First-person report: A VR skeptic’s presence experiences with the Apple Vision Pro

[A new, story in Vanity Fair offers vivid examples of how Apple’s new Vision Pro technology evokes presence, with some powerful, even addictive, consequences. I’ve selected the excerpts below and then highlighted key statements within them (in bold text). See the original story for more details and a second image. –Matthew]

[Image: Credit: Norman Jean Roy]

Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro

Inside Apple Park, the tech giant’s CEO talks about the genesis of a “mind-blowing” new device that could change the way we live and work. A-list directors are already on board—“My experience was religious,” says James Cameron—but will your average iPhone user drop $3,500 on a headset?

By Nick Bilton
February 1, 2024

[snip]

Back in 2013, in a conference room in Los Angeles, I strapped an Oculus VR headset to my head for the first time. (Oculus, a well-funded start-up, would later be purchased by Facebook, which would later rename itself Meta.) It was cool, sure. I offered my proverbial “wow” and gave out a few oohs and aahs as I played a video game with brutalist square-edged graphics that looked like Pablo Picasso had smoked too much opium and designed a digital world. But after a few minutes I felt claustrophobic, and by the intermission I was mired in an existential crisis that maybe I had stopped inhabiting the real world because I could only see myself in the virtual one. Over the last decade, as the graphics became smoother and the chips faster, the same thing kept happening with each new VR device. Rift, Vive, Quest, Quest 2, and Quest 3. I used them all once or twice, and then they went into a drawer or a cupboard or a box in my basement because I didn’t want to feel the claustrophobia of putting something on my face.

Then last August, I was invited to Apple’s Los Angeles office, formally the home of Beats, to experience what I thought would be yet another VR device. I was sitting in a sleek room with white oak furniture and polished floors, and all I was thinking about was how long it would take me to get home, and whether I’d take the local streets because the 405 by that hour is just a nightmare. I sat on this gray couch, and an Apple employee told me to reach out and grab the Apple Vision Pro in front of me and place it on my head, which I did, reluctantly, just wanting to get this over with, and then—as I expected—the world disappeared, as it always does with VR headsets. But that only lasted for a few seconds, because a digital curtain pulled back and behind it was the real world. I could see my arms and legs, and then the Apple app icons popped up in front of me like a multicolored apparition.

This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet. Just as when I scrolled my finger around the wheel of the first iPod or used my finger and thumb to zoom into an image on the first iPhone. With the Vision Pro, I could look at an app icon and simply tap my fingers together, and the app would open. And then it was hanging in front of me. In the clearest resolution I’d ever seen in my life. I could swipe through images with my hands, move things with my fingers. Unlike other VR headsets, where you have to use a controller that feels like you have lobster claws for hands, with the Apple Vision Pro your eyes become the mouse absolutely seamlessly. “It’s mind-blowing,” Cook said to me when I told him about my experience. “We live in a 3D world, but the content that we enjoy is flat.”

During that first demo I went to the iconic Mount Hood stratovolcano in Oregon, and I could hear and see a million raindrops falling into Mirror Lake, so much so that I felt like I was there, and the only thing missing was the earthy scent of rain-soaked soil. I interacted with graphics in midair that were crisper than anything I’d ever seen before. And I touched them all with my fingers, not a mouse or keyboard. I saw spatial videos for the first time. To say this feature is astounding is an understatement. You actually feel like the person is in front of you and you can reach out and touch them. I saw clips of movies that were 100 feet wide, sharper and clearer than any IMAX. But most importantly, I saw the world around me. That very room. I didn’t feel closed off or claustrophobic. I was there. I was everywhere, all at once.

I left the Apple offices that day and went to a nearby coffee shop, and when I opened my laptop, a relatively new computer, it felt like a relic pulled from the rubble of a Soviet-era power plant.

“You know, one of our most common reactions we love is people go, ‘Hold on, I just need a minute. I need to process what just happened,’” said Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as we ate lunch at Apple Park. “How cool is that? How often do people have a product experience where they’re left speechless, right?”

I wasn’t really left speechless until the second demo. A few months after my initial experience, I went back to the LA offices. Two Apple employees led me into a room. I put on the Apple Vision Pro and the curtain opened and I was looking at them. The only difference this time was I had a cup of tea with me. In the middle of this new demo, I reached down and grabbed the tea and I took a sip, and as I did, one of my fingers flickered, like I was in a simulation no different from reality and there was a glitch.

“Wait, what am I seeing?” I asked, confused. “Are you real? Or…”

“No, you’re seeing a video of us that’s being rendered in real time,” one of the employees explained. I sat there for a moment, speechless. I had thought what I had been seeing was the real world, and that all the digital wonder was layered on top of that. That the Apple Vision Pro was transparent and there was a layer of technology on top of it. In reality, it was the other way around.

“I think it’s not evolutionary; it’s revolutionary,” [Director James] Cameron said to me when I told him about my experience. “And I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VR for 18 years.” He explained that the reason it looks so real is because the Apple Vision Pro is writing a 4K image into my eyes. “That’s the equivalent of the resolution of a 75-inch TV into each of your eyeballs—23 million pixels.” To put that into perspective, the average 4K television has around 8 million pixels. Apple engineers didn’t slice off a rectangle from the corner of a 4K display and put it in the Apple Vision Pro. They somehow compressed twice as many pixels into a space as small as your eyeball.

[snip]

But the more I’ve used the Apple Vision Pro over the past two weeks, the more one glaring problem revealed itself to me. It’s not the weight (which is a problem but will come down over time), or the size (which will shrink with each iteration), or the worry that it will drive us to consume more content alone (almost half of Americans already watch TV alone). Or how tech giants like Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and Google are currently withholding their apps from the device. (Content creators may come around once the consumers are there, and some, like Disney, are already embracing the device, making 150 movies available in 3D, including from mega-franchises like Star Wars and Marvel.) And it’s not even the price, because if Apple wanted to, the company could subsidize the cost of the Apple Vision Pro and it would have about as much financial impact as Cook losing a nickel between his couch cushions.

I’m talking about something that I don’t see a solution for.

I first recognized the problem when I was at Apple Park, in the basement offices of SJT. I was seeing yet another demo, this time in Joshua Tree, where I sat in the striking desert silhouette of the arid landscape. I played Fruit Ninja, where I got to slice fruit with my bare hands. Then I tried a DJ app, where a turntable opened in front of me and I could slide the fader, tweak the mixer, and scratch the records, and I summoned a disco ball that magically clung to the ceiling as animated ravers danced around me.

In the middle of my DJ set, an Apple employee said it was time to wrap up. I took the Apple Vision Pro off, and that’s when it hit me. The problem. It happened again at home, scrolling through the spatial videos I’ve taken of my kids over the last few weeks, seeing them as if they’re actually in front of me. And it’s going to happen in a few minutes, when I finish writing this article and the Word document in front of me the size of an IMAX screen goes away.

When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.

I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. “I’m sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails,” one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.” Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he’s seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends.

[snip]

The question is, is the place we’re about to go, into the era of spatial computing, going to make our lives better, or will it become the next technology that becomes a necessity, where we can’t live in a world that’s not augmented? I think Joswiak had it half right when he said, “It feels like we’ve reached into the future and grabbed this product. You’re putting the future on your face.” I think it’s the other way around. Apple is taking us into the future, into a new era of computing. Some of us are running as fast as we can to get there, and others are being dragged, kicking and screaming. But we’re all going.

[snip to end]


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