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Comment by g-b-r | Hacker News Reader

I haven't tried them, but I imagine that despite the high resolution, text that is badly aligned (and probably constantly imperceptibly wobbling) strains the eyes.

The software should probably force text to be aligned on whole real pixels, even if that detracts a little from the realism.

And the best would probably be to keep virtual screens completely fixed until you move by a certain, largish degree (as an option).

Then again, maybe this has nothing to do with the straining.

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I've watched a few reviews where the claim is "multiple 4k monitors", and even on Apple's site it says "More pixels than a 4K TV. For each eye.". But any virtual monitor is going to be scaled down, and with "spatial computing" being the desired interaction, it's not going to be projected at a fixed point on the embedded screens. Sure, when you have a 4k monitor across the room, it's smaller because it's further away, but the full resolution is there (reality is much higher fidelity than "retina display" ever was and even the Vision Pro is). When a virtual display is projected into a space further away, it's going to take up fewer pixels and be down-sampled. It's kind of annoying that the term "4k" is being used to refer to "physical space the display takes up" or "size reported to the operating system" rather than the physical pixel density.

While the resolution is high, the PPD is very low (pixels per degree of vision). It's lower density than a classic monitor, and nowhere close to a modern high density 4k or retina display.

Also your eyes can't really focus the same, anything within about 12 ft causes you to struggle to focus leading to eye strain. This is an unfortunate reality of the lenses

> The software should probably force text to be aligned on whole real pixels, even if that detracts a little from the realism.

I think that'd be difficult given that pixels are effectively "non-rectangular" given the warping from the lenses.

Well they might be non-rectangular, but text aligned on their borders should still be sharper than misaligned text, no?

High DPI monitor text effectively can't be misaligned, especially since Apple's text rendering always dilated characters instead of trying to fit them onto pixel grids.

That's an interesting point. You potentially also have alignment issues with the window being placed spatially, i.e., rendering text that is not perpendicular to the plane of the screens. When moving my head in the AVP I'm moving the screens, unlike when I move my head to look at a different part of a monitor.

Yeah with slanted screens it might well be best to not align anything, at least beyond certain angles

Text in natively rendered apps is perspective corrected before rendering and incredibly sharp as a result. It’s been mentioned in a few interviews in passing.

Text in streamed displays from a Mac may suffer from pixel misalignment.

> aligned on whole real pixels

Remember that you're working with two screens, not one, and they have to have coordinated projections that will also depend on the user's IPD.

Interpupillary distance fwiw

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_distance

Well ok, but is it a problem to have the text aligned on both screens, if the user is fine with some "stuttering" when moving or with keeping the virtual screen fixed?

It's a problem because a given piece of text isn't going to match the same pixel boundaries on both screens.

Windows aren’t perpendicular to your view, though. They shear because of perspective.

Yes I was mostly considering exactly perpendicular windows; it might be beneficial to let go of some realism and perspective to work more comfortably

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