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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

The display may be 3,386 PPI, but wow my laptop screen has never looked sharper after taking the AVP off my head. Screen sharing from my Mac looks distractingly bad, which is a huge bummer. (AVP apps, by contrast, look fantastic.) No matter how I scale or where I place the space, it just never looks very good.

I'm really hoping this improves because it's nice to turn my 14" MacBook Pro into a theater screen of sorts alongside native apps. For the moment, though, AVP doesn't seem very useful apart from watching movies (which is amazing).

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It's not surprising. The AVP has a PPD of 34. A 14" MBP screen with a resolution of 3024x1964 already has a PPD of 66 at a close 14" viewing distance and it gets higher as you move further away [1]. Retina is considered 60+ at 20/20 vision. Of course a real display has no resampling or micro-OLED smearing to overcome either.

To achieve the same effective pixel count as a MBP, a virtual screen at the AVP's PPD would have to be resized to 90° horizontal FOV, which is just too big to be comfortable, equivalent to sitting 6" from a 14" MBP screen.

The technology just isn't there yet. We need at least another doubling of PPD. See you in 10 years.

[1] https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/

That's the great irony of Apple trying to make AR work as a monitor replacement, their existing users will be some of the hardest to please in terms of resolution since they've been spoiled by retina displays as standard on every Mac for the last decade.

yea i truly do not understand. not to mention cranking your neck for more than 2 seconds a workday is going to make this a nonstarter once most people get over the cost justifications

My current setup is 3x monitors + a laptop screen to the side at the office and 3x monitor + a wall-mounted television in my home office. That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what people are willing to do for screen real estate.

Many people are accustomed to working with 3x or more display devices where at least one of them is out of their field of view no matter where they are looking so I imagine the primary adaptation to using a vision pro would be the weight.

I am a color accuracy and resolution snob so I only use professional monitors: BenQ at home and Eizo at the office.

If one day the vision pro can match the performance of color-critical monitors for less than $5,100 it will be a definite "oui-starter".

If one day the vision pro can BEAT the performance of color-critical monitors for less than $5,100 I will hire a personal trainer for the sole purpose of getting my neck buff enough to use one without strain.

For me the interest here is VR making your set up hyper-portable. And even if it could I'd still want that physical set up in my workspace.

Currently though it cannot match the efficiency of a single monitor with a tiling WM.

> Currently though it cannot match the efficiency of a single monitor with a tiling WM.

This.

More than anything else, I've found tiling to be the single most important improvement in my workflow in ages.

Specifically, the Pop OS Tiling extension, which is zero-config.

The closest I've found on Mac (besides some wm attempts), is Rectangle.app, though it's still a long ways off from a tiling wm.

> That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what people are willing to do for screen real estate.

Very, very few people. I would be surprised if it's more than a fraction of a percent of the home computing market.

In fact, most people seem quite content to downgrade. They have laptops or desktops that are collecting dust while they're browsing the web on their phones while at home. My entire family does that, I'm the only outlier.

I'm sure that cost and convenience are factors and there would be a larger market for zero-hassle "high-FOV" computing, but a bulky headset isn't it. As it is, the market for Apple Vision Pro is almost nonexistent - not without some killer use case that appeals to more than just hardcore geeks.

> My current setup is 3x monitors + a laptop screen to the side at the office and 3x monitor + a wall-mounted television in my home office.

Well, that only leaves one question: Why so few monitors?

More seriously, I'd be really interested to hear your system for arranging things across all that real estate and how you use it optimally.

I used to have 2.5 monitors (two widescreens + a laptop off to the side) --- but after several moves, the inexorable passage of time, and my growing laziness, I now just spend my workdays hunched over a single laptop.

You didn’t ask me, but I’ll chime in here. I run 6 monitors — four landscape in a 2x2 config and a portrait on either side. I use the bottom right landscape for most web browsing, email, and sharing my screen. When I’m sharing I do those things on bottom left landscape. Top monitors are for reference type info as they’re too high to stare at for long periods. Top left is downloads folder, CPU/RAM/etc monitors, sticky note, and to-do list. Top right is calendar and security cameras. Right portrait is slack (portrait is great for this, lots of history without scrolling). Left portrait is windows explorer. It’s super fast to just move the mouse and turn my head to what I need without switching windows as much.

My setup is similar to your multi-monitor arrangement, except instead of moving my head I switch between respective window sets in Stage Manager (macOS).

One downside is that my neck does not exercise much because I do not look in different directions while working. Another downside is that at certain times context can involve multiple window sets, but that is rare, and it comes with an upside: it is easier to focus on one task without windows on other monitors distracting me.

What do you do that you need so much hardware?

My experience was a few weeks with pcvr gaming on quest 3 was all I needed to get the neck strength. The AVP feels lighter by comparison.

Left: Outlook and Teams

Middle: Solidworks and/or CST Studio Suite

Right: Browser and as many terminal windows as I can stand before I start to go insane.

Laptop/TV: personal stuff

I design satellites. Specifically antenna tiles and onboard processors that do RF things. I also assist in the testing of new RF signal processing methods.

appreciate the comprehensive reply. very cool.

I spent a couple months sporadically training a neck harness to build up for lifting and it made a big difference when I gamed long sessions on VR again. I feel like will probably take headset fatigue/injuries as seriously as any other office overuse. Which is to say, probably not much, but maybe awareness will get there one day.

OP was saying the native apps look good but screen sharing is bad. How does this explain that?

Nice website. I got a 27" 5K UHD LG monitor at 90 PPD, so I'll never be able to use these things. So sharp I have to wear glasses not contacts.

That's my kind of monitor. :) It's not wasted either. Foveal cone angular density is actually around 12,000 cones/deg^2, or 110 PPD, so anything up to that is achievable with perfectly corrected vision. That's a lot higher than the 60 PPD typically claimed for retina PPD, which is at an imperfect 20/20. 110 PPD is more than 3x the PPD of the AVP...

Good to hear! I wonder how many people kinda need glasses and don't get them, making the popular opinion of what the retina is capable of much too low.

Has anyone done studies showing how much people notice the difference between 60 and 110 PPD photos for example? There are many people who have a hard time articulating 30 vs 60 PPD as it is with computer monitors. How much of a diminishing return is it to go beyond 60 PPD?

I don't know about studies, but I'm pretty sure there is a large difference between very high contrast edges (worst case: text rendered without anti-aliasing) and photos or even videos, where there usually aren't any high-contrast high-frequency edges (black pixel next to white pixel). Since anti-aliasing is standard in font rendering and pretty common in computer games, I don't think very high PPD content would often be noticable.

On the monitor I mentioned, this text is about 15-20 pixels tall mostly-white on mostly-black, and I can read it from ~4 feet away.

(website says that is ~186 PPD)

That makes sense. Given that the smallest legible fonts are around 5 pixels tall, that's 3-4x less PPD than your monitor offers at 4 feet, so you'd need ~46-62 PPD eyesight to be able to read the text. 20/20 at 60 would be more than sufficient.

This study popped up: https://www.techhive.com/article/578376/8k-vs-4k-tvs-most-co...

In summary, with an 88" screen at a distance of 5 feet, some viewers rated 8K content (118 PPD) higher on average than equivalent 4K content (59 PPD), particularly those with better than 20/20 vision (~60 PPD). Most would not notice. It wasn't directly tested but I'd guess most people do notice the difference between 30 and 60 PPD, but only those with above average eyesight will see improvements beyond that.

Nice find. TV image quality is usually so imprecise (compression, lack of text), I would suspected computer displays to be more noticeable.

I use a 27" 5K display as well, only with contacts. I'm short sighted at -6.75 in each eye. Why would I be unable to wear contacts when using it? If anything its an improved experience as my lenses significantly shrink whatever i'm looking at which the contacts do significantly less.

At -6.75, the impact of the shrinkage caused by eyeglasses would very likely exceed any slight visual imperfections caused by contacts (glare, halos, instability, rotation misalignment for astigmatism, etc.) I'm at -4 and prefer contacts for computer use, but it's right on the point of almost indifference for me.

-2.5 (IIRC, I'm long overdue for a new prescription) for me

Maybe I had bad contacts, but I found that my vision was just worse with them. Couldn't really explain it or describe it. It wasn't like the fuzziness of near-sitedness.

At -2.5, you probably don't get much shrinkage or aberration with your glasses, so they work better for you. For me, at -4 plus strong astigmatism, wearing glasses makes everything look tiny, and circles look like ovals... contacts are a better experience. That said I have tried over a dozen types of contacts over the years and it took me many many attempts to find both a product and a set of lens parameters that worked well enough for my eyes to want to switch from specs. Now I found that, I don't even own spectacles any more.

What brand/models of contacts ended up working well with your astigmatism? I find that one of my eyes has issues with the contact losing alignment too frequently, and so I’m always looking for other options. Thanks!

I've been wearing lenses since the 90s. These days I wear 1-Day Acuvue Moist for Astigmatism for the most part, released in 2006, and they continue to be my overall favorite.

I keep trying newer lens technologies as they come out, but mostly it's been a bust. However I do also like Precision1 for Astigmatism water gradient lenses, which came out in 2021. They are thicker and more stable overall, with slightly higher vision quality, but prone to drying up if I don't blink.

Occasionally for a change I'll wear Acuvue Oasys 1-Day for Astigmatism, which came out in 2017.

All three work well for me but the Acuvue Moist are the ones I tend to reach for the most often. It depends a lot on the individual and the fit, I think.

I do have some astigmatism so I'll keep this in mind.

I hate that at -6.75 that my glasses shrink things so much that a 27" monitor almost looks more like a 24" monitor and so on. I'd wear contacts more but I can't wear them often or for long due to dry eye issues caused by something else.

i dont know why it took a week but i finally have you to confirm my suspicions based on the nebulous " its a bit out of focus i dont know" crap from every review I came across.

keep it up good man.

I think we need to withhold analysis based on the 34 PPD number. In the article you can see that the rendering projection is quite distorted, with the apparent effect of using more pixels per degree for the center part. They don't account for this when calculating the 34 number. Of course a "fisheye" lens would also be "distorted" and allocate an equal number of pixels to each angle, so it's hard to tell by just eyeballing things. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual PPD number in the center, where it matters, is higher.

I think the article merely superimposed manually distorted screenshots from the AVP onto a photo of the sensor, rather than taking a photo of the sensor while turned on, so it's not representative of the distortion, but yes, I agree, you make a good point - the pancake lens optics might be nonlinear, with higher PPD in the center.

There's some interesting analysis here: https://kguttag.com/2023/06/26/apple-vision-pro-part-4-hyper...

He concludes, by making comparison with the Meta Quest which has similar pancake optics to the AVP, and by scaling up the PPD, that the AVP's PPD could be as high as 39 PPD in the center of the image.

I think most of the conclusions derived from the analysis here will still hold true if the central PPD does turn out to be as high as 39, rather than 34. It's still a very long way from 20/20 retina at 60, from foveal cone density at 110, and pales in comparison to the PPD achieved by even entry level 14" laptops or 27" 4K displays.

s/sensor/panel/

I guess I was assuming that based on the AVP virtual desktop native resolution of 4096 x 2304 that it would be about 86PPD in practice

Agreed. I find my AVP actually quite bad for using my Mac. I use a MBP instead of a MBA because 120hz makes a big difference. The MBP screen within AVP is probably something like 30hz (likely because it's using Airplay, and it doesn't have enough bandwidth). And I can't change the resolution either! It's kind of like working on a TV — I don't see why it's any better than the 14" MBP screen.

Overall, the AVP is a disappointment for me. Most of the new UX patterns I find far worse than keyboard shortcuts. (For example, a window manager is _much_ easier to use than having to pinch to drag windows around. For example Vimium is much easier to use than looking at elements and pinching at things.) I don't consume much content (e.g. TV), but of the content that I do consume, it feels lower resolution to me. The demos they have (e.g. the Alicia Keys video) feels nothing like real-life to me. As a parallel to what you said — real life has never looked better (after taking off the AVP), haha.

I agree with much of what you wrote — except I found the Alicia Keys video staggeringly good. It felt like I was in the studio with her and her band.

You can combine paradigms for the best of both worlds (e.g. physical keyboard + your apps). I imagine that IDE experiences will only improve as time goes on.

You can change the resolution though? If you go to Displays on your mac you can change the resolution of the AVP mirroring. I find it works much better at "1080p" than the default since it makes small text much more readable.

> Screen sharing from my Mac looks distractingly bad, which is a huge bummer. (AVP apps, by contrast, look fantastic.) No matter how I scale or where I place the space, it just never looks very good.

I think a big part of the difference is that your feed is rotated and skewed raster graphic. That might work fine for photographs and movies. But UIs and text will quickly suffer from washed out edges when you apply transformations to otherwise "perfect" pixels.

The resolution of the pre-transformed image would have to be vastly higher to counteract the fuzzyness.

An even better solution would be if the UI could be rendered directly to the AVP rather than being a screen capture.

The thing I wonder is can't you fix the screen to be straight relative to your head at all times? Or is it always fixed to the environment?

The pixels of the AVP display are wrapped around your eyes, so pixel perfect rendering would result in an out of shape screen (although it would likely be much sharper). Also - from my experience - it doesn't feel good to have a large object unnaturally fixed to the center of your view in VR.

There's so many layers of compression and scaling and transforming going on that it's never going to look Great.

macOS renders to 5120x2880 'display', then it's downscaled to 4k, which is then streamed to the Vision Pro with whatever compression or bitrate, where it's scaled to whatever size you display it as.

I for one don't notice any quality/resolution difference between native apps and a mirrored Mac screen.

I agree it feels "worse" than a physical screen - it is certainly less crisp. But I ran an experiment, and created a doc with font sizes from 1-15 pt, then viewed it on my physical 24" 4k monitor, and on a mirrored Mac display in the AVP set to the same (virtual) dimensions and distance away.

Interestingly, text became illegible (without leaning closer in either case) for me at around the 6pt mark for both of them. Objectively speaking, the size of font I can read is pretty equivalent, although I find myself preferring fonts about 2pts larger on the AVP than on my physical monitor.

I suspect this is because the physical display is able to benefit from precise pixel alignment and subpixel rendering, which the AVP can't. But the "average density" feels pretty equivalent... it somehow feels more an issue of optical sharpness than of "pixel size" (even I know the two are related.)

> I for one don't notice any quality/resolution difference between native apps and a mirrored Mac screen.

I wonder how so different opinions exist on things that should be pretty much the same for everyone.

People’s eyes vary quite a bit even with corrective lenses.

Some people immediately notice 90/120Hz screns vs 60. Some will see pixels on a 3K 14" screen while it will "good enough" for most.

Aside from sheer eye sight, I think there's also attention and sensibility to these specific things. The same way web designers recognize fonts from 4 letters when generic users barely pay attention to whether it's serif.

Some people have much worse vision? Makes sense that people would perceive visual clarity differently

It's hard to talk about something so based in individual perception: it's true, my eyes could literally be different.

However, my strong suspicion is that the visionOS native apps have a larger font size and bigger, smoother UX elements. In this case, the mind doesn't notice a little blurriness around the edges.

Whereas with a mirrored display, there's tons of tiny thin lines where it's easier to notice that visual acuity is not 100%.

How is your wifi network? Have you tried changing the display resolution on the Mac while you're connected to the Vision Pro?

The virtual display doesn't look as good as the laptop screen, but it looks as good or better than the 1440p monitor I normally use at my desk.

Thank you, I’ll fiddle with that. WiFi is good and my 14” M3 is using its native resolution, whatever the default is.

For comparison purposes can you share the size of your monitor and how far away you sit from it? Trying to decide if it's worth getting one of these (which would be a bit of a pain since I'm in Canada).

Of every major issue with the AVP the fact that they not only avoided but made impossible to have a wired connections to anything even though they laughably made the battery pack external is really the most stupid thing ever. As a display replacement for more powerful hardware, we will never overcome the bandwidth problem (heck, it's already hard enough to do 5k at high fps with a wire) no matter how good the compression is.

It makes no sense that they built and advertise this "feature" when it could have been so much better with a thunderbolt/usb c input on the battery pack...

It doesn't spell much good for the future of the device, because it seems it will be largely locked down and limited like the iPad but even less enticing uses cases...

Disappointing to hear. I was hoping laptop work to be on par with a 27" 4k monitor, otherwise can't see I'd use it "enough".

Matching the 60° FOV of a 27" monitor at close distance, it's equivalent to 1080p or less. It gets even worse at FOVs equivalent to more reasonable distances.

Given that the screen inside the AVP is basically 4k, your screen would then have to fill your entire vision to have the same resolution. So almost like having your nose touching the screen.

How much of that is compression artifacts of streaming via wifi?

Maybe it‘s linked to streaming resolution and bitrate.

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