Dana: Sitting up close in the center of Apple Immersive and spatial videos reminded me of Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s A Wonderful Life: I was both an insider and outsider at the same time. In one demo, we saw Alicia Keys performing the most special of performances: just for us, in a living room. In a different series of videos — these meant to demonstrate spatial video — we saw the same family at mealtime, and a mother and daughter outside, playing with bubbles.
As I watched these clips, particularly the family home videos that reminded me of my own toddler, I felt immersed, yes, but also excluded; no one in the videos sees you or interacts with you, obviously. You are a ghost. I imagined myself years from now, peering in from the future on bygone videos of my daughter, and felt verklempt. I did not expect to get teary-eyed during a routine Apple briefing.
Cherlynn Low & Dana Wollman
Apple’s Vision Pro is nearing launch, and last week we saw another round of hands-on reporting from various tech journalists. I enjoyed this one from Engadget the most, as I think it hits the main points of contention in terms of user experience:
- fitting the device and its weight seem to be the most frequent complaints from people who tried it – and keep in mind this was still an Apple-controlled setting and the total time wearing the Vision Pro was under half an hour! While the weight is comparable to other VR headsets, its distribution matters, as for instance the Quest Pro puts a lot of that weight into the battery behind your head, balancing the screen on the front.
- the virtual keyboard was also criticized as unfinished and clunky. As with the iPad, another Apple product that was supposed to replace traditional computers, text input is currently better with a Bluetooth keyboard.
- the Engadget hands-on mentions several ‘uncanny valley’ moments because the visual experience is so immersive, but lacks support from other senses, in particular touch, and can stir up feelings of being distant or excluded.
- my favorite bit was about meditation: buying a $3,500+ device to meditate for a couple of minutes (before the fatigue and neck strain kick in) is a peak consumerism moment for me.
Dana: This was one of the more frustrating aspects of the demo for me. Although there were several typing options – hunting and pecking with your fingers, using eye control to select keys, or just using Siri – none of them felt adequate for anything resembling extended use. It took several tries for me to even spell Engadget correctly in the Safari demo. This was surprising to me, as so many other aspects of the broader Apple experience – the pinch gesture, the original touch keyboard on the original iPhone – “just work”, as Apple loves to say about itself. The floating keyboard here clearly needs improvement. In the meantime, it’s harder to imagine using the Vision Pro for actual work. The Vision Pro feels much further along as a personal home theater.
Several articles and tweets detailed the lack of optimized apps for visionOS, ranging from Apple’s own apps to large streaming companies like Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify. Not entirely surprising: building apps for this radical new experience would require significant investment for developers with highly uncertain payoffs. Small developers would prefer to focus on more immediate profitability, while large companies can afford to wait and see how the ecosystem develops before committing to ‘spatial computing’. Apple is also notorious for its tight controls and high fees collected from its App Stores, which the recent lawsuit from Epic failed to challenge, so developers are understandably reluctant to contribute to yet another store which would benefit Apple much more than them.
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