One More Thing… Apple Vision Pro
One More Thing……
In signature Apple way, Tim Cook went ahead and announced one more thing on stage during the Apple WWDC 2023.
One more thing has been Apple’s way of revealing their best products, their most innovative, most unique and most most outrageous products. Be it the iPhone, iPad, Mac or AirPods, every single one has something outrageous.
One More thing, can be associated with disrupting industries, creating new industries or turning an existing one over it’s head.
And this time, Apple is doing this with the Apple Vision Pro.
Apple Vision Pro, a mixed reality headset, is Apple’s take on VR and AR. With an outrageous price tag, a very controversial design and ground breaking technology, this headset is Apple declaring we are here, and we are here to disrupt it all.
Apple Vision Pro
Design
A look at the device and you know the design is going to be a talking point.
It looks a lot like a high end ski mask. A ski mask stuffed with way too much tech and made out of glass and aluminium and high quality fabric bands.
I like it. Compare it to the competition, and it easily wins me over.
The next thing that just stands out is the amount of tech in this piece of hardware. Just amount of sensors is enough to tell you, a lot, and I mean a lot of technological wizardry has gone into this device. Front facing cameras, IR cameras, Down facing cameras, LIDAR sensors, Depth cameras.. ooofff.. that’s a lot of sensors in a consumer device.
Sensors and Computing
Taking in information from all these sensors, processing huge amounts of data, and giving the best possible experience to users meant Apple needed powerful computation on board. With the on board M2 chip — same as in it’s laptops — Apple has taken care of handling compute intensive tasks like running the operating system, performing machine learning tasks, and graphics processing.
To handle the huge amount of data coming in from all the sensors, cameras and microphones, there is the new R1 chip. Apple claims that the R1 processes all this data in real time with a lag of just 12 milliseconds, which if true, implies almost instantaneous response and processing — — that is awesome.
Vision OS
Yeah.. you read that right. Apple just developed a whole new OS for their Vision Pro. It clearly shows how serious Apple is about this new direction.
To give consumers a seamless experience, something so intuitive that it just works with the Vision Pro headset, Apple came up with the Vision OS.
Controlling Vision OS is made intuitive by using hands, eyes and speech as the controllers rather than having physical controllers. Using the onboard sensors and the R1 chip, Apple seems to have figured out a way to make using a VR headset as natural as it can be.. just short of using brain waves to navigate the UI and use the OS.
From the announcements made by Apple, Vision OS seems super capable and feature rich. An infinite screen space, scrolling and controlling using hand gestures, resizable screens, controlling the extent of the virtual environment, facetime, taking pictures, taking notes, searching the web …… so many and even more … and of course Apple being Apple has it’s ecosystem tricks which again are mind blowing. VisionOS looks like a combination of all the best features of all the platforms iOS, iPadOS and MacOS
VisionOS has so much going on that covering all the features in this article is impossible and will require an article of its own.
As of now there aren’t many apps for the Vision OS, infact if we go by the demo, the only apps are Apple’s apps. But Apple has released software kits and development tools to help developers adopt to the platform and develop an entire app ecosystem for this device. That’s probably one of the reasons for the late launch of the device, Early 2024, to give developers a window to experiment with the platform and create new apps for the platform.
We already know about Disney’s plans to make stunning application for the Vision OS and with Apple’s brand value I believe a lot many developers jumping in, after all Apple is not marketing this as a gaming thing or just a content consumption device.. it’s a whole new way, a whole new dimension to computing.
My Take
There’s a lot to talk about the Vision Pro. The design, technology, hardware, software sensors… the price. With Apple stepping into this domain, we will probably see major changes and breakthroughs and explosion in this industry.
The VisionPro is an excellent technological marvel, but it also comes with its downsides.. the 2 hr battery life, the price, its impact on our health.. but the biggest concern I have is how it would affect as a society. With this headset, the already isolating society will be pushed into even more isolation. What happens and how we face these challenges remains to be seen, but what’s sure is that we are heading into a new direction and it sure seems a fun direction, but we do need to be careful.
For now, lets see the Vision Pro unfold, how it develops, its adoption.. and how it changes.. whether it takes the shrinking VR industry to new highs or itself becomes a victim of it. It sure is an exciting time ahead of us.
