20 ms·

I could see this as a virtual office, as some of the comments speculate. If I had a set of AR glasses that projected what appeared to be an 8K monitor on top o

• mycall 6y ago
  Furthermore, I would be willing to use 16-bit colors for higher resolution.
  • messe 6y ago
    I wonder if a little bit of dithering would be enough to compensate for that at that high a resolution. The actual area of our eyes that can resolve colour is quite small, so it might work.
  • bigiain 6y ago
    16 bit colours on a pair of 8K screens is the best part of half a gigabyte per frame... I assume sir will be wanting 60 or 120 FPS as well? :-)
    • chomp 6y ago
      802.11ay can hit that at 15fps theoretically, and if apple culls peripheral video, it may need way less bandwidth!
      • p1necone 6y ago
        VR at 15fps would make you feel sick.
      • xxs 6y ago
        wifi is a horrid idea, any retransmissions/interference would cause an immediate/noticeable latency. The distance for full speed is low and any object between the antenas, e.g. a human, would have noticeable effects.
    • WalterSear 6y ago
      Foveated rendering will cut that in half or more.
      • bigiain 6y ago
        For some purposes. There's still 72 raw megapixels in the two displays. Even if you "cheat" and run rendered output for the edges in 4K or 1080p, something still has to drive each RGD emitter for each of those pixels, even if you're painting blocks of 4 or 16 of them all the same colour...
    • davrosthedalek 6y ago
      7680x4320x2pixels x2 bytes/pixel ~ 127 MBytes/frame.
      • bigiain 6y ago
        Ahhh, right. I'd misinterpreted that "16 bit colour" as wanting 16 bits per colour 6 byte pixels, not 2 byte pixels.
        • repsilat 6y ago
          I read it the same way. I guess the phrasing ("I would be willing") should have made it clear, but it's an understandable misunderstanding: it's used both ways: https://www.photoshopessentials.com/essentials/16-bit/ https://www.photoshopessentials.com/essentials/16-bit/ https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001557.htm https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001557.htm
        • davrosthedalek 6y ago
          Yeah, but even at 100 MByte/frame, we talk enormous bitrates for sensible frame rates.
• garaetjjte 6y ago
  I'm confused by people saying that they would use VR for work. My head hurts after one or maybe two hours of using it, and if I would work whole day in it?... ugh.
  • ryanianian 6y ago
    The headaches are commonly a result of low resolution, low frame-rate, insufficient lighting, or bad hardware design (too tight or heavy or not adjustable for your head/face/glasses/etc). These are nontrivial problems to solve.
    • darkstarsys 6y ago
      Yes. Not to mention position tracking latency, frame latency, jittery/slow controls, mismatched depth cues (parallax vs. lens focus), and on and on...
      • lookdangerous 6y ago
        I know what parallax is, but what is lens focus? Is that an area seeking improvement in AR research?
        • ses1984 6y ago
          Close one eye and focus on something really close with the open eye. Notice that things that are far away are blurry. Now still with one eye open, focus on something far away, and notice that things nearby are blurry. VR doesn't replicate this.
          • pault 6y ago
            This is a very active area of research, and I'm pretty confident it will be a standard feature within the next five years. There are also light field displays, which are super interesting, but I'm pretty sure they are cost prohibitive for consumer devices.
    • 6y ago
• ghaff 6y ago
  Why? I mostly have zero interest in being immersed in meetings. Most people aren't IRL most of the time. There's potentially value where people need to be on-site in other contexts such as repairing equipment.
  • jayd16 6y ago
    Laptop + magical AR/VR headset means you can always have your 3 monitor workspace, even at the coffee shop. Plus, you get fully private screens.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      That sounds utterly unappealing. If I'm in a coffeeshop I have zero reason to want to cut off from the outside world. Otherwise I wouldn't be in a coffeeshop. Most of the reason I'd work in a coffeeshop is for an ambient social vibe. And for many things I do a 13" laptop screen is fine. (And I probably wouldn't feel comfortable being utterly cut off from the environment in an urban space.)
      • netizen-9748 6y ago
        It might be better with AR, where you still get the ambiance but with virtual monitors.
        • ghaff 6y ago
          I have no idea how that works with AR overlaying monitors on a physical worldview. So you're writing something overlaid on the view around the coffeeshop? The idea of AR is more to give a HUD that provides information about what you're looking at.
          • psyc 6y ago
            AR is commonly used to insert solid objects into the real world. See Pokemon Go and most HoloLens games. And the HoloLens app where a virtual dog lives in your house.
• babyshake 6y ago
  I'm wondering why Apple doesn't create a device that is much cheaper, has no augmented reality, and is just for consuming TV/movies with A/V quality matching that of the best cinemas. Pay off the device with a monthly subscription that includes Apple TV+. Something like $600-700 would get a lot of people interested.
  • outoftheabyss 6y ago
    Like a TV? I just don’t see wearables for consuming entertainment catching on and having mass market appeal
    • gfxgirl 6y ago
      In my imagination, teen girls would love to be able to use AR to talk to their friends with their friend appearing like a hologram in their room over their friend appearing on their phone ala facetime.
  • sjg007 6y ago
    I don't enjoy wearing glasses when I watch TV. I'm lucky that my vision isn't that bad that I need too.
  • lukeschlather 6y ago
    The cheaper devices already exist. An Oculus Quest is basically that. However I don't think the refresh rate or image quality is really up to scratch. And if this were just a question of image quality, I wouldn't make a big deal about it, but poor image quality means something resembling motion sickness will set in pretty quickly, even if you're just watching a video. One time I tried to do some yoga while watching TV with an Oculus Go and I stopped immediately, huge mistake, never trying that again. But based on my knowledge of the tech it seems possible that such a thing might be possible at a $3000 price point. If the external cameras are low enough latency that I could basically have a TV floating at the perfect viewing distance while walking around and doing chores or exercising I would buy one in a heartbeat. Though I'm not sure that's even possible or if that's just guaranteed motion sickness. I would say if it's possible, it's definitely not going to be possible for under $2000, at least not for 3-5 years.
• lambda_obrien 6y ago
  An AR headset like you describe would be killer: get rid of the laptop form factor, put everything into a phone sized box, and you can sit at a table with just a keyboard and mouse and work.
• iandanforth 6y ago
  You may be interested in https://immersedvr.com/ https://immersedvr.com/. Some videos suggest that their coders use their VR workspace to code the app itself. Not exactly what you described of course :)
  • evan_ 6y ago
    Fwiw I use this a couple hours a day a few times a week for coding. It’s great for focus and completely comfortable/readable as long as the text size isn’t tiny.
  • jimmySixDOF 6y ago
    iSpatial is also an interesting experience. ImmersedVR is basically a 4+ screen desktop extended workspace while iSpatial gives each window its own screen in multi-level opp center environment. They both have some problems scaling certain content and are works in progress but are the standouts for getting things done in VR. Provided you can touch type well enough.
• baybal2 6y ago
  Tame your expectations. I'm pretty sure Apple's gaslighting field has yet not found a way to bend laws of physics. Everybody wants a sleek, everyday wearable device, without usability corner cases, but such are physically impossible to make. Portability, visibility, usability. Choose one. First, power requirements demand either external power, or extreme power austerity cutting into display, and graphics. Recon Instruments had first really practical battery powered HUD goggles, and they barely lasted more than an hour in real life use. The lowest possible power at which you can provide just any much rich graphics is 250mw — the lowest end of most energy efficient SoCs. Possibly, Apple can bruteforce it with 5nm custom ASICs, but not by much, 100mw at max possible with CMOS cells. Even if you have a magic chip with hypothetical 0 Watt power usage, you will not improve the situation by much as your display will still eat at least 1W, or usually up to 2.5-4W if you use any waveguides. Daylight visibility is essentially impossible without displays outputting at least 100000+ nits. There are no tricks around that, that's just physics. There are very few technologies on the horizon which are physically capable of achieving anything better. Monolithic devices are one, and only ones which can offer sub 1W power use at any much good visual quality. But, they are very expensive to make. All existing makers are manufacturing on lab scales only. Getting manufacturing out of the lab, and into fabs is impossible without the process technology, getting out of the lab too. And this shortens the list of credible contenders to just 1 company in the world, and guess, it's nor Apple. Third, even if you agree to a wired up design, where do you get 16k video from? Have you ever seen how thick DP 2.0 cables are? How do you get latency down? How do you make even simplest AR interactions not require the wearer to also wear a Quad SLI videogaming PC? How do you transport 40 gigabits per second of video without having the I/O PHY eat more than the system itself? Only optics can do it under 1W. Apple can surely put its silicon to good use here, but even a purpose made ASIC video system will be on the edge. It will limit them to the most basic graphics, and pretty much hardcoded, and handcoded use cases to extract maximum power efficiency, and workaround hardware limitations. It will be a basic HUD, maybe with some GFX, and good video playback options. Essentially an Apple Watch, except you wear it on the head. I bet they will intentionally limit its functionality to not to let users see performance limitations, and corner cases too often.
  • throwaway316943 6y ago
• p1necone 6y ago
  If the screens in the goggles themselves are 8k, the "monitor" is only going to be a small fraction of that unless you have your face up really close. (Although you could effectively have much higher than 8k when you do stick your face right up next to it.)
  • zamadatix 6y ago
    Yeah the idea of having a better virtual office really isn't as great as it seems when you try it out. Basically extra latency to not see all of the stuff on your desk and have the entire world skip frames when you do something that maxes out your CPU or GPU. Not to mention the aformentioned image-in-an-image quality problems.
    • judge2020 6y ago
      See mirage[0] - this solves the "can't see your desk" problem. A more recent seems to be ThinkReality (by Lenovo) which prominently features a 'extra screens' application on the home page[1]. 0: https://www.mirage-app.com/ https://www.mirage-app.com/ 1: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3
      • zamadatix 6y ago
        I think the softwre side answers are there, just pump more high quality information in faster and it's easily solved. The problem is i just punts it to hardware. Both the lenovo product and hololens have absymal fovs and resolution but you can at least look to the real world great. Otoh normal headsets can display the virtual world in great detail and double the fov but not only is it taxing on the hardware to do so you need to bring in the real world insted. In either scenario you get pretty bad tradeoffs at this point, and I've tried both approaches for quite a while.
    • disabled 6y ago
      I think this can be solved. This may surprise many, but I use virtual reality for all of my heavy reading, without any issue whatsoever. It basically feels like I am reading on a movie screen. While my use case is different than most, I personally have a print related disability (severe convergence insufficiency), which requires the use of assistive technology. Anyways, the app I use is called Retinopsy Look VR, which is available in Viveport. It is intended for people with visual impairments and is super adjustable. I think the adjustability is key. To augment my reading experience, I use a screen reader called Kurzweil 3000, which reads the text aloud to me, with the sentence being read in yellow and the word being read aloud in green, simultaneously. I use a Valve Index headset with prescription lenses that are adapted to the headset (I got them from VR Optician). I also use a laptop with an i9 10th gen processor, a 2080 Super video card, 32 GB RAM, and SSDs as hard drives. The only thing I do not like about my setup is the fact that it is not wireless and also the fact that base stations (“lighthouses”) are required.
• cultofmetatron 6y ago
  ditto. I bought a oculus quest 2 purely based on video from immersedvr. its notw quite there yet but I'm enjoying beat saber in the meantime
• smoldesu 6y ago
  That's basically the premise of the Oculus Quest, and my experience with virtual offices there are extremely mixed. I don't even find any of the apps to be particularly bad, but the inconvenience of using VR as a user shell becomes apparent very quickly. Small gestures that used to be a centimeter of movement are abstracted into larger, easier to read gestures that just tire you out. With that being said, I still found a few "professional" uses for it: I was particularly impressed by how easy it was to load up a Blender project and step inside of it.
• dzhiurgis 6y ago
  If it’s contact lenses you could have terminal with your eyes closed!
• treve 6y ago
  This is pretty funny to me. With VR you can go anywhere you can possibly imagine, and you chose an office.
  • playpause 6y ago
    With VR/AR you can’t “go anywhere” (not until the experience is Matrix-like anyway). You can just look at stuff. Like on a screen. Just a bit better than a traditional screen in a few ways, and worse in others. It’s not going to replace travelling to interesting places any time soon.
  • cambalache 6y ago
    Well if the objective is to be productive I dont think it is a stupid take. I would pick that or a monk cell.
• purplecats 6y ago
  i would absolutely abhor being mandated or otherwise pressured to use this device for work. i would love forcing or otherwise pressuring my employees to have this strapped on their face for work 24/7.
• jonplackett 6y ago
  So long as your dining table is black and has no reflections, should be great...
• nothis 6y ago
  I never believed in VR as a mainstream thing but AR keeps me curious. There's a Hololens demo on youtube that shows a bunch of virtual monitors of arbitrary size and shape floating around the user. That's potentially awesome. Think the desktop "windows" concepts but with virtual monitors, 3D UI elements where useful. This could have potential. I'd say the technology to make it workable as something you wanna wear for 8 hours a day still isn't there yet, though, and probably won't be until some major breakthrough. It's not just resolution, it's battery, contrast, size... I don't see anything I'd personally want to use with current or next-year tech.
• blueboo 6y ago
  This is indeed the concept behind Lenovo’s forthcoming glasses: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3