What is Apple Vision Pro: What It’s Actually Like!
What is the vision pro
All right, so you’ve seen the unboxing. Now it’s time for the breakdown. What is using the Apple Vision Pro actually like? This is easily one of Apple’s craziest, most radical, possibly dystopian products of all time. And I have a lot of thoughts here, like I’ve been using it for about a week now.
There are some parts of this thing that are absolutely incredible, and some other parts that feel weird, or borderline unfinished. There are all kinds of new technologies, from a new operating system to infrared eye tracking to virtually reconstructed versions of you.
I feel like there are so many actually new things that you have to understand in order to get a sense of what this headset actually is and what it does. So I’m gonna break this down into two parts. This video is all about using the Vision Pro.
It’s everything I’ve learned from the past week of wearing and getting used to this thing every single day. But I’m also working on a more wide ranging, possibly more existential, review video. But let’s just start with the more hardware fundamentals, right? Like what is this thing that I’m holding literally?
What is the apple vision pro used for
Apple Vision Pro at its core, well, it is a VR headset. Now, Apple would never say that, and they probably won’t like
We’ll get there. But the truth is it’s a really, really, really high end virtual reality headset. It’s something we’ve seen before, right? It’s got displays and lenses and speakers and fans and buttons. And this is a form factor. This is a thing that we have seen
before, but before I even turn this thing on, there are clearly several things that are a little different about this one. So first of all, it’s made of metal. Lots of metal and glass here, which are high quality, but heavy materials, relatively speaking. So there’s this precisely machined aluminum frame around the outside. And yes, those are intakes for fans at the bottom. And then vents for those fans at the top. On the right side, there’s your digital crown that can be pressed in or turned. And then on the other side is just a single larger
button. So kind of basically the same two buttons as an Apple Watch. And then when you get a little further back on this band here, these little pods with downward facing grills, these are speakers which are pointed straight at your ears, and work surprisingly well.
Though of course, it also means that people around you can hear a little bit of what you’re hearing. There’s a little bit of bleed, and I have a lot to say about spatial audio, so stay tuned for that. But the main event is at the front. There is an enormous piece
of glass, which, yes, is very easy to fingerprint and smudge. And then behind that thing, there’s this outward-facing OLED display and a bunch of sensors all the way around, outside facing sensors that go forward, sideways, and straight down.
And there’s depth sensors, infrared illuminators, lidar scanners, and just regular old RGB cameras, all being processed by an M2 chip and an R1 chip inside this thing. And then maybe the craziest part, inside the headset, there are a bunch more sensors facing your eyes, tracking your eyes in real time, for all the eye control and everything that
comes with that. And also then to display a representation of your eyes on the outside of the headset. Kinda, we’ll get there. But overall, when you put it all together, you get a very well made, very high end, but also pretty heavy computer to wear on your face.
So officially, this headset with this solo knit band when I weighed it, showed up as 638 grams, which some of you on Twitter have already pointed out is actually slightly less than the plastic Meta Quest Pro. But that Quest Pro also has a lot of battery on the
back of your head as a sort of a counterbalance, so the weight distribution is very different. Also, the Quest Pro is not that comfortable anyway. But the point is this, for Apple, made the choice of taking the battery off of the headset, which means okay, now there’s nothing on the back of your head, so you can wear it and lean up against things, and that might be an upside, but that also now means you have to deal with this cable all the time running up to your head, and the fact that it’s very front weighted
now. All of the weight is on the front of your face. So this is the battery, as you saw in the unboxing. If you haven’t already seen the unboxing, that just went up. I’ll link it below the like button. But this battery is a surprisingly small 3,366 milliamp hours. I say surprisingly small because a normal battery bank of this size, you might expect to be 10, 15, 20,000 milliamp hours. I suspect there’s a lot of heat insulation happening here. But it comes with a non-removable four foot cable, and a proprietary connector at the end of
the cable that will twist and lock to the headset. And so the lock is really solid. It makes sense that it’s not just straight USB that could get disconnected easily. Once you connect it, it starts glowing, and then it starts booting up. And there’s even a little Apple logo that displays on the outside screen while it takes, you know, a little under a minute to turn on. So there is no on or off button or switch anywhere on this headset. Maybe kind of like AirPods Max or something like that. So if you ever take the
headset off and put it down, it will enter a standby mode after some time, but it won’t turn off. If you wanna turn it off, you literally have to twist and unplug the cable. That’s the only way to actually turn the headset off. Now famously already, the battery life with this included battery, is not super long on this headset. Two to four hours is actually realistic for what you can expect for just like this built-in battery. But that’s also kind of right in line with a lot of other VR headsets. Battery life on VR headsets
is not that great in general. If you do wanna use it longer, the only way to do that is there’s USBC port on the battery, and you have to plug the battery in. So you could plug the battery into the wall for infinite battery life, or I guess you could plug it into like a, you could daisy chain another battery into the other pocket or something for even longer life. But yeah, two to four hours. Now at first it seemed weird to me that the port is on the same side of the battery as the
non-removable cable, but I think it’s because they just want you to default to putting this battery in your pocket, probably in your back pocket. So even if it’s plugged into the wall, it can still be in your back pocket. You’re just gonna want to get a longer USBC cable. So there are no controllers that come with this headset. Now it does support other input methods that are like game controllers, and mouse, and keyboard, and those can be incredibly useful, but by default the primary input method for everyone using the Vision Pro is your eyes and
your hands. So the first time you put on this headset, it goes through this calibration process, and it’s pretty interesting. So the first time you ever put it on, it first adjusts the distance between the lenses, physically moving them inside the headset to match the distance between your eyes. Then it does this sort of a hand scan so it understands your hands. And then you go through this process of basically looking at a bunch of dots all the way around the screen, and then tapping your fingers together to select them. Kind of feels like an
eye test or something. And then you’re in. So first thing you’re gonna notice is you can actually kind of put your hands anywhere as long as the headset can see this, just your fingers touching together. So there’s a lot of pictures of people using a headset with their fingers, like out in front of them, pinching like that. But you actually don’t have to do that. It’s such a wide angle because of the sensors facing forward and sideways and down. You can kind of just rest your hand anywhere, in front of you, in your lap. As
long as you pinch like that, it can generally pick it up, which is impressive. So you’re pinching to control anywhere in that 180 degree bubble in front of you. And then the digital crown, you hit that once, and the app drawer comes up, pretty simple. Doesn’t seem that impressive. But this is actually a peek at the first really impressive thing about this headset to me, which is it seems to have incredible spatial positioning lock, and like, it’s really hard to have you appreciate this through a YouTube video. Reviewing VR headsets is hard. But turn around
in the room you’re in, and picture a wall or a window just appearing locked in place in 3D space in your room, and no matter how much you move your head, or move around, it stays exactly kind of floating where it’s supposed to be. But when I say floating, I think you’re picturing like a, a soft float, but it’s locked, and that’s how it starts. So now you’re in Apple’s new Vision OS I would describe this as kind of similar to iPad OS, but way more glassy, and of course with the extra dimension of 3D
space. So hitting a digital crown will always get the app drawer back in front of you, and then simply look at the icon you want and pinch your fingers together, to select it and open that app. Scrolling is basically as you’d expect, you just kind of pinch and grab in the air, and then pull as if it’s on a string, and physics let you pull things through the air. It’s pretty intuitive, it’s responsive, it’s fluid. Sometimes it’s kind of bouncy even. I would say the biggest adjustment is only being able to control exactly what you’re
looking at. And I don’t think people realize how often they’re controlling things that they’re not exactly looking directly at with other computers and other UIs. But with this, you can look at the button to select it, and if you look at the next thing you’re gonna do, you’re no longer controlling the button. You have to look exactly where you’re trying to interact with things. It takes a few extra brain cycles to remember to always be looking exactly at the thing you’re controlling. So when you open a window of a Vision OS app, like any one
of the default Apple apps here, it locks into place, it’s floating there. It kind of looks, again, like an iPad app, but very glassy, like this frosted glass around the UI sort of lets you see through a little bit to the color behind it. And it even sometimes casts a shadow on the ground in the correct Z space, so it really solidifies that it’s floating in front of you. All this makes it feel like the window is in the space around you. Then if you look at the bottom of the window, you get a little
bar, you can always just look at that bar and pinch to drag it around. So drag it forward, backward, anywhere you want in X, Y, and Z space, and then let go and it just stays absolutely locked. And then you can look at either bottom corner to resize to make it bigger or smaller. And then finally there’s a little X at the bottom, you select that, that closes it. So that is the basics of Vision OS, and just using an app. Now this entire time, by default, and almost any time they can, passthrough is on,
which means you have the headset on, but you can see with the cameras right through to everything around you. And I think this is where Apple really wants to normalize the term spatial computing, because it feels like augmented reality. It feels like you’re always able to see the space around you, but technically it’s not actually AR, because you are still looking at a reconstructed version through a camera feed of the world around you instead of the actual world around you. But maybe it’s all just semantics. I will say, this is the best passthrough of any
VR headset I’ve ever used, and it’s not even that close. Now again, it’s so hard to get this through a YouTube video. It does have screen recording built in, so I’m gonna try to use that. But imagine putting a headset on, and not really feeling like you’re looking at a screen with the real world. Because of the pixel density, because of the 90 hertz refresh rate, and because of the impressive dynamic range of the cameras and the correctly adjusting shutter speed, you just almost don’t, you almost just feel like you’re looking at the real world,
not through a headset. Also the passthrough is so close to real time that I could legitimately interact with all kinds of things. I could catch items flying at me. I even tried playing ping pong. It was easy, no hesitation. So officially, the R1 chip is doing all the processing of all this stuff and adjusting the shutter speed for different lighting conditions and always keeping passthrough latency under 12 milliseconds, which is the lowest in the industry. But it’s really combining that with how close to reality the colors and brightness and everything are that keeps it feeling
kind of real. Basically, the only noticeable restriction is super close up items and objects can get a bit blurry, and then you can’t quite make out really small or fine texts, so you can’t read an email or a tiny text on your phone in your hand, but you can absolutely text people, or read your notifications, while keeping the headset on. If you’ve tried other VR headsets, you know how impressive that is. It’s just, it’s really good with the tech that exists now for VR headsets. But you can definitely still take the headset off and be
like, oh, it’s way brighter in here than I thought it was. Either way, that’s all passthrough, but if you ever wanna fully immerse yourself, I mean it is a VR headset after all, all you gotta do is rotate this digital crown clockwise, just keep turning it, and it will slowly dial your environment more and more into your field of view until you dial it all the way up to fully surrounding you. So all of the windows you might have had open will still stay stuck where they were, but everything you’re doing is just on the
moon now. So yeah, there’s a couple environments Apple has built in here, most of them relaxing scenic locations, like in California somewhere, or one really nice one is Mount Hood with a little bit of rain falling. They’re not quite photorealistic, but they’re just short of photorealistic, like they’re the most realistic digital environments that I’ve seen. So then the last two big quirks of the UI, control center. So the only way to get to control center is to look up, and you can’t just look up, but you have to physically turn your head up and look
at this arrow that appears above you. So once you see that, you select that and then you get your control center for things like, you know, battery life and notifications, focus modes, and screen recording, and pairing to a Mac. But the other big quirk is text input. So you might be wondering how does text input work with no physical controllers? So there’s basically three ways to do this. So let’s say you are in Safari, and you want to go to mkbhd.com. You really want one of those shiny new Chevron hoodies for the rest of winter.
Great, how do you do it? So the first way is to literally hunt and peck poking the keys on the keyboard that appears in the air in front of you. So this one is tough, because it literally only reacts to your pointer finger on each hand. So you actually can’t type fast, like with home row or anything like that. Not great. The second way, though, I think is actually kind of good. It’s at least faster, which is looking at the key you want to interact with, and then pinching to select it. So just looking around
the keyboard like this, and selecting the keys. And you might be surprised how fast you can type like this if you actually know your way around a keyboard pretty well. I actually prefer this to poking the virtual keys because I at least get a little bit of haptic feedback from my own fingers tapping together. But then in Safari, the last way to do it is literally to just look up at the microphone and say the URL out loud. MKBHD.com. And then it just hears you and goes to the site pretty quick, if it’s a URL
that you can actually say out loud. So, what can you actually do with this thing? Like now that we know what it is, it’s the M2 chip, a computer on your face with the displays and the lenses inside, and all sorts of sensors everywhere. What can this thing actually do? And I feel like the most common way to phrase that is what is the killer app?
How much is apple vision pro
Because that’s, we feel like we need some sort of justification to spend three, $4,000 on this thing. Like applications made the iPhone what it is as we know it, like apps made the iPad. So what is the app situation on the Vision Pro? So there are two types of apps on the Vision Pro, actually. The first is apps that are built specifically for the Vision Pro to take advantage of its awesome experiences. And there are a few of those right now, and then there are all the other apps, which basically are iPhone and iPad apps that happen to be compatible because the developer didn’t opt out. And the first kind is way cooler. So these are Apple’s stock apps here that come with the Vision Pro.
And so these are all, of course, made just for Vision Pro. So they’re gonna have stuff that takes full advantage of what this thing is capable of. Apple Music is a pretty classic one, like it has all the same functionality of any other Apple Music app, but in this super glassy frosted window, and shows the colors of whatever’s behind it. And you have the sort of sorting menu on the left hand side instead of across the bottom. That’s the basic layout. Same thing with the Notes app and the Settings app. Very glassy, almost looking like
an iPad app in the air, just rebuilt with this new material design. And then there’s the media apps. So Apple TV and Disney+, they both come pre-installed, which they have built entire environments inside of them for watching media. And there’s even a small collection of videos on the Apple TV app that are shot on a new proprietary format specifically for Vision Pro. So it drops you into a space with a full 180 degree video, and Alicia Keys walks right up to you and starts singing right to your face. It’s crazy. There’s also the Photos app,
which will let you look at panoramic photos, for example, in this fully immersive view. So you can blow them up to full screen, and then it gives you a bit of a parallax effect around the edges, so it feels like you’re looking into a window of your own photo and looking around. It’s kind of incredible. And then there’s also some other really fun third party apps that I’ve tried that were built ahead of time. So Sky Guide, this is a good one. You can look around a real representation of the sky around you or any
of the constellations would normally be, you can look at it a little longer and it’ll pop it out. You can pull it outta the sky to get more information about it. It’s a pretty great idea. There’s another one called Jig Space, which is, it’s a sick app, I don’t know if I’d ever use it, but basically it lets you load 3D models into the space you’re in and mess around with them, take ’em apart, view them in actual size. And this really takes advantage of how good the placement lock is on the Vision Pro. And
you can walk around, and really gets you a better understanding of the scale of things that you don’t get to see up close very often. And then Keynote is another funny one. So you can of course go through and edit a Keynote just like normal if you want to, but then they’ve built this whole environment for practicing your presentation skills. So you press that and it says, oh, would you like to go to a conference room, or the literal Steve Jobs Theater, so you can rehearse talking to your audience with your Keynote slides behind you.
It is genuinely incredibly immersive. And there’s already a bunch more apps like this in the App Store already at launch that are specifically built for Vision Pro. So they’ll take advantage of its various strengths. Now, are any of these a killer app? Not really. I mean I don’t, if you’re looking for any one of these to be the reason why you spend like $4,000 on this headset, I don’t think we have that yet. But then at least there’s all the other non-native, but technically still compatible, apps that are in the App Store. And these are
gonna look just like iPhone and iPad apps. Actually, there’s a pre-installed folder on the home screen when you get this thing literally called Compatible Apps, and there’s a bunch of them from Apple here. They look exactly like iPad apps. I’m surprised actually that more of them aren’t fully built out to take advantage of Vision Pro, but like, Apple Maps is just the iPad app. And so it would be cool if there were some fun augmented reality overlay walking directions type stuff, but nope, it’s all the exact same functionality that you would find if you opened
this app on your iPad. And you can go to the App Store and search a bunch of the names of apps you already know and love, and find them by name and grab them, and they’ll work the exact same way. Crazily enough though, there are already some notable exceptions. No Netflix app for the Vision Pro, no YouTube app for the Vision Pro, no Spotify app for the Vision Pro. Apple has kind of a contentious relationship with a lot of developers right now, especially some of the bigger ones. And so some have made the active choice
to opt out. They’re like, we don’t wanna be there. This won’t be a big enough platform to matter to us to justify the work. So they’re not there. Now I totally get it, but also now as a Vision Pro owner and someone who’s using it, I’m like, oh, it’s kind of a bummer. I really wanted to be able to watch a Netflix show offline, downloaded it ahead of time, but you can’t do that now. But at least, at least for now, for the record, you can use the browser, and anything that would work in the
browser. So if you pull up Safari, and you get a full screen 4K YouTube video going, and locked in space, or even in an environment, it looks great. It’s razor sharp. Like, I could totally watch YouTube videos like this. But you will definitely be missing the features of having the dedicated app, like offline video. Honestly to me, the killer app of the Vision Pro isn’t just an app, it’s actually the ecosystem. And we knew this was coming, but the second you log into a Vision Pro with your Apple ID, immediately it starts pulling all the
services, and all the stuff that you’re used to from all the other Apple devices you already have. And I said this before the Vision Pro was announced, I was like, this is the most obvious strategy for Apple because there are lots of people out there who have never considered buying a VR headset that are considering only this one because they have an iPhone, and this is the one that works with the iPhone, and none of the others are particularly close. So all of your iMessages are already here, all of your photos are already here and
loaded up and backed up. All your Notes are already at your fingertips. You already saw the Keynote app. But okay, easily my favorite feature is connecting to your Mac, right? So anytime your Mac is in front of you and it’s turned on, hit that arrow and then there’s this little icon to Become My Mac’s Virtual Display. So I click that, and then pick my Mac, and it pretty much instantly, it actually blacks out the display of my Mac, and then turns that display into a 4K window inside of the headset. So now my keyboard and
trackpad still work, even if it is a desktop. The keyboard and the trackpad still control everything, and you can continue using it just like a normal computer, but with the ability to make your new 4K monitor as big or as small or close or far away as you want, which is super sick. And then the bonus is you can still open up and place other Vision Pro apps around your Mac computer. So like you can have your Mac in the middle here, and maybe you’re editing or doing some work on the Mac app, and then
you have a Safari window, or Messages, or whatever else you want right next to it around it. And then your keyboard and trackpad can move seamlessly between them all to control all of them. This, to me, as a Mac user, the ease of use for setup to make this happen, this feels like the biggest game changer, like the most compelling futuristic feeling use of this headset to me. Especially on a plane. Oh my god, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an awkward conversation because, like, I’m editing a video on the plane, the
person next to me sees I’m editing a video of myself, and it’s kind of weird and hard to explain, but I’m picturing putting the headset on, the display blacks out, but now I can do all the editing I want, and I can make the screen as big as I want. So I’ve really enjoyed using that feature. Again, the biggest challenge, though, is still remembering to look exactly at the thing you want to control. So aside from typing on the real keyboard on whatever window is open, if you want to control something, you have to be
looking at it. Again, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you try it, you’ll see what I mean. And then also, odd limitation, one monitor only. From the Mac, one virtual monitor only at a time. So if you usually run a dual display setup like I do for Final Cut Pro, big preview on one side, timeline on the other side, you can’t do that. You have to use the big one monitor version of your setup. All right, so you might have realized I’ve left one thing out this whole time. One thing, you could
call it one more thing, sure. It’s one more huge crazy thing, but it’s kind of the defining characteristic of this product and that is Personas. So in all the advertising you’ve seen of Vision Pro, there’s these eyes on the outside of the headset that looks like they’re kind of in a passthrough, like in a dark astronaut helmet type of thing. Easily the most memed, most unique aspect of this headset, right? It’s the only headset with an outward display. And I mean it’s very, very prominent in those videos, but in real life, as you’ve started to
see from some of my footage, it is very different, and I think I figured out why. So first of all, it’s not actually see-through, right? There’s a whole bunch of computer in between me and you right now. So the eyes aren’t on the outside. It’s a representation of my eyes based on what all the sensors on the inside are seeing. It’s reconstructing it on the outside. So those sensors are tracking at 90 frames per second, and they give you optic ID, which is, it’s how you log into the headset and keep things secure. It’s basically
the same as face ID, or touch ID, it’s just looking at and identifying your eyes. And it also powers the one beta feature of this headset, which is Personas, which is, it’s the most impressive and weirdest thing about this headset at the same time. I’m calling it right now. So the purpose of the eyes on the outside is really not for you, the wearer of the headset. In fact, you’ll never see it. But it’s for the people around you. So when you’re in a passthrough mode, your eyes will shine through to indicate that you wearing
the headset can see the person outside. So that right there is already pretty unique. But then, when you’re in something immersive and you can’t see what’s around you, it covers up your eyes with this sort of like a blue, purple glowing animation. So that intuitively makes sense. You can see the eyes when they can see you, you can’t see the eyes when they can’t see you. But crazily enough, there’s also a feature where if you have someone who’s outside the headset looking at you, talking to you, and you are in an immersion, but you want
to talk to them through that, they will kind of appear through the fog of whatever immersive environment you’re in. So you just start talking and looking in their direction. It detects that, and sort of parts a little bit of a fog and that person’s eyes will show through the fog. It’s pretty decent. It basically only shows one person at a time. And when this is happening on the outside of the headset, it shows a little bit of your eyes poking through the purple and blue glow. It’s, as you can see, it’s all working, but also,
I think it looks nothing like the eyes from the ad. So in an effort to make the eyes as presentable as possible, two things. First of all, this screen is actually behind a lenticular film, which I didn’t even realize that from the initial media they had published. But if you’ve ever heard of that, it’s sort of what gives it this 3D depth. You might have seen this on other holographic displays and stuff, but the point of that is to make the eyes appear to be sunken into the display, like on your actual face, instead of
glued to the front of the headset, which would look a little more weird. But then two, to represent your actual eyes, they’ve built in a way to scan in and create a digital representation of your face, which is called your Persona. And it looks like this. So to get those eyes on the outside of the Vision Pro headset, you have to do something called registering your Persona. This is how it creates the digital version of you that includes your eyes that will show up here. So let’s do that now. It’s actually kind of a cool
process. So I’m gonna put it on, and hopefully the screen recording works so you can see exactly what I’m doing. I’ll hit the digital crown. I’m gonna go to Settings. And you can do this when you first set it up. But I’m going to Persona, and I’m gonna hit Get Started. So let’s refine my hands real quick. This is capturing detail from the front of the headset of the hands in front of me. Once it’s done with that- – Your Persona, remove Apple Vision Pro. – It’s gonna ask me to take it off. So this
is how it goes. – When you’re ready, hold Apple Vision Pro at eye level. Keep your arms and shoulders relaxed. Align your entire face within the frame. – My face shows up like face ID. – Slowly turn your head to the right. Now slowly turn your head to the left. Now tilt your head up, then tilt your head down. Next, let’s capture your facial expressions. Smile with your mouth closed. Then make a big smile with your teeth showing. Now raise your eyebrows. Close your eyes for a moment. Capture complete. Put Vision Pro back on to
continue. – I will do that. So now I have a menu that says Creating Persona, and it says it’s in beta, and now there’s my Persona right there. Kind of uncanny. The hair’s a little bit different, but the face. Wow, wow. Okay. So there’s different lighting. You can choose it to always be in studio lighting, and always be in contour lighting. I’ll just leave it at natural, and hit next. You can change the color temperature of your skin tone. Cool to warm, I think I’m around there. Brightness, darkness. I think I’m around there, near the
middle. Next. And then I can add glasses. So if I typically have glasses, which obviously I wouldn’t be able to wear in the Vision Pro, you can still look like you have glasses, anytime you’re on that FaceTime call. And then next. Save. And that’s it. So I think now you should see my eyes. Maybe. And that that’s the thing, it barely shows up. You can barely see my eyes when I’m wearing the headset. Now I’ve tried a couple other scans subsequently, so I’ve tried different lighting conditions, I’ve tried different backgrounds, simple backgrounds, tried different shirts
and things like that. It doesn’t really ever appear any brighter. I think if you have a darker skin tone like me, just don’t expect the eyes to show up very brightly on the outside of the headset. It’s pretty subtle. Even when it does show up, it’s a little weird looking. The eyes are a little too far apart sometimes. They’re a little dim. You see one eye at a time. It’s kind of weird. But that Persona though. Whew. That is some pretty interesting stuff. It’s crazy that this is actually a real thing being shipped, like first
Meta started doing it. Now Apple’s doing this. This is, again, it’s technically in beta. So I dunno, there’s room for improvement, but it still works. But as of right now, I feel like this is both incredibly impressive and slightly unsettling. Like, it’s very impressive that this thing, this headset I’m wearing on my face, is tracking all these little micro expressions and little movements for my eyes and my cheeks and my mouth and everything. But at the same time, it’s just not quite human. It’s right at the edge of the uncanny valley of I’m not looking
at a person. So yeah. But the crazy part is you can now use this Persona as your camera feed for any apps in Vision Pro that require a front facing camera, like FaceTime. And so I’ve tried, I’ve been using FaceTime a few times in the Vision Pro, and it is, technically speaking, incredible. So I’ve made a few FaceTime calls in the past few days with some fellow reviewers, who you’ll probably recognize from their Personas, who are also testing the Vision Pro. And universally, once we all got past the shock of, oh my god, it’s you.
It looks like a digital version of you. This is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Once we got past that, there is a ton happening here. So you can see the FaceTime windows literally appear as just that. They’re just like glassy windows floating in space with people looking through them. And then the angle that you look into the window is gonna match the angle that they see you looking at them. Meaning if we’re all in Vision Pros on this call, unlikely, but hear me out. If we’re all in Vision Pros, and you’ve got
a bunch of people on this FaceTime call, so there’s somebody to the left, and somebody to the right, if I look to the person, and make eye contact with the person to the right, the person to the left sees the side of my head, because I’m looking at somebody else. That’s already pretty cool. And then the same thing is true for hand gestures. So we tried this out. Turns out you can reach out and make hand gestures that are tracked by the cameras in this bubble in front of you, and they show up at the
correct angle towards the person that you’re gesturing at, so not towards everybody else on the call. Oh wait, wait, wait. Okay, good test. So wait, Justine, do you see this? – Yes. – And Brian, do you see? – I don’t see that. I don’t see that, Marques. – Whoa. – Now wait. So now Brian, do you see this? (Justine gasps) – Now I can see that, Marques. – And then on top of that, spatial audio here is incredibly well developed. So again, you’re on the call, the voice of the person to the right comes from
the right side. The voice of the person to the left comes from the left. But also, you can just pick up and move the window around, and that angle will match where the people are in the room and where their sound and video comes from. If I put you on the other side of the room, it sounds like they’re further away. And if I turn up the environment, and bring them into the moon, or some other 3D space, it actually sounds much more like I’m in a gigantic space with no echo, versus in the actual
room. It’s all very subtle, but very well considered. So once you’re in this a while, you start to notice all these little smaller things. Again, it’s not quite human-like. It’s not like looking at a video feed of a human face, but it is still, like it has a lot of like, this would be the best avatar anyone’s ever made in 2K. Like no one’s ever done a 2K face scan and had it look this good, but it’s still not as good as a perfect reality. It’s a, you’ve heard the uncanny valley thing before. I think
the number one weakness for the avatars or the Personas that I’ve seen is hair. So basically everyone I’ve talked to has like a frozen lump of hair instead of flowing realistic hair. And that’s true about all flowing things, like however your hair was when you did the scan, it’s frozen that way. And so is any necklace you’re wearing, whether it’s crooked or not, or I guess, technically also any makeup you had on, or however you looked when you did the scan. Maybe that could be a good thing. Maybe you did a scan when you were
looking all dolled up, and then you get on a 7:00 AM call, and you still look perfect even though you look like you just woke up in real life. So I guess there’s that too. But anyway, all that is to say FaceTime. FaceTime is the most well thought out, like most futuristic Vision Pro experience. It just is. So I’ll end this video with this. Now you know what it’s like to use and operate the Vision Pro.
What is apple vision pro price
But there’s still a lot more to consider when actually considering if you should buy and own this thing, fromthe use cases, to the things that work well, and don’t work well, the philosophy behind it, the prices, all of that stuff. That’s what’s gonna be for my full review. Like there are parts of this thing that are absolutely amazing, unparalleled, best I’ve ever seen. But the reason it’s so interesting is because it’s actually a young category. Like we’re so used to this slow, boring iteration in mature categories, like smartphones, and laptops, and you always see the comments talking about how tech is so boring, but now they’re actually jumping into something risky, and it’s actually
fun, and there is downfalls and flaws, and it’s fun to actually weigh the pros and cons. So I’ll be expanding on all these way more in the full review, but I’ll leave you with this. I’ve got my upsides and downsides to Vision Pro. It’s been a week. Upsides, some of the stuff that’s the best I’ve ever seen in a headset. Immersion, placement in space, eye tracking and hand control, passthrough, ecosystem, and spatial audio. And the downsides, weight and comfort, the eyes on the outside, app selection right now, battery life, and price. So the full reviews
in the works. Definitely get subscribed to be among the first to see that when it drops. Either way, till the next one. Thanks for watching. Catch you later. Peace.
