Raphael ThysPhoto by Christine Sandu on Unsplash
Could Apple’s Vision Pro Replace Your Monitor?
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Published in
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5 min read
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May 1
I recently published this post discussing Apple’s Vision Pro headset.
And I got this comment:
At this point I’m expecting a PSVR2 that just plugs into a Mac and acts as a Studio Display strapped to your face.
Now I’m not saying this comment is wrong. This comment doesn’t even mention Apple’s headset. But I get this feeling that people expect the Apple Vision Pro headset to replace their monitor. And I’ve always been extremely skeptical about these claims for one big reason.
The Screen Door Effect
So I’ve used a few VR headsets before. And they all tend to suffer from the same problem: the screen door effect. This is a problem with many VR headsets where you can see the individual pixels. More specifically you can see the gaps between the individual pixels. And this sort of looks like a screen door.
It’s not the best analogy because if you look at a screen door from far away it just looks like a blur. If you look at it really close the holes in the screen door are very big. Much larger than a single pixel. But I guess it’s a good enough analogy for now.
A screen door can be incredibly distracting. Not just for the screen door effect itself, but also if you’re encountering the screen door effect it means the resolution is incredibly low and things like small text will be unreadable. If you’re immersed in a video game which does not have much text (or the text is very big) it’s not too much of a problem. But if you’re doing work it can be a huge problem.
So the reason why the screen door effect happens is because the display is so close to your face. 1.5–3 inches in most cases. And because of that the display has to fill up most of your field of view.
Let’s say you’re reading this on a smartphone. The display of a typical smartphone fills a relatively small portion of your field of view, usually around 40 to 60 degrees horizontally and 25 to 35 degrees vertically. This…