Virtual Mac in Vision Pro & work insights

[digitster]

That is all true, but some future Apple Vision Pro could certainly change it.

1) If Apple moved to TWO 12K or 16K displays, it that has enough pixels to better map (even if not perfectly native, which is of course impossible) 4K or 5K displays.

2) If Apple is really cool, a future AVP could literally support plugging in displays (maybe into the battery pod) meaning that the signals wouldn't have to be wireless at all.

While (1) will definitely happen eventually, (2) will almost certainly not happen.

12 or 16K displays….

I am not your opinion 😬, because I know, that such resolutions would be useless for any productivity. Even with a 4K resolution, the picture is so damned small, that you just cannot read the text and click the buttons precisely with a 32‘‘ native hardware display. So I am wondering, how you manage to work with a 16K resolution. You‘d probably need a 100‘‘ hardware monitor for doing this. ^^

ps: I discovered, that the extreme small fov of the Apple Vision Pro makes working with multiple virtual displays quite a bit complicated, as you must move your head extremely, which does not happen, if you had 3 external monitors in front of you (which I do at home). It is particularly difficult to place the virtual monitors inside the available space of the Vision Pro, so that these do not overlap (the transparent fading) and not be too far away for readability. So the productivity aims that the AVP claims to deliver (spatial computing paradigm) is somewhat… errrm … limited in reality.

 

[DavidSchaub]

12 or 16K displays….

I am not your opinion 😬, because I know, that such resolutions would be useless for any productivity. Even with a 4K resolution, the picture is so damned small, that you just cannot read the text and click the buttons precisely with a 32‘‘ native hardware display. So I am wondering, how you manage to work with a 16K resolution. You#d probably need a 100‘‘ monitor for this. ^^

12K to 16K Vision Pro displays per eye, not external monitors.

The point of the additional pixels is so that the internal virtual displays can match external 4K/5K screens.

If you are looking at a 5K Apple Studio Display 27" screen, it is probably taking up somewhere around 40 degrees of your Field of View. That means 5K pixels fit across 40% of your field of view.

Now the AVP fills around 100% of your field of view (the two displays don't entirely overlap, which makes the math messier, but let's ignore that), that means to display those same 5K pixels, you need 40% of the AVP screens to be 5K across, which makes the whole AVP screens neerd to be about 12K (i.e. 5000 * (1/0.4)) themselves.

 

[digitster]

12K to 16K Vision Pro displays per eye, not external monitors.

The point of the additional pixels is so that the internal virtual displays can match external 4K/5K screens.

If you are looking at a 5K Apple Studio Display 27" screen, it is probably taking up somewhere around 40 degrees of your Field of View. That means 5K pixels fit across 40% of your field of view.

Now the AVP fills around 100% of your field of view (the two displays don't entirely overlap, which makes the math messier, but let's ignore that), that means to display those same 5K pixels, you need 40% of the AVP screens to be 5K across, which makes the whole AVP screens neerd to be about 12K (i.e. 5000 * (1/0.4)) themselves.

Oh. Ok. Now I understood. 😀

And thats basically what I meant.

The 4K resolution for virtual displays would be theoretically (mathematically) possible, if the device has much higher resolution internally. But the optical laws of the reality apply to this too. You must have a certain distance to the display to see everything so that is of a use. And this always will make this a challenge on a spatial workspace.
To see a real 4K display resolution on the Apple Vision Pro, an exact matching of overlapping virtual and real pixels must apply. And this finally limits the appearance to a certain size and distance, which practically is of no real use but a very special case.

 

[Night Spring]

All this discussion of screen resolution is very interesting, but I'm thinking what I really need is not to mirror multiple Mac displays in the VP. What I need is for Mac apps to open as VP windows. Then there will be no need for Mac displays inside VP. Is there any chance Apple will make this possible in the future?

 

[digitster]

All this discussion of screen resolution is very interesting, but I'm thinking what I really need is not to mirror multiple Mac displays in the VP. What I need is for Mac apps to open as VP windows. Then there will be no need for Mac displays inside VP. Is there any chance Apple will make this possible in the future?

This would require that macOS apps support eye tracking and all native input methods from the Apple Vision Pro. I do not believe in that. Although there are already some projects trying this, i.e. moving single Windows onto the Vision Pro. But there are loads of potential problems with this approach, resizing and positioning does not work very well, as this must be done on the source computer (the mac) directly and the user will lose orientation in spatial space very quickly, as the window management on the Vision Pro is not made for this and all such things. Native input controls of the source computer will not work very well with this approach too. In my opinion, this approach has major conceptual flaws and reflecting entire Displays is definitively the better approach, even because it possibly will support other operating systems like windows and linux without any problems. The relations are kept this way. Especially the orientation/navigation inside an operating system is disturbed completely with this window-based approach, which in return leads to unresolved problems and potential user confusion. With other words, the user would probably lose totally the control and synchronisation with the source system, forget where he actually is in spatial space … and the chaos is finally perfect. The window management on both (independent) operating systems, the source and the destination will be totally mixed up and confused. Logically, because both operating systems will then fight for the window control and hierarchy and this cannot work. I personally do not believe that this approach ever can work at all. It basically would require and introduce a giant and overly complex synchronisation protocol on both sides, the Mac and the Vision Pro, in such a way that requires a total rewrite of the macOS finally, alone for keeping security aspects or data synchronisation for instance. An example: alone the complex parent/child windowing concept on the Mac (menus, popups, layers, multiple window arrangements and hierarchies… ) is fundamentally different to iOS/visionOS, so that only an „entire display concept„ ala remote desktop actually will work currently, because it actually keeps all control on the source computer in its entirety, this is on the Mac! The Vision Pro can merely be a slave for displaying and the Mac must remain the master and keep all control. There is probably no way around that.

 

[Eugr]

I discovered, that the extreme small fov of the Apple Vision Pro makes working with multiple virtual displays quite a bit complicated, as you must move your head extremely, which does not happen, if you had 3 external monitors in front of you (which I do at home).

… unless you wear glasses and got used to it already.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

I do do video editing. That looks pretty cool!

What is that — video editing on the loo? 😉

 

[jclardy]

I feel a lot of the early tech reviews were pretty lazy to be honest - I don't remember who it was, but I saw one of them react to someone pinching to zoom a photo on AVP...this was literally in the video released by apple if they had spent 5 minutes researching things.

Granted - I think that just means Apple has a much larger UX task ahead of it - if tech reviewers can't figure out that all the iPhone gestures work nearly identically on AVP, users aren't going to figure it out either (I learned this the hard way in my own apps which included long press gestures to access menus - many people didn't figure this out so I had to add more obvious buttons to the UI)