Apple’s Vision Pro is an example of the opposite of vanishing

The Little Bit Apple Has Done: Feeling Like a Boundary in the Glass of a 3D AR/VR Headset

Apple just announced the Vision Pro headset at its WWDC developer conference, during which executives spent a long time detailing both how the hardware works and how you’re meant to use it. After the event, we were able to take a brief look at the $3,499 Vision Pro itself — we couldn’t use it or even touch it, but we could gaze upon its metallic wonders in a demo room at the Steve Jobs Theater.

Based on the little bit we’ve seen, it’s a dramatically better-looking device than any other AR or VR headset we’ve seen. The headset is thin and has a shield around it and a band around the back. The goggles should wrap around faces fairly nicely, due to being slightly curved. The battery pack at the bottom is an iPad-sized one that offers two hours of battery life, and the whole thing is a silvery color.

The small bumps you see on the sides of the Vision Pro’s band are where the built-in audio lives. (Spatial audio is one of the big selling points of the device.) Most of its other sensors and cameras are housed just under the front-facing glass; at just the right angle, you can see some of the cameras pointing outwards from the headset. The cheese grater-style vent runs underneath both eyes, presumably to push all the processor’s hot air down onto your cheeks.

The big question is how it feels in use. Will it sit too heavily on your nose with no overhead band? Will the cable that goes down to the battery pack being annoying? Is it hot after a few minutes? How will it look from the inside? Apple spent a long time talking about how you could use the Vision Pro to replace your television or computer monitor, but doing that well on your face requires a huge amount of processing power and display prowess. Apple announced 4K displays and they might not be enough.

The question is, what is this for? Unlike when the company launched the Apple Watch or even AirPods, there’s not a huge existing market for mixed reality devices; there’s the Meta Quest, a bunch of barely successful prototypes like Microsoft’s HoloLens and the Magic Leap, and not much else. Most people have little or no idea how these headsets work, and little about how they should work seems to have been settled.

While using some apps, though, the room dimmed around me, which is one of the more compelling parts of Vision Pro. It can either be manually dimmed or auto-magically dimed, depending on the app you are using. Tap into one of the virtual “Environments” Apple seeded on the demo unit, and the Scandinavian normcore living room disappeared around me. Open Apple TV+ and air-tap into a stereoscopic video reel, then select “Cinematic” mode, and you might as well be in the Alamo Drafthouse. This is what Apple seems to think is the essence of making this a platform versus a product: You don’t have to choose between AR and VR. Your app can be anything you want it to be.

A chance to create an extremely human experience using mixed Reality headsets would be an opportunity to create, in theory. It didn’t achieve this in my demo. The internal cameras within the headset are capable of capturing and regurgitating your face in digital form, a hyper-realistic digital twin that appears before the person you’re chatting with. In my FaceTime demo I chatted with the digital twin of an Apple employee who cheerfully talked me through some of these features. She didn’t feel like herself. She was real, but she was also not. I don’t recall her name.

Seeing with the Eyes: Opening Apple Apps in AR Home Screens (or How I Learned to Open Photos, Messages, and Look at Web Pages)

The way I talked to them was interesting. I opened Photos by pinching my thumb and forefinger together, scrolling through photos by grabbing each one, and expanding them to the left, by staring and tapping at the “Expand” option. I used my fingers and eyes to scroll the web pages. I opened Messages, too, though audio interactions aren’t ready yet apparently, and I wasn’t able to record or send a Message. I couldn’t pinch the apps to scale up, or even bring myself into them, because most of the content wasn’t fully volumetric. App makers can build these experiences in the future, according to an Apple representative.

In home mode, the dock of Apple apps was in front of me. I could still see the room from where I am. An AR home screen of Apple apps in AR is as vanilla as it sounds. The app containers themselves were certainly not reinvented, and their icons were not little grabble globules or anything else that conferred volume. They were just … there.

The Vision Pro interface is intuitive—within a few gestures and taps on the digital crown, I had it down. External cameras obviate the need for hand controllers, because the device sees your hands. And internal eye-tracking cameras see where your eyes are looking, so it knows which app you want to open or close.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-vision-pro-hands-on-demo/

Calibration of a heavy-loopy dilatonic headset and an orb in the middle of the sound field at the LHC

I assumed the battery pack meant the headset wouldn’t be heavy, but it was. I went through another calibration process after I adjusted the back straps, with a chime of approval. There was a light orb in the middle of my demo.