Apple Vision Pro demo impressions

I'm not interested in buying a Vision Pro for £3500 (starting at...), but I am interested in the product category. I've said before that I believe some form of VR / AR is an inevitability. I don't know when, it could be 20+ years from now, but I do feel like there is something fundamentally compelling in the immersive experiences it can offer.

So I booked into the Apple Vision Pro demo as soon as they became available in the UK. The TLDR is this:

It's very impressive technology, far exceeded my expectations in a good few areas but it hasn't convinced me that this is a product I want to buy, especially for this price. I'm excited for future development.

If you're even vaguely interested in this sort of tech, go book a demo. They don't nag you or presume you're even likely to buy it, they know most people are just wanting to try it out and are very honest about the price.

Ergonomics, resolution and pass-through

I'll go through the demo process initially. Booking a demo can utilise a FaceID equipped iPhone to do some preliminary scans to get your sizing right for your faceplates/light shields (and maybe straps?), although when I got started in the store they did take me through that same process again on my own iPhone.

As part of that, they took my prescription glasses into the back to scan or measure them in some way. 5 minutes later, they brought down a prepared Vision Pro unit that had prescription lenses that matched my own glasses and a light shield/faceplate and straps that were supposedly optimised for my face based on the measurements.

The straps on all the demos were the developer strap, rather than the fancy one they use in all the ads - presumably as it's easier to get the dev strap comfortable for a wider range of people.

After some explanation from the Apple Store staff, I put the unit on and my first few impressions were:

• The straps feel a bit tight, but also feels necessary to feel secure and not wobble as you move your head around.
• It is heavier than headsets I've used before, weight distribution wasn't great, pushed down on my cheeks even after a fair amount of readjusting.

Then the screen started up and immediately struck by the resolution and clarity of the screen. Text is sharp, not just sharp for a VR headset, it's not on the level of high end flat displays (phones, high resolution PC monitors, etc), but it felt as sharp as my 27" 1440p display at a viewing distance of just over 60cm - even though on paper the desktop display has a noticeably higher pixels per degree - but I think other things are going on here to improve that clarity in the Vision Pro.

This alone is a gigantic leap over the only VR headset I still own, the HTC Vive - which admittedly is from 2016 and other modern headsets like the Meta Quest line have improved fairly significantly. I have tried the Quest 2 - but even then - this felt like a substantial improvement, way beyond what I expected.

The pass through also felt surprisingly natural immediately. I carried on my conversation with the Apple Store staff member like normal, at least from my end - I can't say how natural it felt for them talking to me with the headset on.

There's definitely a bit of noise in the camera pass through, but much better than I expected and pretty impressive given the limitations being worked within. The Apple Store is a fairly ideal environment though - very bright lights, large open spaces, so i'd be curious to see how it holds up in low light.

Finally though, the latency of the passthrough - felt pretty much as good as it needed to me. I'm sure we'd still notice some more improvement, but it's not something that stood out as much needing much.

Eye and hand tracking

The next big surprise was the eye and hand tracking. I had seen enough videos of the Vision Pro to know how to use it, and I can say it was immediately intuitive. The eye and hand tracking was almost entirely error free in my experience - the calibration at the beginning was perfect, selecting things the 'pinch' gesture with my hand resting naturally in my lap was a revelation in how I feel like I could relax into using this device.

When some of the gestures got a little more complicated, like swiping through photos, there were one or two false starts - it picked up and registered that I was trying to move it immediately, but it felt like I had picked the photo in the middle of it and then 'ran out of room' to fully swipe it - it's hard to explain, but trying again from further to the right in those two-three instances where it didn't quite work first time seemed to do the trick.

The store employee doing my demo was taking me through a script and explaining how to do things, but I just started bouncing around the UI very quickly with a high degree of accuracy, outpacing their script by a decent amount. Again, that might be because I knew about how the UI worked before coming in - but I still think it says something about how well this thing works.

One thing I didn't get to use, and that may be intentional, is the virtual keyboard. The employee was eager to mention "you can use a bluetooth keyboard with it", which to me suggests they may avoid including keyboard usage in their standard demo for a reason.

UI and demo content

I don't really have a huge amount to say about the UI, I quite like the style, it feels fresh but familiar and very iOS-like in its simplicity. Opening apps, moving and repositioning windows and interacting with small controls felt natural, about my only complaint was that it felt a bit more difficult to figure out what some controls were signifying - I hadn't tried any sort of 'hover for a tooltip' action - I don't know if one exists, but I could see that resulting in a bit of trial and error.

So the interesting thing here is really the demo content, first up: the 3d rendered dinosaur experience. Honestly this was the least impressive and most pedestrian part of the demo content for me - it was good, well designed and everything - but as someone with VR experience in one-of-a-kind games like Half-Life: Alyx - it felt like a lot of other VR demo content I had experienced 8 years or so ago, just in significantly better image quality.

Next they took me into view some photos, panoramas feel like they finally make sense in the Vision Pro and the spatial photos and videos - especially the one filmed on the Vision Pro of a child's birthday party was very cool. Those shot on an iPhone 15 Pro were also good, but the depth effects didn't feel anywhere near as pronounced.

It does feel a lot closer to 'reliving a memory' than most other things do, and it wasn't even my memory! In fact, given the inclusion of a birthday cake, it did feel pretty familiar to the Blade Runner 2049 birthday memory maker scene.

Then they took me through some more standard video experiences, by placing you in a virtual cinema and other environments and playing some Apple TV+ tv show clips. That was fine, again, the resolution makes this feel like it could be a pretty compelling way to consume video. Finally, they let me take a quick peek at a Super Mario trailer - which is a 3D film that actually feels like the 3D adds to the experience.

Finally - they run you through a montage of specially made spatial video - a variety of clips from sports, nature and wildlife, music performances (the Alicia Keys one is great) and other various activities that showcase the sense of scale and immersion only a headset like this can bring. It does genuinely feel like a glimpse into what audio/visual experiences could be like in the future.

As I had sped through the script in the demo quickly, I was given some time just to play around in the OS - and I chose to spend my time by firing up Safari and Keynote to get a feel for more day-to-day computing tasks. Safari felt more than usable, especially with the excellent text clarity and the prebuilt keynote deck had a 3d model embedded which you could interact with in 3d space.

One key part in this that I keep forgetting: the sound! It has built in speakers that sound quite good considering their physical limitations and placement above your ears - clear, punchy and distortion-free, all the while keeping your ears free for the ambient sound around you.

All around, my expectations were surpassed. Maybe I had low expectations, I didn't think I did, I thought I had realistic expectations given my experience with VR. As I've said, I'm not a sceptic of this sort of stuff, in fact I am a believer - but a believer in the sense that I believe this medium will be a part of a lot of our lives at some point in the future - just not in the near term.

Final thoughts

As I mentioned above - it was very impressive all around. It didn't make me start trying to find justifications to buy one, because of the price, the realities of the ergonomics - which aren't great - and the likelihood of having enough content developed for this anytime soon being low. It has, however, re-ignited my excitement about the potential of this segment of computing - I'm excited to see what Apple and others can do to bring this level of technology down in price and more comfortable.