Apple Vision Pro: What’s the Point!?

[Music] [Music] hey everybody it's Norm from tested and well it's about time today I'm going to be sharing my review and deep dive into the Apple Vision Pro as I'm recording this for about a month since it's release since people have actually been able to buy it and use it I've been personally using and testing it for the past couple weeks and want to throw my voice out there as well someone who's been testing and using headsets for well over 10 years now uh my thoughts my opinions and to dive d

eep into the hardware for those of you who may not be following this as deeply as those of us who are obsessed with VR and mixed reality today uh now since it's launch there have been plenty of reviews I've read and watched them with eager anticipation at launch as well but the community and the user base has learned so much about the Apple Vision Pro since it's launched there have been new applications betas for the software and things and quirks and features that only after using it for so lon

g that we feel like it's actually worth discussing and even then it feels like the beginning of something and while it certainly isn't the first headset on the marketplace it is the first for apple and the beginning of what they call what they're considering this era of spatial Computing Computing in a 3D environment in your physical space while wearing something on your head so in that sense this is still very early and so the point and purpose of this video may be to help share my evaluation t

o help you make a purchasing decision but honestly as a $3500 headset to start before the upgrades and the accessories most of you I think out there may have made up your mind already $3,500 is a lot of money and so as anything this is more for posterity this video is about a moment in time one month after this headset has first come out so that we can look at this share our thoughts and 6 months later a year later 5 years 10 years later come back to this video and see what we got right and whet

her the ideas that are presented here with the release of this headset and that we're sharing actually hold up that's the fun part about making these videos and so the format of this is going to be a deep dive into the hardware a demonstration of the experiences and then a discussion and evaluation of the ins and outs of the experience of using Apple Vision Pro a little bit compared to for example The Meta Quest 3 and and some thoughts going in some anecdotes about my time using it so strap on t

ight this is going to be a long and deep dive it's not often that we get to review something that's the first of a new era of any type of computing and so I've been looking forward to this for a long time let's dive in so as is customary with these type of reviews I'm going to start off by talking about the the visual experience the displays and the optic because while Apple doesn't position this as a virtual reality headset they call this a spatial Computing device it fundamentally shares so mu

ch of the characteristics as VR headsets and Mr headsets that we've Ed whether Standalone ones or PC VR headsets they are wearable devices that take compute whether it's done on board or tethered or streamed uh and processes outside information through a series of sensors and cameras and then presents them them to you with displays and lenses and what Apple's done here is they've chosen and they were able to manufacture and produce at quantity the best display system I've seen in any headset I'v

e ever worn whether in the consumer space or even the professional space and that all starts with these micro OLED panels they've chosen these panels that uh with iFixit recent tear down we've now known to be 1.1 in small micro OLED panels that have a resolution roughly 3600 by 3200 so we can call in the realm of 4K 4K TVs aren't actually 4K pixels wide now as you may know uh the resolution of these panels doesn't really mean a lot unless you're talking about how that pairs with the field of vie

w and so when we're talking about displays and headsets we're really looking at a pixels per degree kind of the equivalent as the pixels per inch metric that when we're looking at smartphones or laptop screens and on the highest end previous to the Apple Vision Pro you know the meta Quest 3 had a respectable and pretty good pixels per degree of 25 the human eye can resolve up to 60 pixels per degree and we've seen headsets like big screen Beyond and the vario arrow that crept up into the 30s um

with the Apple Vision Pro with that 3600 pixel wide display at a reasonable field of view which does change depending on how far your eyes are from the lenses it's close to 34 35 pixels per degree and that is immediately noticeable you know even as high resolution as the Met Quest 3 is you're still noticing not necessarily the screen door effect know distance between the pixels but you're noticing aliasing and the size of text really can change the readability of it here while I think even after

weeks of use I would say I can still notice some aliasing in the edges of Windows and even in three models and some of that text as well the pixels are nearly imperceptible I mean every time I put this headset on I and pull up the home view menu of icons I am almost taken aback by how crisp and how clear this display is and the fact they were able to manufacture those Source those and put them and then power them and run them on their M2 processor here is what makes this a class above just from

a visual experience and where class above the headsets currently on the market today whether it is the big screen Beyond vir Arrow or the higher-end headsets Tex even in its smallest size is incredibly readable images photos and videos high resolution photos and videos are crisp and look so good in headset and 3D models are an absolute joy to turn around and examine up close as close as the headset will allow rendered at 100% native resolution even with some super sampling sometimes added on to

smooth out any of that aliasing now unfortunately unlike with other headsets I'm not able to capture photos through the lens because of the eye tracking system here once you take the headset off there's no way even with uh there's no proximity sensor that we can fool to have it display a persistent image for us to shoot video or photos through so it's one of those things that's really hard to communicate because even with the screen capture that we're showing it doesn't really show exactly how

crisp these images look how crisp the visuals are in headset and as crisp and clear as that imagery is I'm primarily talking about the rendered imagery the stuff generated by Vision OS whether it's applications text safari windows web browsing video things that are not part of the real world but the real world is what you actually see when you put this headset on because this is primarily a mixed reality headset it's not a virtual reality headset fully immersive fully enclosed VR experiences tha

t put you somewhere else are here and they're almost like wallpapers to the content but Apple wants this primarily to be a headset where you are experiencing in near real time the world around you with then computed rendered objects overlaid on top of that and the pass through on this is the best I've seen in a consumer headset it's higher resolution it's better dynamic range and it's more responsive than the pass through in the meta Quest 3 right now it's a two 6.5 megapixel color cameras stere

o cameras that then combined uh with the other sensors whether it's the true depth uh sensor or the lar sensor or the other wide- angle cameras all that is then fused and rectified to give you a near realtime responsive view of your real world but it's also very clearly video of that world the resolution isn't as crisp as what the display panels can resolve and while the exposure and the image processing that they've done is I think A Cut Above the pass through systems of other headsets dynamic

range looks good you can look outside through a window and it will adjust exposure will adjust and you can look inside and you can interact with things like your phone you can write on a piece of paper you even watch a TV that's in the same room that you are and you can certainly talk to other people there's no mistaking the fact that these this is process video and you're going to maybe want more out of that pass through if you're wearing this headset to actually interact with the things in the

real space but aside from the quality the visual quality of that pass through there are actually two other attributes worth discussing and one is that this pass through has no Distortion so the way the past two cameras work is that it primarily relies on these two cameras these two stereo cameras on the front of the headset or near the front of this glass here and as with every headset like the quest 3 there are two cameras there as well those cameras ideally would be as close to where your eye

s are as possible to give you this perspective correct real time pass through imagery and there's just no way for these cameras to be where your eyes are because your eyes are where your eyeballs are and so the software has to do some type of Correction it has to analyze the scene combine it with depth data combine it with scans of the room and make an estimation as to where your eyes are and then kind of readjust Rectify reproject that image uh to be back where your eyes would be it's not an ea

sy problem to solve in the quest 3 this display system has geometric Distortion while it is perfectly uh perspective correct and you get a real sense that an object that's a couple feet away is a couple feet away you can grab it no problem your hands are where your hands they should be you do see near field Distortion in The Meta Quest implementation of pass through video Apple's pass through video has no nearfield Distortion whatever they're doing to correct your hands and things in the near fi

eld it seems It's a perfect stereo image at the cost though of perspective correction uh in the far field and where I think that's where some of the trade-offs come in if you look at something further than 5 m out you know a door frame or a window frame in the distance and you move your head quickly left and right you're going to see the lines of that door frame struggle to keep up and blur a little bit and some people have called this the uh or they've identified this as uh persistence in the m

icro OLED panels and I don't think it's actually pixel persistence in the micro OLED panels although that may contribute to some of it if you move your hand really quickly in front of your face in the near field you don't notice that similar persistence you actually see it almost almost like a high shutter um movement of your hand not a lot of motion blur it's only when you move your head side to side uh in the distance do you see some that blurring and some of that persistence so I think it's m

ore a characteristic of how they're rectifying and reprojecting the imagery of the world uh so that they can make this decision to avoid nearfield Distortion at the expense of correct perspectives in the distance uh maybe that lagging behind a bit I think that trade-off is actually worth it because in the headset everything in the nearfield the things I'm interacting with most being correct being stereo correct and also being uh undistorted unwarped just makes that whole Pastor experience that m

uch more comfortable it does seem a class above what I've seen in previous headsets uh in terms of what decision they've made and it's especially important with the second point is that your hands and your arms and even up to your shoulders have occlusion in the pass through systems what's being run through the Apple R1 chip in The Vision Pro they've prioritized the ability to recognize the visual representation of your hand your arm and up to your shoulder and do a real-time rotoscoping this ki

nd of cutout of the shape of your hand to overlay on top of any digital imagery applications anything that's rendered it's something that in past pass through systems has always created this this discomfort or this misalignment because if you put your hand in front of a virtual object the virtual object even though it maybe converge many feet away it's still going to overlay on top of your the the representation of your hand and that's why on the quest they use these outlines of your hand to all

ow for recognition of occlusion in The Vision Pro it's just video this realtime rotoscoping of your hand that is overlaid and they do it really really well now there are some quirks with this um because that rotoscoping well near perfect in a great lighting condition when the lighting gets poor it loses that ability to generate that occlusion and while it recognizes things like you know you might be wearing an Apple Watch and you can look at the time if you're holding a smartphone up even an iPh

one it won't actually recognize that as part of the occlusion like they're modeling their training data doesn't recognize the standardized shape it's rectangle of a phone that you might be holding holding and so there was a weird cutout of this invisible phone that you you're just seeing through it's kind of odd that they didn't rec they didn't build in that recognition of a phone that you may be interacting with because they kind of want people to be maybe looking at their phones checking messa

ges as well as they're using Vision Pro one of the funny ways I was able to test this is hold my phone up and put my fingers behind it and my fingers would be masked cuz it couldn't recognize my fingers were there but I poke my fingers out you can actually see that rotoscoping is married with the skeletal modeling of my hand and the prediction of my hand pose and so it would then realize my fingers were about to point poke up from behind the phone and then generate that rotoscoping above those f

ingers as well and it's not perfect you're able to trick it with uh you know where you move your fingers around these other occluded objects but it's interesting that they're combining the visual rotoscoping with also the hand modeling to let you know let the system know where to do this cutout something that's also neat is that this cutout representation of your hand this video of your hand is also affected dynamically with some of the lighting uh changes that uh the system May employ so if you

uh put on a fully immersive environment like a cinema or for example one of their uh preset environments like Y at night time the system has a light model for what that environment is supposed to be like at night time and then will actually darken and create Shadows over that video of your hand so it's not the lighting of your real environment that's affecting your hand they're masking over it kind of an augmented reality way of masking lighting uh to better match this immersive environment rea

lly neat way that they're making your hand presence feel As Natural as possible in addition to how responsive how low latency that hand movement is that's the pass through and then finally that hand tracking is so important to the way you primarily interface with the Vision Pro which is through a combination of ey tracking which is used for targeting and interacting with the environment as well as fiated rendering and also the hand tracked model of your hand a re recognizing a simple tap gesture

there's only one gesture one type of Click equivalent you can do in Vision Pro and that's by just tapping your fingers together and to best demonstrate that let's head to the studio and see what using Apple Vision Pro is actually like so here we are in the tested studio and what you're seeing is a capture of the pass through video it's actually uh capturing both my eyes so unlike some other VR headsets it's not a left eye or right eye capture although what I see is actually a slightly wider fie

ld of view than what you see this is essentially a 1080p capture and hopefully you'll be able to see uh some of the details I'm talking about but I want to really run through what using Vision OS is like now on the top right of the headset there's the digital Crown I press that or I can activate a home view is what they call this it's essentially the home screen but floating in space and already this with the subtle animations of the icon these are like three layers of imagery per icon when i ga

ze at an icon and tap and move my hands the subtle animations the level of Polish just that smoothness of even moving the home view icons is indicative of what a polished experience this all is and I wanted to First demonstrate some a basic application so photos right in the center of the screen probably the most compelling uh Native application here and it's essentially a flat window pane so it opens up where I clicked it and to interact with it I am just holding either of my hands out and tapp

ing and dragging as if it was uh I was holding on to a string or something and it's very responsive and the field of view of what it captures from my hands is actually pretty impressive so I'm going to hold on to this window and keep on manipulating it but also move my hand and I can't actually see my hand right now it's outside my visual field of view but it's still well within the field of view of the downward facing and outward facing tracking cameras if I move my hand above it's still I can'

t see my hand really and has that tracking but like over my head of course there's no tracking there behind my head no tracking as well so really is made for your hands to be kind of in a natural resting position you know you see a lot of people demos holding their hands out to interact you don't need to do that it's more about keeping it in a comfortable position not fatiguing your arm your wrist just having it kind of rested whether you're standing up or you're sitting down and then you can ma

nipulate these windows so photos Safari I have instances of safari popped up here and these are all running they're not like iOS or iPad OS applications where uh they're only running one at a time these are more like desktop versions where they're running all the scripts and all the animations on these windows at once and I can reposition them so I can see I can push them further away or closer to me move within that z-axis and same with the Safar windows I can you know move them up and down or

push them far or near or far away something should notice that's really interesting is the text in the safari windows and happens with your mail application and anything with text it's actually staying the same size as I move that window closer and further away it's keeping the relative size of the text even though the window itself is expanding it's almost kind of like a a dolly Zoom for the image on here so you it's trying to make it as readable as possible and keeping it even though you can c

hange the the size of your text here you can scale up the text up or down but it wants to be it wants to be as readable as possible and one of the tricks they're doing even as I expand the windows here to make it bigger and I move the windows closer it's keeping that text exactly the same size something that's also interesting is how it's keeping track of the space around you the slam tracking simultaneous location and mapping and there's lar sensor there's a true depth sensor there are stereo c

ameras and the window panes here whether it's flat windows or volumes are really locked in place now I can move them I can move them kind of within this sphere around me but I can also move out of that sphere of movement and it kind of stays with me and for example there's a table right here I can move this window through the table and acknowledges that there is some type of surface you saw the Safari window go a little bit transparent as it realizes it's going behind an object but if I let it g

o it actually then goes fully visible there's a little bit of a conversion misalignment because my braid wants the table to be in front of the S fire window but they're prioritizing the reading of your digital content over the physical space you can't though actually have your flat window panes like lock into flat surfaces or walls you can kind of push them through walls again it's acknowledging there's a wall there by going a little more transparent but you can't actually have them stick to the

wall and there's a lack of stickiness in terms of window management the windows themselves these interactive panes are locked in place but if I hold down the digital Crown it'll reset everything and there's no way to say save this arrangement of my workspace for my home save this arrangement for the studio uh you just have to kind of reset it up every single time the other type of native Vision application are volumes and here's a good example of it this is Lego builders and unlike a safari win

dow or the photos app it's actually a three-dimensional volume you can think of it almost not not exact like a sphere but you can see the edges of it uh and the digital content is within it I can peer within it but if I move my head inside to really get a nearfield interaction with the digital content kind of vignettes out the world around me and it's really neat that there are applications where these these volumetric applications can live alongside the floating pains as well there're also a th

ird type of application and of course that's the compatible apps they're listed right here in the home View and these are then iPad or iPhone applications that where the developers have not chosen to opt out and so you can bring in you know Lightroom from Adobe and here it's kind of like having a floating iPad screen you can change the orientation to Portrait or landscape Orient ation you can interact with it with your gaze and tap gesture but one thing I like to do is actually bring it real clo

se and almost have like a you know 12-in iPad in front of me and use it a direct touch method so poke my finger through the screen and interact with it I'm not getting any haptic feedback here but it's really usable where I can just grab the pan and move it around uh something I wish I could do is tilt it I wish there were handles on the side where I can you know more manipulate it and kind of again place it more in different uh spaces um but for IP applications for which there are over a millio

n of them compatible in uh in Vision Pro um there's so much you can do it's having as many iPads as you want uh now not only are the visuals spatial here uh but the audio is as well and something that's interesting and maybe a little peculiar is uh if you open up you know for example Apple music and you play a song the song will sound like it's coming uh like as if you're wearing headphones will come from these little speakers that are on the arms of the headset that's how I imagine you know lis

tening to to songs off of your your phone would be and you can of course put on airpod Pros or airpod Max and listen or or connected to any Bluetooth headset um and listen to music that way but if you open open a application like a podcast player and here I have pocketcast it's just a compatible app and I play audio from this player the audio will come from this window pane wherever I put it if I open up you know a Safari browser and play YouTube the audio will come from that window pane and rig

ht now there's no way to change it where the positional audio can be toggled to more of a headlocked audio to make it feel like I'm wearing headphones I'd really think about this as if it's like a radio or a physical jukebox I'm placing in the room and the audio is going to come from that uh the hand tracking like I mentioned has been pretty good and you can see here an example of the occlusion so this is the you know rotoscoping of my fingers around uh both my hands uh that's actually I think I

think separate from the actual hand tracking model this is just the visual rotoscoping and if you load up applications like the encounter dinosaurs app it opens up with a a butterfly flying and landing on your fingers and one way I've been able to test just the latency of the hand tracking is to move my hand away from that butterfly and the Butterfly struggles to keep up even though the visual representation of my rotoscope hand is moving near instantaneously the late see here for the visual re

presentation of your hand is quite good the hand tracking model lags behind that just a little bit one other thing I want to point out that's going to be really hard to communicate because it's an optical art Optical artifact is I've noticed that because the headset is doing an active calibration and correction for my uh lenses that I'm wearing the Zeiss lenses as well as uh What uh where my eyes are looking there seems to be a slight mismatch occasionally in uh text on top of white background l

ike on this web page here where it looks like there's a almost a bumpy texture of text on top of the white background and when I scroll up and down I almost notice it's like looking at a um a Magic Eye image incorrectly I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this but something I've notice in the mail application and on uh White web pages with dark high contrast text so I think it's due to the active correction of uh the image for uh the stereo representation um of the application and one more

thing I wanted to demonstrate was well uh you're seeing these applications in on top of the pass through of the world Apple also has a selection of what they call immersive environments some pre-loaded some coming soon where you can load up environments like yosity and here is yosity at night but if we turn today you actually have your applications in a kind of a photogrametry uh version of your sem there's some geometry in the foreground as well as some animated um details in the background as

well you can use a digital Crown to make that fully immersive so it's a full 360 environment where you're getting parallx with like the trees for example um and this kind of lets you focus in on just the content without being distracted by the outside world Mak can always turn a digital Crown to fade back into the real world so I hope that gave you an idea of what this concept of spatial Computing is like in The Vision Pro and here's where I want to talk about performance and polish and just th

e user interface experience in this because we've seen a lot of discussion about things that you can do already in a $500 headset uh like the quest 3 even natively web browsing or using thirdparty applications like virtual desktop or immersed and to some extent all of that is true one of my favorite things I did when using the quest Pro and the quest 3 was open up you know instances of the web browser and watch YouTube and have you know have uh slack uh web interface on the right side but that e

xperience while it's possible and I acknowledge that uh is still limited I've been harping on wanting Progressive web apps to be more of a thing in in meta Quest and they really haven't leaned into it the browser is a little dated you're limited to these three windows that while you can resize they're kind of fix in Orient in orientation to each other and it really feels like you know like if you on a game console using the web browser on a game console rather than a actual Computing device and

on Vision Pro there's the freedom to open as many of these instances as you want and to position them anywhere you want and one of the things I've been most impressed by is on Hardware that's not even the latest processor that Apple makes this is the M2 Chip and they've already have MacBooks with the M3 out there and this is on 16 gigs of RAM it feels like you can have as many iPad compatible Windows as you want and as many instances and tabs of safari as you can place in your room and the syste

m is far from bug-free because there have been instances where I've had to hold down the digital crown and the top button to open a force quit window to quit applications it's you know kind of the equivalent of you swiping up from your phone but the fact that they don't limit the amount of Windows that you can have open these planes of interfaces that you can have open is a testament to how far ahead this device works as a Computing device over a gaming device that you can also do web browsing a

nd you know word processing on um and one of the ways that they're able to do that because these processes do Run in real time is uh limit um the refresh rate of those windows and the way I understand it is that you may have for example you know four safari windows uh tabs open and animations and scripts are running on all of those at once but the window that you're focused on that gets the full 90 frames per second update and windows that may be more faded in the background or around you while

those scripts are running under the entire Safari process tree those aren't getting the visual refresh rate uh until you do focus on them so they're using little tricks here and there to make multitasking work in real time but not strain the processor and it's place where I'm looking forward to with the next version where they tap into the M3 or whatever next chip they put in here because I do want more and more uh I notice that when I do have half a dozen windows up and things like Google Docs

you know things that are a little more memory intensive um scrolling using things like apple music the smoothness of some of the animations does go away and so you do have to do a little bit of memory management on your own um if you have a ton of stuff that you're multitasking so another thing they're doing to optimize for performance especially in pushing all those pixels to these two high resolution displays is fiated rendering the eye tracking has to be good enough not only for interaction w

ith the windows uh but also for tracking where to display the highest density of the rendering and it's pretty impressive now in the video we've been sharing of the capture of the device you can actually see the foliated space it's kind of small the these small circles or almost like squares um and as I'm moving across like a large Excel sheet that's a great demo you can see where the detail Trails off on the edges where you're not looking but also how responsive it is to where your ey tracking

is um so it's Testament to the fact that fate rendering can work and for me it's been not noticeable in headset I'm darting my eyes left and right and up and down as fast as possible even kind of focus forward but trying to see off onto the periphery I cannot notice the resolution falling off it's everything just looks sharp to me as uh as it's rendering at you know 100% resolution uh where my eyes are focused and as capable as the system is with the data Vision applications as well as the iPad

compatible applications it really feels like having a ton of iPads the iPad level of computing versus a desktop or laptop level of computing both in terms of how you interact with those applications plus how much visual density you can get with the UI of those applications uh some of the stuff is a little bit interesting for example the photos application which about being maybe the best visual representation of the photos app my photos of my family my kids I've taken with the phone looks so goo

d in headset that photos app clearly something they want to promote and want people to use as a killer app for this it is less capable than the photos app that you have on an iPhone or an iPad you can crop an image if you pull a photo out and use a preview but you can't do any actual image editing like uh adjust your portrait photos adjust brightness contrast any of that tweaking that you can do in photos app here they're going to want you to maybe download a third party application to manipulat

e kind of interesting what they were able to get into their first party applications in time for this launch now Apple also sees Vision Pro useful as kind of a a portable Apple Studio display it's an accessory for your Mac Computing device and when used with Mac Mini uh MacBook Air MacBook Pro you basically can mirror what's on that display what that single desktop in headset at any size that you want to have it in front of you and that's kind of been one of the dreams of having uh virtual reali

ty headsets you know Michael abash has talked about wanting infinite displays and infinite monitors and if you have Mac OS and you have the the full computing power of the operating system with that processor having that run your compute your you know your video editing your photo editing but using the headset just to display a mirror of that that's a powerful combination especially with the display resolution in this headset being such that you can actually see and use those virtual monitors al

most as well as your laptop screen and certainly in a larger scale than your laptop screen but here it's also feels like a first generation implementation because there are some limitations uh one it is a single screen mirroring right now so if you have your MacBook you open it up there's actually a little augmented reality connect dialogue uh button right on top that floats above your your MacBook and so there's a Bluetooth connection that recognizes the Vision Pro with your MacBook device Dev

and you can tap that connect button and the screen goes dark on your laptop and then pops up in view that you can scale now the resolution of this virtual display is uh is complicated because the MacBook renders its own desktop in a variety of different resolutions and different ways um your MacBook might have uh 2560 by 1440 native resolution but in the back end it might be actually rendering double that four times as many pixels a 5k display and then pixel doubling for the retina implementatio

n of that in Vision OS you can actually render the full 5K number pixels at DPI and so you can have uh what's effectively a very large virtual desktop with a ton of Windows uh so that compensates for the fact that this is a single display but you won't get the pixel doubling so won't have as much of the smooth anti-alias as in that retina 2560x1440 mode you can kind of toggle there seems to be a sweet spot if you're rendering at near 4K um but also 4K seems to be also the native video resolution

of that direct connection it's actually going over your Wi-Fi once you have that Bluetooth handshake between headset and your compute device and you connect it then uses its own Wi-Fi chips for direct connection not using your home Wi-Fi to improve latency and that Wi-Fi video basically video encode and decode on the headset is limited to 4K and that's perhaps the reason that right now they're only doing single monitor mirroring not double or three monitor mirroring even though I know you know

that the MacBooks can handle doing multiple monitors at once there are also you know third part party applications uh like Moonlight that will allow you to mirror from a Windows PC a desktop PC and experiences are great as well but the limiting factor for that for all of this for using any of these virtual desktop experiences uh is not the resolution or the clarity of the image which I find perfectly usable for playing games for video editing and photo editing but the ergonomics of the Apple Vis

ion Pro and so now it's time to talk about comfort and maybe the most controversial thing about Apple Vision Pro is the fact that even with this 353 G battery separate and tethered from the headset it is still a relatively heavy headset at up to 650 gam somewhere between 600 and 650 gam depending on the light seal configuration and so it is front glass there is a front display panel here uh for their eyesight feature which we'll talk about later um the full fan and processor the display system t

he optic stack here for me even these nice lenses that magnetically snap on uh and then all of that is uh interfaced with this light seal this custom fit light seal and now what they've done here I think is pretty remarkable because they've not gone with a one siiz fit most design which is what something like the meta Quest has done for now you can adjust on those headsets the eye relief um with different facial interfaces and they've there have been alternate fits and third-party versions of th

e facial interfaces for the quest headsets and the rift headsets and other third party headsets and doesn't go as granular as what you know the big screen Beyond does which is a face scanned um perfectly custom machine and manufactured facial interface that perfectly conforms to the shape uh of every user here you're doing a face scan and they then take that geometry of that face scan and categorize you into one of 28 different shapes and sizes it's actually 14 different shapes with two variants

a narrow and a wide and so I've used a 23 W here and the difference between a 21 W 23 W 25w or 33w or 14 W is very opaque it's not been very clear people Apple users have compared notes you can go into an Apple store and ask them to bring out different fits for you to try which I did and to the best that we can understand the numbers are more corresponded primarily to the shape of this interface rather than the width or the depth of the size there is there are a few variants for the actual shap

es so people with more prouder brows maybe with higher cheekbones and you want as much of this light seal and the light seal gasket here light seal pad to be touching your face as possible um for me I like the weight more on my forehead than on my cheeks and so there's also preferences between for people depending on where they like the weight of a wearable like this but primarily you want to block out as much light as possible comfortable to wear as long as you as long periods of time as you ca

n um and then there is a variation for width so you're narrow and your wide variance as well as depth depending on whether you're using the magnetic inserts or not which just very simply pop in people have tried using the Vision Pro without the light seal you know clipping it to a baseball the brim of a baseball cap to expand the field of view uh and while ey tracking still works and you can get some you know peripheral light um coming in uh I found it not very comfortable in fact you get a warn

ing that says caution your headset the lenses are too close to your eyes uh and I've gone back to using the light seal this 23 uh W uh having tried things like the 21 W and a 25 W but you can't get around the fact that the vast majority of the weight on this is in the front here and the strap that they include there are two straps the primary one is this knit strap has has not a ton of structure in it uh kind of like the the rigid headstraps that you might get um with uh the the quest and the el

ite headstrap or the the Halo style bands that you get uh for third party uh strap makers or what was in the the PlayStation VR and the quest Pro now their design decision here seems to be maximizing the surface area with this wide tall back of the solo knit band uh which is designed impeccably I mean just the the the fabric design of this elastic the way the single dial allows you to loosen it up it's a wonderful piece of industrial design the way it snaps on is actually can go either way so yo

u can give the knob on either left or right side they also prioritize this being soft so that when you lean back when you're on a couch when you're using this on a pillow you don't have any hard materials on the back of your head that seems to be a very conscious decision of theirs now that doesn't preclude them offering a top strap option and there is a top strap alternative which from the rumor seems to be something that was maybe a late addition to the packaging of the Vision Pro and just hav

ing the top strap offloads enough weight to make it a significantly more comfortable experience I'm disappointed that you can't have the knit solo strap with the top strap design because comfort-wise I find this secondary dual strap option much more comfortable overall but the knit strap option when leading back more comfortable because of that wide surface area because of the ease of tightening I just like the visuals like the Aesthetics and like the feel of the solo knit strap while the ergono

mics of the Dual strap are better and so I've taken to using you know a velcro strap is actually the one that came with the big screen Beyond and wrapping that around the top of the solo knit strap uh other people have you know 3D printed clips and bought additional solo knit straps to use as a top strap and however you do it it's undeniable that the ergonomics of this headset could be better either by removing weight from the front of it or putting some of the weight on the top of the head with

some type of side to side top strap or front to back top strap um they acknowledge as much with this secondary option I just wish this was connected to the solo knit strap so when we're talking about how usable a virtual desktop or the vision OS applications are as an alternative or a uh a complement to using a desktop computer or a laptop computer today it's not just about the clarity and the pixel resolution of the virtual images or the virtual desktop that you see while wearing the headset e

rgonomics absolutely becomes a part of it and despite the totally fine field of view inside this headset I think it's a little lower for me uh given the eye relief than what I've been able to use in the quest 3 and certainly most noticeably a lower vertical field of view uh has a large sweet spot with some chromatic aberration on the outer 5% edges the lenses I feel like aren't as good as what's in the quest 3 or the quest Pro uh just because of how much they have to magnify those 1.1 in micro o

leds uh it's really about how long I can be in this headset and how long can I be in this headset in a lean forward activity when I have have a Bluetooth keyboard or trackpad in front of me and I'm using it as a virtual monitor display um and I really couldn't use this in a full day doing video editing I could really go for an hour hour and a half tops um kind of using it as uh an alternative to my big 4K display that I have for my desktop PC um which point I really started to feel the weight of

the headset uh even with battery plugged in had nothing to do with the you know 2 and 1 half hour battery life of this or the clarity of the image in front of me or the ice any eye strain it was really just the weight of the headset that I was wearing another thing that's worth mentioning is the variety of inputs that Apple Vision Pro supports because in headset gaze and tap gesture while that is your primary way of interacting there is direct touch as we demonstrated of just putting your finge

rs through virtual keyboard and grabbing the handles for your virtual displays but if you're going to do any type of real Computing whether mirroring a laptop computer device or in Native applications you're going to want to have at very least a Bluetooth keyboard the Apple magic keyboard is the one that they recommend because not only does it work as a lightweight keyboard that you can throw in your bag for travel also is one of the devices like the MacBook that the computer vision system recog

nizes is and throws up a little bit of augmented reality on top in this case it's the the autocorrect typing um text your text field floats above the magic keyboard regardless of what orientation or where that keyboard's at there's also cursor input and this is where it's also a little bit frustrating because there is trackpad support so you have Apple Magic trackpad of course first party accessory that once you uh pair it with Vision Pro you get not a pinpoint cursor but a kind of a circle circ

ular cursor the equivalent of if you paired a trackpad or Mouse with your iPad unlike pairing those input methods with the iPad though you cannot pair a Bluetooth mouse with the Vision Pro it's just flat out not supported you know I have a Logitech k380 which has a keyboard and a Windows trackpad that Windows trackpad will not pair the only trackpad that will pair is Apple trackpads seems to be a strange design cision there now there is interesting uh compatibility so uh handoff is a feature whe

re if you're in a virtual desktop environment connected to your MacBook or or your Mac OS device and you have Vision OS windows that cursor when you're using a trackpad will float seamlessly from one to the other now it does that base on gaze and attention so it's not like if you have a window in front of you and a window that's you know 18 in separate from you it doesn't fly through the negative space the cursor doesn't fly through there it reaches the edge of your frame kind of the edge of a w

indow and the moment you gaze and look and focus at another window the trackpad then surfaces there so it's an instantaneous movement it's not representing the kind of zspace or through XY zspace of uh the Computing device so that's maybe a reason they didn't allow for you know the cursor support or Bluetooth mouse support but I still want that there and while your mirror desktop if you have Mac OS device you can pair a mouse to that that mouse cursor will be locked inside your Mac OS window you

won't be able to bring that mouse cursor outside to Vision OS only if you use the trackpad on your MacBook or Apple Magic trackpad will you have that handoff ability to move the Mouse um between Windows it seems like this arbitrary design decision that it's one of those things we just don't know is it ever going to change they just not get to it in time or is this philosophically one of these things that they want to draw a line in the sand not sure I mean when we're talking about the Precision

of input the mouse cursor is one of the most precise things we've developed for human computer interfacing gaze and pinch feels natural but using something like scrubbing a video and moving the playhead scrubber I found that in Vision Pro I've had difficult time just getting precisely to where I want it to be uh even with the trackpad the trackpad cursor great for you know two fingers scrolling on a you know Safari web browser but anytime I want extra pinpoint Precision I can tell UI elements a

re inflated a little bit to make hitting those touch points a little bit or those gaze points a little bit easier um and when that fails when ey tracking you know fails and I know I'm staring at a menu icon or a menu item and it's not highlighting and I have to kind of like move my eyeballs flutter them up to get it to to move up that's where gaze and tap gets becomes a bit frustrating it's a place where I sometimes miss having the pinpoint precision and the responsiveness honestly of a track co

ntroller with a raycast laser beam I know that's not going to be the best case best use case for computing ubiquitously but gaming you still kind of need a track controller I think and even for navigating a lot of UI there are times where I I want that Precision I want all the M all the modals you know multimodal of being I and finger tapping they've done a lot of work to make it feel good but give me that option of keyboard IE tapping trackpad Mouse and whatever is best fit for the user so I do

n't have to change the way I operate to make the consist the computer system work best for me that been my experience for what I would call Lean Forward activities where I'm actively engaged in trying to do Computing as an alternative to what I may have available at home but the places where Apple Vision Pro really shines are lean backward activities where I normally would be sitting on a couch using a tablet or watching a big screen TV and watching a movie at home and so let's head back to the

studio and give you a demonstration of what media viewing is like in apple Vision Pro so one of my favorite things to do with Vision Pro is watch media and of course there are all types of media that you can enjoy in headset from photos to videos to movies to TV shows and each of those you can enjoy in a bunch of different ways I want to run through some of the peculiars of watching video in apple Vision Pro uh on a base level I can open an application like Juno which is a front end for uh YouTu

be essentially a YouTube player and it kind of is like a floating video player where I can play a video and you have the same controls as if you this was a safari window you can resize it by grabbing the edge corner or using two hands to resize the window you can move it closer and for further back and here's an interesting thing that really is only relevant to the type of media that you might watch in uh a headset where you have uh basically a a a a 3D representation of this video player the vi

deo itself isn't 3D but it exists in zspace in 3D space and so not only do I have to think about how big I want this video player to be I also need to think about how close and how or how far away I might want to enjoy this video how much I want my eyes to actually Converge on the image um do I want to have more like a laptop or iPad experience where I'm bringing a video player up close and I can still make it big but it's like having like you know maybe a 40inch computer monitor in front of you

uh I find that little bit more straining than pushing the media player back and having the largest screen I can make it but as far away from me as possible my eyes are a little bit more relaxed it's like having this video projected on a cinema screen it's not just about the density of the pixels it really also is about the comfort for my eyes and how I'm looking and gazing on the video content and not only is that for videos that you can load up in a web browser or in thirdparty applications bu

t also in Apple TV as well and so same thing this is a trailer brought up in Apple TV and rather than having it play floating in my space in the Apple TV application you can actually load up environments where this video is playing in so there's a full cinem environment which is unique to the Apple TV application where it does feel like you're in a giant Cinema space there are no chairs though I do see my hands included in here and you actually see the ceiling in the floor react to the image on

the screen it's Illuminating that we've seen this in other you know immersive video players before uh on other headsets and the implementation here is really really compelling uh you can also if you don't want to use a cinnamon environment a trick is to also pull up the other ver of environment so if I open up my home View and load up the immersive environments here having the video player float in Yos or Mount Hood in the default immersive environment isn't actually as compelling as going into

the Apple TV's implementation of that immersive environment where I can have this playing in yosity and it actually again has the video Illuminating the actual environment uh there are some restrictions in this fully focused mode I can't multitask I can't bring in other windows it's a purely a media playing mode and these this version of the immersive environments is locked only to Apple TV but I've quite enjoyed you know playing a video uh in in in Mount Hood for example selecting Mount Hood as

my mive environment playing it in the dark and you can actually see the video here the movie trailer playing on Top of the Lake of Mount Hood you can see the reflections looking really nice on top of that Lake it looks super super cool now one thing where I feel like media playback could be included one area is just in navigating the interface I feel like this 2D representation of a playback bar of that play head feels a little bit archaic in Vision Pro I can look at the scrub bar you know tap

and move it back and forth but it's not the same as pressing my finger on a screen and scrubbing back I feel like having the passive haptics of my finger on a scrub bar on a a piece of glass actually allows me more find control as if I was using a mouse to to scrub um back and forth pinching and looking to scrub back and forth you know it's kind of like the difference between trying to draw a perfect circle in the air versus drawing a perfect circle again on a white sheet of paper you're going t

o get more Precision when you have some type of haptic response so I'd like to see a more developed version of this interface maybe it's a time to a place to bring back more skew morphism I could see you know for example maybe something can grab and and slowly move in front of me having it floating there where I need to look at it and scrub something back and forth on a long video I've there are many times where it just jumps back and forth and it's been a little bit frustrating uh now the last

type of video I also wanted to demonstrate was spatial video and uh these are videos captured either uh with the headset itself with the stereo cameras or uh with a current generation iPhone 15 Pro so if you load up iPhone 15 Pro and you have uh the video mode you can actually see a spatial capture button there and you can press record and you can then capture what's essentially a stereoscopic video now it's not a full VR 180 video It Doesn't fill your entire field of view it's kind of the equiv

alent of that window iPhone that you were holding that window camera camera that you're holding to to watch those videos and I found them really really compelling to watch memories of my family my daughter my dad here and I can see it in my perspective in full 3d I can see the depth and while there's no Parx I can't look around it for example uh it does make it feel more real hair light caught on hair volumetric effects you know smoke coming out of a birthday candle all look really really powerf

ul in side by side stereo video now you can also capture it with the headset itself and that's by using the uh the capture the top button on the top left of the Vision Pro so if I press that I can actually toggle a video capture mode and here I can actually start recording a spatial video from my perspective now this is more full VR1 a more full field of view and here I'm being very careful how I'm capturing this because any type of rotation any type of fast movement is going to make playing bac

k that video uncomfortable and apple doesn't do a ton to give you tips or advise you on the best way to capture this type of immersive spatial video you can see I'm playing it back right now and if I was doing a ton of head movements this would be really uncomfortable to watch it does feel really immersive because it's more of that feeling of that first person view not holding up a camera view um and so I've had fun experimenting going back and forth between using the phone and using the headset

to capture a spatial video I think the stuff captured with the phone feels like it's something I'm going to do more frequently I don't see myself wearing this headset to birthday parties wearing it around the house but I do see myself toggling on that spatial video toggle in uh the photo in the camera app and do using that uh even if it's capturing at just 1080 resolution so the one place where I feel like apple Vision Pro almost justifies its entire cost it's killer application is in watching

media and it's a place where we we've known headsets can be great media viewing devices all the way back to you know even gear VR we were watching videos in headset with three degrees of freedom and tracking but waiting for a point where the resolution and the clarity of the image and just the seamlessness of the experience would make it the equivalent of if not better than the kind of TV that you would buy for your home to watch at home uh that you might spend you know thousands of dollars on a

highquality home theater setup and I felt like we got close to that with the quest 3 and certainly the big screen Beyond one of the things I love doing big screen Beyond was watching movies on there but as you saw in my review of that it was Tethered to not only the computer but also my steam VR trackers and while great for sitting in my office chair in my home office watching a movie um I really wanted that on the couch or in bed and the Apple Vision Pro gives me that I mean I love watching mo

vies on the quest 3 as well and for $500 being able to load something and watch in in you know Skybox video player it is a totally enjoyable experience here in the Vision Pro It Feels Like A Cut Above not only because of the immersive environments that Apple TV allows you to do so the variance of the immersive environments that they've built into the uh the the shared space um but also the aversions in exclusive to Apple TV where you can put the display over the lake of Mount Hood or you know fl

oating on top of the clouds above a a Hawaiian volcano like those immersive experience immersive environments with 4K HDR and 3D High frame rate movies in apple Vision Pro are unsurpassed you're not getting you know half the frames or half the resolution even when you're buying a 3D movie you know on a 3D Blu-ray disc here you're actually getting you know the same amount of images at Full Resolution per eye and it's the only place where you can find high frame rate actually in home video home en

tertainment market for things like Avatar and the Ang Le film that he made at full 60fps um and applications like IMAX oh my goodness it's the one time where I felt like if I had the choice between paying $20 to go to an IMAX theater to watch the full 4x3 IMAX aspect ratio documentary or renting it and watching it in headset I would actually prefer watching it in headset there feel there's nothing that feels compromised in headset in Apple Vision Pro for the iMac in the IMAX app when compared to

going to the IMAX theater it's full B bit rate full resolution full aspect ratio I can choose the seat that I like right you know not right under the screen and when using you know airpod Pros or even using the built-in audio it feels like a premium realistic IMAX experience no compromises uh the glare in the lenses is present but much diminished than uh I think people are reporting and especially compared to the glare I saw in like big screen Beyond using micro OLED uh panels it's much less an

issue here there does seem to be though a strange siloing of some of the media viewing experiences though like you're going to have applications that are the iPad versions of those streaming services so they're just going to be floating windows and all the only immersive environments you can use are the ones baked into uh Apple Vision in their applications or environments list Apple TV seems to have a leg up on the other streaming services in terms of the environments they can use uh and then t

hird parties have their environments like Disney plus has an array of them but you can't view other media in Disney plus and so you know if you want to watch Avatar for example uh you want to watch it in the Apple Cinema environment you got to buy the Apple TV version you can't just stream the Disney plus version and so these seem to be inconsistencies and maybe intentionally designed differentiation in the type of experiences that users will just have to figure out and navigate like you know ca

n I watch YouTube in the headset yes but out of the box only through a Safari browser uh until Google releases an official YouTube app or you can pay for the excellent Juno app which is a standalone YouTube viewer uh but doesn't have all the features I think and ative YouTube viewer might have in terms of cashing uh videos so we're still a little bit in the early days of media viewing and something that they're going to have to figure out is what is the shared experience of watching a movie goin

g to be because right now it's a pretty isolating experience uh especially in immersive environments there is share play so there is something right out of the box if other people have a headset or don't have a vision Pro you can you know start a FaceTime call with them and link up through their Apple TV or their Vision Pro uh the share play sync so uh if they have purchased the same movie uh you can actually sync it up and uh either viewer can remotely uh adjust the playhead and change chapters

and have that kind of shared experience but it's not quite the same as something like big screen where you have you know embodied avatars in the virtual Cinema share play for Apple Vision Pro users right now is limited between tiled personas which is something we should dive into it's your the Apple equivalent of avatars uh and so let's actually talk about how those personas are [Music] created so now that I've done the scan it's creating my Persona and it does it relatively quickly surprisingl

y quickly for what it needed and you know what there it goes that's me very quickly captured uh using the front cameras of the Vision Pro you can see my hands are captured as well uh you can do a little bit of adjustments so you can change the lighting Studio lighting uh Contour lighting and then also change the color temperature just a little bit as well as the brightness but not a lot of customization options so you can of course add glasses and there is a selection of them all the glasses you

'll notice are also um translucent so you're not going to get the full color or texture of your glasses but it's very quick and pretty effective I'm actually going to open a thirdparty application called Persona Studio that someone's created that let me better view the Persona and all the details it's captured not only just the texture and the geometry of my face and even the hair and the general silhouette and a really quick capture cuz it was less than 30 seconds to get all that but the the ri

gging of my facial expressions to this model uh the fact that they can get my eye movements of course with the eye tracking the mouth movements even the scrunch of the nose and the eyebrows the subtle lip curl you can see teeth and if I stick my tongue out like that the tongue sticks out but it's not my real tongue cuz actually never got to scan the inside of my my mouth now they're also doing some tricks here like adding some noise and grain to the Persona as well as some vignetting to just hid

e some of the lack of detail it does capture a little bit your top of what you're the shirt you're wearing as well but this is much more uh subtle of detail um Nuance uh of Animation that you're getting in this than Apple's mimoji system that it would normally capture with the the front of an an iPhone and this background here is just generic background what you're getting here is essentially if you're using an iPad compatible app or anything that's going to require a front-facing camera it's go

ing to send them this Persona feed and using this while of course while in headset has been totally sufficient to communicate I think it's been far more effective in communicating my thoughts and expressions and having a a conversation with someone who's not wearing a headset uh than a more cartoonish like Avatar now I do wish there maybe were more customization options addition to the glasses but right now they're no sliders you know it's it's not like a role playing game where you're going to

be tweaking this they want this to be as accurate uh as a representation of you your real self as possible um and this is even supposed to be better in the coming versions there's a 1.1 beta where people have reported much improved Persona likenesses uh and that's why they're calling this a beta application right now but the other place that the Persona and your persona is used is also in the eyesight camera and so this is kind of the the controversial feature that Apple put in Vision Pro puttin

g a OLED screen on the exterior of the headset so that people out in the world can still communicate with you and if I'm walking up to a camera right now and I have no other application it actually recognizes that there's someone I'm looking at so as Joey fades in for me my eyes fade out for him I have no idea I can't see what's on this lenticular screen right now but knowing there's this one toone reciprocal action where as I make eye contact with people in the world they see my eyes as as well

and it's well even though it's low resolution and they've you know kind of filtered it behind this lular screen to give it the illusion of depth so it's not just on the the surface of the glass but it's receded just a little bit that's been sufficient at home to have conversations with someone else and let people know that I'm not just in my own world I can still engage with them you can toggle on and off that people awareness and it's pretty sensitive sensitive to to a point where I might be a

gain looking at digital uh content but even the face of like my child on the phone will actually fade in that image and I'll think that that's a person that I'm looking at and my eyes will fade out for them now it was super quick for me to create this Persona and we've been wondering what the the limits of this are and I've seen people you know you can wear hats some people have tried to put on parts of you know their cosplay a little bit of makeup and you can capture some of those details at so

me point if you're wearing a full mask they're not going to let you capture that as your persona and if you have optic ID turned on it does scan your retina before you begin the process but if you have a buddy you can actually scan their face as your persona because the outside cameras don't know what you look like they're just looking for a face looking for you to you know turn and scan and and do those actions and smile so you can actually take off the headset give it to someone else scan thei

r face put it on and it's super trippy to wear your headset get on a FaceTime call use this Persona studio and basically have you animate someone else's face it is possible right now it's one of those weird artifacts of their Avatar generation and as fun as it might be to mess around with generating personas and kind of Dipping Into The Uncanny Valley I want to reiterate that the personas technology is maybe one of the most impressive parts of what Apple has made for Vision Pro the fact that you

can generate them in headset without you know any type of large capture array that they can be rigged to the skeletal model of what they think your face is in under 30 seconds and capture the nuances of your Expressions especially you know your lip curl your mouth movements your eyebrow movements yes it does dip into The Uncanny Valley and that's because they're going for a photo real representation and you can argue that maybe they should have gone with something that was more stylized like yo

u know avatars that you could customize in in any other you know virtual reality application but the fact that they shot for photo real and made something that from an animation standpoint is believable and in a communication standpoint does communicate everything that I would might I would want a facial expression to communicate I think is an incredible uh leap um forward for Avatar generation and for these type of mixed reality and virtual reality avatars um it seems like they're getting aroun

d people you know maybe generating false avatars by just requiring people to generate new personas every so often if you're going to update to version 1.1 whenever that comes out you're going to have to generate a new persona and you're not able to save your personas and so you know it's it's a way it's a passive way for them to ensure that as you're using your Vision Pro it's your persona your representation is just going to be as close to a contemporary representation of you as possible uh and

it's also as we go back to the earlier discussion it's how they're doing uh any type of social aspect uh any type of Multiplayer any type of a shared experience in headset right now which admittedly is still very limited if you go back to WWDC and the documentation and the developer sessions they released announcing the shareplay protocol you can see that there are supposed to be eventually experiences where you can have a bunch of personas not necessarily in those square tiles but just floatin

g in space uh for people to remotely interact with either a single screen in front of them be surrounded around a 3D object to discuss or in a kind of semicircle pattern these different arrangements and they got the spatial audio part of that figured out they got the Persona part of that kind of figured out but implementation of the share play extensions and experiences is not just there yet I mean in applications like jigspace you see you know a notification that says sharea share play is comin

g they're going to have some version of multiplayer um uh um remote collaboration um but a month into the launch we're not seeing a lot of that and we don't know going forward what the limits of that will be because if it's just going to be floating personas around a 3D object with with some hands in there that's not the kind of full embodiment that you can even do now on the quest you know in your quest home environment where you can invite your friends into your home virtual space and the syst

em right now doesn't seem to have a way of doing collocation that's the idea of having iners people wearing headsets using Vision OS using the shared system where the spatial anchors are then synced up so that what they're looking at is from their relative perspective the same interface the same object the same web browser windows same 3D model and can interact with that that's something that's actually available right now on the quest platform in games you can play demio and have people wearing

headsets in the same room and then see the same game board um maybe they just Apple doesn't expect a ton of people to be wearing Apple Vision Pros in the same physical space yet collocation I think is going to be a really important part of mixed reality uh experiences and so hopefully we'll see more of that maybe at GDC maybe at WWDC later this year so as we near the end of our discussion and review of Apple Vision Pro I want to talk about some of the things it's been great at and some of the t

hings it's not been great at in some interesting anecdotes that we've learned uh from using it this past month uh let's start with what it's not great at because this is not a gaming device and as much as people may want to compare meta Quest 3 with apple Vision Pro they're not in the same category I really think about the analogy of one is a game console like Nintendo switch and one is a full computer that a MacBook Pro that you're essentially buying for productivity that maybe isn't great at g

ames but great at productivity applications and the other thing is and the other headset qu 3 may be great at games and is great at games uh but maybe not great at the Computing side of things um it's also I think appropriate that Apple isn't calling this a virtual reality headset because there aren't a lot of things that you do in this that are fully immersive I really think of the immersive environments that you can toggle and and dial in using the digital Crown more is the the mixed reality e

quivalent of wallpapers they're a way to isolate you while you're Computing you're still in your your physical environment and that's why the uh the people awareness pops up that's why eyesight works um but you're not really transported to be interacting in that space it's really just kind of background and there are supposed to be full VR applications uh for this you know developers are working on it you know there's going to be wreck room at some point in apple Vision Pro and I don't know if w

ithout track controllers those experiences are going to be as resp responsive or as immersive as with what you get with having a thumb stick and Trigger buttons cuz when people play games they're going to want to press a trigger or do fire a blaster they're going to want to hold something feel the passive haptics of having a controller in their hand to swing around a sword and maybe it's Apple's philosophy that at some point hand tracking becomes good enough that you don't need an active track c

ontroller that you can pick up a passive thing you know uh a a a cylinder a small thing on your tabletop that isn't tracked and it works as a sword I don't know what their plan is going forward but the games they have right now feel more like the Casual games it honestly feels like you know smartphone games where uh I wish I could play them with a Bluetooth controller or it's best played with a Bluetooth controller the onscreen native controls are not optimal the app selection also a month into

launch seems like it's slow growing um a new platform form I get that uh and as of right now there are over a thousand applications uh that are native to Vision OS so already a couple hundred more than the 600 plus they had uh a month ago but app Discovery has been kind of anemic uh you go into the App Store and it's the same couple dozen applications that are highlighted kind of reminds me the early days of you know Amazon Prime video where you couldn't even search for vide because their Librar

y wasn't that deep and so it's like here's a couple dozen of the great things you can do don't dive too deep otherwise it's Trails off pretty quickly into some basic basic applications and I I feel that with Vision Pro there are a couple really fun and great things and then there are a bunch of like task apps and timer apps and clock applications that are just kind of filler it feels like the selection of iPad applications iPad and iPhone uh iPhone o OS uh compatible apps is well over a million

and I do love having them in the near field using the direct input to interface with but that's not the true potential of spatial Computing and even then there don't seem to be a way to surface the best version of those uh that work with uh Vision OS you're just kind of searching based on what you may remember that you have on the iPad or the iPhone and then the system while it is extremely responsive and the performance has been incredibly impressive it's been a little bit of buggy I mean it's

it reminds me of the early days of the iPad where uh as stable as an Osa that was at launch you'd have to manually swipe away the applications and here I'm forc quitting from time to time or sometimes things won't load and I'm actually having to disconnect the power and shut off and reboot the whole headset and only one time have I had the headset go dark on me uh through a bug and had the manly reset and it's pretty jarring I mean if an application crashes that's fine I can reboot it uh I can r

estart it if I know I'm restarting the headset and take it off but when the screens go black suddenly uh that's when I really feel like like wow I forgot I'm wearing a headset and this is it being all black not a great feeling let me take this off reset it and put it back on uh so definitely could be a little more stable uh in the versions going forward but what the headset has been great at media viewing first and foremost as great as the iPad has been for viewing photos and watching movies thi

s is the next level up we wondered forever you know if Apple was going to make a physical TV turns out they don't need to a headset with a virtual TV with a virtual cinema screen is the solution for that and paired with what they've built into Apple TV and Apple tv plus and all their partner uh applications for streaming and local playback and viewing YouTube um this is been just a joy to watch 4K video in and honestly also to view photos in I'm always amazed in the photos application how good a

n an iPhone photo looks in headset being able to swipe through you know all the thousands and thousands of photos I've taken with iPhones and smartphones over the years they've also done an impeccable almost perfect job at their slam tracking uh with a foundation for mixed reality the responsiveness of the pass through especially in the near field and with the hand occlusion plus the fact that Windows just stay in place I've never had a virtual window drift off or not be pixel precise to exactly

where it was if I walked to another part of the house and walk back to it that is something they've just solved and that no other tracking system headset system has done so far and even though there's more that I wish they were doing with that slam tracking and making applications more reactive and more semantically aware of the kind of the geography of the rooms you're in they've done that uh incredibly with audio so the spatial audio not only having the sound come from where the windows are f

loating from but bouncing from either an immersive environment or the real physical envir whether you're in a small room a large room a room with hardwood floors or a room with what they recognize as carpeted floors all those soundscapes feel believable it's one of those things where going back from this headset to a previous you know to a quest you notice that while there is positional audio in in the quest the sound the spatial audio just doesn't feel as realistic or believable um until you've

tried it in apple Vision Pro and then the final thing that feels like a killer application and I've had such a pleasure of using this in is travel the travel mode so I've been lucky enough to take couple flights with this already taking on a work trip uh didn't even bring a laptop on those work trips and on the plane enabling travel mode which does take you know a little bit of navigating if you're already in the air and you want to activate it from the uh the the control menu um once you've to

ggled it on uh it is solid enough that I could enjoy an incredible screen and it's so it's so it kind of opens mentally the amount of space I have so sitting in an economy seat and normally feeling very physically constrained just the act of having a photo album you know a little further out and a media player a little further out and and then you know a podcast application into the seat next to me makes me feel more at ease I my my mind feels like I'm less constricted and it's less claustrophob

ic uh and I'm less looking at the pass through of the world around me and looking at the depth the Z depth of these virtual windows and it really made flying on a whether it was a short flight or long flight feel like one the time went by much faster uh and I just felt less claustrophobic overall even though I was in my own heads space uh wearing a headset and then using in a hotel room not having to look at a small iPad screen or laptop screen and having a full web browser word processor email

application up filling the space in front of me uh that was been great for being productive while on the road one thing I can't get enough of in apple Vision Pro is just the experience of viewing 3D models of manipulating a a usdz model that you can pull from an online repository you can email to yourself you can download and having it float in your space the crispness of the panels and the models rendered at Native scale it feels it feel I hesitate to use the word magical but it feels like this

magical moment in interacting with 3D objects uh apps like polycam and jigspace really show the potential of what it can what interacting and what interfacing with three-dimensional data and three-dimensional visualizations can mean in a mixed reality headset just because of the sheer performance and resolution and Clarity of that and it benefits from all the things that Apple's been doing with AR kit I mean not only do the flat plane windows with the frosted glass react to Lighting in your roo

m uh but also the 3D models actually in semi-real time react to the lighting and actual details the texture in your room as well something you can do is pull up a highly reflective object like a the the front Dome of a an astronaut's helmet or an Iron Man armor and as you maybe change the lights in your room or have it move around your workspace the Reflections in that shiny surface are actually being baked into the flection maps on the 3D model itself it feels more believable not just because o

f how fixated it is in your virtual space in that Z space in the pass through but the fact that it's reacting to the information that's passed through the cameras as well into the object this is something that Apple's done really really well and it's made it such a joy to bring those objects into the shared space now a couple of anecdotes I want to talk about and one is augmented reality tracking and I mentioned a few times a few places is where the system can recognize real physical objects thi

ng we've been asking Hardware VR Hardware makers whether it can do and you know the quest has a way of representing or recognizing The Limited number of keyboards and implementing a a digital overlay on that uh here it recognizes the Apple magic keyboard uh a Macbook actually the MacBook keyboard not the screen part of it to have those floating uh images and some think it's interesting about that is the the responsiveness and latency of that seems to be updating that uh that model about one fram

e a second and so all the kind of dreams of it being of being able to recognize your phone and kind of do a hologram above your phone or a hologram above your watch seems to be far-fetched because it's not tapping into the full AR Kit's ability to do a 60 hertz update on its computer vision tracking of physical objects without tracking markers because there are no tracking markers on the magic keyboard or the MacBooks and so maybe it's something they can train the system to tap into and unlock i

n the future but I say don't expect that kind of floating hologram track to your wrist anytime soon uh also want to mention the Apple Store experience I went to go and get my light seal fitted and the Apple Store experience is fascinating it's something that only they can do Apple because they have the stores when you buy the headset you might have you know you might have bought it to be delivered in the store what's actually delivered to Apple isn't a closed box um because when you go in you st

ill have to go through a light seal fitting to make sure that what you were scann is best suited for you and full credit and kudos to Apple store employees for the amount of patience I've seen them um give to new headset users or are the first time in headset or even people who are very experienced in headsets like me who've gone in who just want you know to get a different light seal or try different light seals on uh they were fully able to accompany uh prescription lenses by just putting my g

lasses inside a way to measure my prescription all of that is very private so they don't even know what my prescription is and then someone in the back gets uh a notification for what you know what what lens is to pull out of a drawer to to then give uh for the demo and the headsets they're actually from what I understand assembled the packaging is assembled in store and so even if you've ordered you know a headset with a 23w light seal you know in the back they actually pull the headset put it

in the Box pick the right light seal put it Merit to the Box get the right size of knit band attach it and then someone in blue gloves plastic gloves is putting it package all together and then taping it up um to then give you a sealed box that you take home it's not something that's sealed overseas and then shipped to the store so it's a very custom retail experience that I don't see them doing it Best Buy for example this is one of the reasons I don't see you know prepackaged Apple Vision Pros

in big box stores that Apple would otherwise sell iPads and iPhones at uh you would have to buy this either directly shipped directly to you or to an Apple store where they will package it up behind the scenes very interesting the way they're doing that um also that the battery you know we talked about battery life a little bit at 2 and 1 half hours and the fact that it is removable it makes this the first Apple product in well over a decade that has kind of a user replaceable battery now it's

not cheap it's 200 bucks to to buy a new battery and this is a solia battery there's no battery in the headset but as people pointed out you can detach this connector with a metal pin it's a variant of their lightning connection same with the side straps here and the headset battery while it disconnects you can see there are uh six contacts on the inside here and I'm curious it's neither hasn't been confirmed to me either way of whether that would allow any type of data transfer through this six

pin proprietary Connection in the future because right now there is no way of onboarding data directly onto a headset unless you buy a special developer s strap with a USB connection but I would love it in the future for there to be for a a standard user a way to have a battery with data pass through um and hopefully that's not physically impossible given this six pin Arrangement inside here the unit starts at 256 gigs and I think that that is is sufficient for the vast majority of users movie

sizes uh to vary in size so a standard 4K movie is somewhere in about the four to 6 gigabyte range it's interesting that the same movie downloaded in Apple TV and Disney plus will actually be different sizes and notice you know Moana for example both 3D movies one was 8 gigs and one was six gigs and then the largest movie I saw was Avatar way of water that's high frame rate in stereo 3D and I was about 20 gigs and so if you're going to be caching movies on the go 256 gigs seems plenty uh and you

can also toggle in the settings for it to autom manage like on your phone your photos applications and iCloud so while the headset will be back up the iCloud it doesn't need to sync up your entirety of your iCloud catalog onto the headset um if you want to spend the extra $200 for 512 gigs that seems to also be a nice sweet spot if you're if you're planning on using this as a primary Computing device and then something to also keep an eye on even though there are applications that let you do re

mote desktop from a Windows PC getting something like steam VR or PC VR stream to headset is still in the early days it has been possible with thirdparty tinkering but it would require uh aligning track controllers like steamvr controllers uh with the headset and disabling the hand pass through um for full immersive uh Comfort uh and it's just not something readily available yet although technologically it is possible something we're going to keep an eye on so as I wrap up my review of Apple Vis

ion Pro I do want to talk about this as a product that you can buy today its value as a piece of technology you can buy today as well as what what might say about headsets virtual reality mixed reality augmented reality headsets going forward and let's be up front this is the most expensive piece of technology the most expensive computer I have at home right now more expensive than my laptop my gaming PC my meta Quest 3 my game console my phone my iPad almost combined right with what you can buy

for $3 $500 to $4,000 you could buy the latest iPhone a MacBook Pro game console and The Meta Quest 3 and so from a pure dollars to utility value proposition it's not for anyone who's looking to buy a new Computing device to replace those other devices it is at once a developer kit as well as an early adopter device to tap into the latest that's out there and as a piece of technology it is undoubtedly the most impressive and advanced single piece of technology I've ever owned I mean having used

every single almost every single VR headset previously having used everything from 3D printers to drones to you know high-end home entertainment systems um the Apple Vision Pro feels more like a piece of the future available today and that alone for those of you out there who are curious about this technology or who are into a virtual reality into mixed reality into technology in general and have the discretionary funds to to pay for it um that might be worth it in its own it also is very clear

ly the foundation for this spatial Computing platform and this new era of computing that apple is going to develop alongside what's going to be around for a long time phones Mac OS flat screen interfaces and you can very clearly see see that because of how much flat screen interfaces feel like a part of vision OS today those aren't going to be replaced feels very complimentary um and the the foundational Technologies they've built in here from personas to pass through to the slam tracking the th

e the lock spatial anchors for uh for Windows um the interface of gaze and tap all those fuel foundational not just for Vision Pro as a product line going forward but for this headset uh in its next couple years of life um you know can't imagine them releasing another Vision headset in the next 18 months or so and it feels like there's still so much untapped uh potential in this headset they're waiting for developers and apple to explore develop and release in the coming years and whether or not

the price of that becomes more affordable or the headset future versions of it gets lighter what's exciting for me as someone who's just fascinated by technology and loves this stuff is how exciting it is this this first month has been Adam also has an apple Vision Pro and he's love using it and we are chatting almost every day talking about the new things we're discovering in the headset the new things we're trying out and the things were 3D printing to to modify it and and the ways were the n

ew new new types of apps and experiences and it feels so much like those first couple weeks and months of when the iPhone came out and we're all learning new things with that fundamentally new way of enjoying media of computing of browsing the internet and of communicating um you know like Steve Job says internet Communicator a phone and a an iPod with video all of that again feels new and fresh here and that's what a lot of us are buying into is to be on the ground floor um and and to be in tha

t discussion and to learn these things and to feel like we're being a part of the future as it's unfolding in front of us now what this device means for headsets going forward though you know I've seen a lot of discussion about this is fundamentally still an intermediate device to what Apple may want or what any company may want going forward which is you know the glasses the wearable augmented reality glasses Optical pass through and this debate over you know is Optical pass through the end all

Beall versus a digital pass through system because even as the best digital pass through system available to Consumers today you can clearly see the limits of it and I can personally still see the ways in which it can improve with known knowable Technologies whether it's you know verif focal lenses for more comfortable nearfield viewing or you know just higher resolution cameras uh more perspective correct you know reprojection and rectification of the pastor images like all these things improv

e hand track hand model tracking all these things you know can be uh things paths going forward that give video pass through mixed reality pass through a uh a path for and it's my personal belief that it's not going to be convergence to a single device you know that meta doesn't make the meta the Rayband with meta sunglasses and the quest Pro as two uh product lines that will eventually become one product but they are kind of going to be two product lines that well they may share Technologies in

terms of world tracking and a user interface uh they're going to be as different as having a watch to a laptop top you know there's going to be a device that you're going to wear out in the world like a digital watch like an apple watch that can give you information that can give you glanceable details but is low power uh and blends into your daily wearable you know uh technology um but doesn't have the compute or the battery life as what you would buy a laptop for uh in the same way I think th

at there's going to be a world where there is a A Vision Pro or a vision category or device that you're going to use at home in a kind of stationary office working environment or on the couch in your living room kind of indoors um that has the compute that can use that can tap into you know a larger battery um and then maybe a version of that that is tapping into Optical pass through that you would wear out in the world that would give you less information or different type of information but be

more about seeing the world around you and for the Mixed reality experience where the primary type of content is the digital content I want to interact with and not the world I need to see interact with I don't need the video pass through to be perfect I need to be good enough where it's not getting the way of my interaction with the real world with my talking to people my picking up of objects and I think this has crested that point already there is a clear path forward for improvement you kno

w it could be lighter it could be more comfortable the battery life could be longer it could have more memory or faster processor and it could have better pass through and that makes me really excited for future V versions of the Vision Pro but the fundamentals I think they really got right from the user interface the minimum Benchmark for visual Clarity both in the pass through and in the digital content which makes this the best media player that you can have today as well as as more than serv

iceable and usable and certainly a great travel companion those are the two reasons to buy a Vision Pro today media and travel and for everyone else it's just fun being on the ground floor so that's it that's a deep dive into Apple Vision Pro uh if there are questions or other things that you'd like me to talk about or discuss please post them in the comments below um hope this has been enjoyable and entertaining for you as uh this has been a long time coming uh and thank you so much for watchin

g I'm norm and I'll see you next time bye