The tech is definitely impressive. I have not been that excited about a new HMD since … announcement of Pimax 8k in 2017 
. Considering Apple having a slightly better track record than Pimax in delivering things, the wait till the next year will be long…
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Oh I am so in!
Let’s see just what it feels like, there should be a lot of impressions shared in the upcoming months and the US-centric launch is a good excuse for a little shopping weekend in the Big Apple with the wife where I too get to take something home that in this case, might even make the flight back more enjoyable!
The 2024 launch also offers a good excuse to go for the BigScreen beyond as a suitable replacement to my VR-3 in terms of comfort.
All in all, I am way stoked how fully invested Apple appear on a product that is currently in a niche I have been extremely attached to for years!
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Looks like the pixels per degree on Apple’s HMD is going to be 46, so it seems like the Crystal with the 42 PPD lens should be pretty sweet for the cost savings.
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Yeah I thought at least the reveal was extremely disappointing. The most they could make out of it was showing 2d movies in 3d? Really?
I’m sure the hardware rocks and will be the best out there. Lenses and panels I’m sure are top notch. But no way I’m paying $3500 for glasses that basically do just what an iphone does.
So they are indeed doing the long-rumored creepy outward eyes-display…
…but whilst we are still to see what things really look like, as opposed to in a CG promo video, there does seem to be a number of key things they appear to have done, which look like they may mitigate the cheesiness of it…
- The vignetted dark visor effect, making it more “sunglasses” subtle, and less sharply defined.
- The seeming use of the scanned face, which is also used for face-time, and not an actual video feed, in such a way that it is not only animated based on user eyetracking, but by the looks of it possibly also tracking the position of the outside viewer that the user is making eye contact with, and adapting the rendered view on the front screen to their view angle (EDIT: only for that one viewer, obviously), so that the projection on-screen matches for the depth of the face behind the headset screen, instead of the user’s eyes appearing transposed several centimetres out, to the front panel of the HMD (even though that’s where the screen is, and even though this does of course not trick the watcher’s binocular vision). (EDIT2: Adjusting the rendered image for the lighting conditions in the room, too…)
- I am not ruling out the possibility that the optical properties of the front glass could actually make the the out-facing screen appear as if it was deeper into the HMD than it is…
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No controllers so gaming on this thing is really a no-go.
I’m really bad at predicting apple sales, I always thought people would stop buying iphones when good Android alternatives popped up, lol. But damn, who is going to pay $3500 for basically just a virtual monitor?
I guess the only positive part indeed is:
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Well…
I mean SOME of what I saw on the presentation looks interesting/good.
But price, lack of hard specs at this point, seemingly lack of ability to take it outside the Apple ecosystem, seems to require and only able to use Apple hardware.
It’s too much of a closed system for me.
Good luck on them making money at that price-point, with those requirements/limitations.
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Well I mean the whole fact that there are no controllers extremely limits the potential of this thing. It’s closed eco indeed and at this point I dare to bet that there’s no DP connection at all. So yeah it’s basically a virtual monitor
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It’s a pity.
But I do understand why they do it. To try to make a headset that is flexible with multiple use-cases and PC support opens up a world of hurt to support it and that they’d need to deal with.
At least for them, in their closed environment, they have complete control over everything. For those who are married to Apple, it’s not a discussion point.
Didn‘t they explicitly mention a kind of 3D depth effect making it seem as if the eyes were deeper to make it seem as if you were looking at the face through a transparent visor?
So, 23M pixels? That would mean roughly 3.400x3.400 per eye if rectangular, pretty neat.
However, we have no clue as to how good the processing for virtual content is as they have shown reproduction of 2D for the greater part, and besides the carefully pre-rendered photogrammetry environments (the mountain lake) there was absolutely no sophisticated on-device rendering of virtual worlds. So still a number of question marks out there.
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That is probably the case. According to the keynote the pixels are 7.5 µm wide, which, if the display was 1x1 inch square would give 3387 pixels per one side (or 3400 if you want). This would give total of 22,943,538 pixels for both displays. It is a pity that the original rumour about 4k x 4k display was not true, but 3.4k x 3.4k is still quite good.
How did you get to that?
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But you do actually know that the apple vision pro is very heavy after 30 mins of usage ?
You could watch some sexy content on the apple vision pro , I bet its fun and looks good 
Isn’t iOS 17 supporting sideloading officially now? And - assuming that the Vision Pro will also be released in Europe - shouldn’t visionOS also have sideloading capabilities then?
Then I bet something like Virtual Desktop that lets you play SteamVR games wirelessly is almost a given(?)
Would require some self-tracking controllers like the Quest Pro controllers though…
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Lighthouse controllers should work with some hacks xD
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Good point, there are standalone trackers available!
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And for Simmers the controllers aren’t required anyhow. So yes, there is some potential.
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Amazed to read that several hands-on reviewers say that apple didn’t get the comfort right and that it’s front heavy. If anything I had expected Apple to get this exactly right.
Also a real bummer that THE best use case for this headset, 3d video conferencing, is severly limited. It’s not really a video stream but a generated image of a user’s head. Of course this must be due to the fact that the (internet) bandwidth and latency simply is not there yet for most users. But damn, if you can’t even do that optimally, then what’s left? I can see people buy this who just prefer to work in a VR world instead of behind a PC but other than that it’s really really hard to justify that 3500 usd pricetag
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The porn industry could benefit from this hmd
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Haha even for that use case, will it be better than a bigscreen beyond? Apple hasn’t published the FoV but people are reporting to see blacks on the sides, although that in itself of course doesn’t say very much. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not even beating the index and much closer to the ‘average’ FoV out there.