What is using the Apple Vision Pro actually like? This is easily one of Apple’s craziest, most radical, and possibly dystopian products of all time. And I have a lot of thoughts here, like that I’ve been using it for about a week now. There are some parts of this thing that are absolutely incredible, and some other parts that feel weird or borderline unfinished.
There are all kinds of new technologies, from a new operating system to infrared eye tracking to virtually reconstructed versions of you. I feel like there are so many new things that you have to understand in order to get a sense of what this headset actually is and what it does. So I’m going to break this down into two parts. This video is all about using Vision Pro.
It’s everything I’ve learned from the past week of wearing and getting used to this thing every single day. But I’m also working on a more wide-ranging, possibly more existential, review video. But let’s just start with the hardware fundamentals, right? Like, what is this thing that I’m holding literally? Apple Vision Pro, at its core, is, well, a VR headset.
Now, Apple would never say that, and they probably won’t like that I’m saying that word. You know, I made an entire video about why they refuse to use those words, and they’re calling it spatial computing instead. We’ll get there. But the truth is, it’s a really, really, really high-end virtual reality headset. It’s something. We’ve seen it before, right? It’s got displays, lenses, speakers, fans, and buttons. And this is a form factor.
This is a thing that we have seen before, but before I even turn this thing on, there are clearly several things that are a little different about this one. So first of all, it’s made of metal. There is lots of metal and glass here, which are high-quality but heavy materials, relatively speaking. So there’s this precisely machined aluminum frame around the outside. And yes, those are intakes for fans at the bottom. And then vents for those fans at the top.
On the right side, there’s your digital crown, which can be pressed in or turned. And then on the other side is just a single, larger button. So,,, basically, it has the same two buttons as an Apple Watch. And then, when you get a little further back on this band here, these little pods with downward-facing grills are speakers that are pointed straight at your ears and work surprisingly well. Of course, it also means that people around you can hear a little bit of what you’re hearing.
There’s a little bit of bleed, and I have a lot to say about spatial audio, so stay tuned for that. But the main event is at the front. There is an enormous piece of glass, which, yes, is very easy to fingerprint and smudge. And then behind that thing, there’s this outward-facing OLED display and a bunch of sensors all the way around, outside-facing sensors that go forward, sideways, and straight down.
And there’s depth sensors, infrared illuminators, lidar scanners, and just regular old RGB cameras, all being processed by an M2 chip and an R1 chip inside this thing. And then maybe the craziest part: inside the headset, there are a bunch more sensors facing your eyes, tracking your eyes in real time for all the eye control and everything that comes with that.
And also to display a representation of your eyes on the outside of the headset. Kinda; we’ll get there. But overall, when you put it all together, you get a very well-made, very high-end, but also pretty heavy computer to wear on your face. So officially, this headset with this solo knit band, when I weighed it, showed up as 638 grams, which some of you on Twitter have already pointed out is actually slightly less than the plastic Meta Quest Pro.
ButUsing Apple Vision Pro: What It’s Actually Like! Quest Pro also has a lot of battery on the back of your head as a sort of counterbalance, so the weight distribution is very different. Also, the Quest Pro is not that comfortable anyway. But the point is that Apple made the choice of taking the battery off of the headset, which means okay, now there’s nothing on the back of your head, so you can wear it and lean up against things, and that might be an upside, but that also now means you have to deal with this cable all the time running up to your head, andthe fact that it’s very front-weighted now.
All of the weight is on the front of your face. So this is the battery, as you saw in the unboxing. If you haven’t already seen the unboxing, that just went up. I’ll link it below the like button. But this battery is surprisingly small, at 3,366 milliamp hours. I say surprisingly small because, for a normal battery bank of this size, you might expect to have 10, 15, or 20,000 milliamp hours. I suspect there’s a lot of heat insulation happening here.
But it comes with a non-removable four-foot cable and a proprietary connector at the end of the cable that will twist and lock to the headset. And so the lock is really solid. It makes sense that it’s not just straight USB that could get disconnected easily. Once you connect it, it starts glowing, and then it starts booting up. And there’s even a little Apple logo that displays on the outside screen. While it takes, youknow, a little under a minute to turn on,.
So there is no on or off button or switch anywhere on this headset. Maybe kind of like AirPods Max or something like that. So if you ever take the headset off and put it down, it will enter standby mode after some time, but it won’t turn off.
If you want to turn it off, you literally have to twist and unplug the cable. That’s the only way to actually turn the headset off. Now, famously, the battery life with this included battery is not super long on this headset. Two to four hours is actually realistic for what you can expect from something like this built-in battery. But that’s also kind of right in line with a lot of other VR headsets. Battery life on VR headsets is not that great in general.
If you do want to use it longer, the only way to do that is if there’s USBC port on the battery, and you have to plug the battery in. So you could plug the battery into the wall for infinite battery life, or I guess you could plug it into, like, a daisy chain,chain, another battery into the other pocket,pocket, or something for even longer life. But yeah, two to four hours. At first, it seemed weird to me that the port is on the same side of the battery as the non-removable cable, but I think it’s because they just want you to default to putting this battery in your pocket, probably in your back pocket. So even if it’s plugged into the wall, it can still be in your back pocket.
You’re just going to want to get a longer USBC cable. So there are no controllers that come with this headset. Now it does support other input methods that are like game controllers, and mouse, and keyboard, and those can be incredibly useful, but by default the primary input method for everyone. Using the Vision Pro is your eyes and your hands.
So the first time you put on this headset, it goes through this calibration process, and it’s pretty interesting. So the first time you ever put it on, it first adjusts the distance between the lenses, physically moving them inside the headset to match the distance between your eyes. Then it does this sort of hand scan, so it understands your hands. And then you go through this process of basically looking at a bunch of dots all the way around the screen and then tapping your fingers together to select them. Kind of feels like an eye test or something.
And then you’re in. So the theSo the first thing you’re going togoing to. Notice thatthat you can actuallyactuallyput your hands anywhere. As long as the headset can see this, just your fingers touching together. So there’s a lot of pictures of people using a headset with their fingers, like out in front of them, pinching like that. But you actually don’t have to do that. It’s such a wide angle because of the sensors facing forward, sideways,,sideways, and down. You can kind of just rest your hand anywhere—inanywhere—in front of you, in your lap. As long as you pinch like that, it can generally pick it up, which is impressive.
So you’re pinching to control anywhere in that 180 degree bubble in front of you. And then the digital crown, you hit that once, and the app drawer comes up, pretty simple. Doesn’t seem that impressive. But this is actually a peek at the first really impressive thing about this headset to me, which is that
it seems to have incredible spatial positioning lock, and, like, it’s really hard to have you appreciate this through a YouTube video. Reviewing VR headsets is hard. But turn around in the room you’re in, and picture a wall or a window just appearing locked in place in 3D space.
In your room, no matter how much you move your headhead or move around, it stays exactly where it’s supposed to be. But when I say floating, I think you’re picturing like a, a soft float, but it’s locked, and that’s how it starts.
So now you’re on Apple’s new Vision OS. I would describe this as kind of similar to iPad OS, but way more glassy, and of course with the extra dimension of 3D space. So hitting a digital crown will always get the app drawer back in front of you, and then simply look at the icon. You want and pinch your fingers together to select it and open that app.
Scrolling is basically as you’d expect;expect; you just kind of pinch and grab in the air and then pull as if it’s on a string, and physics letss you pull things through the air. It’s pretty intuitive, it’s responsive, and and it’s fluid. Sometimes it’s kind of bouncy,,bouncy, even. I would say the biggest adjustment is only being able to control exactly what you’re looking at. And I don’t think people realize how often they’re controlling things that they’re not exactly looking directly at with other computers and other UIs. But with this, you can look at the button to select it, and if you look at the next thing you’re going to do, you’re no longer controlling the button. You have to look exactly where you’re trying to interact with things.
It takes a few extra brain cycles to remember to always be looking exactly at the thing you’re controlling. So when you open a window of a Vision OS app, like any one of the default Apple apps here, it locks into place; it’s floating there. It kind of looks, again, like an iPad app, but very glassy, like this frosted glass around the UI sort of lets you see through a little bit to the color behind it. And it even sometimes casts a shadow on the ground in the correct Z space, so it really solidifies that it’s floating in front of you. All this makes it feel like the window is in the space around you.
Then,,Then, if you look at the bottom of the window, you get a little bar. You can always just look at that bar and pinch to drag it around. So drag it forward, backward, anywhere you want in X, Y, and Z space, and then let go,,, and it just stays absolutely locked. And then you can look at either bottom corner to resize it it to make it bigger or smaller. And then finally,, there’s a little X at the bottom; you select that, and and and that closes it. So that is the basics of Vision OS, and just using an app.
Now this entire time, by default, and almost any time they can, passthrough is on, which means you have the headset on, but you can see with the cameras right through to everything around you. And I think this is where Apple really wants to normalize the term spatial computing, because it feels like augmented reality. It feels like you’re always able to see the space around you, but technically it’s not actually AR, because you are still looking at a reconstructed version through a camera feed of the world around you instead of the actual world around you.
But maybe it’s all just semantics. I will say that this is the best passthrough of any VR headset I’ve ever used, and it’s not even that close. Now again, it’s so hard to get this through a YouTube video. It does have screen recording built in, so I’m going to try to use that. But imagine putting a headset on, and not really feeling like you’re looking at a screen with the real world.
Because of the pixel density, because of the 90 hertz refresh rate, and because of the impressive dynamic range of the cameras and the correctly adjusting shutter speed, you just almost don’t, you almost just feel like you’re looking at the real world, not through a headset.
Also the passthrough is so close to real time that I could legitimately interact with all kinds of things. I could catch items flying at me. I even tried playing ping pong. It was easy, no hesitation. So officially, the R1 chip is doing all the processing of all this stuff and adjusting the shutter speed for different lighting conditions and always keeping passthrough latency under 12 milliseconds, which is the lowest in the industry.
But it’s really combining that with how close to reality the colors and brightness and everything are that keeps it feeling kind of real. Basically, the only noticeable restriction is super close up. Items and objects can get a bit blurry, and then you can’t quite make out really small or fine texts, so you can’t read an email or a tiny text on your phone in your hand, but you can absolutely text people, or read your notifications, while keeping the headset on. If you’ve tried other VR headsets, you know how impressive that is. It’s just, it’s really good with the tech that exists now for VR headsets.
But you can definitely still take the headset off and be like, oh, it’s way brighter in here than I thought it was. Either way, that’s all passthrough, but if you ever wanna fully immerse yourself, I mean it is a VR headset. After all, all you gotta do is rotate. This digital crown clockwise, just keep turning it, and it will slowly dial your environment more and more into your field of view until you dial it. All the way up to fully surrounding you. So all of the windows you might have had open will still stay stuck where they were, but everything you’re doing is just on the moon now.
So yeah, there’s a couple environments. Apple has built in here, most of them relaxing scenic locations, like in California. Somewhere, or one really nice. One is Mount Hood, with a little bit of rain falling. They’re not quite photorealistic, but they’re just short of photorealistic, like they’re the most realistic digital environments that I’ve seen. So then the last two big quirks of the UI, the control center,. So the only way to get to the control center is to look up, and you can’t just look up; you have to physically turn your head up and look at this arrow that appears above you.
So once you see that, you select that, and then you get your control center for things. Like, you know, battery life and notifications, focus modes, screen recording, and pairing to a Mac. But the other big quirk is text input. So you might be wondering. How does text input work with no physical controllers? So there are basically three ways to do this. So let’s say you are in Safari and you want to go to mkbhd.com. You really want one of those shiny.
New Chevron hoodies for the rest of winter. Great, how do you do it? So the first way is to literally hunt and peck,, poking the keys on the keyboard that appear in the air in front of you. So this one is tough because it literally only reacts to your pointer finger on each hand. So you actually can’t type fast, like with home row or anything like that.
Not great. The second way, though, I think is actually kind of good. It’s at least faster, which means looking at the key you want to interact with and then pinching to select it. So just look around the keyboard like this and select the keys. And you might be surprised at how fast you can type like this if you actually know your way around a keyboard pretty well. I actually prefer this to poking the virtual keys because I at least get a little bit of haptic feedback from my own fingers tapping together.
But then in Safari, the last way to do it is literally to just look up at the microphone and say the URL out loud. MKBHD.com. And then it just hears you and goes to the site pretty quickly, if it’s a URL that you can actually say out loud. So, what can you actually do with this thing? Now that we know what it is, it’s the M2 chip, a computer on your face with the displays and the lenses inside, and all sorts of sensors everywhere. What can this thing actually do?
And I feel like the most common way to phrase. That is, what is the killer app? Because of that, we feel like we need some sort of justification to spend $4,000 on this thing. Like applications made the iPhone what it is as we know it, like apps made the iPad.
So what is the app situation on the Vision Pro? So there are two types of apps on the Vision Pro, actually. The first are apps that are built specifically for Vision Pro to take advantage of its awesome experiences. And there are a few of those right now, and then there are all the other apps, which basically are iPhone and iPad apps that happen to be compatible because the developer didn’t opt out. And the first kind is way cooler. So these are Apple’s stock apps here that come with the Vision Pro. And so these are all, of course, made just for Vision Pro.
So they’re going to have stuff that takes full advantage of what this thing is capable of. Apple Music is a pretty classic one; it has all the same functionality as any other Apple Music app, but in this super glassy,, frosted window and shows the colors of whatever’s behind it. And you have the sort menu on the left-hand side instead of across the bottom. That’s the basic layout. Same thing with the Notes app and the Settings app.
Very glassy, almost looking like an iPad app in the air, just rebuilt with this new material design. And then there’s the media app. So Apple TV and Disney+ both come pre-installed, and they have built entire environments inside of them for watching media. And there’s even a small collection of videos on the Apple TV app that are shot on a new proprietary format specifically for Vision Pro.
So it drops you into a space with a full 180-degree video, and Alicia Keys walks right up to you and starts singing right to your face. It’s crazy. There’s also the Photos app, which will let you look at panoramic photos, for example, in this fully immersive view. So you can blow them up to full screen, and then it gives you a bit of a parallax effect around the edges, so it feels like you’re looking into a window of your own photo and looking around.
It’s kind of incredible. And then there are also some other really fun third-party apps that I’ve tried that were built ahead of time. So, Sky Guide, this is a good one. You can look around for a real representation of the sky. Around you or any of the constellations would normally be, you can look at it a little longer and it’ll pop it out.
You can pull it out of the sky to get more information about it. It’s a pretty great idea. There’s another one called Jig Space, which is, it’s a sick app, I don’t know know know. I don’t know if I’d ever use it, but basically it lets you load 3D models into the space you’re in and mess around with them, take ’em apart, and and and view them in actual size. And this really takes advantage of how good the placement lock is on the Vision Pro. And you can walk around, which really gives you a better understanding of the scale of things that you don’t get to see up close very often.
And then Keynote is another funny one. So you can, of course, go through and edit a Keynote just like normal if you want to, but then they’ve built this whole environment for practicing your presentation skills. So you press that, and it says, Oh, would you like to go to a conference room, or the literal Steve Jobs Theater, so you can rehearse talking to your audience with your Keynote slides behind you?
It is genuinely incredibly immersive. And there’s already a bunch more apps like this in the App Store already at launch that are specifically built for Vision Pro. So they’ll take advantage of its various strengths. Now, are any of these killer apps? Not really. I mean, I don’t, if you’re looking for any one of these to be the reason why you spend like $4,000.
On this headset, I don’t think we have that yet. But then, at least, there’s all the other non-native, but technically still compatible, apps that are in the App Store. And these are going to look just like iPhone and iPad apps. Actually, there’s a pre-installed folder on the home screen when you get this thing literally called Compatible Apps, and there’s a bunch of them from Apple here. They look exactly like iPad apps. I’m surprised, actually, that more of them aren’t fully built out to take advantage of Vision Pro, but, like, Apple Maps is just the iPad app.
And so it would be cool. If there were some fun augmented reality overlay walking directions type stuff, but nope, it’s all the exact same functionality that you would find if you opened this app on your iPad. And you can go to the App Store and search a bunch of the names of apps you already know and love, find them by name, and grab them, and they’ll work the exact same way. Crazily enough, though, there are already some notable exceptions.
There is no Netflix app for the Vision Pro, no YouTube app for the Vision Pro, and no Spotify app for the Vision Pro. Apple has kind of a contentious relationship with a lot of developers right now, especially some of the bigger ones. And so some have made the active choice to opt out. They’re like, we don’t want to be there. This won’t be a big enough platform to matter to us enough to justify the work. So they’re not there. Now I totally get it, but also now as a Vision Pro owner and someone. Who’s using it? I’m like, Oh, it’s kind of a bummer.
I really wanted to be able to watch a Netflix show offline and download it ahead of time, but you can’t do that now. But at least for now, for the record, you can use the browser and anything that would work in the browser. So if you pull up Safari and get a full-screen 4K YouTube video going, locked in space, or even in an environment, it looks great. It’s razor-sharp. Like, I could totally watch YouTube videos like this.
But you will definitely be missing the features of having the dedicated app, like offline video. Honestly, to me, the killer app of Vision Pro isn’t just an app; it’s actually the ecosystem. And we knew this was coming, but the second you log into a Vision Pro with your Apple ID, immediately it starts pulling all the services and all the stuff that you’re used to from all the other Apple devices you already have.
And I said this before the Vision Pro was announced. I was like, This is the most obvious strategy for Apple because there are lots of people out there who have never considered buying a VR headset and are considering only this one because they have an iPhone, and this is the one that works with the iPhone, and none of the others are particularly close. So all of your iMessages are already here, and all of your photos are already here and loaded up and backed up.
All your notes are already at your fingertips. You already saw the Keynote app. But okay, easily my favorite feature is connecting to your Mac, right? So anytime your Mac is in front of you and it’s turned on, hit that arrow, and then there’s this little icon to become my Mac’s virtual display. So I click that, and then pick my Mac, and pretty much instantly, it actually blacks out the display of my Mac, and then turns that display into a 4K window inside of the headset. So now my keyboard and trackpad still work, even if it is a desktop.
The keyboard and the trackpad still control everything, and you can continue using it just like a normal computer, but with the ability to make your new 4K monitor as big or as small or close or far away as you want, which is super sick. And then the bonus is that you can still open up and place other Vision Pro apps around your Mac computer. So, like, you can have your Mac in the middle here, and maybe you’re editing or doing some work on the Mac app, and then you have a Safari window, or Messages, or whatever else you want right next to it around it.
And then your keyboard and trackpad can move seamlessly between them all to control all of them. This, to me, as a Mac user, is the ease of setup. To make this happen, this feels like the biggest game changer, like the most compelling futuristic feeling of using this headset to me. Especially on a plane. Oh my god, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an awkward conversation because, like, when I’m editing a video on the plane, the person next to me sees I’m editing a video of myself, and it’s kind of weird and hard to explain, but I’m picturing.
Putting the headset on, the display blacks out, but now I can do all the editing I want, and I can make the screen as big as I want.
So I’ve really enjoyed using that feature. Again, the biggest challenge, though, is still remembering to look exactly at the thing you want to control.
So aside from typing on the real keyboard on whatever window is open, if you want to control something, you have to be looking at it. Again, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you try it, you’ll see what I mean.
And then also, oddly, one monitor only. From the Mac, one virtual monitor only at a time.
So if you usually run a dual display setup like I do for Final Cut Pro, with a big preview on one side and a timeline on the other side, you can’t do that. You have to use the big monitor version of your setup. All right, so you might have realized I’ve left one thing out this whole time. One thing—you could call it one more thing, sure. It’s one more huge crazy thing, but it’s kind of the defining characteristic of this product, and that is personas.
So in all the advertising you’ve seen of Vision Pro, there’s these eyes on the outside of the headset that look like they’re kind of in a passthrough, like in a dark astronaut helmet type of thing. This is easily the most mesmerizing and unique aspect of this headset, right? It’s the only headset with an outward display.
And I mean, it’s very, very prominent in those videos, but in real life, as you’ve started to see from some of my footage, it is very different, and I think I figured out why.
So first of all, it’s not actually see-through, right? There’s a whole bunch of computers in between me and you right now.
So the eyes aren’t on the outside. It’s a representation of my eyes based on what all the sensors on the inside are seeing. It’s reconstructing it on the outside.
So those sensors are tracking at 90 frames per second, and they give you optic ID, which is how you log into the headset and keep things secure. It’s basically the same as face ID or touch ID; it’s just looking at and identifying your eyes.
And it also powers the one beta feature of this headset, which is Personas, which is the most impressive and weirdest thing about this headset at the same time. I’m calling it right now.
So the purpose of the eyes on the outside is really not for you, the wearer of the headset. In fact, you’ll never see it. But it’s for the people around you.
So when you’re in passthrough mode, your eyes will shine through to indicate that you wearing the headset can see the person outside.
So that right there is already pretty unique. But then, when you’re in something immersive and you can’t see what’s around you, it covers up your eyes with this sort of blue, purple, glowing animation.
So that intuitively makes sense. You can see the eyes. When they can see you, you can’t see the eyes when they can’t see you. But crazily enough, there’s also a feature where if you have someone who’s outside the headset looking at you, talking to you, and you are in an immersion, but you want to talk to them,. Through that, they will kind of appear through the fog of whatever immersive environment you’re in.
So you just start talking and looking in their direction. It detects that, and sort of parts a little bit of a fog, and that person’s eyes will show through the fog. It’s pretty decent. It basically only shows one person at a time.
And when this is happening on the outside of the headset, it shows a little bit of your eyes poking through the purple and blue glow. As you can see, it’s all working, but I also think it looks nothing like the eyes from the ad.
So in an effort to make the eyes as presentable as possible, two things. First of all, this screen is actually behind a lenticular film, which I didn’t even realize from the initial media they had published. But if you’ve ever heard of that, it’s sort of what gives it this 3D depth. You might have seen this on other holographic displays and stuff, but the point of that is to make the eyes appear to be sunken into the display, like on your actual face, instead of glued to the front of the headset, which would look a little more weird. But then, to represent your actual eyes, they’ve built in a way to scan in and create a digital representation of your face, which is called your persona.
And it looks like this:.
So to get those eyes on the outside of the Vision Pro headset, you have to do something called register your persona. This is how it creates the digital version of you that includes your eyes, which will show up here.
So let’s do that now. It’s actually kind of a cool process.
So I’m going to put it on, and hopefully the screen recording works.
So you can see exactly what I’m doing. I’ll hit the digital crown. I’m going to go to Settings.
And you can do this when you first set it up. But I’m going to Persona, and I’m going to hit Get Started.
So let’s refine my hands real quick. This is capturing details from the front of the headset of the hands in front of me. Once it’s done with that, when you’re ready, hold Apple Vision Pro at eye level. Keep your arms and shoulders relaxed. Align your entire face within the frame. -. Slowly turn your head to the right. Now slowly turn your head to the left. Now tilt your head up, then tilt your head down. Next, let’s capture your facial expressions. Smile with your mouth closed. Then make a big smile with your teeth showing. Now raise your eyebrows. Close your eyes for a moment. Capture complete. Put Vision Pro back on to continue. -. I will do that.
So now I have a menu that says Creating Persona, and it says it’s in beta, and now there’s my persona right there. Kind of uncanny. The hair’s a little bit different, but the face. Wow, wow. Okay.
So there’s different lighting. You can choose it to always be in studio lighting or always be in contour lighting. I’ll just leave it at that and hit next. You can change the color temperature of your skin tone. I think I’m around there. Brightness, darkness. I think I’m around there, near the middle. Next.
And then I can add glasses.
So if I typically have glasses, which obviously I wouldn’t be able to wear in the Vision Pro, you can still look like you have glasses anytime you’re on that FaceTime call.
And then next. Save.
And that’s it.
So I think now you should see my eyes. Maybe.
And that’s the thing; it barely shows up. You can barely see my eyes when I’m wearing the headset. Now I’ve tried a couple other scans subsequently, so I’ve tried different lighting conditions, I’ve tried different backgrounds, simple backgrounds, different shirts, and things like that. It doesn’t really ever appear any brighter. I think if you have a darker skin tone like me, just don’t expect the eyes to show up very brightly on the outside of the headset. It’s pretty subtle. Even when it does show up, it’s a little weird-looking. The eyes are a little too far apart sometimes.
They’re a little dim. You see one eye at a time. It’s kind of weird. But that persona, though. Whew. That is some pretty interesting stuff. It’s crazy that this is actually a real thing being shipped, like when Meta first started doing it. Now Apple’s doing this. This is, again, technically in beta.
So, I dunno, there’s room for improvement, but it still works. But as of right now, I feel like this is both incredibly impressive and slightly unsettling. It’s very impressive that this thing, this headset I’m wearing on my face, is tracking all these little microexpressions and little movements for my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth, and everything. But at the same time, it’s just not quite human. It’s right at the edge of the uncanny valley, and I’m not looking at a person.
So yeah. But the crazy part is that you can now use this persona as your own. Camera feed for any apps in Vision Pro that require a front-facing camera, like FaceTime.
And so I’ve tried. I’ve been using FaceTime a few times in Vision Pro, and it is, technically speaking, incredible.
So I’ve made a few FaceTime calls in the past few days with some fellow reviewers, who you’ll probably recognize from their personas, who are also testing the Vision Pro.
And universally, once we all got past the shock of, Oh my god, it’s you. It looks like a digital version of you. This is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Once we got past that, there was a ton happening here.
So you can see the FaceTime. Windows literally appear as just that.
They’re just like glassy windows floating in space with people looking through them.
And then the angle that you look into the window is going to match the angle that they see you looking at them. Meaning if we’re all in Vision Pros on this call, it’s unlikely, but hear me out. If we’re all in Vision Pros and you’ve got a bunch of people on this FaceTime call, so there’s somebody to the left and somebody to the right, if I look to the person and make eye contact with the person to the right, the person to the left sees the side of my head because I’m looking at somebody else. That’s already pretty cool.
And then the same thing is true for hand gestures.
So we tried this out. It turns out that you can reach out and make hand gestures that are tracked by the cameras in this bubble in front of you, and they show up at the correct angle towards the person that you’re gesturing at, not towards everybody else on the call. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Okay, good test.
So wait, Justine, do you see this? -. Yes. -.
And Brian, do you see? -. I don’t see that. I don’t see that, Marques. -. Whoa. -. Now wait.
So now, Brian, do you see this? Now I can see that, Marques. -.
And then, on top of that, the spatial audio here is incredibly well developed.
So again, you’re on the call, and the voice of the person to the right comes from the right side. The voice of the person to the left comes from the left. But also, you can just pick up and move the window around, and that angle will match where the people are in the room and where their sound and video come from. If I put you on the other side of the room, it sounds like they’re further away.
And if I turn up the environment and bring them into the moon or some other 3D space, it actually sounds much more like I’m in a gigantic space with no echo than in the actual room. It’s all very subtle, but very well considered.
So once you’re in this for a while, you start to notice all these little, smaller things. Again, it’s not quite human-like. It’s not like looking at a video feed of a human face, but it is still, like it has a lot of like, this would be the best avatar anyone’s ever made in 2K. No one’s ever done a 2K face scan and had it look this good, but it’s still not as good as a perfect reality. You’ve heard of the uncanny valley thing before. I think the number one weakness of the avatars or personas that I’ve seen is hair.
So basically, everyone I’ve talked to has like a frozen lump of hair instead of flowing realistic hair.
And that’s true about all flowing things, like however your hair was when you did the scan, it’s frozen that way.
And so is any necklace you’re wearing, whether it’s crooked or not, or, I guess, technically, any makeup you had on, or however you looked when you did the scan. Maybe that could be a good thing. Maybe you did a scan when you were looking all dolled up, and then you get on a 7:00 AM call, and you still look perfect even though you look like you just woke up in real life.
So I guess there’s that too. But anyway, all that is to say is FaceTime. FaceTime is the most well-thought-out, like most futuristic Vision Pro experiences. It just is.
So I’ll end this video with this. Now you know what it’s like to use and operate the Vision Pro. But there’s still a lot more to consider when actually considering if you should buy and own this thing, from the use cases to the things that work well and don’t work well, the philosophy behind it, the prices, all of that stuff. That’s what’s going to be for my full review. There are parts of this thing that are absolutely amazing, unparalleled, and the best I’ve ever seen. But the reason it’s so interesting is because it’s actually a young category. Like, we’re so used to this slow, boring iteration in mature categories, like smartphones and laptops, and you always see the comments talking about how tech is so boring, but now they’re actually jumping into something risky, and it’s actually fun, and there are downfalls and flaws, and it’s fun to actually weigh the pros and cons.
So I’ll be expanding on all these ways more in the full review, but I’ll leave you with this. I’ve got my upsides and downsides to Vision Pro. It’s been a week. Upsides, some of the stuff. That’s the best I’ve ever seen on a headset. Immersion, placement in space, eye tracking and hand control, passthrough, ecosystem, and spatial audio.
And the downsides: weight and comfort, the eyes on the outside, and app selection. Right now, battery life and price.
So the full review is in the works. Definitely get subscribed to be among the first to see that when it drops. Either way, till the next one. Thanks for watching. Catch. You later. Peace.
