GETTING CLOSE
Flat screen TV‘s have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Flat screens range from the small screen of an iPhone, to the much larger screen of the iPad, to a huge 65 inch television screen. As I understand this comes partly by increasing the resolution, the number of pixels, on a screen which I will wonder about later.
But the fact is that if I hold an iPhone close to my face it looks just as large as a 65 inch TV screen from across the room. You don’t need to get a large screen, you just have to sit closer. For a couple of years I have been watching TV on a large iPad, which has very good resolution, rather than my much large TV screen across the room.
This is all common sense. But with the Vision Pro something else is happening. I am looking at everything from an inch away. What would take an enormous wrap around screen 15 feet away from me can now be an enormous wrap around screen from an inch away. The Vision Pro can be much more immersive because I am so close to it. Panoramic photographs which are four feet by two feet on my TV screen at 15 feet become wrap around photographs that appear to be ten feet high and fifty feel long so that I have to circle in my office chair from all the way to the left to all the way to the right to see the whole thing. I attribute this to closeness. It is an effect that you can only have from an inch away.
But of course there is no screen. There is what looks like a screen but it is a virtual screen. I can stand up with my goggles on and walk right through it and look at it from the back and then walk right back through it again and see it again.
You can only get this close if you have a virtual screen, which you can bring closer or push away. But always everything you see is only an inch away. This is true of the pass through mode with the Vision Pro. I can look at my entire living room through the goggles and it looks eerily exactly like the my living room without the googles. But without the glasses I am seeing the far wall in actuality at 25 feet away. Through my Vision Pro the back wall looks 25 feet away but what I am seeing is a 3D video one inch away. My body revolts and afterward I feel dizzy and queasy.
So distance is a huge difference between a physical flat screen and a virtual screen whether flat or wraparound.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 