My First Immersion in Apple Vision Pro

 This morning, I spent half an hour trying the Apple Vision Pro headset. Here’s the punch line: This is one freaking mind-blowing piece of tech.

I mean, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, you could feel the paradigm shifting in real time.

This was like that, but better.

In case you’ve been on news blackout for the last 24 hours, we’re talking about Apple’s augmented-reality headset. Its development was supposedly insanely expensive, internally contentious, and repeatedly delayed. But the result is so advanced and polished, it makes Meta’s VR headsets look like Blackberries.

Then again, you can pick up a Meta Quest 3 for $500. Apple’s new headset won’t be available for sale until early 2024, and the price “starts at” $3,500.

I know, I know—I read Twitter, too. “$3,500? Are you insane? What’s the use case? This thing is gonna belly flop like the Newton!”

Also: “Nobody wants VR! Not a single VR headset so far has succeeded with the masses. It’s a dead idea!”

But be careful. Apple has a long history of coming in late to a game, doing it (and marketing it) better, and creating an industry. You know: Tablets. Smartwatches. Detached earbuds.

Furthermore, we, the people (and we, the tech critics) have a long history of spitting on Apple’s unfamiliar inventions the day they’re unveiled. It happened with the iPad (“Why would I need this if I have the phone?”). And the Apple Watch (“Why would I need this if I have the phone?”). And the iPhone itself (“Who’d buy a cellphone with no physical keys?!”).

This headset is 1.0. It’s intended to be catnip for superfans and a shot across the bow of competitors. It’s a safe bet that there will be a Vision Pro 2 in 2025, and a Vision Pro 3 in 2026. Each edition will be lighter and less expensive.

In five years, it won’t cost $3,500. It will have become a standard big-ticket birthday/Christmas option for your kid, spouse, or parent, just the way Apple Watches or AirPods are now.

(For more on this “make the public crave the sexy, high-priced first model” strategy, see the first Tesla model, which cost $110,000.)

AR/VR

So what is this thing? It’s partly a virtual-reality (VR) headset like the Oculus, meaning that it can become opaque, completely blocking your view of the real world.

But here’s the big twist: The Vision Pro is also an augmented-reality (AR) headset, meaning that while wearing it, you can still see the real room around you. The graphics of your game, movie, or app seem to float within your physical space.

By turning the “crown” (knob) above your right eye, in fact, you can control the transparency, turning AR into VR. If you want situational awareness, you can make the background transparent. If you’re in coach on United and really wish you weren’t, you can black out the background completely.

Apple has put together a very clear nine-minute tour of what its headset does. The video, however, suffers from a problem that will haunt Apple’s marketing efforts for years: Trying to represent this product’s 3-D, interactive world with a video is like trying to depict the Mona Lisa with a piece of dental floss. Either way, you’re one dimension short.

So if you want to consider a Vision Pro headset, you’ll eventually have to find a way to try one. Apple Store, friend’s house, whatever.

Until that opportunity comes your way, here’s what the experience was like.

(I was one of hundreds of journalists who received identical 30-minute demo sessions at Apple’s big round headquarters in Cupertino. Each of us had our faces scanned, our glasses measured with an optical scanner, and a Vision Pro custom assembled for our demo. It was a human assembly line that must have required days of rehearsal.

Oh — and we weren’t allowed to take any photos or make any recordings. So these pictures all come from Apple’s own promo materials.)

Hardware Setup

There’s quite a bit of preamble before you can start watching 3-D movies, walking around inside your photos, and shooting aliens.

For one thing, everyone’s eyesight and head shapes are different, so everyone’s Vision Pro must be assembled differently. This headset is actually composed of three parts:

· The computer itself. The front part features a curved glass black faceplate, an army of sensors, and the two tiny screens that will face your eyes. To accommodate your particular eyesight, you may need to buy a pair of magnetic, snap-in lens adapters, made to your prescription by Zeiss. (Not included, by the way. Maybe that’s why the headset “starts at” $3500.)

· The “light shield” is a separator cuff that connects the computer to your face. It comes in three different sizes, placing the screens at any of three different distances from your pupils.

· The headbands. There’s a stretchy, knit back-of-headband (surprisingly tall, to spread out the pressure over a greater surface area) and a top-of-head strap. This headband combo, too, comes in three different sizes.

(Actually, a fourth component goes in your pocket: a two-hour battery, which looks like a silver bar of soap, about the size and weight of an iPhone. You can also connect this brick directly to a power outlet if you don’t need mobility.)

The point is that at the outset, you won’t be able to order the Vision Pro online. You’ll have to visit an Apple Store to get a custom fitting in person. You’ll get a guided tour while you’re at it.

Apple won’t provide the headset’s exact weight — which is a very important spec indeed for a machine you’re going to strap to your face. “A little over a pound” is the stock answer.

But what’s “a little”? When I first picked it up, my guess was 1.5 pounds. There’s a lot of aluminum, glass, and circuitry in there — it’s basically the guts of a fast laptop.

After you slip it on, you tighten the backstrap by turning a dial on the right side, like the one on a bike helmet or construction helmet. Then you tighten the top strap by tugging its end through its buckle.

The idea is to distribute all that weight across your forehead, cheekbones, the top of your head, and the back of your skull. Once that’s done, there’s supposed to be very little weight on your nose.

Once I had it on, the weight I’d sensed initially seemed a lot less relevant. It felt great — at first. (Read on.)

Software Setup

When you power up the headset for the first time, a startup app asks you to look at each of about 10 animated colored dots that appear sequentially around your field of view, accompanied by sweet arpeggiated chimes. The headset is watching your eyes (yes, it’s got cameras facing inward) and calibrating its own spectacular eye-tracking software. That’s sort of important, because for the rest of your time with the Vision Pro, your gaze is going to be your cursor.

During this setup process, you’re already discovering some of what makes the Vision Pro different. There’s a postage-stamp–sized screen in front of each of your eyes, and each has as many pixels as a 4K television. Apple’s very first design objective for this project must have been: “Incorporate insane resolution that makes Meta’s crappy displays look like a screen door.”

The sound comes from speakers aimed directly at your ear sockets. These are not headphones or earbuds; they do not cover your ear in any way. They sound great, and they leave you alert to your environment — but they do leak sound to whoever’s sitting beside you. For use on planes, trains, and automobiles, Apple cheerfully suggests that you buy some AirPods and wear those, too.

In true VR fashion, whatever you’re looking at (and listening to) seems to stay put in space, even as you turn your head or move around. This, of course, is the difference between shooting aliens on your TV screen and shooting them in VR: Now, you can look behind you, above you, below you, and your view changes as you move your head.

In most of Apple’s AR (see-through) apps, you’re facing a wall-sized simulated screen. It’s got Apple’s classic rounded corners, and seems to be hanging on a sheet of acrylic about half an inch thick.

Gestures

You don’t need any dumb plastic controller to navigate the Vision. Your hands and your voice do all the control. (Even in the most immersive apps, your hands are always visible — a nifty trick.)

Tiny cameras inside the glass, aimed outward and downward, watch your hands, even if they’re resting on your thigh. You have to learn a new set of gestures, but they’re quick to master and rock-solid in execution:

· Point to something by looking at it. Your eyesight is, in effect, the mouse cursor. The thing just knows what you mean. Freaky and fantastic.

· Click by touching your fingertips. To click or open whatever you’re looking at, you tap your thumb and forefinger tips together. Seems like an odd choice, but it’s super reliable.

· Scroll a page down by pinching and pulling down in the air, exactly as though there’s an invisible windowshade cord. Same thing with scrolling up, left, or right. Just as on the iPhone or iPad, each scroll seems to have a little bit of inertia, slowing to a stop.

· Zoom in by pinching in the air with both hands, and drawing them apart or together.

To return to your Home screen, you click the crown above your right eye. Turn it to dial in more or less transparency of the world around you.

The World Around You

When you’re not using an app, you just see the room you’re in, exactly as though you’re wearing clear ski goggles.

In fact, though, you’re never directly seeing what’s in front of you. You’re actually looking at a live video feed of what’s around you, sent by cameras hidden in the faceplate!

That may seem like a goofily roundabout way to show you exactly what you’d see without this thing on your face. But if you think about it, that’s really the only way Apple could have created a headset that can be either transparent or opaque.

In related news: When somebody approaches you in your little isolated VR bubble, the headset notices them — and creates a soft-edged, transparent gap in whatever image you’re seeing, so you can see and converse with the person.

Furthermore, at that moment — this is going to sound really insane — the shiny black glass of the Vision Pro displays your eyes, so that person can see you.

The point is to strike a blow against the awful, claustrophobic isolation of traditional VR headsets. You and other people are no longer cut off from each other. You see their face; they see yours.

But how, you may ask, can anyone see your face? There are $3,500 worth of electronics and circuit boards between your eyes and the outer glass!

It turns out that the entire front of the Vision Pro is a screen. It exists purely to show outsiders your face.

So is this a video feed of your eyes, captured from inside the goggles?

It is not.

It is, if you can believe this, a three-dimensional live computer-generated hologram of the top half of your face.

In my description of the setup process, I kind of left something out. The prep sequence also asks you to take off the headset and gaze into its obsidian shiny glass.

Now, you turn your head slowly this way and that; make various facial expressions; and open and close your mouth. The cameras are scanning you, building what Apple calls your Persona — a three-dimensional visual avatar of your head.

This is what other people see on the visor when they approach you: a deepfake of you.

The Vision Pro displays this Persona avatar when you’re on a FaceTime video call with other people. Obviously, nobody wants to look at your face covered up with gear — so what they see instead on their Macs, iPhones, and iPads is your 3-D impersonation.

During a test FaceTime call, I chatted with an Apple rep’s Persona. It looked almost like an actual video feed of her face, perfectly replicating her expressions, mouth movements, eye animation, and so on. There was just the faintest hint of Uncanny Valley — uncanny foothills, maybe. (Apple indicated that this brand-new technology will improve in the eight months before release, and even thereafter.)

I’ll bet app companies will come up with other clever uses of this digital you, too.

This absurd degree of detail should give you some idea of what took Apple’s engineers so long to finish this headset.

The Tour

Here’s what we got to try out during our hands-on session (hands-off session? heads-on session?).

Photos

It’s just like the Photos app on the iPhone or Mac, except that the photos can be huge. Wall-sized.

And when you open a panorama photo — oh my God. It can wrap all the way around you, obscuring three walls of the room. That mountain, that building lobby, that vista is now life sized. Who knew that for all these years, we’ve been taking panorama photos with our iPhones, unwittingly waiting for a $3,500 way to view them properly?

(The Vision Pro can take photos and videos, too. But here again, Apple has learned from the disasters of its predecessors. Remember Google Glass? That $1500 pair of glasses with a built-in camera?

It wound up banned in theaters, restaurants, and, heaven knows, locker rooms — because it could take stealth pictures and videos. Creepy as hell.

To take a photo, you press a button above your left eyebrow. The entire front of the Vision Pro shows a photo-snapping animation, and everybody hears a shutter-snap sound. Can’t miss it.)

3-D photos and videos

When this headset takes a picture or video, it shoots with two cameras simultaneously, spaced apart to create 3-D pictures and movies. Suddenly, your kid’s birthday party looks as dimensional and cool as a James Cameron blockbuster, minus the blue aliens.

The photos are square, for some reason, and seeing your own life represented as lifelike 3-D dioramas will take some getting used to. But…yeah. Wow.

Watching Movies

Oh man. Oh man. This thing does a beautiful simulation of a dazzling, 4K movie screen right in front of you — literally the most pristine visual experience you’ve ever seen, up to “100 feet” diagonal.

For the space around the movie screen, you can opt to see the room itself, or a sunset beach scene, or, well, a movie theater; as the movie brightens and darkens, you even see a subtle light reflection on the walls and ceiling nearest the screen.

If you’re really, really optimistic, you could even see the Vision Pro saving the 3-D movie industry. In the demo, we watched a clip of James Cameron’s latest “Avatar” in 3-D, which worked fantastically.

Getting work done

The Vision Pro comes with a bunch of built-in apps — Photos, Notes, Safari, Messages, Settings, Keynote, Music, TV, Mail, Freeform, Mindfulness, and so on. Each app’s window floats in its own six-foot-tall “panel” about eight feet in front of you. You can resize each one, move it in space, drag it closer or farther.

Web pages and Messages look great at 10 feet diagonal.

Still, working on documents is the weakest argument for an AR/VR headset. Movies, concerts, games, video calls, and live sports broadcasts—I get it. Gigantic, life-size representations make a thrilling difference. But Microsoft Word and Notes? Seems like a nice big monitor would work fine.

Environments and Immersive Videos

An Environment, in Apple’s terminology, is an immersive photo — a classic VR stunt. You can look around you, above you, below you; there’s no trace of the real world (except, as always, for your hands). Outdoor scenes (Mount Hood, for example) make you feel like you’ve fallen head-first into an issue of National Geographic.

The demo included immersive videos, too. These fill 180 degrees of your forward vision (they’re not completely spherical, like the photos), but the ones we saw were overwhelming. A naturalist feeding a baby rhino, four feet away from you. An Alaskan lake, disturbed only by a happy bear waddling in for a bath. A teaser clip of a basketball game, seated courtside, with the action at life size right in front of you.

I’m not sure what you’d do with these things once you’ve seen them a couple of times — but wow, do they make unforgettable demos.

Mindfulness

This app guides you through calming meditation sessions, with soothing music and screensavery visuals all around you. Very effective.

Dinosaur Encounter

The demo ended with an insanely compelling interactive video.

First, a butterfly entered room. The Apple rep instructed me to hold my finger steady in front of me, and said that if the fates were smiling, the butterfly would land on it for a little rest. It did. (Some of my colleagues weren’t so lucky. “I guess I wanted it too much,” said one.)

Then the wall of the demo room split open to reveal a gigantic screen playing a CGI dinosaur scene. An immense dino — some kind of raptor? — lumbered in, noticed me, and looked directly at me.

As I moved around the room, he continued to stare, tracking me.

And then, curiosity thoroughly piqued, the dinosaur — oh man — stepped out of the screen and into the room.

It was another one-shot, virtual-reality magic trick — but man, what a trick. If your heart rate doesn’t shoot up the first time you see it, you’re in a coma.

Now, our demos were, of course, carefully chaperoned. We didn’t get to see everything the finished Vision Pro is supposed to offer.

For example: we didn’t get to shoot any photos or videos. We didn’t get to try Siri, another way to navigate. We didn’t turn ourselves into those holographic Personas. We didn’t get to play any games.

We never got to “lift” what’s on a Mac screen up into the air and turn it into the equivalent of a 200-inch Sony monitor, like we saw in the promo video. And we didn’t get to try a physical mouse, trackpad, or keyboard (or the on-screen virtual keyboard).

Worth the Weight

In general, the experience of using the Vision Pro was everything the nine-minute ad promises. It’s visually stunning, thoroughly immersive, and technologically gobsmacking.

The promo left out one key aspect of the experience, though: After about 20 minutes, my forehead really started to hurt. Too much load-bearing for too long.

The Apple rep suggested that I loosen the headstrap, which I did; but it was too late. I kept shifting the Vision Pro, and it still felt like a clueless German Shepherd was standing on my eyebrow ridge.

My dreams of watching movies in Apple goggles for the rest of my life came crashing down.

Was it just me? After the demo, I asked eight of the other journalists about their comfort levels. Seven said they’d also felt uncomfortable after a while. They, too, had been told that maybe the thing wasn’t adjusted right, or maybe they’d gotten the wrong “light shield.”

And maybe that’s true. Maybe our straps really weren’t adjusted right. Maybe Apple will continue to fiddle with the design in the next eight months. Maybe, in this assembly-line demo situation, there wasn’t time to achieve headset perfection.

In any case, this first incarnation of Apple Vision Pro won’t be a huge seller — not at $3500, not with only a few apps, and not with the weight of half a laptop strapped to your face.

But we know Apple well enough to anticipate its game plan: Start with a 1.0 version that’s equally praised and damned for its differentness. Then keep fixing, fixing, fixing over the years, chipping away at the specs, features, and cost, until it’s got a hit. That’s what happened with the iPhone, iPad, AirPods, and Apple Watch.

Well, that’s usually how it goes (*cough* HomePod *cough*.)

I mean, does anyone even remember that the first iPhone didn’t have a front camera, a flash, video recording, or GPS? And there was no app store. You got 16 apps, and you were happy.

By those standards, this very first Vision Pro looks like a far more finished machine. It’s as though Apple unveiled the iPhone X back in 2007.

So yeah, $3500 and 1-point-something pounds will keep the 2024 model from reaching iPhone sales levels right out of the gate.

But no headset, no device, has ever hit this high a number on the wonder scale before. (Try it and see if you can disagree.) It makes a hell of a demo — and a reason to look forward to 2028.