Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

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..

View on HN

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com