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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

This is just the beginning of the wave of next gen headsets that are employing microOLED + pancake lenses, both technical breakthroughs that have only become available recently in the VR / AR space. Expect to see a lot more like this over the next 6-12 months (including Apple), especially once XR2 gen2 chips are widely available (this one not requiring it because it's entirely dependent on an attached PC). In fact, to some extent, I would say what we are seeing now is a rush to forward-announce by those trying to get in ahead of the big players that will be rolling out this tech. Hence why shipping is in Q3.

This is one of the reasons why I think the people discounting VR/AR are misguided or at least basing their thinking on incorrect assumptions. These breakthroughs will fundmentally change some aspects of the value proposition.

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I think you are right about the timing strategy and about the tech improvements.

Displays and optics have been some of the blockers.

6DOF tracking seems to be mostly solved (albeit in a very costly manner) and seemingly settled on inside-out tracking.

Controls are IMHO a very weak point with no clear line of sight path to a solution.

Software could help, but so far I think that poor engineering did not help to highlight the hardware qualities of the various prototype we've seen (I've not tried everything but I would not call any of those a mass-market product)

Industrial design could be the magic sauce, this is why people have been hoping for Apple to save the day. Given their recent track record I am not convinced this will happen.

Apple can bring far more than just industrial design.

a) Have acquired [1] a ridiculous number of AR/VR companies including Limbak [2] who have conceptual lens designs which are far better than anything on the market today.

b) Proven supply chain and expertise with LiDAR, MicroLED, Photonics, Glass, Custom Silicon, Batteries, Power Management, Wearable Fabrics etc.

c) Up to version 6 of their ARKit SDK [3] and decade of experience in building ultra low power operating systems e.g. Secure Enclave OS, watchOS etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIr4Em03B5s

[3] https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/arkit/

>and decade of experience in building ultra low power operating systems e.g. Secure Enclave OS, watchOS etc.

The latest rumors say that the current headset requires you to carry a large battery separate to it all for 2 hours of battery life. That sounds like a failure to be ultra low power.

2 hours is fine for VR, you can’t play much longer than that anyways. For AR it’s probably not that great, however.

My point was that in order to reach a viable battery life they had to compromise by forcing people to carry around a large battery pack.

Killer app: figure out how to power it off the energy stored in my adipose tissue.

Would inertial charging like an automatic watch be a possiblity for a vr headset? I'd love that actually!

Probably not.

Inertial charging still requires that you put the effort in, the trick is that with watches it's very little effort – equivalent to winding the watch every few days – so you don't feel it.

If you have ever used a hand-crank torch or radio, or something else that converts effort into power, you'll know that it takes a fair bit of effort, and that's for low power devices. Inertial charging to recoup, say, 5k mAh to charge a smart phone for a day, would therefore require a lot of effort. This would be spread out over a day, but might feel like, for example, carrying a heavy backpack the whole day.

Could it be used to charge that external battery and significantly improve its autonomy? :D

Bah call me old fashioned but I prefer my tethered headset where batteries aren't a concern at all.

Pretty sure Apple will allow you to connect the headset to a Mac.

I'm quite excited about VR/AR while sitting at my desk with traditional mouse and keyboard. I also think console game controllers and the hand tracking controllers that ships with the Oculus and Vive are are excellent.

I think the greatest weakness of VR is total immersion. Its not clear to me that people will ever really want to be completely shut off from reality while in virtual space.

> Its not clear to me that people will ever really want to be completely shut off from reality while in virtual space.

I don’t feel that you’d want this all the time, but if for some reason you cant go outside; being able to be in a completely virtual environment gives you a giant sense of space

Is it possible to use one of these as a big screen for developing software?

It would be better and more portable than my multi monitor setup. Maybe I'd be able to focus and concentrate more.

Which would be the downsides?

I'm not sure what the field of view is with this, but I've experimented with that with a valve index and the biggest downside is that virtual screens end up quite low resolution, to the point that to have legible text they need to take up most of your field of view (to the point that in the same visible area where you could have four physical monitors, you'd need to have a single virtual monitor that's scaled up so you can read text on it).

The other thing to consider in terms of portability is that these have very high resolution displays (they just don't necessarily look high resolution because they take up such a large fraction of your field of view), and also need to be run at 100+ hz to minimize motion sickness. While this is easily doable with gaming graphics cards, many development-focused laptops don't have the GPU horsepower necessary to handle it.

Finally, it looks like this is using SteamVR headset tracking. This is an outside-in tracking system that relies on a pair of external tracking beacons that the headset needs to have line of sight to, to figure out its position and orientation. If these are moved, their position needs to be recalibrated. So it's also less ideal for portability in that you need to set up and run power to two other external devices and have somewhere to mount them while using the headset.

It's not FOV that's needed for virtual monitors displaying readable text in VR, it's resolution. Not the flat panel resolution either... the only resolution that matters for VR and AR displays is Pixels Per Degree (PPD). This is because unlike a real monitor or TV, you can't back away from the monitor to increase the PPD. For VR and AR displays, the eye relief is constant, thus the PPD is fixed.

You need >35 PPD to read legible text on a displays. 62PPD is the maximum resolution of the typical human eye.

So, if you can get the company to advertise their PPD (doubtful, but some display providers do and are truthful), then you can answer your question.

They actually advertise 28PPD on their site. That's actually not too bad, but still not very good for reading text on a virtual monitor.

Note that that 35PPD spec comes from the equivalent PPD when viewing 12pt font on a physical standard 1280p 14" display monitor at a seated distance (eye relief) of 20" from the monitor. So, there's some subjectivity in that value. I guess if you're used to working in, say, 38pt font or so, the this 28PPD might be ok? (I didn't do the math)

What's the PPD required for a "Retina" display (one at which individual pixels are no longer distinguishable)? Is that 62 or some other value?

The Googles told me 60PPD (1):

"If there is any single number that people point to for resolution, it is the 1 arcminute value that Apple uses to indicate a “Retina Display”. This number corresponds to around 300 PPI for a display that is at 10-12 inches from the eye. In other words, this is about 60 pixels per degree (PPD)."

1.) https://www.anandtech.com/show/7743/the-pixel-density-race-a...

With USB 3 and/or Thunderbolt 4 exposing the pci bus to make external GPUs a possibility, if there is a larger base station I have to attach my laptop to, in order to use my VR headset for the initial generations, so be it. The idea of having a screen(s) as tall and wide as I'm willing to move my head is quite alluring. Virtual desktops ain't got nothing on that!

Yes I do this routinely, using a Quest Pro.

The main downside is that the resolution just isn't there yet on the Quest Pro to make what you are seeing comparable to a real monitor. If you want to see the same "amount" of eg: text, you will be looking at a bigger screen in space - which is what I do. I stare at the equivalent of about a 32" monitor. It is OK if you only need to use a single monitor, but the advertised benefit of having as many monitors as you want isn't as great as you would think because they have to be so big that you have to rotate your head a lot.

You also need to be pretty good at touch typing. If you can't type without looking at your fingers, it becomes painful fast - even with passthrough showing you the keyboard or with a tracked keyboard (which shows up rendered in VR).

All of this will change with the next gen as they bump up significantly in resolution. I already use it routinely to get a "change of scene" and to focus more. It's quite fun to go into the public rooms and co-work with half a dozen other people doing the same thing from all over the world. So once the resolution goes up another notch I think we'll hit the point where it's unambiguously better for a lot of people than a real monitor and this will start to take off. For now, you have to have a reason or be an enthusiast to want to do it.

Yes, look up an app called Immersed. It does exactly what you want.

The downside has always been comfort and screen clarity, which this headset seems to solve!

I would suggest trying AR glasses rather than VR headsets. I work on the go on Nreal Air glasses (basically a Full HD monitor in glasses form) over Samsung DeX and VNC. My phone turns into a track pad and I carry a small keyboard.

>Which would be the downsides?

Your monitors would be a higher resolution than these. You would be tethered to your PC.

it works pretty well over Wifi with Immersed. I go all over the house leaving my laptop in my study and just carry a bluetooth keyboard around. But the resolution part is on point. It's one of the reason it's exciting to see these improvements rolling out, we can finally get over this resolution barrier.

Sony has a headset like this, the VR2, which is supposed to ship Real Soon Now. Cabled.

Self-contained VR is going to look cheap for quite a while, because you need a gamer PC or a good game console to make it go, and you just can't cram that much graphics power and battery into non-clunky headgear. However, wireless with a local base station generating video ought to work fine.

The VR2 isn't anything like this... It has older lenses, is heavier, bigger, uses inside out tracking, etc.

It is however unlikely that any competing headset will be laser focused on low weight/size like this one.

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