A day with Apple Vision Pro

What it's like to peer into the future of technology via Apple's expensive Spatial Computing headset.

Just to get this out of the way: No, I didn’t buy an Apple Vision Pro. I’ve got a family of six to feed! 😂 But I did go down to my local Apple Store first thing this morning with a friend and colleague to pick his up. While there, we went through Apple’s in-store demo, and then I got to spend a good bit of time with my friend’s Apple Vision Pro, and took several coworkers through demos of my own this afternoon.

The Apple Store Experience

This weekend, demos are walk-in only, and they’re 20 minutes long. You’ll be able to make an online appointment for a demo starting on Monday. If, like me, you wear glasses, your Apple employee demo presenter will have you clean your glasses, and will then place them in a machine that looks like a coffee maker that will figure out your prescription so that they can set your demo unit up with the appropriate lenses. Trust me, if you need glasses for every day use, you will need the $150 prescription lens inserts if you want to use your Apple Vision Pro without it looking like a big blurry mess.

After a few minutes, another employee will bring an Apple Vision Pro demo unit out from the back to the demo table on a fancy wooden tray. Apple Stores have always had simple wooden stools. For your Vision Pro demo, Apple requires you to be seated, and they have a special stool with a back rest for this purpose. They definitely don’t want you falling off of your stool during your demo!

Your demo presenter will show you how to carefully pick up the Vision Pro and place it on your head. I know that sounds simple, but you do need to be careful picking it up. The light shield (the piece that makes contact with your face and prevents outside light from getting into the unit) is held in place magnetically. So if you’re not careful you’ll accidentally separate it from the rest of the unit while lifting it, and may find your headset crashing to the table or floor.

After placing it on your face, you’ll go through a quick alignment process and then you’ll go through a tutorial that teaches you how to interface with the Apple Vision Pro by selecting each point in a ring of dots. To navigate visionOS your eyes are the pointer and a pinch with your thumb and index finger is the click.

Throughout the demo, your presenter will guide you through the basics of navigating the interface: Look at the bottom of an app window, and you’ll see an X to close the window, and a long white bar that you can “grab” to move the window around in your virtual space. Look in the bottom right corner of the window, and a white semi-circular pull tab will appear that allows you to resize the window.

The demo itself does a really good job of hitting the highlights of what visionOS is. I got to experience regular photos and panoramic photos. The latter are incredible because they wrap around you, allowing you to really step into the environment.

Spatial Videos are one of this product’s killer features. These are 3D videos you can capture with Apple Vision Pro, or with iPhone 15 Pro. One of the demo Spatial Videos was of a child’s birthday party. The cake felt so close and tangible that you felt as if you could reach out and touch it. And being able to review these captured memories in 3D is absolutely amazing. Not Star Trek holodeck levels of realism, but definitely heading in that direction.

Apple Vision Pro is primarily focused around mixing the real world with digital content, but there are also more immersive features like Environments. These are full-immersion locations from around the world and even the surface of the Moon. You can twist the Digital Crown to dial more or less of these Environments into your field of view, depending on how immersive you want it to be.

I also got to experience a demo reel of Apple’s Immersive Videos, and this was truly an incredible experience. At one point it puts you into a recording studio while Alicia Keys is singing to you from what looks like just a few feet away with her band surrounding the room. You know it’s not real, but part of your brain thinks it is. There was also a brief segment from a baseball game where you’re seated behind first base. It really gives you a sense of the potential for incredible sports viewing this product can offer.

I don’t know whether or not Apple Vision Pro will be used for much else besides entertainment, but I do know that it’s a killer entertainment device.

The Visual Experience

Ok, I’ve talked about what this thing can do and how you use it. Now it’s time to talk about what it’s like to look into the headset. Here I think I actually had a worse experience than many reviewers did, and I probably should have seen this coming (no pun intended). Despite having poor eyesight, I’m kind of a video quality snob. My TV is a $500 unit, not a $5,000 unit, but I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent trying to dial in my settings to squeeze the best possible picture quality out of my mass market Vizio. I think I was lulled into expecting more magic from Apple Vision Pro than I got because of what many reviewers had said. But I didn’t feel super immersed in Apple Vision Pro for a couple of reasons.

For one, I actually think an Apple Store is a terrible environment in which to demo this product because it’s super bright. However bright the displays in Vision Pro are, the experience is nowhere near as nice as looking around an Apple Store with your eyes. I found the display appeared too dark. Ideally, this would be demo’d in a room with lower, warmer lighting. And as high quality as the displays are, I wasn’t fooled into thinking I wasn’t looking at screens. I was aware of pixels, some lens-created distortions, and was at times quite aware of the overlap in my vision between the two screens.

Even worse, I noticed a good bit of tunnel vision. Again, so many reviewers had gushed about how lifelike it was to look into Vision Pro, that I think my expectations were skewed. If you detach the light seal and press it against your face, your eyes will see the inner frame of the light seal as you’re looking through it. If you think about it, it’s kind of unavoidable because you’re looking down this 1.5” or so tunnel toward the lenses. This photo from The Verge does a good job of illustrating what I mean:

I actually feel bad for my demo presenter, because when I pointed out what I was experiencing she was surprised and actually rescanned my face to make sure we had the right size light seal, and had a new unit brought out from the back. However, the reality is that this is just an unavoidable aspect of the technology.

That said, there’s a difference between seeing and noticing. For example, many people don’t notice a difference between 1080p content and 4K content. In fact, no one else around me was noticing this “tunnel” effect that I was. I promise you your eyes see it, but you may not actually notice it. Moreover, I suspect that even I would get used to it if I had more time to spend with Vision Pro.

The light seal itself worked very well on the whole, though I did get some light leak on the bottom on both sides of my nose. Again, I think being in the bright Apple Store exacerbated this issue. When I used Vision Pro in a different environment later, the screen didn’t look as dark as it did in the store, and the light leak wasn’t really noticeable.

Comfort

Apple Vision Pro is heavy, but it never really felt heavy on my face. But that may just be because I was so focused on what I was doing inside the headset. Over time, it may well become uncomfortable. After I was done with my demo, my face actually hurt a bit. I looked in the bathroom mirror immediately after my demo, and my face was red in the areas where the headset had covered my face. I still have skepticism about how much time you’d want to spend inside Apple Vision Pro.

Eyesight

Apple knows that this is an inherently isolating device, so the outside front part of the unit has a screen. When other people look at you while you’re wearing Vision Pro, they can see your eyes on that screen. When you blink and move your eyes, this is translated directly onto the screen with no noticeable lag. But it’s very subtle. In certain lighting it’s actually quite hard to see. I think this is somewhat intentional to help give the effect that the person looking at you sees your eyes as if they’re within the headset, not projected onto a screen on the front it. But it’s an experience that still needs work, and I’ll be curious to see if Apple tweaks it via a software update in the future. In the photo above, you can see my eyes if you look closely enough, but it’s hard to capture a photo of this, particularly if there are a lot of lights in the room. In person it’s not great, but it definitely minimizes the isolating effect the headset provides.

I’ll have more to say about Apple Vision Pro in the coming days, particularly about what I think about its prospects for success now that I’ve experienced it for myself. Stay tuned!