Uncover the Revolutionary Power of Apple Vision Pro: Our Hands-On Experience Will Shock You!

I assumed that this external battery pack meant that the headphones themselves would feel as light as a feather, but they still felt heavy. Once I fitted a larger back strap and the soft top strap, I went through another calibration process, which concluded with an audible buzzer of approval. (Still, an orb of light appeared in the middle distance during my demo.)

Vision Pro’s interface is intuitive: with a few gestures and taps on the Digital Crown, I had it down. External cameras avoid the need for manual controllers, because the device sees your hands. And internal eye-tracking cameras see where your eyes are looking, so it knows which app you want to open or close.

In home mode, a virtual dock of Apple apps floated in front of me. He could still see the surroundings of the living room in real life. An AR home screen of Apple apps in AR is as simple as it gets. The app containers themselves were certainly not reinvented, and their icons weren’t little writable globules or anything else that conferred volume. They were just… there.

The most interesting part was how I interacted with them. I opened Photos by pinching my index finger and thumb together, scrolled through photos by “grabbing” each image and swiping to the left, zoomed in on panoramic photos by staring and tapping the Expand option. I scrolled 2D web pages in Safari using my eyes and a couple of fingers. I also opened Messages, although apparently the audio interactions aren’t ready yet, and I couldn’t record or send a message. Most of the content I saw wasn’t fully volumetric, nor could I pinch apps to scale, or bring me in them. However, an Apple representative has said that app makers may create these experiences in the future.

FaceTime would, in theory, be an opportunity to create an extremely human experience on a mixed reality headset. In my demo, it didn’t achieve this. Internal cameras inside the headset are capable of digitally capturing and regurgitating your face, a hyper-realistic digital twin that appears to the person you are chatting with. In my FaceTime demo, I chatted with the digital twin of an Apple employee who cheerfully talked me through some of these features. But she felt disembodied. She was real, but she wasn’t real either. I’m afraid I don’t even remember her name.

However, while I was using some apps, the room dimmed around me, which is one of the coolest parts of the Vision Pro. It magically automatically dims when you use certain apps, or it can be manually dimmed using the little dial on your headphones. I tapped into one of the virtual “Environments” Apple seeded on the demo unit, and the Scandinavian normcore living room vanished around me. Open Apple TV+ and air-click a stereoscopic video reel, then select Cinematic mode, and you might as well be at the Alamo Drafthouse. Here’s what Apple seems to think is the gist of making this a platform vs. a product: You don’t have to choose between AR and VR. Your app can be anything you want it to be.

Vision Pro shone in the entertainment category, especially because it was dynamic. I saw a clip of avatar 2 In 3D In a sneak peek at a new dinosaur-centric series from director Jon Favreau, a dinosaur stomped dangerously close to where I was in the room, based on the position of my sensor-filled headphones. A butterfly fluttered across the room before landing on my outstretched finger. These experiences could absolutely happen on another AR or VR headset. The difference is that Apple has the ability to lure Hollywood app directors and creators to build them.

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Apple’s Vision Pro headset has the potential to eventually incorporate AR in a way that other front-end computers haven’t, simply because it’s Apple. Developers are already expressing their enthusiasm for the headset. And again, at $3,500, the first Vision Pro units will likely be snapped up by developers and gadget lovers with disposable income.

But the Vision Pro also differs from almost every other modern Apple product in one crucial way: It doesn’t go away. In fact, it does the opposite. Rest on your face and protect your eyes, sensory organs that are a crucial part of the lived human experience. The same goes for every other head-up display in the world, whether it’s a pair of AR glasses, an industry-focused headset, or fully immersive VR goggles. The experience can be remarkable and surreal, for sure; but it requires a suspension of disbelief and a sacrifice of autonomy. Even Apple can’t get past design to get out of what is fundamentally intrusive technology.

But every successful Apple product of the past two decades has somehow disappeared from our lives: the iPhone in our pockets, the iPad in our bags, the Apple Watch living on our wrists, and AirPods resting in our ears. Using the Vision Pro for hours on end will call into question what it means to compute, but also what it means to live in the real world. My forehead felt cold when I took the Vision Pro off after about 30 minutes, a testament to Apple’s considered design. But my face breathed a sigh of relief, too, as it has after using other heads-up displays. The air feels more real here.