Apple Vision Pro: Hands-On/First Impressions of a New Platform
I attended Apple’s WWDC today and got a heads-on demo of Apple's new Apple Vision Pro headset. I have lots of open questions about what the long-term killer apps will be and I've seen lots of short-term consternation about the $3500 price point on Twitter from people who haven’t tried it, but I came away strongly impressed. For a 1.0 product, the tech in Apple Vision Pro is extensive as are its capabilities. As a 1.0 platform, its potential is incredible.
Let's get that price point out of the way first: a high initial price will not deter early adopters. Unless Apple can build these in the tens of millions (it can't) it will sell absolutely every unit that it can make. I expect that it will actually cost more expensive than advertised; you may need custom lenses for vision correction; you’ll want a carrying case, extra straps, a customized light blocker, and batteries; and more on-board storage than whatever the base model ships with. The price will have to come down over time for the platform to go mainstream but it is not an impediment at launch.
Crucially, Apple’s vision for AR and VR is extremely computing and app centric. Apple did not say “metaverse” even once at the launch. Yes, there are avatars in FaceTime if both people are wearing Apple Vision Pros, but generally speaking, this is a spacial apps platform. If someone wants to build a shared experience a la Ready Player One, they can do that, but Apple isn’t going to.
Highlights:
Apple absolutely nailed the user interface and core user experience. The eye tracking/finger gesture combination is easy to learn — it took me literally five seconds — and feels effortless in practice. As long as they aren’t under a desk you can keep your hands in your lap; the cameras can see nearly everywhere except behind you.
The Apple Vision Pro can go from full VR immersion -- with some enforced spacial awareness so you don't bump into people or objects -- to full augmented reality, complete with opaque objects and room mapping. I was not able to test live room/object mapping (putting a virtual object on a specific surface in the real world), but some of the demos used it.
Unlike other VR headsets, I never felt constrained by field of view. Apple is not volunteering the actual FOV number, but there is no issue of seeing part of the virtual dinosaur - you see the whole dinosaur.
Pass-through (seeing what’s around you) was remarkably good. You should have no problem checking your watch or phone or using a physical keyboard while also seeing virtual things in your field of view. I was able to walk around without a problem, and see the facial expressions of the people in the room with me. While I did see one report of someone complaining of motion sickness (Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal), I didn’t have that issue at all, and I am unusually susceptible to it.
The Apple Vision Pro does require a tether to power, but everything else is contained in the headset itself. I did not think that this was possible from a heat, weight, and performance perspective, but here we are.
Apple does not expect users to wear the headset with glasses. Before testing the Apple Vision Pro, a technician measured my glasses (progressives), and then custom Zeiss lens inserts were provided. This produced sharp images with exceptional ease of putting on and taking off the headset.
One criticism of VR is that it removes you from others around you, and that this is socially unacceptable. Apple seems to have taken this to heart, and built a display on the outside that both shows a representation of your eyes (so it looks like you can see the people around you) and also gives others in the room cues as to whether you can actually see them or if your vision is fully occluded. Does it work? I don’t know. I didn’t get to demo this feature. It’s certainly a unique approach.
The big question for VR has always been around use cases. Apple didn’t fully answer that question today, but the technical capabilities are so rich that the company actually led with productivity – not a typical Apple starting point. While Apple showed off using the Apple Vision Pro as a multi-monitor workspace and app environment, the room-mapping and exceptionally bright and detailed image capabilities allow Apple to target enterprise AR use cases like repair walk-throughs, see-what-I-see, and 3D model design. Essentially everything that Microsoft promised with HoloLens can be accomplished with none of that headset’s image opacity and field of view limitations. These experiences may actually be driven by Microsoft itself; Microsoft has already been announced as an Apple Vision Pro partner, so I expect Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Azure to be on the platform, not just Teams and Microsoft 365 office apps.
Watching movies in the Apple Vision Pro is great fun. I want one of these – and a handful of battery backups – on every long haul flight. 3D and panoramic images and videos were sometimes breathtaking.
ISSUES AND QUESTIONS
It's still a relatively heavy thing hanging off the front of your face that is tethered to a wall outlet or a 2 hour battery pack (you'll be buying more than one of those). Based on my limited experience, it was hard to know just how uncomfortable it will be for more than an hour or two at a time, but I definitely felt it. Even if heat isn’t an issue I suspect that it will need to be lighter for it to be a mainstream all-day device.
Putting a computer on your face requires a change in consumer behavior. VR headsets have not had mainstream success outside of gaming and exercise for consumers and training, high-end design, and simulation for enterprise. However, I predict that this is only a matter of time. By offering incredible utility with a delightful interface, Apple got us staring down at small rectangles all day; I have no doubt that, with the right experiences and lighter designs, Apple can get people to strap computers to their faces, too.
The resolution exceeds the best VR I have experienced at any price point, and text was sharp enough to work with, at least for short periods of time. I have no doubt that 20-year-olds will happily build spreadsheets and write novels in the Apple Vision Pro, but my eyes are, um, older, and I would need text to be even crisper for long reading/writing sessions.
It didn’t fit perfectly to my face – there was light leaking in around my nose. A custom (or differently shaped) light blocker should be an easy fix.
I experienced a bug on my unit where I could not adjust the level of immersion. This is still just an early unit, and some limitations are expected (Apple has until “early next year” to get it to production). Also, I didn’t hear about this issue when I talked to other media members who got demos.
To get the 3D video watching experience in the Apple Vision Pro, you need to take 3D videos with the Apple Vision Pro. Which means you have to be wearing it at the event you intend to capture, which is a questionable choice at, say, your kid’s graduation. However, Apple has a lot of products in its ecosystem. I will be shocked if Apple doesn’t eventually figure out how to put Apple Vision Pro -capable sensors and cameras on an iPhone (or, if the problem is the width of the cameras, at least the iPad Pro).
It is legitimately very expensive for something that does not replace your phone or your Mac. If all you want to do is watch a movie on your face, Xreal or TCL glasses will do the trick for under $500. If you want to exercise or swing lightsabers to a beat, a Meta Quest 2 can do that, and the Quest 3 will improve experience later this year for $499. If you want to hunt post-apocalyptic animal robots or race cars in VR, Sony’s PSVR2 can do that for $1100. The Apple Vision Pro redefines what an AR/VR experience can be, but it will cost you. The price will undoubtedly come down over time – this is the Apple Vision Pro, which implies a non-Pro version must be on a drawing board somewhere in Cupertino – but it’s not an impulse buy today.
You need to try it to appreciate its capabilities. Apple retail stores will be a crucial sales tool, but there may be growing pains as Apple figures out how to scale the glasses/lens problem.
There is a lot of technology packed into the Apple Vision Pro. How many of these can Apple build?
After you’ve watched Avatar in 3D and tried working in VR and petted the dinosaur that walked through your wall, if that is it, does the Apple Vison Pro get put in a drawer? Like all new computing platforms, the most compelling apps for the Apple Vision Pro almost certainly have not been imagined yet. That’s great for the long-term potential for the platform, but it could present a short-term problem. Of course, that is why Apple announced it at its developer conference, WWDC, rather than at its own event. The point was not to convince consumers to buy it today, but to tantalize deveopers with a new market for developers to build apps/services around.
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