Apple announced the VisionPro today at their World Wide Developer’s Conference. I won’t write much about the device itself, as many other tech blogs have and are doing precisely that, but I will bring it home to me, by way of my impressions. (I won’t actually own a device at the eye-watering $3,499 price tag it carries.)
The VisionPro is an augmented/virtual reality headset, like a few we have seen from Oculus and other companies. But what Apple has done is what Apple does best, which is take an existing product category and reshape/re-release it in such a way that it completely reinvents what that product can do. It wasn’t the first to the mouse, the PC, the digital music player, but it was the best. (It was sort of the first to the smartphone, unless we are including a BlackBerry as a smartphone.) Apple wasn’t the first to a smartwatch, or a wearable headset, but wow, is it looking like the best.
I say “looking like” because the VisionPro won’t be available to your average high-end consumer until next year, and they won’t know what it truly looks like until then, but if the promises are true, this headset will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, as was the Apple mouse, iPod, and iMac/iBook/etc.
It appears to be an amazing, immersive experience to wear a VisionPro and view content such as panoramic photos, live sports, movies, and even do mundane things like browse the web or do certain kinds of work. Where it gets awkward is in human/VisionPro interface, i.e., when someone wearing a VisionPro interacts with others who aren’t. It still looks like a silly face-mask of sorts, despite the proto-real EyeSight that Apple is hoping to fool people into thinking are your eyes. I actually cringed during the keynote as Apple hyped the ability to record 3D memories. It showed a father, wearing a VisionPro, kneeling in front of his daughters who were playing with soap bubbles. I couldn’t help but notice the massive headset coming between a man and his children. But then, I dislike pulling out my iPhone to snap photos at a birthday party and interrupting the formation of real memories to create digital ones. I can’t help but wonder at the real cost of forging forever recordings in three dimensions.
Quibbles over picture taking ability aside, I very much desire a VisionPro for travel. Long road trips and air travel will be much more palatable with a private enclave for enjoying any type of content at what appears to be gigantic proportions. Bob Iger, Disney CEO, demoed a new Disney+ experience in which, for one example, one could watch Star Wars while seeming to sit on the surface of Tatooine, with a Jawa sandcrawler to the right, and a desertscape to the left. I crave that experience!
Also hyped was the ability to watch live sports from any angle, or any seat in the arena or stadium. Just when ticket prices to venues are climbing, it would be phenomenal to sit at home, right behind home plate, and watch life-size baseball players play the greatest game on earth. But nothing will replace the smell of the ballpark and the wind in your face while cheering with thousands for the home team to win. As amazing as AR/VR gets, it will still be unreal; though I admit an unreality that will give many experiences they wouldn’t ordinarily get to enjoy. I don’t want to tour Hobbiton in augmented reality, but I definitely would watch The Lord of the Rings in VR en route to New Zealand. Then again, if I never can get to the land of the Kiwi, I would be happy that the ability to go there virtually exists.
Speaking of film, it was hinted at during Disney’s trailer of the Disney+ AR/VR experience, but I believe this device, and others like it, will transform the possibilities for new movie experiences. If the 3D capture of memories is anything to go by, as weird as it is to hide Dad behind a ski mask to record his kids, it will be amazing for a director to strap a VisionPro on and take the audience into a film. Can you imagine tagging along with 13 dwarves and a hobbit into the mountain lair of a dragon? A future remake of The Hobbit story might do just that. Suddenly the holodeck from Star Trek looks a little closer to ahem “reality”.
As you can tell, as an admitted Apple fanboy, I am very excited about the groundbreaking potential of the VisionPro, but I remain dedicated to actual life and all it can give. I don’t ever want to be the person that drags technology between me and life, but where it can enhance or seamlessly augment life, I’m here for it. Given another decade of development and enhancement, I could see walking around Hong Kong, or Tokyo, or someplace where I cannot read the language wearing a descendant of VisionPro that is seamlessly translating transit signs and warning placards so that I can experience a new culture safely and with fewer barriers.
My mind also wanders to quality-of-life enhancements for the home-bound, bed-ridden, or disabled. Virtual and augmented reality can give them back certain things they have lost in terms of travel and other experiences. I am actually surprised that Apple, which has highlighted such use cases in the past for other of their products didn’t at least hint at this possibility during their keynote today. But there is time, as the technology is improved and the price point makes it something that can become ubiquitous.
After all, VisionPro is a category of product in its infancy, even as others have been brought to market before, Apple stands upon their shoulders to reach for the very stars above, and bring them closer, as one demonstration showed a stargazer looking through their bedroom ceiling to the constellations in the night sky above. No substitute for seeing the stars with the naked eye, but ok for the city dweller surrounded by light pollution with no view of the Milky Way.
Leave it to Apple to take a dim, fuzzy view of something and transform it into an encompassing VisionPro. Or is that hyperbole too far? Time will tell.
a simple man 