Apple Vision Pro Impressions!
foreign Pro I had about a 30 minute demo just using this new headset I had about a trillion questions so I tried to ask as many of them as I possibly could of Apple to get all the answers I could for you and for myself so without any further Ado let's just jump right in this is everything you need to know so far about Apple's new AR VR headset so the first question naturally what is it so first things first this is a first generation device from Apple which we don't see very often but it is an augmented reality slash virtual reality headset with a bunch of cameras and sensors inside that you strap to your face it'll start at three thousand five hundred dollars and it'll go on sale starting sometime early next year nobody's been able to shoot video of using it yet so I'm gonna have to do my best with descriptions here but fundamentally this isn't something that's paired to your iPhone or your Mac by default it's a standalone computer with an M2 Chip inside its own Wi-Fi connection a roughly 4K micro OLED display for each eye a set of speakers right above each ear on the band and then a dedicated new R1 chip which is doing all of the real-time processing from all the sensors that make this headset pretty special but we'll get to that in a second so all right then how does it work well basically we've seen VR headsets and AR headsets before it's uh typically there's screens on the inside and then on the outside there's some sort of shell which has some sensors on the outside that help detect what is in your room around you and help to see the controllers in your hands but with this one there are no controllers at all they're not making any for it there aren't going to be any optional accessory they're not even going to design any controllers you are controlling this thing entirely with your hands and your eyes and your voice so you put this headset on and basically all over the headset there are an absolute ton of sensors you have two main forward-facing cameras two down downward facing cameras two more cameras for the sides two infrared illuminators a lidar scanner a true depth camera these are all to keep track of what's happening around the headset and also to track your hands in front of your face and then on the inside there's also a bunch of infrared illuminators and infrared cameras that are purely there just there to track your eyes so there's actually a setup process before you even get the headset you basically measure you sort of scan your face with the true depth camera on the iPhone and it uses that depth information about your face to give you sort of a custom cut out this will be a process that you can do in Apple Stores but basically you get the headset with the custom cut out for your face if you have glasses there are some Zeiss lenses but you finally get the headset out and you put it on and there's some nice meshing on the back some fabric that stretches and is pretty breathable it's built extremely well with all this metal and glass and then once you get it going the most impressive thing about this headset the most impressive thing is the eye tracking I'm not even kidding this this eye tracking is sick so basically the eye tracking in this headset as it looks at your eyes and keeps track of where your eyes move around is the closest thing that I've experienced to like magic like I don't I normally don't call Tech things sort of magical or surreal like this but this was even for a pre-release product kind of unbelievable how well it does anytime you move your eyes around the UI it would immediately highlight and select exactly what you're looking at no matter how small the target was or what you're looking at and then when you want to select something all you do is take your fingers like this and just touch them together that's how you click so you look at something click look at something click so there's actually there's a calibration process when you first set up the headset you put it on for the first time where you basically just look around with your eyes at a bunch of different dots so it learns your eyes and then yeah from that point on you're just cruising you're sailing through everything by just looking at things and it feels like telepathic you just look at something and select it and that's it so this is how the whole UI works pretty much every other headset has the ability to use your hands to select things but most of them rely on the sensors on the outside to keep track of a set of controllers for maximum accuracy but this massive array of sensors on the outside of Apple's headset have done an impressively good job of picking up what my hand is doing kind of no matter where it is so like I said there's sensors all the way around the thing they're facing forward but they're facing sideways and facing down so I can just kind of rest my hand like wherever and look at stuff and click I don't even have to move my head I can just look at something and just click my fingers I kind of did it by accident a few times like I just sort of be sitting there and my fingertips would actually touch and I'd select whatever I was looking at but pretty quickly you get used to just just this just just doing this now there are also some text boxes occasionally you want to type something and so you can look at the text box select it and then a keyboard will pop up and you can look at the letters but also you can just look at a search box field and just start talking and it'll start filling in whatever you're saying because there's microphones on the headset and there's also something they're calling optic ID which is basically kind of just the fingerprint ID of the headset because it's looking at your eyes and everyone's eyes is a different unique biometric pattern and so you log in just by putting a headset on and it looks at your eyes so optic ID this thing knows your eyes really well so you've probably seen all these weird looking frames where you can see people's eyes through it like this this super weird thing that I've never seen in any other headset so what is happening here well spoiler alert it's not actually transparent it kind of looks like it's a glass transparent thing but it's not it appears to be because there's actually an OLED screen facing out this is what I would call a 2 way pass-through that's what I'm calling it see a normal VR headset we've seen is of course completely opaque usually it's like black plastic or something like that so in order to see through to your actual environment without taking the headset off like for picking up your controllers or walking around a room without hitting a wall they have a pass-through mode so it'll turn on a camera on the outside so you can see what's going on around you and some pass-through modes are better than others some will do it from a single black and white camera some will do stereo pass through from two cameras some will do color pass through the pass-through on Apple's headset is again the best I've ever seen in a headset it's stereo it's color it's sharp it's real time it's really good so then the eyes you see from the outside are actually an OLED display showing what your eyes look like to the cameras inside the headset so it shows your eyes like this whenever you're using any sort of pass-through mode and if you can see your environment it'll show your eyes so you're not actually like looking at someone's eyes but it kind of feels like you are kind of creepy a little bit I don't know it's the simplest way of explaining it if they're doing something fully immersive in VR like watching a movie or playing a game then it won't show their eyes it'll show this graphic over their eyes instead it's a really interesting look it's a it's a bold look I just have this like thought of like you're uh you're on a airplane and the flight attendant walks up and Taps you hey do you want any water and you just look up and your eyes shine through the headset it's just a weird thing I don't think it's smart but I don't think other headsets are gonna do it because most of them don't have it in the budget to have a screen facing the outside but then let's get to the burning question you've probably already been thinking what does it actually do so okay I'm sort of I'm separating this into three bulk categories that I made up and I'm kind of proud of here which are Computing content and connections now actually I should preface this all by saying this is a first gen product so right now the only apps that show up on the home screen are Apple's apps just like when the first iPhone came out with no app store it's just Apple's apps but the reason this is coming out or at least getting announced so early but it's not coming out till next year is to give this window for developers to start developing their own apps and making cool things for this headset to do that are way more interesting and way more functional but it does have a core set of functions so for computing I think this is the one that's probably the least likely to be used by most normal people but it is a pretty direct shot at what meta just did with the quest Pro the 1500 Quest Pro so you can use this thing as its own computer with web browsing Etc with these 4K windows in front of you that you can move around and do all kinds of stuff with your hands now this will be its own OS again it's not running off your phone or anything it's running a whole new operating system called Vision OS and it seems pretty similar pretty similar to iPad OS just in the fact that you know you're just touching things in iPad OS and in this headset you look at something and then you touch your fingers together and that's basically just like a normal touch but I was really impressed with the responsiveness again this was better than any headset I've seen with just your hands if I wanted to scroll through something like a safari window I literally in air would touch my fingers together and drag the window and it would scroll nearly in real time I would like throw it around like toss it catch it toss it the other way and start scrolling through things with my finger resizing Windows dragging the corners of things and I was super impressed with that too now if you're like me you might have also had some questions about the sharpness like do I really want to wear something like this for a long time to work like it's on a computer and I think I was also pretty smartly addressed they use a selective rendering based on the super good eye tracking so the computing power is basically focusing on sharply rendering the part of the screen that you're actually looking at while saving power on the rest it's pretty cool and it works so quickly that I did not notice it while using it and then the part you're looking at is actually very sharp like I said before they're super high resolution screens they're 4K I don't know if I have a number for refresh rate but it felt like 120 hertz and you know I fatigue will eventually become a thing with any headset you strapped to your face but this would be on the lower level of eye fatigue compared to what I've experienced with some others and then for even more heavy work this was kind of nuts but they showed it in the keynote apparently if you have a Mac and you want to do Mac OS stuff you can just with the headset on just look at your Mac and it will pick up what you're doing and it'll mirror the max display as one of the 4K windows for you in the headset and then you can even connect a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth trackpad and start working around like it's an actual Mac just with a bigger screen wherever you want at yeah ecosystem stuff so that's Computing I definitely got to try it but then of course there's the uh the connection stuff you got messaging you can type out messages to people just like as if you were on a Mac but there's also impressively FaceTime now I don't even know that this is necessarily better than a normal FaceTime holding your phone or like on a laptop other than the fact that I guess you don't have to be holding anything but you can have people's windows floating in front of you as you talk to them on FaceTime but you might also be asking wait a second if I'm not holding my phone in front of me what do other people on FaceTime see well the answer is they'll see a 3D rendered model of you that was scanned into the system from your iPhone that syncs up and matches the movements of your face with eye tracking and all the other sensors of the headset so I I got to try it it is it works okay so it's it's it's not as good as obviously looking at a person I just feel like a FaceTime you're trying to have like a personal connection with the person and this is obviously more personal than an avatar or like a cartoon of you but it's just it feels kind of somewhere in between it's kind of like a Google project Starline which I just did that video about a couple weeks ago if you haven't already seen that I'll leave a link with a like button so you can check it out but it feels sort of in that like uncanny valley you know moving 3D model territory instead of looking at an actual person it's kind of how I picture it but then last but not least of course content people are just going to watch content on this thing and I think this is the industry now that Apple's jumping into it that is poised to explode like we've had VR games and VR videos for a long time and apple is now also able to do this they of course put their own spin on it and they can use the power and the draw of the Apple brand to get content creators and big motion picture studios and sports leagues and all kinds of creatives to work to make content that looks really good specifically on Apple's headset and in Apple's formats I can personally save from My Demo hell yes I would watch I would pay to watch an NBA game Courtside in the VR headset the quality is good enough and obviously it's not going to be as immersive as feeling the energy from the crowd but you're not paying Courtside prices you'd probably pay is a total guess 10 20 bucks to watch an NBA game Courtside or have some subscription to do that I would totally do that and it would be fun but even with regular 2D content like movies just watching a regular movie you can totally just sit back put the headset on maybe even put some headphones on and just like on a plane seat just watch a movie as if you're in a theater for one which is pretty sweet there is that digital crown on the side that actually lets you spin it clockwise to move in more immersion and fully envelop you in the VR environment or you can turn it counterclockwise to bring in more of your real world environment with pass-through in your peripheral vision kind of a neat trick and then there's also this kind of weird feature where you can take 3D photos and videos with the cameras built into the headset itself and I did not like this one so there was a demo of like a a recording from a headset camera of a kid blowing out some candles on a birthday cake basically and I got to watch this actual scene in the actual Apple headset so because there's two cameras like front-facing there they can record stereoscopic 3D so you can turn on the recording and in that moment sit down and record a super immersive video and then when you watch it back in the headset it's like you're reliving this moment in 3D which can feel kind of cool but I just I can't get the image of like the dad at the birthday party with the headset on just recording things like walking around it just doesn't it's what kind of memory is that for the other people around you you know like I saw this and I immediately thought back to the the reasons we all know why Google Glass failed which is it was ahead of its time but it's also like they're walking around with a camera on your face and everybody knows that you have a camera on your face it just wasn't cool dad what are you doing why do you why are your eyes sticking out through the headset so all right the number one question I've gotten after I've actually tried this thing is is it any good is this headset any good and the answer is well yes some of the parts of this headset that I tried are actually the best I have ever seen in any VR headset by a mile specifically the eye tracking and the Hand tracking now of course it's going to be up to developers to really make it good but I think the foundational like how do you use it part is pretty amazing but that doesn't mean there aren't any downsides all right number one there was no haptics of course because you don't have controllers you're just doing everything with your hands in the air there's no way to have any sort of haptic feedback there was a demo that I did where like I stuck my hand out a wall on the other side of the room opened up and a dinosaur was back there and a butterfly flew out I held out my hand and the butterfly flew up and landed on my finger it could track and see all that information in the volumetric all the computation to make that happen was amazing but when the butterfly landed and I didn't feel anything there was that moment of like oh right this is a VR headset but then number two this was interesting this is pretty heavy this is a pretty heavy VR headset kind of the same way that um airpods max the Apple's metal headphones are heavier than most plastic headphones there's a reason why most other VR headsets are just plastic it's not because that's cheap it's because it's lightweight it's fatiguing to have a heavy thing on your head and this is a headset made of metal and glass it's heavy now it is also super well built like there is no arguing that but I do wonder about using it for longer than the half hour that I did I wonder if it would be more fatiguing to my head that's also actually why the battery isn't attached to it that would be a ton of weight to carry on your head so they connected the battery instead through a proprietary cable and that actually can sit next to you on the couch or in your back pocket and that brings us to the other thing the battery life two hours two hour battery life on the headset which is not that great it's not that long now there's a USBC port on the battery bank and you can plug that into the wall for infinite time but the second you unplug from the wall yeah two hours from that pretty hefty battery bank which is like okay maybe most people won't be spending a lot of time in the headset but you did also just show us apple and AD of people like watching a movie in the headset that's already like most movies are two hours plus so something we're thinking about there's just a two hour but I'm sure people will make bigger external batteries for this thing but two hours and then also I couldn't get a firm answer here on if there are fans inside or not but I think they're stands like they're certainly vents for fans anyway and if you're gaming for long enough or using it for long enough do those spin up do they ever get loud do they ever kill your battery that's kind of unclear but then of course the main thing that everybody's talking about it's expensive it's 3 500 so is that pricey yeah that's very expensive but this is the thing that is always weird with Apple products like there is no direct comp like I always you always say it's expensive but like compared to what and they they did this with uh the pro display xdr they've done this with even airpods Max a little bit but like there there are several things that this headset does that no other headset does the eye tracking the hand tracking that's super good even if an equivalent headset came along today and did all of the same stuff that this does hardware and software wise it still wouldn't have face time it still wouldn't have like looking at a Mac and then the ecosystem allowing the max display to pop up so this is kind of something that only Apple could pull off so bottom line you know I got to try it I thought it was extremely impressive but at the end of the day this is not a product for the masses I mean obviously right it's three thousand five hundred dollars it has the word Pro in the name too but this this feels like this series zero like the Apple Watch Remember When the Apple watch first came out the series zero where it's really going to be up to the first gen the early adopters and the developers to decide the direction that this thing goes to decide what people actually want to use it for and that'll shape the future versions of it that we may eventually get down the road then maybe someday there's like a a vision SE that's like 400 bucks that the masses will all adopt and it'll be this next Generation hit product Maybe but as of right now this is very much in the sort of early adopter people like me people like watching this video testing phase to figure it out so that's the Apple Vision Pro it's uh it's it's the rich person's toy and the developers Muse for right now but we'll see how far this thing goes in the near future it's coming out next year it's not that far off it's not that far away it's really interesting times either way this was also part of a huge entire WWDC keynote so if you want to watch my recap of the rest of that stuff ideally get subscribed because there's going to be a video recap of the biggest announcements of which there are many other things and also uh I'll shout out the waveform podcast to get subscribed there too because the next episode I'll just say it it's a banger it's pretty sick so hit sub hit like hang out in the comments that's been it for this one thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace
2023-06-08 12:29
