Apple Vision Pro AVP

> a couple of projectors… it’s cheaper I’m not saying AVP is cheap, I’m saying visually it’s better. > more comfortable Nothing could be more comfortable than lying flat on bed with head propped up just a bit, and screen floating at 45 degrees in front of me, which I can easily reposition and resize to perfectly hit my FOV. > more social Heh, I’m not looking to socialize while enjoying a movie at home The only way a physical setup would win is righteous speakers. I suppose I could connect physical speakers, but that breaks the awesome immersion of enjoying a movie in perfect (to the rest of my family) silence. But really all I can say is that the visual experience and physical comfort (when lying down) of a movie on AVP is unparalleled, and this is not at all why I bought it, and it’s probably something one really has to experience to understand.

> I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup Looking down onto your lap sucks over time. Resting your head (pillow or other head support) while wearing AVP vs. holding it up is the key to using AVP for better ergonomics compared to using just the laptop.

In my own lived experience, every person I have met IRL who is dismissive of the Vision Pro has never actually used it seriously for more than a handful of minutes. People I know who have swear by spatial computing being the next UI/UX revolution. I own an AVP, and I agree. Now I bought it secondhand for half the price, so I acknowledge that necessarily means there is at least one counterparty out there who disagrees. Using the AVP for one work day, once I got the right fit and optical inserts, was such an eye opener. It’s like using an ultraportable laptop after living an entire life with large CRT monitors & desktop rigs tied to an actual desk. An experience, btw, which also lived through. It just radially opened my eyes to fresh new possibilities and interaction mechanisms I never before thought possible. But at $3.5k? No sane company exec could have been serious in thinking that would take off.

I’m not who you were responding to, but I use it on the plane, at home, mostly for coding but also for entertainment as well. I probably average about 6 to 8 hours a day in the headset. I’ve used a variety of headsets in the past, starting way back with the DK2 for Oculus, and the AVP is the first I felt was truly capable of replacing my monitors.

It's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience). The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.

> I’m pretty shocked to hear that someone like you exists already. Which part? The VR part, or the AI stuff? For VR, the tech honestly isn't there yet. I fell down that rabbit hole when I started playing combat flight sims regularly, and then managed to get my employer to buy me an AVP. I never really had "VR sickness", but what little discomfort I did have faded within a couple of week. I probably spend ~40-60h / week on average in VR now, but honestly don't keep close track of it. > First, now that you spend so much time in VR, why does that kill your need to take notes? Not at all, it's just effectively impossible to do so by writing while wearing a VR headset. The AVP comes closest to allowing it, but the passthrough resolution isn't quite good enough to make it work well. > Are you somehow taking notes in VR? Yep. For most things I use Markdown in Neovim. I have an mkdocs site configured to run locally whenever I have a terminal open, and push changes to a remote git repo regularly. I've considered moving to Obsidian, but am still not sold on the proprietary stuff. Increasingly, I've been using STT and AI tools to speak my thoughts and record them that way. I've not settled on a "final" tech stack for that, but Limitless (and their Pendant) has been working well enough so far. > Do you find that these notes are as effective and personal as real writing? No. Despite the VR and AI stuff, I'm an analog person at heart. I'm in my early 40s. I wear a fully analog watch (I d…

The AVP connected to my MacBook Pro in Ultra Wide mode is fantastic for coding—though not exactly portable. Still, working from the garden and enjoying the fresh air beats being stuck in front of multiple monitors in the home office, any day. Look forward to when Apple releases AVP Air.

I work from home, so I like to move around the house during the day or even work outside, which is surprisingly great with AVP as there are no reflections on the screen. Also, my lounge chair is vastly more comfortable than my desk chair, and with AVP I can maintain a good posture while keeping my laptop on my lap.

Other headsets are like a DC film and the Vision Pro is like a marvel film before endgame. The differences (that matter in GP’s context) are qualitative rather than quantitative, and a big distinction is the shift from VR gaming, which most incumbents and current VR fans won’t “get” nearly as fast as the public will (once things get going). Somewhat ironically, I have no interest in showing people my AVP, I use it for hours everyday but showing it to people feels weird in the same way showing your neighbor your workstation and monitors feels weird. (Part of that is, of course, that I’m not going to give them my laptop to run Mac virtual display, which means they won’t fully “get” it anyhow.) In contrast the quest devices are practically begging to be shown off but lie in disuse a majority of the time, especially if you don’t have time for gaming.

I’ll tell you what the market is. Parents rocking babies to sleep at night. My daughter will get very mad at me if she wants to sleep and I touch the laptop. She couldn’t care less if I put on the AVP.

I would encourage my fellow oldsters (you know who you are!) to strongly consider trying out the AVP. After several days of use, I'll be keeping mine. A few rambling thoughts. First, and foremost, I like the feeling of mental tiredness after using it for an hour or so, reminding me of how fatigued I felt years ago, living in a remote Peace Corps location and wrestling daily with a difficult new language. One can almost feel new mental connections being forged as utterly new visages appear floating in space and novel configurations of information present themselves. And, as a consequence, one can sense dreaded dementia receding a decade or so into the murky future. Second, the meditation app is truly awesome, and allows a length of quiet sitting I've never before been able to attain, and lower blood pressure. Third, the near-term prospect of virtual attendance at performing arts and sports events around the planet, without needing to leave home, is enticing. Fourth, in the mid-future, tele-medicine will surely take account of the possibilities of AVP, tied likely to various monitors the Apple watch will have, opening new vistas of quality care at a distance. And fifth, and best of all, the sheer pleasure of personal spatial videos is not to be denied. It was delightful to hear my own spouse gasp in amazement to see herself in 3D twirling gracefully during a recent outing. All in all, a winner for nearly every senior.

While I definitely understand and even partially agree with you, there's something partially elitist in the attitude of, "just go do it IRL." This tech will eventually be available to most people on the planet in the same way smartphones are. But vacations to Yosemite likely won't be. And that's not counting doing stuff like standing on Mars or traveling to a fantasy world. I have an AVP and it is cool as hell, but I enjoy taking it off when I'm done with the thing I'm doing. I think most people like IRL. I don't think having more options for experiences is a bad thing.

It's nowhere close for me since I can clearly see the individual pixels and aliasing of the Quest 3 screen. But I cannot see the individual pixels and aliasing on my TVs, computer monitors, and projector screens. The PPD (pixels per degree) of the Quest 3 is about 25. The average human eye has the vision capability of about 60 PPD+. Plus after using OLED TVs and monitors I can't go back to using an LCD for video, so the contrast in dark scenes looks poor and washed out to me in the quest. In this regard the AVP is much better as it's using OLED panels with near-infinite contrast. Otherwise, at home I am normally used to movies on my 150" 4K native JVC projector setup where I sit about 11ft away from it giving me about a 53 degree horizontal FOV. I don't want it to be any larger of my FOV, and I wouldn't want to in VR either.

It's the same reason (some) people love multiple monitors and don't find it distracting. In fact, I feel extremely limited on just 1 or even 2 monitors. I'm hoping that the 4k virtual monitor in AVP will suffice and with windowing tools I think it will since it can be so much larger.