AR/VR/MR Headsets Thoughts

I've had the Quest 3 for over a month at this point. And I have a number of thoughts on the Quest 3, but they also apply rather handily to the Apple Vision Pro as far as I've seen.

The first is, in my opinion, these should NOT be marketed as end consumer electronics devices. The part most likely to fail is the lenses and they are not user replaceable. As far as I know they are just simply, not replaceable. Apple does win some points here for 2 simply things:

1. You can purchase lens inserts at the time of purchase and
2. It comes with a cover for the external side of the display.

This provides some protection for the 2 most likely sources of damage; scratches and sun damage respectively. Though, from what I heard the inserts are not standard and I'm not sure if you can get a prescription-less version. Vision Pro also fails in having parts of the device tailored in some small measure to a single user's face.

My issue is that these devices are FAR too easy to damage

The next bit of criticism is how the products are positioned in the market. I had been writing a post about the Quest 3 and how my biggest criticism was really that it didn't make a strong argument over the Quest 2. My brother, who has consumed the Kool-Aid reminds me that the FoV is larger and that the pixel density in greater and that the processing power is better. I used his headset over Christmas, I didn't notice enough to care and there isn't enough at the moment making use of the passthrough to make the color passthrough a major selling feature. 

So, my beef becomes simple; the price delta, especially on the 512GB model is simply too high. Apple Vision Pro takes this criticism and laughs in it's face, but not because it does better. Rather, because it takes this to the extreme. Yes, Apple's headset has even better resolution, even better passthrough and even faster hardware. However, the ecosystem is non-existent at present and it is 10x the cost of the Quest 2. Furthermore, the Quest 3 is already adding many of the features that were supposed to set this new entrant above Meta's.

Apple does look to do things like displaying a monitor inside the headset in a MUCH better fashion. The problem? That is software. Nothing about the $3500USD price tag enabled that. And there is not much stopping Meta (or a 3rd party) from improving on it over time. 

Enough of the bad. If you can get past the price point on whichever device draws you in I think you'll be surprised at how well things work. Especially if you've used a headset in the past. Almost everything people rave about on the Apple Vision Pro is true of the Quest 3 (and 2) with the one I've heard the most being people raving about how well the Vision Pro anchors things into virtual space. Incidentally, this is exactly what struck me as magical about my brother's Quest 2 and subsequently the Quest 3. 

Case in point, I had brought the headset into the basement and setup my area down there. Then a few days later I had brought it back upstairs. I fire it up and I can see an outline in the distance, more or less a floor below with everything oriented where I had last set it up. That is crazy.

Honestly, my thoughts on the matter are quite simple (and likely controversial). For these devices to replace all of the things people want them to replace such as:

• Gaming consoles
• TV's
• Monitors
• Workout equipment

Then they need to:

• Last as long or longer on average
• Have a reasonable cost in relation to many of these devices
• Be easily swappable and shareable among family members
• Or... be reasonably priced enough to buy 2-4 per household

In my head the current devices are too disposable and too expensive and you cannot really have a shared experience without multiple devices which exacerbates the cost problem.

There is a solution (I think). Make the headsets themselves less compute intensive by moving a lot of the processing power to a base station using an frequency which won't have much interference. Air Link effectively does this today. How does this fix things? Most of the problem with cost lies in the shrinking of components. If the headset were basically just enough computer to connect to this network, feed the sensor data to the host and render it, then it would need a much less power hungry SoC. This would need less cooling and battery for the same performance and also less chipset real estate. This would make the BoM of the headset lighter as well as reducing a lot of weight and thickness and bring down the cost.

The base station, if it were using the same chipset as the Quest 3 today would likely not increase the cost much and open some interesting options. No additional battery would be needed, it could hook up to the mains. It could also have more space for airflow or even just better airflow, so better performance even with the same hardware might be possible. 

The more interesting option though is that it makes possible a "pro" base station that builds in the connectivity and runs on a MUCH more powerful CPU and GPU and can drive multiple headsets at once. Now you have the main system and can buy a bunch of more affordable headsets for the entire family and not sweat it if one happens to get damaged a few months in.