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Comment by aranelsurion

14 hours ago

Coming from Quest 3, everything about it sounds great BUT for that FOV. Even on Quest with 103 x 96, I sometimes feel like I'm looking around through a mask or binoculars. Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.

Hopefully it's not so bad.

Oh BTW they showed a new Beat Saber game, and among the logos I've seen Ace Attorney VR among a few others. Let's see if those come for Quest 3 and maybe even PCVR.

70 is crazy! I was thinking years ago that surely by this point headsets would be standardizing on a baseline of like 140+. Progress has really stagnated and over the past few years new headsets never seem to just be universally better than whatever they are replacing. It always seems to be pull one lever to improve one aspect while regressing somewhere else.

I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year and it got consistently better across the board every iteration.

  • It has progressed. The tech is just expensive and heavy and... all sorts of tradeoffs. Meta had a prototype (Boba) with a 180 horizontal and 120 vertical FoV

    But it of course is large and heavy like the quest pro and expensive most likely. Things that when you market to consumers don't pan out.

    So they are optimizing on the other dimension (weight) which of course trades of many other dimensions.

  • > I really wish VR had followed an iPhone like trajectory over the past decade where we got a new Quest/etc every year

    That didn’t happen because you would need market demand for that. Only Gen Alpha likes VR as a demographic.

I have a Vision Pro since launch and loved it, and it has a much more traditional, much wider FOV. However, when you do watch movies on it, it looks incredible but usually only a fraction of that full FOV is utilized -- you do see the theater, or environment, etc. My one wondering is if they'll somehow really deliver the experience of a virtual screen, non-occlusion of the real world, and make it so that the huge screen on the wall several feet away from you can be fully rendered on only this 70 degree FOV. To be sure this is a killer for this as an all-encompassing VR device, but I hope that maybe we'll be shown that it might just be good enough for more of a MR use. Or maybe its just cause I'm at least excited someone is trying and bringing products in this space and so I want to cheer this on

> Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.

Ouch, that's a tough sell. Maybe useful for AR type stuff, but I wouldn't want to go from a Quest/Index/Frame/etc to that for VR.

IMO, FOV is the biggest immersion killer in VR today, and doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's not so bad when you're relatively new to it as the illusion is convincing enough that you don't notice, but once the magic wears off a bit, it's hard to escape that binocular effect. I wish one of the bigger players would tackle that. I'm not willing to take a chance on Pimax.

From description I thought this is more 'View on a Virtual TV' rather than a full VR thing, I may be wrong. This is good, because I, honestly, find that a lot of my VR time is sitting or lying down.