Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

351–360 of 465 posts

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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh. I've owned a VR headset for a long time now, and I think many people underestimate how fundamentally isolating being in VR is. Humans are social creatures and unless you live by yourself and want to escape into VR, you're a lot more likely to enjoy watching the big game with friends and family so you can shoot the shit, and share the experience. Don't get me wrong... VR is and can be a lot of fun, but I just don…

Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring and their main value is the social context - cheering for players/teams, spectating together with family and friends. In contrast, the market for serious movies or single-player videogames suggest that there is a lot of demand for "lone time" experiences. I think a big factor in lackluster adoption of VR is... space. VR games require space, which is expens…

Games do you are right, but productivity work is much like sitting at a desk in a cubicle -- just with so much much more you can do, even now. Sure, today there are a lot of caveats, like you need to touch type and transitioning between controllers and keyboard is sub optimal on the hardware side; while the software is still all 99.9% game oriented, there's no native multitasking, even little things like cut/copy/paste are a hassle. Today, your only option is some version of screen casting with all its multiple window resolution/scaling pain. But once you get it working it is hard not to be amazed working on a 10foot tall visio diagram and by the time Apple rolls anything out all these problems will have been solved for all practical purposes.

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

#352

The #1 use of VR headsets is porn and porn apps are growing. Porn apps have some advantages over video apps because * a VR porn app is 6DOF, VR video is 3DOF * a VR porn character has more presence. Their eyes can follow you, they can turn to face you, they can reach to your face, hands. * You can interact at a VR character. You can't with a video In other words, either Apple is going to need to support porn apps on…

What's the source on this? I see people keep saying that but from what I've seen, the #1 use of VR is as a gaming console, with a focus on games that embrace the fitness aspect of VR. The Quest 2 has an insane mainstream potential, too, and most people won't bother rooting it. Speaking of, I'm going back to beat saber. You might have been misled by its name if you think that's a porn app. :) Email's in my profile if…

It's also possible that they are different from you (e.g. they have an IPD that's not in the range the headsets are designed for, or they are more sensitive to the vergence-accomodation-conflict) and still experience eye strain/headaches. I do own a headset and I also love beat saber and alyx, but I can't use it for too long.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh. I've owned a VR headset for a long time now, and I think many people underestimate how fundamentally isolating being in VR is. Humans are social creatures and unless you live by yourself and want to escape into VR, you're a lot more likely to enjoy watching the big game with friends and family so you can shoot the shit, and share the experience. Don't get me wrong... VR is and can be a lot of fun, but I just don…

Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring and their main value is the social context - cheering for players/teams, spectating together with family and friends. In contrast, the market for serious movies or single-player videogames suggest that there is a lot of demand for "lone time" experiences. I think a big factor in lackluster adoption of VR is... space. VR games require space, which is expens…

>> Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring

This only applies to american football, where you have on average 12 minutes of actual gameplay over 3.5 hour match.

Soccer or basketball are much more dynamic, and therefore can be entertaining on their own, no social context required.

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

#354
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptop + magical AR/VR headset means you can always have your 3 monitor workspace, even at the coffee shop. Plus, you get fully private screens.

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

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

I remember the fuss, but it's so weird -- everyone carries a smartphone with camera with them all the time, even into public bathrooms. If someone wanted to record me I think I'd have a better chance of noticing someone looking at me with their face than I would someone doing it while pretending to be scrolling twitter.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by people saying that they would use VR for work. My head hurts after one or maybe two hours of using it, and if I would work whole day in it?... ugh.

Same; even with 8K screens, I'm sure my mild eye problems (glasses) would cause enough issues for me to prefer a regular screen. I mean I'd love to be proven wrong, put one of these things on and everything being full of stars, but at the moment I'm skeptical. My experience with VR has been limited to an HTC Vive. While a game like Elite Dangerous feels great, I had a lot of trouble reading text on it. Probably the s…

>My experience with VR has been limited to an HTC Vive. While a game like Elite Dangerous feels great, I had a lot of trouble reading text on it. Probably the same reason why I can't get along with binoculars, I just can't seem to focus on things with both eyes?

You might have a problem focusing with both your eyes, but the reason you couldn't read the text in Elite was simply that the Vive is a very low resolution headset compared to more modern models. Everyone had to lean into the display screens to read them on that display.

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

#356

The #1 use of VR headsets is porn and porn apps are growing. Porn apps have some advantages over video apps because * a VR porn app is 6DOF, VR video is 3DOF * a VR porn character has more presence. Their eyes can follow you, they can turn to face you, they can reach to your face, hands. * You can interact at a VR character. You can't with a video In other words, either Apple is going to need to support porn apps on…

What's the source on this? I see people keep saying that but from what I've seen, the #1 use of VR is as a gaming console, with a focus on games that embrace the fitness aspect of VR. The Quest 2 has an insane mainstream potential, too, and most people won't bother rooting it. Speaking of, I'm going back to beat saber. You might have been misled by its name if you think that's a porn app. :) Email's in my profile if…

While I have no specific source for VR, it's been kind of a meme for a long time that porn has been one of the major driving forces in the tech world and for tech adoption [0]

I guess the nature of the content makes it difficult to actually surface that because only a minority of people are open/vocal about their porn consumption habits or in what ways they are consuming it.

Case in point: Most people have no issue letting their online-social circle know that games they are playing, like in the way Steam surfaces it to friends.

While at the same time there is some demand by people to hide the more "embarrasing" games from their library they don't want others to know they have in their library [1]

On a personal note: I have to agree with the parent comment that porn is actually the kind of content that makes the advantages of VR really shine on the immersive end, particularly when coupled with 3D audio like that of the Index.

Fitness games are cool too, but they suffer from usually being very fictionalized in setting and art style. So while they take you to a place, you inherently know that place is fake.

With porn VR content its usually a real setting, with real people, and you are suddenly right in the middle of it, which adds a lot to the feeling of being immersed in an actual place, and not just some virtual space made up of virtual polygons.

[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/23/porn.technology/index...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/9wvfbw/a_way_to_hide...

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

#357
> The headset (which the report says is codenamed N301) will be able to display rich 3D graphics at that resolution, the report says, thanks to an ultrafast M1 chip successor and because Apple will liberally use an already-known VR technique that involves using eye-tracking to render objects in the user's periphery at a lower fidelity than what the user is focusing on.

That would be superb. I could consider paying $3k for the dual 8K headset if I can skip buying a separate gaming pc for running a flight simulator. (Not to mention that 2x8K capable rig would cost a LOT!)

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

#358
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are more games on the iOS app store than exist on steam. What's the figure when you compute the total engineering-hours into the games, though?

I see what you're getting at, but I think you probably want to look at total engineering hours per game if you want to get there. There were about 45,000 games on Steam at the end of 2020, based on what I've been able to pick up from news reports and Statista; there are over 950,000 games for iOS. Even presuming the average good iOS game takes fewer engineering hours and presuming there's more quick-buck cookie-cutte…

I don't agree. 99% of games on ios are cookie cutter or trivially small. I'd wager the average engineering hours put into a steam game is >100x the hours put into an average ios game.

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

#359
Productivity strongly correlates with screen size. Immersive VR/AR experience would replace all large displays, and could allow complete redesign of a human-computer interaction. No more trying to fit windows on a screen.

I think that the Apple AirPod Max is an experiment to test the structure. That's why they are so heavy.

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring and their main value is the social context - cheering for players/teams, spectating together with family and friends. In contrast, the market for serious movies or single-player videogames suggest that there is a lot of demand for "lone time" experiences. I think a big factor in lackluster adoption of VR is... space. VR games require space, which is expens…

> Sports are a special case as, arguably, they're mostly boring and their main value is the social context I think this is a bit of a fringe opinion. I can certainly see how people appreciate the social aspect of sports events with necessarily appreciating the sports. But I don’t think I wake up in the middle of the night to watch F1 alone for the social benefit.

yup,im watching f1 for the last 20 years mostly alone. there are boring races but those would not be fun even if i watched it with somebody else.
Post reply on HN