Virtual Reality

I have used and worked on/with/owned quite a few VR headsets, yeah. Not a comprehensive reviewer-worthy amount, but I've been working on, or playing with, a VR headset since 2015, and I do consider myself to be an enthusiast.

Currently I own a Valve Index and a PSVR 2 along with my Vision Pro. Those two haven't gotten use in a long while, whereas I use my Vision Pro a lot every day.

I don't have a lot of experience with Quest 2, 3, or Pro, because Meta's whole account debacle caused me to give my original quest away to a homeless friend of mine, which he sold for child support money, I think. Not a fan or Meta as a company in general.

I am a slight fan of Apple as a company, and by lemmy standards, I qualify as a rabid lunatic fanboy of Apple, so take it with a grain of salt, but...

The Vision Pro is a lot more of a comprehensive product than any of the other devices I've used, in ways that probably don't matter to most VR enthusiasts. The surprisingly gripping features of it have nothing to do with gaming whatsoever, and everything to do with art, content, media, and productivity.

The main hobby I've been using it for daily is learning how to create 3D videos using Stable Diffusion. The huge bonus for this is all of the iPad apps that mostly just work without issue out of the box sprinkled with some Vision Pro specific apps.

Without leaving the headset or relying on an external device, I can use Draw Things to generate a high resolution image, generate up to 25 frames of video with that image as a starting point, save the image sequence out to a directory, where I can use LumaFusion to combine sequences into a video. If I need to I can use waifu2x to uprez, but that takes forever, so I usually don't.

I can export the video and drag and drop it into Spatial Media Toolkit, futz with the depth setting, and output an AI generated spatial video. I can use Spatialify to output a SBS video if I want to at that point, but usually just keep them as spatial videos.

Aside from that specific workflow, It's also the best 2D and 3D video watching headset experience. Being able to dial my environment in to drown out a the rest of a cross-country flight and watch Mad Max: Fury Road in 3D while it reflects on a lake in front of me, the size of a cinema screen, is both magical, and something that I hope even Quest users get to experience in some capacity on their platform.

It comes in handy, too, when I want to watch or do something different than the bf is watching on the tv.

I also am benefiting from the Apple ecosystem, since I own an m1 macbook and an iPhone 15 pro.

I love being able to capture spatial videos and panoramas and then experience them in headset later. Airdropping files between devices also lets me offload longer video processing to them, since waifu2x and handbrake on the mac work better for uprezzing and Spatial Media Toolkit has a native-ish Mac release.

For generative AI Draw Things is also on the mac and iPhone, but I'm learning ComfyUI since it seems way more powerful. And I use Screens 5 to vnc from my headset or phone, or I use the native virtual display if I'm by the mac itself.

My only experience using a Quest 2 was recently when a friend came over and we spent an hour trying to get it to work, resetting and rebooting over and over, before finally just giving up on pairing one of the two controllers, and we used the ios app to launch the browser to watch some 180 stereo videos. It wasn't a good experience, but I'm sure it would be once it's setup.

But I can't really knock it too much, since trying to share the Vision Pro is the worst part of the device. The best option is to SharePlay to a mac or Apple TV, since the whole guest mode thing takes too long. And while I won't fly without my Vision Pro again, I wouldn't feel comfortable bringing it to a friend's place. That thing's expensive as hell, and I don't want someone to drop it or for it to get stolen.