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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait what the Vision Pro 4S-equivalent would look like and what capabilities it would have.

I already imagine how people from 5 years in the future will be sharing photos of the current Vision Pro asking "Remember when this was the best VR headset hhh??"

Sure, VR headsets existed before Apple's foray into that segment, but also did laptops, smartphones, tables computers, smart watches and bluetooth headsets.

And if one to learn from history, all these products categories were significantly improved after Apple entered their respective markets.

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It's not VR though. The AR angle of this device is why it's compelling. VR is completely blind to your surroundings, Apple Pro could in principle make your public park look like Jurassic Park with full size dinosaurs etc. Blending our reality with an overlayed real time rendering is a massive benefit over straight VR.

Its not true AR though. Its "record reality then display in VR". You're never looking at the world. Always through screens.

That could just be an initial limitation of technology, though. The Apple Vision "spatial computing" line could move to glasses eventually.

That said, I think the "you're looking at a digital reconstruction of the world" aspect pretty interesting since it means, in principle, everything can be changed as you'd like. Why not turn day to night, night to day, redecorate, block out ads on billboards, re-paint your house, hang paintings, add an extra window to your wall, etc?

To completely reproduce the reality you need to be able to manipulate the phase of light of individual pixels. Basically, make a dynamic hologram.

Without that, you'll be looking at an artificially "crisp" version of the world.

You're looking at reality with half of the colors your eyes can see, a reality with a limited field of view, a reality which looks much worse as the surroundings become darker. Nothing I've seen is impressive. I'm impressed by the lack of things more than what this thing actually offers.

Yeah, but that's our reality we know and love.

Why not just get a few projectors or more screens if you want digital environments?

It's clear from the commercials I saw that AR is Apple's vision. How long the hardware takes to match that vision is an open question.

I've defined this elsewhere in the comments. Please provide a common definition that aligns with yours

It is VR, though.

Sure, Apple built the headset so that it mimics AR devices, but it definitely is not one itself.

The technology to build an AR device with the capabilities that Apple boasted is simply not here yet. I'm sure that Apple top-talent is hard at work trying to break the barrier (if it didn't yet), but that'll be for a future version, just not this one.

When you say "AR devices" I think you specifically mean AR devices that do optical compositing vs. AVP's digital compositing, yes?

> I'm sure that Apple top-talent is hard at work trying to break the barrier (if it didn't yet), but that'll be for a future version, just not this one.

To me, it feels like AVP is the final nail in the coffin of the optical compositing evolutionary branch of HMDs. Even if it's someday possible to do well, devices would still need the same realtime subsystem necessary for digital compositing in order to do 3D mapping, object detection, environmental lighting integration, etc.

I understand that in the short-term, camera sensors and displays don't exceed what the human eye can perceive, but those seem straightforward (if not easy) to address.

Same here. If there's some breakthrough they're not going to ignore it, but I would bet anything that current Apple far-forecasting plans for the "Vision 10" amount to current Vision Pro functionality in oversized wraparound shades, relying entirely on the camera passthrough for vision.

When I say AR I mean exactly what it's defined as. Put this in the previous comment, it's the Wikipedia definition:

"AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects"

There is nowhere in there that says the output has to have pure optical through. Digital composition seems to fit into the definition.

I don't understand, every definition of AR I can find conforms to what Apple has made. This one from Wikipedia for instance:

"AR can be defined as a system that incorporates three basic features: a combination of real and virtual worlds, real-time interaction, and accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects"

What is it missing?

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