Face-wearables - will any survive or thrive (Rift / Glass / HoloLens / Vive / Apple Vision etc)?

Exordium01 said:

I'd be more worried about it being a worse device with fewer use cases, but then again, I'm not really all that bullish on VR in the short term and think the market would be better served by continuing to push the boundaries in a less cost sensitive manner. Once there's a real killer application, they can figure out what corners to cut.

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A cheaper device could have more use cases, in that it could have more adoption, allowing for use cases that require a larger installed base to make practical, for example, online games, or Apple-exclusive social VR apps. It could also be lighter, by cutting premium materials, or even pancake lenses, which would add physical bulk, but weigh less.

There is no single killer app that would cause this thing to suddenly find PMF - it needs to be a series of things, and for that to occur, I think there needs to be broader adoption across more (frankly) income brackets.

Horatio said:

A cheaper device could have more use cases, in that it could have more adoption, allowing for use cases that require a larger installed base to make practical, for example, online games, or Apple-exclusive social VR apps. It could also be lighter, by cutting premium materials, or even pancake lenses, which would add physical bulk, but weigh less.

There is no single killer app that would cause this thing to suddenly find PMF - it needs to be a series of things, and for that to occur, I think there needs to be broader adoption across more (frankly) income brackets.

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The meta quest is basically free and that hasn’t seemed to help it get past the problem of being a piece of junk.

Happysin said:

Seems to me that Apply Vision Pro + 24 months = Apple Vision Air + Price Cut.

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'Air' implies some kind of feature reduction to justify the cost difference and/or a more svelte product. EyeSight has to add significant cost to the hardware. an AVP with a flat front panel and optional pair of googly eyes would absolutely cut BoM costs for minimal loss.

I think Apple envisions an environment where you'll be wearing AVP in a situation where you're interacting with others physically or virtually, and in reality most usage modalities remain relatively solitary.

Exordium01 said:

The meta quest is basically free and that hasn’t seemed to help it get past the problem of being a piece of junk.

Click to expand...

Horatio said:

A cheaper device could have more use cases, in that it could have more adoption, allowing for use cases that require a larger installed base to make practical, for example, online games, or Apple-exclusive social VR apps.

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It's not really about the specifications for any kind of multi-user 'thing'.

If Apple envisions more things like multi-user virtual meetings/telepresence or VR games then only part of the resistance is that it costs a small fortune to ensure every participant has a compatible headset (or a smaller fortune for something like a Meta Quest.)

There's still the realities that some people absolutely do not want the product, hurting its value proposition. The same is true for Meta, even if the Quest products are in your budget.

Some people think the whole concept is stupid.
Some people have problems with motion sickness or claustrophobia (even on current devices)
Some people have physical limitations that make using hardware like that difficult or impossible
Some people will just flatly reject an Apple product no matter what, just because it's from Apple and tied into the Apple ecosystem, just as others will reject a Meta product, for basically the same reason. They don't want to be tangled up in a given ecosystem if they don't have to be.

Ultimately any killer app will need to be mostly solitary and / or useful with only a small number of people. If there is something like that on the horizon, I don't see it yet. Video games are as close as we get and they're clearly not absolutely must haves for large segments of the population, including gamers who happily consume content on other gaming platforms.

If enough small scale use cases put together combined with a much cheaper price might drive adoption and wider adoption might drive larger scale applications, but it's going to take some effort to go from A to B to C. Even corporations who might have enough $$$ to care about AVP are daunted by how business-unfriendly the process is (personal fitting in stores if nothing else, but fleet management for AVP is still not all the way there yet.)

Nevarre said:

'Air' implies some kind of feature reduction to justify the cost difference and/or a more svelte product. EyeSight has to add significant cost to the hardware. an AVP with a flat front panel and optional pair of googly eyes would absolutely cut BoM costs for minimal loss.

I think Apple envisions an environment where you'll be wearing AVP in a situation where you're interacting with others physically or virtually, and in reality most usage modalities remain relatively solitary.

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It does, and you might be right, I was just making a joke about the general progress of hardware and how it might play out on Apple's cheaper Vision timeline.

Happysin said:

It does, and you might be right, I was just making a joke about the general progress of hardware and how it might play out on Apple's cheaper Vision timeline.

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I mean... you may not be fundamentally wrong. A "cheaper" model may be virtually the same as the existing model with as many price cuts as they think they can get away with. It may not need to be fundamentally a different product, but it might be.

Here I am 18 months ago, before the Vision Pro announcement, commenting on pricing rumors:

ZnU said:

We still haven't seen a fully-baked XR interaction model from anyone, with the right input/output modalities and coherent, comprehensive UI and associated APIs designed around those. This, more than anything, is what I'm hoping to see in Apple's announcement. In this context, the high price of their rumored device is a good sign, because it suggests they're just going to bite the bullet and stuff in all the sensors/display/compute this plausibly requires.

Interaction models define platforms and, really, entire eras of computing. Everyone else in this space been doing the approximate equivalent of shipping the first Mac without a bitmap display and a mouse, or shipping the first iPhone without capacitative multitouch. Pointless.

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Vision Pro is $3500 because that's what it took to deliver what Apple considered to be the defining capabilities of an XR platform using 2024 tech. Not because Apple believed they were most likely to achieve market fit with a product in the 16" MacBook Pro's price class.

In light of this, there's no reason for Apple to keep offering an HMD at the $3500 price point even as it becomes possible to deliver the necessary capabilities at lower cost. To such an extent that I wonder if the rumors haven't been misinterpreted all along. Perhaps the two devices Apple has been working on weren't non-Pro and Pro products per se, but a greenfield design for a cheaper/slimmer product, and a more straightforward update of the existing product to be used as a fallback if that didn't work out. And now Apple has decided the fallback isn't necessary, due to some combination of growing confidence in the cheaper product and more willingness to risk a long update gap given that the HMD market doesn't look ready to tip yet.

I think it's more likely that Apple has solved the issue it was having with waveguides about a year ago, and has a path forward on true AR glasses now, and can pivot a team to that, rather than working on a high-end VR headset, which is (IMO) an evolutionary dead end.

ZnU said:

Here I am 18 months ago, before the Vision Pro announcement, commenting on pricing rumors:



Vision Pro is $3500 because that's what it took to deliver what Apple considered to be the defining capabilities of an XR platform using 2024 tech. Not because Apple believed they were most likely to achieve market fit with a product in the 16" MacBook Pro's price class.

In light of this, there's no reason for Apple to keep offering an HMD at the $3500 price point even as it becomes possible to deliver the necessary capabilities at lower cost. To such an extent that I wonder if the rumors haven't been misinterpreted all along. Perhaps the two devices Apple has been working on weren't non-Pro and Pro products per se, but a greenfield design for a cheaper/slimmer product, and a more straightforward update of the existing product to be used as a fallback if that didn't work out. And now Apple has decided the fallback isn't necessary, due to some combination of growing confidence in the cheaper product and more willingness to risk a long update gap given that the HMD market doesn't look ready to tip yet.

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Apple's not really big on throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. The Newton is the classic example everyone can point to, and maybe that is the best parallel for the AVP-- a product that did too little, cost too much, and while "cool" was just not something people had use cases for at the time. As technology matured, you got the Palm Pilot and then later the iPhone, but I think that failure of launching a product too early into an unreceptive market still haunts Apple.

I don't think they would have released the AVP as a stop-gap product where they pull out all the stops to make VR emulate AR only to shrug and just go sell AR headsets or some other fundamentally different hardware a few years later. They don't need to keep the 'hype train' alive or need to just sell something to keep money flowing in until the real product launches. They spent a decade working on a car, but cut their losses there rather than put out a product that had poor fit for the market.

Nevarre said:

Apple's not really big on throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

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They hardly picked this category at random. XR headsets are on the very short list of developments that could plausibly disrupt the smartphone market.

Nevarre said:

The Newton is the classic example everyone can point to, and maybe that is the best parallel for the AVP-- a product that did too little, cost too much, and while "cool" was just not something people had use cases for at the time. As technology matured, you got the Palm Pilot and then later the iPhone, but I think that failure of launching a product too early into an unreceptive market still haunts Apple.

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The Newton was the wrong type of thing; Vision Pro, I'm arguing, is merely a clunky, expensive version of the right kind of thing. Less Newton, more Macintosh Portable. Hopefully with the PowerBook 100 around the corner.

Nevarre said:

I don't think they would have released the AVP as a stop-gap product where they pull out all the stops to make VR emulate AR only to shrug and just go sell AR headsets or some other fundamentally different hardware a few years later.

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Conceptually, visionOS is an AR-first platform. So the VR-emulating-AR thing almost certainly is a stopgap. It's just a question of how large the gap is. If it turns out it's only a year or two, well, perhaps Apple wouldn't have bothered if they'd know in advance that a) it would be that short, and b) the HMD market wouldn't take off during that year or two. But could they have known those things probably 2-3 years ago when they'd have been making a decision about whether to proceed to market with the first Vision Pro?

Apple is taking ~$100B/year in profit out of markets that could conceivably be disrupted by XR. They really can't afford to let anyone steal a base on them. Burning a few billion on being "too early" is cheap insurance.

Nevarre said:

They don't need to keep the 'hype train' alive or need to just sell something to keep money flowing in until the real product launches. They spent a decade working on a car, but cut their losses there rather than put out a product that had poor fit for the market.

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A car isn't a platform; visionOS is. Platforms live or die on their ecosystems. This means two things. First, that developers and content creators are going to need some time — especially with a platform fundamentally different from what came before — to figure out how to add value. Second, that early-mover advantages can snowball, with network effects making it impossible to break in if you're late to the game. You're in much better shape with respect to both of these if you've actually got a product on the market.

I'm of the opinion that there are two distinct markets for HMDs, neither of which Apple is really interested in targeting. The first is gaming which requires something in the <$1000 range to be successful long term. You also need the software obviously and to define unique experiences that make people want to use it rather than just a clunkier more nausea inducing alternative to a standard monitor / TV and kb+m / controller. One way to do this would be to "pull a Wii" so to speak and make a new console where the primary or only interface is a bundled HMD with good first party launch titles showing a truly unique experience. The only companies capable of pulling that off though are Nintendo, maybe Sony, probably not Microsoft, and definitely not Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, or anyone else.

The other is professional use for things like architects, interior designers, corporate training, etc. This market can support a larger hardware cost but from a user perspective the use case is the complete opposite of what Apple appears to have in mind. It needs to be completely sharable between users with a "good enough" fit for most people / face shapes and ideally multi-user and corporate LAN compatible, etc. Both Microsoft and Google have attempted to crack this nut though and it hasn't really been a market with a lot of current value. I don't see Apple settling for something so niche long term.

Apple tried to create a third category with the emphasis on simulated in person meetings and watching TV. I truly don't think that is a viable long term market and it will disappear after the wow factor completely wears off. I think it's a complete non-starter at $3500 but also won't be a real success at even $1000. If Apple is successful with a second, cheaper, iteration my guess is it will be due to gaming more than the usage they have in mind and Apple will be drug along kicking and screaming the whole time until they decide this was all just a hobby and unceremoniously end it.

I'm not convinced HMDs will ever be anything more than a niche market and I really don't see how it can disrupt mobile phones. Phones are ubiquitous because they are with you all the time, whether you are at home, at work, on a bus, standing in line, or walking down the street. For HMDs to supplant that they'd need to provide the same portability which means, "best case", people wearing them all the time while about in public. I think the public backlash will be sufficient to curtail that before it gets any traction. Well that and the tan lines in sunnier locations, while glorious, probably aren't going to be things people will accept as a tradeoff so they can always have netflix and email in front of their face.

lithven said:

For HMDs to supplant that they'd need to provide the same portability which means, "best case", people wearing them all the time while about in public. I think the public backlash will be sufficient to curtail that before it gets any traction.

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I think AR glasses can get there. I see Ray-Ban Metas being worn in public with no issue. If they could squeeze displays in there it would meet the social acceptably level that seems to be acceptable today.

Vergecast was talking about the Ray-Ban Metas.

They said Meta doesn't want glasses to be tied to phones, because they don't want to be reliant on someone else.

So where would they put the processing and battery for glasses if they want to add more powerful features?

lithven said:

Apple tried to create a third category with the emphasis on simulated in person meetings and watching TV. I truly don't think that is a viable long term market and it will disappear after the wow factor completely wears off. I think it's a complete non-starter at $3500 but also won't be a real success at even $1000.

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The current Vision Pro is effectively an iPad Pro, except you get an infinite volumetric display coextensive with real space. Make that comfortable and cheap enough, and I don't see why there isn't at least an iPad-sized market for it.

Communications/social, media consumption, and gaming are the main use cases for such a device, because they're the main use cases for consumer computing in general.

lithven said:

I'm not convinced HMDs will ever be anything more than a niche market and I really don't see how it can disrupt mobile phones. Phones are ubiquitous because they are with you all the time, whether you are at home, at work, on a bus, standing in line, or walking down the street. For HMDs to supplant that they'd need to provide the same portability which means, "best case", people wearing them all the time while about in public. I think the public backlash will be sufficient to curtail that before it gets any traction.

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Unseating the iPhone may require something not much more intrusive than a regular pair of eyeglasses. That won't happen soon, but it will happen eventually.

I don't think "public backlash" is an important factor in a model of consumer adoption. The notion that it is, and that this is relevant to HMDs in particular, seems to come from a few months of bad press for Google Glass, a mostly-useless decade-old product. Meanwhile we see regular principled objections to TV, cars, social media, smartphones, etc. failing to meaningfully damage those things in the market.

wco81 said:

Vergecast was talking about the Ray-Ban Metas.

They said Meta doesn't want glasses to be tied to phones, because they don't want to be reliant on someone else.

So where would they put the processing and battery for glasses if they want to add more powerful features?

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Huh, I didn't know that. My guess in that case would be cloud over 5G and wifi with reasonable on device compute. Other possibility would be a companion device. They've shown off a lot of wrist EMG tech, so why not build compute into that? Or do both.

Re: public backlash

See the ubiquity of AirPods and how quickly we all kind of just adapted to that. I personally think it's polite to pull mine out when I interact with someone rather than just pausing the podcast I'm inevitably playing, but I think I'm on the upper end of politeness so I don't expect everyone to follow that pattern.

ZnU said:

The current Vision Pro is effectively an iPad Pro, except you get an infinite volumetric display coextensive with real space. Make that comfortable and cheap enough, and I don't see why there isn't at least an iPad-sized market for it.

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Headsets are much higher friction than tablets. I'll just idly pick up and play with my iPad, but using my headset is an intentional decision. I think that will limit the market size.

ant1pathy said:

Re: public backlash

See the ubiquity of AirPods and how quickly we all kind of just adapted to that. I personally think it's polite to pull mine out when I interact with someone rather than just pausing the podcast I'm inevitably playing, but I think I'm on the upper end of politeness so I don't expect everyone to follow that pattern.

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They also speculated that cameras for AirPods would be the next logical thing, so that AirPods would do more. Again, you have to wonder where the processing power would come from. Are they going to stream greater amount of data through bluetooth?

Horatio said:

Headsets are much higher friction than tablets. I'll just idly pick up and play with my iPad, but using my headset is an intentional decision. I think that will limit the market size.

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Yep. Thats by far the biggest issue with headsets, they aren't "pickup and play".

lithven said:

I'm of the opinion that there are two distinct markets for HMDs, neither of which Apple is really interested in targeting. The first is gaming which requires something in the <$1000 range to be successful long term.

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I think you are half right. You are thinking about personal gaming, but I think VR has its best chance in arcade gaming. Businesses are more likely to spend more for them, and people are more likely to want to try the experience than to own one. VR is really just an experience. Its fun, but not something you'd want to do all the time.

wco81 said:

They also speculated that cameras for AirPods would be the next logical thing, so that AirPods would do more. Again, you have to wonder where the processing power would come from. Are they going to stream greater amount of data through bluetooth?

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I am extremely skeptical of such a thing. Size, weight, orientation, processing power. A lot of limitations. Heck, I'd think the Watch would be a more viable "add a camera" item than the AirPods, and a Watch camera is also a dumb idea.

Horatio said:

Headsets are much higher friction than tablets. I'll just idly pick up and play with my iPad, but using my headset is an intentional decision. I think that will limit the market size.

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The obvious answer there (and one the AVP clearly points at, but can't achieve yet) is that the headset is a relatively permanent part of your day, so even the friction of "pick up" goes away. There's a lot of work between here and there, but AVP is probably one of the clearest statements of where the tech is currently on that vision of the future.

Horatio said:

Headsets are much higher friction than tablets. I'll just idly pick up and play with my iPad, but using my headset is an intentional decision. I think that will limit the market size.

Click to expand...

True right now, sure. But consider that a PCVR headset requires launching an app on your computer, getting a controller into each hand without being able to see the real world, moving to your play area. Then of course the headset needs to be taken off and put back on to perform even the most trivial real-world task. Compared with that, 80% of the friction is already gone with Vision Pro. Something about as easy to put on or take off as a regular pair of glasses, with passthrough good enough that you didn't mind casually leaving it on, would get rid of most of the rest. At some point things will tip to the HMD over the iPad, because an HMD leaves your hands free.

ZnU said:

True right now, sure. But consider that a PCVR headset requires launching an app on your computer, getting a controller into each hand without being able to see the real world, moving to your play area. Then of course the headset needs to be taken off and put back on to perform even the most trivial real-world task. Compared with that, 80% of the friction is already gone with Vision Pro. Something about as easy to put on or take off as a regular pair of glasses, with passthrough good enough that you didn't mind casually leaving it on, would get rid of most of the rest. At some point things will tip to the HMD over the iPad, because an HMD leaves your hands free.

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I'm not thinking PCVR levels of friction but even the lowest level of VR friction which is a modded Q3 or AVP with an open periphery FI and a halo strap, which are both about 1 second from table to VR. That's still enough extra friction over an iPad to move it into what I term an intentional use device vs an incidental use device where you can just use it on a whim.

Happysin said:

The obvious answer there (and one the AVP clearly points at, but can't achieve yet) is that the headset is a relatively permanent part of your day, so even the friction of "pick up" goes away. There's a lot of work between here and there, but AVP is probably one of the clearest statements of where the tech is currently on that vision of the future.

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Yeah, glasses solve this, but I think we're pretty far away from true all day wear AR glasses (50g weight limit). Once we do get there though, that's really low friction even compared to your phone.

Bloomberg has an article on some of the tradeoffs Apple is considering for the lower cost VR headset. Except for removing EyeSight, they're really bad.


The worst one is lowering the already meh FOV, but the others, taken together turn it into a worse Q3 with eye tracking.

Apparently I totally overlooked the possible tradeoff that the cheaper headset would be a PCVR (off device rendered) device. That would be the worst tradeoff.

Horatio said:

Apparently I totally overlooked the possible tradeoff that the cheaper headset would be a PCVR (off device rendered) device. That would be the worst tradeoff.

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Why? A wire to an iPhone would be no worse than the wire to the external battery on the current model.

A wire to a stationary Mac would be bad, but I think there's almost no chance they'd go that route; if they're offloading to a Mac it'll be wireless, and will use WiFi Direct or some proprietary thing to eliminate the user's local network as a potential bottleneck (a common issue for wireless PCVR). With Apple controlling both ends of the connection, there wouldn't be any of the friction usually involved with setting up a PCVR session; no reason you'd have to even touch the Mac to get a session going.

Ideally, they'd support both. It would be amazing if the headset could be driven by an iPhone on the go, and a Mac Studio at the office. The level of convergence between macOS and iOS would make it trivial for them to run the same apps. That's a capability nobody else could easily match; trying to duplicate that sort of handoff between random Android phones and Windows PCs would be a nightmare.

ZnU said:

Why? A wire to an iPhone would be no worse than the wire to the external battery on the current model.

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Well, the iPhone's battery is tiny compared to the size of the AVP's and it would have to do the compute, so battery life would be short... or you'd have a battery tether and phone tether. Best case, you'd have the same external battery, and the off-device compute (iPhone or Mac) would be wireless, which is reasonably plausible.

ZnU said:

A wire to a stationary Mac would be bad, but I think there's almost no chance they'd go that route; if they're offloading to a Mac it'll be wireless, and will use WiFi Direct or some proprietary thing to eliminate the user's local network as a potential bottleneck (a common issue for wireless PCVR). With Apple controlling both ends of the connection, there wouldn't be any of the friction usually involved with setting up a PCVR session; no reason you'd have to even touch the Mac to get a session going.

Ideally, they'd support both. It would be amazing if the headset could be driven by an iPhone on the go, and a Mac Studio at the office. The level of convergence between macOS and iOS would make it trivial for them to run the same apps. That's a capability nobody else could easily match; trying to duplicate that sort of handoff between random Android phones and Windows PCs would be a nightmare.

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Tethered VR has been dead for years now - that's not to say Apple can't bring it back, but the idea that the cheaper Apple VR device would require an external connection would be a pretty big step backwards from the AVP.

Horatio said:

Well, the iPhone's battery is tiny compared to the size of the AVP's and it would have to do the compute, so battery life would be short... or you'd have a battery tether and phone tether. Best case, you'd have the same external battery, and the off-device compute (iPhone or Mac) would be wireless, which is reasonably plausible.

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MagSafe lets you just slap a battery pack on the back of the phone, no additional cable required.

Horatio said:

Tethered VR has been dead for years now - that's not to say Apple can't bring it back, but the idea that the cheaper Apple VR device would require an external connection would be a pretty big step backwards from the AVP.

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Only working with a Mac would be a meaningful limitation, since many potential customers won't own one, whereas the set of people who'd plausibly buy an Apple headset in the next five years is almost completely contained within the set of people who use iPhones.

But being able to function untethered and/or with an iPhone, with the option to host the same environment on a Mac for more power, would be all upside. Nobody is fitting a Mac Studio worth of compute in a headset anytime soon. And it's interesting that a Mac Studio is so small; you could pack one in carry-on luggage and have workstation-class spatial computing in your hotel room.

Horatio said:

I think it's more likely that Apple has solved the issue it was having with waveguides about a year ago, and has a path forward on true AR glasses now, and can pivot a team to that, rather than working on a high-end VR headset, which is (IMO) an evolutionary dead end.

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An interesting thought but 100% of the rumors are saying “cheap version of AVP”. Or are you suggesting that there was two teams - VR-based pass-through AVP2 and cheap AV - and now there’s two different teams - waveguide-based AVP2 and cheap pass-through AV?

The rule of thumb I remember is that Wifi 7's spec is the only wireless bandwidth fast enough for high resolution wireless VR. Rumors were that Steam has been holding back the Index sequel for Wifi 7 to become standard. Who knows if that's accurate now, but they did have a patent filing about it.

So if Apple really does want to go that way, we're also looking at no current iPhone or Mac supporting the speeds that would be needed for Wifi. I don't see this as a show-stopper, but it does mean that if Apple releases the "Apple Vision Air" that needs something to offload to, it would basically be releasing the iPhone that can do so beside it.

ZnU said:

True right now, sure. But consider that a PCVR headset requires launching an app on your computer, getting a controller into each hand without being able to see the real world, moving to your play area. Then of course the headset needs to be taken off and put back on to perform even the most trivial real-world task. Compared with that, 80% of the friction is already gone with Vision Pro. Something about as easy to put on or take off as a regular pair of glasses, with passthrough good enough that you didn't mind casually leaving it on, would get rid of most of the rest. At some point things will tip to the HMD over the iPad, because an HMD leaves your hands free.

Click to expand...

What kind of time frame are you talking about?

I can definitely see AR being huge when it gets down to just a pair of glasses. Something like the Ray-Bans. Has to work with prescription lenses. A lot has to happen for it to work well and really take off though. I think we are looking at 10 years probably at least.

Echohead2 said:

I can definitely see AR being huge when it gets down to just a pair of glasses. Something like the Ray-Bans. Has to work with prescription lenses. A lot has to happen for it to work well and really take off though. I think we are looking at 10 years probably at least.

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I’d imagine the prescription glasses part will be hard when the display is being reflected off the surface not transmitted through. The correction would need to be software side.

Though I’d argue that AR is already here with things like audio passthrough and selective amplification with noise canceling on the headphones. The car wasn’t an insane fit for Apple because ADAS is AR.

wrylachlan said:

An interesting thought but 100% of the rumors are saying “cheap version of AVP”. Or are you suggesting that there was two teams - VR-based pass-through AVP2 and cheap AV - and now there’s two different teams - waveguide-based AVP2 and cheap pass-through AV?

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I'm quite certain that Apple is working on true AR glasses, so there is a team working on that. They may have peeled some people off to ramp that up. There is no waveguide based AVP2. It's waveguides for glasses, and traditional optics for VR.

Happysin said:

The rule of thumb I remember is that Wifi 7's spec is the only wireless bandwidth fast enough for high resolution wireless VR. Rumors were that Steam has been holding back the Index sequel for Wifi 7 to become standard. Who knows if that's accurate now, but they did have a patent filing about it.

Click to expand...

Wifi 6 is good enough for VR, even less if you have foveated rendering and good ways to hide latency.

Horatio said:

I'm quite certain that Apple is working on true AR glasses, so there is a team working on that. They may have peeled some people off to ramp that up. There is no waveguide based AVP2. It's waveguides for glasses, and traditional optics for VR.

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What I was getting at was that if the waveguide technology is getting closer to prime time that the thing that Apple calls AVP2 might be the waveguide device. I wasn’t positing a frankenstein’s monster of the current pass through and waveguide.

wrylachlan said:

What I was getting at was that if the waveguide technology is getting closer to prime time that the thing that Apple calls AVP2 might be the waveguide device. I wasn’t positing a frankenstein’s monster of the current pass through and waveguide.

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Ah. Makes sense. I think it'll get it's own name, but probably within the Apple Vision umbrella

poochyena said:

I think you are half right. You are thinking about personal gaming, but I think VR has its best chance in arcade gaming. Businesses are more likely to spend more for them, and people are more likely to want to try the experience than to own one. VR is really just an experience. Its fun, but not something you'd want to do all the time.

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I kind of doubt this for a number of reasons. First, VR arcade experiences have been a thing since the 80s. They were expensive novelties then, and they're the same now, regardless of increases in fidelity. Second, arcades are, by their very nature, pretty gross. People put up with that when it's things they're generally used to getting dirty, like their hands or shoes. It's a different matter entirely when it's your face. Unless the headset gets stuck in something like a CPAP sterilizer for half an hour between each session, I don't think you're going to have a lot of takers. Third, arcades are, by and large, an industry on life support. Outside of barcades like Dave & Busters (which already has some VR experiences), or smaller versions of the same (bars with some classic cabinets/pinball/etc), they're basically extinct. That's not a target market where a nascent technology can flourish.

Exordium01 said:

I’d imagine the prescription glasses part will be hard when the display is being reflected off the surface not transmitted through. The correction would need to be software side.

Though I’d argue that AR is already here with things like audio passthrough and selective amplification with noise canceling on the headphones. The car wasn’t an insane fit for Apple because ADAS is AR.

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Fair point about the headphones...you are technically correct.

I've tried VR a few times...a big fat "meh".