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Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

It seems that a lot of basic information is missing in the review:

1. How does it compare to an high-end monitor for text editing/programming, web browsing, watching non-VR video, playing non-VR games? Is it better or not?

2. Is the resolution, latency, FoV and lack of color fringing good enough for it to be indistinguishable from reality in both passthrough and VR modes? If not, how exactly far is it?

3. Can you run VR games on a PC with multiple desktop GPUs and stream to it? How does it compare to current high-end and ultra-high-end VR headsets?

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This review from TheVerge answers some of your questions: https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr...

I recommend the video review as well. Seeing the video call between Nilay, Joanna, and MKB shows how much the tech has advanced but also how much it still needs to evolve to be at the level of FaceTime Video.

I’m excited about the Vision Pro but I now see why some reviewers called the FaceTime “Personas” creepy.

They’re like talking paintings in the Haunted Mansion ride with bunch of blur and depth of field. It’s way too weird. Joanna’s looks a bit like she’s been stuck as the replacement person in the Mona Lisa.

A static picture of you or maybe your Memoji (remember those?) would be far preferable.

I’m surprised Apple is shipping Personas.

I'd rather have just a VRChat avatar. Hook up the eye tracking and the mouth visemes and it'll probably be more likable than the Personas are.

yeah ... i regularly do Workrooms meetings with avatars and i have to say it looks and feels much less creepy - safely outside the uncanny valley but still conveying all our natural expressions. It's actually quite weird when I think about how much I forget we are avatars and just talk to the other person as if it is really them.

They've also shipped memojis.

Facebook has also shipped meta.

All the money in the world can't buy you an understanding of your market.

Memojis work. They not be a style you like, I’m meh, but they work.

This seems alpha. I’m sure it’s a hard problem but I feel like waiting a bit longer would have done them a better service.

> I’m surprised Apple is shipping Personas.

They do make it clear that it's in Beta so they know there is work to do.

But if you're having a Zoom meeting with a divorce lawyer or negotiating an M&A a Memoji is the last thing you want.

They look like the 3D version of police drawings.

Nilay's video review is just fantastic-one of the best consumer technology reviews in written or multmedia form ever. Walt would be proud.

> "Apple sent zeiss lens inserts for reading glasses, but I just used my soft contacts and it was fine."

lol what kind of review says that. It would be like someone who doesn't even use any kind of vision correction saying "I just used it without glasses and it was fine."

(edit: the review is actually quite good. but that line was bizarre)

Apple said that contact lenses might interfere with eye tracking (or maybe with the iris scanning). So it’s a data point if he says he had no problems with soft contacts.

Only some kinds do (mostly cosmetics). If you go through the purchase process there's a questionnaire on if you actually need the inserts.

Also, I don't think people with only near/far vision issues or prism correction know how this interacts with VR. IIRC in general you always use your far prescription and there is no support for prism.

For #3 the question is how you're going to control the games, when the overwhelming majority of existing VR games are built for dedicated VR controllers rather than hand tracking.

Streaming games from a PC to a standalone headset over WiFi has been proven to work with the Quest, but that has proper controllers.

I feel like the simple hacky solution there is to use Joycons connected directly to the PC for the buttons/thumbsticks. Attach the control inputs to whatever virtual tracking points the vOS app is supplying and voila.

Joycons don't have absolute positioning, only relative, they're not good enough for VR. There is one way you could do it, if you have a Valve Lighthouse setup then you could use Index or Vive controllers, but that would require manually calibrating the two independent tracking systems to align with each other and it's not exactly a cheap solution if you don't already have the gear.

It's a very niche setup, but a few people already use it in order to combine Lighthouse-based body trackers with a non-Lighthouse headset.

> Joycons don't have absolute positioning, only relative, they're not good enough for VR.

The point would be that you don't use them for positioning at all, just buttons/thumbsticks. If you've using a Virtual Desktop-like app on the headset then it's already got positioning from the hand tracking.

Oh right, I get you. Yeah that could kinda work but it's putting a lot of faith in the accuracy of the hand tracking.

I suppose an ambitious implementation could try to fuse the hand tracking data with the IMU data from the Joycons for better resolution.

It does read well as a non-technical review though, where a user would only make note of those things if they were lacking. If the passthrough looked artificial and weird you would imagine that would have come up.

On number 3, definitely not.

You can always make an app to stream H265 content from any device :)

Windows even has support for IndirectDisplayDevices - I'm not sure how openXR or SteamVR handles those, however.

That gives you a flat video presumably, not a VR game.

Huh, you think VR is some special non-flat surface? All render target surfaces are a 2D texture

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