Agree. Most/none of us have ever used VR this high end. If FOV were obnoxiously narrow, I think more people would be hammering on it by now. And I believe The Verge only showed that view because they were trying to demonstrate how much area 3D video capture can cover, but I might be wrong on that. I won't read Nilay Patel's reviews because I think he's a dingleberry.
Tomorrow is going to be interesting and amazing and fun. I'm sure we'll all be back here to say "Told you!" in some way or another.
The issue won’t be tomorrows excitement, it will be 6 months from now when many (not all) people are not using a $4,000 device very often which I absolutely think is going to happen. Everyone is going to be wowed by the slick UI and ‘newness’ but unless your focus is media consumption I don’t think anyone is going to use it for more than a few hours a week in 6 months, unlike for example an XDR which would get 8+ hours most days. We’ll see.
So my question is how do Apple fix this in future versions? Do they need to make larger lenses that are wider and stretches to the side where your peripheral vision is? I’m a very picky person and the littlest things irk me. I will try it out but if it bothers me I’ll have to return it until Apple solves this problem.
I speculate that Apple
can’t get the eye tracking to work at a larger FOV, and probably won’t want to. There are some Ui conveyances they could use like blurring the edges, and using foveated rendering to obscure things that are on the periphery, but the goggle effect will require some kind of screen/lens system that this first version, and almost every VR headset outside of the extremely niche ones don’t have.
They could also come up with some internal backlight/display but I don’t know how that would interact with the optics, probably not well.. something like when you see 4:3 video shown in widescreen and you have the blurred out edges, I could see them adding additional displays that in realtime match the color spectrum of what you’re looking at, so that the edges of your peripheral vision wouldn’t be black, they’d somewhat match what’s on screen. We’ll see what they do in a couple years. If they go this route I want partial credit for the idea, you heard it here first!
Just change the field of view via software setting, and loose some resolution. After all, the vision is digital, its not actual. It would be simple to adjust the edges too via software, to give a lower resolution wider field of view at the edges in lower resolution. People who weear eye glasses are used to that already. John Lennon's glasses had a very restricted field of view. OK, maybe he needed ones with a wider field?
So, software upgrades and user choices.
THe hardware as it is shipped is incapable of expanding the field of view of your eyes. Glasses don’t’ block out the outside of your focal vision, it’s just less clear around the frames. This will be black. It’s totally different and a huge issue for a Mixed Reality headset, which this is being pitched as. In reality, it’s just really good VR with a very polished UI and innovative interaction / UX coupled with great screens and pass through cameras. Mixed Reality has never been done well, and I don’t think this will be an exception to that particular aspect. Nobody wants to put a MR headset on and lose a big part of the world they were seeing, and that is inevitable with this first version.
I question if known technology can even achieve what Apple wants and expect either some breakthrough they know about that is proprietary for the next version that is causing them to ship this one now, or them hoping that an ecosystem will develop around this type of VR that will make it worthwhile for more people as prices come down, which I think is a lot less likely.
I stil think the tech is neat and I’m glad Apple is pushing it forward but am beyond shocked that this wasn’t addressed. I thought for sure they’d crack it, especially at the price point they’re asking. I still hope to try one eventually and may even get one down the road, especially if the price comes down.
However, the marketing – especially that immersion dial – is extremely misleading… and you won’t care tomorrow because the experience is going to be
so novel.
But in a month or two, when you take off the headset and see how much brighter and more clear the real world is, and critically how much more your actual eyes can see of it, I think owners will begin to ask “was this really worth
four thousand dollars?”.
