One advantage of Quest 2's standalone operation capability is easy portability. I have a friend who was curious about VR but wanted to get some first-hand experience, and we were able to meet up for a demo with my Quest 2. No need to lug around a powerful PC plus two lighthouse beacons for a Valve Index.

At one point during the test drive, my friend turned towards me to talk about something. He can see where I sat as he had pass-through camera view active, but all I saw in return was the blank white plastic front surface of my Quest 2. It was a little disconcerting, like conversing through an one-way mirror. After that experience I understood the problem Apple wanted to solve with Vision Pro's EyeSight feature.

It's a really cool idea! EyeSight is a screen mounted on front of the headset and displays a rendering of the wearer's eyes so people around them has something to focus on. There's a lot of technical sophistication behind that eye rendering: because Vision Pro tracks direction of wearer's gaze, those replicated eyes reflect the actual direction wearer is looking at. Our brains are high evolved to interpret gaze direction (very useful skill out in the wilderness to know if a saber-toothed cat is looking at us) and EyeSight aimed to make it effortlessly natural for all our normal instincts and social conventions to stay intact.

I have not seen this myself but online reports indicate EyeSight falls short of its intention. The screen is too dark to be visible in many environments, a problem made worse by the glossy clear outer layer reflecting ambient light. It was further dimmed by a lenticular lens layer that tries to give it a 3D effect, which is reportedly not very convincing as those rendered eyes are still obviously in the wrong place and not the real eyes.

Given Apple's history of hardware iteration, I expect future iterations of EyeSight to become more convincing and natural for people to interact with. In the meantime, I can build something with 80% of the functionality for 1% of the cost.

I stuck a pair of self-adhesive googly eyes(*) to the front of my headset, and that will give human eyes something to look at instead of a blank white plastic face. It bears no resemblance to the wearer's eyes within (or at least I hope not) and does not reflect actual gaze direction. On the upside, it is a lot more visible in bright environments and a far more amusing. Yeah it's a silly thing but don't worry, I have serious headset modification project ideas too.

(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases