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wvenable | on: Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?
Since it's tethered anyway for the battery, I think Apple made a mistake just not building it as a (smart) monitor tethered to a separate PC.

Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.

Cassell | parent | next
Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.

It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.

One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.

grokx | root | parent | next
> Yes, make the battery 2x bigger and include the compute in that.

You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.

Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.

A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.

wvenable | root | parent | next
> You can't move the compute away in a headset.

Meta has shown pretty convincingly that you can literally stream VR apps/games over Wifi from a PC to a headset and have a great experience. You will need some compute on the device, as close as possible, but the bulk of the computing could be moved off.

Jabrov | root | parent
Have you ever tried that? For me, the lag was the tiniest bit perceptible and was enough to make me sick
Cassell | root | parent | next
This is how most consumer vr used to be before the (oculus) quest, and it worked fine. The data path was massive with base stations etc. A lot of people did get motion sick, but its probably more to do with framerate, one would have thought
wvenable | root | parent
Played Half-Life Alyx this way entirely on a Quest 2, and I have gotten sick in VR, but I had no problem with it.

The technology has actually gotten better since I last spent a significant amount of time with it.

t-writescode | root | parent | next
The Big Screen Beyond and WiFi-enabled video streaming like for the Quest 3 and upcoming Steam Frame disagree with you.
dsernst | root | parent
I agree w/ most of what you said about reducing latency.

Just wanted to let you know the new Dual Knit bands are weighted in the back, and improve the balance a bunch.

al_borland | root | parent
Considering the short battery life, I’d prefer they ditch the battery and just tether the headset completely. Maybe have a small internal battery just to facilitate a 5 minute change of input.
asadotzler | parent
A tethered virtual monitor wouldn't be a PC, it'd be a PC peripheral. Cook wanted a PC platform and app store he could call his own, so we got this 1.5 pound strap-on facial PC instead of a really nice virtual display.

Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.