What I learned from the Apple Store’s 30-minute Vision Pro demo
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Echoing Kyle's experience, I was a little annoyed that I wasn't able to go-off script during the demo. They wouldn't let me try typing in any apps or open any games, for example. I wanted to try some immersive videos on youtube, for example, and they quickly nixed that idea. And they were definitely reading from a script. Still though, it was pretty badass.
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Longmile149
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The review I really want to read is the one where Apple drops a dozen off these off at Pixar and ILM and asks them to have professional animators spend six months using them and write about how it affected their work.
I don’t particularly expect that to happen, mind you, but that’s the take I want.
I don’t particularly expect that to happen, mind you, but that’s the take I want.
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Aside from the fact that it comes with inserts, glasses require a lot of extra room that the headset probably isn't designed for. Speaking from experience, 100 hours with glasses in the Valve Index was painful, created a bunch of glare, and scratched the lens. Inserts were a godsend and Apple making that the default makes sense.
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In the brief soccer and baseball clips they demoed, the camera is locked, but at a position which is the best seat in the house. In the case of the soccer clip, it was at a place you could never sit maybe 20 feet behind a goal and about 10 feet above. Both clips really did feel like being right there. I suspect that if Apple were to really get serious about this they'd offer a way to switch from a few other static and strategically placed angles. I'm pretty sure the cameras would never move.
Edited: grammar and to add several details.
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Its one of the standard lines from the 'Pitch Meeting' series of youtube comedy sketches I was made aware of recently.
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Having been using one fairly regularly now for a few days -- software.
I DO NOT mean apps; if you asked me "Why shouldn't I buy a Vision Pro right now?", my first answer would be "Apple and Unity managed to catastrophically bungle the availability of software at launch." There may actually be "more than 600 apps available at launch," but it sure doesn't look that way while browsing the single-page (and sometimes single-item) App Store categories. A lot of it's repetitive: every sport/entertainment company/niche apparently feels the need to have its own custom cinema app even though they're all basically the same. And a lot of it's just dumb; there's a "game" in there that's just a ball bouncing in AR space. So lack of software would come first on my list of negatives right now; ahead of cost, comfort, the possibility it might mess up your hair or eyebrows, and apparently the lack of porn.
That software selection will improve, but Apple's tools are new, a little buggy, and abstracted to the point of being extremely hard to learn, even for existing iOS devs. Unity's are new, a lot buggy, and inaccessible to most of the hobby/indie devs that make up the bulk of Apple platform developers because of the $2000/person/year barrier of entry. So I think it's going to be slow, and "I'll wait until there are actually a decent amount of apps to buy" seems a quite reasonable position for someone to take.
But it's hard to complain about visionOS itself. A lot of the hyperbolic statements in the demo aren't actually all that hyperbolic. Things are clearer, sharper, and easier to read than any AR/VR system I've ever used--even ones with "on paper" better specs--and I've used many of them. Most of the extensive set of "flat" iPad apps actually work well, and can "cover" a bit for not having a decent software selection; being able to scatter them around you in space makes for an upgraded experience even though they're not actually any better than their on-tablet forms.
A lot of folks (including me) complained about the eye tracking and gestures being uncomfortable. That lasts about two days; at this point interacting with this thing is completely natural, fast, and easy. As with the iPhone and the Apple Watch, there are some new metaphors that you need to learn, and some old ones that you can't do. Your eyes aren't a mouse, and a lot of that early adjustment is learning that. It does some things better and some things worse, but on the balance, it's an Apple product: it's designed for what it is, and it's good at it. I'm flinging things about with wild abandon at this point; I look like one of those Hollywood hackers with a half dozen windows appearing and disappearing in a flash onscreen.
[Edit: Hint to new users: Move your eyes, NOT your head. It feels wrong at first, but not actually moving your neck muscles (or not as much) dramatically improves the comfort and wear-duration of the headset.]
There's a lot of whining about not having controllers, but for most day to day non-game stuff you don't need them, and not having those extra parts around (with their separate batteries, usually) is a win. For games, it supports any bluetooth gamepad that works in iOS just fine (effectively all of them); although there are a few rough edges in that, still -- Steam Link, for example, can't see my controller, even though it works fine in the app on iPad, and works fine in every other app on the Vision Pro. No idea.
The Mac Virtual screen is either wonderful (if the virtual screen is better than your real one(s)), or an OK gimmick (if not). It has some annoying quirks, but works well enough for actual use at full resolution and any reasonable size. As a dev; I've been using it to avoid having to take the headset off and on while testing VP apps. It's a tradeoff -- I gain the ability to transition between device and code trivally, but I lose the multi-monitor setup that I use when developing flatter apps. I'm hoping for some improvement here, but it's enough for now.
Overall, I'd say that Apple released it a few months before the software environment could support it, and they made a massive mistake in trusting Unity (though I suppose they couldn't have known at the time), but this is going to be a stable, well-liked platform sooner rather than later. There's nothing broken here that can't be fixed, and plenty that works well enough to use now.
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sigmasirrus
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Actually, I think Steve Jobs' keynote for the iPhone was probably the best and clearest consumer electronics sales pitch ever:
'It's a phone, an iPod, and a breakthrough internet communicator ... are you getting it? It's not 3 devices but one device and we call it iPhone.'
Super simple.
But I think we use iPhones / smart phones and iPads / tablets for the same things we used to use PCs for, aside from taking photos and GPS. But we used to have dedicated devices for that.
Portibility, ease of use for the masses, and consolidating multiple devices to one, was the big selling point.
I think Apple has a much harder sell with the Vision Pro. It's not more portable. It doesn't replace previous devices, and it's not easier to use than a touch screen.
Apple needed 3D AR stuff in the demo. Like show me 3D models floating in space of the inside of the earth, or games that interact with the envrionment I'm in, like an RTS on a table. POV surgery or sky diving. That's all stuff that a 3D device can do better than a 2D screen...and they show 2D iPad apps. It's really lame and I don't know why they didn't think to develop some at least proof of concept fluff apps to showcase the good stuff...
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Precisely what aspects do you feel require several evolutionary leaps for this to become mainstream?
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Pico, Sony, Microsoft, and HTC, have been doing this for a while.
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Apple certainly is doing their best to ruin that phrase "right from iPhone" completely. It starts to get on peoples nerves.
They need to stop this NOW or they are becoming counter productive.
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Thanks for the writeup. Is it true that you can only have a single virtual 'mirrored' laptop screen in there?
To me that would have been a easy low hanging fruit near-killer-app to let a users have 3-4 (or whatever) virtual screens tied to their Mac laptop/desktop. As I see it AR virtual screens would be the first killer apps. Though in my mind only when we have true lightweight see through glasses.
Maybe they don't want people to start think of it as a 2d plane platform and want to force/encourage more inventive 'spacial computing' ideas.
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I am super eager to demo this but think I'll wait for the cheaper "Vision Air" or a couple of generations of the V.P. to see how it all works out.
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They really need to find a way to stream light field video it stuff like this.
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Did you use the 1st gen iPhone or iPad? I have including a 1st gen Macintosh to do real work. They were all relatively slow, limited apps, lots of rough spots and the general complaint was "Neat but why?" Sounds like nearly every review I have seen of the Vision Pro.
I have had mine now for 5 days. I have been using it for work and leisure. This is more usable out of the box than its 1st gen predecessor because it arrives in a mature eco-system.It will only get better. But I very much consider it like the 1st gen iPhone. Exciting and sometimes a little frustrating, but no regrets.
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Nowhere in the story did he say you have to keep your hands in the air (you don't). And I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about scrolling. I took the demo yesterday, and found scrolling entirely natural–exactly as it is on any other screen.
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That sounds a lot like me when I got my Odyssey. I'd spend days looking at things in vr, checking out experiences, 3d movies, just browsing. I definitely get it. Eventually though, I just stopped. I suppose the novelty went away, and then at some point I never did that again. Now I use it to play DCS and Blade and Sorcery, and it's amazing for that, but that's all it does.
Maybe with this it's that it's past some threshold where the novelty will never wear off? Where doing things this way can become a normal part of day to day use? I'd love to see it, if only to see what it enables down the line. I'm just not seeing that so far, but I've been known to be wrong before.
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Yes. It's not really mirrored, so much as "replaces the monitor setup from the Mac." My desktop has three monitors normally; when I "go VP", all three of them black out, and every window on all three of them is thrown onto the "new" monitor.
That's annoying enough that I don't do it often; usually I use the feature with a single-screen laptop instead, where it's more reasonable; it in fact gives me a better screen than the laptop one it's turning off.
I don't know why multi-monitors work that way: limitation of wifi/bluetooth bandwidth, maybe? If so, might not be fixable.
But the thing I'd really like them to do is stop blanking out the existing screens. I understand that the passthrough isn't (quite) good enough for reading small text on the screens, but for a lot of what I do, the extra screen space would be nice even if it was a little blurry.
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Speaking as a software dev who has a Vision Pro as well as a few other VR headsets, I think where folks are going wrong with this is expecting it to be AMAZING. Which, granted, it is in some ways relative to other consumer grade VR gear, but that's kind of missing the bigger deal I think.
It's the first VR/AR experience I've had, that's just barely good enough.
It feels adequate, and the pass-through is good enough not to bother taking it off. Messing around in it trying the various demos and such and remember it's time to feed the cat? Didn't bother taking it off, just walked to the kitchen and fed the cat. Was I seeing the world in lower quality than I'm used to? Absolutely. But it wasn't annoying enough to bother with even the trivial step of taking it off.
That felt like a big difference.
The app ecosystem is basically non-existent in terms of anything that actually feels designed for it. The 'designed for vision' apps are monumentally disappointing so far, but that's to be expected given the pre-release dev process and timelines.
But that gets to the second thing which is a big deal: It feels just barely good enough to be worth the bother of maybe writing some real software for. Now I love me some VR games, Alyx was a masterpiece, but I'm talking boring every day software. Like an actual digital whiteboard? Or data visualization work? Etc.
As a dev it feels good enough capability wise, and there's at least an implication that if I were to write some software that was barely usable today, because the hand tracking isn't quite fast enough, and the environment mapping isn't actually as good as it seems, etc. That's ok, because it'll probably get better, so it's maybe worth the risk of investing my time in that ecosystem.
It's an amazing bit of kit, but more important to me was the reaction someone in my life had then they tried it: "I don't get what's so special, everything looks kinda normal but worse." It's good enough that it's boring, and that's the big milestone.
It's the first VR/AR experience I've had, that's just barely good enough.
It feels adequate, and the pass-through is good enough not to bother taking it off. Messing around in it trying the various demos and such and remember it's time to feed the cat? Didn't bother taking it off, just walked to the kitchen and fed the cat. Was I seeing the world in lower quality than I'm used to? Absolutely. But it wasn't annoying enough to bother with even the trivial step of taking it off.
That felt like a big difference.
The app ecosystem is basically non-existent in terms of anything that actually feels designed for it. The 'designed for vision' apps are monumentally disappointing so far, but that's to be expected given the pre-release dev process and timelines.
But that gets to the second thing which is a big deal: It feels just barely good enough to be worth the bother of maybe writing some real software for. Now I love me some VR games, Alyx was a masterpiece, but I'm talking boring every day software. Like an actual digital whiteboard? Or data visualization work? Etc.
As a dev it feels good enough capability wise, and there's at least an implication that if I were to write some software that was barely usable today, because the hand tracking isn't quite fast enough, and the environment mapping isn't actually as good as it seems, etc. That's ok, because it'll probably get better, so it's maybe worth the risk of investing my time in that ecosystem.
It's an amazing bit of kit, but more important to me was the reaction someone in my life had then they tried it: "I don't get what's so special, everything looks kinda normal but worse." It's good enough that it's boring, and that's the big milestone.
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Hard to say; it's too new. But my experience with other VR systems was similar; I stopped using them because they were uncomfortable, had annoying and inconsistent UIs, required finding (and replacing the batteries in) the controllers, switching hands because you always pick them up the wrong way, and there's just not enough games out there that are all that good. It just seemed like "work" to get ready for a single experience. [Edit: And the passthrough is sufficient that the device doesn't limit you in space as much as a standard VR set. The "ghost" that shows up when my wife walks into the room looking for me during immersion is useful, too. It's definitely less "isolating" than the old VR sets.]
This one is definitely less game oriented, there's not that "blind" period when you first put it on, comfort is better (I don't find it differs that much between the two straps), and the controllling usability is high because it's just my hands, which I never...well rarely...misplace.
That said; I think we're a couple generations still from XR systems that can be (and are meant to be) worn for anything like a full workday. 2-3 hours isn't really a problem (and I know there have been articles about people wearing them for 24 hours at a time), but it's less something that integrates into your life all time time like a smartphone, and more a tool you use to do things for a while, then stop using to go do other things.
We'll see.
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Only 1st-gen Apple device I've ever owned was the Apple Watch. I think I'll continue to wait for the improvements and price breaks that tend to come from later generations.
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Neither of those are an issue. You can scroll using your hands in your lap while looking at the text you're scrolling.
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Yeah, it shows the Mac output as one screen. Interestingly (according to one review I read) on a Mac with multiple monitors, both screens show up as one big element. Like if it’s two different size/shaped monitors, they show up as those sizes/shape rectangles concatenated together with relative position as defined in Settings. But to the Vision Pro UI, they are a single object that gets moved/resized together.
It’s possible they do it that way to avoid the potential confusion of relative positioning of items on the two monitors, if they could be moved independently. You could end up with a spreadsheet where the left half is on a virtual monitor on the right side of your view in Vision Pro, and vice versa.
Clearly, however, it means the two video streams get to the Vision Pro just fine, so what to do with them there just becomes a UI question. Also, there wouldn’t necessarily be a reason why a Mac couldn’t produce the output for a second monitor, even without having a second physical monitor attached. So the fact you can only get the stream from a second monitor when one is attached probably isn’t a hardware constraint.
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Only aspect of AVP that surprises me is that they are demoing in stores but maybe that is part of marketing to developers to say “build apps now because we’re selling this now.”
Looks like the most interesting device they have made since AirPods and Apple Watch.
Looks like the most interesting device they have made since AirPods and Apple Watch.
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It isn't suggesting that at all, this is clearly a review of the sales experience, not of the device.
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In the "weird complaints I wouldn't have guessed before buying" category, though: it's very hard to drink from a cup while wearing the AVP. It just sticks out too far and too low to tip a cup successfully, unless it's very small. So buy shares in straw companies, I suppose.
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I've got mixed feelings on the device. There are some amazing pro's:
- panels are astounding, clarity and resolution is enough to work in without visual discomfort (though the weight may be a bit uncomfortable.
- The camera experience/captures are generally pretty amazing.
Ultimately though (As a VR/XR enthusiast/developer) I feel like its a bit of a novelty that Apple is using to see how use-cases develop. And some of Apple's matter-o-fact statements ("we're not making/supporting controllers/external tracking etc.") are quite frankly dumb/tone-deaf.
I hope they figure it out, decide to support VR etc. I also though hope that the Panels, and other tech from Sony and various Chinese companies becomes more universally available.
- panels are astounding, clarity and resolution is enough to work in without visual discomfort (though the weight may be a bit uncomfortable.
- The camera experience/captures are generally pretty amazing.
Ultimately though (As a VR/XR enthusiast/developer) I feel like its a bit of a novelty that Apple is using to see how use-cases develop. And some of Apple's matter-o-fact statements ("we're not making/supporting controllers/external tracking etc.") are quite frankly dumb/tone-deaf.
I hope they figure it out, decide to support VR etc. I also though hope that the Panels, and other tech from Sony and various Chinese companies becomes more universally available.
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You shouldn't need a bifocal lens for this -- since the screen is always at the same focal length you'll just need a single fixed correction.
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I find the use of "iPhone" as if it was a proper name for an individual super weird and offputting. "Shot on iPhones", "right off of the iPhone", "from the iPhone", there's any number of non-super-weird ways to say that. I hardly think I'm alone on that.
Do companies not know that people find that creepy and weird, or do they not care because they know something we don't?
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I'm surprised they didn't attach it to the back of the headband to counterbalance the goggles. One of the few complaints I've heard is that holding up the weight of the goggles makes your neck sore after a while.
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It's an interesting problem, but I think the idea is more about mimicing a live sports experience, rather than a live TV experience. People definitely don't notice all the work and skill that goes into a live TV broadcast (seriously, try tracking a baseball travelling 100mph with a giant zoom lens, zooming and changing focus, keeping it smooth, etc., for ball after ball, for three hours). And that would be hard to mimic with a device like this.
But having a few pre-positioned viewpoints you can switch between at-will, as if you're changing your seat to always be "in the action" I think makes a lot of sense. For a baseball game you could have a couple cams in the outfield, one near first and third base, and one behind the plate, and deliver a pretty cool way to watch a game that's more like being there than watching on TV.
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That does seem odd; also seems like it would be annoying to have a cable trailing down to your pocket (isn't that why we have airpods and no 3.5mm jacks?). A lot of reviews for alternative headbands for the Quest 3 that incorporate an additional battery on the back of the headband say it improves comfort to have that weight counterbalancing the goggles, though to be fair the base headband for the Quest is pretty uncomfortable so anything might be an improvement.
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This could not be more wrong: the killer app for the iPhone was Safari. Blackberry was pretty good for email but its browser blew chunks – someone should have asked “why do you want to bring shame to this company by shipping this?” bad. Not only did everyone I know who tried it decide to buy their own, but I know multiple people who got C-level mandates to redesign their enterprise IT environment to support mobile web access because someone senior got one and was unwilling to go back.
I don’t know if the AVP features are enough to do that, especially at the price. I’m really looking forward to seeing it mature, though, and would bet on some pretty motivated developers coming up with something we haven’t thought of.
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Used one at work this week. It was interesting, and I'd probably pick one up at $1500 but it's not nearly interesting enough for me at the current price point.
Highlights: The video passthrough was startlingly decent. Watching movies seemed excellent.
Lowlights: Turns out I'm very used to not looking directly at stuff when I'm controlling an interface, and working in my peripheral vision instead. Not possible with this.
Highlights: The video passthrough was startlingly decent. Watching movies seemed excellent.
Lowlights: Turns out I'm very used to not looking directly at stuff when I'm controlling an interface, and working in my peripheral vision instead. Not possible with this.
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