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Comment by bitbeq | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I’m part of the small majority thinking that it’s a reasonable price. It’s the first generation of the product so I’m looking forward on seeing how it changes in the future.

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It costs 7 times as much as a Meta Quest 3, for that you get:

1) double the resolution.

2) better (perfect?) passthrough (not sure how good it is on the Quest 3, apparently a lot better than the quest 2 which was pretty bad).

3) native hand tracking. This is again in beta for the Meta Quest, and I expect apple to do it better but again how much better is the question.

4) A front screen to show your eyes: this is ridiculous and I don't know why anyone would care enough about this feature to pay for a high resolution curved screen on the front of the device to enable it. If it's a short conversation you don't need to see my eyes, if it's a long conversation I'm taking the thing off. Technologically impressive but feels like a huge gimmick.

To point 4, I wonder if someone did the pros and cons and decided it was worth it. Imagine sitting around a table with several people "jacked-in" to their own headsets (e.g. all in a conference with the Berlin office), but you want to converse quickly with someone in the room - hah your camera will then be looking at Janice's front screen and this will be considered eye contact (although I guess it's not much different to a Zoom call).

Looking forward to someone writing an app that tracks faces near the device and fakes giving them attention...

With face tracking and 4 people wearing the headset you could just put them anywhere in you FOV if you wanted to, no need to pass through and see physical screens showing a face through two levels of camera + screen.

The whole point of VR is it's immersive, what "immersive" activity are you doing while also holding a conversation? The use cases are at odds.

Sure I can imagine edge cases where it's kind of cool but I would pay exactly $0 for this feature if it was optional.

I dont think they wanted VR - they wanted AR.

That is a pretty small use case to rationalize having an expensive, power hungry OLED screen on your portable headset. Also, it doesn't directly show your real eyes, it's a digital rendering of your face+eyes, using the eye tracking for showing where you look. Don't know how it gets all the small facial expressions though, or if it does that at all.

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