Speaker 1: Let’s do this. You’re like, ready Player one. Can you see my eyes? You can see my eyes. I’ve been covering AR and VR for over a decade. The biggest bet in this space in years has finally arrived. Apple’s Vision Pro, A $3,500. So-called Spatial Computer. Now, if you’ve been AR and VR for years, what makes the Vision Pro different? And if you’re new to the space, what makes it a computer? Well, I’ve been wearing one for days [00:00:30] and I’m about to tell you, so let’s find out. The Apple Vision Pro is like a totally new product from Apple, but it’s design-wise, very similar to something like a Meta Quest three, it feels like a VR headset. The weight of this is heavier than a Quest three. It’s 1.3 pounds, but the Quest three is 1.1 pounds. So the difference is not that fast, but you can definitely feel it.
Speaker 1: This is aluminum and glass on the front. How it goes on your face and [00:01:00] how it attaches with these straps really matters. This one strap feels fine for short sessions, but I would really recommend that other dual loop strap for even longer sessions. But the one thing that this doesn’t have is a battery. So you also have this three quarter pound battery that’s also here. So this is 1.3 pounds without a battery, so that is heavy, and when you put on your face, you’re going to feel that, but I just want to tell you that I really don’t think it’s that different in size than what something like a Quest three is like. [00:01:30] It is very soft. You just turn this knob to tighten it and that’s it. So it’s very easy to put on. I’ve gotten used to having it centered on where my eyes are and it feels comfortable.
Speaker 1: One thing about Vision Pro is that I think it’s best for the hand tracking, eye tracking that you be seated. A lot of this is browsing type stuff where you’re clicking and dragging and swiping and doing stuff like that. The other thing is that this doesn’t do any room setup, which surprised me. The Quest three has this set up your room boundary and all that. [00:02:00] The Vision Pro, you just get up and walk around. Hi, I’m just taking a look around the room. You guys are here. I just put this dinosaur experience over here, which is bringing this window where the dinosaur is actually leaning its head from the screen into here and it’s sniffing my hand. There’s a big, I think it’s an allosaurus. I saw this demo with Apple too, where it’s going to step into the room. Now my hands can actually [00:02:30] be seen overlaid with this experience. It’s like green screen. The occlusion with that is also wild because that is not something that you can do in any other headset that I’ve tried. Let’s try out meditation. I feel like this actually is something you would do in while lying down in bed. Okay, let’s do five minutes.
Speaker 2: Hi, this is Jessica and I’ll be guiding you through this meditation on creativity.
Speaker 1: I just want to share [00:03:00] that there’s a pulsing ball of pedals. It’s very peaceful how the headset dims your surroundings around you. And now, whoa, all these pedals are flying everywhere and I feel like I’m floating through a multicolored art gallery.
Speaker 2: Exhale release.
Speaker 1: That actually was really good to do. So those are my very first impressions of putting on the Vision [00:03:30] Pro. But let’s go into the details. Apple calls the Vision Pro a spatial computer, but it is a VR ar headset. This is a mixed reality headset, and I’ve looked at products like this before and Apples has its own style, so it looks like a VR headset, but on front it almost looks like a curved iPhone bonded here of aluminum and glass and the controls on top are kind of like an Apple Watch. You’ve got a digital crown and you’ve got a flat button that also handles Apple Pay payments when you do a double tap. So those should feel [00:04:00] pretty familiar except the digital crown dials out. And in reality, bringing this curtain of VR basically around you or brings in the pass through cameras. Now the pass through cameras are what makes this mixed reality.
Speaker 1: These are very high resolution cameras that are on the outside along with lidar, which is on the iPhone for depth sensing. And there are even cameras on the bottom here that handle face tracking, so it can see your lips in your mouth movement as well as your eyes inside here. [00:04:30] The lenses which move to adjust to your IPD or inter pupillary distance also have tracking cameras that are in here on the inside that handle eye tracking. And they also are used for optic id, which is a new type of feature. I haven’t used other headsets that do this, that scan your iris to authenticate things like unlocking or making payments. Apple’s new system on here instead of face ID or touch id. Audio is pumped in through these little speakers on the sides, which [00:05:00] you can hear from the outside, but are mostly directed to your ears. Kind of like the meta quest, but you could also put in AirPods and just listen to things personalized as well and block out sound. Let’s talk about this battery. Okay, this battery is a thing. You have to use an external battery with the Vision Pro and it’s pretty heavy. This is all part of one construction and it’s what makes this headset feel a little more uncomfortable to walk around in, to say the least.
Speaker 1: [00:05:30] The whole way you interact with Vision Pro is the newest, most interesting thing here. It’s the most different from any other vr, AR headset. The whole thing is hand in eye tracking, but Apple’s kept a lot of the gestures pretty simple. If you want to select something, you look at it and you tap it. And if you want to close a window or you look at it where something will you can then exit out. If you want to be able [00:06:00] to bring up the apps again, you can click on this button up here or you could use Siri. But if you want to scroll, use your fingers to do the swipe gesture. And then if you want to zoom, you take your two fingers. And I do that. I can zoom in on wherever I’m looking, which is really cool. Or if I look down at the bottom of the screen and then I can drag my fingers to make the picture bigger or I could swipe back and forth to different photos.
Speaker 1: Or if I want to be able to exit [00:06:30] the app, I can look down at an X and I can tap. But there are some areas where I find the precision to be a little challenging. That is because of eye tracking. If you’re looking at something like a webpage where there are all sorts of little things that you could click on a website, maybe you get it a little bit off and then suddenly you are clicking on something that you didn’t mean to click on. Maybe you accidentally delete something or you want to do something. And after a while, that started to make me feel a little bit fatigued. So I’m curious to [00:07:00] see how that feels over time.
Speaker 3: I’m seeing it. It’s real.
Speaker 1: Oh, hey, what’s up Bridgette?
Speaker 3: Hi. Hey, can you see me? Hi. Those are your Yeah, look, I see you blinking. I’m blinking,
Speaker 1: I’m smiling. So what does it look like to you? Because I can’t actually capture this. This
Speaker 3: Is not what I expected. It looks like like a blur. Really? Yeah. I want to clean it off [00:07:30] a little bit to get, do you
Speaker 1: Smudge my eyes? Eyesight is a wild technology that puts your eyes on the outside of the vision pro. It’s animating the eyes real time from the same scan data that was used to create the persona. My avatar that I use in FaceTimes,
Speaker 3: I am press. The is very reactive, but it isn’t as clear as I hope it would be. I’m kind of like, can you see me? I kind of want to squinch a little bit. Like, Hey, are you in there? So
Speaker 1: Do you see me blinking
Speaker 3: Like this [00:08:00] at certain angles? I can’t just, Scott’s in there somewhere, right? Just add you here deep
Speaker 1: Down, right? I’m going to open up a grid of apps. Okay, what do you see now? It’s
Speaker 3: Much brighter. Like this blue haze, right?
Speaker 1: Okay. Did I disappear?
Speaker 3: Oh, oh, I see your eyes with the haze. So can tell you’re still able to see me, but you’re clearly in some.
Speaker 1: Now if I do this and bring up my
Speaker 3: Whole, oh, Scott’s going away.
Speaker 1: Now I’m in Joshua Tree. Where am I?
Speaker 3: Yeah, now I can definitely tell that you [00:08:30] are not able to see me.
Speaker 1: You appear, when I look at you, you begin to sort of ghost in a little
Speaker 3: Bit. Oh, I’m a ghost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re ghost.
Speaker 3: Ghost standing. Hello. It’s just me and you’re virtual land paying you a visit. I bridge it
Speaker 1: And now I can dial away Joshua Tree. And now you’re here.
Speaker 3: Does it know your hands from my hands? If I just kind of come in here and start clicking.
Speaker 1: [00:09:00] Oh wait, something happened? Bring your hand up.
Speaker 3: Hold on, we’re going to click.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it opened. It
Speaker 4: Messing with you. I didn’t really
Speaker 1: Think that would happen.
Speaker 1: One of the most uncanny parts of Vision Pro is persona. This whole idea of scanning yourself. I already did one here and you can see what it looks like with my virtual glasses and my hands popping up here. It’s not exactly like me. I mean it’s kind of close and you can see some emotions [00:09:30] here where, I mean I can do that with my face. I can smile. And this is all virtual, so that’s not actually me. This is the scan that Apple does. Okay, let’s test out FaceTime. I’m going to call Lexi to Lexi. I’m going to do FaceTime.
Speaker 4: FaceTime video from Scott,
Speaker 1: Lexi.
Speaker 4: Oh my goodness. I dunno what to make of this. This is [00:10:00] very different. You look like Scott, but from an alternate universe. Am I talking to which version? Your glasses.
Speaker 1: Glasses. My hovering glasses.
Speaker 4: Your glasses. So do you know what you look like? What are you doing? Do you know what you look like? What
Speaker 1: I do know I do. Yes. I’ll ask. I do know what I look like. It looks somewhat like me.
Speaker 4: Do I look like a normal FaceTime call?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re just popping up in a window right now in a volcanic landscape though. So [00:10:30] as you would hovering all over the volcanic basin here, I’m going to share my view. Ready?
Speaker 4: Okay, I am ready. Oh, this is bizarre.
Speaker 1: So as we’re talking and I’m in the volcano with you, we’re going to also, I’m going to drag this over here, put Apple TV up here if you want to see me adjusting the room environment.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: I’m going to bring the world back in [00:11:00] and it’s going to Now here’s the rest of
Speaker 4: The, hi everybody.
Speaker 1: Hello.
Speaker 4: Hi. I never going to get used to this. I can really feel like I’m going to have this odd like, oh, that’s bizarre. Don’t do that. That’s scary. That’s scary. Okay. This is a very weird dream that I’m having right now. This is not real.
Speaker 1: It looks really trippy from my end too.
Speaker 4: Wow. Well thank you for calling me. Have fun [00:11:30] in the metaverse. Bye.
Speaker 1: Of course. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.
Speaker 4: That was so weird.
Speaker 1: So that’s a little bit about the Vision Pro’s design and features and what it feels like. But what about what you’d actually do with it in everyday life? That’s a good question. I’ve only been using this for a handful of days and I think Apple makes it pretty clear. First, this is a pretty fantastic personal home theater headset, but incredibly [00:12:00] expensive. I think you’ll use it for that possibly. Definitely. If you have one, lemme watch a video on cnet Siri, open CNET YouTube channel. And I’m actually going to play a video of myself. This is really weird. That’s when I had longer hair. I don’t normally lie down and watch videos about myself in bed. People might use it for doing work and starting to work on a bit of my review. Here I am [00:12:30] sitting here during my video writing and talking on camera. And yeah, I can just take some notes and type absolutely terribly while I talk to you. But I could just do this and I’m floating a monitor right here. So you could just basically do a whole bunch of different things at once and float this one up there. Do Siri Open Maps.
Speaker 1: [00:13:00] I don’t know why I’d want to look at a map right now, but maybe I just do want to look at a map. You don’t have to use Siri, but actually I find it’s an easier way to open up stuff. You can also search for things with voice cnet. And so I’ve got CNET up here and I’m checking out the site and I’m talking here and I’m also looking at you and I’m floating 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different screens up at once. And I think you can just keep opening up more and just make it a big multitasking [00:13:30] environment that goes all around you. So one thing Apple’s selling this headset for is some sort of a memory device, an experiential memory machine, the ability to record 3D they call spatial videos or photos, doing them on the headset or doing them on an iPhone 15 pro and playing them back in this, I mean, you can play back videos in a VR headset anywhere.
Speaker 1: One thing that Apple does is making it easy to access your own photo library and just tap into it. Plus panoramic photos. [00:14:00] Feel like you’re looking at this window into the world that you visited. I’ve taken panoramic photos, so looking at them now, I have a few that I forgot that I took and suddenly I’m in this giant wraparound window that feels like I’m at the place like my mom’s backyard. And that’s really cool. But there are some things that feel, especially when you expand them into this hazy background, like you are actually there. [00:14:30] People are pretty much a life size. So I’m looking at my relatives staring at me and I’m looking at walking around Central Park and it does feel like a hazy minority report, sort of a holographic recollection. So yes, it can be a memory machine or it’s starting to become one.
Speaker 1: The other thing you can do besides connecting a keyboard and trackpad is you could actually pair your MacBook and [00:15:00] interconnect it with the Vision Pro. I’m taking a MacBook Air and I’m putting effectively a giant monitor floating it right here instead of seeing it on my screen. I can look at pages, I can do a lot of those things. I can look at Slack to see when people arrive today and checked in. I can share all my work tools. And then I can also still bring up things like Vision Pro apps. So I could say Siri, open Photos, and then all my photos are popped up over there and you can actually, [00:15:30] if I copy this and then I go over here to Pages and I paste it. So I actually pasted the photo that I just had opened in the Photos app now into the thing I was working on.
Speaker 1: So let’s talk about games. If you are thinking about getting a Vision Pro for games, don’t get a Vision Pro because it’s not a gaming device. The MedQuest has [00:16:00] games. It is a game console and there are hundreds of games on there that are really great and immersive. Apple’s gaming presence right now on this is very slight. There are a couple of Apple arcade games that have various elements of immersiveness and there is the ability to use a controller and throw games onto a big screen, which is cool, similar to the way you can get display glasses, like X reels glasses to do that too. But at this price, I don’t think you’re buying a headset to just play your games on a big screen. [00:16:30] Another big thing compared to the Quest three that’s missing on Vision Pro is fitness. Now I use the Quest three all the time to get exercise every single day with Supernatural.
Speaker 1: That is an app that I found to be fantastic. A lot of people use it for cardio exercise, beat Saber, very active things. Now, apple has not been doing active fitness on the Vision Pro yet. Maybe it’s because of safety concerns. Maybe it’s because of this big battery pack. So again, you want games and you want fitness. You should go for the MedQuest. [00:17:00] So what are the final thoughts on Apple Vision Pro and should you buy one? First of all, it’s a $3,500 mixed reality headset. I would not recommend that people I know spend that much money for something like this, but it’s one of the most complex products I’ve ever had to review. I have so many different feelings about it. I mean, there’s the element of the price, but there are also so many fascinating and stunning experiences that I’ve had in this headset.
Speaker 1: A little butterfly, things that have opened my eyes in new directions. I mean, there are ways that this pushes the boundaries [00:17:30] on the technology, the way that the display is fantastic in quality. I mean the fact that it allows the ecosystem from Apple to flow in very easily and get work done, the persona and telepresence questions. But then there are also the weird things like this dangling battery and this very delicate build, I feel like where I’d coddle it and take care of it. And the fact that there aren’t many apps that launch, and I’m really curious who develops for this. At the same time that Pro and Vision Pro should tell you something, this is for people [00:18:00] who either want to pay into the future now and see what it’s like or people who might be interested in using this For the Fidelity. For things like maybe viewing 3D animation or working on a model, or maybe it’s for medical training or the things that you would’ve used High-end AR headsets before, or the types of business VR headsets.
Speaker 1: This could enter that space at that price. The future may be on our face or it may be exploring new types [00:18:30] of interactions that will flow into other types of devices, including our face. Hard to tell where the future’s going, but I think it dovetails with AI in a lot of ways, and I think it’s the type of expanded computing ecosystem that we’re going to see from a lot of different people. This isn’t the last time I’m going to talk about Vision Pro. We’re going to look at this as it keeps evolving and take a look at a lot more absent experiences and think about it in comparison with the rest of the landscape. But if you have any other questions, make sure to leave them below and make sure to [00:19:00] like and subscribe. Thanks for watching.
