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Apple’s new headset meets reality

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Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#451

Post by KaiserPro »

danpalmer wrote: post #323
cubefox wrote: post #138

From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality". Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

> From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware That's not really accurate. The rumours suggest optics at least as good as the Meta Quest Pro ($1k), possibly with a substantial move forward from there. They suggest resolution of 3k per eye, significantly above the Meta Quest Pro, and using Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door ef…

If we ignore the biggest problem that VR has (power) then the second biggest problem VR has to deal with is heat dissipation.

> an M2 chip per eye

first, the definition on an M2 chip is very murky. There is a massive difference between an M2 targeted for small mobile, compared to a M2 found in a laptop.

A mobile can't sustain power draw of 5 watts for very long.

A headset can't sustain power draw of 10 watts for that long.

AAA graphics needs >40 watts of power. You can't have that next to your face without large amounts of cooling. Now, I'm assuming that Apple will offload graphics to phones/tablets/laptops in the style of oculus link. This solves a bunch of other problems like weight, size and battery life.

This is where Apple has the great advantage of course, not only does it control the entire vertical there, but they actually have a QA team, product metrics and leadership to make sure that the link will be seamless, easy and reliable. Meta will devote a team to it for a year, who will build a totally new system, sling it over the fence and move on to make sure that they get promotions. It never really worked of course, but it pushed the promotions metrics, and the leadership don't care about users, only moving a synthetic metric so they can be made VP of cables.

I digress.

However, for remote rendering to work reliably, you'll either need decent wifi(new time machine anyone?) or a decent quality cable. Wifi is a right shit to make work reliably at full throughput, if not impossible. so I'd assume cables would be the way forward (or some fancy 60gig networking stuff, but that seems unlikely)

> Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door effect, brightness, quality

Nope. The screen is not actually the limiting factor, its the optics. The "barn door" and brightness is almost entirely down to the style of lenses.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#452

Post by mlajtos »

danpalmer wrote: post #390
oblio wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A single M2 chip is able to play a recent-ish AAA game and decent-ish settings, on ~2k at >30fps, while also running the whole game itself and macOS. Doing the math to the OPs numbers. 6k vs 2k = 3x. 90 fps vs 30 fps = 3x. That an extra 900% performance difference right there. Reality, out the window.

3k (there's supposedly an M2 per eye). 2k->3k = +125%. If foveated rendering can half the necessary pixel count, that's pretty much a wash. FPS alone is +200%, but games are running above 30fps already so it's less than that. Add a reduction in system load due to not running the full OS, potentially framework improvements as we usually see at WWDC, and slightly reduced graphical fidelity that is typical for VR games,…

Also, there is MetalFX for faster rendering time. Render at low-res, upscale to high-res.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metalfx

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#453

Post by KaiserPro »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

I don't think there is a consumer market for head mounted AR anymore - if there ever really was. That makes me sad having been in AR since 2010 - and knowing what we could do with it if done right. I just don't think society currently has an appetite for a $3000 product that gives the wearer visual superpowers (that is the promise after all) and is an impossible to ignore distinction between classes. I honestly think…

AR is currently impossible. Even with a 300watt power budget we just don't have the machine perception abilities to actually make it work properly.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#454

Post by criddell »

Turskarama wrote: post #209
criddell wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think consumers just don’t want to spend a lot of money on VR And I don’t think Apple wants those people as customers, at least not initially. $3000 for a headset from a company that sells $1000 monitor stands for $5000 monitors and $500 wheels for the computers doesn’t seem about right to me. In a year or two, the next generation of VR headset will be much better and still $3000 and you will be able to buy this…

There is an absolutely gigantic market for computers (and the monitors to go with them), it's almost impossible to do any kind of business without them. VR is not there and maybe never will be.

> VR is not there and maybe never will be

I think that’s probably the ultimate truth at least as long as it requires glasses or goggles.

VR won’t be there, but VR may be here. Tens of millions of units are sold each year. That might be the right size of the market. It’s been around for 30 years now. In some ways it’s a mature market.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#455

Post by aryc19 »

jnsie wrote: post #298
zamnos wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. $3,000 is obviously a luxury/niche product, but $450 Nreal Air (which is a product you can buy today off Amazon) much less so. It's like 3D TVs, the idea will never die. Even if it's doesn't work out time around (which I doubt, having spent a tiny bit of time with an Nreal Air), expect to see it again in 10 years or so.

Really curious about Nreal Air but would love to try before buying. Have you experienced them? If so, what's your take?

I've used nreal air.

The good: - Great form factor - Image quality for screen mirroring is great - Display has good brightness - Decent speakers

The bad: - Nebula (AR software that allows projecting multiple screens) has a worse image quality (I see some flickering). It's also buggy (e.g. it doesn't work on latest MacOS) - Slightly heavy. You would start feeling the weight on your ears after wearing it for an hour or so. - When screen mirroring an M1 Mac, the display settings on Mac doesn't allow you to resize the screen. It works on an Intel Mac though.

Eventually I decided to return it as I want to wait for the device to mature and I don't really have a strong need for AR glasses at this time. I'd be looking forward to their next version.

I think the current AR glasses (Nreal, Rokid, etc) are probably at the same level of maturity as smart watches when they first came out in the early to mid 2010s.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#456

Post by scarface74 »

Wazako wrote: post #446
scarface74 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “monopoly” in what product category?

In the sense that it has become hostile to use. I remember when iTune and safari were user friendly on Windows. Or the iphone wouldn't be limited to a usb 2.0 port.

That’s not what a “monopoly” means and Safari was never good on Windows.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#457

Post by Ultimatt »

criddell wrote: post #454
Turskarama wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an absolutely gigantic market for computers (and the monitors to go with them), it's almost impossible to do any kind of business without them. VR is not there and maybe never will be.

> VR is not there and maybe never will be I think that’s probably the ultimate truth at least as long as it requires glasses or goggles. VR won’t be there , but VR may be here . Tens of millions of units are sold each year. That might be the right size of the market. It’s been around for 30 years now. In some ways it’s a mature market.

That reasoning feels a bit like saying only tens of millions of smart phones will sell because rotary dial telephones have been around since the 1890s. I think its very fair to say the Quest and PSVR and all their friends are a big leap from Nintendo's Virtual Boy or something. Enough we should consider it a different market for sure. The real issue is software still to this day utterly sucks. There is zero incentive for existing games companies to make content until the market is as large and easy to port to as the existing status quo. The difference with 3D accelerated screen base 3D games was the entire form of entertainment was new and clearly valuable. Too many business people think VR is just another medium for existing 3D games, which also means its being treated like a new console or something with respect to investment. The barriers to entry for plucky homebrew creating something of super high quality is also much much higher than the start of 3D games. Valve already demonstrated what the good end of experiences can look like, even on older gen of VR hardware, but also demonstrated it takes a seriously talented team given total freedom to produce the best with investment behind them. Augmented reality who knows, metaverse type VR who knows. But we haven't even seen the basic uptake of high quality AAA VR software because it doesn't exist regardless of how good a headset is. It's like if a smartphone could only act like an analogue mobile phone and everyone questions the hardware being important.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#458

Post by jimmySixDOF »

themagician wrote: post #145
zmmmmm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quest Pro is probably the leading example yes. If you're calling that garbage, then I think you're (a) setting impossibly high standards and (b) out of sync with most people's perception, as most people perceive these has having "edge to edge clarity".

Oddly enough, the reason I have so many VR headsets is because I mostly give demos to non-tech people. Quest Pro still gets the, "Pretty cool, but why is it so blurry," comments. Not as much as other headsets, but still enough that it will never fly for general use. Meta, to their credit, does a good job of masking the poor optics by keeping texture detail to a minimum in their own software and encouraging developers…

It is easy to miss the forrest for the trees, which I think is what is happening if your users can't get into immersion because it's not instant Retina focus. Good enough does not need to be perfect once the experience kicks in and you are actively engaged in doing something you otherwise could not do in the real world. If I'm at the theater; yes, if asked, I might tell you the seat could be more comfortable this way or that way, but it should not matter so much once the show starts.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#459

Post by cubefox »

danpalmer wrote: post #323
cubefox wrote: post #138

From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware: Portable and with external cameras to allow for orientation and "mixed reality". Maybe Apple is on the right track here, since the Oculus Quest has sold more units than all the other VR headsets combined. But there is one big difference: Apple's headset will be a very expensive premium product (a…

> From the information available so far, the Apple headset will be fairly close to Meta's Oculus Quest in terms of hardware That's not really accurate. The rumours suggest optics at least as good as the Meta Quest Pro ($1k), possibly with a substantial move forward from there. They suggest resolution of 3k per eye, significantly above the Meta Quest Pro, and using Micro LED for a big improvement on the screen door ef…

You are misunderstanding what I said. Of course the Apple headset would have much higher quality components. But it is similar to the Oculus Quest in that it is a standalone device which uses external cameras to track the environment. It's easy to use.

My point was that it seems consumers don't care about expensive high performance VR headsets. They want something that is both easy to use and inexpensive: The unusually early Quest Pro price drop suggests as much.

It's like the Nintendo Switch: If it had cost substantially more, much better graphics, screen resolution etc would have been possible, but it almost certainly would have been a flop. The same thing seems to be true for VR headsets.

Re: Apple’s new headset meets reality

#460

Post by mahathu »

Too wrote: post #340
hamandcheese wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.

Not only does it “just work”. The sound and noise canceling quality is fantastic. On par or even beating many larger over-ear headsets in same price range. (Talking about the gen 2 pro) I haven’t heard anything in-ear that comes close, disclaimer though I honestly haven’t tried many other in-ears in that price category.

You can get way higher audio quality at half the price with the Truthear Hexas. There are a ton of good wired IEMd that are cheaper than Airpod Pros and knock them out of the park
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