Impressive but is it essential? The reality of Apple’s Vision for the future of work and play
By Tim Biggs
Half a year after launching in the United States, Apple’s Vision Pro headset is finally making its way to Australia. And while the astronomical price and reticence over headsets in general may make this a niche product at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, this is in many ways a ground-breaking device that may preview the future of personal entertainment, distributed work and long-distance socialising.
Released on Friday and starting at $6000, Vision Pro is by no means the first consumer headset for extended reality (or XR, meaning it can create an entirely virtual environment or mix digital content with a view of the real world), but it could be the most competent overall.
Sequestering myself away to beside a lake at the picturesque Mount Hood, but looking down and seeing my real arms and hands, was a mind-boggling experience. And being able to clearly read my phone, smartwatch or computer screen while still in the headset is no less impressive. When there’s an option to use my own 65-inch 4K TV, I’d previously never have chosen to watch a movie through an XR headset. But with the Apple Vision Pro, I might.
Options are there for gaming, work and hangouts too but, for any use beyond just having a huge virtual screen, some first-gen weirdness and caveats do tend to appear.
Fit and finish
Your first impression of the Vision Pro experience will actually occur before you get it in your hands because there’s a whole rigmarole involved in achieving a custom fit. You need to measure your face and head using a special iPhone app to determine the right straps, seals and cushions to include in the box, and if you wear glasses you need to provide your prescription for custom ZEISS inserts that magnetise into the headset. When you put it on the first time, a series of eye exercises dial in the settings. This makes for a comfortable headset with no manual fiddling, and in practise I was able to wear Vision Pro comfortably for hours whereas I can go only 30 minutes or so with other headsets. But the setup does also make it tough to share the device.
The metal and fabric finish on the headset will be familiar to anyone with an Apple Watch and, as you’d expect from Apple, the design is immaculately detailed and textural with soft materials and connections that are easy to access thanks to magnets and pull tabs.
Vision Pro’s default strap is nice to look at, but doesn’t offer much support.
The knitted headband that comes installed on the unit is an outstanding design in and of itself, with a rotating dial that adjusts internal tension to change the length. Unfortunately, as a headband it doesn’t really work. The Vision Pro is too heavy to use with just a single piece of fabric (however ingenious) wrapped around your head like a ski mask, and you feel the pressure pulling down on your face. Apple also includes a far better (if less aesthetically pleasing) option in the box; a double loop that passes around the base of your skull and over the top of your head to hold the weight.
Once the headset’s on, you get a view of the world around you that’s sharper, stabler and more realistic in colour than any other headset I’ve used. You do get some goggle effect in your peripheral vision, lens reflections from bright images, grain in low light and motion blur, but you get used to those artefacts quickly and will be confident enough to walk around in the headset in no time. Complicating matters slightly is the heavy battery pack that powers the headset, which needs to come with you.
The double loop strap, which is also included, fares much better.
During setup, you’ll take the headset off again to scan your face and create a Persona (more on that later), which also powers something called EyeSight. This uses an outward-facing lenticular screen to show your eyes to people nearby, with the idea being that they can tell at a glance whether you can see them, but I found it pretty weird. It’s like a hologram of someone’s eyes viewed through a fish tank.
A button at the top of the device captures photos, and there’s a digital crown you can press to return to your home screen. Rotate it, and you can adjust how much of your surrounding is the real world and how much is a digital environment. Apple provides a number of natural, mostly mountainous environments, though other apps can include their own. It’s a simple thing, but placing yourself in another environment goes a long way towards centring yourself in the virtual world if you don’t need to see your immediate surrounds, especially since the digital graphics are much sharper than the camera’s view. While you’re immersed, the real world does still come through if you wander too close to an object or a person is nearby.
With no included controllers to speak of, you operate the headset mainly by looking with your eyes and “clicking” by tapping your thumb and forefinger together. Vision Pro has sensors to detect this gesture essentially anywhere in front of your body, and out of the box I’d say it worked about 80 per cent of the time. You can also hold your fingers together to swipe, scroll or zoom, and saying “Hey Siri” will summon the assistant as a cute little orb that will happily open or close apps for you, which is convenient.
An enormous, portable cinema
There are thousands of apps that have either been brought over from iPhone or iPad, have been tweaked to optimise for XR or that feel like fully native immersive apps. But as unlikely as it sounds, I’ve so far found video streaming is probably the single most incredible use for it.
The Apple TV app gives you access to an enormous cinema screen wherever you are, and the headset has the resolution and brightness to make it feel comfortable and real. Viewed in your favourite environment, the screen reflects off the lake or colours the clouds below you at Haleakalā volcano. A specific Apple TV environment takes you to a movie theatre where you can choose your preferred distance and elevation. Or you can just have a huge screen sitting in your real environment, with your surrounds artificially dimmed.
Apple TV and the Vision Pro make for a very impressive pairing.
Apple doesn’t support older web-based VR video formats, but has invented its own for Apple TV called Apple Immersive Video. These wrap around you in 180 degrees and display in 3D, which is stunning despite there not being a lot of content to support it yet. Of course, standard 3D movies on Apple TV and Disney+ work too.
And speaking of Disney+ (which is essentially the only other major streaming service on the device at present), it has its own take on cinematic environments, including a speeder drive-in set on Tatooine from Star Wars and Avengers Tower from Marvel. It might seem silly, but these touches of ambience help you feel like you’re at a cinema somewhere (despite the lack of booming sound and the energy of other humans watching along) rather than in a black void.
The potential is there for fully immersive, interactive animated stories as well, though there currently aren’t many. A brief dinosaur experience is included on the headset, and Disney also has a technologically complex but narratively light VR tale in What If? The headset seems ideal for watching sports, with apps from the NBA, PGA and MLB allowing you to set up multiple screens to watch simultaneous games, as well as dig into data and visualisations. An Apple Immersive Video trailer teases the true (as-yet-unrealised) potential though; virtual seats anywhere in the stadium, streamed in 3D.
The video game experience on Vision Pro is also strong, but limited by Apple’s ecosystem. If you have a Bluetooth controller you can play the iPad versions of most games just fine in a big floating window, while certain games have been specially adapted. There are some full VR-style games, but Vision Pro lacks a room-scale mode and its hand-tracking isn’t up to the likes of Job Simulator, which I found frustrating compared to its Meta Quest version. Games with less of a reliance on fine motor (such as Beat Punch, where you box to music), worked better. For high-end traditional games, you’ll need to stream wirelessly from a Mac, as there’s no easy way to display from your Xbox or PS5.
Some games come straight from iPad, while others (such as Crossy Castles, pictured) have been updated for Vision Pro.
Elsewhere in media, the Vision Pro is great for looking through your photo library as though each pic and video is being projected onto a 100-inch screen: if you’ve taken panoramas it’s a lot of fun to see them wrap around your room. You can also take immersive video using the headset or an iPhone 15 Pro, which plays back in 3D through what looks like an interdimensional portal.
Face to FaceTime
Productivity and creativity is clearly an area where Apple sees a lot of potential. The immersive environments and hand-based controls are great for working with 3D models and visual design for example, as you can wander around and enlarge things to huge proportions, though it isn’t the most comfortable for typing and multitasking.
You can pair things such as keyboards, trackpads and earbuds with the Vision Pro to avoid having to use the tricky virtual keyboard, so it’s possible to create a workspace of floating apps that you can take anywhere. Apple’s continuity features also work well, so you can, for example, copy text on your iPhone and paste it in Vision Pro. I do wish I could just mirror my phone to the headset entirely though, to avoid having to look at my device through the Vision Pro’s cameras.
This isn’t a problem with Mac, however, which can output to a Vision Pro window, meaning you can have one big central screen with all your usual work surrounded by other windows of Vision native apps. I operated like this for half a day and it worked fine, but I’m unsure it added enough to my specific workflow to be worth the gradually building weight and eye strain. Still, when you have the headset on for a work task that needs it, it’s nice to also have easy access to your Mac.
Finally, the most future-facing part of the whole thing is arguably the Persona, which is a mask that represents you in FaceTime calls, conference apps and elsewhere. So while people in the real world who see you wearing a Vision Pro get that smeary EyeSight view, people connecting with you from far away get a smooth, 3D, CGI version.
During a FaceTime call with other Vision Pro users I was able to see representations of people’s faces and hands in real time, and it’s a lot more like a simulated real-world meeting than the line of camera feeds we’re used to on Zoom. You can see when people are looking at you, for example, and pick up on non-verbal cues. If you’re in Vision Pro and others are not, they show up as video feeds floating in space.
I can see this setup working for small distributed teams, as you can take turns sharing files or giving presentations. It might be a bit awkward for strangers, though.
Persona also factors into friendly catch-ups using Apple’s SharePlay, where multiple Vision Pro users can hang out. They might get together in the cavernous virtual cinema of Apple TV, where the app will place them in seats side by side to watch a movie together.
Realistically, I’m not sure anyone is going to wear Vision Pro for 10 hours at a time. However, it is a phenomenal personal media device that can also replicate an entire office setup anywhere, and simulate physical interactions between faraway people. So I can absolutely see it being something people pick up and put on for multiple shorter sessions per day.
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