A virtual CRT simulator, emulating the various attributes of CRT displays. Shadow masks/aperture grilles, phosphor glow, bloom, geometric distortions. EmuVR does some of this already but it'd be a fun novelty to have such a thing in a AR headset with Vision Pro's resolution and other capabilities.
The lack of a 60/120hz mode will cause inevitable stutter, but that's going to be the case with any 60hz content (24p will be fine due to the 96hz mode).
The resolution of the Vision is probably not high enough for that. The Micro-OLED screens themselves are something like 4k, but that's stretched over the entire field of view. The CRT screen would cover just a small fraction of that.
Depend how close you are, the resolution of the CRT etc. There's also the temporal accumulation from the micro-movements the head makes, so you're never sampling a fixed grid.
It's already quite effective in EmuVR even on lower end HMDs, get close enough to the virtual TVs and you can see the individual RGB phosphor dots. Moire is pretty bad at a distance though.
Nice. It’s like a lame version of The Matrix. Instead of going to a fantastic and amazing virtual world I get to ~virtually~ be in the same room I’m already in but with a crappy CRT monitor. For the sake of nostalgia, I guess?
Nostalgia sure, but also preservation. CRTs have visual characteristics that flat panel monitors can't fully emulate, which matters in that a lot of media was created for display on them and only look correct when viewed that way, mostly old video games. Current AR headsets can't fully replicate it either, that'd require 1000hz+ high contrast screens so the beam scanout could be emulated. But it'd do a better job than a flat panel, particularly with CRT's more physical attributes like the thick curved glass and the layers underneath it.
Or, I dunno, they could single-handedly port Half Life Alyx. But I feel like the virtual CRT thing is more manageable.
CRT monitors had exceptional "motion clarity", because they worked more like a fast strobe light than displaying a sequence of frozen frames for a fraction of a second, like current flat screens. The former is apparently better at tricking our eyes to perceive it as fluid motion. OLED monitors could theoretically emulate that, to some degree, with black frame insertion. But manufacturers hate to implement it, perhaps because it causes wear. It also makes the screen dimmer.
CRTs also had no native resolution. They would instead change resolution physically, which made fuzzy interpolation unnecessary.
For a long time, they also had much higher refresh rates and better contrast than LCDs, though this has been matched in recent times.
I had a 21" Sony Trinitron for a computer monitor through the 2000s. 100hz at 1600x1200, it bested everything I bought after it for years. Until something in it popped, anyway.
CRTs didn't have a native resolution, but colour ones did have either masks or grills with individual RGB subpixels just like a flat panel. There was still interpolation in a sense, it was just done physically instead of transforming a framebuffer. If you made a CRT photon gun accurate enough that it could reliably address those subpixels it would then have a "native" resolution.
e: Also, a heads up that VR headsets strobe by default, it's part of what makes them work at all. Even LCD models, where they strobe the backlight.
Interesting, I wonder why manufacturers don't offer LCD backlight strobing as an option in TVs or monitors. It wouldn't cause wear like in organic displays. Perhaps the backlight doesn't get bright enough for that? I assume it should at least be possible with HDR TVs, as they have quite powerful blacklights.
The lack of a 60/120hz mode will cause inevitable stutter, but that's going to be the case with any 60hz content (24p will be fine due to the 96hz mode).