Yesterday, I had a 30-minute AVP demo session in an Apple Store. It was pretty short and I’m just sitting down, but from what I experienced, here are the pros and cons I gathered:
- Comfortable face cushion. The padding is thick and soft.
- Stunning visual clarity. The 3,660 x 3200 is definitely a noticeable leap from the typical 2k headsets in the market.
- The 3D photo and video is really selling the personal immersion. Seeing the depth and parallax effect make you really feel like you’re in that place, at that moment.
- Watching movie in their immersive virtual cinema felt very real. Like a high-end home cinema in a headset.
- If you have Apple ecosystem already, I can see this will be a seamless device to integrate.
- Adjustable immersiveness and people awareness. You can dial the slider between VR and MR. And when people are around, they will show up faintly through the digital content.
- Accurate spatial understanding. Tables and floor are detected nicely and when dragging/placing windows it will take that into consideration as not to clip through physical tables awkwardly. Digital shadows really make the windows feel like they’re floating physical screens.
- Superb occlusion. You can see your hands clearly over the digital content.
- The head strap is not intuitive enough to wear. Definitely need some getting used to in order to find the right balance. Beginners will most likely put the pressure too much on the front face rather than the top of the head.
- Considerably heavy. Even with the right strapping, I don’t see people will find it comfortable for hours of usage.
- The eye tracking can be finicky at times. I had to move forward a bit and really glare my eyes on small icons to trigger the hovering.
- Hand gesture detection misfired or undetected at times. I think mostly just need time to find the right angle that the headset camera can see.
- Pretty narrow field of view, seems narrower a little bit than the Meta Quest 3. This is not a problem at all for indoor stationary usage, but definitely not recommended for walking around outside.
- Poor audio speaker. I need to cup my hand over my ear to get a clearer sound, else it’s leaking outside. Meta Quest 3 has it better as I can hear clearly when wearing it, but almost inaudible to the people outside.
- Troublesome to use for specs wearer. Going for personal device route, AVP needs special inserts for people with prescription glasses. As it’s tethered, I foresee I need to take the headset off and on quite often, and adding taking off and on of my specs in top of that can get tedious real fast.
- Pricey!!! In Singapore it’s SGD5,299 for the lowest storage and another SGD219 for the optical inserts. This alone would be a deal breaker for the majority of people. Hardly justifiable for a consumer product. And if you’re a couple planning to watch in the immersive cinema together, you need 2 AVPs.
In short, Apple Vision Pro is a really well-made piece of technology. Most things work well and the UX design is definitely top notch. Immersive content is superbly engaging thanks to its visual clarity.
But the chicken and egg question remains: will the content drive the adoption, or the adoption drive the content. Currently I don’t see many game-changing contents yet other than watching movies. So from consumer POV, it’s hardly worth it.
Content creators and developers, on the other hand, should appreciate all the bells and whistles AVP have to offer.
I am still contemplating.
For SEA enterprise market, it would likely be an NO, as there are other devices better suited for certain cases. AVP holds the versatility, but in enterprise settings, it is often the specialty that matters more.
For creating consumer content, it’s not exactly our focus at the moment. But who knows if there’s an opportunity there down the line.
At the moment I’ll just put Apple Vision Pro as ‘keep in view’.
