4 ms·

The weird part is the MQ3 does more. I'd assume people with this kind of purchasing habits are just buying both and some more anyway.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Hard to say. I think the most interesting feature of the AVP is the eye tracking which could not only project your avatar to the front of the device but might be able to make an avatar good enough that you could jump into a Zoom call from an AVP. That's one of those things that would make it possible to travel and pack an XR headset instead of a laptop That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc. The kind of thing that makes people afraid that Facebook is involved with this. The Quest controllers work great for a range of applications. Hand tracking has come a long way since the painful experience of holding your arms up high so the Hololens 1 can see them but I don't know if AVP's hand tracking will really be as versatile as the Quest controllers and Apple's the sort of company that will go down with the ship because they think there is something unclean about a design... But on that other hand they've got that battery pack. The Quest has really good VR games and also the kind of media apps that this article is talking about. MQ3 came with a great MR demo game: they opened up the API for MR apps as soon as the MQ3 hit the street but they have been slow to get third-party MR apps through the app store, I just got my first one the other day. The Quest's graphics capabilities aren't that great by modern standards, certainly if you are a serious gamer with a powerful gaming PC you have seen games that are much more detailed and impressive... I would say that the graphics of Asgard's Wrath 2 are pretty similar to those of Metroid Prime. On the other hand there is something really special about being in a space. The AVP is a lot more powerful and on paper could synthesize better graphics but it's not so clear to me how it works out in practice. I think how the 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas lets you travel in a huge world with no loading screens in a Playstation 2 with 36MB of RAM... An experience which is still uncommon despite having phones with 1000x the RAM because it is a lot of work to tune up graphics. Similarly you see most of the games that are on Xbox and Playstation and PC are also on the much less powerful Switch. Part of the reason Horizon Worlds has failed is that they were trying to make an easy authoring experience that would be accessible to people who don't use traditional 3D tools which comes with all sorts of limitation, not just in the amount of geometry you can have or the number of players, but that you can't bring in your own textures. In the end it all has to fit in RAM in the headset. Maybe you pay 7x as much for 7x the capacity on an AVP (so a world could have 140 max players instead of 20) but often you give people more resources and they just waste them... Look how cloud gaming never developed exclusive titles that did anything that you could only do with cloud gaming.
- jsheard 3y ago
  > That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc. For better or worse Apple isn't allowing this kind of thing, the eye tracking "cursor" is only ever known to the OS itself and apps only receive "click" events with a snapshot of where you're looking when the OS detects the relevent hand gesture. Apps are never allowed to know what you're gazing at passively. It's a good move for privacy, but it's very limiting for games since they will only have (accurate) head and (not so accurate) hand tracking data to work with.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    I suspect there will be ways of getting this information though, it would be incredibly hard to design the foveated renderer such that you can't figure out where the eye is by e.g. positioning different amounts of geometry on the screen and then timing frames.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      Apple hasn't made it exactly clear AFAICT, but I suspect that foveated rendering might only work in the managed RealityKit environment where Apple controls the entire rendering pipeline, and not inside applications which implement their own rendering from the ground up using Metal, for exactly that reason. There's nothing in the documentation about foveated rendering in Metal apps, and it is something that engines would have to be explicitly aware of if they do any kind of off-screen rendering.
    - dwaite 3y ago
      I don't believe you get mouseover/"glanceover" events; you have to define your focus visual behavior declaratively. Rendering of that behavior is then not visible to an app with default entitlements. Of course, Apple's store means they can just forbid gaming the system.
- makeitdouble 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago

Hard to say. I think the most interesting feature of the AVP is the eye tracking which could not only project your avatar to the front of the device but might be able to make an avatar good enough that you could jump into a Zoom call from an AVP. That's one of those things that would make it possible to travel and pack an XR headset instead of a laptop That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc. The kind of thing that makes people afraid that Facebook is involved with this. The Quest controllers work great for a range of applications. Hand tracking has come a long way since the painful experience of holding your arms up high so the Hololens 1 can see them but I don't know if AVP's hand tracking will really be as versatile as the Quest controllers and Apple's the sort of company that will go down with the ship because they think there is something unclean about a design... But on that other hand they've got that battery pack. The Quest has really good VR games and also the kind of media apps that this article is talking about. MQ3 came with a great MR demo game: they opened up the API for MR apps as soon as the MQ3 hit the street but they have been slow to get third-party MR apps through the app store, I just got my first one the other day. The Quest's graphics capabilities aren't that great by modern standards, certainly if you are a serious gamer with a powerful gaming PC you have seen games that are much more detailed and impressive... I would say that the graphics of Asgard's Wrath 2 are pretty similar to those of Metroid Prime. On the other hand there is something really special about being in a space. The AVP is a lot more powerful and on paper could synthesize better graphics but it's not so clear to me how it works out in practice. I think how the 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas lets you travel in a huge world with no loading screens in a Playstation 2 with 36MB of RAM... An experience which is still uncommon despite having phones with 1000x the RAM because it is a lot of work to tune up graphics. Similarly you see most of the games that are on Xbox and Playstation and PC are also on the much less powerful Switch. Part of the reason Horizon Worlds has failed is that they were trying to make an easy authoring experience that would be accessible to people who don't use traditional 3D tools which comes with all sorts of limitation, not just in the amount of geometry you can have or the number of players, but that you can't bring in your own textures. In the end it all has to fit in RAM in the headset. Maybe you pay 7x as much for 7x the capacity on an AVP (so a world could have 140 max players instead of 20) but often you give people more resources and they just waste them... Look how cloud gaming never developed exclusive titles that did anything that you could only do with cloud gaming.

jsheard 3y ago
> That eye tracking though also supports dystopian scenarios such as being able to change the world right from under you by only changing things you're not looking at, "reading your mind" by seeing what catches your eye, etc. For better or worse Apple isn't allowing this kind of thing, the eye tracking "cursor" is only ever known to the OS itself and apps only receive "click" events with a snapshot of where you're looking when the OS detects the relevent hand gesture. Apps are never allowed to know what you're gazing at passively. It's a good move for privacy, but it's very limiting for games since they will only have (accurate) head and (not so accurate) hand tracking data to work with.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I suspect there will be ways of getting this information though, it would be incredibly hard to design the foveated renderer such that you can't figure out where the eye is by e.g. positioning different amounts of geometry on the screen and then timing frames.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Apple hasn't made it exactly clear AFAICT, but I suspect that foveated rendering might only work in the managed RealityKit environment where Apple controls the entire rendering pipeline, and not inside applications which implement their own rendering from the ground up using Metal, for exactly that reason. There's nothing in the documentation about foveated rendering in Metal apps, and it is something that engines would have to be explicitly aware of if they do any kind of off-screen rendering.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    I don't believe you get mouseover/"glanceover" events; you have to define your focus visual behavior declaratively. Rendering of that behavior is then not visible to an app with default entitlements. Of course, Apple's store means they can just forbid gaming the system.
makeitdouble 3y ago