[curiouscavalier]

having developed multiple apps on it and tried every which way to use it (as an XR enthusiast in general), I have never been so happy to put a headset up on the shelf and never pull it out again.

using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.

[nkrisc]

Unless materials science advances to the point where a display like the Vision Pro weighs as much as a pair of glasses, I don’t think there’ll ever be mass adoption of wearable VR beyond anything more than a novelty, for exactly the reason you stated.

Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.

[pmontra]

The weight is important but it's only a part of what's wrong with those kind of devices. Wearing something that hides their face is something that people do at Carnival or because they must. It's antisocial. It creates a barrier. It isolates from other people. There is no chance it will become something people will do together with other people not wearing the same device.

[gwbas1c]

> Wearing something that hides their face is something that people do at Carnival or because they must. It's antisocial. It creates a barrier. It isolates from other people.

When I ski, I often raise my goggles to my forehead when I'm in the lift line, unless it's extremely bright or extremely cold. Specifically, because of the "antisocial, barrier, isolates" aspect of blocking my face.

I'm interested in the concept for computer work because I like very large monitors. Something like Vision Pro would work if it was similar to a ski helmet and goggles, where it's easy to lift the visor when talking to someone, and then flip it closed.

[nkrisc]

Agreed, that’s the other big reason I didn’t mention: most people don’t want a screen on their face. They don’t want their face covered, they want to see out the window or just what’s around them.

I have never seen someone wear a VR headset in public that wasn’t part of a mall VR novelty attraction.

[Geee]

Beyond 2 is 107 grams. The new M5 Vision Pro is 750 grams. It's easily doable, but Apple deliberately makes them heavy for some reason.

[layer8]

107 grams is still pretty heavy. Regular glasses are 35 grams or less. My sunglasses are below 20 grams.

[Geee]

I wouldn't say so, if they're properly balanced / supported. Most headphones are heavier than that and comfortable. Ski goggles are around the same weight, and you can easily wear them for long periods without even noticing.

[layer8]

It makes a difference. People are less willing to wear heavy headphones all day than they are willing to wear regular glasses all day. They also wouldn’t want to wear ski goggles all day (unless they are into all-day skiing I guess). I much prefer wearing 20-gram glasses to wearing 35-gram glasses. 100-gram glasses would be a turn-off.

[Geee]

The difference is that glasses sit on your nose and headphones sit on your head. 100g headphones are considered lightweight. Apple's headphones are 386 grams, which are too heavy for a lot of people.

[asadotzler]

Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.

Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.

[Geee]

Yeah, that's why I don't have Beyond 2.

Beoynd 2e has eye tracking. The added mass is just 1 g which is kind of hilarious. You could add 8 visual sensors for pass-through, inside-out tracking and hand tracking, adding maybe 10 g. Compute should probably be on the wired external unit or streamed wirelessly. Having it on-board would probably add less than 50g of mass though, but you also need cooling which is not very easy without adding mass. You could try something like structural heat piping through the headstrap or the battery wire.

Anyway I think it should definitely be doable under 200g, which would be much more comfortable than the current 750-800g.

[sleepybrett]

the steam frame is apparently 440 grams.

[Geee]

The display part is 185g and headstrap adds 245g, which has headphones and battery at the back. Seems like it's well balanced, but might be too heavy. If it's comfortable it will be the first ever decent VR device. Assuming that they've implemented eye-tracking based UI like Vision Pro, and I don't have to shoot tiny targets to click, which is hilariously bad UI.

[jerf]

"Assuming that they've implemented eye-tracking based UI like Vision Pro, and I don't have to shoot tiny targets to click, which is hilariously bad UI."

Assuming that the Steam Frame isn't accompanied by a complete change to the current SteamVR experience that hasn't been so much as hinted at, alas, no, SteamVR is full of tiny targets to shoot. I've only ever used the Meta Quest 3S' native UI but the smallest targets there are generally significantly bigger than the smallest targets in the SteamVR UI. On the plus side, once you activate some of those small targets you can do some cursor navigation like a conventional UI, and having that option is a breath of fresh air... but it's completely inconsistent. You experience it as a bonus when it's available because it's not even consistent enough to "miss it when it is gone", let alone for it to be a consistent navigation method.

We may get the obvious eye-tracking upgrade but the targets are still pretty small, it's going to need to be very accurate.

[Geee]

Just switching the input method from shooting to eye-control would be fine for me, if it's accurate enough. Clicks can be made from the controller.

[sleepybrett]

I found the index to be a bit on the heavy side but comfortable. I certainly put in significant time in several different 'flight simulators' (elite dangerous, star wars squadrons, etc) with it. No battery of course.

[nkrisc]

107 grams is still too heavy. That’s four times as heavy as my glasses.

[numpad0]

Vive Flow is 189 grams btw

[cineticdaffodil]

In industrial robotics, there is this emergency practice when the payload and tooling on the robot gets to heavy, to connect the payload to a counterweight and pully system, to "neutralize it in weight". Has anyone here tried that ? It should take three thin ropes with weight to make a object neutrally buyont. Yes, its tied to one room, yes its not pretty and futuristic, but its practical? If you want freedom of movement, connect via magnet- and dedock on leaving the room?

[thih9]

Here is a video:

https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1cki7jc/brillian...

[masfuerte]

More simply, I wonder if anyone's tried adding an equal weight to the back of their head. This would double the weight, but people can carry very heavy loads on their heads as long as the weight is acting downwards.

[t-writescode]

Yes. This is how various headsets are made. The HTC focus Vision is one example, and there’s an addon (not sure if third party) for the quest 3 that puts a battery back there.

So yes, this is done and it can help.

[firmretention]

I did this with my aftermarket Quest 3 headset strap. Added a few counterweights to the back to keep it from sliding down on my face. It is indeed much more comfortable.

[numpad0]

I think the only device that don't have that option is Vive Flow VR yoga goggles(???), which I happen to have, and suspect that someone at Apple fell in love with its concept. It just feels too similar if described in PowerPoint slides to the production Vision Pro.

[vunderba]

First thing I thought of when I tried a Vision Pro was why they never provided a way to attach the battery pack as a pouch on the back so that it sits horizontally across the rear of the head. You have to carry that external battery anyway, so why not use it as a natural counterweight?

[hgoel]

This has been done as a mod for the Valve Index, it works pretty well. Really is mainly a balance issue.

[esikich]

The issue with that is you would constantly need to keep your head on the same plane, as soon as you move it around, it becomes unbalanced and now it's even harder to move around because it's heavier. Walking with something balanced on your head is a completely different use case than looking around, up and down etc.

[MisterTea]

Counterweights are common in a lot of industrial machinery. Most CNC mills have them on the Z axis to neutralize the spindle weight. And they're not always a weight on a rope or chain, they can be gas or hydraulic cylinders with valves enabling dynamic loading.

[wvenable]

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]

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]

> 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]

> 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]

Have you ever tried that? For me, the lag was the tiniest bit perceptible and was enough to make me sick

[t-writescode]

To each their own, but I do it every day, nearly. I’m using wifi 6 though, so that might be the difference. 2.4Ghz might not be sufficient. There’s also very likely local faking on the device (Quest 3) that can rotate your vision before the new data arrives.

Either way, it’s pretty alright nowadays, at least in my experience.

Though time in the seat *might* be making it easier for me.

[Cassell]

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]

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.

[cco]

Light would travel six feet on a cable in about 10 nanoseconds, is that the sort of latency that you're referencing?

I would be surprised to learn that nanoseconds of latency is worth more than much better compute, lower cost, lighter weight, more physical space in the device etc.

Is that really the case?

[t-writescode]

The Big Screen Beyond and WiFi-enabled video streaming like for the Quest 3 and upcoming Steam Frame disagree with you.

[dsernst]

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]

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]

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.

[system2]

If you are not going to pick it up from the shelf, why wouldn't you sell it before it loses even more value as tech evolves?

[dehugger]

most gen1 apple products are a small retirement investment if you keep it in working condition for long enough

[system2]

You mean 40-50 years? It would make more money if you invested in a tech stock. Apple itself has gone up 3,000x since its ipo. $1K would be $3M today.

[al_borland]

This is gambling on a 50 year timeline.

[orimirs]

Is there a headset you like use for prolonged periods?

[t-writescode]

I regularly wear a Quest 3 for 4-7 hours at a time. Before that, I used a Focus Vision for the same.

I have a battery pack I put in my pocket for the Quest 3 and I’m generally very happy with it.

[fouc]

is that 4-7 hours with the Quest 3 mostly for working or entertainment?

[t-writescode]

Mostly entertainment. Oftentimes with lots of generalized movement, including head turning, tilting, etc.

[ChoGGi]

I don't have any issue going a couple hours with my HP reverb g2, it is wired though, and I imagine quite a bit lighter.