The Apple Vision Pro has made my eyes work harder than ever. It’s not just because I have ultra-sharp and incredibly bright micro OLED screens right in front of my face: the Vision Pro relies on visionOS eye tracking, its new “spatial Computing” operating system for Navigation. If you want to launch an application, visit a link or do just about anything that usually requires mouse or touchscreen input, your eyes should be looking directly at you.
It’s magical, almost telepathic. The Vision Pro’s eye tracking gives you the impression of discovering the power of the force, a feeling supported by the intuitive hand gestures that you use to interact with what your eyes are directed at. But if you rely on your gaze so much, the Vision Pro can quickly become exhausting when you run into problems, such as trying to press a small button on YouTube’s visually cluttered website. Eye strain is real.
That’s pretty much The Vision Pro experience in a nutshell. Wonder and Frustration. A look into the future limited by the existing hardware today — even if this hardware is among the best we have ever seen.
Before you ask, No, you probably shouldn’t even think about buying the Apple Vision Pro. It is exclusively intended for developers, wealthy Apple fanatics who do not hesitate to jump on a curiosity and, of course, influential influencers. But you shouldn’t refuse it completely either. This is just the beginning of Apple’s journey in spatial computing. Like the iPod and the iPhone before it, the Vision Pro has the potential to fundamentally change the way we live with technology.
This future is probably years away, provided that Apple manages to provide a affordable and lighter headset. But it is fascinating to see how the company has taken a completely new direction in IT without knowing exactly where it is going.
Apple Vision Pro
The Vision Pro is an ambitious first step in the world of spatial computing with the best screens and AR integration we have ever seen. But it is also clearly a beta product aimed at developers.
What is Apple Vision Pro?
Despite Apple’s refusal to say the words virtual reality or even the letters V and R in that order, the Vision Pro is a virtual reality headset. What makes it unique compared to almost every other VR headset we’ve seen in the last decade (apart from Meta Quest Pro and Quest 3) is that the Vision Pro provides a real-world video stream to its micro OLED screens. It’s a very limited view of reality – the colors are muted, the dark scenes seem blurry and the objects distort as they move — but it’s the best attempt we’ve seen in augmented reality (AR) from a VR headset.
The Vision Pro is not a pure AR gadget like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Magic Leap headsets, both of which display digital overlays on transparent lenses. These devices offer much more realistic AR experiences, as they do not need to recreate the real world via cameras. But you can never get the feeling of immersion that you get from a VR headset, where your entire field of vision can be taken over by digital environments. (The dimming indicators of the Magic Leap 2 are an attempt to solve this problem.)
In an ideal world, Apple would not need to capture reality with cameras and transfer it to a headset screen. Virtual reality enthusiasts call this “Passthrough”, but it is only a brute-force way to imitate augmented reality. It is much easier to make the world digital than to delve into a new complex display technology to paint the real world with virtual objects.
