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Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

If it has to be tethered to external battery always, why not move processing and fans to that also?

I would imagine they didn't want to have an external pack and that's just a compromise they had to make for this initial version, with the intention of getting rid of it in a future iteration. It wouldn't be worth overcomplicating the external pack if they don't see that as the way forward.

A "Vision Air" that exchanges the glass and most of the metal structure for plastic, and maybe ditches the underwhelming front display, but integrates the battery like the Quests would be a pretty good trade IMO.

The front display is underwhelming, but it also lets you have a conversation with someone else in the room. When you're wearing it, it's easy to forget it's there while talking with people. That was something that was hard to do with previous headsets, such as Valve's Index. I honestly think that the front display is going to become something that every other vendor replicates in some way.

I get the point of it, but I’ve had countless conversations with people wearing sunglasses, or ski goggles, where I couldn’t see their eyes and it wasn’t a major problem.

If I’m having a serious conversation with someone, I’d expect them to take the headset off, just like I’d expect them to put their phone down, or look away from their laptop.

With all the negative press they’ve gotten for it, I assume they will put a significant amount of energy into improving the quality of the eye sight for version 2.

Back when this all started, there was a word for people who insist on interacting with others while wearing tech on their face: glasshole. The message it sends is, "You're not worth me putting my screen down for a minute to have a conversation."

With Google Glass at least you were actually seeing their real eyes. I always got the vibe that the attitude came from the fact that 1) looking at you also pointed a camera at you 2) you could never tell what the person wearing the glasses was looking at while talking to you, if anything.

If people start wearing this thing to go grocery shopping, you'll probably get similar reaction. If people are obviously in the middle of doing something and you walk up to ask them a question, I'd expect that would be less of an issue.

Being a glass hole wasn’t just about wearing tech while talking to people. It was more about how smug the users were and how overtly “look at me” the interaction was.

It was just because glass rhymes with ass, and people didn't like other people wearing cameras.

Google glass user behavior also rhymed with asshole.

Before that was “Bluetooth Johnson” that you’d see running around at airports with their Bluetooth ear piece and a BlackBerry.

That’s changed a bit with Airpods (and the like) has it not?

The exact same product features with savvier marketing makes the Apple users appear more suave: it's still a Bluetooth headset or a camera strapped on someone's face, just with Apple branding.

People don't like people who can afford more expensive things.

That was also a time when it was rude generally rude to have earbuds in when interacting with people, meetings needed to be done face to face, and having anything covering you face was just viscerally rejected by a chunk of the population.

The consensus has changed a lot in the meantime, or at least you'll find your group that doesn't care about any of that.

I still think it's rude to not remove your earbuds when talking to people. I even feel that way when people don't remove their AirPods when they quickly interact with the person working at the check-out counter in the grocery store. It's kind of degrading.

I kinda saw the point a decade or two ago. As of today we have transparency mode where the person might actually hear you better with the buds on, then bone conduction where putting or removing them makes no sense, then ear cuff types etc.

It's just so much more complex that having someone remove whatever they're wearing feels like an anachronism. It can still be a nice gesture, but as it becomes devoid of meaning it's also to me signaling that we don't trust the other person to understand they have our attention (through eye contact, actual conversation etc) if we don't overdo it.

arguably there is not so much difference between AirPods in transparency mode and a hearing aid these days.

i share your feeling and remove earbuds. but it’s starting to feel like taking your hat off — purely symbolic gesture.

Glasshole - love it.

Gargoyle is also apt.

> Gargoyle is also apt.

For those who don't know, this is a Snow Crash reference. Quoting Wikipedia: "Stephenson also describes a subculture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the Metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment; they are nicknamed "gargoyles" [...]"

I absolutely hate talking to people who are wearing sunglasses. Not seeing peoples eyes is very offputting.

I think the goal is that people live their lives with their cell phone strapped permanently to their face, so they need to incentivize you to take it off as little as possible.

Honestly I think the front display is the first thing they will drop when they try to get the price down so regular people can buy it.

If you are having serious conversation where expression matters, just take it off or all person may wear it in the Metaverse. In current form it is gimmicky.

I would say that for quick, <10 minute conversations, it's fine. It's one of those things that doesn't seem impactful until you interact with it for the first time. I used to think the same way.

<10 minutes? If I think the conversation is going to take more than 30 seconds I am taking that thing off. Care to imagine how much extra cost this gimmick adds to the device? A high definition second screen just so you can make "eye contact" with someone while simultaneously not paying full attention to them anyway.

It'll depend on how people actually end up using the Vision Pro in the real world I suppose - being able to easily talk to other people isn't a high value feature if the average AVP owner ends up treating it like a VR headset you use alone, rather than wearing it around other people or even in public like Apple envisioned.

They haven't advertised people using it "in public". It's home, office, etc. In those contexts, it's more appropriate.

I've seen Instagram reels of people wearing these things while crossing the street, sitting on the subway, and, worst of all, while driving a CyberTruck...

narcissism: it's easy for the wearer to forget.

perfect Apple products for the perfect individuals narcissism.

Alternatively, ditch the glass & metal + display and keep battery separate; then it might actually be comfortable.

That was one of the things they tried while they were iterating on it in-house.

Ming Chi Kuo first reported details of the product as shipped at the end of 2021.

> Kuo's prediction that the headset will be a standalone device goes against a report by The Information from September claiming that it will need to wirelessly communicate with an an iPhone, an iPad or a computer to handle most of its computing.

https://www.engadget.com/apples-mixed-reality-headset-standa...

I assume there would be concerns about latency and throughput.

That seems reasonable. Also, wireless bandwidth would be an issue with so many sensors running at the same time.

You would need to stream all the sensor data in one direction while also streaming two 4k display streams in the other direction.

That seems like a really tight latency budget to run through even an optimized wireless stack.

Working backward: frame needs to be received by headset in time to refresh, which means it needs to be sent by host device in time to make its way through the headset wireless phy and be decoded.

And working forward: headset needs to encode sensor values, send across wireless, be decoded on host, before frame can start to be generated.

Which leaves the time in-between those for actually doing all the processing and frame generation.

Ditching the wireless phy and low-level steps seems like an easy trade-off for more processing time.

Even wired that seems like it’d need a lot of copper. The power cable connector right now is pretty pliable. Most thunderbolts cables are not as much. And who knows if it would need to be even thicker than that.

Also, judging from the cable on the valve index ... a much heavier and harder to manage cable...

You could do something like an active optical cable if you wanted - adds expense but given the price tag of this, probably not insurmountable.

> You could do something like an active optical cable

Wouldn't that add more latency due to the extra encoding/decoding step?

That extra latency would be on the order of nanoseconds, which is negligible for this use case.

Plus nobody wants hot pockets.

Well, I do now. I'm hungry.

It could be done, but there are more tradeoffs than at first glance. They probably didn’t do this because when they took the battery off the head it was already too late to redesign the thing again.

You would need to propagate signals from all the sensors back and forth which adds some overall weight in copper, and perhaps latency for more encoding and decoding. Could be worth it, we’ll see in v2.

Tried it today. The weight is a real problem. I'd gladly have a larger side pack to lose weight off the headset. If they ditched the useless eye screen, and moved the m2 to a pack they could probably drop 100g from the headset.

ISTR somewhere someone saying that moving it to the pack would break their really low latency processing requirements. Distance / latency options are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.

Light travels 300km in one millisecond, so I doubt that's a limitation here.

This is true but keep in mind that once latency starts to go over ~10ms it starts to become noticeable for a lot of people, and even if it isn't directly noticeable it's likely that VR latency still causes some physiological issues for most people.

I believe it's more the processing that would be needed to send the data over the larger distance in fewer wires which would add latency.

You can't just take the absurd number of traces off a PCB and shove them into a wire without hitting issues like voltage drop, crosstalk, interference, or having a cable as thick as your finger.

You'd need optical transceivers and at that point the added complexity and similar board space required might negate any weight savings (and drive up the price further).

There are reports that they tried it. Not just wired but also wireless.

But the increase in latency in transmitting 10k+ of video data from the displays to the puck and back was enough to make the user more nauseous. I suspect because they wouldn't be able to process the data in time for the next frame.

Meta can do wireless VR streamed from a PC with airlink. That’s at lower resolution, but it’s at least theoretically possible.

1080p feed (2m pixels) compared to each eye (23m pixels).

So you need 10x the network bandwidth at the same power levels.

The latency is terrible though. I have an oculus quest 2. Maybe it’s an offer of magnitude better on the 3 but I doubt it.

Usually the WiFi setup is the biggest culprit. You’ll want to have wifi 6 and wire your desktop to the router.

Apple could theoretically directly connect between their compute puck and their headset.

I think this would theoretically work in the optimistic case. But it doesn't make a lot of practical sense: if the puck has the battery, you need to physically connect it to the headset anyway. Even if you used wifi for the data transfer, you're subject to any interference (retransmission of packets for a real-time OS sounds like a nightmare) and people leaving the puck on their desk and getting too far away. In a way, the cable is a feature and not a limitation.

Since it doesn't have a headphone jack (as far as I know) this is actually still a problem since you have to wear wireless earbuds with it, if you don't want other people to hear it.

I'm having an absolute blast with a Quest 3 and Skyrim VR running off my PC, via Steam Link, wireless. Not experiencing any latency (obviously this is all local - copper to my PC, Wifi to the Quest).

Wireless streaming VR seems like a non-starter, just an optional bullet point for marketing material. Shorter latency is always better in VR.

The solutions I've seen adjust for head rotation on the headset (they render and transmit slightly more than the FOV), so latency only affects translation (which happens less frequently and less quickly) and actual scene updates (which are less latency sensitive than head rotation).

The cable needs to withstand a lot of flexing and rough handling. Much easier to make it durable when it doesn't need to transmit 10 gigabits of data.

This is my main complaint with the design. Comfort is king for things you wear on your face, and a lot of the design decisions compromise comfort. If I was designing v2 I would delete the external facing display and glass cover, move all processing to the battery, and ship a rigid strap.

None of the arguments against putting the processor in the battery make any sense. It adds latency? No it doesn't, if designed correctly, and I guarantee you can fit the correct design in the budget for $3500. You can't cool it from inside a pocket? The wire is sticking out already, you could add a short air intake to it. It would be too big? I guarantee that size is easier to carry in the battery than on your literal face!

The only thing that makes sense to me is the battery was supposed to be internal and the external battery was a last minute compromise for comfort. Unfortunately I suspect that Apple will go the direction of moving the battery back in for v2 rather than moving processing out.

There’s 12 cameras and 3 screens to drive, how many lanes would you need for that through the cable? How chunky would the cable be after adding necessary shielding?

optical fiber ? it may cost a bit more than copper for the transceivers (is that still true nowadays?) but given the price of the hardware i doubt it's really an issue.

Until the cable gets crimped while someone's doing VR and the display goes to shit.

Meta already did it and it works great

The external component is meant to fit in one's pocket, so the added size, heat, and moving parts would make for an awkward fit.

I think it’s a smart option. Fair chance there was a LOT of thinking that went into it.

For example, wondering about the characterisation of it with processing in the battery appliance. It would be “an expensive portable device with a dumb headset screen”. Could someone else sell a different headset for the device? Could they sell a Linux machine that is good enough to power the headset? Might people just want one or the other, and bitch about the cost of an ARM based mobile PC that burns up your bag because it has no free-flow air?

Might be Apple releases pricy larger batteries. Or some cable that allows you to hot-swap them. I see there is a cable where you can plug the headset into your Mac for development.

They hopefully considered the multi-year evolution of it, not just this year’s version.

I think eventually when they have an m2 on an iphone then it can work but they’ll probably have to remove the fans somehow. Also the front display I wonder if it will go away one day. To reduce the weight further, cost, and with sunglasses you can’t see the persons eyes. However, it does differentiate the look from oculus

I suppose it's easier to cool something off your forehead than off your pocket, even if that means extra weight -- it's lighter than other VR devices (although maybe that's not a particularly high (low?) bar

What other devices? It's heavier than the Quest 1/2/3 and the PSVR2. The Quest Pro is heavier but more balanced with the battery on the back of the rigid strap.

You're right about cooling. It would go from something you can pocket to something that has to be clipped on a belt like the Magic Leap.

> why not move processing and fans to that also?

my guess is to minimize latency.

Latency from 2-3 feet of wire is not problematic. But depending on how much data you want to move that distance and how thick a bundle of wires you are willing to use, power to move all those bits could be an issue.

USB-C can do 40Gbps. That's more than enough for a bunch of screens and cameras.

40Gbps is not enough to run the screen for one eye at the resolution/framerate/HDR it's running at. You'd have to chop the bpc to 8 or the refresh rate to about 80hz. And then you'd still need another one for the other eye, and a third one for the cameras.

You keep the battery pack in a pocket. If they did what you're suggesting, size would be a problem, and fans are ... usually less effective in pockets.

nah, just make it a trendy belt pack like those early iPhone cases.

3D-knitted battery bandolier, with slots for your AirPods and Apple Watch.

Also comes in a silicone sport option for those times when you need to do spatial computing while trail-running.

It would add too much latency (even if it would be only a few milliseconds.)

Few milliseconds is way off. Over fiber I get sub-milli ping to the datacenters in the same city.

A cable doesn't have the bandwidth of chip to chip so it will be have to serialized/deserialized or decoded etc.

If we take USB4 80 Gbps as a guideline: That's 80 mbit per millisecond. Apple says their goggles have 23 mpixels. So if we multiply by 24 bits for color, transmission has a lower bound of 7 ms per frame.

So I agree now that the delay is in milliseconds which can push perception into nausea. I hadn't considered the pixel density. Of course they could use something faster than USB4, but it wouldn't be easy to go below 1 ms I guess.

You forgot the five sensors, six microphones, and 12 cameras in the other direction too :-)

Oh I ignored them because the 23mpix dwarf everything else.

It would be neat to have a version that plugs straight in to a Macbook pro and uses that for all the processing + battery. Then it's basically just a portable external display.

Posting from Vision, right now. I can say with some serious confidence that this wouldn't work well in that way for multiple reasons. Moving around, not being tethered, being able to take it on the plane, etc. Latency would be an issue. Not to mention, the cost of on board-computing is negligible compared to the necessary cost of the displays, R1, etc.

Although, I have been using it with my MacBook Pro as a remote client, to great effect.

Agree. I don’t think people realize just how many incoming video streams this thing has to process. I’ve heard it’s like 14 or so independent streams of video that needs processing in extremely low latency ways. Apple had to build an entire dedicated chip just to handle the realtime processing of this much incoming data.

> being able to take it on the plane

I see the point of portability. I also wonder how much people actually care about being entertained in airplanes. You put it as your 3rd bullet point after "not being tethered", does it mean you're spending a crazy amount of time in your life inside planes ? Or is such a soul crushing experience that it easily warrants 3500$ of investment to improve ?

And as a follow up question, did you buy a Quest2/3 under the same premise, and will replace your current setup with the AVP as an upgrade ?

(Not the parent.)

As someone who flies a few times a year, I do find it kind of soul-crushing, because of the physical discomfort of being crammed into a small space for 6 hours straight.

But I suspect a headset would just make this worse; the otherwise-mild physical discomfort of wearing it would compound with the plane’s discomfort. Also, I’d be worried about disturbing adjacent passengers. And my backpack has little enough space already without a giant headset inside.

…And yet I did buy a Vision Pro, for mostly unrelated reasons. (Hasn’t arrived yet.) So I’m looking forward to at least giving the airplane AR experience a try, for the novelty if nothing else.

You should definitely give it a try. I don't have the Vision Pro, but I do have an xreal air. I used it on a seven hour transatlantic flight in economy class. I had to cover on so I couldn't see anything but the screens, but everything around me kind of just disappeared and I watched my movies, did my budget, did some writing, and didn't even feel like I was on a plane.

It's worth noting that the xreal air has a form factor of sunglasses instead of a VR headset, so it's much later on my face so maybe that was a factor.

Yall really going to be using these on the plane? Can't wait to watch zombies pinching at the air.

First of all, you don't have to move your hand or pinch "on" something for most tasks. The ones where you do move your hand, the range of motion needed is actually pretty small. You can have your hand in your lap or neutral on an arm rest, and pinch there. Hand position doesn't matter.

Anyways, this is going to be indispensable on the plane and for frequent fliers. Having a full 20 foot cinema experience? Being able to quickly pause and interact with an attendant or the person next to you without taking it off? Killer.

> and pinch there

Pinchers!

I'm only teasing honestly.

When I want to go to sleep I put on an eye mask on the plane, or I stare like a zombie at the screen on the back of the chair in front of me. Either way I have noise cancelling headphones.

Honestly, I just see something like a headset just making my experience a bit more personal, which isn't a bad thing.

Kids these days with their walkmans and their headphones, no respect at all I tell ya

This was in the marketing for the previous VR headsets. They looked just as goofy as Palmer on the cover.

Are people looking down and flicking their fingers the hip crowd and the air pinchers the lamers?.

You don’t need to look down for this. You look at the windows that you want to move/interact with, which are presumably in front of you (not down below), and that acts as a pointer. While your hands are on your lap, which you use to click/drag things.

It is kind of similar to how you don’t need to look at your keyboard or mouse buttons to interact with things on your screen.

Would fans would work well on an external unit if that unit is in your pocket, or even if it clipped to your belt, possibly with a shirt hanging over it?

You can also power it with a standard wall adapter. So, then you'd need to plug the wall thing into the battery, and the battery into the headset?

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