Apple Vision Pro Hands-on: Much better than I was ready for.

   

Our columnist was one of the first to try Apple's new headset, which will arrive early next year for $3,499...

After a roughly 30-minute demo that went through key features that have yet to be experienced, I'm convinced that Apple has taken a real leap forward in the XR's potential and implementation with its new Apple Vision. Nothing less is given. Professor To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying it lives up to all the promises, that it's truly a new paradigm in computing or any other high-powered claim that Apple hopes to deliver once it ships. will do will be fulfilled. I would need a lot more time with the device than a guided demo. But, I've used basically every major VR headset and AR device from 2013's Oculus DK1 to the latest generations of Quest and Vive headsets. When it comes to XR, I've tried all the retrieving experiments and stabs. I've been surprised and surprised again as the hardware and software developers of these devices and their marquee apps continue to chew on the "killer app puzzle" - trying to find something that gets real buy-in with a wider audience. could The people

There are some real social, narrative or gaming successes like Gorilla Tag, VRChat or Cosmonius. I'm also inspired by Sundance filmmakers' first-person experiences that highlight the human (or animal) condition.

But none of them have the advantages that Apple brings to the table with the Apple Vision Pro. That is, 5,000 patents have been filed in the last few years and there is a huge base of talent and capital to work with. Every part of this thing shows Apple's level of ambition. I don't know if this will be the "next mode of computing", but you can see the conviction behind every choice made here. No corners were cut. Full tilt engineering on display.

The hardware is good — very good — with 24 million pixels across two panels, orders of magnitude higher than any headset most users have come in contact with. The optics are better, the headband is comfortable and quickly adjustable and there is a top strap to keep the weight down. Apple says it's still working on what LightCell options will ship with when it's officially released, but the defaults are comfortable for me. Were they meant to ship with different sizes and shapes to fit different faces? There is also a smaller power connector design, which interconnects with the external twist lock using internal pin-type power linkages.

There is also a magnetic solution for some (but not all) optical adjustments for people with vision differences. The onboarding experience features an automatic eye relief calibration to match the lens to the center of your eye. There are no manual wheels adjusting it. The main frame and the glass piece look fine, although it is worth noting that they are quite large in size. Not heavy, per se, but definitely there. If you've had any VR experience at all, you know that the two biggest hurdles most people hit are either delayed onset nausea or the isolation that wearing something over your eyes can provide for long sessions. . Apple has reduced both of them. The R1 chip that sits next to the M2 chip has a system-wide polling rate of 12ms, and I saw no jitter or frame drops. A slight motion blur effect was used in passthrough mode but it wasn't annoying. The windows creaked on their own and rolled at high speed. Of course, Apple was able to mitigate these problems thanks to a lot of new and original hardware. Everywhere you look here is a new idea, a new technology or a new implementation. All this comes at a new price: $3,500 is at the height of expectations and firmly places the device in the power user category for early adopters.

What Apple has achieved is that other headsets just can't nail it:

Eye tracking and gesture control are close at hand. Hand gestures are picked up anywhere around the headset. This includes resting on your lap or down and away on a chair or couch. Many other hand tracking interfaces force you to hold your hands in front of you, which is tedious. Apple has high-resolution cameras on the bottom of the device to keep an eye on your hands. Likewise, the inside eye-tracking array means that, after calibration, almost everything you see is clearly visible. A simple low-effort tap of your fingers and bum, it does the trick.

Pass-thru is an important key. Having a real-time 4K view of the world around you, including any humans in your personal space, is critical for long-session VR or AR wearables. Most humans have a deep animal brain thing that makes us really, really uncomfortable if we can't see our surroundings for too long. Eliminating this problem by going through the picture should improve the chances of longer usage times. There's also a clever "breakthrough" mechanism that automatically passes through your content to someone approaching you, alerting you to the fact that they're approaching. Outside eyes, which change appearance depending on what you're doing, provide a good context for outsiders as well. Resolution means that the text is actually readable. Apple's positioning of this as a full-on computing device only makes sense if you can actually read text in it. All previous iterations of the "virtual desktop" setup have relied on panels and lenses that are too blurry to reliably read fine text at length. In many cases it literally hurts to do so. Not with Apple Vision Pro — text is super crisp and readable at all sizes and far "distances" within your space.

There were also some truly surprising moments in my short time with the headset. In addition to the sharpness of the display and the quick response of the interface, the entire suite of models focused on detail.

The Personas Play.I highly doubted that Apple itself could pull off a workable digital avatar based on just a scan of your face using the Vision Pro headset. Doubt crushed. I'd say if you're measuring the digital version of yourself that it creates as your avatar in FaceTime calls and other areas, it has a solid set of fingers on the other side of the uncanny valley. It's not completely perfect, but their skin tension and muscle function are accurate, using the feedback you provide to reproduce a full range of facial expressions using machine learning models. goes, and my brief conversation with a live person on the call. (And it was live, I checked by asking off-script stuff) Didn't feel awkward or weird. It worked.

It’s crisp.I'm like paraphrasing it but, really, it's crisp as hell. As you race through the demo like a 3D dinosaur, you reach texture levels and beyond.

3D Movies are actually good in it. Jim Cameron might have had a moment when he watched "Avatar: Waterfront" on an Apple Vision Pro. This thing was born to make the 3D format a song — and it can display a lot of them now, so there's going to be a great library of shot-on 3D movies that will bring them all to life. . The 3D photos and videos you can take directly with the Apple Vision Pro also look great, but I wasn't able to test capturing one myself so I don't know how it will feel. Weird? It's hard to say.

The setup is smooth and simple.A few minutes and you're ready to go. Very Apple.

Yes, it does look that good.The interface and output of various apps are so good that Apple used them directly from the device in its keynote. The interface is bright and bold and feels present as it interacts with other windows, casts shadows on the ground and reacts to lighting conditions.

Overall, I'm hesitant to make any sweeping claims about whether the Apple Vision Pro is going to live up to Apple's claims of pioneering native computing. I've had very little time with it and it's far from complete—Apple is still working on things like Light Shroud and certainly many aspects of the software.

It is, however, really, really well done. Platonic ideal of the XR headset. Now, we wait to see what developers and Apple come up with over the next few months and how the public reacts.