Some first impressions of the Vision Pro, and thoughts about AR/VR in general

I’m an early adopter of things. I love to get excited about new technologies. Sometimes that’s because they fill a need, or offer some new capability I couldn’t do before, and sometimes it’s just that they’re fun to tinker with. From that perspective, I’ve felt like the past few years have been in a real rut. All of the new tech to play with has been saddled with giant conditionals — crypto, LLMs, VR, etc…

So here comes the Vision Pro, Apple’s new mixed reality headset. I have a lot of impressions about it, some good and some not great. I don’t think I’ll be hopping in just yet, but it’s not a firm no yet without trying it, and I can see a future where this would be a compelling purchase for me.

For a while, Apple has been trying to thread the needle between selling us screens that we love and also introducing new ways to encourage us to get off of those screens faster or need to spend less time with them. Even as there are for sure some affordances for interactions with the real world, with other people in your vicinity, this is a radical shift towards “you’re going to be present in this screen”. Being in the screen is very likely going to be an isolationist experience. It’s notable that there are no real sharing features at all (yet), in the launch video there are no shots of more than one person using multiple headsets at the same time in the same room. This is aimed very squarely at “1 device per person”, like the iPhone and Watch, even though this is largely a content consumption device more akin to the iPad or Apple TV. It’s very early in this product’s lifecycle and it’s hard to even make any predictions about that, it will be interesting to see where it goes in terms of social features and device sharing.

I started experimenting with VR and 3D printing in college, now a good several decades ago. I’ve never really gotten into the modern VR scene — my my glasses prescription is complicated (near and far sighted corrections, astigmatism, prism corrections), so I can’t wear a headset without corrective lenses, and this hasn’t been terribly comfortable with my glasses. I don’t know if this contributes to VR sickness, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I could play Beat Saber for about 15–20 minutes max before experiencing nausea and vertigo…