Vision Pro Impressions

Most critiques evaluate the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) through the lens of a consumer device. However, the intended market for the AVP is clear from its name - it’s meant for Professionals. The AVP stands out as the superior headset for work and productivity, offering the most intuitive interface for multitasking, navigating, and visualizing. The primary objective of a spatial computing device is to empower users with the capabilities of a computer without the spatial limitations of physical 2D screens. The AVP achieves this with the highest visual fidelity and an intuitive interaction design system of any headset. It’s an impressive first-generation device that raises the bar for all XR headsets, though it is not without flaws.

I spent the weekend working, even writing this article, in the AVP. In my analysis, I will cover the strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and opportunities of the AVP as a device for professional use.

Strengths

The AVP is the only headset I’ve found enjoyable and practical enough to justify using for 6 hours.

??? Eye-Tracking: Using your eyes as your cursor is incredibly intuitive, when done well. Paired with the AVP’s robust hand-tracking, the gaze-to-select feature offers the most seamless headset navigation experience. In fact, I was able to type part of this review in Notes using only the eye-tracking keyboard. Moreover, the high-res display and gaze accuracy enables visual feedback that the HoloLens 2 (HL2) and Meta Quest Pro (MQP) lacked.

?? Hand-tracking: The AVP is the first headset I’ve experienced to do hand tracking right. The camera/sensor array offers a wide range of detection, enabling the user to comfortably interact with UI without stretching arms forward like a zombie.?Once you experience the comfort of hand tracking in the AVP, you'll never want to go back. The tracking was very smooth, enabling smooth scrolling with no noticeable latency. Ray-cast (laser-pointer) hand-aim interactions are very cumbersome - I frequently misclick or need to repeatedly click with the MQ3 and HL2.

?? Voice: As expected, Siri works extremely well with the AVP. Using Siri to navigate and write text was completely painless - unlike my voice assisted experiences in the HL2 and MQ3.?

?? Display: While not a true 4k display, the 3380 PPI OLED screens offer the best visual experience of any untethered headset and even comparable to the best tethered (Varjo XR-4). The AVP is the first standalone headset I’ve used that wasn’t debilitating to read text on. With others, I found myself frequently squinting and dragging/resizing windows just to read content. While some don’t appreciate the motion blur, I found it to be less sickening than the low latency jitter I’ve experienced with other standalone headsets. In short, the AVP proves that there is a benefit of using a headset over a computer with additional monitors.

?? Passthrough: The MR passthrough is a bit grainy, but still significantly higher resolution than the MQ3. Most importantly, I was able to see computer and phone screens clearly via passthrough. With the MQ3, I frequently need to take the device off to look at my phone/computer - which occurs very frequently when troubleshoot/setting up the device.

?? Ecosystem: The onboarding experience was fantastic due to the Apple ecosystem. Being able to access to my contacts, notes, wallet, and passwords immediately from setup is a great utility. Also, being able to just look at my MacBook to switch to Mac Virtual Display is productivity MAGIC. Lastly, the Apple App Store makes testing and distribution easier for developers, which will accelerate professional and enterprise adoption.

Weaknesses

The AVP is not without faults. There are two big design flaws I’m surprised were approved for the final product.

?? Ergonomics: This is a BIG problem and where the AVP underperforms compared to most standalones. My time in the AVP was not limited by battery but by poor weight distribution. My face and neck started to fatigue after 10 minutes. In my prolonged tests, I got through 60 minutes of continuous usage before getting a headache. The back-band is comfortable but does not compensate for the majority of the weight (20oz) being front-distributed. As the main use-case involves looking at floating windows, users spend most of their time looking forward or upwards. The Eyesight feature, while cool, contributes unnecessary weight and compute/battery usage. The user presence story was not strong enough here. The tethered battery pack is not deal-breaker as the AVP is not meant for exercise/immersive gaming, but it is annoying to deal with the cable.

?? Eyestrain: The unfortunate side-effect of the AVP’s gaze-to-interact feature is the eyestrain. Using Siri mitigates most of this, but staring at bright UI all the time doesn’t help. The Control Center surprisingly lacks a brightness control. In general, the AVP doesn’t offer many settings to combat this.

Limitations

At launch, the AVP has challenging limitations that is slowing initial adoption. Though, these are likely to be amended in the near future.

?? Shared Experiences: The AVP doesn’t offer any way to share digital windows/objects with other AVP users. Colocalization should be quite trivial as Apple already supports shared anchors (ARWorldMap) for iOS.

?? Initial Apps: Though many 1st and 3rd party apps iPhone/Pad users are already familiar with were available on the AVP at launch, many were missing. The Microsoft Office suite apps were great to use, but I was missing LinkedIn, Figma, Slack, and YouTube.

?? Cost: I actually believe the AVP is appropriately priced as a pioneer product. There's an incredible amount of cutting-edge tech crammed into a small form factor (though removing the front-facing display would be a welcome saving). That said, I believe the app ecosystem will be quite limited for the near future. The cost for developers to build AVP apps is extremely high, and it was much easier for devs to test/build AR iPhone apps than it will be for the AVP. Unity’s pricing shift certainly doesn’t help this (dev license is $2400/yr)! We’ll likely only see large companies and enterprise apps hit the store in 2024.

Opportunities

Three basic features could drastically improve the overall UX in the AVP.

?? Dark Mode: With eyestrain being a strong pain-point, users should be able to easily toggle UI Light/Dark mode. Despite iPhones making it easy to toggle this in Display settings, AVP users need to navigate to Accessibility > Display & Text Size and then find Increase Contrast. Renaming and moving this feature to the Control Center would be much more user friendly.

?? Unlock with AVP: When wearing the AVP, your phone cannot log you in with Face ID. Similarly to the Unlock with Apple Watch feature, AVP users should be able to login to their connected iPhones via Optic ID.

?? Default Finger Gestures: Though users can use AssistiveTouch to create gestures in the Accessibility settings, it would be helpful for the AVP to have default gestures such as double-finger-tap to open Home. This would also give developers more input possibilities in-place of handheld remotes.

Vision Pro vs Quest 3

Is the AVP useful for consumers? Yes, but not compelling enough at the current price and form-factor. The device is not designed for gaming or highly immersive VR experiences. The MQ3 is the better device for this consumer story with its price, controllers, comfort, and decent visual quality.

For professionals, however, the MQ3 doesn't compare against the advantages of the AVP. In fact, the AVP offers more utility than the current computer/monitor paradigm for most professional use-cases.

So which headset should you get?

If you're looking for a comfortable, immersive experience for gaming or long duration experiences, choose the MQ3. If you are a working professional in need of multitasking capabilities or frequently travel, the AVP is for you. If you're a developer, consider your app's primary use-case. Both ecosystems are large and growing. If there is an overlap, I advise supporting both as Apple is sure to release a non-Pro model and eventually, a V2.

Industry Impact

Even with the pain-points and limitations of the device, the AVP proves that companies can develop headsets that have utility for professional use today. I foresee a few paradigm shifts the AVP will create:

• Eye-tracking will become less of a premium/Pro feature and instead become a default capability of all major headsets.
• Headsets that support hand tracking will add additional sensors to expand the range of detection.
• Enterprise companies will start seriously investing in the development spatial apps. Not just for the AVP but for Quest as well.

Industries that can benefit from AVP apps today:

• Medical: Pre-operative planning and training would benefit from AVP's superior visual fidelity and hand tracking range. More work is needed on the intra-operative use-case. In the future, I could see the AVP extremely useful for displaying patient diagnostics and navigation info without the limitations of physical screens. The AVP could also enable post-operative therapies that show the users' biometrics in immersive environments.
• Automotive: The visual fidelity of the AVP and tracking accuracy meets the quality bar demanded by design/manufacturing and sales for automotive OEMs. This is based on first-hand conversations with OEM engineers and designers. More use-cases could emerge with the addition of high-fidelity scene reconstruction technology.
• Real-Estate: Experiencing the Zillow Vision Pro app with the AVP was actually compelling. I can also imagine users redesigning their home with related e-commerce apps (Ikea and Home Depot). Inspection use-cases could also hit market with the support from scanning/reconstruction developers.
• Design: Some Adobe apps are already supported in the AVP. Both 2D and 3D designers can benefit greatly from the spatial interface. I can't wait to use Figma in the AVP.

Conclusion

The success of the AVP should not be measured by the number of units sold, but by the number of developers and apps in the visionOS ecosystem. As they did with the iOS, Apple must succeed with building a strong development community for visionOS. All players in the XR industry, particularly Unity, will benefit from supporting this: a rising tide lifts all boats. While we may not yet have a mass-market XR headset, the AVP has convinced me that we are closer than ever to achieving this goal.