I got a sneak peek into Apple’s vision for the long run of computing on Monday. For about half an hour, I wore the $3,500 Vision Pro, the corporate’s first high-tech goggles, which might be released next yr.
I walked away with mixed feelings, including a nagging sense of skepticism.
On one hand, I used to be impressed with the standard of the headset, which Apple bills as the start of an era of “spatial computing,” where digital data blends with the physical world to unlock latest capabilities. Imagine wearing a headset to assemble furniture while the instructions are digitally projected onto the parts, as an illustration, or cooking a meal while a recipe is displayed within the corner of your eye.
Apple’s device had high-resolution video, intuitive controls and a snug fit, which felt superior to my experiences with headsets made within the last decade by Meta, Magic Leap, Sony and others.
But after wearing the brand new headset to view photos and interact with a virtual dinosaur, I also felt there wasn’t much latest to see here. And the experience elicited an “ick” factor I had never had before with an Apple product. More on this later.
Let me start from the start. After Apple unveiled the headset on Monday, its first major latest release because the Apple Watch in 2015, I used to be permitted to try a preproduction model of the Vision Pro. Apple staff led me to a personal room at the corporate’s Silicon Valley headquarters and sat me on a couch for a demo.
The Vision Pro, which resembles a pair of ski goggles, has a white USB cable that plugs right into a silver battery pack that I slipped into the pocket of my jeans. To place it on my face, I turned a knob on the side of the headset to regulate the snugness and secured a Velcro strap above my head.
I pressed down on a metal button toward the front of the device to show it on. Then I ran through a setup process, which involved a moving dot so the headset could lock in on my eye movements. The Vision Pro has an array of sensors to trace eye movements, hand gestures and voice commands, that are the first ways to regulate it. an icon is reminiscent of hovering over it with a mouse cursor; to press a button, you tap your thumb and index fingers together, making a fast pinch that’s reminiscent of clicking a mouse.
The pinch gesture was also used for grabbing and moving around apps on the screen. It was intuitive and felt less clunky than waving across the motion controllers that typically include competing handsets.
But it surely raised questions. What other hand gestures would the headset recognize for enjoying games? How good will voice controls be if Siri’s voice transcription on phones currently doesn’t work well? Apple isn’t sure yet what other gestures might be supported, and it didn’t let me try voice controls.
All the various uses?
Then got here time for the app demos to point out how the headset might enrich our on a regular basis lives and help us stay connected with each other.
Apple first walked me through photos and a video of a birthday celebration on the headset. I could turn a dial near the front of the Vision Pro counterclockwise to make the photo backgrounds more transparent and see the true world, including the Apple employees around me, or turn it clockwise to make the photo more opaque to immerse myself.
Apple also had me open a meditation app within the headset that showed 3-D animations while soothing music played and a voice instructed me to breathe. However the meditation couldn’t prepare me for what was coming next: a video call.
A small window popped up — a notification of a FaceTime call from one other Apple worker wearing the headset. I stared at the reply button and pinched to take the decision.
The Apple worker within the video call was using a “persona,” an animated 3-D avatar of herself that the headset created using a scan of her face. Apple portrays videoconferencing through the personas as a more intimate way for people to speak and even collaborate in virtual space.
The Apple worker’s facial expressions looked lifelike, and her mouth movements synchronized together with her speech. But due to how her avatar was digitally rendered, with the uniform texture of her face and the shortage of shadows, I could tell it was fake. It resembled a video hologram I had seen in sci-fi movies like “Minority Report.”
Within the FaceTime session, the Apple worker and I were alleged to collaborate on making a 3-D model in an app called Freeform. But I stared at it blankly, enthusiastic about what I used to be seeing. After three years of my being mostly isolated through the pandemic, Apple wanted me to interact with what was essentially a deepfake video of an actual person. I could feel myself shutting down. My “ick” sensation was probably what technologists have long described as uncanny valleya sense of unease when a human sees a machine creation that appears too human.
A technological feat? Yes. A feature I might wish to use with others day by day? Probably not anytime soon.
To wrap the demonstration with something fun, Apple showed a simulation of a dinosaur that moved toward me once I reached my hand out. I actually have seen greater than my fair proportion of digital dinosaurs in virtual reality (almost every headset maker that’s given me a VR demo has shown a Jurassic Park simulation within the last seven years), and I used to be not enthusiastic about this.
Real people
After the demo, I drove home and processed the experience during rush hour.
Over dinner, I talked to my wife concerning the Vision Pro. The Apple goggles, I said, looked and felt higher than the competing headsets. But I wasn’t sure that mattered.
Other headsets from Meta and Sony PlayStation were less expensive and already quite powerful and entertaining, especially for enjoying video games. But at any time when we had guests over for dinner they usually tried the goggles on, they lost interest after lower than half an hour since the experience was exhausting they usually felt socially disconnected from the group.
Would it not matter in the event that they could twist the dial on the front of the headset to see into the true world while wearing it? I believe it will still feel isolating, because they’d probably be the one person in a room wearing one.
But more essential to me was the thought of connecting with others, including relations and colleagues, through Apple headsets.
“Your mom is getting old,” I said to my wife. “Once you’re FaceTiming together with her, would you quite see her deepfake digital avatar, or a crummier video call where she’s holding the phone camera as much as her face at an unflattering angle?”
“The latter,” she said without hesitation. “That’s real. Although, I’d much quite see her in person.”
