Thoughts on Apple Vision Pro

It's the promise of the Hololens fulfilled in 2024. Much newer hardware, software stack and support infrastructure that Microsoft couldn't bring together several years ago will soon have another chance to become mainstream - however there's the same high price in the way. . . .

The use-cases and input methods (hand/voice/eye tracking) are all familiar to a Hololens user - and that's a good thing as grabbing holographic interfaces is a truly amazing feeling as well as organising GUIs around my physical space to customise and physicalise my virtual / realities. Being able to speak, gaze and gesture are natural ways to manipulate the digital assets too. Once you use all of these input methods together, the immersion really takes over and it's simply about being with the digital world instead of at keyboard/mouse/monitor levels of abstraction.

Pass Through Video may be done far better than we've seen in the horrible Quest Pro - which may allow a sense of reality that is clear enough to read screens/phones and move about the real world with confidence that the Quest devices didn't allow. I don't know if the displays are HDR or if the cameras can pass through HDR video but this will extend the natural perception of reality further. I've heard great things about the fidelity of the displays so this will no doubt be done well by Apple.

Unique to Apple's offering to me is the software stack. Being able to move USDz into play, the connective apps to familiar services (not just Onedrive as I'm used to) and even curious Avatar-phantasms that will appear on video calls on your behalf are all interesting ways to push this offering further than before and to close the loop. Meta's devices don't really offer this level of coverage yet so it's good to see so many bases covered. Notably Unreal Engine is excluded - not a surprise, but I hope for OpenXR/Remote Rendering as this is where my focus currently is.

The real power play here is this workable fusion of Apps into the Spatial Computing context. Placing app windows into your space, moving around 2D and 3D content while still amongst the real world was always the vision of Microsoft's Mixed Reality - but now Apple should have a much smoother fusion of the component pieces that I think will be the 'Killer App' for this device.

The 3D pictures/videos (and movies) were a tickle to see however I can't imagine myself wearing a Vision Pro during my kid's birthday. . . but the ability to watch stereoscopic content brings me joy as much as when Apple Spatial Music brought (back!) the surround sound music I loved in the early 2000's.

Seeing someone's eyes through the device is possibly my favourite bonus feature. I've spent a good amount of time with Magic Leap 2 and still prefer the Hololens 2 for the ability to engage with other people, eye to eye, to maintain that organic level of human interface. I really love that they've bothered to care about this human need.

The Price. I used to think it was foolish for Microsoft to show games, entertainment or Magic Leap showing Holographic Comic books. It really seems hopeless to think any population of consumers will afford a device at this cost in the numbers needed to create a fertile market segment. We've seen Microsoft + Magic Leap focus on Enterprise where the budgets can afford the technology. So while it's not surprising that so much technology costs a pretty penny - and it should - but that they gesture games and experiences for younger-audiences, people moving around their homes or watching movies on their couch with the Vision Pro. . . maybe several iterations down the line the device will enter the "everyday luxury" price bracket and these kinds of examples will make sense.

I'm keen to buy one or several for our own volumetric/4D studio work as we have exciting plans for the rest of 2023 and the continued Mixed Reality workflow we've come to rely on.