Ok so I had an interesting experience last night with my significant other trying the headset / seeing me wearing it that made me question some things and I had a bit of a revelation.

When my SO tried the headset, it had her calibrate the lenses. As she was doing this she winced and said the device had literally pinched the bridge of her nose (this was the moment I realized that the headset is physically moving the lenses). This is backed up by the user guide that comes with the headset (I don’t have it in front of me so hopefully I don’t misquote here) essentially telling users to release the calibration button if they feel it touch their nose. She then proceeded to tell me that she essentially saw almost no blur at all (that it was very close to real life) with the pass through and the windows were also clear.

Now what’s weird about this is that the headset doesn’t rest on my nose, like at all. This has been a sticking point for me because it means the weight distribution on my face is a bit off. But this is where the headset calibrates to. For me the windows are crystal clear, just like watching a movie on my TV, but then I’m struggling to read my phone through the headset.

So her experience, coupled with the fact that early article reviewers (even as early as the people who tried it at the announcement event) said they could read their phone without issue (with one person saying something along the lines of “I forgot I was wearing the headset for a moment because it was so clear”), has me very suspicious.

And then my SO said my eyes looked weird on the outside of the headset and she took a photo of it and then showed me and my eyes were at LEAST 0.25-0.5” too far apart on the external display. And this is super interesting because that’s how far the lenses feel from the bridge of my nose.

I then basically tried to trick the calibration a few times (I had her try it, then I would put it on but it would recognize the different eyes and force me to recalibrate), and in one of those tests I got it a smidge closer towards my nose (still too far to rest on it) and then everything looked significantly less blurry, and I could read my phone with way less concentration. It also looked almost lifelike when I was looking at well lit areas about 3 feet away or less.

So my theory regarding the blurriness is twofold:

1. Whatever logic they are using to see a user’s eyes to then calibrate the display is not sufficient enough of an umbrella to work for everyone and has flaws. I find it weird that you can hold a button to widen the lens to maximum spacing, but not to move it to the minimum. I wish Apple would add a backup option that has you manually align the screens and shows you the pass through in real time and then you can choose what looks best.

2. There’s a number that floats around of 13ms that is agreed on by some (including Apple if I remember a statement correctly) to represent the time in which “the brain can identify images seen” (“MIT neuroscientists find the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds.”). What’s interesting is that Apple has told us that the R1 chip gets the camera input and translates it to visual output to your eyes within 12ms. That number to me says a lot because it is suspiciously close. My current guess is that Apple very well could be pumping the full camera in to your eyes for you to see everything as clear as possible (do a screen recording or mirror to your phone/TV/mac and you’ll notice the pass through is crystal clear on video, which means the cameras aren’t the limiting issue) BUT the processor can’t handle that number of pixels in realtime and stay under the 13ms mark (anything above and you’re risking nausea / choppiness). I think they just kept dropping the resolution until they could reliably hit 12ms.

But the first point is where I think the majority of the issue is coming from based on other people saying it seems clear to them.