I would think this is self-driven, which is not unrealistic considering how powerful iPhone GPUs are.
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Apple's AR/VR Headset Said to Feature Dual 8K Displays, Eye Tracking, Swappable Headbands, and More
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Apple has a lot of work to do to catch up with Oculus and the Quest 2. I worked for Facebook over the holiday and in my single store. I was selling 20 headsets a day, until we could not get any stock. For the last month of the job I had to send the customer to the service desk to order one and told customers you will not see them in store for a couple of months like the xbox series x and PS5. Oculus is already working on the Quest 3 unit.
The only "8K" VR at the moment costs about $1500, and it's not even dual 8K, it's actually 4K on each side. But still... Apple using 8K displays per eye will definitely make it more expensive.
I would think that M1 GPUs would be a more powerful than an iPhone's since M1s can use a bit more power. But even then, 8K needs quite a bit of horsepower. Having two separate 8k screens basically doubling the horsepower needed. Plus, I've heard that VR/AR needs higher refresh rates due to being so close to the eyes (correct me if I'm wrong). So I seriously doubt current Apple GPUs (whether M1s or iPhones) come anywhere near the power needed to drive these.
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What will Apple do with a VR headset when all the VR games are PC-only and require GPUs that are not available for Macs, especially now that the external GPU dream didn't play out (there are hardly any options, the ones that exist are far more expensive than what they're worth, and even BlackMagic, the only company that took this seriously, discontinued theirs).
If you want to see a use case for these, I highly recommend this video by Heiichi Matsuda: Hyper-Reality
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Yep why I went for the quest 2 I just ordered an ASUS G17 strix I’ll use with it. Mean while all I can do on my new M1 MacBook Pro is play Apple Arcade games
Some people are misunderstanding the 8K displays as being prohibitive. But they are not.
1) Just because the displays are 8K does not mean you have to render at 8K per display. You can render games and applications at much lower resolutions, and still benefit from the increase pixel density of an ultra high resolution display that reduces the screen door effect that happens with current VR displays (looks like you are looking at the world through a fine wire mesh, as the gap between pixels is visable)
2) Light weight elements of games can be rendered at 8K and benefit from the full resolution, such as text overlays and UI, while the game world and geometry can be rendered at lower resolutions
3) If this thing is 3000 dollars and has eye tracking, they may finally be the first company to crack foveated rendering, which uses eye facing cameras to track the point of focus and only render that part of the image at full resolution. If executed perfectly (which so far noone has), it is imperceptible, and looks just as good as native high resolution rendering. In reality you would only be rendering a small 10 or so degree area around where the eyes are looking at full resolution. This enables you to drive extremely high res displays at a small fraction of the compute typically required.
1) Just because the displays are 8K does not mean you have to render at 8K per display. You can render games and applications at much lower resolutions, and still benefit from the increase pixel density of an ultra high resolution display that reduces the screen door effect that happens with current VR displays (looks like you are looking at the world through a fine wire mesh, as the gap between pixels is visable)
2) Light weight elements of games can be rendered at 8K and benefit from the full resolution, such as text overlays and UI, while the game world and geometry can be rendered at lower resolutions
3) If this thing is 3000 dollars and has eye tracking, they may finally be the first company to crack foveated rendering, which uses eye facing cameras to track the point of focus and only render that part of the image at full resolution. If executed perfectly (which so far noone has), it is imperceptible, and looks just as good as native high resolution rendering. In reality you would only be rendering a small 10 or so degree area around where the eyes are looking at full resolution. This enables you to drive extremely high res displays at a small fraction of the compute typically required.
First time I’ve seen that. Very well done! If that’s our future, you can let me off at the next stop. I’ll be boarding a flight to Mars.
dual 8K screens at $3,000 actually doesn’t sound hateful for Apple. For this to work, Apple is going to need developers to create compelling apps that use VR/AR.
The rumour mill continues to talk about amazing games and experiences that will be possible.
Meanwhile Apple as a terrible track record on games and no track record with ‘experiences’.
What’s more, it’s proven unsafe to buy games from the App Store - they’ll just be abandoned in a year or two or incompatible due to OS changes.
An Apple ar/vr headset is useless.
Meanwhile Apple as a terrible track record on games and no track record with ‘experiences’.
What’s more, it’s proven unsafe to buy games from the App Store - they’ll just be abandoned in a year or two or incompatible due to OS changes.
An Apple ar/vr headset is useless.
But don’t you see? The $3,000 one will be Apple making a statement. Then a little later the SE will come out for $1,500 and it will be nowhere near as good but everyone will swallow the marketing and “huge savings” and they will sell millions. This is how Apple works these days!
Give demo units to Valve so they can make it work with SteamVR?
I don't think the GPU limitation is hardware only. Seems more of a software issue. We *are* expecting desktop level GPUs for the upcoming Apple Silicon Macs, so we'll see (and this could be 18-24 months away, plenty of time to see what Apple has in store as far as that).
I'm a layman when it comes to this kind of stuff, so correct me if I'm wrong. This still sound like it'll take quite a bit of computing power in order to keep track of where the user's looking, and know just how much & where to do the high vs low resolution rendering. It would have to update pretty quickly to keep up with your eye movements.
Probably not, but not for the reason you think.
In a "totally designed" system, the obvious thing to do would be to track your fovea (the region of your retina with highest density) and only generate full 8K imagery in that region, with quality falling off in some way away from the densest region. Done properly that should allow for substantial savings on both the computational side and bandwidth side. It will require some protocol to indicate to distinct regions (tiles?) of the screen the resolution of each region. And it will require the whole screen (or at least the whole central region; there may be some flexibility as to the edges) to be able to support 8K when called upon.
[Hah! I see multiple other commenters are making the same point
]
With a mix of AR/VR this could be a really interesting headset. Hopefully it'll get loads of content. I dunno if I wanna drop $3K on it but maybe I'll change my mind after I try one out.
but what ports will it have? Some people need HDMI and SD and usb-A so it should have those ports. 🤪🤪🤪