A week of Vision Pro: Revisiting some pre-launch assumptions
I've done ok so far.
A few days before the Apple Vision Pro shipped to Apple Stores around the country I published a short write-up outlining my success criteria for the first generation of the Vision Pro. My write-up made a few assumptions about what might happen — I want to revisit some of these assumptions now that the Vision Pro has existed in the wild for about a week.
I picked up my Vision Pro the morning it was made available in stores. It’s a magical device that I’m using more than I anticipated, and in ways I maybe did not initially anticipate. To my surprise, I’ve found my power usage of this device to be for productivity, replacing my monitor setup (which looks laughable compared to the surface area I get to work with in the Vision Pro). In fact, I’m writing this post from my headset.
I’ll save my review of the device and its significance for a later post (as I’m still ideating on concrete opportunities enabled by it, but if you’re interested my live review thread on Twitter went viral, for some reason) — but let’s shred some of my pre-launch predictions (or maybe not?).
I’m not looking at predictions that will take a longer time to play out, e.g. reverberations across the entire VR market — it’s just too early to call at this point.
There is an undeniable new level of gravitas and a sense of longevity emanating out of the VR industry — and the Vision Pro is VR — with Apple’s entry.
For the last week, the Vision Pro was the hottest topic in tech extending even into “normie” discourse as the future of computing. This segment on Breaking Points, an independent political news outlet, is a pretty great encapsulation of the spread of both positive and negative reactions to the Vision Pro. No prior headset has garnered this much attention and certainly has never widely been touted as a possible “future” of anything by a general audience.
As such, before we embellish LinkedIn influencer posts (“10 ways sPaTiAL cOmpUtinG will revolutionize your business today”)
I haven’t seen any posts like this, yet. Thank the heavens.
Apple might pretend that their device is not a VR headset
Referring to the Vision Pro as a “VR headset”, particularly post-release, is a semantic detail that some folks might get angry with me about here. While it certainly can provide fully immersive experiences, the majority of high-quality experiences currently available in the Vision Pro for consumers are using familiar apps and services in a new geo-anchored modality. There are very few (high-quality) 3D-native apps currently on the store — I didn’t expect too much in this regard but I was surprised by how little there is.
While this will certainly change with 3D devs getting their hands on the device, the over-reliance on geo-anchored planes has led some folks to proclaim that Apple was in its right to call the headset a “spatial computing” device vs a VR headset. I still don’t buy such a distinction in the long term, but alas the “spatial computing” maximalists have a point right now. The Vision Pro genuinely feels more like a laptop and TV replacement than a Quest replacement.
Vision Pro is that it’s not competing with Meta for the attention of the same demographic […] The Vision Pro, with a $3500 price tag and strong proclivity towards productivity-concentric use cases, is clearly not designed as a product for 10-year-olds
This is glaringly obvious, especially after spending a lot of time on the device. The Vision Pro feels purpose-built for productivity and entertainment, and while it’s extraordinary in such an application it feels pretty useless for everything else that’s outside of parameter. This includes use cases like gaming and (in my opinion) fitness, which do very well on the Quest. I don’t think either Gorilla Tag or Supernatural power users will be shifting en masse to the Vision Pro anytime soon.
A big drawback for applications like gaming is the very limited input to the device. The entire UX is effectively controlled by a pinch gesture (which approximates a mouse click on a computer or a screen tap on an iPhone) which is not viable input for many immersive applications and games. For example, the highly successful Golf+ title for Quest is ostensibly infeasible on the Vision Pro — a simple pinch is not sufficient input to emulate an immersion golfing experience (at least to make it worthwhile). In fact, many teams I’ve spoken to building for the Quest are struggling with how to port to the Vision Pro, and question whether the effort is even worth it at this point given the tiny install base.
we have strong guesses of potential killer use cases (e.g. monitor replacement) but no evidence of any
Monitor replacement is indeed a killer use case of this device — it very much feels like the screen to end all other screens. I’m almost ready to sell my TV as it feels like a laughably archaic piece of technology after the Vision Pro.
In a VR/MR sense, there has been a lot of public ideation on great apps for the Vision Pro e.g. virtual pets, spatial presentations, guided training apps etc. My only gripe with most of these ideas: they aren’t uniquely enabled by the Vision Pro, and to some extent either already exist on or are technically viable for the Quest ecosystem — which has and will foreseeably continue to have a much larger install base than the Vision Pro.
As such, I decided to crowdsource getting some ideas of products and features for the Vision Pro that are impossible on the Quest 3. While the responses did not turn me on to a specific product idea, the Vision Pro has (at least) 3 features that may enable such incomparable experiences: 1) Volumes (i.e. ability to run multiple apps simultaneously next to each other) 2) Much more resource available to developers to do on-edge machine learning than on the Quest 3) Eye tracking (which exists in the discontinued Meta Quest Pro, but not Quest 3, which was lamented by many enthusiasts upon its launch).
It’s effectively an expensive dev kit at this stage in its life cycle, by necessity, and doesn’t need to be perfect
I stand by this, but I admit it’s an extremely polished dev kit. The build quality and feel of the device are everything you’d expect from an Apple product.
The install base is and will be tiny for now, the app ecosystem is (shockingly) underdeveloped, it’s prohibitively expensive, and devs are still figuring out what the hell to build for this thing. Many of the consumer spatial apps that do exist make nice demos but are janky and don’t really provide any serious value (e.g. Spatial Paint).
It’s also imperfect — it’s too heavy and uncomfortable for most consumers to tolerate for long sessions, the field of view is poor, there is too much motion blurrines etc.
But — crucially — it does aptly experientially present the vision of the future of computing that Apple is selling consumers. It’s just unlikely that this iteration of the device is the one that’s ready to go mainstream.
I expect the Vision Pro to become a techno-optimist status symbol that later becomes normalized for public wear
This is my hottest take in the entire write-up I feel very confident being proven right about. It’s already happening.