Apple Vision Pro

No pictures, sorry!

During the opening week of Apple's Vision Pro virtual reality headset, I was able to schedule a tour to try our the unit. It was also one of the few times I've visited the Apple Store, so it was a semi-new experience in this regard as well. And it was remarkable! I had low expectations going into it, and my only VR experience is with the Oculus Quest 2 that I own.

The headset seems much smaller than the Quest 2 at first glance, and while it's technically heavier, there is physically less bulk in the headset itself. There is a slight calibration process that was necessary, a process that didn't feel like an initial setup, but a game in its own right. One of the defining features of the Vision Pro involve its eye-tracking. You'll calibrate the interpupillary distance, which is how wide or close the individual displays are to enable clear stereoscopy. Shortly after, you'll calibrate the eye-tracking and gestures by selecting one of many dots in various shapes and arrangements. After calibration, you are placed in the home screen, which was defaulted to a passthrough mode where the surroundings were fully visible with real-life depth.

This is where I was taken aback and realised how perfect the resolution of the screen was for a device like this. I was fully unable to truly differentiate between real surroundings versus "the screen". There was no screen-door effect, there were no perceptible evidence of pixels, even on the computer-generated objects. Unlike the Quest, I was able to fully read text as if I were reading a book, and no matter how close or far away, text remained fully readable with almost all detail of its original detail. The screen was personally the number one selling point of this device for me; the Quest 2 in particular will never be able to compare. I did ask my guide, JaQ, if she knew any details on the display in terms of resolution and refresh rate, which she didn't have on-hand. She personally guided me through interacting with the UI, which wasn't perfect, but was nothing out of the ordinary in terms of generally using a device. In particular, the Vision Pro didn't always catch my pinching but rarely caught my pinch-to-zoom gestures and also rarely was able to catch minute areas of where I was looking, so I wasn't always able to press buttons stuck in corners or buttons adjacent to others.

JaQ also showed me some "spacial video" demos, which started off with the Super Mario Bros. Movie during a scene where the princess remarked "this is incredible". Definitely a cherry-picked scene that made the scenario a bit funnier. It then transitioned into videos taken with the Vision Pro cameras, which were serviceable, but it did not seem like I was re-experiencing that reality due to the semi-decent camera quality. I did ask directly if the Vision Pro used the same camera hardware as the iPhone 15 series, which was met with a hard denial citing physical space concerns and hardware limitations in terms of the SoC. Personally, I don't think spacial videos are anything to necessarily write home about; they're just 360-degree videos that wasn't necessarily much different from watching a 360-degree video with the Quest, which is something I happened to be doing a few days prior to this demo.

The Vision Pro has a hardware feature that is highly appreciated, which is a head-strap tightening crown, securing the headset on your face. Indeed, I had no concerns about the headset getting loose or falling off of my head with the default strap, and the image stayed centered perfectly, both of which are claims I absolutely cannot make about the Quest 2.

Speaking of crowns, watch-like dial crowns are how you adjust your immersion within a computer-generated scene, or the passthrough mode. Even within the computer-generated scene, the Vision Pro shows your real arm and hand within that environment, unlike the 3D model generated by the Quest. The cutouts and blending between real objects and generated environments is seamless. I also like how I was able to focus or place media in front of me, having a generated environment take a finite field of view. and then turn to my side to see my real surroundings at will. I was able to watch a video and turn to my guide, and fully interact with her and see her expressions in real time, full detail, with no latency.

It was one of the rare magical experiences I've had with technology in recent memory. I was so taken aback that I put my head down in disbelief during the demo and couldn't believe the reality of the situation. I can't wait to visit it again.

But not for $3,500.