Apple's mixed reality headset reviewed

I watched that gif 40 times and I want to recreate everything he did on a normal monitor with a normal operating system and I bet I could.

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This is true (well, the optics erect an image of the displays at a fixed focal distance of a couple meters), so you certainly don’t need more than one prescription.

But this is one of my bugbears about the idea that stereo displays are “3D”. In real life, you experience space through focusing and depth of field, which responds to your pupils and lenses; that doesn’t happen with current headsets at all. I doubt it’s good for your eyes, and it certainly makes close-up objects look wrong.

(Which is another reason they’re right to make this thing all about UI in the 1–5m range, and not pretend it can just simulate any old environment)

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How many reps of lifting the normal monitor do you think you’ll need to match the gorilla arms he’s building up with that futuristic UI?

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My understanding is that it’s actively bad for them. Not least, Virtual headsets and 3D tvs, over time, actively train your brain to break the connection between focal length and perceived distance, and damage your ability to visually experience depth in real life in the usual way.

That is, typically depth perception is done with a combination of convergence, eye-parallax, motion-parallax, and focal length: your eyes cross more as something gets closer, the difference between the images in each eye increases as it gets closer, your head moves a little as well, so your brain takes account of the change in view as you move even slightly, and your eyes have to focus closer. 3D imagery works on the first two, but can’t do anything about focal length on a flat screen, and it’s a really sophisticated system that can include really small movements of the head.

(I do not seem to experience the visual sensation of depth in the usual way either, but at least it wasn’t 3D TVs or too much Magic Eye in the '90s that did it. Indeed, I have never seen the sailboat, not once.)

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Sounds like a problem that can be solved by ocular electrodes stimulating the ciliary muscle to enhance the realism of virtual objects at multiple distances.

Don’t worry; with magsafe™ technology there’s a significantly lower chance that sudden removal of the headset will forcibly remove the electrodes!

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What’s the story (by William Gibson, I think) where the protagonist (I don’t think it was Hiro Protagonist) uses his second-hand porn VR to make his tiny cubbyhole of a room feel more spacious? :thinking::older_man:

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VR setups that didn’t accommodate depth perception through head bobbing would really suck for some of our animal friends.

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That didn’t take long

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It did occur to me that if you were, say, lying on a bed with your hands around waist level while consuming media on your Vision Pro, then, by design, the downward-pointing cameras would be able to see your hands even when you were looking straight ahead.

So the (mostly baseless) fear of someone accessing your cameras could be more urgent with this device than with regular computers that can only see your face.

I wonder how much Apple have thought about that, or if they’re so high on their own puritanical supply that they don’t even realise what its killer app might be.

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I suspect that you don’t have Mr. Protagonist in mind. He does use his computer in his shared storage unit; and there’s one scene where the eroticism of its optics is described; but Hiro’s interest is in the hardware; and I don’t think he ever actually uses a computer to view porn, though that is mentioned as a thing people can do, in the course of the book:

“The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished
glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,
this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the
computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic.”

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there may be an implied scene about case in the capsule hotel in necromancer. it’s been a minute tho

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I think it was explicitly mentioned that the character had got the VR programme from his older brother. Having said that, my memory is more limited than Johnny Mnemonic. :yawning_face::older_man:

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Aaah, shit, I can’t remember. Sure it’s one of his earlier books tho. Count Zero?

An interesting not traditional review:

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And iFixit has done a teardown:

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Im quite surprised apple uses simple and “cheap” only vertical lenticular sheets for the frontfacing 3d screen and not a hexagonal lens array;

I mean, I made this full-spatial 3d “hologram” 12 years ago with a selfmade hexagonal lens array out of epoxy and 1 mm steel-balls for the casting mold. Im sure this would work with a high-res oled and would look much more “natural” (as “natural” as you can get with something like this) as their current solution;

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They also could have gone with those lenses from novelty hologram glasses that they used to sell at Spencer’s Gifts in the mall like 25 years ago. :wink:
s-l1200

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