This week in Spatial AI

Oh Apple. The pain – the anguish! – of not being on the leading edge of your new world of spatial computing… is real. As an Australian, I can only watch from afar, as we’re beginning to see the flood of first-hand reports and reactions to your new flagship device: the Apple Vision Pro.

Here's some of the highlights:

Marques Brownlee said: “I also had a moment where I was using the Vision Pro for a while and I had my Mac and some other monitors around me, and then I took it off and then I went and did something, and then I came back and before I put the headset back on I looked up at the wall to where I thought a window was going to be.”

John Gruber said: “With VisionOS the virtual world is the actual world around you… This is not confusing or complex, but it feels profound.”

and from Stephen Colbert: “Jab a tube in my spine and toss me in a goo pod, I want to cook in ‘The Matrix’”

So a slew of highly positive reactions to both the product, as well as the experience. Some were enthralled by the sheer magic of it, while others were immediately drawn to using it for entertainment purposes – content consumption – with only a small number of people beginning to use the flagship device for content creation tasks.

As a middle ground, Casey Neistat correctly pointed out that it’s both simultaneously a) awesome AND b) the worst Apple VisionOS headset we’ll ever see. As is the way with all things Apple, it’s the v2.0 that begins to meet the needs of a wider audience.

My not-overly-prescient prediction is that Apple will announce a new Apple Vision Air at the mid-year Developer Conference.

Since the Apple Vision Pro is the first new Apple device that’s gone straight to the ‘Pro’ version, foregoing any [plain] demarcation, there is ample room to come down a marketing notch, and release a more end-user-consumer-friendly variant of the flagship Pro model.

What would an Apple Vision Air look like?

• No change in the internal screen: the 23 megapixel display is near-perfect for fooling the eye in terms of pixel density. The next Pro, however, might add TrueTone (or the VisionOS equivalent) to assist in low-light conditions, and to help with some visual aberrations at the extreme edges of the screen. The Air, however, would get this exact Pro screen.
• Weight: by definition, all of Apple’s ‘Airs’ have been the lighter, more mobile version of the main variant, so the one-piece billet metal frame would be replaced with plastic, and the front glass would be replaced with acrylic. Teardowns are exposing the incredible engineering to get the new ‘spatial computer’ down to the remarkable 650g that it is – but even saving 2 x ~50g on these two pieces would relieve a lot of front-loaded strain.
• Battery: no change – having an external battery was a pretty huge design compromise from the outset, which ties well with a lower-cost product. But I can foresee a slew of aftermarket battery-holder-headband solutions, that give rise to the standard ‘mullet’ practise of headset-out-front / battery-out-back, to find the overall balance between weight distribution… and fashion : )
• External screen: the googley-eyes stay put. I can’t see Apple walking back their efforts in making the Vision headset sans-lenticular-screen. This is Apple’s intent to make the Vision headset a viable all-day device – and their method to stop anyone having to take the device on/off to simply ‘be present’ with friends, family or colleagues. Sure, they’re uncanny valley – and barely visible if the wearer was in a fully-immersive VR experience – but Apple is attempting to make wearing a Vision device a natural extension of ‘self’, so no doubt they’ll stick with the exact same setup we see today on the Pro.
• Price: oh my. Unlike Meta and their Quest Pro line, Apple does not delve into loss-leaders to help drive uptake… Sure: slim margins where they want to compete (and fat margins where they don’t NEED to compete), but I can’t see Apple undercutting the price of a future Vision Air model just to help with holiday sales. If the base Vision Pro was $3500 today, I can’t imagine Apple pitching the Air at anything less than $2500. That would still be equivalent to a mid-to-high spec MacBook, which would require a massive leap in first-party Apps and native ‘spatial content’ to be justifiable. We’d also need more features in the underlying operating system to help ease the pain in the ‘is it worth it yet?’ department…
• VisionOS: likely the easiest upgrade in the Vision lineup, Apple will release yearly major updates and likely fairly chunky quarterly point releases to the core Vision interface. The Air might still retain the limitation of extending a Mac screen to a single VisionOS window, whereas the Pro will be able to both literally and figuratively break this fourth wall. A killer addition to VisionOS for both Air uptake would be collaborative streaming / shared spatial interfaces – a first-party tool to have a reason to require multiple Vision devices in the one family/the one room. As Colbert put it: “I can’t go get one because my wife Evie still pays all our bills… She would not be thrilled to find that I spent $3,500 to be in the same room with her but not in the same room with her.”

What should we expect – and when?

Crystal-ball-gazing here, but I’d expect the news of a new Vision device to emerge at WWDC, with a… I’m gonna say it… holiday 2024 release.

Why so soon? Apple is under no pressure to keep a follow-up to their Vision Pro as a ‘one more thing’ announcement – unless we see a current VR/AR headset manufacturer step up to the plate and also compete in this new high-end headset market, Apple can announce early, and get as much buzz as they want from telling the world about their next-in-line product. They may even have folks like me starting to put aside my weekly pocket money into a piggy bank, ready to break out the hammer and cough up for the v2.0 device.

Why not wait, and release more variants later? Once Apple commits, they commit. There are patent images going around of an Apple VR headset connected to a version 1.0 iPod. Ouch. Even with the level of obfuscation the big tech companies use to blur the importance of patent filings, it’s clear that Apple has been working on this, skunkworks, for a very long time. With the small production numbers of the Vision Pro already sold out, Apple will be watching the rise of native apps and native spatial content over the first half of 2024, timing the release of a second version as close to the holiday season as possible. I’d even go so far to say that there would not be an upgrades Vision Pro 2 released – but instead, a yearly cycle from here onwards of Air/Pro/Air/Pro… until, of course, Apple quietly discontinues their phone lineup, in favour of this brave new world of spatial computing.

But then again, I could be getting ahead of myself. Time will tell.

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