I was surprised and disappointed to find that I don’t like it as much as I was hoping to.
I’ve been excited for this for weeks and couldn’t wait to pick my order today. Now, after using for about 8 hours, I’m 90% sure I’m going to return it and I’m actually pretty crushed about it. I have never used a VR headset before, so probably went into this with too high expectations. I’m sure it’s significantly better than the competition, but I guess I was expecting more based on some of the reviews/reactions I read.
Pass through is no where near as good as Apple and some reviews made it out to be. Every time i move everything gets extremely blurry. If you’re not in a perfectly lit room everything seems a bit grainy. It’s extremely obvious you’re looking through a display.
Text/UI elements don’t look as sharp as my iPad Pro. It’s good, but noticeably worse than what I’m used to. This is especially true while reading text towards the edge of your field of view. You kind of have to physically turn your head to follow along as you read text. If you just are moving your eyes, the further you get from the center of the field of view the blurrier the text gets.
Everything seems dimmer than I expected, including the UI, pass through, and HDR movies. It also seems a little washed out- kind of how it looks when you put a matte screen protector on an iPhone/iPad.
I’m seeing what seem to be a lot of reflections within the lenses when watching movies, or looking at any window with high contrast, and it’s distracting. Not sure if this is because I have prescription lenses in there.
Eye tracking is impressive at first, but starts getting frustrating very quickly. Too often it just doesn’t do what I want.
It’s really not comfortable for me unless I’m lying down or resting my head back. It’s heavier than I was hoping, and digs into the bridge of my nose a bit. I tried multiple light seals at the Apple Store, and the ones that were most comfortable (bigger ones) had too much light leakage, and the ones with little to no light leakage were more uncomfortable. I ended up with what I thought was the best middle ground, but it’s not great.
The FOV was smaller than expected.
Everything just seems harder/slower to navigate than expected. Even doing something as simple as moving the text curser when it’s in the wrong spot caused me endless frustration. Maybe this is just something I’d get better at the more I use, but in the meantime it’s been frustrating..
In general, AVP seems more finicky/uncomfortable/grainy/dimmer/and generally less impressive than I was hoping. Placing as many windows as you want wherever you want, and making them as big as you want was really really cool, but all the the issues I listed above just degraded the experience to the point where I don’t think I could justify keeping this for the price. It felt like a relief to go back to the real world and my bright/crisp/easier to use/manipulate 12.9 inch iPad Pro.
I’m glad I tried it and I’m excited for future versions, but in the meantime I’m pretty disappointed that this didn’t work out the way I was hoping.