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Comment by jdprgm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

> 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'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.

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