For starters we're in the middle of a huge financial crisis, so releasing yet another VR set, a 3500 USD one at that, is hilarious. To further hammer in how terrible the timing of this is, we are also amid so many tech bro shit schemes failing. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, you name it. The Metaverse was a laughingstock, Twitter is imploding from Elons idiot decisions, Teslas are literally crashing and burning and all major tech companies have been on the News at some point for fucking with people's personal data and other con jobs. AI is scaring people as much as it is entertaining them. Confidence in emergent technology is at an all-time low. It doesn't help that the promo poster features the most dead-eyed soulless-looking person staring through it at you. People are sick of it. VR headsets were already niche, who cares if it has AR or whatever tacked on? Sure, some rich yuppies will buy it to impress their friends, but they buy anything the market tells them is the next big thing and are a small minority (again, more poor people than ever at the moment)
TLDR this is going to be Google Glass again but this time even more of a flop because now people are poorer and more skeptical of big tech than ever.
I think it's stupid because VR has not become popular despite cheap all-in-one headsets like the Meta Quest 2. Sony releasing a new PSVR is also stupid, especially since they just seemed to give up on the last one and you can't use it on PC.
For gaming, VR is both resource intensive and restrictive in terms of what you can actually do: moving freely in a 3D environment is very hard to do without motion sickness, so most VR games confine you to standing or sitting in place plus most people can't stay in VR for that long. Probably the best use case is flight sims and sim racing, and I don't know about flight sim people, but most sim racers really use VR only as a novelty.
edit: and of course AR is even more of a non-starter.
The last number I saw was like 80% of people get their VR legs sooner or later.
The flight sim people I know love it. Being in the cockpit is a huge gamechanger. But these are 300 dollar flight yoke + pedals + expensive software enthusiasts. The kind of people who hacked together their own eye-tracking systems years ago out of IR lights and webcams.
The meta quest 2 has a 1832x1920 pixel display for each eye, that is a terrible resolution for anything realistic. Your entire vertical FOV is 1920 pixels high. That's the same vertical resolution as a 4K screen, but inches away from your eye and occupying your entire field of vision.
The PSVR2 has a slightly higher resolution of over 2000 pixels vertically, but it has two key features witch improve image quality massively. Better lenses, and HDR screens. HDR in gaming makes a massive difference in terms of how realistic colours look. It's still pretty much a novelty for use with Gran Turismo though.
For context, the apple headset is going for 4156×3740 pixel display that's about 1.4 inches diagonally across, for each eye. That's a massive image quality improvement compared to almost anything out there, given how high the resolution is, and how small the screen is. That's the kind of numbers you need to make it usable for stuff like office work and AR spreadsheets or word documents. It's also using OLED screens, so you'll get true blacks, and 5000nits of brightness, with HDR presumably.
The thing is, unless we get massive improvements in resolution and massive price drops, VR will remain a niche technology. The resolution with these two VR headsets you mentioned, is the same resolution you'd get if you strapped a google cardboard to one of Sony's smartphones with a 4k screen. It's not great. But it is coming. Phone screens went from 240p to 1440p and 4k in a couple of years, VR could do the same. And that is very worrying. Or cool if you like VR.
Realistic is a trap. There really aren't many use cases where you need or want realistic. What you want most of the time is immersive; Good art direction, easily read colors and textures, clear map flow or physical layout.
For video games the quest2 and PSVR are fine, as long as you work with the medium instead of trying to fight it. The best VR games use stylized graphics
Breachers in the new hotness right now. The textures don't look this sharp in game, but I hope this conveys that you don't need, or necessarily want, a huge amount of graphical fidelity or clutter to make VR games work. AFAIK it runs well on the Quest2.
It's not about realistic necessarily, that was the wrong word. It's about being able to see what's going on in detail and reading fine text and the like. Maybe not important for stylised video games, but important for what the corporates want to use VR for. And the Apple headset's specs make it very good for that. Better than anything you can buy right now with the extremely high resolution displays and eye tracking.
For videogame, you're absolutely correct. But that's not the market Apple is aiming at.
I know it's not great, but it's kind of old now and always more intended as a budget headset for playing stuff like Beat Saber on the onboard hardware, although IIRC it does have a better resolution than the Rift S.
But why tho? This isn't aimed at you personally, just in general I don't see why anyone would want to do office work on a $3500 VR/AR headset when it's cheaper to just use a couple of monitors, and that's also a system that's proven to work.
I don't know why either, I'm not going to stap a VR headset on my face to do office work. I think it's because companies want the office environment back, and work from home is making it impossible. So the idea is that everyone straps on a VR headset and can all be in the same office while working from home. If the companies don't have to pay rent for office space, they have a ton of money to burn on stuff like this.
they probably dream of using the biometric sensors to police your working at home
Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. It clearly looks like what Apple is going for. A device that can integrate into your work and home life.
Size of the screen doesn't matter because the optics correct to a fixed FOV anyways. For the same reason in VR nits are a meaningless unit, because there's no fixed area, so what actually matters are lumens/candela for a given FOV.
In that case, using a 1.4in 5000nit screen is going to provide the same result as a 300nit 6in screen.