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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

That was the surprise to me too. Lower FOV than a Quest 3? Inexcusable.

Agreed. 8 years out from the original Oculus rift which had 110' FOV and we're still somehow staring through the AR/VR equivalent of a submarine periscope.

a whole eight years???

I still have one of the Oculus Devkits at home from their initial campaign. It's more than 10 years old now. I've noticed the biggest improvements to VR over the last decade were in useability - not the screen. Once they figured out low latency by switching the screen to black after every frame every device upgrade felt like a tiny improvement in resolution at best. Size 12 font text on a 2m screen wasn't really readable yet, but I still don't use VR for text work today (even though I could) so it also doesn't matter. Right now it's still a question of usability rather than the screen.

Even with that FOV and the highest resolution display they could get, it still can only emulate a 15" display comfy 70cm from your eye at a whopping resolution of 940x540.

It's a gimmick priced as 2.5 monitor stands.

How did you get those numbers? They seem quite low, considering that they do 4K mirroring and all.

They don't do 4k mirroring. A 4k monitor has 8 million pixels while the googles have about 11 million pixels per eye. True 4k is only possible if you use 85% of vertical and 85% of horizontal FoV, like when staring at a 24" monitor from 15cm.

I would expect most people to pick a natural size for their windows, perhaps 24-30" half a meter away?

It's a VR headset, angular resolution is fixed at 3800 px / 90 deg = 42px/deg. For a 27.5" virtual display half a meter away, let chord length = 700mm, radius ~ 600mm, distance to virtual display will be 488mm, and diagonal angle it occupies within view will be 71.4deg. with 42px/deg, resolution is ~3000px diagonal, or from (16x)^2+(9x)^2 = (3000)^2, x = 163.4, therefore resolution for that virtual monitor will be 2608x1470.

Other combinations of distances and virtual sizes can be calculated in the same manner.

How much of that “natural size” has been dictated by common monitor sizes, the limits of desk size/setup, and aesthetics?

My work setup as a 43” monitor set about 1 arm’s length away. I can just touch it when my fingertip if I stretch slightly. In a virtual space, I’d probably go slightly larger, maybe 45-48”, pushed a little further back.

I don't think I would want a monitor that big, since I think I would have trouble covering all of it without moving my head.

So then it's not "4k mirroring".

8/11 = 73% not 85%. so should be a lot more comfortable distance than 15cm/5.9 inches.

Nope.

0.85*0.85 => 0.73

Ah, gotcha. But what if you factor in the limited FOV of the display itself? this 11 million pixel calculation doesn't apply to the full FOV of the eye after all.

I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison (heh), I think at this point 'good enough' is going to be better than anything my eyes can resolve. On a Quest 3 with Zenni lenses, pixel visibilty as a concern is way down on my list. It works REALLY well.

Even if they were double the resolution per eye, you aren't going to have "native" 4k reproduction because you are looking at a projection of a screen rather than an actual screen. What is the value of achieving one "accurate" pixel if it is surrounded by eight bilinear-interpolated ones?

But then, you usually don't buy a 4k screen because you can perceive the individual pixels either, unless you are creating content that requires that.

I suspect it aligns easier with the quality concerns of reality and not with virtual components - if I can use a monitor through the screen with no noticeable loss of quality or additional eye strain, there's no reason to think a virtualized monitor won't be at least as good.

Not when text is vastly sharper than Quest 3.

That’s a double edge sword though. Were they to make it 180°, we would critique it for spreading the precious pixels. “With those 4K your virtual monitor is 1080p at most!”

Apple used to excel at making the right trade off here. Choosing what feels right over numbers.

Steve used to excel at it.

And they probably have

Idgi. What feels right has always been very high numbers.

There is a fundamntal tradeoff between FOV and image quality at any given pixel density (and there are other tradeoffs between pixel density and cost and compute power needed).

yeah. But a high number of pixels and a high number of minutes of battery life work against each other here.

I remember when the first Android phones with 4-inch screens hit the market, I saw someone comment online that if a 4-inch screen was better Apple would have figured that out during R&D for the iPhone and made the original iPhone 4 inches.

I hope somebody at the time replied with a picture of the original iMac's hockey puck mouse.

Apple can do amazing things, but they do also fairly regularly make terrible things.

I mean, the current Apple Magic Mouse which has its charging port on the underside is interesting as well.

Sure, but wasn't cockroach charging introduced in 2015, vs. c. 2010 for 4-inch Android phones?

What's 'cockroach charging'?

Upside-down, like a dead cockroach: https://www.behance.net/gallery/36272401/Dear-Apple-about-yo...

Ah, I see. I've never seen a phone which charges from the underside, though.

There's a pretty common use case that's basically this: get in the car, plug in the phone, and drop it in a cup holder with the charging port pointing up and all the antennas that would point skyward during handheld use are now pointing at the ground.

I still think the original iPhone was the best size. I use the iPhone mini today, and I wouldn't mind it being a bit smaller still.

It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.

It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.

They were and are good at this. But the decision to ship this in this state before their typical quality bar was Tim Apple’s. He reportedly overrode the design team and demanded it ship now to enter the market and iterate in public. Even though he’s otherwise hands off with the product itself. This was all widely reported but has been missing from recent reporting now that it’s out.

It was a good call. It needs to get to early adopters and establish the existence of an alternative to facebook's metaverse vision.

The thing is, when one has a user base the size of Apple's what "feels" right actually covers a very large range of possibilities. Even when Apple "excels" and covers most of that range, there's still a ton of people left out. Which leads to every Apple thread on HN filled with users bemoaning Apple's poor choices.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

They certainly could do something clever, like having a screen with gradually decreasing pixel density and quickly moving it around so its center is always where you're looking it.

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