An Immersive Creator's Thoughts on Apple Vision Pro

I’ve had the Apple Vision Pro for a little over a week. Like most VR headsets (yes, it is a VR headset in its current form, despite what the marketing department at Apple might want you to think), it presents an interesting mix of groundbreaking future tech with endless frustrations as we have to rewire parts of our brain in order to make sense of it all.

I’ve seriously re-written this article from the ground up several times over the past week. I’ve gone between “I love it” to "I'm disappointed in it” and back to “it’s amazing” several times. One might assume that I’m having a bipolar affair with the device, but really I think my relationship is complicated and it has been hard to put my thoughts into words.

What the Apple Vision Pro represents is a very premium (and very expensive) VR headset experience. It removes so much friction for certain activities like screen sharing your laptop to work and accessing your photos, messages and email (assuming you are in the Apple Ecosystem, of course) and adds so much friction for other activities like input, file management, and power management. At times, I love it. Other times, I wonder what I just spent almost $5000 on. In many ways, I guess this mirrors my entire immersive journey over the past 9 years as co-founder of Light Sail VR . Spatial computing is a vastly different paradigm that I expect a lot of innovation in. Just like crafting cinematic stories for immersive is very different in a lot of ways, so is the idea of computing and working with a headset on.

Before we dive in...

I should start by saying that I was (ok, probably still am) an Apple nerd. I’ve always been enamored with the company and followed its history closely. I remember my first Mac, the clone years, and the launch of Mac OS X. On my 13th birthday I asked to go to Macworld. Yeah, I was that kid. I even worked at the Apple Store in college resetting frozen iPods and teaching workshops on how to use iLife and Final Cut Pro. I think a lot of those memories fuel my passion for technology today.

However it became painfully obvious around 2016 that if I wanted to really live on the bleeding edge of tech in starting a company to explore this new medium, I was going to have to branch out. The VR headsets at the time and the PC computing power required to run them (and make content) just wasn’t available on Mac.

So I left the Mac ecosystem.

At least for a bit….

I kept my iPhone. I’m not completely crazy.

I’ve waited all this time for the day that Apple would come out with a headset. This Vision Pro is here and it's bold. Full of stuff that’s weird (EyeSight and Personas), frustrating (the lack of support for immersive videos), and awesome (effortless integration into their ecosystem and really impressive displays).

Full Disclosure: I create a lot of immersive video content for Meta. It’s hard not to compare the two, even though I feel like it’s not fair to compare a $3500 device that just came out to a $500 device with a pretty mature ecosystem behind it. The following thoughts will read very critical of the Apple Vision Pro, but I could probably write a similar article about some of my frustrations with the Quest 3 and Quest Pro headsets as well. These are my opinions and may not represent your experience and I reserve the right to have my mind changed as I keep working with this.

For the record, I think what Meta has done with the Quest 3 is incredible. It’s an extremely good product. It’s software, while also frustrating at times, naturally feels more mature. It’s more flexible as a platform and the development toolset is strong. I think it is much easier to get up and running quickly on a Quest 3 platform. Also, we can’t ignore the price here. I could buy seven Quest 3 headsets for the price of one Apple Vision Pro. Eight if you count the $299 developer dongle and Apple Care. Unity developers will need a Unity Pro license at $2400/year. This is a lot of money to invest in an ecosystem that has a very small audience currently.

I think Meta should be incredibly excited about Vision Pro because Apple’s entry into this market validates a lot of what the team over there has been working very hard on for the past decade+. As they say, a rising tide lifts all ships.

Anyway, here are my initial thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro and what it means for us creating immersive content. Again, a lot of the below will be mostly critical and I want to stress that I see all of these shortcomings as opportunities for improvement. Whether that’s Apple, or developers and content creators like myself, we have a lot of room to continue to innovate.

The Best Feature is The Apple Ecosystem

I want to start off with my current favorite feature of this device. We know Apple is a bit of a walled garden, but you can’t deny that if you live in that garden, it’s an incredibly smooth experience.

Two things in particular stand out for me. First, having all my photos and videos from my phone was great, especially when viewing spatial videos. Second, the ability to look at my MacBook Air and seamlessly connect to a large monitor was extremely well thought out. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of virtual display work for years, but every other solution (Virtual Desktop, Meta Remote Desktop, Quest Link) has been so clunky and buggy, it hasn’t been worth it for me.

Again, it’s the Apple “just works” way and that has been another compelling reason to stay within their garden of products and services.

Some of these interactions are very well thought out. For example, placing the device into Guest mode gives me the ability to mirror the screen immediately to my laptop so I can help guide someone through the experience for the first time. I love how I can drag photos from a Vision OS app to an iPad app. Connecting to my computer is seamless (when it wants to work... sometimes it takes a while for that "Connect" icon to appear).

The headset builds on all the latest device interoperability that Apple has pushed the last few years, which makes me feel like a lot of those features were solutions to problems that VR headsets have when integrating in with traditional computing. Anyway, it's great and keeps me coming back into the headset to see how far I can push it.

That Beautiful Display

The display inside the Vision Pro is gorgeous. Text is incredibly crisp. There is no screen door effect. Most of all, the blacks are deeply inky and the contrast is great. I feel like I’m looking at a XDR Cinema Display. I was really happy to see this. I've spent the last week with my Macbook Air on my lap, the headset on my face, and working on a huge monitor while I do some intensive work as I remote into my PCs at work. My wife thinks I'm nuts, but the couch in front of the fireplace is a far more comfortable place to be working on immersive VFX and editing.

It’s also the first HDR capable display, which means so much more dynamic range and contrast. We’re going to have to add the HDR bag of tricks on top of the stereoscopic bag of tricks and leverage all of those advanced post workflows to make the content really take advantage of this displays.

I'd like to say that getting my content onto the Vision Pro was easy. It was not. Information has been hard to find. Currently, creating video content for Vision Pro is a walled garden. There isn't even Quicktime Player for Vision Pro, which is a huge omission I think.

The clarity of video content was something I was paying extremely close attention to. These displays are incredible, but would the video be an equal jump? I have to say it’s a mixed bag. I'm not sure any of the live action immersive content looked dramatically better than anything we’ve been producing at Light Sail VR for the last few years.

The opening shot of Adventure is wildly crisp and I suspect this is because I think it’s shot on a stereo cinema camera rig, as opposed to a dual fisheye. Other shots, like the drone footage, felt softer and I wish it had the crispness of the Apple TV screen savers. Still, it’s an amazing production, both in the cinematography, direction, and storytelling. I enjoyed it a lot and it felt just right for immersive.

The Alicia Keys production (which is wildly similar in approach to my own Soul Sessions , but clearly produced with a higher budget) felt soft at the edges and around the same level of clarity as the work we’ve been producing for Meta (if not actually slightly worse). If you are a fan of Alicia Keys, you’ll love it. Again, nothing new that we aren’t already doing (aside from hiding the cameras in cleverly designed speaker cabinets, which was a nice touch that I’m going to steal). Next time, I'd suggest removing the two bored executives on the couch answering emails on their laptop and maybe adding in some more direct connection with the audience ;)

Prehistoric was very good, but it is a 3D rendered piece created entirely in Unity, so it’s not a fair comparison on video quality. I did, however, enjoy their use of a shallow depth of field and I think it was one of the first immersive pieces I have seen to employ that technique in the storytelling.

The immersive videos could have been streaming, so they may have been at a lower resolution. I don’t know. Either way, after watching all of them, I felt really confident that our team is working at the absolute highest level and our work would easily live side by side with what Apple is producing.

I purchased RealityPlayer, an immersive player that claims to work with 12K videos. I loaded some of our content onto it via iCloud (there is currently no way to load files onto the actual device by plugging in a USB cable) and comparing the Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3 side by side, I saw no noticeable difference. The files, which play flawlessly on Meta Quest 3, started to chop after 15-20 seconds. I suspect this is a matter of dialing in the bitrate, maybe packaging the files as MV-HEVC, etc. It’s a bit like shooting arrows into the dark at the moment. Guidance and documentation are currently lacking or hard to find. Apple, I’m listening!

The other display related issue I am having a hard time coping with is motion blur when moving my head. When watching content, there is a noticeable blurriness until my head stops moving. This tires out my eyes after using it for 20-30 minutes or so. It feels like the early VR headsets of 2016. I hope they can correct this in a software update. The Quest 3 does not exhibit this motion blur, by the way. Right now, I prefer watching content sideloaded on Quest 3. I have to say, the picture quality of the immersive videos was my biggest disappointment about the headset because I expected a dramatically better experience.

The motion blur issue is worse with passthrough, which despite the hype, is not indistinguishable from reality, although by far best of any standalone headset on the market. Just don’t go in with huge expectations, especially if you’ve ever tried one of the incredible headsets from Varjo.

Overall, I do like the displays and I think the canvas is wide for developers to play with. 3D content looks incredible. Spatial videos are very compelling. Using it to work with my laptop is seamless and I’m going to make an effort to really try and get a lot of work done on the platform going forward.

Eye Tracking & Input

I'm that guy. The eye tracking is not 100% for me. My eyes get tired darting around the screen and I’m often missing what I mean to be interacting with. This might just take time to get used to, but it wasn’t as seamless for me as I think it was for some of the tech bloggers who were given early access to the device. The targets are very small. I may try increasing the size of everything from Medium to Large and see if that helps. Again, this is something that might just be part of getting used to "spatial computing" but it sure is annoying to be looking at a button and it not be selected.

I’m also getting used to the input of just tapping my finger, when my instinct is to reach out and touch. Ultimately I think this will be a good thing, but right now it’s a bit of a learning curve. I never thought I'd miss having a controller, but when I want to be fast and very precise, I think they do a better job. To be frankly honest, I’m very comfortable with my keyboard and mouse and I look forward to playing more with how this can be a seamless experience to complete real work on the headset.

Comfort

Nearly every reviewer began to complain how uncomfortable the headset was and how heavy it was. I guess they haven’t worn a lot of VR headsets for hours at a time because this was an area I found myself disagreeing with the majority of folks. In terms of weight, I find the headset as comfortable as any other VR headset. The craftsmanship of the materials is premium and top notch. The face covering really fits me well. Now I have a smallish head and I’m used to wearing headsets, but I don’t think Vision Pro is any less comfortable than any other VR headset I’ve tried. I’m interested to see what third parties do with the strap, as the only awkward thing about it for me is the external battery and power cord which I found myself wrapped up in a few times, especially when tethering to the wall and also having the developer USB cord plugged (which surprisingly does not power the device as well).

After wearing the device for a few hours, it does start to fatigue. Again here I wonder if we’ll see some weight balancing accessories pop up. I did try the dual loop band, but found it less comfortable than the single loop.

One additional note as I’ve shared the headset with lots of people this week: having different sized bands on hand would be helpful for this. I had one experience where someone tugged so hard trying to fit into the headset they actually pulled the side plugs out, causing the headset to reboot. I did not expect it to be so fragile.

Multi-User Support

I know there is a guest mode on the headset, but I think for a device in this price category with the intention of being used for “spatial computing” I was disappointed it lacked support for fully supported multiple users. Guest mode lacks the integration with the ecosystem that makes this headset so seamless to use. I’ve also had guest mode not work a few times because the headset would shut off when passing it to someone with a larger head than mine, although I think this is to a loose connection with the developer strap, rather than a flaw in the software itself.

I think all the tech is already there. Scanning the eye using OpticID means that the headset could automatically adjust the IPD and other settings, load up the ecosystem, etc. I get not having user accounts on an iPhone or even an iPad, but this is a device that rivals the price of a laptop and I think having dedicated user accounts would massively increase adoptability. Switching out the custom face cushions is so easy thanks to the magnetic design, that I can easily see a world where one headset is shared with the whole family, at least for now.

Price

The price of the Apple Vision Pro is eye-watering. This is a comment that I uniformly agree with. The base headset with 256gb is $3499. Apple Care ( recommended as this headset looks like stuff will be incredibly expensive to repair and the whole front is made of glass) is another $499. Add tax. Add a case ($200). Worst yet, add the developer strap so we can hook the headset up via USB-C and that’s another $300. I said I wasn’t going to compare because it wasn’t fair, but I could literally buy an entire other VR headset for the price of the USB-C dongle!

I think there is a price vs. value question here. It’s ok for the price to be high if the value is high, but I’m worried this shuts a few too many people out of the opportunity, without providing a way to easily share headsets among several people.

Taking a cue from history, this product is a first-generation device in an entirely new field of computing. It has a lot of really advanced hardware on board and I feel like the software has a lot of room to grow. The original mac was very expensive back in the day, even if it was marketed as the “every person” computer. I felt like the iPhone was also very expensive when it came out, but it eventually came down.

To me, it feels like a familiar trajectory in tech. Parents get a headset through their work since affording it on their own is challenging. Their kids play with it, do incredible amazing creative things, and become native users of the technology. They grow up and create amazing things. It’s the path I took to get where I am and one that I expect this new category of computing will also take.

Asking me point blank whether to get a Vision Pro or Quest 3 is not a fair question. The price isn't even remotely close, but the features from each other actually aren't that far off. Value depends on what features are important to you.

Conclusion

I apologize this article is so long. I still have a lot of thoughts about the headset that I'm processing and learning. I think there is a steep curve here. To me, the launch of Vision Pro feels similar to the moment Mac OS X launched. I remember we were used to using Mac OS 9 and suddenly Apple drops this brand new operating system. There weren’t really any apps, the old apps felt clunky and slow, and after installing it my reaction back then was, “This looks pretty, but I’m not sure what to do with it.” I had the same feelings when putting on my Vision Pro.

I’ll keep playing with the immersive video pipeline, but at the moment the Meta Quest 3 has a lot more figured out and I think high quality content looks almost the same on each platform.

We should all be excited that Apple has joined the immersive community and I feel validated that all the hard work myself and the team at Light Sail VR have been doing will continue to forge new opportunities to surprise, delight, and entertain.

It’s only going to get better for immersive creators. I'm curious to hear your thoughts - feel free to drop me some comments or add me to your network.