UPDATE 10:37 p.m.: I actually wriote this review in two parts, and reading it back, I can see now it reads a bit disjointedly for that reason, so I am including a separator between the two parts to make it clearer. Also, I had misnamed the Encounter Dinosaurs experience, an error which I have now corrected. Thanks!
I have also added a link to a blogpost by metaverse blogger Matthew Ball, with his opinions after using the Apple Vision Pro for six months.
Since I received my prescription lenses for my Apple Vision Pro on July 29th, I am nearing the end of my third week using the device almost every day, usually for an hour or two each day. The prescription lenses are magnetically attached to the AVP, so I can very easily remove them if and when I decide to start giving demonstrations of the Apple Vision Pro to other people!
I’m still getting used to the device myself, and I want to make sure that I am comfortable enough with it before I start giving demos to other people. Also, I will be reviewing documentation that other AVP users have already written up (like this example), so I can make sure that I give demos in such a way that I (and the person who receives a demo!) don’t accidentally damage my very expensive device!
For example, you have to remember to tell new users not to pick up the device by the facial shield, because it (like my prescription lenses) is only magnetically attached to the actual, glass-and-metal Apple Vision Pro itself, and it will detach when you pick it up by that! You have to remember to pick it up by holding onto the edges of the actual, curved-glass-and-metal device itself. I’m probably going to have to write up detailed, step-by-step instructions, so that any staff who work in the University of Manitoba’s future virtual reality lab will be able to help university faculty, staff, and students have their first AVP experience!
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: I am so blown away by what I experienced these past three weeks (more details below), that I am 100% certain that, in addition to the Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 3, I will be asking the Libraries to purchase an Apple Vision Pro to make available to faculty, staff, and students at my university, to use for teaching, learning, and research purposes. In three short weeks, I have become an Apple Vision Pro evangelist! Come hell or high water, we are getting one. It’s just that good. I will repeat what I said in an earlier blogpost, written during my first week of using my Apple Vision Pro:
The Apple Vision Pro makes every single VR headset I have used to date feel like one of those red plastic View-Masters I used to play with as a kid in the 1960s. The “screen door” effect so evident in earlier VR headsets (where you can see individual pixels, making everything slightly blurry) is COMPLETELY, UTTERLY gone.
In fact, the Apple Vision Pro is such a leap forward in terms of technology, that it is going to be hard to go back to the once-formerly-state-of-the-art displays of the Meta Quest 3, and especially the Vive Pro 2, afterwards!
Anyway, let’s get back to the reason I wanted to write this blogpost: I wanted to talk about some of the apps and experiences I have had in my new Apple Vision Pro over the past three weeks, as well as give some more first impressions of the device itself.
Apple has lavished its usual slavish attention to style and construction on the Apple Vision Pro headset. It is beautiful to look at as well as to use! The front is one piece of custom curved glass, attached to a sleek, rounded metal frame, and it is the smallest VR headset that I have ever tried on (not as small as the Bigscreen Beyond, which I wrote about previously here, but then again, I have never tried that device).
Having worn other, bulkier, VR headsets, I found that the Apple Vision Pro sits higher on my cheeks, which feels strange at first, but you quickly get used to it. The AVP has many internal sensors and cameras, and it is smart enough to warn you when you are wearing the device too high or too low on your face, so you can adjust it accordingly for the best experience. Also, when you give somebody else a demonstration using the built-in guest mode, it automatically calculates the correct interpupillary distance (IPD; i.e. the distance between the pupils of your left and right eyes) so that you have an optimal view. (When giving demos on the Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 3 VR headsets, I now have a special app on my work iPad Pro 11 to measure someone’s IPD so I can dial in the correct value before they put on the headset.)
When you place your order for an AVP from the Apple website (or, if you were to purchase one in your local Apple Store), you will have to use a FaceID-enabled iPhone or iPad to do a scan of your face to determine the correct size of facial shield. The facial shield is highly customized to your face and your needs. For example, because I need prescription lenses, the facial shield has to be somewhat deeper to accommodate them (if I were to wear soft contact lenses instead to correct my vision, then I would need to purchase a separate, less deep facial shield, and my field of view would be a little bit wider than it would be with the prescription lenses).
Which brings me to something that I wish was better: the field of view. While I have found that the up-and-down field of view to be pretty good, I was less impressed with the side-to-side field of view. In particular, when recording spatial videos, it is disappointing when playing them back to see just how constrained they are. While they do offer you a wider-screen, “immersive” playback option for spatial videos, that, too, has its limitations, as the video tends to blur at the edges, instead of the crisp edges you would see when watching the video in a regular (small) window. But I have no doubt that this aspect of the technology will improve over time.
There are actually two different kinds of 3D videos that you can play in the Apple Vision Pro: spatial videos and immersive videos. The videos you can record and share using the Apple Vision Pro or a later-model iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models with iOS 17.2 or later) are called spatial videos; that is, you can clearly see the 3D effect, but it is not immersive. Immersive videos are recorded using more expensive equipoment, and the results are truly spectacular—you watch the video, and you feel like you are actually present!
In fact, one of the apps I signed up for is a monthly subscription service called Explore POV (Point of View), where I can download and play high-quality immersive videos, recorded in 180-degree 3D 16K resolution. The creators visit various locations around the world, and record either one long video scene, or an edited series of scenes in one video. For example, one Explore POV video is simply the videographer walking along a beach in New Zealand, watching the surf pound onto the sand under a blue sky. When you watch it, it actually is so realistic that it feels as if you are actually there—and when you lift your hand and look at it, it is superimposed on the video! Here is the Explore POV website if you want to learn more, and here’s a recent video by the creator himself:
Separate from spatial and immersive videos are the Apple Vision Pro’s built-in 360-degree Environments, which you can turn on and adjust using a knob on the upper-right of the AVP. Turn the knob all the way clockwise, and it completely replaces your space with a selected virtual-reality Environment. Turn it all the way counter-clockwise, you are in full augmented-reality mode, where your icons and app windows hover in and over your physical environment. You can also adjust the knob to somewhere in the middle, where your central view has an Environment, which fades away at the edges to your real world. It’s one of those things which is hard to describe but easy to experience, but Apple Vision Pro Environments in themselves are so well-done and so realistic, that I consider them, alone, to be a “killer app” for the Apple Vision Pro! Quite often, I will simply close all my apps and just sit and meditate (or listen to tunes from my Apple Music library) while sitting peacefully in front of Mount Hood, or halfway up Haleakalā volcano in Hawaii, watching the sun set behind the clouds.
Given this ability to surround you in various realistic environments, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the many use cases for the Apple Vision Pro is as a device to assist in calming, centering, and meditation. There are already numerous spatial meditation apps in the Apple Vision Pro Store, but the one that I have found myself using the most is called Tripp. Tripp’s main menu has five sections (Focus, Calm, Breathe, Ascend, and Sleep) where you can select from many different kinds of guided meditations, or mix and match pieces to create a customized meditation. The Ascend section features a truly psychedelic mini-documentary on the life journey of Ram Dass, the American psychologist and popularizer of Eastern spirituality and yoga, which everybody should try out, at least once!
And, of course, there is already a lot of video content to enjoy in the Apple TV+ app and the Disney+ app, including a small but growing selection of 3D videos. There is a short but extremely well-done app called Encounter Dinosaurs which really should be something anyone who tries on an Apple Vision Pro should experience! It’s definitely a showcase for the cutting-edge capabilities of the technology, where you feel you can almost reach out and touch a real, living dinosaur! Always a good demo.
And, speaking of demos, I finally gave my first demonstration of the Apple Vision Pro to another person, my brother. And this is where I have to say, things did not go so well.
I had difficulties in getting mirroring to work (that is, being able to cast what the other person was seeing in the AVP to another device, such as a MacOS desktop, iPad, or iPhone). Once I got that working, then I was able to set it up so that I could help talk my brother through how to use the Apple Vision Pro—only to forget that I had to turn mirroring off before he could watch any content on Apple TV+ and Disney+ apps! (At least he got to try out Encounter Dinosaurs.)
All in all, trying to give a demo to another user via the AVP’s Guest Mode was highly frustrating. Perhaps I have been too quick to judge the usefulness of the Apple Vision Pro for a multi-user environment like the virtual reality lab that I am currently working on setting up for my university library system. We’ll see what happens as I give other people their first taste of the device.
P.S. I forgot to mention that I have also made five or six forays into InSpaze, the Apple Vision Pro’s premier social app, and had some wonderful conversations with people from around the world! I will save that report for a later blogpost on my blog. In the meantime, you can read what I wrote earlier about InSpaze here (before I got my hot little hands on my own Apple Vision Prto!).
UPDATE 10:30 p.m.: I just discovered that Matthew Ball (whom I have written about before on this blog) has written up a blogpost titled 9 Takeaways from the Vision Pro after 6 months, so I have linked to it from my blog. I very much appreciate Matthew’s take on things, and I wanted to share what he said with you as well, as a sort of counterpoint to my own, obviously more limited, thoughts and impressions. (By the way, I agree 100% with Matthew’s take on the EyeSight feature of the AVP. While it’s cool, I also feel it’s a bit gimmicky.)
