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Comment by aranelsurion | Hacker News Reader

Coming from Quest 3, everything about it sounds great BUT for that FOV. Even on Quest with 103 x 96, I sometimes feel like I'm looking around through a mask or binoculars. Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.

Hopefully it's not so bad.

Oh BTW they showed a new Beat Saber game, and among the logos I've seen Ace Attorney VR among a few others. Let's see if those come for Quest 3 and maybe even PCVR.

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70 is crazy! I was thinking years ago that surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+. Progress has really stagnated and over the past few years new headsets never seem to just be universally better than whatever they are replacing. It always seems to be pull one lever to improve one aspect while regressing somewhere else.

I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year and it got consistently better across the board every iteration.

It's not a headset, it's glasses.

It's a headset

You can’t see through it. So it’s a small glasses shaped headset

...with stray light coming in from all sides because glasses don't cover your face completely. So the best place to use them will probably be a completely darkened room?

Unless like Vision Pro there's a surroundings control that lets you go from total visibility outside the image to complete darkness — within the FOV — in any environment.

Edit: Since the FOV is only 70 degrees, that leaves 110 degrees outside the image, divided between the edges of the glasses and the rest of the room. So for sure in daylight outside light would destroy the theater effect.

Apparently there is a flap you can place on them to block out light.

Then that website is completely misleading, showing those projections within their ambient environment, as if they were AR like Vision Pro.

> I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year

That didn’t happen because you would need market demand for that. Only Gen Alpha likes VR as a demographic.

It has progressed. The tech is just expensive and heavy and... all sorts of tradeoffs. Meta had a prototype (Boba) with a 180 horizontal and 120 vertical FoV

But it of course is large and heavy like the quest pro and expensive most likely. Things that when you market to consumers don't pan out.

So they are optimizing on the other dimension (weight) which of course trades of many other dimensions.

Pancake optics are really cool, very clear and lightweight without some of the light distortions you get from traditional optics. They are worth the tradeoff. But they don't work out beyond 100-ish degrees. I think the Steam Frame is really pushing the maximum the industry seems to be able to get out of them.

More niche manufacturers like Pimax have accomplished much higher FOVs but people keep returning them because they're expensive, heavy and uncomfortable (I think they're popular among people who lie down in cockpit rigs).

> surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+

They would be if they had gotten popular and competition had ramped up. But that didn't happen.

e.g. who's Meta competing with via these VR Glasses?

> Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.

Ouch, that's a tough sell. Maybe useful for AR type stuff, but I wouldn't want to go from a Quest/Index/Frame/etc to that for VR.

From description I thought this is more 'View on a Virtual TV' rather than a full VR thing, I may be wrong. This is good, because I, honestly, find that a lot of my VR time is sitting or lying down.

So, xreal competitor?

I have a Vision Pro since launch and loved it, and it has a much more traditional, much wider FOV. However, when you do watch movies on it, it looks incredible but usually only a fraction of that full FOV is utilized -- you do see the theater, or environment, etc. My one wondering is if they'll somehow really deliver the experience of a virtual screen, non-occlusion of the real world, and make it so that the huge screen on the wall several feet away from you can be fully rendered on only this 70 degree FOV. To be sure this is a killer for this as an all-encompassing VR device, but I hope that maybe we'll be shown that it might just be good enough for more of a MR use. Or maybe its just cause I'm at least excited someone is trying and bringing products in this space and so I want to cheer this on

IMO, FOV is the biggest immersion killer in VR today, and doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's not so bad when you're relatively new to it as the illusion is convincing enough that you don't notice, but once the magic wears off a bit, it's hard to escape that binocular effect. I wish one of the bigger players would tackle that. I'm not willing to take a chance on Pimax.

Microsoft has a patent on a super cheap and easy way to improve FOV, but they cancelled Windows Mixed Reality so this solution will just sit in a vault forever.

TLDR, put LEDs all around the lens. They extend the scene even though they have zero resolution, you perceive the environment as extending to the full angular width you can see.

quest 3 is sooo heavy though

I'm very interested in Valve's approach, shifting some of the weight to the back.

i am not 1200 euro interested

I wish they just removed the SoC/storage/RAM/battery/cooling and gave me the PCVR part for 500

The default strap it comes with doesn't help either, I switched to a halo band type and have comfortably worn it for 6+ hrs multiple times (yes I have/had an addiction to IL2, flight sims (and racing games) are where it truly shines).

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