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Apple Vision Pro (AVP), It Begins and iFixit’s “Extreme Unboxing”
Introduction
Today, I picked up my Apple Vision Pro (AVP) at the Apple Store. I won’t bother you with yet another unboxing video. When you pick it up at the store, they give you a nice custom-made shopping bag for the AVP’s box (left). They give you about a 30-minute guided tour with a store-owned demo headset, and when you are all done with the tour, they give you yours in a sealed box.
iFixit asked if I would help identify some of the optics during their AVP “Extreme Unboxing” (it is Apple; we need a better word for “teardown”). I have helped iFixit in the past with their similar efforts on the Magic Leap One and Meta Quest Pro and readily agreed to help in any way that I could.
iFixit’s “Extreme Unboxing”
As per iFixit’s usual habit, they took the unboxing of a new product to the extreme. They published the first of several videos of their extreme unboxing of the AVP today (Feb. 3rd, 2023). You can expect more videos to follow.
Perhaps the most unexpected thing iFixit showed in the first iFixit video is that the Eyesight (front display) has more than a single lenticular lens in front of the Eyesight’s OLED display. There is a second lens-like element and/or a brightness enhancement film (BEF). BEF films a series of triangular refraction elements that act in one direction, similar to a lenticular lens.
iFixit also showed a glimpse of the AVP’s pancake optics and the OLED microdisplay used for each eye toward the end of the video. The AVP uses pancake optics as described in Apple Vision Pro (Part 4) – Hypervision Pancake Optics Analysis.
Closing
That’s it for today. I mostly wanted to let everyone know about the iFixit extreme unboxing. I have a lot of work to do to analyze the Apple Vision Pro.
Can’t wait for the deep dive in
I think the OLED Microdisplay used here is the ECX344A from Sony
By all reports I have seen, the backplane silicon was designed by Apple and then Sony did the OLED “assembly” (bonded the flex to the backplane, applied the OLED, apply micro lens array, sealed the device, and applied a heat sink backing). Overall, it is probably close to the ECX3344A from Sony, but enough different in signals and exact pixel dimensions that it is not interchangeable.
I’m looking forward your upcoming articles.
It’s become clear that all the current crop of reviews are too generalist, too tech journalist in outlook to give an idea of how the AVP will fare in more specialist areas such as CAD and architecture. Each reviewer is trying to judge the AVP by half a dozen half baked criteria at once.
Tech journalists see the iPad as a way of watching movies and typing emails, even though it has solid roles in industry such as site surveying or live audio mixing. Indeed, vendors of CAD software that never make a Mac version have released ‘viewers’, collaboration and markup tools for the iPad. Industrial equipment such as Leica laser scanners often use iPads for user interface and data sharing.
I mention this because there is a curious disconnect: applications that best suit an AR / VR device – design, architecture, construction, games – are have historically been best supported on Windows PCs, and are sparsely represented on Macs.
Still, Unity (a proprietary game engine that is often used for architectural visualisation) and the open source Universal Scene Descriptor ( originally developed by Pixar, being pushed for Building Information Management) are natively supported by the Vision Pro. Onshape, a cloud hosted CAD package, will be soon releasing a Vision Pro app.
Thankfully we will have Mr Guttag compiling objective measures of the AVP’s capabilities and limitations, so we can better gauge what 3rd party developers might do with it – and it’s competitors – down the road.
I watch with interest.
Well said here. I am looking forward to a deep dive in your analysis.
You cannot expect generalist media targeting a consumer audience to cater to a niche business audience. And it makes sense for Apple to seed early devices to influencers with a huge audience.
make a video review
I plan to do a mix of written and video reporting.
I am looking forward to reading your deep analysis
When are we finally going to find out the resolution?
I can’t believe I cannot find the resolution numbers anywhere yet.
We will probably know soon. It “only” takes putting the display on a microscope. I may be able to figure it out looking through the lens (I’m not tearing mine down).
I think it’s been found from what I am reading. Potentially 3680×3140.
Now to find out the true FOVs 🙂
Thanks Nik, that are the “common” numbers going around. Some amount of them are then going to cut off by the roughly oval optics.
Re: resolution: also seeing 3840×3552 as a possible resolution.
Really looking forward to FOV and PPD numbers! And it would be nifty to know the focal distance, I keep being surprised how few estimates I’ve run across, they’re still all over the map.
Of course FOV will vary depending on the face + facial interface used, and PPD as well to some degree.
I keep wondering if there’s any existing standardized way of looking at “brow to eye” depth and “nose bridge to eye depth” (etc.), both for corrective eyeglasses and head-mounted displays, seems crucial in several ways. E.g. with eyeglasses, you want to know how far they will sit from the eye, how much of the wearer’s FOV will be covered by a given set of lens, which parts of the lens will be seen by the center of the eye while the eye is moving. Implications for head-mounted displays should be obvious to anyone frequenting this establishment. Particularly crucial for non-adjustable waveguide / birdbath glasses, where IPD and face shape make a huge difference.
FYI, the iFixit article that goes with the video has some additional photos & information not included in the video, worth a look if you’ve only watched the video: https://www.ifixit.com/News/90137/vision-pro-teardown-why-those-fake-eyes-look-so-weird
Hi Karl,
Have you heard anything about Immersed Visor? https://shop.visor.com/ It seems too good to be true for a software start-up and no real demo was given. The company claim to ship beginning mid-2024.
I have heard about it, but have not seen it. I think they are lying about the 4K “per eye” which does not bode well for the rest of their claims. I’m expected it to be similar to an early Nreal/Xreal.
Re: Immersed Visor: I’m hoping they’ll invite you to Austin when they’re ready to do tech demos, currently slated for “Q2”, but yeah, one never knows! Obviously the whole thing could be a flop, or vaporware, etc., but it doesn’t seem like they’ve left themselves much wiggle room to pull a “Surprise! It’s actually only 4K if you add both eyes together, ha, whoops!” without really pissing off a lot of people. They’re claiming 102 horizontal FOV & 92 vertical FOV, with a central PPD of 43 (over an unspecified area, as is unfortunately the custom). But yeah, they still need to (A) show prototypes to people and (B) start shipping actual units, before it can be recommended in good conscious. I’m aware there have been many broken promises in the VR world, and of course more broadly in the tech world, e.g. so many Kickstarters that fizzled out and never shipped anything. (Visor is not a Kickstarter, but they are accepting preorders, so there is a somewhat of a parallel)
Hello Karl. Looking forward to your upcoming posts on the AVP. A lot of reviews so far are very superficial, and many of them seem to lack the technical understanding to properly comment on the technology Apple has used. My interest is primarily on the world-facing cameras. If I could ask, is your impression after testing the headset that the cameras are autofocus or fixed focus? Thank you.
Thanks,
I believe the cameras have autofocus, but I don’t know what controls where it focuses (like a “normal” camera or with eye tracking). The cameras are poorly aligned with the eyes as discussed in earlier my earlier articles on the AVP. This does not seem to cause much of an issue for “far work” but is an issue for working close up. If you use your eyes to touch your nose, you will end up touching below the nose. As I wrote in https://kguttag.com/2023/06/16/apple-vision-pro-part-2-hardware-issues/, Steve Mann has written that this will cause vision issues.
The camera are slightly lower in resolution than the “peak” resolution in the center of the displays. Due to the optics the display resolution appears to be highly variable and the AVP uses algorithms to correct for geometric distortion but cannot prevent at the loss resolution in the periphery. I have not run an eye chart test yet, but the headset is clearly not give 20/20 vision even in the center. It is more like 20/30 to 20/40 vision. What I don’t know yet is whether it is the camera’s, the display, or the algorithms (likely some combination) that is limiting the resolution.
Thanks for the quick reply! As said, looking forward to your inputs on the teardown
Hello:) do you think avp have T-lens from polight inside?
No idea.
How are you feeling about the unit after 10 days now? I am returning mine, ended up very disappointed in the optics and find it causes bad eye strain when I don’t have issues in other headsets. Poor stereo overlap, blurry/smearing/streaking on the edges of the FOV, and what feels like a small sweet spot make this a headset that feels so much more optically demanding to tolerate than my Quest 3. Disappointing because I love just about everything else about it.
The eye strain/headaches is still pretty bad for me. I have a problem with all VR but not optical AR/MR headsets. I was talking to Brad Lynch (SadlyItsBradley) the other day and told him it felt like my eyes were about to explode.
I have not measured the binocular overlap yet, but subjectively it seems to be about the same as the Quest Pro and Quest 3.
The image quality as seen through the optics is not all that great at least in terms of white uniformity. I see a cyan (red deficient) ring on the outside and reddish splotches in the center of the of a while image (working on that article today).
I would have never bought the AVP for personal use with all its problems. It is still an solution in search of the problem it solves. It is too bulky and fragile (not to mention lacking theft insurance from Apple and might be expensive to add as a rider to a home insurance policy). I think it will make a lousy monitor replacement and the vast majority of people on planes will likely prefer a flat panel movie screen (I think the movie watching could be 3-D TV part two). We will have to see what happens once the “wild enthusiasm” and the “look at me, I’m living the future” stage wears off.