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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I literally haven’t thought about the Vision Pro even a single time in months.

Wild for such a hyped-up technology product. It just shipped and vanished.

Their stance on developer access made it DOA on day 1.

All apps are flying blind when you're multitasking: apps can't even use iOS style marker tracking unless you run them in "immersive mode", which makes them the only app running. That combined with no camera access at all, extremely laggy hand tracking, and an inability to do room scale without a constant passthrough make it somehow less capable than a Quest 3.

I bought a Quest 3 after my Vision Pro and it's a legitimately better piece of hardware except for the displays, and passthrough (which is gimped in usage on AVP). Even the lenses are better on the Q3. Meta has a commanding lead in VR after all

On the other hand, the weakness of the onboard compute significantly restricts the Quests’ potential, as does their inability to take a DisplayPort input from a PC (the tether can only serve crappy compressed video).

I own a Quest 2 and AVP and while the Quest is alright for what it does and regularly gets used (for PC-tethered Beat Saber mainly), I’m on the lookout for a quality dedicated PCVR-oriented replacement that doesn’t break the bank. I don’t see myself buying another Quest in the future unless they add back DisplayPort input or the onboard compute both becomes more powerful and gains the capability to run Steam so I don’t have to buy games from Facebook to play untethered.

Uncompressed 4k@90 isn't exactly trivial. I think you'd need TB3 or USB4 for the bandwidth alone and Qualcomm doesn't provide that on the chipset. The device itself can decompress 8K video if it's stored in disk.

I'm fairly certain it's not Meta standing in the way here. My bet is Quest 4 will be able to achieve this but we'll see.

Yeah, Meta has a decent excuse in that they're basically using a smartphone chip for their headsets. Apple's using a laptop chip and another big chip, so not having any high-speed IO for the Vision Pro is more of a glaring omission.

As far as passthrough permissions, I don't think either platform lets you near the feed. Vision OS has their nonimmersive 3d widget mode which goes further and only gives you input when your widget is being interacted with. I assume Meta will go a similar route there.

I can forgive most of the Quest's OS limitations because it's functionally an entertainment device.

The AVP should have been a powerhouse like the Hololens, and the $3500 price tag didn't exactly scream anything other than enterprise for mass adoption.

I'm pretty surprised by the idea the Hololens was a powerhouse. Can you elaborate on that? My experience with it certainly didn't evoke 'powerhouse.'

I had a pair that I ended up returning [1]. I think about them often, multiple times a week when I’m using my laptop or tablet. I felt incredibly productive with the AVP when writing code away from my main computer. And they were just really cool/fun to use. I hope to get the second iteration if Apple continues to make them [2].

[1] I bought them because I had several app ideas for AVP that I wanted to explore, but right after they arrived I promptly signed a new client and couldn’t justify the extra time to learn Swift and AVP dev. I decided to return the AVP before the refund window expired.

[2] I realize the irony of hoping Apple continues to make the AVP when the act of returning mine may end up helping contribute to its downfall.

Ever recorded any metrics? I wonder how much of your "feeling" productive is real.

Or if you live outside the US, just vanished, since it has never shipped.

My wife and I saw a Segway in Golden Gate Park yesterday, and I made a similar comment about it.

Those are so fun to use at Burning Man! Just don't run out of battery in the middle of the playa or you'll be lugging the thing back for a mile through dust storms

I use mine almost every day, it's awesome for traveling. It might be the best "watching videos in bed" device ever made.

This frightens me. I have been working at reducing my time of watching videos in bed, and all I have to tempt me is a phone and a laptop. It's such an easy trap to fall into.

Spending time horizontal while not asleep is very unhealthy for your heart, and many other systems in your body.

> Spending time horizontal while not asleep is very unhealthy for your heart.

Why is this?

To be clear, it's not that sleeping while horizontal is better than being awake while horizontal. We all need solid sleep, but being horizontal should otherwise be minimized as it is the ultimate sedentary lifestyle.[0] This causes heart atrophy.

[0] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/the...

see my other comment for other references: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40549893

I think you’re incorrectly jumping to correlations/causations.

Your references are due to sedentary, not laying down. You can have a sedentary life standing in place most of the day. Likewise, the problem is being sedentary, not what position your sedentary in.

Look at the logic in my comment link, does this not make sense? This seems like basic physics and cardio to me.

The less time that your heart has to fight against pressure/gravity, the weaker that muscle will become. This is pure causation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40549893

It’s a reasonable hypothesis, but you’d need to experiment to validate it. It’s easy to imagine how prolonged exposure to bed rest or microgravity may trigger heart muscle remodelling in a way that intermittent bouts of lying down would not.

> Spending time horizontal while not asleep is very unhealthy for your heart.

Never heard of this before, any references?

I will try to find some references, but the basic concept is that your heart will atrophy when it doesn't have to work against gravity, as in pumping blood from foot to head, while vertical.

This is why standing desks are a thing, why an astronaut will lose 30% of his heart-mass after one year on the ISS, and why patients after a long coma have a hard time doing cardio.

edit:

"Cardiac atrophy after bed rest and spaceflight"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11883764_Cardiac_at...

"Cardiac atrophy in women following bed rest"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17379748/

Seems like it should be easy enough to offset with exercise though? Like if you’re doing cardio a few days a week you’re not going to suffer too much by chilling in bed a couple evenings.

Yeah, this seems possible. I was thinking of someone more generally increasing their horizontal time without doing anything to make up for it. This is my own projection, as it is what I have been guilty of doing.

I read the second paragraph as a euphemism for having sex. I was confused because consensual sex is generally considered a healthy activity.

I fell into the trap ages ago, and spend as much time horizontally as possible without actively dying.

You’re absolutely right that it’s bad for you.

Ha! This morning, laying in bed, I put on my AVP and saw that Dune 2 is now on Max. "I'll just watch five minutes..."

You can imagine what happened :-)

The thing is, the Quest 2/3 is nearly as good for watching videos in bed.

There's no need to pay the extra $3,000 or whatever it is.

I'm very curious to see if more people adopt the AVP for productivity while traveling though. That's what the Quest seems pretty useless for still.

I have both Quest 3 and AVP, and they are not even close for “watching videos in bed”. Partly just pure video and audio quality, where the AVP is a generation ahead, at least.

But also for less than singleminded video watching: if you get a text, the notification appears. If you are watching a long-running deployment, you can have a terminal window off to the side to glance at periodically.

And if you want a drink of water or even to get take the glass to the kitchen for a refill, you don’t take the headset off. The passthrough is that good on AVP, where Q3 is sort of functional but very acid trippy with bending geometry when you look around.

Is AVP “worth” 5x as much? IDK. Depends on your income and priorities. But it is certainly a dramatically different experience.

(Q3 is still hands down better for games, BTW)

Apple consistently has the advantage of good UX: tight integration with their ecosystem, including message notifications and calls. Costing around $3,000, the product must feel solid with top quality components. I'm wondering about the external battery and how it affects mobility. I imagine there might be downsides to having to carry it around, but maybe it's not as bad?

i've definitely snagged the cable on a doorknob walking around the house, it's not great, i've been meaning to get one of those ipod armbands people used to wear at the gym to avoid the issue

The battery is annoying but not terrible. At least as a guy who wears pants with pockets, it’s not much different than having a cell phone in a pocket.

The cable is also somewhat irritating, mostly in that “a big just landed on me” moment when an arm brushes it.

It is definitely suboptimal and contributes to the AVP’s vibe of absolutely incredible and yet not quite ready for mass market.

No one for whom money is still an object should buy one, but absolutely everyone should schedule a demo at the Apple Store. It’s heavy, uncomfortable and has few legitimate use cases, but the demo is incredible. It’s a glimpse of what’s to come.

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