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Comment by hordehamhill | Hacker News Reader

So what about this product opened your eyes that the previous 15 years of VR/AR did not? Just Apple's marketing power? Or is there something specific about this device that made it click for you?

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I had always looked at things like Oculus as a "gaming" accessory. And I demoed Google Glass about 10 years ago, and it didn't present a virtual screen.

When seeing the Apple goggles, it clicked for me that this was basically a mac environment, and I started thinking how amazing it would be to run terminals in it, then I started googling for any options that were available now..

Crazy. That's the power of marketing eh. Almost as soon as the DK1 was available, people were running desktop envs inside VR. 3D modelling, CAD, multiple floating desktops, watching movies videos in 3D or big fake theaters, panoramic photos... Google even had a 3D paintbrush program demo on their cardboard product half a decade or more ago. This is stuff all been explored before.

You do understand that there is a difference between a Toyota and a Porsche and whilst they are both cars it isn't just about marketing.

Because yes those features have been available on other devices but what's important and different is how those features have been implemented.

And those that have used other headsets and the Vision Pro all say that there is a jump in the quality of experience that hasn't existed before.

Apple is which car in this comparison?

Must be the Toyota, since the meme is that Apple products just work. I would have used Honda for this comparison, but Toyota is fine.

When it's at 10-15 pixels per degree like those early models, it's a cute demo rather than a realistic screen replacement.

As a reference, the standard resolution for web pages is 47 pixels per degree.

The Vision Pro estimates I've seen are between 33 and 40 PPD (while 20/20 vision is 60 to 70 PPD at the centre of the field of vision). So this could be quite sharp, particularly if you have the text somewhat larger (on the huge virtual monitors) than you'd normally have it.

Not really, it’s the power of solid product development. I don’t want to fuck around with setting up a desktop env inside VR. I’m 100% confident I’ll be able to walk into an Apple Store, buy a Vision Pro, go home, put it on, and get to work.

I have a Valve Index, I've tried it, the resolution is simply not good enough for it to be comfortable as a screen replacement. It (and all VR headsets before it) were simply not reaching the minimum viable product level of hardware for this use case.

And, until the resolution was good enough, your eyes were closed? You literally could not imagine what was possible until an incremental upgrade in optics occurred?

From all accounts this is far more than just an incremental upgrade.

The extremely low latency in rendering courtesy of the dedicated R1 chip is going to take some time for other companies to replicate.

They tried it, but did they keep doing it? i.e. did it work in practice, for real-world work-flows? Was the ROI there, so allocating budget was a no-brainer? I think, if it did, it would have taken over by now.

To me, the question is whether Apple has actually made this work.

It didn’t work because the pixels per degree isn’t enough, even with the Quest Pro, to show clear text. I still use it for coding, but it’s very far from ideal.

Apple claim text is crisp with VP. They also claim the resolution is similar to retina - but their stated pixel count and my guesstimates of usage distance suggest it's about half (in each dimension, so a quarter for area).

If they've got it crisp, how big a deal do feel that would be? For yourself, and for others who've been interested?

I've showed several "professional computer users", who sit behind nice monitors all day, my Quest Pro virtual screen setup. They've all said it's too blurry/font is too large/not enough screen space (which are all the same, from lack of PPD).

So, the Quest Pro is unusable to them, due to PPD. If the Vision Pro is actually retina, then that's good, but I don't think that's the only reason they wouldn't want to use it. I think comfort/bulk is a huge concern, especially since it appears to use the flesh of your face to support the weight, rather than a top strap. My Quest Pro is unusable without a top strop, for more than 30 minutes. With, I can easily do 6 hours. But still, the bulk makes me hesitantly put it on, sometimes.

Thanks - so it's a game-changer (if they've done it).

BTW I read somewhere they are adding a top strap.

I would say claim that use in open office spaces will be the real "killer app". I think being able to cut out all the distractions, and focus, will be extremely valuable to many.

For what it's worth I think of lot of guesstimates of PPD are likely a bit low. You can play games with lenses to increase it near the centre of the display where it actually matters (because your eyes don't travel that far away from straight forwards, so you can have much lower resolution in your peripheral FOV).

SimulaVR, a competitor with roughly half the number of pixels (2x2448x2448 = 11,985,408 vs 23 million), claims to go from 24.48 PPD naively calculated to 35.5 PPD near the centre of the display using this.

https://simulavr.com/blog/ppd-optics/

Fair but I think that's more about you being one of today's lucky 10,000 [1], than anything to do with Apple or Vision Pro :)

1 : https://xkcd.com/1053/

If you really just cared about terminals you can probably get an android terminal running on the quest and ssh where you need.

From my perspective:

1. Eye tracking for interaction vs hand tracking. If the UX works out, the amount of precision that can be reached is just far higher with less effort - just seems to be an easier technical problem.

2. Resolution and lensing. Most VR headsets have fairly low quality fresnel lenses which cause distortion near the edges (basically - if you want to see something in good detail, you have to tilt your whole head to look at it), and in general the resolution is not good enough to see things that are 'far away' (those who play games like DCS have to use the 'binoculars' feature with headsets to accurately see targets). With a device like an HP Reverb, the resolution is probably close to good enough, the lensing is not - the Meta Quest Pro has a good enough lens, but not resolution. I'd expect the lensing on the Apple device to be top of market, and we know the resolution is ~2.5x more dense than the Meta Quest Pro - which should be closer to going from SD to HD TV rather than HD to 4k. Essentially, if you try to code on a Meta Quest Pro, the text looks a bit blurry. With the Vision Pro, it won't.

3. Custom face cushion + prescription lenses. Comfort is everything with these devices and nothing is worse than a headset putting pressure in the wrong places. It'll cost much more, but be totally worth it.

4. People claim common nausea when using VR. I've felt it too, but only on certain headsets. My money is other companies know what causes folks to feel bad, but have had to make technical tradeoffs which mean that nausea remains a problem. I'd put money on Apple having done serious research into 'what causes nausea when using headsets' which causes this to minimised on their headsets.

5. Software stack and usability. VR stacks are typically fairly clunky, usually Android derived, usually behaving a bit like a dodgy phone. iOS/MacOS are usually not most feature-ful, but a core usually works very very well. Will likely push bar a lot higher, change the shape of industry (e.g. samsungs are so good because of the iPhone competition).

Basically, having used some of these devices - the complaints I have with these right now, are the same things that Apple has real, technical solutions for. And the price isn't even _that_ high compared to other players in the market. Pimax Crystal is $1600 for what right now is a fairly buggy user experience. Their vapourware Pimax 12k is listed as starting at $2400 for the most basic model, though it's been in that state for well over a year.

In response to a couple of your points:

(1) The HoloLens used eye tracking. It was tough to get used to but it was interesting. I didn't feel that I ever got to the point where it was more precise than moving my hand to a 3d point in space.

(4) I doubt it's the headset. It's almost certainly the application the headset is running.

I do some sim racing. I can race for hours with a Reverb G2 but get nauseous within minutes with a Meta Quest Pro.

Yeah, Automobilista 2 or Flight Simulator 2020 are a joy on Reverb G2. Though I must say I was surprised how tiny Monaco felt which is probably a question of FOV.

I'll see if I can try racing in the Reverb G2. That was my go to example of games that made me nauseous in VR.

4. Nausea is apparently caused by latency between head movements and updates of the visual field, which they've kept very low on the Vision Pro by means of that R1 chip.

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