Last week, Apple launched Vision Pro. I’ve read and listened to commentary, and watched many reviews and demos since its release. I have a good sense of what it can and can’t do, but that’s hugely different than experiencing it. Here is my current understanding of Vision Pro and what I find most important and interesting without having used it. This Wednesday I’ll be going to an Apple store to demo Vision Pro, and I will follow up with what I’ve learned.
Isolated Entertainment
I’ve had a rabid interest in technology for years, yet my direct experience with VR has been limited to the Oculus Go and the Oculus (ahem Meta) Quest 2.1I did go to a VR gaming lounge with a few friends at the end of college and they were using Rift devices, I believe. They put you in a fifteen foot square, with the headset wired to a rig above you so you could move freely. However, three of us shared the space for only an hour or two so my experience was limited. The former wowed me in its ability to display stationary content like video experiences and a few clever games that worked within the device’s constraints. It was objectively a bit blurry and underpowered, plus you were only given a single simplified controller. Even so, I was hooked on the idea of VR entertainment.
I was intrigued by the great reviews of the Quest 2 upon its release. When the price dropped around the holidays I hopped on board. If we pushed our coffee table against the couch we created a space that the Quest 2 deemed just large enough to support gameplay with movement.2Its skepticism was well-founded: I once busted a knuckle on the corner of our kitchen counter while playing table tennis. Erin and I both enjoyed using it for quite a while, enamored by games like Superhot, Beat Saber, Ultrawings 2, and Eleven Table Tennis. We then stopped using it, rediscovered it a year or so ago, and fell off again. Upon release of the Vision Pro3Ahem says Apple, it is “Apple Vision Pro” without a preceeding “The”. Whatever. I wanted to explore virtual reality again, but I couldn’t get the headset to charge. I’ll need to find the original charger to see if I can salvage the device.
All this history is to make the point that I’m familiar with VR, and to some extent, I buy into the concept for entertainment. I’m young and don’t suffer from motion sickness, so the low-ish quality displays don’t bother me. I can play games that are exciting and new to me. Yet the novelty has worn off, or at least it wasn’t as sticky in my life as I may have imagined.
Using it for gaming was natural because gaming in a shared household is already a somewhat exclusive experience. I could fly in Ultrawings since it could be played while seated, meaning it wasn’t too different from using a Nintendo Switch handheld to play Mario Kart on the couch. However, I don’t believe either Erin or I watched any media on the Quest 2. That would feel too isolating if we were together, and requires that we don’t share any part of the experience. Fully using and appreciating VR for entertainment requires being cut off from the world.
Apple hasn’t fixed this.
Their Vision Pro is still an experience one cannot share except through screen capture similar to what has existed in the Oculus/Meta lineup for years. By all accounts, watching spatial video is emotionally overwhelming and incomparable to any other VR/AR experience. It is uncanny and engaging and unsettling. Even 2D media consumed in a virtual environment is at least as good as being in a movie theater thanks to the high-quality displays that blow every other available headset out of the water. However, this is solitary. There is no current support to watch something with a friend.4I wonder if “watch party” browser extensions will work? All they’ve done is let someone “break in” to a virtual environment if needed.
Since Apple has a poor understanding of the gaming world, my current sense is they should focus on the media experience. And that means doing something more than SharePlay.
Future Promise of Productivity
Apple can’t or won’t beat the companies focused on gaming. Without support for Quest-like controllers, they won’t have the precision or flexibility to allow a player to interact with a true virtual world. Instead, they need to focus on the solitary work many of us do each day when we sit at our computers.
With support for iPad apps (assuming the developer allows it), a growing list of made-for-VisionOS apps, and the ability to route your Mac to a virtual 4K display, and all of these contained in rigidly-placed windows in the environment around you so they are stationary as you move around the room, Apple has reimagined their concept of spacial computing. While it’s reasonable to be skeptical about the current appeal of its current implementation—I think it’s difficult to make full use of these featuers while moving “around the house” given the hardware limitations of size and battery life—the potential it represents for the future is massive. I could imagine something closer to glasses (or goggles, in an intermediate stage) that allows one to create a digitally-augmented household containing shortcuts to information that is useful in each location.
However, Vision Pro at launch seems optimized for optimistic tech-forward companies full of people who would have no shame wearing this around the office, along with remote workers who could manage much of their job via iPad apps, including the iPad-class version of Safari.5I make this distinction because, despite many websites working great on iPad’s Safari, you still can’t use any Google Workspace services there. I’d love for that to change, because that seems more likely than Google making usable versions of their apps. If you have work that fits this bill, then the best use of Vision Pro would be creating a dashboard of apps as if you had several resizable iPads dangling around you. If you mainly use a Mac then the Vision Pro is only useful in cramped spaces, like an airplane, where you want more than a laptop screen. I already use a 27″ 4K display at my desk. I don’t need more right now.
I’d contest that the best productivity feature of Vision Pro is the isolation. I would adore being able to work in a calming environment of my choice, losing myself in the space so I could focus on my work. If someone needs me they can always “break through”; if I need to go grab some more water, I could dial back the environment and use the (well-regarded) video passthrough. Despite Apple’s focus on reducing the isolation of this device by letting people who wear it still physically interact6And digitally interact via Personas, but I won’t get into that. with the world around them, that’s only useful right now because you want the experience of moving between worlds to be seamless. It shouldn’t require removing the headset so you can get back to work as easily as possible.
I’d be fascinated to trial Vision Pro for a week to see how much of my daily work I could do. In the end though, it would likely end up being an iPad Pro with a clunkier keyboard and trackpad interface, but with more windows. What do I value more?
Curiosities
I’m intrigued to see who ends up using this device over the next year. Which companies are buying Vision Pros for their employees? Does the Apple effect suddenly make wearing these devices in public okay in a way that didn’t happen with Google Glass?
For my demo this week though, I’m most interested in the immersive spatial videos. That seems to be the unique feature, better than any other 360 degree video currently available. Betweeen the fidelity of the image, and the particular secret sauce Apple has to capture the information, I’ve only heard amazing things.
I also have hubris about being able to deftly navigate the eye-tracking and pinching interface. I’ve heard a dozen different people discuss it, including the ways they’ve failed to do it correctly right away—looking away, looking too hard, gesturing too wildly—that I hope I can pick it up quickly.
Overall I’m excited to see a glimpse of the feature firsthand. I’m thrilled Apple is providing these demos, because it does seem to be the only way to fully wrap one’s head around the device. Many of my takes above are informed by the well-regarded technology media I follow, but I want to get a sense of how working through the operating system feels, how the entertainment and productivity potential differ. And, really, I’m excited to try a cool toy that I cannot afford.
- 1I did go to a VR gaming lounge with a few friends at the end of college and they were using Rift devices, I believe. They put you in a fifteen foot square, with the headset wired to a rig above you so you could move freely. However, three of us shared the space for only an hour or two so my experience was limited.
- 2Its skepticism was well-founded: I once busted a knuckle on the corner of our kitchen counter while playing table tennis.
- 3Ahem says Apple, it is “Apple Vision Pro” without a preceeding “The”. Whatever.
- 4I wonder if “watch party” browser extensions will work?
- 5I make this distinction because, despite many websites working great on iPad’s Safari, you still can’t use any Google Workspace services there. I’d love for that to change, because that seems more likely than Google making usable versions of their apps.
- 6And digitally interact via Personas, but I won’t get into that.