With Apple's marketing power, I really would expect them to claim a higher resolution number if it was that high. After all, why not? If it's actually 5K they would shout it from the rooftops. All they've said is "more pixels than a 4K screen", also we know this type of lens distortion causes some waste.

We also know 23 million pixels for the whole system. So, 11.5 million for one display. a 4K display is 8.2 million. So it's not a whole lot more than 4K, and lower than their own 5K display (which has 14 million), which matches what they claim ("more than a 4K display"). That's not enough to cover the full field of human vision and still have pixels so small they can't be seen.

With corner waste it's just barely enough for one 4K display this way (and stretched to the full limits of vision it will be pretty unwatchable so close). You can't display two as you mention, because AR/VR projection works by using the 2 screens to display the same content just from a slightly different position (parallax) causing the 3D effect. The more overlap between the eyes the better and more comfortable the 3D effect (some headsets try to get an ultrawide FoV this way but shoot themselves in the foot with low overlap).

If it has a really wide FoV its sharpness will be pretty much on-par with a quest 3/Pico 4, if it's got the same FoV it will be a lot sharper. I expect the truth to be somewhere in between. Wider than a Quest and also sharper, but pixels visible if you look well and not quite full human FoV.

What I expect Apple will have done is sacrifice a bit of vertical FoV for horizontal FoV. Vertical FoV is important in VR (especially 'roomscale') because of orientation issues, and not quite as important in AR. Also most of their marketing material promotes a seated position so moving around is not an issue. Most VR headsets have an almost-square resolution per eye, but I expect this one to be closer to 16:10 (maybe not quite that wide). I think it will come out at around 4300x2600 pixels per eye which is slightly over 11 million pixels.

Still very impressive (which it must be at that price point obviously!). But real-world and not magic. Makes sense because Apple's engineers, as good as they are, are bound by the same laws of physics we all are. Their marketeers would love us to believe otherwise though.

It's really time for some real-world specs on this thing instead of marketing blah. But I think Apple specifically doesn't want this, it's no wonder they let only the most loyal media outlets (like Gruber) get as much as a short hands-on with this thing. And even those experience are white-gloved in detail (they even prepared custom adaptive lenses). They just want to keep the marketing buzz on as long as possible.

Not sure why people are still repeating this erroneous line of thinking. Humans can’t look in two different places at once like a chameleon. The eyes focus on the same point and the stereo images overlap almost entirely - the difference in point-of-view between your two eyes is tiny, they are next to each other! (Try alternatively closing one eye). If you’re emulating a pixel from a screen in VR you’re going to have to draw that same pixel in both eyes. You do not get 2x the pixels.

The exception to this is at the edges of your vision, where each eye does see a unique portion of the field, but by definition that’s not where you’re looking.

> meaning a couple 4k screens can be rendered in the visible area without a noticeable difference in quality to real screens at a similar "apparent" distance

This is impossible at the resolution stated. The headset would have to be 8K or more per eye in order to achieve this, which it most definitely is not.

That's called foveated rendering, and it's exactly what the Apple headset does, they mention it here: https://developer.apple.com/visionos/

I assume that you’d be able to look beyond the edges of the screen.

Oh, that’ll be fun when people start to realize that some polyester fabrics are transparent in IR!