Apple wants to lead a revolution again. The challenge will not be as relatively easy as some of their products that the public knew from day one how they would use. This time it was the same company that explained how its latest gadget can facilitate work and leisure: an augmented reality viewer, of very high quality and at a high price, called Vision Pro. The Cupertino company defined the category of many consumer technology products in the past. Will he get it again?
The CEO of the company, Tim Cook, saved the last bullet yesterday at the world conference of developers (WWDC). The final rabbit in the top hat with the phrase popularized by the company’s co-founder, Steve Jobs: “One more thing”. But the Vision Pro is not something else, but a sophisticated machine that creates impossible universes.
It allows you to see the apps as elements located in the room. It can fill the space with screens of any size. It is able to put the user in any imaginable universe. To control it, you point to things with your eyes, or with your fingers, without doing anything else. It can also be given voice instructions.
Despite the appearance, the Vision Pros do not isolate the user from their environment. When someone appears in the vicinity of the wearer, they appear inside the image. It mixes the real world and the virtual world.
Any app, from the browser to maps, can be opened and manipulated without additional devices. It’s a device that never disconnects from the real world. It is apparently very easy to use. You look at the Mac screen and instantly you have the screen in front of you, but in giant size. The uses seem endless. Panoramic photos introduce the user to the landscape.
The TV screen is like having a movie theater in your living room. In addition, 3D movies are played perfectly, because the image is formed on separate screens for each eye. Includes spatial sound.
The Disney platform will be on the glasses from day one. Therefore, it will allow a more immersive way of viewing the contents, with some additional features.
The Vision Pros are loaded with technology. They only have two controls: a button to take photos and a crown like that of the Apple Watch, which Airpods Pro later also inherited. The entire casing is constructed of aluminum. The viewer has two hours of use with an external battery connected magnetically by a cable. It is one of the tolls of this class of technology. Placing the battery in the viewfinder would make it too heavy and impractical.
Between the two screens of the Vision Pros there are 23 million pixels, much more than any 4K TV screen, which means that the eyes cannot distinguish the pixels and the images are very detailed. Spatial sound distributes the sound sources around the room as seen.
The technological list is endless. It has internal infrared cameras and LEDs to distinguish where each eye is looking. In total, it carries twelve cameras and the powerful M2 chip of Mac computers. The viewer can scan your face for FaceTime conversations and comes with a new operating system called visionOS. It has a biometric identification system through the iris scanner. They will cost $3,499 in the United States and arrive early next year. For the rest of the world, at later dates and at a price that makes them very unaffordable.
Apple yesterday completed the transition to the Apple Silicon architecture and the definitive abandonment of Intel chips. Finally. the only missing model, the Mac Pro, got a new M2 Ultra chip. The price is from 8,399 euros.
