The Apple Vision Pro is a powerful mixed reality headset that is designed to offer immersive experiences, including serious multitasking, video watching, gaming, and reimagined FaceTime calls.
- Design: The headset has a sleek design and features a 3D-formed glass, aluminum alloy frame, and a light seal between the headset and your face that comes in multiple sizes to fit your face. The device is tethered to an external battery, which some consider a downside due to its short battery life.
- Eye and Hand Tracking: The Vision Pro lacks traditional controllers and instead uses a 3D interface with eye and hand tracking. You can stare at an app icon and select it by tapping your fingers together. The device also has cameras that point down at your lap, which allows you to interact without raising your hands. Scrolling is done by tapping your fingers together and waving your arm from right to left.
- EyeSight Feature: This feature displays your eyes on the Vision Pro’s external display, designed to help you feel connected to those around you. It might appear a bit unsettling to some users. When someone decides to turn the immersion level to the maximum (using the Digital Crown), a different animation is displayed, similar to a “do not disturb” mode.
- Use Cases: The device offers a larger canvas for displaying multiple apps simultaneously. For instance, you can have a music player pinned on your left, Messages on the right, and a browser in the middle. You can even extend your MacBook’s display by looking at it while wearing the Vision Pro. The address bar can be operated by voice instead of typing.
- FaceTime Experience: Apple has reinvented the FaceTime experience on the Vision Pro. The front cameras on the device capture your digital “Persona” and display it during video calls, mirroring your face and hand movements. The quality of the video call has been described as akin to video game quality, with facial movements and expressions being fairly convincing.
- Movie Watching Experience: The Vision Pro can replicate a 100-foot-wide screen in front of your face, complete with Spatial Audio. It supports 4K resolution and 3D movie playback. Watching movies on the device can feel like you’re in a movie theater, as the Cinema Environment feature blacks out everything else.
- Gaming and Immersive Videos: Apple says that the Vision Pro will play more than 100 Apple Arcade games at launch and work with game controllers. Additionally, Apple showed off a new Immersive Video format that it’s working on, which has a 180-degree field of view.
- Photos and Videos: The Vision Pro is designed to let you experience photos and videos in an immersive way with life-size scale, and you can view panorama shots as if you were there. The Vision Pro’s 3D camera lets you capture spatial photos and video.
Despite its impressive features and capabilities, the Apple Vision Pro is expensive, retailing at $3,500. It is set to be available early in 2024.