> field of view...Limits of the technology

It really isn't though, at least not for long, as of mid 2023 there are publicly showcased compact lightweight prototypes with 240° FoV.

Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now and antagonistic to one another feature wise. There’s also display brightness which is an issue and I’m not sure how that fits in to the FOV/density spectrum. And then more pixels means more compute… That prototypes exist doesn’t necessarily mean much in a space that is full of prototypes showing off one particular feature. The very hard thing is to combine all of the desired features in to one consumer ready headset.

>Well there’s FOV and there’s pixel density which are both too low right now.

Exactly. You know what is the best "goggle" type display I ever saw (and I tried quite a few)? Recent FPV goggles (hdzero) that have 1930*1080 OLED displays at approximately 46 degrees fov. I'm very glad the manufacturer decided to use the his low fov instead of increasing it to 55deg and more like others. The picture is insanely crisp, and looks better than looking at a 4k display. Another huge benefit is that entire picture fits within your "focus cone" so there is no need to gaze around. It is not a VR display, it's purpose is different, but it shows us what visual quality is possible.

I'd love if manufacturers, if they can't make 16k displays that fill the entire fov, create variable pixel density displays. Best quality in the center. Deteriorating towards the edges. That would be much cheaper, but then for good illusion one would need eye tracking and motorised optics which would probably be more expensive in the end...

Oh, well, I'm pretty happy with my fpv goggles (for fpv) I just wish there was a way for them to display different picture for each eye. They already have head tracking, I wonder what VR would be like with this huge ppi narrow fov goggles. Would it be more or less immersive?

for those who don't know: FPV = first person view. Used for drone racing and things like that.

motorized displays also sounds HEAVY which is a big issue for a device intended to be used for long periods of time

I'm pretty sure one of the varjo headsets had displays like you describe.

they are paying the price for their obsession with super high resolution. I think it's a mistake, from my perception Quest 3 at 25ppd is nearly good enough, and its panels are nearly half the resolution. They should have traded 20% resolution for 10 deg FOV either side. In fact, with appropriate optics the effective resolutions sacrifice could be even less than that.

How is it to read text on the Quest 3? How would you compare it to a high-density display (such as what is on your phone)?

Well, it's no Retina screen. I'd say it's bit like reading text on a 1080p CRT at 96 dpi.

It's perfectly doable, but there's still a hint of fuzziness and we're still a couple generations away from crisp LCD text.

I care about my eyes, so I use a 4k screen at 2x scaling for coding, and will not use the Quest 3 for work, unless that involves playing games and watching videos.

Is there any evidence of pixelated text damaging eyes?

They only need hi-res where the user is looking, don't they?

We can't see what's in our peripheral vision clearly, so they should be able to get away with most of the FoV being blocky af, shouldn't they?

The goggle FoV is fixed right in front of you, but your eyes turn.

> As far as viewing with other people, this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge.

This can also be achieved with 3rd party apps. On Quest, this is already a reality with Big Screen.

I wonder who would actually do that. The only reason I watch tv is to socialize with my family. I think if we were just sitting on the couch all wearing VR googles it would ruin the entire use case for watching stuff together. Surely, some geeks, once or twice.

The use case is watching something with people who are half a world away I think, not with people who are physically present with you.

I wonder if that "theatre experience" would be a significant improvement for most people. I already do this with friends remotely by jumping on discord and hitting play on whatever service we're using at the same time. There more more automatically in-sync solutions out there for sure, but I can't see doing this in VR being more than a novelty that wears out after a few sessions.

[delayed]

That was the surprise to me too. Lower FOV than a Quest 3? Inexcusable.

Agreed. 8 years out from the original Oculus rift which had 110' FOV and we're still somehow staring through the AR/VR equivalent of a submarine periscope.

a whole eight years???

I still have one of the Oculus Devkits at home from their initial campaign. It's more than 10 years old now. I've noticed the biggest improvements to VR over the last decade were in useability - not the screen. Once they figured out low latency by switching the screen to black after every frame every device upgrade felt like a tiny improvement in resolution at best. Size 12 font text on a 2m screen wasn't really readable yet, but I still don't use VR for text work today (even though I could) so it also doesn't matter. Right now it's still a question of usability rather than the screen.

That’s a double edge sword though. Were they to make it 180°, we would critique it for spreading the precious pixels. “With those 4K your virtual monitor is 1080p at most!”

Apple used to excel at making the right trade off here. Choosing what feels right over numbers.

I remember when the first Android phones with 4-inch screens hit the market, I saw someone comment online that if a 4-inch screen was better Apple would have figured that out during R&D for the iPhone and made the original iPhone 4 inches.

I hope somebody at the time replied with a picture of the original iMac's hockey puck mouse.

Apple can do amazing things, but they do also fairly regularly make terrible things.

I mean, the current Apple Magic Mouse which has its charging port on the underside is interesting as well.

Sure, but wasn't cockroach charging introduced in 2015, vs. c. 2010 for 4-inch Android phones?

What's 'cockroach charging'?

Upside-down, like a dead cockroach: https://www.behance.net/gallery/36272401/Dear-Apple-about-yo...

Ah, I see. I've never seen a phone which charges from the underside, though.

There's a pretty common use case that's basically this: get in the car, plug in the phone, and drop it in a cup holder with the charging port pointing up and all the antennas that would point skyward during handheld use are now pointing at the ground.

I still think the original iPhone was the best size. I use the iPhone mini today, and I wouldn't mind it being a bit smaller still.

It really lends itself to the phone being a tool, rather than a device for endless entertainment. It also suggests it is an accessory, with the desktop/laptop being the home base, rather than the phone being a primary device.

It really bothers me that the phone is now at the center of the ecosystem. It seems like the hub should be something that isn't as vulnerable (to theft, loss, or drops) as a phone.

Steve used to excel at it.

Idgi. What feels right has always been very high numbers.

There is a fundamntal tradeoff between FOV and image quality at any given pixel density (and there are other tradeoffs between pixel density and cost and compute power needed).

yeah. But a high number of pixels and a high number of minutes of battery life work against each other here.

And they probably have

They were and are good at this. But the decision to ship this in this state before their typical quality bar was Tim Apple’s. He reportedly overrode the design team and demanded it ship now to enter the market and iterate in public. Even though he’s otherwise hands off with the product itself. This was all widely reported but has been missing from recent reporting now that it’s out.

It was a good call. It needs to get to early adopters and establish the existence of an alternative to facebook's metaverse vision.

The thing is, when one has a user base the size of Apple's what "feels" right actually covers a very large range of possibilities. Even when Apple "excels" and covers most of that range, there's still a ton of people left out. Which leads to every Apple thread on HN filled with users bemoaning Apple's poor choices.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

They certainly could do something clever, like having a screen with gradually decreasing pixel density and quickly moving it around so its center is always where you're looking it.

Even with that FOV and the highest resolution display they could get, it still can only emulate a 15" display comfy 70cm from your eye at a whopping resolution of 940x540.

It's a gimmick priced as 2.5 monitor stands.

How did you get those numbers? They seem quite low, considering that they do 4K mirroring and all.

They don't do 4k mirroring. A 4k monitor has 8 million pixels while the googles have about 11 million pixels per eye. True 4k is only possible if you use 85% of vertical and 85% of horizontal FoV, like when staring at a 24" monitor from 15cm.

8/11 = 73% not 85%. so should be a lot more comfortable distance than 15cm/5.9 inches.

Nope.

0.85*0.85 => 0.73

Ah, gotcha. But what if you factor in the limited FOV of the display itself? this 11 million pixel calculation doesn't apply to the full FOV of the eye after all.

I would expect most people to pick a natural size for their windows, perhaps 24-30" half a meter away?

It's a VR headset, angular resolution is fixed at 3800 px / 90 deg = 42px/deg. For a 27.5" virtual display half a meter away, let chord length = 700mm, radius ~ 600mm, distance to virtual display will be 488mm, and diagonal angle it occupies within view will be 71.4deg. with 42px/deg, resolution is ~3000px diagonal, or from (16x)^2+(9x)^2 = (3000)^2, x = 163.4, therefore resolution for that virtual monitor will be 2608x1470.

Other combinations of distances and virtual sizes can be calculated in the same manner.

How much of that “natural size” has been dictated by common monitor sizes, the limits of desk size/setup, and aesthetics?

My work setup as a 43” monitor set about 1 arm’s length away. I can just touch it when my fingertip if I stretch slightly. In a virtual space, I’d probably go slightly larger, maybe 45-48”, pushed a little further back.

I don't think I would want a monitor that big, since I think I would have trouble covering all of it without moving my head.

So then it's not "4k mirroring".

I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison (heh), I think at this point 'good enough' is going to be better than anything my eyes can resolve. On a Quest 3 with Zenni lenses, pixel visibilty as a concern is way down on my list. It works REALLY well.

Even if they were double the resolution per eye, you aren't going to have "native" 4k reproduction because you are looking at a projection of a screen rather than an actual screen. What is the value of achieving one "accurate" pixel if it is surrounded by eight bilinear-interpolated ones?

But then, you usually don't buy a 4k screen because you can perceive the individual pixels either, unless you are creating content that requires that.

I suspect it aligns easier with the quality concerns of reality and not with virtual components - if I can use a monitor through the screen with no noticeable loss of quality or additional eye strain, there's no reason to think a virtualized monitor won't be at least as good.

Not when text is vastly sharper than Quest 3.

in some ways even the reviews seem to be placed by Apple (same as they provided the exact photos of the device the media printed). all of them seem to present a full view with floating widgets, when there's really no way to photograph them

Surely the device just has a screenshot function?

Two interesting and unrelated facts:

A screenshot would be blurry because of the foveated rendering

The device doesn't even have a power button

Given Apple have complete control with their OS of how the dynamic foveated rendering system works, if they particularly wanted a screenshot feature to be included - reasonably likely for marketing purposes, it seems to me - then surely it wouldn't be too hard to code it such that it renders a second version of the GPU's output to generate the screenshot, when asked to by user, which has even pixel density. (Or perhaps screenshots getting some sort of "bokeh" for the first time, highlighting whatever the user was looking at when taking the screenshot, will turn out to be a desirable feature.)

Not having buttons obviously doesn't prevent there being a screenshot function, just as lack of screenshot button on iPhone hasn't prevented it from taking screenshots, and just as the VP's lack of buttons doesn't prevent users from interacting with it at all...

The end goal here - multiple people who are isolated by the technology they're wearing experiencing a simulacrum of human interaction mediated by that technology - is not only unbelievably depressing but also honestly just really boring. We've already built this. It was called the "metaverse" and it sucked. Everyone left.

The people could also be isolated by being a few time zones away from each other.

The idea of wearing a VR headset so I can "enjoy photos with friends" is absolutely hilarious and so deeply disconnected from what human beings want and need as a species.

Every time I see the spatial photos and spatial videos, I always view it as someone putting on their VR headset to reliving a memory of someone who died. Then they take the headset off and realize they are alone and the loss broke them. I have a lot of trouble not seeing those videos from a very depressing place.

People are totally allowed to watch videos of their children without their children being dead.

This is true. I think it's the fade effect they add to the edge of it, it seems like an effect that would be used in a movie to show a memory of someone who died.

It's all about tradeoffs. If you get at the same time:

- gigantic (virtual) screens showing your photos/videos in a spectacular way

AND

- a incredibly small, light, comfortable, and almost unnoticeable (e.g. glasses) headset

then, yes people will absolutely use that instead of actual photos printed on paper.

Obviously we're not there yet.

Maybe not everyone shares this viewpoint.

I mean, I work full time remotely at home (company is in a different state, family is here where I live). If you watch the FaceTime section of MKBHD’s review, that would be a phenomenal improvement over Teams chat with web cams.

While I wouldn’t move back just to go into the office, I absolutely miss the ability to look at a specific person while talking in meetings, and for other to have the context about who you’re looking at with head turning or gestures etc…

In a Teams group chat, I’m always talking to the whole wall of faces essentially. Only by context of the conversation can you figure out who someone is talking to, and even then their webcam might be off center or on a separate monitor from where they’re looking and you don’t even pretend to make eye contact. There is no way to break out into an isolated side conversation or select your gaze and there’s a lot of value there.

There’s also the concept of sharing a virtual room with a person I’m collaborating with. Drawing on a whiteboard, walking around pointing at things on the monitor and such. The feeling of a shared physical space is powerful for collaboration.

Anyways, what I’m trying to say is this: The thought of replacing all human interaction with tech is of course depressing, but I don’t view this like that. This is technology that can meet people where they are and improve an existing experience. I’m not moving away from my family, esp. as my parents get older, and I will remain working remotely for the company because I very much enjoy what I work on, my team, and the way the company treats me.

This tech is a step towards making the shortcomings of remote work less impactful. It’s stupid expensive and the first iteration so it’ll have problems, but I’m much more excited by Apple’s approach to this than Facebook’s nonsense. Excited to see where it develops and how it’s adopted as it becomes cheaper.

I've been telling people this for awhile, the biggest issue I have with the available VR headsets is the limited FoV. It causes unneccesary neck strain having to move your head as much as you do to look at things.