So many questions I’d love to ask you about this, but again, none of my business. Just wanted to let you know I’d upvote that blog post to the moon should you ever decide to write it.

Feel free to ask any questions here and I'll answer anything I can (e.g. no unreleased info, but maybe go into more detail about the kind of stuff that was shown to devs at WWDC). No blog right now but maybe in the future :)

The idea of looking at real screens in passthrough didn't even occur to me.

If you're wondering about passthrough it's pretty good for most things but is definitely missing the dynamic range of the human eye, which no video camera or display can really match yet. Like a super bright light might just show up as white and you can look directly at it no problem. Basically the same as what you get when you record a video and watch it back on your phone.

I'm sure as soon as it's released people will be doing that and reporting back though!

I do think a bunch of incremental improvements will eventually allow different use cases though. E.g. you'd never take it on a run or a bike ride in its current state but with enough weight and battery improvements you could have a HUD for exercise stats + navigation when biking with stuff like a videogame-esque ghost of your PR to race against. Just a random idea, there's a lot of stuff you can dream up.

Imagine riding a bike at 30kmph and accidentally unplugging the headset. Boom. Black. Instantly. That's a scary place to find yourself.

I'm curious if Apple will utilize the gyroscope to try and detect movement faster than a certain speed and show a warning. Take the risk if you want, but at least people should be aware of the consequences!

> I'm curious if Apple will utilize the gyroscope to try and detect movement faster than a certain speed and show a warning.

The Vision Pro is doing SLAM at all times so it actually always knows exactly where you are (relative to its origin) and your speed!

2. What about sleeping with it? VRC people do that, so they might be curious.

3. Is it usable outside?

4. What was the longest time you had it continuously on?

5. Have you ever dropped it? :D

2. Never tried sleeping with it... I don't see why it would be any worse than other headsets though.

3. I've never used it outside, but that was for secrecy and not technical reasons.

4. Honestly not sure, maybe an hour without taking it off at all but I've definitely been in it for the majority of a few hour spans many times. At the time the main blocker was the beta OS and not comfort or battery (I would keep the battery pack plugged into the charger most of the time).

5. Nope! We were all super careful with them because prototypes are expensive, much more so than the consumer product. It's not something you could just casually drop while using like your phone though.

4. So the battery can be charged while plugged into the headset. What happens when you pull the battery from headset? I am guessing insta black. Does it have some power-saving mode where only R1 is feeding images from cameras to displays without any computing possibilities?

This sounds like the battery can be charging while using the headset, right? Which imo makes the 2 hour battery life much more understandable – if you're stationary in the device most of the time then you only have to rely on the battery when you move. If you can plug in to charge when you're back at your desk/couch, it's not really a limiting factor (for the use cases Apple is pursuing).

https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/first_impressions_of_visi...

What does "border in the FoV" means?

Either one of those statements can be right. Not both at the same time.

It's time someone with real measuring equipment looks at of these and gives a more technical review than just "wow Apple magic".

meaning a couple 4k screens can be rendered in the visible area without a noticeable difference in quality to real screens at a similar "apparent" distance

We also know 23 million pixels for the whole system. So, 11.5 million for one display. a 4K display is 8.2 million. So it's not a whole lot more than 4K, and lower than their own 5K display (which has 14 million), which matches what they claim ("more than a 4K display"). That's not enough to cover the full field of human vision and still have pixels so small they can't be seen.

With corner waste it's just barely enough for one 4K display this way (and stretched to the full limits of vision it will be pretty unwatchable so close). You can't display two as you mention, because AR/VR projection works by using the 2 screens to display the same content just from a slightly different position (parallax) causing the 3D effect. The more overlap between the eyes the better and more comfortable the 3D effect (some headsets try to get an ultrawide FoV this way but shoot themselves in the foot with low overlap).

If it has a really wide FoV its sharpness will be pretty much on-par with a quest 3/Pico 4, if it's got the same FoV it will be a lot sharper. I expect the truth to be somewhere in between. Wider than a Quest and also sharper, but pixels visible if you look well and not quite full human FoV.

Still very impressive (which it must be at that price point obviously!). But real-world and not magic. Makes sense because Apple's engineers, as good as they are, are bound by the same laws of physics we all are. Their marketeers would love us to believe otherwise though.

It's really time for some real-world specs on this thing instead of marketing blah.

The exception to this is at the edges of your vision, where each eye does see a unique portion of the field, but by definition that’s not where you’re looking.

This is impossible at the resolution stated. The headset would have to be 8K or more per eye in order to achieve this, which it most definitely is not.

I'm not so sure. Human vision is only sharp in a coin-sized area at any time. If you fix your eyes on a single word in your comment you can't actually read the entire comment, for example.

In other words, you don't need 4k in your entire FOV you just need to ensure that most of the pixels are spent in the middle of the viewing area.

I believe that it would be possible to have the screens in the headset generate a very distorted image, where the edges are compressed to a small area of the actual screen and therefore low-res, while the lenses stretch this image to fill the viewing FOV. Kind of like anamorphic movie lenses, or even how wideangle lenses distort the edges more than the center.

I have no idea if Vision Pro does this but it seems theoretically possible at least.

I think what the OP means is that you'd have actually less physical resolution in the sides. Most headsets do this somewhat but not in a huge amount.

tf? Did he miss everything about LLMs?

This is actually a bit disappointing since I would rather not have to move my entire head to look at a virtual side monitor. It seems like the technology is there now and many companies are looking into it, hopefully other headsets will be released with higher FOVs: https://youtu.be/y054OEP3qck?t=283

Another noteworthy point from that video: Apple has bought Limbak, an optics specialist that was formerly tied with Lynx R1's optics. This means Lynx can no longer use Limbak's future optics that, admittedly, fall short in scaling to higher resolutions. Now, Lynx has shifted its gaze to hypervision optics, intent on preventing a similar acquisition by another tech behemoth like Apple.

I was already into performance programming beforehand but had no finance knowledge whatsoever.

> That shift is fundamental. The interface for Vision Pro felt like it was reading my thoughts rather than responding to my inputs. Its infinite, pixel perfect canvas also felt inherently different. I wasn’t constrained by my physical setup, instead my setup was whatever I thought would be most productive for me.

That DOES seem like a paradigm shift in the offing to me. Sure it might be iPhone 1 expensive and uncertain, but it's easy to imagine how incredible a lighter, more affordable version will be to MANY people within 5 years or so.

- Sensors: It looks like the XREAL AIR doesn't have any sensors so just displays the monitor in a fixed position on screen, which is pretty different than loading up monitors in a fixed point in space and being able to look away at other stuff. Also eye tracking is a pretty killer feature that totally changes the game in my opinion, I wouldn't personally buy a headset without it after having experienced it.

- VR vs AR display: As I'm sure you're aware, with AR sunglasses you can't really have anything darker than the actual light passing through so you're limited to only rendering stuff brighter than the surroundings. Maybe for text it's fine but not for images or video in my opinion. I can't find any footage taken through the XREAL AIR lens (and their website doesn't faithfully show this effect) so idk exactly how big the difference will be for you.

- FOV: I'm not actually sure what the FOV is of the Vision Pro but it's significantly higher than 46°. And because usable area increases with the square, you'd be able to fit a few times more displays and other stuff in.

- Resolution: XREAL AIR looks to be 1080p, Vision Pro is way better than that (per-degree too), so you can have better looking and smaller text.

I'd say that eye strain wasn't really an issue at all for me. When you take off the headset after a while inside of it you kinda get a jarring transition back to normal vision instead of passthrough, but passthrough doesn't have any noticeable issues when you're inside of it. It's almost like waking up from a dream where stuff feels different and you can't exactly place why.

As for physical weight, it's lighter than other VR headsets I'm used to but obviously more than a pair of ski goggles. I'll echo MKBHD's thoughts that the most noticeable strain was on my nose because my lightseal (like the WWDC demos) wasn't as personalized as the version you'd get as a customer, so I fully expect that to be a non-issue.

Also, is passthrough good enough for things like typing, so you don't get an uncanny valley sense of the keys being just slightly off visually compared to your proprioception & touch?

I don't really look at my keyboard while typing so that's also a non-issue. For stuff where you really need hand-eye coordination it's totally fine at normal arms-length but gets worse as you get closer to your face. Finding a key on the keyboard with your eyes is not a big deal but if you try to drink from a glass of water you'll likely spill it on yourself the first time (and then eventually get used to it).

I wondered about that.

Great to hear about heat. That was always an issue for me in other headsets.

Either way, very fair.

I'm not sure how common this is for neurotypicals with VR headsets. With Vision Pro have you experienced losing track of time? Or does the AR passthrough seem to help with this?

I'm not sure if that's due to the passthrough or the fact that I was only ever using it to actively do work (and I usually mean work on stuff for the Vision Pro itself, not just "normal" dev work).

Here's the one that I bought to use with my "frankenquest" (Vive Deluxe Audio Strap on a Quest 2) setup: https://www.studioformcreative.com/product-page/vive-das-200...

I would say 6500 is too much for a better version of something I already have that doesn't really enable any additional usecases. The Vision Pro would be used pretty differently than my Vive (which is just the occasional gaming session right now). I'd think of it as more competing with iPads, external monitors, and laptops than a Varjo right now.

My gut feeling is Quest 3 will be more than good enough for most people/use cases, and people will be more than happy to pay 7x less for what is - at the end of the day - basically the same experience.

Vision Pro looks like a better version of HoloLens of yesteryear. Doesn’t really seem all that groundbreaking to me, just more refined.

I seriously doubt it comes close to what Apple is doing. The price just isn’t anywhere near high enough.

Fact is there is a laptop chip stuffed into this headset, there is a mobile soc in the oculus line.

Although I do think that facebook has sold a lot of their devices at a loss?

Apple loves their profit margins. But it’s not $3500 for fun. It’s clearly expensive to make, even if their profit margin in still baked in.

This product is inherently experimental. They are not going to be operating at the type of scale they do when it comes to iphones, macbooks, ipads, etc ...

So I do imagine that if this thing takes off and they can start putting out hundreds of thousands or millions of units they will gain more savings through scale.

I'd love to know what their initial order for launch is. It will be interesting to see how far the preorder precedes delivery as well.

Full color passthrough from cameras and a depth sensor (better than Quest Pro), 120Hz, slightly higher resolution than Quest 2, 40% smaller (whatever that means), Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 (they claim more than twice as fast as Quest 2), pancake lenses, controllers without the tracking rings, $500.

Compared to Apple's, the main downsides are lower resolution display (also not OLED), slower, no eye tracking.

Main advantages are price, support for games/controllers (you can still use hand tracking if you just want to watch movies), and no external battery pack.

The main difference is that Vision has a laptop grade processor, LiDAR, and another separate processor to manage the LiDAR, a separate depth sensor, & all the other sensors and cameras

The Quest only has a smartphone processor. The pro doesn’t even have a depth sensor

Is it possible to use Vision Pro to build and publish a Vision Pro app?

Because it seems to be another Apple device separating producers and consumers just like iPad and iPhone.

The persistent framing of i-devices this way on HN, after all these years, is baffling to me. Tons of creation happens on them, or using them as a tool in service of creation, much of which would be harder or impossible with traditional computer. Just not a lot of software creation.

Even in digital art where the iPad excels doing something like having a reference photo open while you work is compromised and the only good way to do is to hope the app you're using supports it a reasonable way or else throw away half your screen real estate.

For most creation-oriented tasks I do that aren't computer-centric, I'd much rather have an iPhone or iPad than a laptop. They're great tools for creation & work, just not so much for creating stuff for computers, certain exceptions aside, and for those they're mostly just about as good as a laptop, or even not-very-good but usable in a pinch, not better.

Desktop shines when you create something novel.

It's as simple as that -- there are tons of things people have created really polished iOS "happy path" software to create on, but they're not general purpose creators.

Specifically because anything general purpose threatens Apple's App Store toll gate, and thus cannot be allowed to exist.

If apple would just get over themselves and allow sideloading (or, gosh, a terminal!), it would go a long way to improving iOS usability for creatives.

…as long as it’s sanctioned by the platform owners.

The main one for me is the longevity of your data. It is connected to the control over your data you have in a desktop OS. Good luck finding what you did five years ago in an app in some device and reproducing it now. You are at the mercy of some proprietary format the app creator chose, the availability of the app at a later stage, whether you saved your work in a cloud service, whether you kept your old device running, the operating system updates you installed, .....

With a desktop you can archive your work, whatever it might be, in sequences of bits that reside in your disk. Open source software and virtual machines go a long way for helping reproducibility.

Not all tasks benefit from reproducibility and longevity but I'd argue they include a lot more than computer programming

Compiling code isn't impossible; every webpage that contains JavaScript uses the Just In Time compiler to execute JavaScript. The ability for 3rd party apps to compile code is limited due to security reasons—Apple's Lockdown Mode [1] specifically disables the JIT.

iPad users have been able to write code using Swift and submit apps to the App Store since late 2021. [2]

I have no doubt you'll be able to create apps using the Vision Pro in the future… there's probably a version of Swift Playgrounds [3] running on a prototype Apple Vision Pro right now.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-lockdown-mode-ios-16/

[2]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apples-swift-playgrounds...

[3]: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

I think the disconnect is in the type of creation, the higher-end production quality you want, rarer iOS devices are. And the corollary is, if you only care about the highest-end of creation, they essentially become invisible.

For producing stuff for computers or for industrial design (e.g. CAD or architectural drafting), yes. In other areas, tablets and phones are ubiquitous tools, and if they vanished tomorrow they wouldn't be replaced with e.g. laptops—they'd be replaced with paper, with various single-purpose devices, et c.

iPad is not because it cannot be used to create the Vision Pro. It may still have advantages where it's better for some uses cases, but it still doesn't make it a general purpose computing device in the same way that a TV is better for watching videos than a Macbook, but a TV is not a "real computer".

I think the real/not-real computer thing's not especially illuminating, but I don't take issue with it the same way I do dismissing phones and tablets as "consumption-only", a perspective I find simply baffling, because I see them used for creation and productive purposes all the time in a ton of contexts by ordinary people.

It's using local Wifi (or USB), so the latency is very low.

Beyond that, even though an iPad can act as another monitor, it's not a big monitor. It doesn't really achieve the ideal of a workstation replacement.

Are we going to be able to create a large software project using it without carrying around a MacBook as well?

It’d be nice to be able to run macOS when I travel and not have to bring my MacBook.

I suspect the downvotes are because the keynote literally featured someone using their Mac inside the headset. And another video (session? State of the union?) showed developing a Vision Pro app on the Mac and testing it right next to the Mac from inside the Vision Pro.

That doesn’t mean Apple will expose that. Maybe just not today. The original iPhone had a full OS capable of multitasking but it wasn’t a feature given to the user due to memory and battery constraints. We’ve now had it for years.

This was the first we’ve seen of it, and I suspect the on device development story was not one they wanted to spend limited time on. Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.

Time will tell. The iPad can do development. Apple has proven it with Swift Playgrounds. But they still haven’t given us Xcode. So who knows.

Or are you speaking instead to a local terminal environment, like iSH or a-Shell on iPad?

Apple announced just before WWDC the iPadOS versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, their professional media creation tools. We've all seen shows and listed to music (and podcasts) created with these tools. While most of the core functionality is the same between the Mac and iPadOS versions, the iPad versions take advantage of multitouch and other iPadOS features, as they should.

> Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.

Yes; that's how Apple does things.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, iPad users can already use Swift Playgrounds to code and submit an app to the App Store [1].

It's just a matter of time before there will be a version of Xcode for the iPad.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36303426

Thats nothing compared to the bash build stages and custom permission setups, third party libraries, bespoke source code management scripts, ruby-based project initialization and preprocessing scripts I've seen amongst Xcode-based projects.

When those fail, you are troubleshooting through logs and at the filesystem level.

If the idea is a version of Xcode without those things but is otherwise fully featured, I think that is actually speaking about some future version of Swift Playgrounds.

Otherwise, "Xcode for iPad" is basically a jailed Mac VM.

I suspect that, like the iPad, there will be ways to force it to function as a standalone device, but that the happy path will be heavily optimized towards you buying as much Apple hardware as possible.

basically is it a laptop (fully independent), an ipad (excellent secondary device that can do focused work on it's own), or a smart monitor (peripheral with some built in usability)?

Gaming, TV, casual internet browsing, stationary exercise, socializing with people remotely (e.g. VRChat instead of Zoom/FaceTime), passing time on trains+planes, etc.

Tech enthusiasts underestimate how much the general public hates having gear strapped to their faces and over their hair, especially more than half of women who put considerable effort into their face makeup and hair.

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-37306404

This can

>8k per eye

Not required to get 4K fidelity… you only need somewhat higher than 4K resolution.

This is, for most people, pointless, as the rendering costs will be much, much higher (>8x for a quadrupling in resolution per eye), they probably won't care if text is not quite as sharp as a real 4K display, and they might not even be able to tell if their eyes haven't been trained on them.

Unfortunately though, I require a 4K display for sharp text (I get really weird visual effects from low-resolution displays), and my current HMD (HP Reverb G2 at 2160x2160 per eye) is uncomfortably blurry, so I don't imagine the Vision Pro at an estimated 3400 pixels per eye according to their marketing figure (`sqrt(23000000 / 2)`) can do much better.

I know it's revolutionary and this is about at the current limits of HMD technology, I'm not at all claiming that it's not impressive for the industry. It's just part of the reason why I don't use HMDs often is because the tech hasn't yet advanced enough to be comfortable for me.

As for development of non-VR stuff I personally didn't because I already had a fully-featured desk setup and the OS at the time was buggy enough to not want to deal with it (as every OS is years before release, not a ding on Vision Pro at all). With a good OS (which it will be upon release) and more native apps (like Termius on iPad) I definitely would though!

FWIW the iPad supports dumbed down app development through Swift Playgrounds and presumably the Vision Pro will at the very least support that if it supports all iPad apps, but that's pure speculation.

This gets at my main question about this: does it feel to you like it will be great for "doing work", which generally happens at discrete places, or something which will apply to life generally, which is the kind of (some would say dystopian) ideal of "augmented reality"?

Or put another way, I felt a huge increase in immersion and interest going from the original Oculus's three degrees of freedom to the "room scale" six degrees of freedom in Quest.

I know this is "spatial computing" and you can put monitors in fixed positions in the environment, but is "desk scale" where you can kind of look around and pivot your head, or "room scale" where you can get up and move around the room, or "life scale" where you can leave the room entirely to check on the screens you left in the kitchen before coming back to sit down in front of the ones in your office?

according to the videos they show, people move around a lot in a room with these things on, grab things (e.g. their phone, cup of coffee). and makes sense, if you see basically what you have in front of you, then there's no "boundaries" you should stay in not to bump into things.

I also don't expect it to be super dystopian or replace real life in general, but it could definitely replace the parts where you're already looking at a screen regardless.

It is technically capable of being "life scale" in the way that you describe: it tries to keep a consistent coordinate system across multiple reboots and from room to room and real life objects can occlude virtual objects, but to be honest I have no clue what the average use case will be or how the OS will enforce it.

To me its a bit like tap to pay vs magnetic credit cards. Eventually tap to pay replaces all other ways of paying much like AR might replace all other screen interactions. But FIRST it should replace something critical. In the payment space this was subway entrances where people needed to pay quick and get through.

The reason it takes so long for full adoption is because its very challenging to replace something like magnetic credit card that “works pretty well”. From my point of view, the iPhone “works pretty well” and its going to towards the END of the innovation cycle when other screen usage gets folded into these spatial platforms

The most important part of a WFH setup is desk + chair. That's where the comfort is, much more so than a big screen - which is certainly nice.

Desk + chair is what takes up space though. Once that space is taken, a big monitor is just something you put on it.

As excited I am about this new tech, which looks fantastic from the ad, I don't think it will replace a comfortable desk + chair setup.

At this point, I doubt they’d be letting them off campus.

When you worked with Vision Pro, did it have a device native terminal and/or a device native ssh client?

What I mean by that is a terminal running under VisionOS, as opposed to getting terminal access by first connecting to a remote computer.

I'm sure some developers will switch over on the first generation, some will wait until it gets lighter/cheaper/more immersive (disclosure: I have no clue what's coming in the future), and some might never switch if they just plain don't like having something on their head.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

AR VR for iOS and macOS. Millions of glyphs. Instant control. There’s magic here. If this excites you, work with me and help make this a reality! I don’t have all of it in me.

I wish I did. I don’t. I don’t have all the time and energy. But there are people here that if they spent just a little time to work on this, we would be in the future of a 3D code space in days, and not weeks or months.

I owe a new readme for the project. If any of this makes you feel any feelies, get in contact with me star it, make noise, whatever!

Lotta love to yall. Thanks for letting me vomit words.

The real question is, can you make two devices sync to each other simultaneously.

Probably not I'm imagining

Third party developers will definitely be capable of adding a sync feature like you're describing but I have no clue if they will.

Within an app, the challenge would be identifying they occupy the same space and mapping into the same coordinate system. Easier for VR mode than AR mode, where your mapping can be pretty arbitrary to the available bounds.

Absolutely. It's impressive work on Meta's side that the full ecosystem of headsets natively support this in AR mode already [0]. It will be interesting to see if Apple has this figured out, or if they can ship in time for release. The fact they didn't demo it suggests to me that they are still in catchup mode here. But then, there are a lot of things they didn't demo that came out in the technical talks later.

[0] https://developer.oculus.com/blog/build-local-multiplayer-ex...

Then the real world will feel like paradise.

It's also not novel to me because I've spent a while using it already, so I'm not exactly in a rush to test it out just to see all the features.

However most of the previews I read do point to some amount of weight/comfort ergonomics that I think play against the productivity use case.

Basically my work compute needs to be ergonomic enough to use for 8-12 hours/day.

I have a hard time believing we can live in this headset for anything north of 2-3 hours at best.

I have to wear a cpap so I haven’t found an eyemask that works with my cpap headgear.

1. Could I take a disconnected cable keyboard and "anchor" the virtual keyboard to overlay the real one to get the haptical feedback when typing on the virtual keyboard?

2. I'm very excited about "hanging out in VR" but initial impressions of Persona avatars seem to be mixed. Do you think people will eventually get used to Personas after using them for longer or are we not quite there yet?

3. What is the focal distance for the eyes?

4. What are you most excited for using the Vision Pro again once it comes out :)?

I definitely can't wait to upgrade from my original HTC Vive!

2. Honestly no clue how the public will react to Apple's avatars, but keep in mind that third party apps are free to create experiences like that and I'm sure you'll see a dozen VRChat clones taking off.

3. Not sure! I never ran into any issues but I also don't need glasses.

4. I personally am a VR gaming enthusiast and despite gaming not being the core use case of the Vision Pro, I'm very excited to see what people do with it. If you've played Half Life Alyx you know how fun gravity gloves are, so imagine having games that have graphics and physics that can seamlessly blend with real life. Use your hands to toss around virtual objects that bounce off walls in the real environment! The cool thing is that this is all super easy to develop for now: all the scene understanding, rendering, hand tracking, physics, etc. is all handled by the device so you can probably whip up a gravity gloves prototype in a few lines of code.

Apart from that, I really hope Apple will work with more game engines in the future. I rented an HTC Vive Pro 2 last year just to play through Half Life Alyx and everything about this experience was so, so good (especially Jeff). Would be incredible if it ran on the Vision Pro eventually but I guess Source 2 is probably not on the engine list :)

One last question I actually had if you don't mind. How do you think gestures will evolve once the headset releases? I understand there are a few basic gestures defined already, like clicking, dragging, zooming, but what about cmd + Z or deleting something. I'm sure eventually people will expect the same gestures for those actions across apps but I didn't see any mention on them so far. Any thoughts on how those might emerge?

Flat earthers try to explain to others how certain they are that the earth is flat. That doesn't make the earth flat, though.