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Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

The potential of the display is what convinces me that Vision will be a breakthrough device.

If Apple has a roadmap to keep scaling up the resolution, while only incurring a fixed manufacturing cost of producing a small 2cm display, there will soon be no other device category that will be able to offer such image quality at so low a cost, not laptop screens or desktop monitors or TVs or movie theatres.

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It's Sony's display. You can see a very similar version here. [1]

[1] https://www.sony.com/content/sony/en/en_us/SCA/company-news/...

Long term I dont think they _want_ Vision to be a breakthrough device. It's only supposed to be a stepping stone towards a true AR/MR device. The ultimate and likely not possible for decades goal is a contact lense based solution. The main goal is a normal looking pair of glasses capable of true AR/MR (not Google Glass or Nreal style attempts with hardware thats not really capable of a truly usable experience).

Long term wide adoption cant really happen with a VR device, the pitfalls (Weight, long term pain, hair being messed up, red marks on your face, poor battery life, etc) are too high of a barrier.

Tim Cook is famously pretty negative on VR, but positive on AR. I would agree with you.

Doesn't this largely hedge his bets?

I agree 100%, I think the potential is in a future Vision device which is smaller, lighter, and cheaper, while having an even better display.

That's been their plan in the past, but I wonder if they'll reconsider. You can't do stuff like virtual environments in AR glasses. Apple may never care about games, but there are other VR features which users might really love.

I wouldn't be surprised if the headset continues even in the future where amazing perfect AR glasses are possible.

> The main goal is a normal looking pair of glasses capable of true AR/MR

You can't consume media e.g watch sports, movies etc or do any real work with those glasses which is a huge part of why Apple built Vision Pro in the first place.

And the battery technology doesn't exist for them to last anything longer than a few minutes in such a form factor unless you have it tethered.

I agree, but how will this device ever get beyond home entertainment or light office work if it's always going to be a big screen strapped to your face, not to mention the social aspect. I dread to live in a world where people are walking around self absorbed prodding and poking at things no one else can see. It just seems so selfish and antisocial.

> I dread to live in a world where people are walking around self absorbed prodding and poking at things no one else can see.

Phones?

We dread to live in a world of phone-zombies as well, yes.

And that's why none of this will go anywhere of consequences for a good long while. Regular people won't wear a dorkbox on their faces and the glasses form factor cannot today do what's needed.

You're confused. Vision Pro is a true AR/MR device. It uses AR passthrough. A lot of people for a long time have assumed there's some inherent reason people would never accept passthrough AR devices. A few people like myself have been consistent saying that's not the case, that passthrough AR is actually the right solution. Vision Pro is just the first version of what I expect to be a long line of passthrough AR devices from Apple.

I don't think the physics will ever be there in terms of battery/energy consumption of said future devices, meaning that I don't think Apple (or any other company) will ever be able to build a processing-device that won't have to depend on a big enough battery.

You could try to miniaturise it all (up to a point) and include it as part of the device itself, similar to Google Glass, but who would want such an energy "bucket" so close to one's eyes and face? That's just disaster (and a big lawsuit) waiting to happen.

Apple Watch. iPhone.

The iPhone is quote a big (and at times quite heated) device, not sure that the philosophy behind it will help Apple in this case. Apple Watch, while physically small, it can't honestly do all that much (like displaying a movie in HD-like conditions on a reasonable big screen), so its energy requirements are not that big to begin with.

I wonder if another aspect of the external battery is that it presumably heats up, and so attaching that as a counterbalance on the headstrap would get uncomfortable?

I thought Sony makes the display (and cameras for that matter). It's odd that there are two critical pieces of tech that need a lot of R&D for the Vision Pro to keep progressing, and Apple has nothing to do with them. The screens need to get brighter and have higher resolution. The cameras need to work faster in low light and capture more accurate colors.

If I understand your point, I don’t think it makes as much of a difference as it may seem. Display panels are typically made from large “mother glass” panels out of which smaller display panels are cut. So you can make many different sized panels from a single type of mother glass (all with the same PPI of course). And the TV/monitor industry has delivered remarkable improvements in quality and cost very quickly, so it’s not as if our current methods aren’t working.

It’s an interesting thought though, let’s see how it develops.

The process used to make Micro-OLED displays is very different to the processes used for large OLEDs or LCDs, it has more in common with silicon manufacturing than conventional display manufacturing. AIUI that means the panel size will always be limited by the maximum reticle size of the silicon process, which is usually at most ~800mm².

That lines up with the 27.5x24mm size of the panels in the Vision Pro - that's 660mm², already close to the largest silicon die you can make.

After using it since launch, the displays are still startling every time I step back to really look at them. They look so good. There's a few things that could be improved upon — let me look at my phone, or project a digital display over my phone screen — but the UI and virtual displays you see in Vision Pro feel just like reality. It's startling, and bodes well for future Vision Pro devices (and other VR handsets, too).

I agree they feel like reality, but I don't know how much of that is the display quality vs the absolutely astonishing way they stay fixed in space.

> The potential of the display

... will never be manifested, because Apple won't let you have it. Use your imagination to tease you, but you won't ever get it. Lock'n'lol. iPad paperweight. Maybe next time, tiger.

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