Finally, I have been able to put my hands on an Apple Vision Pro. Thanks to the very kind people of the Helsinki XR Center who let me spend more than one hour with it, and my buddy Gianni who let me have another half an hour, I managed to have enough time to play around with the device to have an informed opinion about it. And I would like to share it with you, even if I’m sure that you have already read a thousand opinions about it… but mine is the only one where you will find the word “potato”, so it’s worth reading it.
Keep in mind that this is a “hands-on” post and not a full detailed review because the time I have spent on it is not enough to have a final opinion on the headset (I would have needed at least a week). So some impressions I’m writing here may actually change after intensive and prolonged use.
Design
Since I’m Italian, I always like to start with the design of the device. I would say the Vision Pro is well-manufactured and you can see it has been made with premium materials. Apple is one of the tech companies that cares the most about design and beauty and the Vision Pro reflects this.
But still, I can’t say I fully love it. The main reason behind this statement is that the lateral white plastic parts are for me totally unrelated to the rest of the body of the device, which is made with black and gray materials, usually fabric. They look out of context and in my opinion, ruin a bit the aesthetics of everything.
That said, let’s have a look at the headset. On the front, you can see the covering glass of the device, with the EyeSight display behind it.
Front view of the headset
If you look with more attention, you notice that on the lower part there are the various tracking cameras and sensors.
Tilted Top View
On the left side, you can see the left white plastic frame, that holds one of the speakers and the connector for the battery.
Left view
On the right side, there is the other speaker, and also the crown to regulate the headset around your head.
Right View
On the back, there is a soft strap that goes onto your nape when you wear the device.
Back view
From the top, you can have a full overview of the wearing system of the headset, plus you see the digital crown button and the top button that you can use to give commands to the headset. The top button is the one you use to turn on the device.
Top View
From the bottom, you have a better view of the speakers’ holes. You also see the nose pad and you notice more sensors used to track you and the environment.
Bottom View
If you look inside it, you mostly see the facemask and the lenses, which have a pretty unique shape. What surprised me about the lenses is that while I was learning them with a cloth I noticed that they were concave and not convex.
Inner view
Visuals
Visuals are the part that impressed me the most with the Vision Pro. But it is also the clearest example of why I defined the Vision Pro “Good Good Bad Bad” soon after I did my first tests.
The “Good Good” part is the resolution. It is simply incredible. After having handed me the headset, my friend Jussi suggested me to try the “Environments” demo, which basically enclosed me into a few enhanced 6DOF photos of places. I tried a few of them, one about the moon, and one being on some rocks close to a cliff. And I can guarantee you that it has been one of the fucking coolest demos of VR I had in my 10 years in the field: the sense of immersion was literally over the top… I’ve never felt immersed like that. The digital environment has such a high resolution, that is displayed so well to the eyes, that you can only go in awe when you try it. The subtle ambient audio completes the magic and if you try it, you feel really there. When I was on the moon, it felt so good, so relaxing. When I moved towards the cliff, I was afraid of going down. It was crazy good, I would like to return there.
Nice video, but trust me… seeing it from inside is a totally different experience
Every experience that tries to show high-quality graphics is amplified on the Vision Pro because the resolution is very good, the processor is strong enough to show good-looking 3D assets, and the colors of the display are pretty bright. I also didn’t see any screen door effect, even if I didn’t explicitly try to focus on the pixels. Everything was so magical.
The FOV is also good enough: I’ve heard that it is slightly smaller than the Quest 3 one, but in the short time I had with it, I never had any sensation of being inside binoculars or things like that.
But before you get too excited by my words and start doing this
let me go to the “Bad Bad” parts. First of all, the display has some motion blur issues and things do not look that good while you rotate your head: this is especially noticeable in the passthrough (I will talk about it in a while). Then the lenses suffer from aberrations in the periphery: if you try to look at the very left or the very right, you will see that things look distorted there. It is just a tiny slice of your field of view, but a part of me kept noticing it and I found it pretty disturbing. It is not so bad as to ruin your experience, but it is like having a little stone in your shoe: you can still walk, but once in a while, it gives you discomfort.
The lenses of the device
It seems they optimized everything for the scenario where the user sits down and focuses on a big screen in front of him to watch a movie. For this, you just need a very high resolution in the center of your vision. We will see soon that visuals are not the only thing for which they seem to have optimized for the seated use case…
Comfort
The first thing I noticed when I grabbed the headset was that it was heavier than it seemed. While all the VR hardware companies are working hard to make headsets that are lighter and more balanced, Apple had the genius idea of putting glass and aluminum on its front side, together with all the computational units.
I guess this is the only explanation for having made the headset so front-heavy
To wear the headset, you just put it on, and then rotate a knob to tighten it around your head. The first time I put it on, I could see how its weight was heavingly pressing on my face. The standard strap was also not good enough and I had the constant sensation as if the device was not fully stable on my head, as it was about to fall at any time (this was just a sensation… it actually never slipped down). It’s also a pity that the lateral frames do not rotate up and down, so I could not make the device perfectly fit my face. Just to show you how the weight distribution is bad, I can tell you that when my friend Jussi came from a long session with AVP, he had a big red mark on his forehead. I’ve heard many of these problems are improved with the over-the-head strap, but I did not have the occasion to try it.
Apple Vision Pro and its detachable facemask
It’s a pity they made these poor weight distribution choices because the materials are very good and feel good on the body. The rear strap that goes around the nape feels incredibly soft and comfortable, I loved it. Regarding the facemask, it’s great that it is magnetic, so it can be easily detached and reattached. there are different facemasks for different face shapes, and this is also good to facilitate comfort.
The battery is attached via a wire to the device but I have to tell you that rarely the wire was an issue to me. Putting the battery in the pocket and launching the Vision Pro experiences, which usually are not very dynamic, I was fine most of the time. I consider the wire a minor problem for the Vision Pro comfort.
Tracking
The positional tracking of the headset is good: you move around and the augmentations appear as fixed in the place you left them, with no noticeable wobbling even when you rotate your head. This elevates the Apple Vision Pro above many cheap AR headsets that have rather imprecise tracking when the user is moving. I tried also to make some sudden movements and the headset kept tracking me accurately. But in some occasional moments, it has some small hiccups, some small jumps, where you see the virtual elements slightly snapping. I never saw something like this on Quest 3, so I think Meta still has an edge over Apple for what concerns tracking.
Talking about the things that Meta does better, we can mention hand tracking. According to various tests and reports, Apple’s tracking on Vision Pro is slower and less accurate than Meta’s one. The good thing is that you almost never notice this while using the headset, because Apple shows your real hands and not the virtual ones. This way, you can not notice all its tracking problems. I’ve anyway verified that the tracking of the hands works quite well, and it tracks the hands correctly if your hand is in the field of view of the device. Outside the FOV, the tracking of the hand degrades, and at a certain point, the tracking is even lost. I wouldn’t trust making an archery game with the Vision Pro.
Video posted by a developer that shows the lag of the hand tracking of the Vision Pro at release time
Regarding eye tracking, I have to say that it is rather accurate, but not perfect. As with all the eye-tracking systems I’ve tried in my life (7Invensun, Tobii, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, …), its performance degrades when you start looking at the periphery of your vision. So while looking at menu items more or less in front of you leads to accurate results, looking at buttons more in the periphery is going to have some misdetection. Of course, eye tracking quality improves a lot with eye calibration, so if someone hands you a Vision Pro, start with the eye calibration process, or your experience in using the eyes as a controller for interaction is going to be very frustrating.
Audio
One of the speakers of the Vision Pro
The audio of the Vision Pro is provided through two little speakers embedded into the two lateral frames of the visor. This is a similar solution to the one provided by almost all other headset vendors. I’m not an audio expert, so I can not speak in detail about the audio quality. But I can say I tried many applications (including one about DJing), and I’ve found the audio quality to be good.
Performances
The M2 chipset of the Apple Vision Pro gives it a lot of horsepower. But still, it has to handle a lot of data and especially a big screen. I agree with Ben Lang when he says that the passthrough vision never misses a frame, it is always fluid, in whatever condition you operate. But I can not say the same about the applications: I had the impression a few of them I tried were not entirely smooth, even if there were not so many graphical elements in the scene. So I guess developers have to optimize a lot to make a title run smoothly on the Vision Pro.
Battery
The battery looks like a silver brick that you put in your pocket. I thought it was slimmer, while actually it is thick as two smartphones put one on top of the other.
It is connected to the headset via a special circular connector. Luckily the battery itself has a USB-C connector, so charging it is pretty easy.
Top view of the batteryBottom viewSide View
Passthrough
Before trying the Vision Pro, I’ve read some people in the VR community saying that the Quest 3 has basically the same passthrough at one-seventh of the price, so I was expecting a similar experience. Actually, I do not know what these people have smoked (I guess a lot of fanboyism), but the two passthroughs are completely different.
The resolution of the passthrough of the Vision Pro is crazy good. It is not identical to reality as Ian Hamilton said during his first run on the device, but it is very crisp. You see that you are watching the world through a screen and you perceive a bit of noise, but the quality is incredible. I was able to take notes very easily on my phone while still wearing the Vision Pro. It also comes with almost no distortion, so you don’t have that “underwater effect” that you have on Quest 3 when you move your hand in front of the device (I know, v66 improved this factor…).
Everything was so magical with the passthrough until I took a step forward while rotating my head and I was like “What the hell??!”. Motion blur kicked in and I saw my reality becoming super-fizzy. Every time you rotate your head, you perceive this strong blur effect: it is incredibly disturbing and disappointing and ruins the experience completely. The motion blur in the passthrough is so visible that it is difficult to forget about it.
The fun thing about the passthrough of Vision Pro is that you can put a Quest 3 on top of it and see the passthrough of the passthrough (passthrough-ception!)
At the end of the day, if you are seated and you are just watching something in front of you, the passthrough of the Vision Pro is amazing. But if you have to make an experience with people moving in the room, I would still go for the Quest 3.
EyeSight Display
Let’s talk about the display that is in front of the device and that should make you see the eyes of the user. The marketing material showed us how you can really see the user’s eyes, and it is like the user has no headset on his face. The sad reality is that it is really an image with potato quality (yes, I’ve said the word). Even worse, it’s not clear when it displays the eyes and when it displays a color animation, so it is very confusing both for the person in the headset and the one watching him.
Here you can see a mix of the blue animated visuals and my eyes provided by EyeSight
But notwithstanding all of these issues, I still think it’s better than not having it. Even if the eyes are not accurate, seeing them still makes the experience of speaking with someone having a VR headset more human. I personally believe that Apple shouldn’t abandon this technology and instead should work on improving it.
User Experience
Hand-Gaze Interactions
Everyone knows that the Vision Pro can be controlled by using your eyes and your hands: you look at objects, and then you perform an “air tap” to activate them. Everyone was excited by this feature, but a few months ago I criticized this system saying that while it is very innovative, it has the drawback of trying to use the eyes as a mouse, which is a bad idea because our eyes are not meant for that. Some people told me that I shouldn’t have written such an article without having tried the headset before.
Now I have tried the device and in fact thanks to this test I have changed my mind completely: now I think that trying to use the eyes as a mouse is a bad idea, because our eyes are not meant for that. In fact, after 15 minutes of using the eye-hand interface, I would have wanted to throw the headset out of the window (then I remembered its cost and changed my mind). Whenever I could, I got close to objects and I poked them with my finger (but the fun thing is that the menu disappears if you get too close or distant from it, so I had to poke it from a distance). A few friends told me “You have to get used to it”, but I find it pretty absurd that I should get used to a “natural interface”… if it is natural, if it is well-thought, I do not have to get used to it, I just behave naturally. The human brain is very plastic and can get used to everything, even controlling the menu of an MR headset with a dildo between the foot fingers, but this does not mean that this should be the interface of all the next devices (even if it would be pretty fun).
