The only thing Apple will have to do to get rapid adoption of its new product, Vision Pro, is to get people to try it. We are possibly facing the most impressive technological product since the release of the iPhone in 2007. It does not have a category yet because it is not close to anything we have seen so far. Comparing it with virtual reality glasses, like Meta’s Quest Pro, is mixing churras with Merinos. This is something else. The Cupertino company insists that they are not glasses and prefers to call its new product “space computer”. They may not be able to enforce this definition, but the viewfinder is an impressive machine.
Since Monday’s presentation, Apple has made some demonstrations of Vision Pro to journalists, YouTubers and influencers. The reactions are shocking, because professionals who dedicate themselves to describing things with words are left without knowing what to say. It is a device that introduces a new way of doing and seeing things. Working with computers, leisure and personal life can change for many people.
Before the demonstration, vision problems that the user may have are determined. If you wear contact lenses, there is no need to do any prior adjustment. If you wear glasses, they are put into a machine that measures your lenses. In a few minutes, the Apple team has already placed quality lenses suitable for the vision of that user and it is ready for the show. Setup is very fast. They follow with their eyes a series of points that appear on the screen in a circular way. This function is used for the machine to “learn” how the user looks. Then, the hands are placed in front, so that you recognize them. One second and that’s it.
Vision Pro is handled in a very natural way. When looking at a point, a function, an option or an app icon, the eye is like a pointer pointing. You just have to look and that’s it. To finish selecting, you only have to join two fingers of your right hand, without making strange gestures, without raising it, without showing anything. Of natural form. That’s all. The only user interface simpler than this would be a computer acting on thought commands, but we don’t have that at the moment.
With Vision Pro, each app that is used appears on a screen over the natural space in which the user is. Once that screen is located, which can be moved at will, it remains anchored in that space. The user can move as he wants, but the screen integrates perfectly with the reality of the room. Limits are not appreciated. It is noticeable that one wears a device adjusted to the face, but when looking to the sides, up or down, there are no dark areas.
Apple’s demo begins with photos. Seeing photographs, no matter how high quality they may be, is nothing special. But here’s where the fun starts, because Vision Pro can take and save 3D photos and videos. Seeing a memory in this way has a high emotional component, because it is like reliving a memory with an overwhelming closeness to reality. It is not seeing a photo or a video. It’s being back there in the moment. And panoramic photos have an expand feature that makes the user appear to be inside the image. It’s hard not to be jaw-dropping.
Opening an app from a home screen is as easy as pressing a button/wheel located at the top right of the viewer that brings up the app icons before your eyes. You look at the one you want to activate and make a small pincer gesture with your fingers. voila. With your fingers together, you can, for example, scroll on the Safari internet browser. The texts read perfectly. Moving the screens on the Vision Pro is just as intuitive. They are placed anywhere in the room and do not move from there. It takes a lot of technology to achieve such a perfected effect.
In the presentation on Monday, Apple left some things about Vision Pro unexplained. For example, with the viewfinder you can see some recordings in a new immersive video format in which the apple company works through a new 8K camera with recording of spatial sound. Watching a basketball game is like being on the court, a rhino farm in Africa, or a tightrope walker defying the void on a rope stretched over a long precipice. At all times, the user looks inside.
Cinema is one of the most spectacular sections. Avatar was used in the demo. The sense of water in the 3D version. There was the screen, as if it were a television in an enormous size and with a quality that rivaled that of the cinemas. To play these videos, Apple TV is used, an application that in its version for Vision Pro has a cinema function. If you look to select it and pinch your fingers together, everything around the screen goes dark, like in a movie theater and puts the big screen in front of the user’s couch. It’s hard to believe how quickly and naturally the viewer draws you into a different world.
With almost no time to recover, the last phase of the demo uses an Apple app about dinosaurs. It’s computer animation, but high quality, similar to the Apple TV series Prehistoric Planet. A giant window, virtual although it seems real, opens on the wall of the room. It seems incredible that it disappears before the eyes of the beholder. It doesn’t matter how you move. The effect is maintained in real time as if it were happening in reality. Suddenly, one of those “wow effect†details: a butterfly flies towards the user. If it puts an outstretched finger in front of it, the insect flies to land on top of it. Awesome. But the best is yet to come.
A T-Rex appears and sneaks into the room through the open window. The user can get closer to the prehistoric creature, surround it. The animal appears real and continues to look at the viewer. He even lets out a snort, making him jump. How have they done it? The beast turns and walks away, its mighty tail whirling into the hall. Suddenly, the window is closing and the same wall with paintings appears that was always there, although it had disappeared. End of the show. And the breath. It is hard to assimilate that there are no flaws, that these virtual worlds are articulated around the viewer as if they were part of reality.
The show is all very well, but what about the job? How do you type? Easy. Just like on an iPad or iPhone, when you need to type and the device isn’t connected to a bluetooth keyboard, a virtual keyboard appears in front of the user so they can type from the air. With the user’s real hands on top. Apple couldn’t show me how the Vision Pro connects to a Mac simply by staring at its screen to create another giant screen for the user to see, one of the features it showed off in Monday’s keynote, but the company says this functionality will be ready for the beginning. of the year, when the machine will begin to be distributed at the beginning of 2024 in the United States.
Vision Pro is a new way of using computing. During the demonstration, a FaceTime video call was used with a person who had previously scanned their face to use it so that their interlocutors did not see someone with glasses in front of them, but a person. It is the weakest effect of the device. It looks good, but although it is a realistic avatar, it is too noticeable that it is not the real face of the person, and that makes the communication strange.
However, the fact of being able to easily place each screen at any point in the room has a feature that makes it more natural: sound. It’s all about spatial immersive sound. The Vision Pro analyze the room, so that the sound not only comes from the point where it is supposed to be generated, but its effects are as if there was a person at that point, with its natural reverberation. It is a very, very, very well worked product. Among its few buts, we must count the fact of having to use an external battery -which has a range of two hours- connected by a cable, but putting the battery in the viewfinder would have made it heavy. It can also be plugged into a power outlet for
The Vision Pro is a new concept of how computers can be in an increasingly natural user interface relationship. When you start using them, you can’t avoid the sensation of feeling that the device reads your mind, because when the user wants to open an app or activate a function, they just have to look at that point and put their fingers together. The effect is very fast. This first machine of what Apple considers a “space computer” is just the first version of what is to come. It may be smaller, lighter, and with greater autonomy, but with the concept it is already impeccable from day one.
Apple has hit the table. There is nothing in the world similar to what they have created in Cupertino. That does not guarantee that Vision Pro will be a popular or commercial success. Convincing the public to buy them is not easy when the price, at 3,500 euros in the United States next year, will surely be closer to a value of around 4,000 euros in the rest of the world. Does the viewer solve any need not already covered by technology? Probably not, but maybe that’s not the right answer, it’s how you do things, because that’s the way technological advances happen. And this time, in Cupertino they have not settled, but have taken several steps forward
It is not a pair of glasses to play, although they are also. It is the best way that someone has found to put what we do today with our machines in a different dimension. If the user understands that this is a computing device, the introduction of it, even if gradual, will be effective. The price is not going to help you, but each person who tries it is going to become, probably, a prescriber of the machine. It remains to be seen what one can get used to when you have a viewer like this in the living room at home or in the office and even consider whether it can transform industries. Potential, certainly not lacking.
When Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh in 1984, there was a different kind of computer that everyone knew how to use right out of the box, without the need to learn codes or complicated instructions. A mouse launched for the first time a simple way to communicate with the machine. Some windows were used to open programs and work with several at the same time. Although it may not seem like it, then that was a revolution that ended up being imposed. Vision Pro is true to that legacy of the company’s co-founder. A clean and polished user interface, along with natural handling. The best mouse, the eyes, the best button, the fingers. Apple has done it again.
