they don't. For a naive calculation on resolution you should just use the per eye resolution.

As mentioned resolution on the centroid may be higher depending on the lens design, but there's so much dependent on the rendering pipeline and the optics that I don't think it's worth doing more than ballparking. If you're interested in HMD displays, Oliver Kreylos has posted a lot on resolution measurements over the past few years:

* Optical Properties of Current VR HMDs http://doc-ok.org/?p=1414

* Measuring the Effective Resolution of Head-mounted Displays http://doc-ok.org/?p=1631

* The Display Resolution of Head-mounted Displays http://doc-ok.org/?p=1677

* The Display Resolution of Head-mounted Displays, Revisited http://doc-ok.org/?p=1694

Ha, significantly more complex than I realised. Thanks for the collection of links, very interesting reading.

Apple’s keynote showed an image similar to the 3-lens optical train at the bottom of https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/ and they have a screenshot of HN.

Why the wondering, there are already devices on the market with higher resolutions than what Apple will bring in near future. It may not be comparable for some high FPS use case, but as virtual desktop, especially crispness of image is very much comparable.

For comparison the top of the line PSVR2 does 2K per eye, hooked up to basically a PC made for gaming

Different market, I think. The PSVR2 is aimed at gaming where resolution matters less but the demands on graphics hardware to push that resolution are much higher because they're rendering complex scenes with fancy visual effects and fast motion, all on a console that's limited in graphics power compared to higher-end gaming PCs. Projecting mostly flat windows with little overdraw is much less graphically demanding; the SimulaVR folks and others experimenting with spatial computing have even managed it using the integrated graphics on low-power Intel CPUs, though admittedly with not quite as high a resolution as Apple.

Yeah, I actually wonder if 4k ends up being as good as it sounds in practice for the use-cases Apple are pushing.

A 27" 4k monitor in real life should look better than a virtual 27" window pushing the same resolution within the 4k display of the headset. For stuff like text that's going to have a corresponding loss in sharpness, and because you could be seeing something at an angle there's going to be lots of weird aliasing effects. There's a reason why Apple starting pushing 5k monitors.

I'd guess the tech would need to get to 8k+ for each eye before it starts feeling "really good" for these use cases.

I feel like they have their "game porting tool" out now, because they want to drum up games for visionOS, so it's likely that they'll also do gaming if they can.

The PSVR2 also does foveated rendering, which the Vision Pro does not seem to do, which is about the biggest disappointment about this. I don't care about millions of pixels in the corner of my eye eating up my battery life when I can't even see them.

Vision Pro does foveated rendering, it was called out as an underlying feature of the platform

I believe the vision pro does do divested rendering. They mention it as a core component of the VisionOS render pipeline.

(Sony's probably making the display for Apple anyway.)

I think 4k might really be a bare minimum for this kind of thing. For the text heavy use cases that apple are pushing things like pixel density are going to be much more important than the gaming usecases VR has been used for thus far.

Once those virtual displays show text at any sort of angle the aliasing effects will be much higher too.

I think the tech might need to get to 8k+ before it starts feeling as good as "retina display" did when Apple launched that.

It's not 4K per eye. They say 23M pixels across two eyes, which is 11.5M for each eye. 4K is 8.2M. It's 40% more pixels than 4K, with the intent presumably being to be able to display a 4K-resolution display within a larger space.

The patent brag isn’t a first for Apple though.

Steve Jobs himself during the first iPhone presentation bragged “oh boy we’ve patented it” about multitouch technology.

IIRC that was only half-true since multitouch existed before the iPhone. Don't know the details though.

They bought the company that invented it.

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