Apple's new headset ?

[Supmua]

1 hour ago, shagrat said:

The Apple Vision Pro is designed as a standalone wearable Computer, not a VR-Headset for Mac's, leave alone a Windows PC. If you watch the trailers and showcases carefully, you'll notice they do not even have a lot of real 3D applications on the Apple Vision Pro, yet (and no Store to download apps).

The main concept is to augment your environment with virtual Desktop Windows running Facetime, your Mac's office or creative suite (in a window!) and entertain yourself with movies in a virtual cinema... You may be able to mirror your Mac's desktop to a huge virtual window and play DCS in 2D on a virtual 40" display, though.

The 3D stuff will definitely come, they just haven't bothered to show it yet.  With the built-in 3D cameras alone, I expect to see an explosion of 3D instagrams, tiktoks, etc. including 3DVR documentaries of people's daily life or travels or even podcasts from your favorite youtubers.  The typical 2D GUI or apps that we're used to may be the thing of the past in the near future.  This piece of tech alone will be splendid in the medical field where you can record real-time surgical procedures (with patient's consent) or rare medical conditions in 3DVR for medical students/residents/fellows to watch and absorb.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Supmua

[WipeUout]

Apple vision pro per eye: 11,400,000 pixels

Varjo aero per eye : 7,833,600 pixels

Pimax 8KX per eye : 8,294,400 pixels

Pimax Crystal per eye : 8,294,400 pixels

The image in the apple vision must be pretty amazing, it is also reported to have a 50 to 70 PPD which matches the human eye 60 PPD.  With this kind of specs, no need to have any anti-aliasing! 

[shagrat]

vor 34 Minuten schrieb Supmua:

The 3D stuff will definitely come, they just haven't bothered to show it yet.  With the built-in 3D cameras alone, I expect to see an explosion of 3D instagrams, tiktoks, etc. including 3DVR documentaries of people's daily life or travels or even podcasts from your favorite youtubers.  The typical 2D GUI or apps that we're used to may be the thing of the past in the near future.  This piece of tech alone will be splendid in the medical field where you can record real-time surgical procedures (with patient's consent) or rare medical conditions in 3DVR for medical students/residents/fellows to watch and absorb.

 

Rise and fall will depend on the available applications. Remembering the iPad hype and marketing, I am sceptical towards "changing the world" promises. The best selling add ons for the iPad were stylus and keyboard.

Nothing the Vision Pro does is actually new. We heard all that about the Hololens then the Hololens2, then the Thinkreality Platform etc. the actual end user acceptance will be key. As usual Apple does not focus on business applications and I am interested to see average consumers paying $3,500 for a wearable Computer that can't even be used with their already purchased VR Games... If Apple would partner with existing environments and applications, though, that could be a tremendous incentive.

Anyway, just my personal thoughts from experience. Next step is filling the ecosystem with apps and stuff. Time will tell...

 

 

[Dragon1-1]

If nothing else, this is an impressive leap in display technology. That kind of PPD with decent FOV might have a decent shot at approximating 20/20 vision, which would be quite an achievement. I'm going to wait until this tech is available for decent kind of money, but if it can be done today for $3500, in a decade or so it might be possible to get for $350.

[Supmua]

Not just the display technology. The software side seems also equally impressive. To achieve lifelike performance the headset could actually predict which onscreen options you will select based on the analysis of your eyes (pupils typically dilate before the motor function happens). So by tracking the gaze and pupillary size the headset already knows which virtual button you will press based on eye analysis and executes it at that instant. This is straight up sci fi stuff. 

[edmuss]

But all that said, software & human interation design aside, this was all possible on a varjo headset 4 years ago

[Dragon1-1]

19 minutes ago, edmuss said:

But all that said, software & human interation design aside, this was all possible on a varjo headset 4 years ago

If you had 10k on you, it was.  Now it's "just" for 3.5k, so that's progress. In another four years suck kit might well go for $1000 or so, particularly a PC headset from someone other than Apple. 

[edmuss]

Absolutely, but the price of varjo headsets is not determined by consumer needs, 10k to the type of enterprise client of which varjo deal with is nothing.  I'd hazard a guess that the 10k headset of 4 years ago is still 10k, not because the tech is still expensive but because there is a customer base that will pay it; the extra profits (from reduced tech costs) will go towards software development and subsidising the aero as a consumer product.

I bet that what is being discussed (eye tracking guessing which icon you're going to select) could be achieved with a reverb omnicept/quest pro for less than a third of the price.  The high resolution is great, but it's still using foveated rendering (like varjo have done for years), similarly hand tracking has been done by ultraleap for the last decade.  The magic comes from apples software integration of the different systems into one cohesive system.

[Rodeo]

15 hours ago, kerlcat said:

A 42" LCD 1080P TV costed me $3000 in 2006... what's the price of 85" OLED today?

My father in-law is a general contractor and 20 years ago he was trying to get in on a group purchase of 50” plasma TVs for $10k a piece 

[kerlcat]

1 hour ago, Rodeo said:

My father in-law is a general contractor and 20 years ago he was trying to get in on a group purchase of 50” plasma TVs for $10k a piece 

True. If sales of 42” or 50” flat TV were zero back then, there won’t be affordable flat TV today at so damn low price for all of us. Bless all cutting edge tech could fly in sales without complaining.

[Supmua]

6 hours ago, kerlcat said:

True. If sales of 42” or 50” flat TV were zero back then, there won’t be affordable flat TV today at so damn low price for all of us. Bless all cutting edge tech could fly in sales without complaining.

This reminds me of my first plasma TV purchase. Let’s just say that it wasn’t cheap lol. 

[Dragon1-1]

13 hours ago, edmuss said:

The high resolution is great, but it's still using foveated rendering (like varjo have done for years),

Foveated rendering is merely the way to make driving the headset at such high resolution possible with processing power that this thing has. This is purely a software thing, the headset still has to be able to show maximum resolution at any point the fovea might be pointed at, which requires a physical display superior to ones in Varjo headsets. That's what this headset brings to the market, a compact display with enough PD to match human vision. If you're referring to the fact maximum resolution is lower in areas the fovea can't point at, this isn't a new idea, but it's also not the point.

[edmuss]

Yes, the screens are high resolution, but it's not a new concept or execution which everyone seems to be bleating about.  It does exactly the same as my aero/leap motion could do but with a software layer that connects the two together with the OS.  Apple has always pushed high resolution displays with the associated costs and this is just a continuation of the trend.  The high resolution displays aren't any more ground breaking than the reverb displays over the rift CV1, it's just a natural progression of technology.

I'll reiterate my point.  Apples software/UX is what makes this work, the display clarity is just icing on the cake.

[winghunter]

Apple Vision Pro beats the Varjo XR-3, and with its price point of $3500 at half the price.

Edited June 12, 2023 by winghunter

[edmuss]

The point I made a few posts up is that the XR3 isn't a consumer focused unit, the price isn't really an issue and the vision pro isn't going to be a competitor to it.

Apple will have funded the development work for the vision pro via other sales; if apples only product was the vision pro then it would almost certainly be far more expensive to the end user in order to recoup the development costs.  The same with the quest2, it was subsidised by meta using funds from facebook.

[winghunter]

Hmm not sure the "Pro" is really a consumer device. I think the main client base will be enterprise, professionals and some prosumers. Any company doing any sort of 3D, CAD, media will need a bunch of these. The XR3 may have some niche use cases, though imho the Pro will easily take the majority enterprise share.

The "Apple Vision Air" may be the consumer version

Edited June 12, 2023 by winghunter

[edmuss]

Perhaps bad wording on my behalf, this version clearly isn't a consumer unit

You will find though that apple is generally not supported with 3D engineering software though, they can run on macOS via virtual machines (windows installed on mac hardware) but typically don't have correct driver support, especially for GPUs.  In my experience, most 3D engineering design is either solidworks/siemens NX/inventor/catia/creo and all of them are windows based software.  No company is going to suddenly switch from windows to a macOS supported software because apple releases a headset that is a couple of grand cheaper.  No company is going to run critical design software on an unsupported hardware environment.

Put it into perspective, a solidworks (mid level design software) license is around 8 grand with an annual subscription of between 500 and 1500 depending on licenses and packages/modules; a corporation of the likes that employs VR for training/visualisation might have a couple of thousand licenses.  The cost an XR3 vs a vision pro really is non issue.

Edited June 12, 2023 by edmuss

[winghunter]

Thats true they wont switch their software stack. But my Quest runs on Android, yet i can play windows games. Theres also iTunes for windows. It all depends on apple's software integration plans.

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, winghunter said:

Any company doing any sort of 3D, CAD, media will need a bunch of these.

My industry, architecture and construction is all solidly Windows based. So Apple Pro won’t be useful here. Indeed the VR hype seems to have passed as people aren’t sharing headsets anymore. Otherwise VR is perfect for what we do. 

4 hours ago, edmuss said:

The high resolution displays aren't any more ground breaking than the reverb displays over the rift CV1, it's just a natural progression of technology.

High resolution is the key to making all these other uses like watching movies and reading documents appealing or even possible. The trouble with the current crop of HMDs is they’re all too blurry. And from what I read there’s still room for improvement wit the Vision Pro. Even with 23 million pixels. 

[edmuss]

I don't find my aero blurry, I could quite happily work in it on solidworks if I so desired

[ackattacker]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

And from what I read there’s still room for improvement wit the Vision Pro. Even with 23 million pixels. 

I read somewhere that to fully reproduce human vision in a VR headset would require 500 megapixels.  But that if you perfectly implement foveated rendering, only about 7 megapixels need to be actually rendered. 

Edited June 12, 2023 by ackattacker

[dburne]

1 hour ago, edmuss said:

I don't find my aero blurry, I could quite happily work in it on solidworks if I so desired

Ditto here. 

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, edmuss said:

I don't find my aero blurry, I could quite happily work in it on solidworks if I so desired

Blurry compared to what? Your real eyesight? I think the goal is to achieve that eventually. 

[Dragon1-1]

9 hours ago, edmuss said:

The high resolution displays aren't any more ground breaking than the reverb displays over the rift CV1, it's just a natural progression of technology.

I'll reiterate my point.  Apples software/UX is what makes this work, the display clarity is just icing on the cake.

It's not just resolution, though, pixel density on that thing is enormous. If you look into how those displays are made, cramming that many pixels into a given space is very much nontrivial. You don't have this sort of PD in phone screens, this is a technological leap a lot like going from 5nm to 3nm architecture in CPUs. Yes, Apple is good at making high resolution screens, but that's why they're the first to hit this milestone.

And no, display clarity is a fundamental thing with VR, and very much the place where the biggest usability gains can be made. Far from being icing on the cake. Fundamentally, a VR headset is a screen strapped to your head. Rotational and positional tracking have been basically solved problems for a long time, while sound is basically optional (though nice to have). In the end, the remaining major improvement area for VR headsets is the display. The Apple headset is a major leap in the display department.

I won't be getting that one, but I'm looking forward for other manufacturers to try to compete with it.

[edmuss]

10 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Blurry compared to what? Your real eyesight? I think the goal is to achieve that eventually. 

Naturally no, but compared to the monitor I use daily it's not far off.  The varjo bionic displays give 70PPD which is supposed to be human eye resolution, but I dare say it's not possible to truely replicate what our eyes see.

10 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It's not just resolution, though, pixel density on that thing is enormous. If you look into how those displays are made, cramming that many pixels into a given space is very much nontrivial. You don't have this sort of PD in phone screens, this is a technological leap a lot like going from 5nm to 3nm architecture in CPUs. Yes, Apple is good at making high resolution screens, but that's why they're the first to hit this milestone.

And no, display clarity is a fundamental thing with VR, and very much the place where the biggest usability gains can be made. Far from being icing on the cake. Fundamentally, a VR headset is a screen strapped to your head. Rotational and positional tracking have been basically solved problems for a long time, while sound is basically optional (though nice to have). In the end, the remaining major improvement area for VR headsets is the display. The Apple headset is a major leap in the display department.

I won't be getting that one, but I'm looking forward for other manufacturers to try to compete with it.

The advent of higher resolution panels is just the natural progression of technology, Apple has just pushed the boundaries like they always do.

Agreed, the higher the resolution the better and the competition / tech trickle down will be amazing for everyone else