Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple Vision Pro – I Hate How Good it Looks”.
Yo Jonathan here Apple debuted their Vision Pro headset this week and after a couple days, I got some mixed feelings. This isn’t necessarily a rant or anything, but I kind of hate how good it looks before I dive into Vision. Pro specifically, I can’t not think of an experience that I had many many years back. There was this company meta, not this meta, a different meta who have seemingly since closed up shop. They debuted the meadow one developer kit, aka the most advanced, augmented reality glasses. They flew a few of us up to Northern California and it was one of the most insane pizzar experiences. I’Ve ever had to the point where it almost feels like a dream. Looking back, we got to location a where we were picked up by this bus, and I vividly remember Michael Jackson, playing in the bus as we’re shuttling up a mountain into the woods thinking. What is going on everybody who worked on this project lived at this house in the woods, so you get up there, you’re wondering! What’S going on everybody’s greeting you everyone’s pumped and just talking about how amazing this thing is their pitch was we’ve created Iron Man in real life like Jarvis, is here everything you’ve known about Computing? Throw that away, because this changes everything you can see your displays, your screens Twitter, the internet.
It works through touch gestures. This is it I remember putting on the headset and it was awful. Everything was slow and clunky and almost counter-intuitive. They must have forgot to download the graphics DLC because it looked like you were looking out of two potatoes.
Meanwhile, on the outside they’re, like how amazing is this and internally I’m just like, I don’t know what to say. It was so bad that I could not make the video and I felt bad that they brought me out there. I remember telling them. I don’t think I can make a video on this and they were just perplexed, but it’s like hey.
I don’t want to make a video on this, where it’s not ready, and it’s this poor of an experience and B. I don’t want to make it seem better than it actually is. Looking back on things now, they eventually made it to a meta 2, which was apparently endorsed by will. I am, but ultimately nothing came out of that, so I’ve always had that in the back of my mind. Of this definitely wasn’t it, but at what point do we get there and I think the scary part is we’re here.
There are absolutely some giant pills to swallow with Vision Pro, the first of which, being the price tag. Parallel to that, if you look at something like the hololens from Microsoft, that’s priced the exact same. So I don’t think it’s too far off for what it is, especially at this point in time, but it is absolutely not affordable by any means.
The wild part is. Is I think, a lot more people than you think are going to pick this up and we’re going to see a lot more of these on planes than you would think as well? If we take one quick, look back at the meta developer kit, what they did right was the hand based touch gesture control. It wasn’t done well, but I think that’s the move over using something like a controller. What I think really separates the Vision Pro apart from anything else, we’ve seen is the fact that you are not only controlling it with your hands and gestures, but you’re controlling it with your eyes.
The fact that you’re not physically moving your head around to navigate or to act as your mouse cursor, but instead your eyes is wild. If you really take a second to break down the tech and the engineering that is packed inside here, it’s mind-blowing the build quality. The amount of pixels that it’s pushing out the sensors, the microphones, the fact that there’s an M2 Chip alongside an R1 chip packed inside this headset, that’s relatively compact. I think we take something like M2 for granted at this point in time, because we’ve had something like it for a couple of years, but when M1 came out that changed everything and the fact that you have that in a headset is bananas. What I think Apple does better than anybody else in the industry, and this is almost a separate. Video in itself is take one piece of tech that they developed for this product and then bring that into future products down the line, something as simple as the original homepod and the team behind that that was such an instrumental part of getting better audio into the Macbook Pros into iPads into the studio display into air pods and then airpods Max things like the digital crown that first made its way on the Apple watch, which then made its way into airpods Max and then now into Vision. Pro in a lot of ways. I think iPad throughout the years as much as we’ve wanted more and more out of it, I think, played a huge part in Vision Pro in terms of touch response and animations and how things interact and behave. We’Re going to see a huge part of that with vision, OS and then something as simple as lidar. When that first came out, everybody was like: okay, that’s cool, but I don’t really see what the point of it is, especially when they brought it to an iPad.
Since then, it’s made huge strides and I think it plays a huge part in things like accessibility, which I don’t think should be overlooked. But here we are years later and it’s such a crucial part of the Vision Pro headset from there for me, especially as someone who’s been really into spatial audio that is now standard on the headset, so even without airpods you’re. Getting that spatial experience where sound is such an important part of this picture, so the idea of doing something like an edit within Final Cut Pro on Vision Pro with this giant landscape, is really exciting. The fact that you’re implementing eye control and again touching back on what I just mentioned, with the touch response of iPad, the fact that you’re going to be able able to move around and make decisions almost instant to the point where it really is an extension of Your brain is kind of wild. You very well may also be doing things like editing your audio in spatial in real time, because you’re already in that environment, which is kind of crazy to think about Apple, is claiming that you’re getting a 4K display on each of your eyes, which is kind of Mind-Blowing – and I think at this point with the early demos and experiences it’s clear that Apple delivered, I think again at this point, the scary part for me is, I just don’t know if I’m ready to take that leap. There are absolutely huge upsides to this and it’s a very exciting step forward into technology, and I think there will be tons of applications in terms of education and learning and getting to experience things you may normally not have.
But I worry that it’s going to make life less good. What was probably my least favorite part of the presentation and demo and experience was FaceTime and not face time itself, because I think, as an application, it is awesome being able to see someone or multiple people or to have Jesse or Susie and control where they are In your environment and then hear them according to how you position them is incredible, but then you’re kind of looking at the demo and you’re thinking. Well, what happens if I’m wearing the headset like? How do they see me? Well, that is a virtual version of UDA, and then you start to think about well what, if everybody in that face time has a headset on and then you’re just FaceTiming virtual versions of everybody, which kind of eliminates the point of face time in the first place. If you’ve ever had something like a phantom vibration, where you’re used to your phone vibrating in your pocket and there’s an instance where it’s not in your pocket, but you swear, you feel it that’s a thing.
So what happens when your brain and your eyes gets used to interacting with something like this interface and you take it off and then you’re looking at something expecting it to move or to open or to react and doesn’t like? What does that do to you? Alternatively, then you look at the upside of watching a concert or a movie and getting immersed in ways that you never would have before. Maybe you’re able to sit closer than you ever would have at the actual concert or the sporting event. Those are all very enticing things, but again it’s like at what point do we find the balance between both it’s kind of this really weird thing where we are striving to make things more lifelike and we’re trying to make virtual reality feel like reality, but at the Same time it’s like we have reality already, so we’re chasing this thing that we essentially already have there’s a ton of TV shows and movies where this was eerily reminiscent of, but I think what it reminded me most of was the show upload, there’s a specific scene Where in this digital afterlife you’re looking at and viewing old memories in your life, like you would at a movie theater so to see that moment in the presentation and keynote where the dad is looking at the birthday party through Vision Pro but not. Actually, there was just like man, I don’t know if I like this. All that aside, there is no denying how impressive this technology is, both the good, the exciting and, honestly, the scary. What we really have to remember is that this is not what’s going to change the world or what’s going to be that next thing, but it is going to be the product that takes us.
There Apple didn’t mention AI. They didn’t really talk a ton about AR or VR. They are specifically angling this as the next generation of computing. Sorry, iPad things like the battery pack are going to get better.
Things will be lighter and more powerful. Could you imagine when there’s an M5 inside the fifth generation of Vision, Pro Tech honestly for the most part, especially over the last five to ten years, has been fairly stagnant and I think a lot of people have been bored and wanting something new something different. And I think this, whether you like it or not, is that I don’t think I’m ready to have something on my head at all times that I don’t think that’s where this eventually ends up. But I am curious to see where things head and in 10 years from now, my goodness it is going to be wild outside of that.
Those are my initial thoughts. Let me know what you guys think with a comment down below and if you’re feeling, like being awesome, make sure you guys drop a like as well. If you missed it, I also released a video on Final Cut Pro for the iPad Pro. You can check that out here or Linked In the description. This is Jonathan and I will catch you guys later. .