Simula One vs. Quest 2 vs. Valve Index

One of my friends recently took a position at Apple to specifically work on this hardware and I get the impression they’re hoping to ship sooner rather than later.

Every year Apple is one year away from releasing its supposed AR headset. Google basically abandoned Daydream (which was gaming/entertainment focused anyway). Microsoft had a great early Hololens prototype, but doesn't seem to be pushing consumer facing AR/VR at all (instead selling contracts to the military??).

Meta is investing heavily in VR (which is cool), but is unfortunately jamming it through the awkward framing of "make everything in VR a social network", which we're not fans of: https://simulavr.com/blog/we-dont-want-the-metaverse/

In any event, we're really excited to help bring a Linux VRC to market that is focused primarily on office work, programmer productivity, and general purpose computing. =]

VR is in a very good place, but it still has a lot of jank. I imagine Apple is working through as much of that as possible before releasing anything.

Furthermore, there are a lot of different smartphones out there with different performance attributes. This makes is much harder to make a compelling VR experience, because you trend towards the lowest common denominator. Another point is that while yes, a smartphone has almost the same components as a VR headset, you can optimize the components and space much better if you are using it for a specific use case (which is as a VR headset) and not a general purpose phone. Finally, it's much easier to keep your VR headset charged and ready to go compared to relying on your phone to jump into VR.

Oculus already tried the phone route and abandoned it because of the inherent limitations of not controlling the whole hardware stack. Let's look at first mobile Oculus headset, the Oculus GO which was binary compatible with content made for GearVR;

- Performed better than GearVR with a far slower SoC than the Galaxy handsets because the thermal solution could be designed around the headset.

- Cost $200 vs the $1000 for a Galaxy handset + GearVR

- Was more comfortable with higher weight because of better distribution across the headset instead of being concentrated in the front where the phone attaches.

- The display was sharper with a lower resolution than GearVR, because you design the panel differently for headset than a handset

I'm not sure what part of having a separate smartphone as a compute unit makes it any easier. It might even be harder to do.

Graphically the native-quest stuff is relatively basic to run well on the hardware but for the kinds of things I enjoy most it doesn’t really matter/bother me. I use Virtual Desktops for PCVR on the quest 2 and in some cases I think the fancier graphics are worse. I prefer best saber natively on the quest because it has way less effects that reduce readability.

They are also using/pitching ASW as a method to effectively double frame rate so they can up the fidelity and maintain a high frame rate. I haven’t played anything that does this yet as far as I know but I’m a little skeptical on this technique.

I got one for the boy a year ago (last christmas present) and while he uses it a lot I use it more connected to my PC for elite dangerous etc.

The extra resolution over the Rift S I had/have is well worth it (text is readable on ship displays on the Quest 2, not on the Rift S) - for the price they are an excellent bit of kit.

You often need 2-4x more panel resolution than the effective resolution to the viewer, just to deal with those factors (though this does vary wildly with lens and panel design).

I wish we had a better system wherein the facilitator of funding, Kickstarter, would require an action plan, goals, dates, and skeptically reviewed the progress and required the claims to be met. Along with limiting initial funding and splitting it into funding rounds based on delivery of the goal plans and proof of tangibility. Or whatever.

Meh, pass. The Index is at 130 degrees and even that looks like you're looking through a pair of toilet paper rolls.

Why do they bother going with such high resolution if they don't expand the FoV? It's just gonna chug more with your average mid range graphics card.

The "95% light path amplification" for their pancake lenses is also either misleading or an impossibly high transmission figure for pancake optics. Maybe I just misinterpreted this though.

I won't support any crowdfunding projects after that.

With that said, we will definitely look back in 5-10 years in horror at how large and bulky our VR headsets were. Keeping weight down will be a critical factor in driving up "all-day" usage from knowledge workers.

Agreed RE neck pain though. Our goal is to make a VR Computer (VRC) so good that it completely replaces laptops/PCs, but we can't do that if the headset is too heavy.

I know these things will get smaller and have higher resolutions, no cables, etc. But I am really not looking forward to having an antenna strapped to my head all day long.

It's obvious that many young people don't have a problem with that, since bt headphones seem incredibly popular and well on their way to replace the cords, but I am not like that

Intel also has the NUC compute element solution which significantly simplifies the EE and allows for a seamless upgrade to e.g. Alder Lake.

We're approaching the limit of what we can do with a 3 person team, and we need to place orders for our components so the insane lead times at least result in a product that's soon enough. We can't do that without both funding and an expectation of how many units we'll ship.

Hand tracking is TBD because ultraleap still hasn't V5 Linux support, so we might need to pivot to a different solution. We'll definitely have some form.

Eye tracking is the one feature we're still undecided on, but right now we're tending towards yes. It allows us to have automatic IPD adjustment which is a requirement for our class.

SLAM for this kind of headset is just plain difficult, so we need to both evaluate different solutions (see previous blog post) and hire more people if we end up with a custom solution. Backup plan is to just use a module but it's less preferable.