After social media network Meta has already invested billions of dollars in virtual reality glasses, Apple is also launching computer glasses: the Vision Pro. Apple worked on this product for more than seven years, and the $3,499 price tag suggests it’s far from ready for the mass market. The Vision Pro won’t be on sale until next year, initially only in the US. Monday evening, Apple announced the Vision Pro with a slick commercial. The glasses combine virtual reality with a direct video display of your surroundings. The result is called ‘mixed reality’. For Apple, the world’s largest hardware maker with annual sales of $394 billion, this is the first new product category since the white AirPod earphones and the Apple Watch. It’s also the first new product that doesn’t need to be continuously connected to the iPhone, Apple’s biggest sales success to date.
With this device on your head, you move to a spatial version of the iPhone operating system iOS. Operation works via eye movements, hand gestures and voice commands. Or you can connect a mouse or keyboard to it, as with a normal computer.
The Vision Pro looks like modern ski goggles, but the comparison with diving goggles is better. After all, you immerse yourself in a different world. And just as a diver only has oxygen for a limited time, the Vision Pro can also last up to two hours on a full battery. And just as a diver carries an oxygen tank on his back, the Vision Pro user carries a portable battery with him. This keeps the weight of the glasses somewhat within limits.
With the Vision Pro glasses, Apple focuses on indoor or office use, or safely strapped into an airplane seat. It is dangerous to walk around the street with these glasses.
Anti-vomiting chip against nausea
During its presentation, Apple suggested scenarios in which it would be useful to wear such glasses. To fully immerse yourself in video calls, movies or games or to operate your computer semi hands-free, with a few magical hand movements.
Read also: After the VR glasses on your eyes, now also a sticker under your nose: smell gives virtual reality a new dimension
There are just so many ways that this device is not working properly. For example, a faltering operation, Siri that does not immediately understand what you say, people who wonder what you are doing with those dark glasses on your head. To give the bystanders an impression of your activities, the glasses on the front show an animated version of your moving eyes, like a digital hatch.
The Vision Pro is packed with sensors: cameras, radars, lidars (lasers that can estimate distance) and scanners. They are necessary to scan the environment, so that you do not trip over the coffee table or the planter when you walk to your mail. On the inside, you’re looking at a high-resolution screen. A separate processor, the R1, has to process all environmental information in real time and make it correspond to what you see. It’s a kind of anti-vomiting chip, to prevent you from getting sick. Not everyone is up to ‘motion sickness’, the modern variant of motion sickness.
Sensors in the glasses monitor your eye movements and a built-in 3D camera can identify you using an iris scan. Your eye movements are not passed on to websites and apps from other developers, Apple emphasizes. But privacy is a sensitive point when using these types of devices. The Vision Pro collects a truckload of biometric and personal data in order to function at all: an accurate scan of your face, of your posture, of your home environment, of the people around you, of all the noise in the environment. It is not data that you want to give away unnoticed to outsiders.
Developers
Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, already spent billions on computer glasses without achieving great commercial success. The metaverse, a 3D version of the social network, is also not getting off the ground. The enthusiasm about meeting in the virtual world has also died down since the corona pandemic is over and everyone can meet again in real life.
Apple considers the Vision Pro as an extra screen that you use where you would normally grab a tablet or a computer. But if those expensive glasses only show flat screens (your mail, a movie or a web browser), the added value is not very great.
So far, few people outside of Apple have been able to try out the Vision Pro. For the press, the device could only be admired from a distance on Monday. The presentation at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is aimed at developers; they have to come up with apps and especially games that can make optimal use of the new spatial possibilities. Only then will you really feel like you’re living in your iPhone. As it stands, Apple’s vision of the computer of the future is not yet a product for the masses in the coming years.
This Cnet journalist got a Vision sneak peek: