> Priced at $2,000, the Spacetop is purpose-built as a business tool, with an optimized Arm processor, AOSP (open-source Android) operating system, and, of course, the custom headset. But you’ll need to act fast: Sightful is inviting just 1,000 early adopters to purchase the final hardware, enticing them with the opportunity to provide feedback on subsequent products.
It sports a Snapdragon 865. I don't see anything here that could possibly justify that price. You're basically just paying for exclusivity as a beta tester.
The obvious one is taking regular breaks from the screen. Focus on things at least 10-30 meters away, so your eyes can relax.
Also, with a good lens setup or with direct projection, VR/AR headsets could theoretically set the focus distance at any distance or even dynamically change it. This would also solve the vergence-accommodation conflict with current headsets.
Most VR headsets on the market are not clear enough to display text. For example, Meta Quest Pro and Quest 2 both have pixel densities around 21 pixels per degree. While a 27" monitor running at 2560x1440 at an arm's length (40 degrees horizontal FOV) will have a pixel density of around 64 pixels per degree. 64 PPD is very legible and usable for office applications, chatting, and similar things. One can see individual pixels in very aliased and high-contrast images, but not otherwise. In contrast, 21 PPD is not great - most text will be either very blurry or aliased on an equivalent virtual display. The math is simple: 21 pixels per degree x 40 degrees (which is 1/3rd of the human eye's horizontal FOV including peripheral vision), equals a display resolution of about 840x473 at 16:9, or close to 420p. Clearly, this is not comfortable to do office work with.
SpaceTop has a relatively low FOV but much higher pixel density of about 46 pixels per degree. It's about twice as good as what Meta Quest Pro and Quest 2 can do. It also seems to have individual floating apps rather than entire screens, but if we would assume that one would like to have a typical experience roughly equivalent to a 27" 16:9 screen at an arm's length, that virtual screen would be at about 1840x1035. I think this is right at the edge of what I would consider comfortable. Most graphics, including text, would probably be slightly blurry, and anti-aliasing blur or aliasing artefacts would be clearly seen. But I would not get too frustrated by it.
That's a trend with AR glasses when compared to VR headsets - they have narrower FOV and higher pixel densities. So they are overall better for non-immersive office-like applications. Still, the holy grail of productivity AR headsets is something like 60 PPD and at least 90 degrees horizontal FOV x 60 degrees vertical FOV. At that point, I would say the differences between our actual vision and what can be shown on the glasses in terms of resolution would be not significant, assuming the eye balls always point within 30 degrees of the center of the AR display. But this means a resolution of around 5400x3600 per eye. Or approaching 12K in total for both eyes combined.
SpaceTop is probably much more usable for office work than many of the VR headsets on the market. And it seems like they're aiming for a similar experience to having one or two 1080p 27" screens about a meter away from one's face. I think it's right on the border between fun tech and practical tech. Slightly higher PPD and FOV would push it more into the territory of practical tech for me, someone who writes and codes while travelling. Now it sounds good but not revolutionary.
Probably not great if you compare to previous inventions. Kids that use iPads early instead of going outside already have problems with developing proper eyesight.
TVs made us watch things close, PCs made us watch things closer, then we had smartphones. Wearing glasses is the last step before we go full Borg.
The difference here being that you don't focus on the glass, but further. So in terms of focus, that's closer to a PC screen than to a smartphone, right?
It makes sense, kinda. Basically Nreal-style glasses with a headless computer.
But why stop there? If you further separate the keyboard/mouse from the computer, then you not only allow people to choose their own HCI (trackball? tapwithus keyboard?) but they can bring their own input, too.
Imagine all the benefits of the modularity of a desktop, with equal (if not better) portability of a laptop.
The problem with going wearable is the input. Nothing is as good as a full keyboard. The smallest reasonable solution I have found is a bluetooth keyboard for nontrivial use. Chorded keyboards and whatnot just aren't as good and believe me I've tried.
I don't know what the solution is, but I remember most decrying that a keyboard on a mobile device would not work and that they wanted their Blackberry keyboards, but Apple nailed it. Here's to seeing that the next input/interface will be.
Uhh... this is about as innovative as a much cheaper DIY project from many years ago? I think everyone with a vufine and a pi zero has done this before. As a bonus you get to use linux instead of android.
Huh? It does work well. It's just an ordinary raspberry pi. No modifications. I upgraded to using my pi 4 though. I just toss it in a workout armband along with a battery pack whenever I feel like it. Input device can be whatever you want. I usually use a bluetooth media remote since that's a keyboard with a trackpad that easily fits in my pocket. Real world battery life of almost 8 hours on a 10000mAh pack including the vufine plugged in at all times despite its internal battery.
Maybe the only thing I sort of had to hack together was the stupid mount for the vufine which is a bit cheap and flimsy. This is a necessary mod anyway if you buy one of these and want to use it for anything serious. I dremeled out a channel on the magnetic mount and ran a velcro zip tie through that. Holds onto a pair of glasses very firmly now. I added a second velcro strap around the body of it for stability. I can even go out for a jog no problems. All the cables I use are thin and lightweight (meant for connecting HDMI on a drone).
It's such a cheap and obvious idea that you can unregretfully drunk buy all the parts on amazon right now for probably less than I paid back then and you'd still just have a pile of otherwise useful stuff. The hunt for durable low-profile and L-angled cables needed to cram it all into a pocket is the expensive part, but you might even already have a pile of those.
Where did I say it doesn't? You seemed to be complaining about the fact that it was not innovative. I just said that innovation often doesn't matter. A good product works well, doesn't have to be innovative. Innovation is mostly great for marketing and VCs.
Still looks like a prototype, but I hope we get to this as a common form factor. I take my laptop from office to couch and being able to have the screen size wherever would be great. I especially liked the ability to move the displays closer and farther away from you and pin windows. We’ll see if keyboards and trackpads get replaced by other inputs. The processing will likely move to your “phone”.
I don’t really understand why my iPhone can’t just be a desktop. It should just hook up to a dock and turn into a desktop pc. It’s got the power to do everything I do I just need a monitor and keyboard hookup
This is already the case on most (not all) Android phones with USB-C video out. However, Google has not provided a desktop interface, so OEMs have had to create their own. Currently, Samsung, Motorola, Huawei and LG (RIP) offer desktop UIs when the phone is hooked up to a monitor.
Samsung has a feature to turn it into a WiDi display. It works, but the wireless latency and throughput limitations are a tad annoying. Maybe the Samsung laptops have optimizations for this.
The fact you can use the stylus that comes with the tablet on your PC through the second screen feature is kind of nice, but the wireless issues make using it kind of a bother.
> I don’t really understand why my iPhone can’t just be a desktop.
It can’t?
I mean, I’ve got better desktops (all of which are actually laptops) so I rarely use the phone this way, but my phone can with just an adaptor to plug in HDMI and a keyboard & mouse, and the Apple fans are always telling me how much better iPhones are at everything…
I've purchased a lapdock for my Galaxy Fold precisely for this reason. My MBP is almost 10 years old, and when I looked at buying a new one, I saw that it cost $400 to bump up the RAM from base model 8GB to 16GB.
No thanks! My phone has 12GB; I'm going to be using that for general computing and RDP into my Macbook when I need to.
At a point some time ago, I think around when Windows mobile OS was still a thing, they released a phone and a dock and you could use it as a desktop for modern apps. It was limited to apps due to architecture but that always seemed like the next step to me for many people. A mobile you could just use as a PC via a dock and run desktop apps on it. I think we will still see it, but it really felt like Microsoft was going to deliver years ago on it.
Yeah. I'm the same. At some point we're going to get to a point where your 'laptop' is your phone or another 'phone sized thing'. That can be docked into various configurations (laptop configuration: small keyboard with an attached screen. desktop configuration: Monitors, full sized keyboard, mice other peripherals. Or some kind of ultra mobile configuration like this: keyboard pointing device glasses based display.) Or used in a more limited way via a touchscreen (or not!).
Sadly Wondows Mobile was already death when HP X3 came to public. The concept was great. CPU and storage in the cellphone, transmitted wireless to the "lapdock". You could plug the things together and load the cellphone from the lapdock battery.
I've for a budget range Samsung tablet and Samsung dex works great.
Apple doesn't want to build a version of dex. I don't know why, it seems like an excellent fit, but they don't care. It probably has to do with the fact Microsoft's attempt has failed miserably.
If you care about this concept, I'd recommend considering buying a Samsung phone instead of an iPhone. Web browsing, office work, remote desktop, terminal stuff, it all Just Works hooked up to a compatible dock. The desktop feels a bit like a polished Linux environment, with deviations from Windows and macOS in the way things like the launcher works, but it also feels very finished.
The only real limit I've run into is the amount of RAM packed with these devices. The 4GiB of RAM my tablet packs clearly isn't enough to run multiple browser tabs, hires video playback and a fully featured MS Office at the same time, but I also imagine most computers would struggle with 4GiB these days. The S23 contains up to 12GiB of RAM, I imagine that'd be a breeze to work with.
I think people who care can use DeX for real office work today. I imagine the people who care are a minority, though.
I was tooling around with VR development when I tried developing directly from within the headset. Shockingly, the Quest 2 was streets ahead of the Index when it came to usability. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't something I would want to replace my current setup.
I'm sure once the headsets hit a certain resolution, this will become much more common.
This is exactly the kind of concept I personally expect from Apple if the AR rumors materialize at the upcoming WWDC... maybe with a less clunky design.
Now that I think about it, the existing Mission Control/Full screen App interface could make total sense for this UI. You could quite easily translate theses concepts to an AR deck bridging the gap between all existing Apps and this new interface.
It's widely speculated that the Apple AR product will run iPad apps, and that stage manager was shipped last year as a multitasking environment well suited to AR.
Exactly - Apple has all the pieces to absolutely nail the AR workspace experience.
Reality OS Headset built on top of iOS (and MacOS) could easily allow bluetooth peripherals (keyboard/mouse) to pair with to their headset, and you've got multi-monitor workspace ready to go in a physical space that normally wouldn't accomodate it.
Need more CPU/GPU than the Headset provides? Just use Sidecar to push your Mac desktop into AR and work on it as a 2D pane from there.
I've used Virtual Desktop on the HP G2 Reverb, and while the quality was excellent, it's a bit clunky having to connect HDMI/Displayport loopback connectors to bring up multiple displays, and I'd much prefer to do my work in MacOS.
A lot of the speculation around the new product seems to be around AR augmenting people moving around in public space, but the thing that gets me excited is what this might mean for the traditional desktop environment.
And while we are at connecting the dots... One main problem with VR/AR is how the hell are you supposed to have online meeting while under a ski mask?
The headset could include discreet lidar/else captor to track eyes movements. Meanwhile the base could track head movements and mouth expression from the outside. Bam you have every data points to animate a memoji. I guess through an API more advanced avatars could be designed by a game developer. But memoji would be a nice proof of concept.
If all this materialize The sweet spot would be a Thunderbolt plug and a M1/M2 requirements. The 3000$ rumored price tag would refer to a complete setup including a mac mini but the headset alone could sell at a more affordable price range.
(Disclaimer: this is a personal guess I have no access to insiders)
Yes, tracking the entire face is already being done in prototypes. I guess Meta in particular is extremely interested in rolling this out, it enables them to analyze better which content and ads you react to.
People in the meeting with standard laptops and desktops with a camera are going to show their faces to the other participants. What are they going to see for the ones wearing a headset?
This could make total sense, I always thought they spend to much energy on what was a gimmick at this point. But maybe they were just preparing a live memoji feature until it was flawless.
You might notice that unlike Meta, Apple current approach focus solely on head avatar. But they make a point for them to be very expressive.
This also perfectly fit the privacy narrative. Expressing yourself thought an expressive live animated avatar help preserve privacy as a remote worker. My life companion colleagues never agreed to turn on their webcam, maybe they would feel more at ease with an avatar.
PS: Maybe a better video (example) of the footage used in last year daily WWDC recap. The setup for the daily recap was a memoji of Serenity Caldwell reporting thought online meeting with other developers using memoji.
I just switch off my camera when I don't need it and turn it on for those few business interactions that are more effective by looking each other faces. That's it. 3D moving avatars feel totally inappropriate to me in a business environment. I would wonder if I am working with kids.
Not sure typical business meetings would be the main target audience anyway. Videoconferencing is here to stay.
It should rather be compared to other VR avatar concepts. Meta full body avatar for instance. The tech is clearly not ready and feel clumsy and add absolutely nothing. Meanwhile a floating head of some sort that can surimpose over the media you are collaborating on could be a better experience.
This review seems a little lacking without any mention of direct competitors to the headset like NReal Air and Bigscreens glasses.
It dismisses Meta's workspaces on VR platforms without mentioning dedicated providers like Immersed as potentially better options.
There is possibly a niche market for separates (glasses, keyboards, base units etc) that excel at their individual function within this emerging AR/VR space; it will be interesting to see if closely coupled products like this can match the excellence of specialists or if the focus on the convenience of all-in-one will lead to generalist jack-of-all-trades mediocrity.
Interesting product anyway but would have liked more thought in the comparison products, and more consideration of the base unit as a potential driver for competitor headsets like the aforementioned.
Fascinating. Hard to know if it's worth it at this stage due to the 1080p per-eye resolution, but the second incarnation of this product ought to be a real game-changer.
Also, I noted this passage:
even with a very odd prescription (one eye is near-sighted, and one far-sighted) the default corrective lenses Sightful had available worked well.
I've never encountered another person with this same eye disorder... It can be a real nuisance in certain cases. Nice to see this specifically addressed :)
> Hard to know if it's worth it at this stage due to the 1080p per-eye resolution,
I wonder if a normal camera can be used to track head movements with a better AR set.
It'd be fun to add multiple extra screens around the main one on my laptop just by plugging in my glasses into the USB-C port.
> I've never encountered another person with this same eye disorder...
Before both my eyes went shortsighted I had it - it always felt like having one eye optimized for short distances and one for long ones, with the brain making the switch automatically like a smartphone stitches together an image using various lenses of various focal lengths.
Still having different degrees of shortsightedness (a bit on the left and almost none on the right) is mildly annoying.
There are dozens of us! My glasses and contact RXs always got a comment. Mine are on the extreme side in difference too, plus astigmatism in one eye and not the other. When contacts were finally available for me, I had to relearn how to live in a 3d space.
I'm definitely going to follow the development of this as attention to edge cases and details like this are a good indicator of quality. It definitely has beta version battery life which I'd hope they'd address in a v2 as well.
When I had cataract surgery I specifically requested and gat this - one eye for distances and the other at about 18" for computer use. I very much like it. Adaptation felt immediate.. while I was waiting for glasses to arrive I felt like I didn't need them. Now I use glasses for distance and computer work but I sort of feel like I'm just being a little lazy. ;)
> I've never encountered another person with this same eye disorder... It can be a real nuisance in certain cases. Nice to see this specifically addressed :)
I had this as a child, meant that it wasn't clear I had vision issues for a bit. I could see things clearly.
While my far-sighted became near-sighted eventually, it remains a dominant eye for me.
I've been dreaming of a product like this for years. I'm most productive in my office setup with large 42" + 24" monitors. When I travel I feel cramped and unproductive on my laptop. The laptop screen size does not seem to matter within the limits of what I'm comfortable lugging with me (nothing larger than a 15-16" mbp). So I've longed for some kind of VR or projected display from a laptop or mobile device.
Nreal sells glasses that are available today, on Amazon, and their Nebula virtual desktop app is available for Mac and Windows. The FoV on the Air isn't great, and if you wear corrective lenses you'll need to wear contacts, or get their prescription inserts, but that future is already here. It connects via USB-C to your existing computer, though dongles are available if you only have HDMI.
The software isn't quite there yet, but it's still early days for it so it'll hopefully get better.
i have nreal light too, for around $400 its really good.
there is a community made api that can access glasses head tracking data, some made their own multi monitor app demos too,
hope official one gets better later on too
edit; spacetop is using nreal light (6dof)
Does nebula virtual desktop support rdp and browser? I remote into dozens of machines for work and most other things are browser based- email, chat, etc.
For a reality check on those large virtual desktop illustrations, while I do like the (same hardware?) NReal Light's 1080p, its 52 deg FOV means looking at such a desktop through a smaller, not-curved, head-pointed portal. Picture holding up your laptop, so it appears 5 fists across diagonally, and then waving it around, likely synchronized with your neck. Which looks something vaguely like these:[1][2].
Also note the 53-degree FOV they quote is for the diagonal angle!
In all their press releases they're comically cagey about giving actual resolution and angle info for the display, which makes me distrust them.
The less-than-transparent approach to specs has bothered me as well. But, at least as of a few years ago, their primary market was China, followed by SK and Japan. And was largely media consumption on phones. With competitors that would spin a wider fov, or more distant depth of focus, even with lower resolution, as "we're an N inch TV, not a mere M inch!". So, I've tagged it as culture mismatch, and consumer vs tiny tech. Several things they could have done differently, but unicorn dreams.
Compared with my 15 inch laptop, the glasses too are 1080p, visually about ~50% wider/higher, and ~2 meters out instead of ~half. I might be using it now, if only for posture, but for having diy kludged the eyeglass lens snapons. Face comfort/fit... can be an issue. Folks who live in a one-screen tiling window manager, or in terminals, might use it as a simple monitor. Using a magnetic USB adapter, it's trivially snap-on/off.
I just got the nreal air recently. Don't know if the nreal light is the same but the airs can be just used as a display through dp alt without the app. However, instead of a floating screen in a fixed position, it will just be a static display that moves with your head.
I will also say, for the nreal airs, they're not quite there yet. It's blurry throughout and completely unreadable off center, I find myself moving the glasses around so different parts of the screen will be in the center. Regardless of center or edge they they're always a bit blurry and hurt my eyes, and after taking them off I can't focus my eyes on things far away. I still like them as a low resolution screen for watching youtube while washing the dishes for example, but their use is quite limited.
You aren't gonna answer the reply to that tweet? :(
I like the idea of wearing glasses like that and moving a Youtube video into the corner of my vision, like a recipe video while I'm cooking. Or something more stimulating than just a podcast when I'm running that I can tune in and out of.
I would gladly buy a PC built into decent keyboard. Considering performance of ultra portable laptops and their size, it should be a perfect fit. I would even go for an option without battery, powered by USB-C by connecting this computer to external monitor. Monitor could act as a hub, thus reducing the need for ports, although there should be ample space for all the ports on the back of the keyboard.
I've been thinking about getting a cheap Mac mini and shoving inside a custom mechanical keyboard. Basically acting as a slab top with ridiculously low power draw for the performance.
This is why I’d prefer a Mac mini as a little home server. The price difference is obviously a massive drawback, but the power brick Intel use is a right PITA.
I've been doing this since December with a pair of Nreal Air glasses and alternately a MacBook and an SBC. It's okay-ish, but not great. Text rendering is sub-par requiring jacked-up font sizes, the viewport is fairly small, and if you're using the Nreal desktop for simulated multi-monitor configuration, the display jiggles a bit as the accelerometers catch up with your movements. It's sure as hell not worth the $2000 they're looking for. The SoC is old, too. Just get an 11g Framework, strip the LCD, plug a set of Nreals into a USB-C DP port, install Windows, and use the Nreal desktop. Boom: better, faster, newer, cheaper than $2000, and you can get it shipped right away.
I'd say that the cover is more-or-less mandatory for productivity because you lose dimmer colors to the background without it, even with the OLED brightness jacked up to max.
Then again, they're doing obvious PWM to achieve the lower-than-max brightness levels which creates flicker reminiscent of looking at an old CRT monitor running at 60Hz, which for me is a disincentive to run at anything less than max brightness.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadCould look like a Sinclair QL, at least.
It sports a Snapdragon 865. I don't see anything here that could possibly justify that price. You're basically just paying for exclusivity as a beta tester.
I also don't know the long term impact of these devices to my eye sight.
†unless, in your case, the arrow of causality between vision and computer screen distance is in the opposite direction.
Also, with a good lens setup or with direct projection, VR/AR headsets could theoretically set the focus distance at any distance or even dynamically change it. This would also solve the vergence-accommodation conflict with current headsets.
SpaceTop has a relatively low FOV but much higher pixel density of about 46 pixels per degree. It's about twice as good as what Meta Quest Pro and Quest 2 can do. It also seems to have individual floating apps rather than entire screens, but if we would assume that one would like to have a typical experience roughly equivalent to a 27" 16:9 screen at an arm's length, that virtual screen would be at about 1840x1035. I think this is right at the edge of what I would consider comfortable. Most graphics, including text, would probably be slightly blurry, and anti-aliasing blur or aliasing artefacts would be clearly seen. But I would not get too frustrated by it.
That's a trend with AR glasses when compared to VR headsets - they have narrower FOV and higher pixel densities. So they are overall better for non-immersive office-like applications. Still, the holy grail of productivity AR headsets is something like 60 PPD and at least 90 degrees horizontal FOV x 60 degrees vertical FOV. At that point, I would say the differences between our actual vision and what can be shown on the glasses in terms of resolution would be not significant, assuming the eye balls always point within 30 degrees of the center of the AR display. But this means a resolution of around 5400x3600 per eye. Or approaching 12K in total for both eyes combined.
SpaceTop is probably much more usable for office work than many of the VR headsets on the market. And it seems like they're aiming for a similar experience to having one or two 1080p 27" screens about a meter away from one's face. I think it's right on the border between fun tech and practical tech. Slightly higher PPD and FOV would push it more into the territory of practical tech for me, someone who writes and codes while travelling. Now it sounds good but not revolutionary.
TVs made us watch things close, PCs made us watch things closer, then we had smartphones. Wearing glasses is the last step before we go full Borg.
But why stop there? If you further separate the keyboard/mouse from the computer, then you not only allow people to choose their own HCI (trackball? tapwithus keyboard?) but they can bring their own input, too.
Imagine all the benefits of the modularity of a desktop, with equal (if not better) portability of a laptop.
I don't know what the solution is, but I remember most decrying that a keyboard on a mobile device would not work and that they wanted their Blackberry keyboards, but Apple nailed it. Here's to seeing that the next input/interface will be.
On-screen keyboards are only a slight improvement. What they solved is everything else except typing speed and accuracy.
https://www.bigscreenvr.com
Uhh... this is about as innovative as a much cheaper DIY project from many years ago? I think everyone with a vufine and a pi zero has done this before. As a bonus you get to use linux instead of android.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/7/27/16035508/d...
Maybe the only thing I sort of had to hack together was the stupid mount for the vufine which is a bit cheap and flimsy. This is a necessary mod anyway if you buy one of these and want to use it for anything serious. I dremeled out a channel on the magnetic mount and ran a velcro zip tie through that. Holds onto a pair of glasses very firmly now. I added a second velcro strap around the body of it for stability. I can even go out for a jog no problems. All the cables I use are thin and lightweight (meant for connecting HDMI on a drone).
It's such a cheap and obvious idea that you can unregretfully drunk buy all the parts on amazon right now for probably less than I paid back then and you'd still just have a pile of otherwise useful stuff. The hunt for durable low-profile and L-angled cables needed to cram it all into a pocket is the expensive part, but you might even already have a pile of those.
Where did I say it doesn't? You seemed to be complaining about the fact that it was not innovative. I just said that innovation often doesn't matter. A good product works well, doesn't have to be innovative. Innovation is mostly great for marketing and VCs.
It's a Kinect. It's a head tracker.
$300 13.3-inch keyboard monitor turns a smartphone into a laptop
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/motorola-laptop-dock-review/
The fact you can use the stylus that comes with the tablet on your PC through the second screen feature is kind of nice, but the wireless issues make using it kind of a bother.
It can’t?
I mean, I’ve got better desktops (all of which are actually laptops) so I rarely use the phone this way, but my phone can with just an adaptor to plug in HDMI and a keyboard & mouse, and the Apple fans are always telling me how much better iPhones are at everything…
No thanks! My phone has 12GB; I'm going to be using that for general computing and RDP into my Macbook when I need to.
https://www.windowscentral.com/hands-hp-elite-x3-lap-dock
Apple doesn't want to build a version of dex. I don't know why, it seems like an excellent fit, but they don't care. It probably has to do with the fact Microsoft's attempt has failed miserably.
If you care about this concept, I'd recommend considering buying a Samsung phone instead of an iPhone. Web browsing, office work, remote desktop, terminal stuff, it all Just Works hooked up to a compatible dock. The desktop feels a bit like a polished Linux environment, with deviations from Windows and macOS in the way things like the launcher works, but it also feels very finished.
The only real limit I've run into is the amount of RAM packed with these devices. The 4GiB of RAM my tablet packs clearly isn't enough to run multiple browser tabs, hires video playback and a fully featured MS Office at the same time, but I also imagine most computers would struggle with 4GiB these days. The S23 contains up to 12GiB of RAM, I imagine that'd be a breeze to work with.
I think people who care can use DeX for real office work today. I imagine the people who care are a minority, though.
I'm sure once the headsets hit a certain resolution, this will become much more common.
Now that I think about it, the existing Mission Control/Full screen App interface could make total sense for this UI. You could quite easily translate theses concepts to an AR deck bridging the gap between all existing Apps and this new interface.
Reality OS Headset built on top of iOS (and MacOS) could easily allow bluetooth peripherals (keyboard/mouse) to pair with to their headset, and you've got multi-monitor workspace ready to go in a physical space that normally wouldn't accomodate it.
Need more CPU/GPU than the Headset provides? Just use Sidecar to push your Mac desktop into AR and work on it as a 2D pane from there.
I've used Virtual Desktop on the HP G2 Reverb, and while the quality was excellent, it's a bit clunky having to connect HDMI/Displayport loopback connectors to bring up multiple displays, and I'd much prefer to do my work in MacOS.
A lot of the speculation around the new product seems to be around AR augmenting people moving around in public space, but the thing that gets me excited is what this might mean for the traditional desktop environment.
The headset could include discreet lidar/else captor to track eyes movements. Meanwhile the base could track head movements and mouth expression from the outside. Bam you have every data points to animate a memoji. I guess through an API more advanced avatars could be designed by a game developer. But memoji would be a nice proof of concept.
If all this materialize The sweet spot would be a Thunderbolt plug and a M1/M2 requirements. The 3000$ rumored price tag would refer to a complete setup including a mac mini but the headset alone could sell at a more affordable price range.
(Disclaimer: this is a personal guess I have no access to insiders)
This could make total sense, I always thought they spend to much energy on what was a gimmick at this point. But maybe they were just preparing a live memoji feature until it was flawless.
You might notice that unlike Meta, Apple current approach focus solely on head avatar. But they make a point for them to be very expressive.
This also perfectly fit the privacy narrative. Expressing yourself thought an expressive live animated avatar help preserve privacy as a remote worker. My life companion colleagues never agreed to turn on their webcam, maybe they would feel more at ease with an avatar.
PS: Maybe a better video (example) of the footage used in last year daily WWDC recap. The setup for the daily recap was a memoji of Serenity Caldwell reporting thought online meeting with other developers using memoji.
WWDC22 Day 5 Final statement : https://youtu.be/PMCDIIxBiZA?t=46
WWDC21 Day 5 Final statement : https://youtu.be/fwQF-HQG-pU?t=64
WWDC20 Day 5 Final statement : https://youtu.be/GHHw_hOnML0?t=1
Fun to see the evolution also...
It should rather be compared to other VR avatar concepts. Meta full body avatar for instance. The tech is clearly not ready and feel clumsy and add absolutely nothing. Meanwhile a floating head of some sort that can surimpose over the media you are collaborating on could be a better experience.
It dismisses Meta's workspaces on VR platforms without mentioning dedicated providers like Immersed as potentially better options.
There is possibly a niche market for separates (glasses, keyboards, base units etc) that excel at their individual function within this emerging AR/VR space; it will be interesting to see if closely coupled products like this can match the excellence of specialists or if the focus on the convenience of all-in-one will lead to generalist jack-of-all-trades mediocrity.
Interesting product anyway but would have liked more thought in the comparison products, and more consideration of the base unit as a potential driver for competitor headsets like the aforementioned.
Also, I noted this passage:
even with a very odd prescription (one eye is near-sighted, and one far-sighted) the default corrective lenses Sightful had available worked well.
I've never encountered another person with this same eye disorder... It can be a real nuisance in certain cases. Nice to see this specifically addressed :)
I wonder if a normal camera can be used to track head movements with a better AR set.
It'd be fun to add multiple extra screens around the main one on my laptop just by plugging in my glasses into the USB-C port.
> I've never encountered another person with this same eye disorder...
Before both my eyes went shortsighted I had it - it always felt like having one eye optimized for short distances and one for long ones, with the brain making the switch automatically like a smartphone stitches together an image using various lenses of various focal lengths.
Still having different degrees of shortsightedness (a bit on the left and almost none on the right) is mildly annoying.
I like to think that's the reason, anyway.
I'm definitely going to follow the development of this as attention to edge cases and details like this are a good indicator of quality. It definitely has beta version battery life which I'd hope they'd address in a v2 as well.
I had this as a child, meant that it wasn't clear I had vision issues for a bit. I could see things clearly.
While my far-sighted became near-sighted eventually, it remains a dominant eye for me.
I signed up and really hope that I'm selected..
The software isn't quite there yet, but it's still early days for it so it'll hopefully get better.
[1] Phone photo through NReal Light https://twitter.com/mncharity/status/1397553615372529668/pho... [2] DIY rough analogy https://twitter.com/mncharity/status/1225091755667853318
The less-than-transparent approach to specs has bothered me as well. But, at least as of a few years ago, their primary market was China, followed by SK and Japan. And was largely media consumption on phones. With competitors that would spin a wider fov, or more distant depth of focus, even with lower resolution, as "we're an N inch TV, not a mere M inch!". So, I've tagged it as culture mismatch, and consumer vs tiny tech. Several things they could have done differently, but unicorn dreams.
Compared with my 15 inch laptop, the glasses too are 1080p, visually about ~50% wider/higher, and ~2 meters out instead of ~half. I might be using it now, if only for posture, but for having diy kludged the eyeglass lens snapons. Face comfort/fit... can be an issue. Folks who live in a one-screen tiling window manager, or in terminals, might use it as a simple monitor. Using a magnetic USB adapter, it's trivially snap-on/off.
I will also say, for the nreal airs, they're not quite there yet. It's blurry throughout and completely unreadable off center, I find myself moving the glasses around so different parts of the screen will be in the center. Regardless of center or edge they they're always a bit blurry and hurt my eyes, and after taking them off I can't focus my eyes on things far away. I still like them as a low resolution screen for watching youtube while washing the dishes for example, but their use is quite limited.
I like the idea of wearing glasses like that and moving a Youtube video into the corner of my vision, like a recipe video while I'm cooking. Or something more stimulating than just a podcast when I'm running that I can tune in and out of.
Then again, they're doing obvious PWM to achieve the lower-than-max brightness levels which creates flicker reminiscent of looking at an old CRT monitor running at 60Hz, which for me is a disincentive to run at anything less than max brightness.