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New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

arstechnica.com

111–120 of 465 posts

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#111
post #9

I could see this as a virtual office, as some of the comments speculate. If I had a set of AR glasses that projected what appeared to be an 8K monitor on top of my dining room table, and integrated with my MacBook Pro for input / output, and that had batteries to last a workday, I’d pay $2K/$3K. Even more if it worked well at brightness levels I’d have in my backyard. Never mind gaming, mobile high-quality virtual of…

If the screens in the goggles themselves are 8k, the "monitor" is only going to be a small fraction of that unless you have your face up really close. (Although you could effectively have much higher than 8k when you do stick your face right up next to it.)

Yeah the idea of having a better virtual office really isn't as great as it seems when you try it out. Basically extra latency to not see all of the stuff on your desk and have the entire world skip frames when you do something that maxes out your CPU or GPU. Not to mention the aformentioned image-in-an-image quality problems.

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#112

Do we know what the effects are likely to be of wearing a VR headset for hours at a time? I don't think our eyes are going to be happy with a fixed focal length for an extended period of time. At least when I'm working on a laptop/desktop, I'm constantly looking around the room, at my keyboard etc.

There is not a fixed focal distance in VR. The screens are an inch in front of your eye, but the objects you look at can be (virtually) at any distance. It’s like normal vision.

The question of the effect on vision of shining screens into your eyes for hours at a time still stands.

Edit: whoops, guess I was wrong about that!

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#113
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16 bit colours on a pair of 8K screens is the best part of half a gigabyte per frame... I assume sir will be wanting 60 or 120 FPS as well? :-)

7680x4320x2pixels x2 bytes/pixel ~ 127 MBytes/frame.

Ahhh, right. I'd misinterpreted that "16 bit colour" as wanting 16 bits per colour 6 byte pixels, not 2 byte pixels.

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#114
post #112

Do we know what the effects are likely to be of wearing a VR headset for hours at a time? I don't think our eyes are going to be happy with a fixed focal length for an extended period of time. At least when I'm working on a laptop/desktop, I'm constantly looking around the room, at my keyboard etc.

There is not a fixed focal distance in VR. The screens are an inch in front of your eye, but the objects you look at can be (virtually) at any distance. It’s like normal vision. The question of the effect on vision of shining screens into your eyes for hours at a time still stands. Edit: whoops, guess I was wrong about that!

Over the years ive found it increasingly difficult to find a way it could be harmful: latest nugget that comes to mind is that daylight is 1000s of times more intense than any indoor light

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#115
post #76
post #9

I could see this as a virtual office, as some of the comments speculate. If I had a set of AR glasses that projected what appeared to be an 8K monitor on top of my dining room table, and integrated with my MacBook Pro for input / output, and that had batteries to last a workday, I’d pay $2K/$3K. Even more if it worked well at brightness levels I’d have in my backyard. Never mind gaming, mobile high-quality virtual of…

Tame your expectations. I'm pretty sure Apple's gaslighting field has yet not found a way to bend laws of physics. Everybody wants a sleek, everyday wearable device, without usability corner cases, but such are physically impossible to make. Portability, visibility, usability. Choose one. First, power requirements demand either external power, or extreme power austerity cutting into display, and graphics. Recon Instr…

I agree that the 8k displays sound ambitious but they may have some tricks up their sleeves if they are doing foveated rendering using eye tracking. I think they’ll primarily focus on VR but they may do AR via camera pass through. They graphics in VR mode will be much better than what your claiming though, current stand alone headsets like the Quest 2 have good enough graphics to create a sense of immersion where you forget that what you’re interacting with isn’t actually there. That’s more than enough for virtual meetings and office spaces. If they can nail the facial animations by tracking eye and mouth movement so that non verbal communication crosses the gap they’ll have a winner. The current offerings for meeting and social apps in VR are almost there so Apple has a good shot at pushing it over the line.

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do AR, it'll need a camera. People hated google glass because of the camera.

Do you mean to pass the real world through, or for scanning the world? If the display is see-through - perhaps with a removable view shield for switching AR/VR - you can have pass-through without a camera. Like magic leap, but without the magic "black pixels" tech. Alternately, if it has lidar you could display a wireframe / point cloud version of the environment. I don't think people will consider a lidar scan to be…

For scanning it. It's a good point that something like lidar might be more socially acceptable.

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#117
post #112

Do we know what the effects are likely to be of wearing a VR headset for hours at a time? I don't think our eyes are going to be happy with a fixed focal length for an extended period of time. At least when I'm working on a laptop/desktop, I'm constantly looking around the room, at my keyboard etc.

There is not a fixed focal distance in VR. The screens are an inch in front of your eye, but the objects you look at can be (virtually) at any distance. It’s like normal vision. The question of the effect on vision of shining screens into your eyes for hours at a time still stands. Edit: whoops, guess I was wrong about that!

I don't believe this to be true - don't you need a light field for this to be possible? i.e. what magic leap was doing?

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#118
The problem with Apple is that although they care about privacy, they don't deeply care about the addictiveness of their products.

30-50 years from now:

* in society, concerns about privacy will become fringe

* concern about addiction to computational worlds and deeply impaired cognition due to this addiction — initially via iPhones and ultimately by VR — will be the the true concern of the era, not unlike cigarettes

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#119
post #77
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how that works with AR overlaying monitors on a physical worldview. So you're writing something overlaid on the view around the coffeeshop? The idea of AR is more to give a HUD that provides information about what you're looking at.

AR is commonly used to insert solid objects into the real world. See Pokemon Go and most HoloLens games. And the HoloLens app where a virtual dog lives in your house.

HoloLens is not able to render opaque objects. They always have some level of translucency, and the darker the colour of the object, the more translucent it is.

Re: New report on Apple’s VR headset: 8K in each eye, potential $3k price tag

#120
post #47

What's the necessary resolution in each eye needed to be "retina"? Once we reach that will it be the end of the "monitor era"? A lot of interesting things can happen once you no longer need monitors. Though sharing with others will still be a practical limitation so I doubt they'll go anywhere for now. Once you no longer have monitors I think there will have to be a UI and UX shift around how you interact with things…

A field of view about 180 degrees wide, 135 degrees high, 1 arc minute in maximum pixel size, and updated 100 times per second… twice, to account for full stereography, and using 48 bits of color. 180 * 135 * 60 * 60 * 100 * 48 = 419904000000, 420 billion bits per second, without compression.

What's the resolution in terms of a screen? Like height by width in pixels? Sorry if that's obvious from your comment, coming at this with just basic consumer knowledge about displays.
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