9 ms·

If it has to be tethered to external battery always, why not move processing and fans to that also?

airstrike 3y ago
I suppose it's easier to cool something off your forehead than off your pocket, even if that means extra weight -- it's lighter than other VR devices (although maybe that's not a particularly high (low?) bar
- jayd16 3y ago
  What other devices? It's heavier than the Quest 1/2/3 and the PSVR2. The Quest Pro is heavier but more balanced with the battery on the back of the rigid strap. You're right about cooling. It would go from something you can pocket to something that has to be clipped on a belt like the Magic Leap.
jsheard 3y ago
I would imagine they didn't want to have an external pack and that's just a compromise they had to make for this initial version, with the intention of getting rid of it in a future iteration. It wouldn't be worth overcomplicating the external pack if they don't see that as the way forward. A "Vision Air" that exchanges the glass and most of the metal structure for plastic, and maybe ditches the underwhelming front display, but integrates the battery like the Quests would be a pretty good trade IMO.
- karlgkk 3y ago
  The front display is underwhelming, but it also lets you have a conversation with someone else in the room. When you're wearing it, it's easy to forget it's there while talking with people. That was something that was hard to do with previous headsets, such as Valve's Index. I honestly think that the front display is going to become something that every other vendor replicates in some way.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    If you are having serious conversation where expression matters, just take it off or all person may wear it in the Metaverse. In current form it is gimmicky.
    - karlgkk 3y ago
      I would say that for quick, <10 minute conversations, it's fine. It's one of those things that doesn't seem impactful until you interact with it for the first time. I used to think the same way.
      - Turskarama 3y ago
        <10 minutes? If I think the conversation is going to take more than 30 seconds I am taking that thing off. Care to imagine how much extra cost this gimmick adds to the device? A high definition second screen just so you can make "eye contact" with someone while simultaneously not paying full attention to them anyway.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    It'll depend on how people actually end up using the Vision Pro in the real world I suppose - being able to easily talk to other people isn't a high value feature if the average AVP owner ends up treating it like a VR headset you use alone, rather than wearing it around other people or even in public like Apple envisioned.
    - karlgkk 3y ago
      They haven't advertised people using it "in public". It's home, office, etc. In those contexts, it's more appropriate.
      - netsharc 3y ago
        I've seen Instagram reels of people wearing these things while crossing the street, sitting on the subway, and, worst of all, while driving a CyberTruck...
- Stevvo 3y ago
  Alternatively, ditch the glass & metal + display and keep battery separate; then it might actually be comfortable.
polyomino 3y ago
It could be done, but there are more tradeoffs than at first glance. They probably didn’t do this because when they took the battery off the head it was already too late to redesign the thing again. You would need to propagate signals from all the sensors back and forth which adds some overall weight in copper, and perhaps latency for more encoding and decoding. Could be worth it, we’ll see in v2.
- iandanforth 3y ago
  Tried it today. The weight is a real problem. I'd gladly have a larger side pack to lose weight off the headset. If they ditched the useless eye screen, and moved the m2 to a pack they could probably drop 100g from the headset.
  - gwd 3y ago
    ISTR somewhere someone saying that moving it to the pack would break their really low latency processing requirements. Distance / latency options are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.
    - vlabakje90 3y ago
      Light travels 300km in one millisecond, so I doubt that's a limitation here.
      - Klathmon 3y ago
        I believe it's more the processing that would be needed to send the data over the larger distance in fewer wires which would add latency. You can't just take the absurd number of traces off a PCB and shove them into a wire without hitting issues like voltage drop, crosstalk, interference, or having a cable as thick as your finger.
        geerlingguy 3y ago
        You'd need optical transceivers and at that point the added complexity and similar board space required might negate any weight savings (and drive up the price further).
threeseed 3y ago
There are reports that they tried it. Not just wired but also wireless. But the increase in latency in transmitting 10k+ of video data from the displays to the puck and back was enough to make the user more nauseous. I suspect because they wouldn't be able to process the data in time for the next frame.
- polyomino 3y ago
  Meta can do wireless VR streamed from a PC with airlink. That’s at lower resolution, but it’s at least theoretically possible.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    The latency is terrible though. I have an oculus quest 2. Maybe it’s an offer of magnitude better on the 3 but I doubt it.
    - polyomino 3y ago
      Usually the WiFi setup is the biggest culprit. You’ll want to have wifi 6 and wire your desktop to the router. Apple could theoretically directly connect between their compute puck and their headset.
      - bastawhiz 3y ago
        I think this would theoretically work in the optimistic case. But it doesn't make a lot of practical sense: if the puck has the battery, you need to physically connect it to the headset anyway. Even if you used wifi for the data transfer, you're subject to any interference (retransmission of packets for a real-time OS sounds like a nightmare) and people leaving the puck on their desk and getting too far away. In a way, the cable is a feature and not a limitation.
        astrange 3y ago
        Since it doesn't have a headphone jack (as far as I know) this is actually still a problem since you have to wear wireless earbuds with it, if you don't want other people to hear it.
pants2 3y ago
It would be neat to have a version that plugs straight in to a Macbook pro and uses that for all the processing + battery. Then it's basically just a portable external display.
- karlgkk 3y ago
  Posting from Vision, right now. I can say with some serious confidence that this wouldn't work well in that way for multiple reasons. Moving around, not being tethered, being able to take it on the plane, etc. Latency would be an issue. Not to mention, the cost of on board-computing is negligible compared to the necessary cost of the displays, R1, etc. Although, I have been using it with my MacBook Pro as a remote client, to great effect.
  - pests 3y ago
    Yall really going to be using these on the plane? Can't wait to watch zombies pinching at the air.
    - karlgkk 3y ago
      First of all, you don't have to move your hand or pinch "on" something for most tasks. The ones where you do move your hand, the range of motion needed is actually pretty small. You can have your hand in your lap or neutral on an arm rest, and pinch there. Hand position doesn't matter. Anyways, this is going to be indispensable on the plane and for frequent fliers. Having a full 20 foot cinema experience? Being able to quickly pause and interact with an attendant or the person next to you without taking it off? Killer.
      - pests 3y ago
        > and pinch there Pinchers! I'm only teasing honestly.
    - wudangmonk 3y ago
      Are people looking down and flicking their fingers the hip crowd and the air pinchers the lamers?.
GeekyBear 3y ago
That was one of the things they tried while they were iterating on it in-house. Ming Chi Kuo first reported details of the product as shipped at the end of 2021. > Kuo's prediction that the headset will be a standalone device goes against a report by The Information from September claiming that it will need to wirelessly communicate with an an iPhone, an iPad or a computer to handle most of its computing. https://www.engadget.com/apples-mixed-reality-headset-standalone-ming-chi-kuo-082117045.html https://www.engadget.com/apples-mixed-reality-headset-standa...
- naravara 3y ago
  I assume there would be concerns about latency and throughput.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    That seems reasonable. Also, wireless bandwidth would be an issue with so many sensors running at the same time. You would need to stream all the sensor data in one direction while also streaming two 4k display streams in the other direction.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      That seems like a really tight latency budget to run through even an optimized wireless stack. Working backward: frame needs to be received by headset in time to refresh, which means it needs to be sent by host device in time to make its way through the headset wireless phy and be decoded. And working forward: headset needs to encode sensor values, send across wireless, be decoded on host, before frame can start to be generated. Which leaves the time in-between those for actually doing all the processing and frame generation. Ditching the wireless phy and low-level steps seems like an easy trade-off for more processing time.
    - naravara 3y ago
      Even wired that seems like it’d need a lot of copper. The power cable connector right now is pretty pliable. Most thunderbolts cables are not as much. And who knows if it would need to be even thicker than that.
polio 3y ago
The external component is meant to fit in one's pocket, so the added size, heat, and moving parts would make for an awkward fit.
phonon 3y ago
It would add too much latency (even if it would be only a few milliseconds.)
- lolc 3y ago
  Few milliseconds is way off. Over fiber I get sub-milli ping to the datacenters in the same city.
  - phonon 3y ago
    A cable doesn't have the bandwidth of chip to chip so it will be have to serialized/deserialized or decoded etc.
    - lolc 3y ago
      If we take USB4 80 Gbps as a guideline: That's 80 mbit per millisecond. Apple says their goggles have 23 mpixels. So if we multiply by 24 bits for color, transmission has a lower bound of 7 ms per frame. So I agree now that the delay is in milliseconds which can push perception into nausea. I hadn't considered the pixel density. Of course they could use something faster than USB4, but it wouldn't be easy to go below 1 ms I guess.
      - phonon 3y ago
        You forgot the five sensors, six microphones, and 12 cameras in the other direction too :-)
        lolc 3y ago
        Oh I ignored them because the 23mpix dwarf everything else.
antoniuschan99 3y ago
I think eventually when they have an m2 on an iphone then it can work but they’ll probably have to remove the fans somehow. Also the front display I wonder if it will go away one day. To reduce the weight further, cost, and with sunglasses you can’t see the persons eyes. However, it does differentiate the look from oculus
mort96 3y ago
You keep the battery pack in a pocket. If they did what you're suggesting, size would be a problem, and fans are ... usually less effective in pockets.
- dylan604 3y ago
  nah, just make it a trendy belt pack like those early iPhone cases.
  - zharknado 3y ago
    3D-knitted battery bandolier, with slots for your AirPods and Apple Watch. Also comes in a silicone sport option for those times when you need to do spatial computing while trail-running.
richardw 3y ago
I think it’s a smart option. Fair chance there was a LOT of thinking that went into it. For example, wondering about the characterisation of it with processing in the battery appliance. It would be “an expensive portable device with a dumb headset screen”. Could someone else sell a different headset for the device? Could they sell a Linux machine that is good enough to power the headset? Might people just want one or the other, and bitch about the cost of an ARM based mobile PC that burns up your bag because it has no free-flow air? Might be Apple releases pricy larger batteries. Or some cable that allows you to hot-swap them. I see there is a cable where you can plug the headset into your Mac for development. They hopefully considered the multi-year evolution of it, not just this year’s version.
iancmceachern 3y ago
Latency
cultofmetatron 3y ago
> why not move processing and fans to that also? my guess is to minimize latency.
- wtallis 3y ago
  Latency from 2-3 feet of wire is not problematic. But depending on how much data you want to move that distance and how thick a bundle of wires you are willing to use, power to move all those bits could be an issue.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    USB-C can do 40Gbps. That's more than enough for a bunch of screens and cameras.
    - vluft 3y ago
      40Gbps is not enough to run the screen for one eye at the resolution/framerate/HDR it's running at. You'd have to chop the bpc to 8 or the refresh rate to about 80hz. And then you'd still need another one for the other eye, and a third one for the cameras.
modeless 3y ago
This is my main complaint with the design. Comfort is king for things you wear on your face, and a lot of the design decisions compromise comfort. If I was designing v2 I would delete the external facing display and glass cover, move all processing to the battery, and ship a rigid strap. None of the arguments against putting the processor in the battery make any sense. It adds latency? No it doesn't, if designed correctly, and I guarantee you can fit the correct design in the budget for $3500. You can't cool it from inside a pocket? The wire is sticking out already, you could add a short air intake to it. It would be too big? I guarantee that size is easier to carry in the battery than on your literal face! The only thing that makes sense to me is the battery was supposed to be internal and the external battery was a last minute compromise for comfort. Unfortunately I suspect that Apple will go the direction of moving the battery back in for v2 rather than moving processing out.
- snom380 3y ago
  There’s 12 cameras and 3 screens to drive, how many lanes would you need for that through the cable? How chunky would the cable be after adding necessary shielding?
  - throwfaraway398 3y ago
    optical fiber ? it may cost a bit more than copper for the transceivers (is that still true nowadays?) but given the price of the hardware i doubt it's really an issue.
    - CuriouslyC 3y ago
      Until the cable gets crimped while someone's doing VR and the display goes to shit.
      - modeless 3y ago
        Meta already did it and it works great
michaelt 3y ago
The cable needs to withstand a lot of flexing and rough handling. Much easier to make it durable when it doesn't need to transmit 10 gigabits of data.
snitty 3y ago
You can also power it with a standard wall adapter. So, then you'd need to plug the wall thing into the battery, and the battery into the headset?
Someone 3y ago
Would fans would work well on an external unit if that unit is in your pocket, or even if it clipped to your belt, possibly with a shirt hanging over it?

I suppose it's easier to cool something off your forehead than off your pocket, even if that means extra weight -- it's lighter than other VR devices (although maybe that's not a particularly high (low?) bar

jayd16 3y ago
What other devices? It's heavier than the Quest 1/2/3 and the PSVR2. The Quest Pro is heavier but more balanced with the battery on the back of the rigid strap. You're right about cooling. It would go from something you can pocket to something that has to be clipped on a belt like the Magic Leap.

jsheard 3y ago

I would imagine they didn't want to have an external pack and that's just a compromise they had to make for this initial version, with the intention of getting rid of it in a future iteration. It wouldn't be worth overcomplicating the external pack if they don't see that as the way forward. A "Vision Air" that exchanges the glass and most of the metal structure for plastic, and maybe ditches the underwhelming front display, but integrates the battery like the Quests would be a pretty good trade IMO.

karlgkk 3y ago
The front display is underwhelming, but it also lets you have a conversation with someone else in the room. When you're wearing it, it's easy to forget it's there while talking with people. That was something that was hard to do with previous headsets, such as Valve's Index. I honestly think that the front display is going to become something that every other vendor replicates in some way.
- blackoil 3y ago
  If you are having serious conversation where expression matters, just take it off or all person may wear it in the Metaverse. In current form it is gimmicky.
  - karlgkk 3y ago
    I would say that for quick, <10 minute conversations, it's fine. It's one of those things that doesn't seem impactful until you interact with it for the first time. I used to think the same way.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      <10 minutes? If I think the conversation is going to take more than 30 seconds I am taking that thing off. Care to imagine how much extra cost this gimmick adds to the device? A high definition second screen just so you can make "eye contact" with someone while simultaneously not paying full attention to them anyway.
- jsheard 3y ago
  It'll depend on how people actually end up using the Vision Pro in the real world I suppose - being able to easily talk to other people isn't a high value feature if the average AVP owner ends up treating it like a VR headset you use alone, rather than wearing it around other people or even in public like Apple envisioned.
  - karlgkk 3y ago
    They haven't advertised people using it "in public". It's home, office, etc. In those contexts, it's more appropriate.
    - netsharc 3y ago
      I've seen Instagram reels of people wearing these things while crossing the street, sitting on the subway, and, worst of all, while driving a CyberTruck...
Stevvo 3y ago
Alternatively, ditch the glass & metal + display and keep battery separate; then it might actually be comfortable.

polyomino 3y ago

It could be done, but there are more tradeoffs than at first glance. They probably didn’t do this because when they took the battery off the head it was already too late to redesign the thing again. You would need to propagate signals from all the sensors back and forth which adds some overall weight in copper, and perhaps latency for more encoding and decoding. Could be worth it, we’ll see in v2.

iandanforth 3y ago
Tried it today. The weight is a real problem. I'd gladly have a larger side pack to lose weight off the headset. If they ditched the useless eye screen, and moved the m2 to a pack they could probably drop 100g from the headset.
- gwd 3y ago
  ISTR somewhere someone saying that moving it to the pack would break their really low latency processing requirements. Distance / latency options are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.
  - vlabakje90 3y ago
    Light travels 300km in one millisecond, so I doubt that's a limitation here.
    - Klathmon 3y ago
      I believe it's more the processing that would be needed to send the data over the larger distance in fewer wires which would add latency. You can't just take the absurd number of traces off a PCB and shove them into a wire without hitting issues like voltage drop, crosstalk, interference, or having a cable as thick as your finger.
      - geerlingguy 3y ago
        You'd need optical transceivers and at that point the added complexity and similar board space required might negate any weight savings (and drive up the price further).

threeseed 3y ago

There are reports that they tried it. Not just wired but also wireless. But the increase in latency in transmitting 10k+ of video data from the displays to the puck and back was enough to make the user more nauseous. I suspect because they wouldn't be able to process the data in time for the next frame.

polyomino 3y ago
Meta can do wireless VR streamed from a PC with airlink. That’s at lower resolution, but it’s at least theoretically possible.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  The latency is terrible though. I have an oculus quest 2. Maybe it’s an offer of magnitude better on the 3 but I doubt it.
  - polyomino 3y ago
    Usually the WiFi setup is the biggest culprit. You’ll want to have wifi 6 and wire your desktop to the router. Apple could theoretically directly connect between their compute puck and their headset.
    - bastawhiz 3y ago
      I think this would theoretically work in the optimistic case. But it doesn't make a lot of practical sense: if the puck has the battery, you need to physically connect it to the headset anyway. Even if you used wifi for the data transfer, you're subject to any interference (retransmission of packets for a real-time OS sounds like a nightmare) and people leaving the puck on their desk and getting too far away. In a way, the cable is a feature and not a limitation.
      - astrange 3y ago
        Since it doesn't have a headphone jack (as far as I know) this is actually still a problem since you have to wear wireless earbuds with it, if you don't want other people to hear it.

pants2 3y ago

It would be neat to have a version that plugs straight in to a Macbook pro and uses that for all the processing + battery. Then it's basically just a portable external display.

karlgkk 3y ago
Posting from Vision, right now. I can say with some serious confidence that this wouldn't work well in that way for multiple reasons. Moving around, not being tethered, being able to take it on the plane, etc. Latency would be an issue. Not to mention, the cost of on board-computing is negligible compared to the necessary cost of the displays, R1, etc. Although, I have been using it with my MacBook Pro as a remote client, to great effect.
- pests 3y ago
  Yall really going to be using these on the plane? Can't wait to watch zombies pinching at the air.
  - karlgkk 3y ago
    First of all, you don't have to move your hand or pinch "on" something for most tasks. The ones where you do move your hand, the range of motion needed is actually pretty small. You can have your hand in your lap or neutral on an arm rest, and pinch there. Hand position doesn't matter. Anyways, this is going to be indispensable on the plane and for frequent fliers. Having a full 20 foot cinema experience? Being able to quickly pause and interact with an attendant or the person next to you without taking it off? Killer.
    - pests 3y ago
      > and pinch there Pinchers! I'm only teasing honestly.
  - wudangmonk 3y ago
    Are people looking down and flicking their fingers the hip crowd and the air pinchers the lamers?.

GeekyBear 3y ago

That was one of the things they tried while they were iterating on it in-house. Ming Chi Kuo first reported details of the product as shipped at the end of 2021. > Kuo's prediction that the headset will be a standalone device goes against a report by The Information from September claiming that it will need to wirelessly communicate with an an iPhone, an iPad or a computer to handle most of its computing. https://www.engadget.com/apples-mixed-reality-headset-standalone-ming-chi-kuo-082117045.html https://www.engadget.com/apples-mixed-reality-headset-standa...

naravara 3y ago
I assume there would be concerns about latency and throughput.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  That seems reasonable. Also, wireless bandwidth would be an issue with so many sensors running at the same time. You would need to stream all the sensor data in one direction while also streaming two 4k display streams in the other direction.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    That seems like a really tight latency budget to run through even an optimized wireless stack. Working backward: frame needs to be received by headset in time to refresh, which means it needs to be sent by host device in time to make its way through the headset wireless phy and be decoded. And working forward: headset needs to encode sensor values, send across wireless, be decoded on host, before frame can start to be generated. Which leaves the time in-between those for actually doing all the processing and frame generation. Ditching the wireless phy and low-level steps seems like an easy trade-off for more processing time.
  - naravara 3y ago
    Even wired that seems like it’d need a lot of copper. The power cable connector right now is pretty pliable. Most thunderbolts cables are not as much. And who knows if it would need to be even thicker than that.

polio 3y ago

The external component is meant to fit in one's pocket, so the added size, heat, and moving parts would make for an awkward fit.

phonon 3y ago

It would add too much latency (even if it would be only a few milliseconds.)

lolc 3y ago
Few milliseconds is way off. Over fiber I get sub-milli ping to the datacenters in the same city.
- phonon 3y ago
  A cable doesn't have the bandwidth of chip to chip so it will be have to serialized/deserialized or decoded etc.
  - lolc 3y ago
    If we take USB4 80 Gbps as a guideline: That's 80 mbit per millisecond. Apple says their goggles have 23 mpixels. So if we multiply by 24 bits for color, transmission has a lower bound of 7 ms per frame. So I agree now that the delay is in milliseconds which can push perception into nausea. I hadn't considered the pixel density. Of course they could use something faster than USB4, but it wouldn't be easy to go below 1 ms I guess.
    - phonon 3y ago
      You forgot the five sensors, six microphones, and 12 cameras in the other direction too :-)
      - lolc 3y ago
        Oh I ignored them because the 23mpix dwarf everything else.

antoniuschan99 3y ago

I think eventually when they have an m2 on an iphone then it can work but they’ll probably have to remove the fans somehow. Also the front display I wonder if it will go away one day. To reduce the weight further, cost, and with sunglasses you can’t see the persons eyes. However, it does differentiate the look from oculus

mort96 3y ago

You keep the battery pack in a pocket. If they did what you're suggesting, size would be a problem, and fans are ... usually less effective in pockets.

dylan604 3y ago
nah, just make it a trendy belt pack like those early iPhone cases.
- zharknado 3y ago
  3D-knitted battery bandolier, with slots for your AirPods and Apple Watch. Also comes in a silicone sport option for those times when you need to do spatial computing while trail-running.

richardw 3y ago

I think it’s a smart option. Fair chance there was a LOT of thinking that went into it. For example, wondering about the characterisation of it with processing in the battery appliance. It would be “an expensive portable device with a dumb headset screen”. Could someone else sell a different headset for the device? Could they sell a Linux machine that is good enough to power the headset? Might people just want one or the other, and bitch about the cost of an ARM based mobile PC that burns up your bag because it has no free-flow air? Might be Apple releases pricy larger batteries. Or some cable that allows you to hot-swap them. I see there is a cable where you can plug the headset into your Mac for development. They hopefully considered the multi-year evolution of it, not just this year’s version.

iancmceachern 3y ago

Latency

cultofmetatron 3y ago

> why not move processing and fans to that also? my guess is to minimize latency.

wtallis 3y ago
Latency from 2-3 feet of wire is not problematic. But depending on how much data you want to move that distance and how thick a bundle of wires you are willing to use, power to move all those bits could be an issue.
- jojobas 3y ago
  USB-C can do 40Gbps. That's more than enough for a bunch of screens and cameras.
  - vluft 3y ago
    40Gbps is not enough to run the screen for one eye at the resolution/framerate/HDR it's running at. You'd have to chop the bpc to 8 or the refresh rate to about 80hz. And then you'd still need another one for the other eye, and a third one for the cameras.

modeless 3y ago

This is my main complaint with the design. Comfort is king for things you wear on your face, and a lot of the design decisions compromise comfort. If I was designing v2 I would delete the external facing display and glass cover, move all processing to the battery, and ship a rigid strap. None of the arguments against putting the processor in the battery make any sense. It adds latency? No it doesn't, if designed correctly, and I guarantee you can fit the correct design in the budget for $3500. You can't cool it from inside a pocket? The wire is sticking out already, you could add a short air intake to it. It would be too big? I guarantee that size is easier to carry in the battery than on your literal face! The only thing that makes sense to me is the battery was supposed to be internal and the external battery was a last minute compromise for comfort. Unfortunately I suspect that Apple will go the direction of moving the battery back in for v2 rather than moving processing out.

snom380 3y ago
There’s 12 cameras and 3 screens to drive, how many lanes would you need for that through the cable? How chunky would the cable be after adding necessary shielding?
- throwfaraway398 3y ago
  optical fiber ? it may cost a bit more than copper for the transceivers (is that still true nowadays?) but given the price of the hardware i doubt it's really an issue.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Until the cable gets crimped while someone's doing VR and the display goes to shit.
    - modeless 3y ago
      Meta already did it and it works great

michaelt 3y ago

The cable needs to withstand a lot of flexing and rough handling. Much easier to make it durable when it doesn't need to transmit 10 gigabits of data.

snitty 3y ago

You can also power it with a standard wall adapter. So, then you'd need to plug the wall thing into the battery, and the battery into the headset?

Someone 3y ago

Would fans would work well on an external unit if that unit is in your pocket, or even if it clipped to your belt, possibly with a shirt hanging over it?