[the_watcher]

It would very obviously be useful for work if you can actually get high res, effectively unlimited monitor space. Maybe not for everyone, but people already spend $3500+ on monitor setups somewhat regularly (and employers definitely do this). Apple themselves sell a single monitor that costs $2300 when fully spec'd out (5k, but the point is that they know what people spend on monitors). I can't figure out why that wasn't the highlight of the demo, since that's just very clearly the easiest way to sell a $3500 device with this specific set of features.

The recording video of a kid's birthday was one of the most ridiculous thing's I've ever seen. I'd maybe record my kid with something like this every once in a while, but I certainly wouldn't be wearing ski goggles while he blows out candles.

[coryfklein]

This "unlimited monitor space" is a complete non-selling point for me.

Being a wealthy software engineer, my monitor space is not bottlenecked by my budget or desk space, but by my literal neck. Constantly rotating my head back and forth from one monitor to another is, quite literally, a pain.

For me the sweet spot is a single curved monitor right in front of me. If I need more "desktop space" I add another Space with Mission Control. And with keyboard shortcuts I can move between Spaces nearly as fast as I can rotate my head around.

So what am I going to do with a VR headset if I ever got one? Put the active app straight in front of me just like I do with my normal monitor. I'm not going to put my terminal at some odd angle 25° above my head and crane my head back when I want to run a command in it. I won't put the Weather app 90° to my right, obscuring what is currently a nice picture window looking out on my yard.

For me, VR needs that "killer app" to justify the high pricing and inconvenience of use, and I just don't see one yet. I don't expect one any time soon either; if VR was going to get a killer app, it would have shown up by now.

[derefr]

You sound like someone who has a very stable and spacious office. Have you considered that "having more desk space than there is space in the room" is the killer app for many (wealthy!) people who either 1. travel a lot, or 2. live in countries like Hong Kong where space is at a premium?

[qup]

Not only swiveling your head around, but doing it with a couple pounds strapped to it. People's necks are going to be swole.

That being said, I've always wanted a wearable monitor so I can lay in bed (or stand, or lay in my hammock, or just have some variety). The chair is bad, and I've spent way too many years (literally) in it. I need options.

I'm a terminal nerd, though, so I don't care too much about all the 4k etc.

[zmmmmm]

Aren't you a case in point then?

> the sweet spot is a single curved monitor right in front of me

So you can have that. Exactly the right monitor size, curvature, location - in every room of the house, on the train, at work, in the cafe etc. People with ergonomic challenges are, I would have thought, a perfect market for this.

[dumbfounder]

No one will create the killer app because they won't have enough people to buy it. They aren't going to sell 100 million of these things. They will sell 1 million to prosumers. But you can't make a killer high-end game on a completely new system with completely new features with such a limited market, they would need to sell it everyone to make money. That's the real problem with AR/VR. You need critical mass in the number of users to justify people building mass-market appeal games and apps. The goggles need to not have a cord, be 1/3 as heavy, and 1/4 the price, and then we will get mass adoption. My gut says we are 3 generations away. But it will happen.

[dclowd9901]

The killer app imo is AR instruction. That is:

- you’re looking at some kind of physical thing in the real world you’re “working on” (whatever it may be) - your goggles are pointing out important aspects, telling you what to do next, etc etc.

I always thought something like this for auto repair would be really cool. Of course we need the software to catch up in this regard, since it would have to recognize and overlay fairly complex visual spaces.

[_ea1k]

I just think you are thinking of the monitors in an overly literal way.

Imagine a calendar on the wall, but with your meetings and everything dynamic instead of just a static calendar. And it adjusts to show your next meeting extra large as it approaches. No you see useful information in your periphery.

Or perhaps you have application monitoring dashboards on another wall. You don't look at them all the time, but a dedicated space wouldn't be a bad thing.

I see a lot of potential here in the future.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Real estate costs more than this head set. I am a VR skeptic. But if someone truly solves the problems, a virtual desktop has obvious advantages even for the rich. I could literally clear out one room and shrink the remaining desk to fit a closed laptop, keyboard and coffee mug. And now my entire workstation is portable and exactly the way I want it where ever I go.

[samstave]

When I worked at Intel in 1997 we bought one of the first 42" plasma screens on the market to put in our game lab - and I put it on my desk and attempted to play Quake and Descent and other games on it and I couldnt handle it so close to me - it had ghosting and bad lag and poor angular visibility and it was $14,999.00

We turned it into a wall piece that rarely got used.

in 2016 I got a monitor for one of my OPs guys that was 4k and was ~34" and that was still to big to sit in front of - and my OPs guy gave it to me, I hated it and gave it to an eng, and he loved it.

Big screens are for certain people. I have a 70" screen in the living room that I never turn on, my brother uses it exclusively, and I use a 15" laptop as my personal screen.

[thelittleone]

But its very handy if you're a wealthy nomadic software engineer. I don't want to take monitors with me and I'd like to travel more while working. I'd like to do that with my 12" Macbook air.

[86J8oyZv]

Also being a wealthy software engineer, there still isn’t a better multi-monitor mobile solution than this at any price point. If you’re only working from home sure, but I like to cowork with friends in a variety of places.

[veidr]

I use 4 monitors arranged on arms to form a shape roughly like a curved 15360x 4320 display.

I also don't see how VR will come close to replicating the productivity I have in my home office, on any foreseeable timeline.

But when I go somewhere and just use my laptop screen, it's almost laughable how inefficient and annoying it is. The screen is tiny, I am constantly switching apps / virtual desktops, and there is no way to even see my debugger, documentation, and my app running at the same time.

To me, that's what I want VR to fix. The portable workspace. For us spoiled rich engineers sitting in our spacious home offices, the constraints that make VR (theoretically) appealing just don't exist.

(I'm skeptical there are enough people who want this badly enough to pay $3500 for it to fund an entire product category, though... I expected them to come out talking about fitness and health.)

[abujazar]

The first question that pops into my head is why you’d work on a curved monitor (of which there still doesn’t exist a high resolution model) as a software engineer. Do you find the workspace on a single curved display sufficient?

My primary concern with the Apple headset is the relatively low resolution of 23M pixels. Our eyes can perceive so much more detail, and I’m afraid the low resolution will reintroduce pixellation as is commonly seen on low end and curved displays.

[mrinterweb]

Agreed about the non-selling point. I've only ever been able to get my eyes to focus on one thing at a time. So I prefer one monitor. CMD/Alt+tab works for me. If I need to have things side-by-side for some reason I use a window manager and some key combos to quickly rearrange windows. There are very few times that I wish I had another monitor.

[delecti]

Even beyond my neck, the limitation for me is my ability to keep track of the spatial location of that many things, and need to have them all displayed simultaneously. I've really just found the sweet spot to be two displays (with the cost sweet spot for me currently being 1440p, but I imagine 2x4k would be an improvement). Even a third monitor really doesn't improve my ability to do things, so I can't imagine "infinite" impressing either.

For me, the main appeal of VR is its potential for gaming, with a distant second place being more broadly "interacting with things in 3d" (such as 3d sculpting/modeling, or something like VR chat).

[Grieverheart]

This. I used to be a multi monitor type of person but when desktop switching became good (I first experienced this in Linux) I started using a single larger monitor and never looked back.

[rubicon33]

Turning your head causes you pain? You need to go to the gym, get in shape, or figure out what the hell is causing a natural motion to induce pain and discomfort.

[threeseed]

Most developers don't have mobility issues. They have 2 / 3 large monitors (or laptop + monitor).

And so in this case they have the ability to access them anywhere, anytime.

[cultofmetatron]

I'm a digital nomad. I miss having a spacious multimonitor setup. tried making it work with an occulus quest and immersed VR but the results were disappointing. If they can make it seamless and match the resolution so my eyes don't hurt after a minuite of actually reading code, Its going to be an immediate shutup and take my money moment.

[brookst]

Why wouldn't you use gestures to move the right monitor to be directly in front if you, maintaining some concept on what's on adjacent ones from UI hints?

Really the whole concept of "monitors" feels skeumorphic here. Shouldn't it just be a sphere where you're looking at a concave part with your current app, and can rotate as needed to pull other apps into view?

[mruniverse]

I can see it being nice if it's like Minority Report, where you can swipe small screens away, etc. Talk and it types. Glance to the left to see how the builds are going, etc. It could also be a nice virtual whiteboard. Usually it's hard to know how nice hardware can be without the apps. And you don't have to be in your office.

[FpUser]

>"Constantly rotating my head back and forth from one monitor to another is, quite literally, a pain."

60+yo fart here. Same problem as well. After dicking with 3 32" 4K monitor setup a good while ago I am now down to a single monitor. It is still 32" 4K at 100% scale and feels comfy enough.

[sspiff]

As someone who used to have a cheap-ish 3x27" monitor setup, I can confirm neck strain on big triple monitor setups is most definitely a thing. Imagine combining this with carrying the weight a pair of technogoggles like these,and I think it could get tiresome really quickly.

[hogu]

What if the mapping between your neck angle and screen angle wasn’t 1-1?

[specialist]

Perhaps someone will invent a way to virtually move around within a virtual space. Seems far fetched, I know. But we can still dream.

[choppaface]

You don’t need to turn your neck tho, you can turn the environment. And nothing goes off screen, just out of foveal focus.

[netman21]

It's called Beat Saber. :-)

[jamesrcole]

you, or someone in a situation like yours, might at times find it valuable to have like a giant whiteboard in front of you, that you can walk around in front of, and on which you could spatially arrange a bunch of details

[dustingetz]

putting it in 3D is also an opportunity to fix window management

[foobiekr]

Most VR goggles eventually cause pretty significant eyestrain due to vergence-accommodation conflict [1] and other issues all of which get significantly worse the closer to the user the virtual objects are.

Apple's display is, I guess, in best-of-class, but they have no special sauce at all on this, and no physical IPD adjustment at all, and so this device as previewed is basically only useful for media consumption and maybe something like a telepresence meeting, albeit not long duration. Without controllers it's unlikely to even work well for most games.

Basically this is the best of a huge crowd of not very good VR helmets with probably industry-leading AR camera-based passthrough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...

[MacsHeadroom]

The Vision Pro demo clearly showed physical IPD adjustment multiple times.

[baby]

You mean like screens already cause issues to our eyes?

[deergomoo]

> It would very obviously be useful for work if you can actually get high res

Is it even that high res for detailed monitor work? 4K per eye yes, but for your entire field of view. Does that meet Apple’s definition of a “retina display”?

I currently sit a few feet away from a 5K display, that’s way more pixels per degree of FoV.

Same goes for movie and TV watching. I sit maybe 8 feet away from a 4K 55” TV and I can absolutely tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. Surely the equivalent “projected” display on this thing is gonna be 1080 or lower?

Of course, as one of those 30% of people with myopia they referenced earlier in the video, I dread to think how much extra it would cost to be able to see anything at all through this thing.

[TimTheTinker]

Keep in mind that the display processor utilizes a foveated rendering pipeline, which appears to concentrate the highest resolution rendering where your eyes are focusing.

That doesn't speak to the overall resolution of the per-eye screens, however.

[automatic6131]

>4K per eye yes

I think what's missed here, in the absence of any better specs, is that they're saying "better than 4K per eye!" without mentioning that 4k refers to 3840x2160, and that it's the vertical dimension that they've exceeded. So > 2160x2160 per eye. Pretty good but not even close to good enough for a floating screen of text

[yowzadave]

The tech on this thing is so cool and so useless! People will buy them, try them out, and then a month later realize they didn't actually use it at all and return them to the store.

[keymon-o]

Most people buy products because they are usable, not useful. There is crazy amount of tech available today, and people strive to own most of them. The decision to purchase is usually based on wheter we can afford it and wether we will find some use for it.

The mere fact that goggles will enable users to communicate and consume media just as they can with devices they already own, will be the key argument to purchase this expensive headset.

But this incremental improvement we get after purchase of each-time-more-polished device finacnces future inventions and innovations, and then after some number iteration we get something that is truly useful. At least that's the trend I noticed regarding every tech breakthrough and hype in this century.

[bredren]

I am OP on the XDR Pro Display owner’s thread over in the Macrumors Forums.

Last week I asked XDR owners about their thoughts for possibly replacing their high end XDR monitor(s) with virtual displays in the Apple Vision Pro (I called it Apple Reality)

The question and replies cover some of the considerations around this replacement and there are ongoing replies now that some of the specs are known:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pro-display-xdr-owners-...

[bufferoverflow]

> but people already spend $3500+ on monitor setups somewhat regularly

I don't know a single person who has such an expensive monitor (or a set of monitors). And none of my employers, current or past, would ever agree to spend that much on a monitor setup.

You can buy a 4K OLED monitor for a fraction of that.

[alexalx666]

Pro Display XDR costs around 7000 euros in Germany

[jen729w]

2007: ‘There’s no way I’d watch my kid’s entire school play through a 4” screen just so that I could get a recording of it.’

2023: ‘I certainly wouldn't be wearing ski goggles while he blows out candles.’

We — perhaps not you, but humans — have shown a remarkable preference for watching the live event through a tiny screen so that we can have a recording of it for later.

[ric2b]

When I record something that I also want live I don't watch it through the screen, I just glance at the screen occasionally to make sure it's still pointed correctly.

[sizzle]

Yeah the kids playing scene felt like a clip from Black Mirror. I would never want to relive memories like that when I can just go hug my kid, and if they weren’t alive it would destroy my mental health to see them in that high fidelity without being able to hug them.

What a strange demo.

[cjbprime]

It felt like strong "I am recently divorced, and also a parent of young children" vibes throughout. There was the value comparison to a large TV and surround sound system, which is only valid if both your home theater and AR device have the same audience size (to divide the cost by) of one person.

[sooheon]

The vast majority of families are multi-city, and many are multinational. I don't see anything wrong with trying to improve on FaceTime, since millions of people already use that every day.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

The catch is, they might have an impressive display of unlimited size, but it is still likely to be tied to locked down iOS (or whatever they call it on Vision devices), so the selection of productivity apps and their capabilities will probably be very limited.

[mihaaly]

Except when they find a way mirroring the Mac's desktop in this environment on a nice way. Straight up 'external display' mode (more like external 3D space), but with less constraints on how to position the windows and the taskbar ... and consequently more trouble on navigating among those. Desktop icons might be a burden too, also wonder what to do with fullscreen mode.

Anyway, if one app was used on its OS for mirroring the Mac environment on a nice way, that could be enough for me.

[ramblenode]

> It would very obviously be useful for work if you can actually get high res, effectively unlimited monitor space.

Very big "if".

I already notice visual artifacting in REPLs on 1080p displays at 60FPS. That's nothing compared to the aliasing issues facing stereoscopic virtual displays. I can't imagine wanting to do hours of focused work staring at objects in an aliased virtual world.

Could still be a useful for travel.

[crossroadsguy]

I am not a fan of even the look of this thing but I am not sure why people are just talking about room and work. I think people will just buy it and watch films when lying down on their beds or sideways, when on the commode, or when commuting on a bus seat (assuming power delivery is sorted - and yeah if everything needed for it is portable enough).

[rchaud]

They'll do it on a $400 tablet, not something that costs 2 months' rent.

[dwhitney]

Yeah that was silly, but aren't all of the new iPhone cameras 3D cameras? People take photos/videos all of the time. Now you can immerse yourself in them. I think it's pretty cool

[bredren]

Presumably the current and next iPhone Pros can capture 3D video.

I don’t know why this wouldn’t have been ridiculous, because it really is ridiculous to suggest this would be worn by a parent during a young child’s happy birthday singing and blowing out the candles.

This idea seemed like way too much of a stretch for this intro. They had to know this, so I am very curious what the reasoning was for why they included it.

[ray__]

Yes, I agree with this. I'll only be buying one of these if it means I can replace my work displays with it–I'd happily pay the exorbitant price if it meant being able to have the equivalent of an unlimited high-res display anywhere, at any time. The lack of sub-pixel rendering on macOS means that I'm already forced to buy an expensive 5K display for every place that I plan to do work; a headset like this is a bargain in comparison. Obviously this means that the headset will have to be comfortable enough to use for long periods of time and have high enough resolution to compete with a hiDPI display. I doubt that this device will be able to deliver on both of those fronts.

[bigthymer]

I can see how that would be a popular application. I imagine a software engineer that was forcefully returned back to the office would love the ability to have unlimited computer screens hidden from the prying eyes of busybodies around the office.

[agumonkey]

I feel the same, like glass, it has some real work (or peculiar situations) value, where augmenting the information at hand for important tasks would be a massive leverage. Electrical work, repair, medicine..

[eterevsky]

That would be a valid use case, but it's hard to imagine that this headset is miles ahead of all existing ones in resolution and clarity. In all present-day headset even simple tasks involving text are a challenge. They just can't legibly render more than ~10 lines of text in your field of view. To compete with monitors for day-to-day tasks, the perceived resolution has to improve by an order of magnitude.

[antigirl]

4k monitor at 27 inches costs less than 400 dollars. Unless its 10 bit with 1ms response time for gaming. Who is spending $3500 on monitor setups besides gamers?

[reaperducer]

The same people who spend $50,000 on home theater gear, or buy a house based on the size of the "man cave."

I've met sports gamblers who have a dozen or more flat screens on a wall so they can fully indulge in their addiction^w hobby.

[mnky9800n]

the second I want to show any of my colleagues what I'm working on to get a question answered I need a headset for each of them. That kind of kills the whole idea of VR goggles in general.

[pelorat]

My 27" $500 monitor smokes anything Apple has ever produced in the monitor space.