iFixit tore down Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional, giving an interesting take a look at its intricate design and revealing the secrets and techniques of EyeSight.
When revealing Imaginative and prescient Professional at WWDC 2023 in June Apple described Imaginative and prescient Professional’s EyeSight characteristic as utilizing a “curved OLED panel with a lenticular lens” to indicate a rendered view of your eyes to others within the room with parallax, so the parts used have been already confirmed. However iFixit’s teardown provides one of the best look but at how precisely this works, why it appears to be like so low decision, and what it appears to be like like with out the lens layer.
In addition to rendering the 2 first individual views on the internal-facing OLED microdisplays, one for every eye, Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional renders a number of third individual views of your higher face for the exterior dealing with curved common OLED show, with every view tailor-made to a particular viewing angle.
In entrance of the show is a lenticular lens, a kind of skinny plastic lens consisting of vertical ridges that every direct gentle from beneath to solely be seen from a slim explicit angle.
These ridges are grouped, with every within the group directing gentle to a viewing angle that matches one of many rendered views, and Imaginative and prescient Professional shows that rendered view on a vertical strip beneath it.
The result’s a picture that seems to have depth, referred to as constructive parallax. Your higher face appears to be like as if it is behind the show, not on it like a flat picture.
Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional with the magnifying layer eliminated.
There are three issues with this strategy nonetheless, and all of them are evident in Imaginative and prescient Professional.
Firstly, since you’re rendering a number of views however every is simply seen by way of the strips that match its viewing angle, you get a a lot decrease efficient decision. It is not but identified what number of views there are, however for the sake of instance, if it was a 1920 pixel extensive show with 6 views every view would solely have a decision of 320 pixels extensive.
The opposite downside is brightness and blur. The ridges scatter, replicate, and take up gentle, a lot of it would not go by way of to the viewer. Additional, iFixit discovered that Imaginative and prescient Professional has one other layer that stretches the picture to cowl a wider space of the entrance of the headset than it in any other case would, which additionally reduces brightness and will increase blur.
The third downside is that lenticular lenses solely work on one axis. If the Imaginative and prescient Professional wearer rotates their head left or proper the phantasm is maintained, but when they give the impression of being up or down it breaks.
This is the reason Imaginative and prescient Professional’s EyeSight has spectacular parallax horizontally, however is disappointingly dim and blurry, and the impact breaks veritcally.
EyeSight on Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional, from Scott Stein,
We extremely advocate you watch the total video to see simply what number of parts are packed into such a comparatively small house.
iFixit additionally took aside Meta Quest 3 not too long ago, revealing simply how a lot of the inner house its battery takes up, and we advocate you watch that too.
