Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?
The Quest 3S has color passthrough and it's hardly an Apple-level device, and it's $349 in comparison.
I guess as a gamer, I don't care that much. I put on my headset to game, and if I need to step away for a moment, I'm more likely to take it off than to wander around my house with a headset on. Still, I thought color passthrough was now table stakes for a headset.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/the-steam-frame...
> The Frame’s four outward-facing monochrome cameras and IR illuminator seem to provide excellent tracking, though in a brief demo, the black-and-white passthrough view wasn’t useful for much except getting a general idea of my surroundings. Rowe says sticking with monochrome passthrough was an intentional choice because color passthrough would have added to the Frame’s price. “The core focus of the device is the gaming,” Rowe says.
> For those who want color passthrough and other changes to the headset, Valve has made its headset modular, including a dedicated expansion port in the nose piece designed to support extra cameras. The expansion port offers 2.5Gbps of bandwidth via MIPI and one lane of PCIe data.
Did anyone ever use that and did it live up to the hype? Or did you just get sick from having a headset on?
I don't specify which brand or model because I have gone through several pairs since then. They're all about the same and somewhat flimsy, but worth it for the reduced bulk.
How did you use these? Did you like them?
With this form factor, the main limitation is physical user input, not compatibility or fatigue. There's no battery or adapters or walled garden to mess around with. I would not be opposed to a touch pad or gesture system if it actually worked reliably and didn't require accessories or excessive motion from me.
For now, they're literally just a screen in a pair of glasses, and that's all I ever wanted. I'm sure there will be improvements to this category, but any product that strays from this core functionality will be a hard pass from me.
Pros:
- Price (~$200 one year ago)
- Display quality/resolution is fine
- Brightness is excellent, can use it in direct sunlight without issue
- Build quality is fine.
- It really is just a plug-and-play USB-C monitor that overlays on whatever you're looking at.
- The focal distance (~4 meters) is really nice since my eyes often get strained when working on my laptop screen
Cons:
- (BIG con) it turns out that the field of view is TOO large - I often can't see the system clock in the corner of my screen or the quickbar in games.
- It just has normal pads like for glasses, and they can get a little sore/leave a red mark since they're heavier than normal glasses
- It's powered by the same USB that delivers the display data, so while it works fine for my macbook, it won't display from my phone. I've seen that there are battery/power converter dongles to add power to the cable but haven't tried one.
So if I did it again I'd just check reviews and get whatever is cheap and well reviewed currently. I was thinking about finding some sort of airplane-friendly keyboard+mouse setup as well but it turns out that just using my laptop keyboard and touchpad works fine.
Haven’t tried on the AVP, I think it has way better displays than the OG Vive did.
PPD (pixels per degree):
* vive ~10ppd
* index ~11pdp
* quest3 ~25ppd
* steam frame ~30ppd
* AVP ~34ppd
while the ppd between the vive and the index is similar, from personal experience the coding experience on the index is far more comfortable, perhaps because of the significantly reduced 'screen door effect'.
I haven't purchased a meta quest 3 simply because i have no desire to give zuck money or have any kind of meta account, but perhaps i will have to see if i can't find one on ebay or something for cheap.
Curious if anyone is using it successfully for ergonomics (not just for the convenience of having a big monitor which is secondary for me - Macbook + iPad sidecar display is very travel-friendly but very difficult to use ergonomically away from home).
It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.
Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.
(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)
Looking down onto your lap sucks over time. Resting your head (pillow or other head support) while wearing AVP vs. holding it up is the key to using AVP for better ergonomics compared to using just the laptop.
There are only two first-adopters for any new technology: military and adult industry.
Without these you wont get any traction
https://www.three.co.uk/support/internet-and-apps/accessing-...
The prudishness is really holding back the industry.
You mean sitting in the cuck chair?
Cuck style content is of course available too. But not very common.
The content is usually VR180 meaning it's 180 degrees field of view (you can look around a bit but not behind you) and stereoscopic so you can see depth.
There's many live streamers in this mode of vision too.
These days there are several pro-grade solutions. Canon has a really nice dual fisheye lens for their R5 camera - https://www.canon.co.uk/store/canon-rf-5-2mm-f2-8l-dual-fish... , there's also some dedicated cameras in the pro-scene like the blackmagic ursa immersive: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursacine... if you have 30k$ to spend :)
In the low-end people tend to mod 360 degree cameras by taking them apart and putting the two cameras side by side in a 3D printed enclosure. Reddit has a community about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/VR180Film . You can get a gopro max 2 now for 400$ or so and it does 8K (you need a really high resolution because the viewer will only see part of the recording at a time!). Though modding is difficult because they tend to be action cameras and glued shut to avoid damage from shocks. But the resulting image quality is surprisingly great.
And the streamers use cameras from https://www.calfvr.com I believe. Not entirely sure though.
using as a spatial monitor was cool. for about 10min until my neck got tired of the added weight. but I’ll give credit that those 10min were pretty cool.
I have a battery pack I put in my pocket for the Quest 3 and I’m generally very happy with it.
Imagine if the vision pro could just be plugged into a small compute module with a battery or just plugged directly into a Macbook. It would be lighter, cheaper, and more flexible. I think a lot more people would have been interested in it.
It would be so cool to be able to plug in arbitrary input devices too, like a dvd player, but its understandable that others don’t feel this way, and it would totally not be an apple product if it did this.
One of their main imposed constraints was clearly to make the battery pocketable, which sadly precludes a lot of things which would have made it a better product, in favour of wider acceptability.
You can't move the compute away in a headset. I have worked for an XR OEM, and when you are designing a headset, you want the compute to be as close as possible from the cameras and displays, to achieve the lowest possible latency and avoid motion sickness for the users.
Even moving the compute to the back of the headset was not considered viable by our HW team. And we haven't spoken about the bandwidth required for all those cameras and UHD displays.
A better way to reduce the weight of the AVP would have been to remove the (useless IMO) front holographic screen, and to replace most of the glass and metal by plastic. And maybe move the battery pack to the back, to get a more balanced headset.
Just wanted to let you know the new Dual Knit bands are weighted in the back, and improve the balance a bunch.
Meta has shown pretty convincingly that you can literally stream VR apps/games over Wifi from a PC to a headset and have a great experience. You will need some compute on the device, as close as possible, but the bulk of the computing could be moved off.
The technology has actually gotten better since I last spent a significant amount of time with it.
Current Wi-Fi based streaming pipe mp4 frames and swing it around. That's slightly different from static raw frame wireless solutions before Oculus Quest.
Either way, it’s pretty alright nowadays, at least in my experience.
Though time in the seat *might* be making it easier for me.
I would be surprised to learn that nanoseconds of latency is worth more than much better compute, lower cost, lighter weight, more physical space in the device etc.
Is that really the case?
Also, it doesn't make the best virtual monitor anyway, as the display fidelity is about half-Retina, so all the pixels really stick out compared to every other display Apple's shipped in recent memory. A 1998 Powerbook has crisper text.
Wearing something heavy on the front of your face is simply not a pleasant experience.
Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.
Beoynd 2e has eye tracking. The added mass is just 1 g which is kind of hilarious. You could add 8 visual sensors for pass-through, inside-out tracking and hand tracking, adding maybe 10 g. Compute should probably be on the wired external unit or streamed wirelessly. Having it on-board would probably add less than 50g of mass though, but you also need cooling which is not very easy without adding mass. You could try something like structural heat piping through the headstrap or the battery wire.
Anyway I think it should definitely be doable under 200g, which would be much more comfortable than the current 750-800g.
Assuming that the Steam Frame isn't accompanied by a complete change to the current SteamVR experience that hasn't been so much as hinted at, alas, no, SteamVR is full of tiny targets to shoot. I've only ever used the Meta Quest 3S' native UI but the smallest targets there are generally significantly bigger than the smallest targets in the SteamVR UI. On the plus side, once you activate some of those small targets you can do some cursor navigation like a conventional UI, and having that option is a breath of fresh air... but it's completely inconsistent. You experience it as a bonus when it's available because it's not even consistent enough to "miss it when it is gone", let alone for it to be a consistent navigation method.
We may get the obvious eye-tracking upgrade but the targets are still pretty small, it's going to need to be very accurate.
I have never seen someone wear a VR headset in public that wasn’t part of a mall VR novelty attraction.
When I ski, I often raise my goggles to my forehead when I'm in the lift line, unless it's extremely bright or extremely cold. Specifically, because of the "antisocial, barrier, isolates" aspect of blocking my face.
I'm interested in the concept for computer work because I like very large monitors. Something like Vision Pro would work if it was similar to a ski helmet and goggles, where it's easy to lift the visor when talking to someone, and then flip it closed.
https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1cki7jc/brillian...
So yes, this is done and it can help.
KRVR - https://krvr.app/
This might be a little difficult seeing as how the largest gaming engine in the industry for AAA (unreal) is owned by a dude that has sued them for their store practices but shrug.
WWDC also just rolled out some quite exciting features to RealityKit: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/279/ as well as visionOS itself (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/287/)
It makes me wonder if Apple is really giving it up as news have claimed.
I don't think anyone serious has claimed that.
Apple shelved the follow up v2 over a year ago and signaled very clearly it was refocusing its XR efforts toward AR glasses.
There hasn't been a new Vision Pro component order since the late 2023, early 2024 original orders that were capped (by SSS's display capacity) at 500k units worth, so Apple hasn't sold even that tiny amount yet.
It was Tim Cook's baby, his last shot at a product legacy, and the guy that just inherited Cooks role put even the lesser Vision Air on ice, the last goggles product that was still on Apple's roadmap.
So, it's not dead, but it's clearly on life support with no goggles of any kind remaining on the roadmap and Apple's attention fully moved to glasses and AI.
My guess is it is basically a real world survey of how people would use such a device, and what developers would do with it. Then they could later focus on a cheaper product that is only a display, or a product that is only a media viewer, or a product that focuses on VR/AR applications while deemphasizing other use cases.
This is the version of reality that doesn’t require anyone to be stupid. In my experience if a reality candidate requires that someone is just really really stupid to arrive at the outcome (in this case Apple execs), probably you are missing something about someone’s perspective.
It seems like it would take up a majority of your personal item space. As someone who only packs a personal item for most flights, that’s a hard sell.
Can you reliably plug it in? It seems like the battery doesn’t last long enough for a long haul flight, and for shorter flights where the battery would hold up, the bulk doesn’t seem worth it. Of course, on the long flights, I’d hope to sleep, and having a cumbersome VR headset seems like it would be more trouble than it’s worth vs just watching the screen in the seat back.
When you get to your destination, do you use it there, or does it just sit around like a neck pillow?
If you can charge your phone, you can charge your vision pro. The battery itself can last any movie with no problem.
Mostly multiple safari windows opening on servers via webterm, cli and emacs.
It’s especially great when traveling.
Only problem, I cannot share a window when presenting…
For other work or entertainment that doesn't take advantage of its spatial features, I tend to revert to using a computer with an external display. The display in the Vision Pro cannot quite match the resolution and HDR headroom of the external display I ended up having (a Pro Display XDR). Maybe if it didn't get outclassed by my external display when displaying 2D content, I'd have additional motivation to use it more often.
That said, the battery cable was super annoying, id accidentally catch it multiple times per day. The battery is good for less than 2 hours so i used it plugged into the wall.
For zoom calls, the persona thing is hilariously bad, unusable in a business context. Interesting for a few minutes as a tech demo though.
The virtual layout is good - a big citrix app screen (its the ipad app) for remote desktop, zoom, safari etc off to the sides and then things like calendar widget pinned to physical wall. But text clarity / quality is just slightly not good enough for software development. Almost, its close. If you dont mind large fonts its good enough.
Ultimately returned it but it was a close run thing, i almost kept it.
I do still hanker for something like this, tempted to try xreal or other glasses but seems like the PPD is even lower.
I managed several days back to back, it's very like 1440p on a 27" and millions of people use that every day productively but when you're spending that kind of money, i don't want £200 monitor quality.
Careful using body-worn devices when plugged in. Medical power supplies have special requirements to avoid electrocution, because they are often powering equipment in contact with a person's body. Consumer power supplies probably don't, on the assumption that the device will not be charging whilst being worn.
People have died from using headphones plugged into USB chargers.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/faulty-usb-phone-charger...
At least here in the EU they do and i think it's the case in most countries world wide?
Looks like that 2014 case might have been a sub-standard charger that didn't conform to required safety standards?
I actually experienced a (cheap) charger exploding under my desk back around 2015.
There's a youtuber called BigClive that delights in tearing down the bad chargers. Ken Shirrif's blog is the best resource i know of for this topic though.
Anyway, i feel pretty safe with the vision pro plugged in with an apple charger. The battery does get warm though...
In that case it was a cheap USB supply, though there are other reports of similar. "Good" consumer power supply are designed to IEC standards, but to keep the cost down they are different standards to those used for wearable medical equipment. Medical equipment has to conform to IEC 60601, which governs things like electrical isolation and safe failure modes.
> i feel pretty safe
So be it. It is unlikely, but even a good power supply can fail in the face of a voltage surge on the mains. Absolutely don't wear it plugged in if there is any hint of a thunderstorm!
Just yesterday they announced a new OS with a number of interesting new features, like custom environments, improved click-with-your-eyes-controls (Dwell Control), a bunch more: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
seems like basically Vision Pro is going to become Vision XR. All roads lead to Rome.
Getting it comfortable was the most important step. The 6-months-old DualKnit band is really great for making it a lot more comfortable. An open face mod (eg $10 Macally on amazon) helps a lot with eye breathability, and restoring peripheral vision.
Also really great for being able to work well from anywhere.
Sad that so many people are sleeping on it, but what can you do? Check out r/VisionPro for tons of people that love theirs and use them constantly.
Similarly I tried the original HoloLens, many many years ago (2016?), with the similar waveguide technology. It was outside, at night, so relatively easy to see, albeit with jarringly tight field of view.
Without a doubt I'm excited about lightweight AR glasses that I can wear in public. My non-expert opinion is we're still a few years away.
In the meantime, I love my Apple goggles. For home usage only, and not when guests come over. Going open face (no lightshield) makes them feel a lot more like magic AR glasses, with the ~95% accurate passthrough.
But also not really a surprise given the difference in optics.
Not the same type of AR, but the Even G2 look very promising. Can't use them as an external screen, they're more of an assistant with notes, live translate, app ecosystem, etc. I imagine they might be useful as a moving teleprompter.
They get a B+ as daily glasses, but if more than one of the "killer features" (e.g. teleprompter, conversate, live translate) really gets your attention they are worth it.
For context, I have no problem using external monitors without my glasses. The only downside is very tired eyes at the end of a workday, but I can read text just fine.
Have you tried w/ contact lenses? I've seen that work well for friends when they try them out.
Xcode 27’s Device Hub now allows interacting with nearby dev devices (a bit better than Android Studio’s implementation). Super convenient change that makes it practical to do more things while in the recliner / VP.
This could have been a great device for gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, cinematographers... but Apple's fear of I/O ruined it.
Anytime part of the screen is dark and part is bright I get annoying reflections that I can't tolerate. Takes me right out of the film. That said the few 3d movies they have in 4k are amazing during the scenes that arent all dorked up due to the reflections.
Maybe its because I use the prescription inserts, but they're the official ones and it's blurry without them.
Also the battery stopped holding enough charge to get through a full film within a month or two and the replacement was two hundred dollars. I wouldn't resent it if I ever needed a battery, but I had to spring for it even though it stays plugged in the entire time I use. The stupid useless brick is required for it to turn on and it won't even allow pass-through when the cells go.
Idk if there’s an easy solution to this — maybe shared setups distributed to WeWork type spaces or something… but I suspect it’s the main barrier to adoption, assuming even just 10% of developers would share the same experience as you when they try it for the first time. (Or maybe there’s also a learning curve where it sucks on first experience, and your body gets used to it only after some prolonged usage?)
I've said before and I'll say it again, Apple/Meta need to have rental stands in major airports so I can rent a Vision Pro or Meta Quest for my cross-country flights. That would be a huge way to "try before you buy" !
I agree that the price is the barrier. If it was around $1k I would MAYBE think about buying one. I'm curious to see what the newer Valve headset retails at, even though that's more for play than for work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1t37xvi/psa_you_...
and can I put both into your plane seat if I’m next to you? =]
The two things that consistently delight me are AI and my AVP. I'm trying to combine the two.
I use it occasionally, either to watch movies or the content that Apple releases specifically for it.
The ability to focus on something while the world around me melts away. When it is just myself, the virtual display of my Mac, and the drifting grains of gypsum at White Sands, I seem to be at peace with whatever I am working on.
I just can't justify the $5000CAD starting price to watch movies. I've considered getting a used M2 model, but I believe you still need to get fitted for the eye piece to ensure a proper seal, and the closest Apple Store to me is about a 6 hour drive. Also I'm not even sure all the cool new Siri stuff yesterday would be supported on the M2 model, so it'd kinda suck to spend all that money and be locked out of new features right away.
Swappa’s another place I’ve had decent success for used Apple products but like any market, it’s often a matter timing and luck.
never owned one but this makes sense
My main use cases are Mac Virtual Display, movies/entertainment, PS5 gaming [0], casual browsing, and -- most surprisingly -- reading. The first few are pretty self-explanatory, but reading is one of my favorite unexpected niche use cases. It's really nice having a floating book (via Apple Books) perfectly positioned at eye height in front of you in your favorite virtual environment, listening to music of your choice. This use case didn't really take off for me until the recent dual knit band fixed the comfort issue. I dabbled with reading in the Vision Pro before but the comfort level just wasn't quite there yet. The new band is good enough to make this one of my favorite ways to read today.
[0] I use the Portal app for this. It lets you stream PS5 games into a gigantic screen inside the Vision Pro. I combine it with a Dolby Atmos surround sound speaker setup in our upstairs game room. It's truly a stunning experience. The only reason I wouldn't declare this the gold standard way to play games is because it currently relies on WiFi streaming, which introduces some input lag. The lag tends not to be an issue with the games that I play, but it's enough that you wouldn't play competitive twitch shooters with it. If Apple had just allowed you to plug in an external device via HDMI, this would hands down be the most impressive gaming experience out there. I'm personally very sensitive to input lag thanks to years of low-latency PC gaming, but I know not everybody is. If you're not, you may be even more impressed by it than me.
And it doesn't put strain on my neck like others have experienced.
One bonus benefit is that with normal computer screens I have to wear glasses, but inside the Vision Pro, I don't. So when eye strain becomes an issue after hours of programming, it's very comfortable to switch to the Vision Pro. Much less eye strain.
In the same sense, your dependency on corrective lenses and the nature of the problem also stand out. Some people feel fine, Some people feel fine with script matching inserts, some people can't handle internal reflections and the focus effects of a "pseudo horizon" on your focus region.
TL;DR Some people.
Also, media consumption in general on it is unparalleled. I watched Lawrence of Arabia a few weeks ago in the Super Panavision 70 native resolution and was in awe of how much a difference it made for my appreciation of the film.
It's not a product for everyone, but I've not used anything quite like it. One of my favorite memories of it was getting my father to send me some of his favorite photographs from his travels (he's a professional photographer with a great camera setup) and making an album of spacial and panoramic photos for him and some other family members to relive. My grandma literally cried because she can't travel anymore so being able to see the world as if she was there was super meaningful :)
The window management was buggy. I didn’t see a point to the virtual displays on the Mac. Maybe it was me, but some elements were tack sharp while others felt blurry, which messed with me a lot. The battery didn’t last long enough to feel like I could be cordless, but also got in the way while plugged in. Overall the whole experience felt really finicky.
Some of the immersive content was cool, but the cuts in the video were really jarring. I felt like they should have been done in a single shot.
Movies were… ok… I watched Avatar for the first time, and in 3D. It was fine. Not enough for me to sit down for 3 hours to watch the 2nd one before returning it.
I thought the dinosaur demo was the most impressive, but it was rather short and I didn’t know where to go for more stuff like that. I had the new one, so that demo was already old by the time I tried it, and still the more impressive part of what I tried.
I found some immersive 360 travel videos on YouTube, which were cool, but limited.
I wanted to like it, but the discomfort wasn’t worth what it gave me.
It is still heavy as hell on my head, even with tons of 3rd party harnesses. On the other hand, my neck muscles are getting stronger.
Perhaps I can buy the Galaxy XR some day, they are half the price and similarly specced. But it's not available in Europe at all (and the vision pro only in a handful of countries)
I use my Quest 3 and Xreal (AR) headsets a lot though. For content (including adult as I've mentioned elsewhere, but not only of course) and also development of dedicated corporate stuff.