Karl Guttag had a series of articles on the Apple Vision Pro soon after it was announced, and I read them with interest since Karl goes into the hardware/technical side of things when most other people simply “Ooh” and “Aah” about the “shiny” 😛

Then there was nothing from Karl for about a month, even though Karl had promised more articles with further thoughts.

Finally, there’s a new article — part one of two — which discusses something that I’ve been very keen on — monitor replacement.

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

Monitor replacement has been my goal with AR/VR from the outset. I’ve tried most of the available software solutions, but have yet to find one that really works for me.

Immersed (https://www.immersed.com/) on Quest 2 is probably the one which comes closest, in software terms, to what I wanted. And I know that Renji Bijoy and his team do use Immersed to do work on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, my old eyes still have issues doing work for a full day using Immersed and Quest 2 😕

To be clear, this is not an issue with Immersed. It’s just that the current hardware does not have the display resolution to display text in a way that isn’t jarring, at least for my own use.

So I was pinning my hopes on Vision Pro, but Karl seems to think that this will be just that — a hope, and not something which will turn out to be reality.

I’ll still wait to try it out myself, but at this point, I’m thinking “Maybe the next version?”

#Apple #VisionPro #MonitorReplacement #Hardware #Analysis #AR #VR

@f This was an interesting read, albeit way over my head. I’d make the distinction that Apple never promoted Apple Vision Pro as a “multiple monitor” replacement. The marketing images show multiple apps running side-by-side, but those are native visionOS apps entirely. Then again, if you have a native visionOS app like Safari, why would we want to run Safari through a virtual monitor if a better experience is running the native variant?

@branfonk I can’t speak for Karl (the author) since I’m not the author of the article, but I don’t believe his point was specifically “multi-monitor” or that he was claiming that that was Apple’s main focus.

My understanding was, that he was talking more about the fact that people (including myself) are looking at VisionPro as a monitor replacement solution. I don’t care about the multi-monitor aspect myself, but I do want a compact/portable monitor replacement solution.

Plus, the multi-monitor aspect might come from the fact that on Meta Quest, you can run only one app at a time. So you have to have a specific app to provide monitor/multi-monitor support.

On VisionPro, since you can run multiple apps as windows, it becomes sort of a defacto multi-monitor set up by simply having multiple large windows for different apps …

@f Totally understood! For what it's worth, I remember that in one of the WWDC Labs related to Apple Vision Pro, one of the Apple engineers mentioned that he uses Mac Virtual Display Mode every day with Xcode. Obviously something we need to see first-hand, but if there's confidence that someone could code in Xcode with enough detail and legibility through Apple Vision Pro, that excites me for the virtual monitor replacement concept here.

@branfonk As I mentioned in my original post, the folk at Immersed have been using virtual monitors in Quest 2 for several years now 🙂

And yet, I can’t use that for more than an hour or two without it getting uncomfortable for me.

Being able to ≠ comfortable 😛

@f Valid point! I like that analogy. I’ll be excited to try this out when the headset is available. Definitely curious what the experience will be like as I have never tried this on any other headset before. Thanks for sharing these resources, super great reads!

@branfonk Happy to share 🙂

Like you, I’m excited to try it out. Opinions are simply that, opinions. And while I temper my expectations based on them, I do want to try it out for myself to know if it will work for me personally despite the reservations of others.

I’ve tried multiple VR headsets with the hope of finding one which will allow me to be free of monitors. So far, no luck.

But let’s see how AVP fares when it comes out since that has higher display specs than any of the others I’ve tried 🙂