Could The Vision Pro Be 2024’s Studio Display?

And Did Meta Just Steal All Of Apple’s Thunder?

We are just one day away from the WWDC keynote and things in the VR space are heating up a bit. First we had an AR laptop:

And now we have the Meta Quest 3:

OK, let’s talk about it.

AR

What do you notice when you look at the Quest 3?

Yeah, there are now 3 giant cameras on the front of the device. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. The Quest 3 is going to put a huge emphasis on AR which they call ‘MR’ which means

meta reality:

Quest 3 makes Meta Reality available to even more people and at a lower price point, making it our first mass-market offering to deliver both cutting-edge VR and MR experiences in a single device, setting a new benchmark for future headsets.

Making up new works for existing things. Who do you think you are? Apple?

I’m just not sure why there are three of them. Maybe they’re using one for each eye and then the third one is for a depth sensor or something. Or maybe one’s just for aesthetics to get over the uncanny valley of two things that look like eyes that are totally not. Or maybe they just needed more space in the chassis. Who knows.

Anyways, this is important because I looked into how Apple could do a convincing AR monitor. They’d have to have 6K panels to pull it off. But that would take a lot of processing power. So I proposed a compromise: only render the monitors themselves and superimpose them on some live camera feed. This way you could get high resolution monitors with minimum graphics work.

It could work. But I had this question in the back of my head: where would Apple put the cameras? Because to have cameras that pipe in a convincing AR world they’d have to have pretty big lenses. And everyone seems to think they will not have giant lenses on the front of the devices.

Now I don’t really think the renderings of the Vision Pro headset are very realistic.

For one every single AR/VR headset has a third strap for support. And you don’t think Apple is going to have one? Puh-lease. If Apple does release their headset without a third strap for support on Monday I’m not going to edit this paragraph so you can laugh at me all you like. But if they do have a third strap I’m going to be like, “Told you so.”

But I guess I trusted these renderings a little still. Now I’m much more skeptical. I now think Apple’s VR headset will have cameras on the front like Meta’s. Now they may try to hide it. But I think they will be there. That’s the only way that Apple can provide a truly immersive AR experience.

Stealing Their Thunder

Now the second thing I’d like to talk about. The Quest 3 looks amazing. Full AR capabilities, a high resolution display, and for $500 too? Apple’s Vision Pro is rumoured to be $3000. What could it possibly have that justifies a 6x higher cost?

Like the Quest 3 features “Higher resolution displays” The Quest 2 already has an 1832x1920 resolution for each eye. That’s like almost 4K already. It’s a bit of a weird aspect ratio though. It does not match the human eye’s field of view which is 3x2-ish and some people have described it as like looking through goggles. But if you just ignore it it’s a 4K image. And now the Quest 3 is going to be even better. It’s rumoured it will be 2064x2208 which is about a 10% increase.

Now Apple’s headset is rumoured to be better. I said it would probably have a 6K ‘Retina’ panel. So many pixels you can’t tell them apart with a field of view high enough you won’t be able to see the edges in normal usage. So? Is it worth a 6x higher price? I don’t think so. I think a 4K resolution like on the Quest 3 will be good enough for most users as it will provide the equivalent at looking at a 1080p image (if you had a virtual monitor).

That’s good enough for most people. It’s like the Studio Display.

If you buy it you’ll have one of the best experiences money can buy (assuming you’re OK with a 60Hz LCD) but it’s not that much better than what the competition offers. And at a significantly higher price.

And Meta has been doing this VR thing for quite a while. They have been teased for some of it, sure, but at least their gaming offerings are solid. And it looks like the Quest 3 will improve on this even further adding full AR functionality.

So how much better can the Vision Pro possibly be? 6x better? I don’t think so. Anything can happen tomorrow, but I’m now second guessing if the Vision Pro will really be that great. Because most VR headsets are being heavily subsidized. If Apple doesn’t it could turn out that their Vision Pro turns out to be the Studio Display of 2023.

If you liked this article consider following me on one of my publications: Lost But Coding (for programming content) or The Rest Of The Story (for everything else). You can do so with my RSS reader available on iOS (and Apple Silicon Macs) and Android.