Apples AR-headset is a slow gamechanger
Non-isolating UX and seamless integration beats total immersion.
Yesterday, Apple unveiled their Mixed Reality-headset years in the making.
Here it is:
I mentioned before that i have a background in graphic design and typography, and when i started in those fields working at a newspaper, Apple was just turning the publishing industry on it’s head. Macs everywhere and Apple computers remained an industry standard for many years. This was before anyone even thought about iPods or iPhones and Apple had their breakthrough in the mass consumer market in the mid 2000s.
I was at a MacExpo a few times in the 1990s and have had my mind blown by Kai Krause live on stage presenting a little new piece of software called Bryce 3D, a fast generator for CGI-landscapes, the first glimpses of user friendly, usable and fun software for rudimentary virtual environments on an Apple Macintosh.
While I’m an old fart and have seen my share of technological revolutions in the past 30 years — from the democratization of music production to the media revolution that was (and is) desktop publishing to the internet to the paradigm shift of multitouch-screens that enabled the iPhone, then social media and now AI — i never was good at predicting single pieces of hardware. I was pretty bullish on the iPad back then, but i completely underestimated the Apple Watch for instance, and thought it would just wither away. Instead, fitness bands and smartwatches are very common now.
So, my take on the Vision Pro may turn out to be complete BS, but: I like it and the device may grow into a gamechanger.
I was never really excited about Virtual Reality, despite the cool shiny possibilities, and the main reason always was: cables and isolation.
If you want to isolate yourself in an immersive environment, you don’t want to have annoying cables dangle around your neck especially when you have to move your head too look around, and that immersion also means that any headset can’t be used in any social situations and reduces it to non-social entertainment purposes.
Apple had exactly these issues in mind while designing the Vision Pro, and they adress them in the product design.
Here’s the WWDC-stream with the One-More-Thing starting at 80 mins in, and here’s their ten minute promo clip I’m sure you’ve seen by now:
In short: This is a state-of-the-art headset with some revolutionary features and it blends Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality into one seamless experience integrated with other Apple devices. They reduce the isolation-factor by tracking your face and displaying your eyes on an outside facing screen, and while they didn’t solve the dangling cable problem, it’s just a battery pack you carry with you. Still annoying, but better than being leashed to a computer. It also comes at 3500 bucks, so just like the Apple Watch, initially, it will be a toy for rich people and showoffs.
Technical, there are two things that really matter for this device: Resolution and UX. Here Apple eats Meta for lunch and i bet Mark Zuckerberg has a not-very-good-morning today. It has a resolution of “23 million pixels“ which translates to a resolution of 3200×3600px which will be enough to stream 4k movies directly to your eyeballs, but this is merely competitive with Metas just announced Quest 3.
It’s in the user experience where Apple shines, as it always does: The Vision Pro has twenty million cameras built in to track your eyes, your hands, your body and your environment and you point and click by looking at something and then pinching your fingers. Apple describes this tracking tech as "so precise, it completely frees up your hands from needing clumsy hardware controllers", and first reports are supporting this.
The VisionOS integrates seamless with existing Apple enviroments, you can use the standard Apple system software including Notes, Messages, Safari, Keynote, Photos, FaceTime, and Apple Music and display your Macbook as a giant 4k screen in your living room. Apple terms this stuff as "spatial computing" which just means that the floating windows will integrate in your physical enviroment, with e.g. digital objects dropping shadows on the physical world.
The cameras will scan your facial expressions for video conferencing, where you will take part as a photorealistic virtual CGI-character. This is technology Meta has shown in research for quite a while now, but Apple will be first to introduce this to the consumer market. This, combined with the seamless integration of existing Apple devices, is quite a feature. You can, without taking off the headset, watch a movie, get a call, hit pause with a look and pinch, talk to your neighbor without looking like a doofus, and get back to your movie while taking a short note on your virtual desktop, all seamless without leaving the augmented mixed-reality enviroment.
It’s this seamlessness that makes me think that this device may be a slow burner and change the game, despite a lack of games and the ridiculous price tag, despite the dangling cable of the battery you have to put in your pocket and despite the not-that-isolating display of your eyes on the outside screen while still wearing a huge isolating mask on your face.
I’m not entirely convinced though. One of the reasons of the massive success of the iPhone was it’s simplicity. It’s a phone with a browser and multitouch, extendable through an app store, simple as that. You carry it with you all day long and it just sits there in your pocket. You can look at it for a while, and if you are in a social situation, you just put it aside. This is simple, and as we’ve seen, it neatly integrates into any life.
This headset is a whole other story, and there is not much simplicity in there, neither in the UX, nor in the product design, and surely not in the integration into everyday life.
But Apple surely just put a lot of pressure on it’s competitors, first and foremost Meta ofcourse, and the evolution of VR/AR-tech will be interesting to watch over the next few years, especially after this product gets diversified into lower end headsets for bigger consumer markets, which is expected to be introduced in 2025, maybe with a less clunky and more elegant and leightweight design.
Also, I’m very interested in which direction the neuroscientific contributions in this product will develop, especially the eye tracking software demo’d at the WWDC seems to merely scratch the surface of where Apple is heading — imagine the Vision Pro reading your brainwaves.
So, to sum this up: I’m intrigued.