It’s interesting that Apple isn’t using terms like AR, VR, MR, XR, and pancake lenses.
It’s prob either that they want to package the tech as their own and give it fancy labels (like spatial computing). Or they are concerned about being compared to competitors. Or perhaps they want to do the “it just works” thing where you are not supposed to care about the specs, like system memory on iPhones. Maybe all three.
But if they want to avoid being compared to competitors, that concerns me. As they use that strategy to deliver inferior products.
> But if they want to avoid being compared to competitors, that concerns me. As they use that strategy to deliver inferior products.
Based on the initial reviews, I think it’s more the opposite: they don’t want you assuming that their product has the same limitations which have characterized those acronyms so far. From what I’ve read they have gotten over a couple of key thresholds for resolution, response time, etc. which held back lower-spec products and don’t want people to think prior experience with e.g. Oculus devices is representative.
I don’t think they’ve broken new ground in terms of resolution (compared to Pimax) and refresh rate (12ms is a bit less than 90Hz, which is equivalent to Quest Pro and worse than Quest 2 in dev mode).
I think they might want to avoid these spec-to-spec comparisons because other aspects of implementation can give a better UX (like software in iOS compared to Android). Though, until we see the hardware, it will be difficult to say whether they can pull more out of current industry-leading specs than others.
> I don’t think they’ve broken new ground in terms of resolution (compared to Pimax) and refresh rate (12ms is a bit less than 90Hz, which is equivalent to Quest Pro and worse than Quest 2 in dev mode).
I don’t think it’s unprecedented on the raw hardware capacities but the combination is: the Pimax is only a VR headset, so it’s missing half of the hardware, and it has half the PPD; the Quest 2 can go higher on refresh rate but has much lower resolution, no eye tracking, etc. while the Quest Pro gets closer on some of those features but at under a third the PPD.
I mention that because one thing which has stalled AR/VR adoption is the high threshold your brain sets for accepting a scene as real, especially for AR. We won’t know until it ships but I did find it interesting how many reviewers mentioned this being the first time things came together. It might be that much of the conventional wisdom around AR is too pessimistic and it’s simply that you need to reach an aggressive combination of resolution, color depth, responsiveness, tracking precision, weight, etc. similar to how it took decades for digital cameras to hit the quality/weight/cost thresholds where the benefits became compelling. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out that the Vision Pro is barely over that level for Apple at a high price point and out of reach for Facebook for a few more years since they don’t have a high-end CPU team in house and have to wait for the commodity market to advance.
A good look at the topic, it's nothing new for them. They specifically love to both avoid marketing terms for some things and to give their own specific branding terms to others (think "Retina" instead of High Res, "ProMotion" instead of 120Hz, etc).
It’s prob either that they want to package the tech as their own and give it fancy labels (like spatial computing). Or they are concerned about being compared to competitors. Or perhaps they want to do the “it just works” thing where you are not supposed to care about the specs, like system memory on iPhones. Maybe all three.
But if they want to avoid being compared to competitors, that concerns me. As they use that strategy to deliver inferior products.