Apple's Working on a Powerful, Wireless Headset for Both AR, VR (cnet.com) 65
Apple CEO Tim Cook has nothing but praise for augmented reality, saying it's a technology that's potentially as important as the iPhone. It turns out he may have big plans for virtual reality too. From a report: The company is working on a headset capable of running both AR and VR technology, according to a person familiar with Apple's plans. Plans so far call for an 8K display for each eye -- higher resolution than today's best TVs -- that would be untethered from a computer or smartphone, the person said. The project, codenamed T288, is still in its early stages but is slated for release in 2020. Apple still could change or scrap its plans. It's notable that Apple is working on a headset that combines both AR and VR given its intense focus over the past year on pushing augmented reality in iPhones and iPads. Cook has said he sees bigger possibilities in AR than VR, partly because augmented reality allows you to be more present. Either way, it's vital for Apple to expand beyond its iPhones, currently its top moneymaker, and the slowing mobile market.
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There you go, champ! [macrumors.com]
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"Links or it didn't happen."
Doesn't matter, it has no headphone jack.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Performance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Powerful hardware isn't necessary when they have eye tracking and foveated rendering. The human eye only sees high resolution in a tiny spot in the center [seul.org], everything else can be rendered at much lower resolutions.
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Foveated rendering? That would add further savings but I doubt it's practical. You would need a ridiculously low latency, I don't believe in it. Perhaps a very broad notion of where your eyes are looking can be used to determine which broad areas are rendered at half res.. That'd be all.
Bandwidth of present day HDMI/DP links is already something like 2000 times that of the human optic nerve and yet this is still at least 100 times short of what would actually be required to drive a VR display to the limit of human vision using current photon spamming techniques.
Regardless of challenges of Foveated rendering it WILL HAPPEN no matter what. There is no viable path forward that does not involve foveated rendering.
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Foveated rendering? That would add further savings but I doubt it's practical. You would need a ridiculously low latency, I don't believe in it.
What kind of ridiculously low latency do you think you could get if you only render a 600x600 image? How long do you think it takes for a saccade to track and stabilize?
I'd imagine you'd have two rendering paths, one for a low-resolution overall image, one to track the eye and render that 600x600 image at the predicted point that the eye will be looking at in the next millisecond. Update about 1000 times per second.
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You don't even need to update the scene more often, just go from low resolution to high resolution in that one small patch. I'd think updating the scene and doing a low resolution rendering every 8 ms would be plenty fast. If the stuff being done with ray tracing works out, the high resolution patch might even be done that way.
I'm guessing you'd do this with direct updates to groups of pixels on the screen, with no reference to a scan frequency, just how fast it takes to update 600x600 pixels.
The low reso
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More vapor...
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Found the guy who has no idea what vaporware means.
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Latency is the problem. A wireless system will have to compress the video, transmit it with extra error correction data, and decode it for display.
It also adds more latency to the head tracking sensors.
VR is extremely sensitive to latency. Not to mention power hungry.
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Re: Performance? (Score:2)
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AR doesn't completely fill the view, they only have to display the virtual objects/environment/etc.
It also depends on the level of details they're targeting. Just because they want to use 8K displays doesn't mean the end result has to look like the best games on the market today. For all we know, they could very well use flat shading with no textures, etc. The use of 8K may only be to avoid having "pixel edges".
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"2 x 8k screens at, say, 90hz (minimum needed really) is going to require some seriously hefty hardware."
Indeed, right now, the helmet weighs around 800 pounds, so IOW, the helmet wears you, not the other way 'round.
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LCD or OLED screens etc. don't need an "Hz".
Unless you play a game and want the aim of your cross hair displayed accurately, and for that 40Hz is more than enough. The synchronization of your mouse with what you see, and via internet, were you aim at, is 100 times more important than the "refresh rate" of your screen.
Hint: the old 50Hz/60Hz CRT screens projected "half images" with that rate, and that did not really have any relation to online games or cross hairs but was the technological limitation of the
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Your eyes are not able to detect a difference above about 30Hz - 50Hz.
The only difference, as I pointed out, is for aiming with a cross hair using e.g a mouse, where two or three pixels difference decide if you hit or miss.
Nausea is usually caused by your balance organs in the ear. You see something but feel nothing related to it, refresh rates of screens have no influence on that.
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Your link supports my point.
Frame rate is only relevant if you can relate something to it, like moving the mouse.
A normal LCD or OLED has no frame rate like an CRT, a static picture is a static picture.
Frame rates come from CRTs, were you needed to refresh the screen, 50 times a second to get a picture.
Traditionally that was done with half pictures. the first picture illuminating the odd rows on the CRT, and the next one the even rows. As soon as we reached about 100Hz (actually 70Hz) the screen did no long
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Sounds like you too have a Dragon Spirit.
Only $6000 (Score:1)
And it will run on almost all the Apple hardware, except the MacBook pro.
Good luck getting it to run on anything not Apple.
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The only thing that this makes the needle on my give'o'shit meter shiver is that this might help push VR more main stream.
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Since the nausea is caused by the mixed messages the eyes (you are moving!) and inner ear (no you aren't!) are sending to the brain, can it ever be solved?
One of my best friend gets nausea from playing FPSs on a PC. I told her to push the monitor back so her eyes could see more of a "stable" image, the wall behind the monitor. While it didn't completely solve the problem, it definitely helped.
The nausea of "cheap" VR is not exactly a great selling point. Play this game on our VR and get sea-sick for free
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You got me...Why is this even news? Heck, all companies are surely doing something all the time. Sometimes, I get tired of Apple news.
Is this all media companies have got?
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Not much new there (Score:1)
Sounds great (Score:2)
Maybe next they can work on a powerful escape key and usb port on the macbook pro.
Seriously... (Score:2)
A headset isn't SteveJobs launching the first iPhone category killer, industry disruptor nor bet the company innovation.
Sadly (Score:2)
i#ts gonna fail and hard in their face (Score:1)