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

arstechnica.com

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

#41

Post by lambda_obrien »

hppb wrote: 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…

An AR headset like you describe would be killer: get rid of the laptop form factor, put everything into a phone sized box, and you can sit at a table with just a keyboard and mouse and work.

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

#42

Post by banana_giraffe »

Tomdarkness wrote: post #18

8k seems... optimistic. The PPI of such a display would be off the charts. Not to mention the kind of hardware required to run such a device. The NVIDIA RTX 3090 can barely run a 3D 8k game at 30fps, let alone in 3D for VR. What would you even connect such a device with? Displayport and HDMI wouldn't support two 8k streams.

The article mentions use of something like a M1 processor, so I'd assume this is something like the Oculus Quest where the rendering is done on the VR headset itself.

It'd also explain the price tag, if you have to buy both a high quality display and a speedy GPU that's been glued together.

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

#43

Post by Strom »

endisneigh wrote: post #14

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…

Depends on the field of view angle you want to achive, but 8K is unlikely to be enough.

Back in 2015 Michael Abrash said:

In order for it to have retinal resolution across a field of view of 180 degrees it would have to have something on the order of 16K by 16K resolution [per eye]. [1]

--

[1] https://youtu.be/UDu-cnXI8E8?t=4232

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

#44

Post by wyxuan »

trixie_ wrote: post #28

Apple CPU/hardware + Apple display technology + Apple software would easily justify the 3k price. And people would pay it. Not just because it's Apple, but because Apple has the means to vertically integrate the entire tech stack into a high end product that far surpasses what their competitors are capable of. Google Android software and Qualcomm hardware have been trying for a decade and still can't match Apple. So…

Rumors indicate this to only being a transitionary product for AR. Sorta like a dev kit, but not named that way.

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

#45

Post by auggierose »

hehehaha wrote: post #16

Isn’t this a clear indication that Apple will have its own stand-alone GPU line? This plus the car news from earlier this week made me think Apple already has its own GPUs to rival or surpass Nvidia. Edited for clarification.

Apple already has its own GPU line. It is in all iPads, iPhones, and M1 Macs.

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

#46

Post by jiggawatts »

Tomdarkness wrote: post #18

8k seems... optimistic. The PPI of such a display would be off the charts. Not to mention the kind of hardware required to run such a device. The NVIDIA RTX 3090 can barely run a 3D 8k game at 30fps, let alone in 3D for VR. What would you even connect such a device with? Displayport and HDMI wouldn't support two 8k streams.

a) Deep-learning super sampling (DLSS) allows upscaling to 8K at a low cost.

b) VR uses variable rate shading because we have a lower visual acuity in our peripheral vision.

c) VR rendering typically "shares" a significant amount of the work between the two viewports. E.g.: one set of "commands" are rendered simultaneously into two buffers with different view transforms. Textures and meshes are cached once and rendered twice, so the bandwidth requirements aren't actually doubled.

d) Display stream compression (DSC) and similar technologies would work well for VR because the viewport is always in motion with a high refresh rate. One could even imagine sending a H.265 compressed stream wirelessly at a mere gigabit, which is fantastically high bitrate video but well within current WiFi capabilities.

e) There will be future developments as well, we're not stuck with current technology. Keep in mind that current era flagship GPUs are manufactured on silicon processes that are about 3 generations old! By the time this VR kit hits the mainstream market, GPUs could be manufactured on a 3 nm TSMC process and easily put out 90fps in 8K resolution.

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

#47

Post by dsr_ »

endisneigh wrote: post #14

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.

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

#48

Post by iandanforth »

endisneigh wrote: post #14

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…

About 3000ppi

Example headset that used a small display with this pixel density.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/retina-resolution-he...

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

#50

Post by offtop5 »

Thank God, with oculus being hostile towards consumers this provides a much-needed option,. I strongly suspect this will be the first year pro model, and next year so we'll see a consumer model. Assuming it runs on an a12 or an a14 chip existing iOS apps, I.e Unity projects will run out of the box. So I could imagine developers being able to get games out within a month or so.

I do wonder if Unity has some type of top secret team which has early access to the Apple apis ( at least a phone number to call Apple's internal tech team/

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