I Tried the Apple Vision Pro and It Far Exceeded My Expectations

As I put my right hand on the aluminum casing on the front of the Apple Vision Pro and my left hand on the soft, cloth back and gently slide it over my face, I think about VR experiences I’ve had in the past and Reminded myself to look for progress and focus on the bigger picture. That’s because when it comes to these augmented reality and virtual reality headsets, substance never lives up to sizzle.

Thirty minutes later when I finished my tryout of the Vision Pro, I had a feeling I never had after one of these demos: “I wish I could jump back and do it again. Right now.”

Lots of factors made the Vision Pro’s headset experience more enjoyable, but let’s break down the biggest ones.

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1.) Eye-tracking interface is intuitive and easy to learn

The first thing you do after putting on the Vision Pro and fitting it to your head is to press the Digital Crown and calibrate the headset to your eyes. It involves focusing on certain dots that pop up in front of you in a circle. Frankly, after the demo I thought about how important and effective eye-tracking is for pretty much everything you do in the Vision Pro, and I was shocked at how simple calibration was to get it dialed in.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. After eye calibration, you calibrate by holding your hands in front of you and then hit the Digital Crown to jump straight into Home View, which defaults to a set of app icons that appear on the iPad home screen or Mac Launchpad. looks like.

From here, I quickly learned that all I had to do to launch the app was look at it and then tap my thumb and forefinger together while my hand was resting in my lap. To scroll to the next page of apps, I just put my thumb and forefinger together and drag it left or right or up or down like I was pulling a piece of string. Closing a window, an app, or an experience involves a quick tap of the thumb and forefinger to bring up the controls, looking at the “X” and then tapping the thumb and forefinger again.

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Within five to ten minutes, I was rapidly opening and closing apps, scrolling up and down and left to right, selecting things, and moving apps and windows around in the space in front of me. Was. By the end of the demo, I was doing it all without much thought and with great precision and confidence.

This is the Vision Pro’s biggest success to date and it’s clearly something Apple has been working on for a long time, which was Confirmed by Sterling Crispin, a former neurotechnology researcher on the Vision Pro team. The interface opened the door to make this a properly usable product, but then the content has to deliver the experience to prevent this headset from stuffing itself into the drawer where most headsets disappear.

2.) Display quality keeps you immersed in the experience

After learning the Vision Pro’s interface, the next thing that jumped out at me was how smooth everything was moving between different experiences and elements. I opened the Photos app and got to see beautiful iPhone photos at a resolution and immersiveness that rivals iPhone, iPad, Mac, and even the Apple TV in one giant screen. And when I flipped through different photos and videos, the motion was instantaneous and buttery smooth.

The reason behind both of those things – resolution and ease – was definitely technical. The Vision Pro’s displays fit 64 pixels into the same space as one pixel on the iPhone. And the new R1 chip inside Vision Pro streams images in 12 milliseconds, which is equivalent to eight times faster than the blink of an eye.

The result is that the display never stutters, slows down, or glitches when you’re viewing content, jumping between apps, or moving around your location. In every other AR and VR experience I’ve seen, there are always moments that take you out of the experience and can even cause some motion sickness. I’m definitely prone to motion sickness from these devices, and I didn’t feel any disorientation or discomfort from the Vision Pro demo.

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One final note here: The performances are so good that they outweigh the quality of the content and this is likely to be a problem for some time. For example, the demo included beautiful panoramas shot on the iPhone. But since I majored in photography, I easily noticed pixelated parts of photos where machine learning clumsily tried to fill in some gaps in the data. Other high-resolution photos captured by professional cameras and some three-dimensional images captured by the Vision Pro itself look phenomenal. Still, this will be a problem for years to come, in the same way that the transition from SD to HD or HD to 4K was for TVs.

Much of the content that Apple showed off in the demo — from Avatar 2 to NBA cameras to clips of climbers in extreme locations with Alicia Keys inside the studio — all looked incredible and showed off the full capabilities of the studio, Storytellers. And software developers will be able to build for this platform.

3.) Must See 3D Photos and Videos

The third part of the Vision Pro demo that really impressed me is also the experience that’s hardest to describe. This includes three-dimensionalization of photos and videos that you can take with the Vision Pro and replay later in the headset. When you look at these, it brings them to life in a way that’s far beyond anything you’ve ever seen in a 3D movie. I believe this is due to the advanced depth mapping the Vision Pro can do when taking photos combined with the massive graphics and spatial presentation capabilities available in the Apple headset.

See what I mean about it being difficult to describe?

It’s the one part of Vision Pro that you have to experience to fully understand. Luckily, the demo will be coming to Apple Stores next year when the product is released. For now, I’ll just say that the photos and videos experienced this way on the Vision Pro have a level of richness and realism that represents one of the most exciting leaps in technology I’ve seen in the past two decades — And much more exciting than anything I’ve seen on a two-dimensional 8K display. I’ve never been a fan of 3D. Looks like what 3D was always supposed to look like.

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That said, this feature also highlights one of the biggest challenges of the Apple Vision Pro. The photos and videos you want to capture most are during some of the most important events in your life — a family celebration, a memorable trip, a child’s birthday, and more. Strap a giant headset to your face to record.

When we get to the 7.0 version of the headset in 2030, this may be much less of an issue as the technology shrinks down to a smaller and less obtrusive form factor. But in 2024, it’s going to be an issue.

Nevertheless, Apple made breakthroughs with the Vision Pro that would redefine technology, productivity, and entertainment for the next decade. I have a lot more to say about how the product operates, what stuff Apple has built into it to make it worth using, and specifically how we can put the Vision Pro to work. For now, I’ll save those thoughts for future stories.