2412 x 2288 per eye (and horizontal FoV is around 70 degrees). Not sure it's really enough for monitor replacement, but certainly an upgrade over Xreal's offerings.

I think they're calling them "VR" because they use camera pass-through for AR, whereas all their other AR products are see-through. (I think this is a reasonable place to draw the line - pass-through AR kind of sucks in my experience. Although maybe a third category would be appropriate.)

They've been using that branding since last June (with the reorg into "Meta Superintelligence Labs"), for better or worse.

Rumor is they are going to do a Quest 4 (late next year).

I agree that these seem like a stopgap short of the thing everyone wants - Vision Pro specs (ahaha) in a pair of regular glasses.

Personally, as a glasses-wearer, I'm not quite convinced it's the right target though - even my 20 gram glasses are uncomfortable to wear all day and I take them off whenever they're not needed. I'd rather have a ski-goggle device (similarly light, but with the weight more evenly distributed, and still with optical see-through) with fewer performance compromises. Of course that wouldn't let the manufacturer dominate "the next form of personal computing" or whatever.

Yeah, I've switched to ultra-light rimless glasses and I really do not want to go back. I no longer have sore nose-pad dents at the end of the day.

(I have a fairly strong prescription, so the literal glass in my glasses does weigh a fair bit more than for most people. Yay modern optional media! It's so much nicer than it used to be)

I don't know if there's an overall limit, but their regular tunnels have a limit of 100 MB per request which breaks stuff like Immich.

I get the impression that Nvidia employees don't care too much - I started seeing fully AI-written "documentation" on some of their smaller projects more than a year ago (i.e., before it was even slightly a good idea).

> People never really read documentation before.

The heck you talking about? How do you think we wrote software for the last 50 years?

Yeah lol it’s basically the only reliable way to know how things work. Pre-AI, I read documentation for libraries that I used almost every day.

And now with AI I’m using it to fact check Claude. And still reading it for myself to understand why other peoples code is written a certain way. It’s basically the most important thing to reference when coding.

Sure today Claude can just read the library code and tell you what a function does or how to do something. But it still won’t tell you why something is a certain way or won’t figure out specifically-designed usage patterns as reliably as the author telling you “this is an example of doing x”

I really appreciated a friend reaching out to me with some PHP questions today. It was, to me, fairly basic but he was having a hard time grokking the documentation vs reading what his coworker wrote (some code using output buffering).

I brushed up on the docs since I haven't touched it in a couple years, explained my understanding of the ob_* functions, and gave him a very brief demo on a PHP playground.

He could have asked any LLM to tell him what that chunk of code did, and to explain the three functions, and instead he reached out to me. That felt _good_. Talking shop has always been a good way for me to form connections, because the pressure to socialize becomes task-oriented and you start to learn about how people think and feel, and that opens up easier paths for actual connection. It was nice.

Just like the Old Internet still exists - niche websites, mailing lists, probably a BBS or two (likely more right?), the pre-LLM world will trudge on, for a time. I hope LLMs actually lead to good things for people in the long run, and for now I personally will remain sparse in my usage of them.

Where do you work? Sounds nice!

only reliable way to know how things work is to reverse engineer them

But that’s my point, it’ll tell you how things work. In libraries I’m using, you can just read the code yourself.

You need the documentation to know why certain things work a particular way, or to know why some relationships or methods are the way they are

My absolute greatest skill in my career, that has consistently set me apart from my peers, is that I read documentation thoroughly.

It is shocking how much of a differentiator this is. You will discover that the software you’re already using is much more capable than you realized.

The good news is your attention to actually reading and understanding documentation will differentiate you more and more as others (short-sighted, IMO) outsource understanding to an LLM.

when you start to internalize that these kinds of statements are an indication of how the average developer of the last 10-15 years operated the adoption rate of AI makes a lot more sense

This is extremely depressing, I think I'm coming around to the realization that you may be right and I've been naive my entire career.

Copy past the example code, then tweak until it breaks? If we were meant to read documentation, not reading it would cause a compiler error!

A small percentage of engineers

What? People never read documentation?

I start with reading and exploring documentation first; with the codebase as a secondary tab.

When it’s not LLM generated, documentation is supposed to be easier to read and more insightful than code.

>People never really read documentation before.

Speak for yourself. I read it.

People definitely like teepees and yurts (and thatched roofs, dry stone walls, log cabins, etc.), it's just that at some point the practicality gap becomes too wide to contemplate.

But this is a reasonable point to raise. Although both would serve their purpose a concrete viaduct is much cheaper to build than a masonry one, to the point that it may be difficult to justify the latter no matter how strong the public preference is for it.

Somehow, it always makes me smile that the Glenfinnan Viaduct (as seen in Harry Potter) is concrete. I'm not sure quite why.

Agreed; not writing your own prose is lazy and disrespectful. If you expect/hope that humans will read something, you should demonstrate that it is important to you by spending your own time on it, and you should respect their time by being as clear and eloquent as possible (which Claude et al. are decidedly not, for now anyway).

You could do it, but the resolution isn't high enough for it to be a good experience. (2160x2160 per eye sounds like a lot, but with a 110 degree fov it's only ~19 pixels per degree. Which is like sitting very close to a 27" 720p monitor.)

Usually the pixel density is higher in the center of the FOV though (more distortion due to the lenses on the sides). It's what set the original Oculus apart from existing headsets at the time: cheap lenses and correct the distorsiin in software. It's also a feature, as the actual density is better in the center :)

I do wish they used micro-LEDs for that kind of display though. I guess that they could be manufactured at the same time as a metamaterial acting as a lens sitting on top.

For comparison, Apple’s Vision Pro has 3660x3200 pixels per eye.

Yep, across a smaller fov too (100 degree horizontal).

Seems like we need one more decade of oled panel and gpu improvements before we can have good enough density with a reasonable size and power consumption.

What hardware are people using to run modern VR?

1440p (2560x1440) is 3,686,400 pixels.

2160p (2160x2160) is 4,665,600 pixels, per eye, so 9,331,200 pixels.

This headset will require a million more pixels to be rendered than 4K. 9 Million pixels @ 144hz is no easy task.

My RTX 4080 (9800X3D) struggles with 4K gaming.

You render lower quality and scale the images up to native resolution, with filters to reduce any jagged artifacts. It's not ideal, and so even running at the "same" resolution, the 2d monitor looks better then it does in the headset.

But the immersion is enough that you forget about it and just enjoy the content, as long as it's comfortable enough

Yeah, the blog post itself loads for me but everything else is really struggling.