Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> Insanely good text clarity. Higher pixel density (35.5 PPD) than any portable VR headset currently on the market (e.g., 56% higher than the Quest Pro & 220% higher than the Valve Index).

I'd order one right now if I could believe this was good enough for coding. But my only experience with VR is with an HTC Vive XR Elite headset with 1920x1920 per eye, and that turned out not to be nearly good enough to read comfortably at a reasonable font size. I'm quite willing to be convinced, but apparently the only way to do that now is to be a prospective angel investor in the company and wait for the single review unit to be passed around.

View on HN

The HTC Vive XR Elite has 19 pixels per degree (PPD). Simula claims to have 35, which if true would make a marked difference.

But yeah, the problem at this stage is getting one to try.

In one of the WWDC videos, they mention they reimplemented their glyph renderer to be vector-based, so text should at least not depend on first rendering to laptop-screen pixels and then to face-screen pixels. Seems like it should be state of the art at launch.

Would you happen to have a link for that? It would certainly help, as they are currently around where I'd call the minimum necessary (likely) PPD. Every little improvement counts until they catch up to 4k monitors, where anything looks good.

It actually wasn't WWDC, it was an interview some execs did with John Gruber, which unfortunately was 2 hours long. Segment on visionOS starts here: https://youtu.be/DgLrBSQ6x7E?t=2323

I don't have time to dig in and grab the exact spot, but I'm pretty sure they didn't go into detail much beyond what I said. My guess is text rendering is as good as it can be with state of the art displays, from a software stack standpoint.

It's also not factually true. Xreal Air (formerly Nreal Air) has 49 ppd.

In "mirror" mode (aka a single giant screen), it feels like working on a 1080p projector. Not great. Not terrible.

In "nebula" mode (aka virtual desktop), it feels like I'm working on 3 720p screens. Great when I need to reference multiple different sources (like during development). If I'm just focused on a single document/window, a laptop screen is better.

----

I think the tipping point is going to be at about 100 ppd. That seems like it will be the point where you can simulate a 1080p screen at roughly arms length while maintaining excel clarity.

The Xreal isn't a wide FOV at all though, unsuitable for what SimulaVR is going for.

It's more literally a head mounted display, rather than a virtual reality headset, with its 46° field of view.

I've found the Xreal's FOV sufficient for productivity. Right now, I can't really make use of things near the edge of the FOV. 46 degrees requires a lot of eye moment to make use of.

Yeahhhhh probably should've left that part out... Hopefully that's a sign that they're not concerned about marketing/PR atm and are heads-down on the tech :) We can all discuss together in the launch thread next year!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com