Avatar: The Way of Water looked great in Vision Pro.
20th Century Studios
Apple also demonstrated its Immersive Video format that’s coming as an extension to Apple TV Plus. It’s a 180-degree video format, similar to what I’ve seen before in concept, but with really strong resolution and video quality. A splash demo reel of Alicia Keys singing, Apple Sports events, documentary footage, and more reeled off in front of me, a teaser of what’s to come. One-eighty-degree video never appears quite as crisp to me as big-screen film content, but the sports clips I saw made me wonder how good virtual Jets games could be in the future. Things have come a long way.
Would I pay $3,499 for a head-worn cinema? No, but it’s clearly one of this device’s greatest unique strengths. The resolution and brightness of the display was surprising.
Convincing avatars (I mean, personas)
Apple’s Personas are 3D-scanned avatars generated by using the Vision Pro to scan your face, making a version of yourself that shows up in FaceTime chats if you want, or also on the outside of the Vision Pro’s curved OLED display to show whether you’re “present” or in an app. I didn’t see how that outer display worked, but I had a FaceTime with someone in their Persona form, and it was good. Again, it looked surprisingly good.
I’ve seen Meta’s ultra-realistic Codec Avatars, which aim for realistic representations of people in VR. Those are stunning, and I’ve also seen Meta’s phone-scanned step-down version in an early form last year, where a talking head spoke to me in VR. Apple’s Persona looked better than Meta’s phone-scanned avatar, although a bit fuzzy around the edges, like a dream. The woman whose Persona was scanned appeared in her own window, not in a full-screen form.
And I wondered how expressive the emotions are with the Vision Pro’s scanning cameras. The Pro has an ability to scan jaw movement similar to the Quest Pro, and the Persona I chatted with was friendly and smiling. How would it look for someone I know, like my mom? Here, it was good enough that I forgot it was a scan.
We demoed a bit of Apple’s Freeform app, where a collaboration window opened up while my Persona friend chatted in another window. 3D objects popped up in the Freeform app, a full home scan. It looked realistic enough.
Dinosaurs in my world
The final demo was an app experience called Encounter Dinosaurs, which reminded me of early VR app demos I had years ago: An experience emphasizing just the immersive ‘wow’ factor of dinosaurs appearing in a 3D window that seemed to open up in the back wall of my demo room. Creatures that looked like carnotauruses slowly walked through the window and into my space.
All my demos were seated except for this one, where I stood up and walked around a bit. This sounds like it wouldn’t be an impressive demo, but again, the quality of the visuals and how they looked in relation to the room’s passthrough video capture was what made it feel so great. As the dinosaur snapped at my hand, it felt pretty real. And so did a butterfly that danced through the room and tried to land on my extended finger.
I smiled. But even more so, I was impressed when I took off the headset. My own everyday vision wasn’t that much sharper than what Apple’s passthrough cameras provided. The gap between the two was closer than I would have expected, and it’s what makes Apple’s take on mixed reality in VR work so well.
Then there’s the battery pack. There’s a corded battery that’s needed to power the headset, instead of a built-in battery like most others have. That meant I had to make sure to grab the battery pack as I started to move around, which is probably a reason why so many of Apple’s demos were seated.
What about fitness and everything else?
Apple didn’t emphasize fitness much at all, a surprise to me. VR is already a great platform for fitness, although no one’s finessed headset design for fitness comfort. Maybe having that battery pack right now will limit movement in active games and experiences. Maybe Apple will announce more plans here later. The only taste I got of health and wellness was a one-minute micro meditation, which was similar to the one on the Apple Watch. It was pretty, and again a great showcase of the display quality, but I want more.
2024 is still a while away, and Apple’s headset is priced way out of range for most people. And, I have no idea how much this current headset will feel functional doing everyday work. But Apple did show off a display, and an interface, that are far better than I was ready for. If Apple can build on that, and Vision Pro finds ways of expanding its mixed reality capabilities, then who knows what else is possible?
This was just my fast-take reaction to a quick set of demos on one day in Cupertino. There are a lot more questions to come.