In 20 years, we’ll look back nostalgically on the Vision Pro from our Hyper Apple Vision X and talk about how, in spite of its flaws, more than any other device, it kickstarted the spatial computing revolution we’ll probably be taking for granted by 2044. I know that sounds hyperbolic, and maybe time will prove me wrong, but Apple went ahead and Appled again, making a device that’s both incredible to use and transformative in what it sets out to achieve. Is it without flaw? Absolutely not. There are a lot of things about the Vision Pro I don’t like, but the stuff I do like… “like” isn’t strong enough. It’s more of a mixture of love and downright astonishment at what it brings to computing.

Seeing Into the Future

Apple bills the Vision Pro as the world’s first spatial computing device, a concept where the real world and the digital world act together in an intuitive and mostly-seamless way. Technically, this isn’t augmented reality, because the “real world” you’re seeing when you don the Vision Pro is actually being beamed into your eyeballs via a pair of close-but-not-quite-4K screens that adjust automatically to your eyes’ placement on your face. There are a total of 12 cameras in the headset, most of which are tracking the outside world and then firing those images into your eyes via those beautiful screens.

There are a total of 12 cameras in the headset, firing images into your eyes via two beautiful screens. 

The effect is a very close approximation of the world around you, with a bit of digital noise. I found myself having difficulty reading words on the screen of my iPhone and even on my PC, but otherwise it didn’t take long for me to adjust to the world in a slightly lower resolution than that of reality.

The noise, just like any digital sensor, increases in lower-light conditions. Moving around my house, there were a few times when I’d enter a room with low-lighting and get a warning from the Vision Pro basically telling me “hey pal, it’s dark in here, so your gestures might not work.” That’s not the actual warning, of course, but you get the gist of it.

It’s a Snap

That warning is important, however, since the Vision Pro relies almost entirely on gestures to navigate its user interface. When you put it on for the first time, you run through a set-up process that adjusts the headset to your specific face and hands, as well as your eyes and sets up your Persona. The Persona is the avatar people see when they FaceTime or otherwise video conference with you when you’re in the Vision Pro. Mine is horrifying and I may have intentionally gone with the worst-looking first-attempt for the sake of comedy.

After it’s all set up, you interact with the interface with a little pinching gesture with your dominant hand. That quick pinch renders the equivalent of a keystroke or a mouse click. Holding the pinch and then moving your hand in an open window registers a scroll. A lot of how the gestures work depends on what application you’re using and where you’re looking, too.

Instead of pointing with your fingers where you want to click, you just point your eyes. Want to open Apple TV? Easy enough. Just look at the icon, and give a quick little pinch. Want to close it out? OK, look at the dot on the bottom until it expands into an “X” button. Pinch. You just quit out. Resizing and moving the windows also requires a look and a pinch. With the exception of when I was trying it at my very busy, poorly lit desk, I never had a single problem with the Vision Pro registering a gesture. One of the nicer UI touches is when you’re looking at an icon or button, it expands just a tiny bit, and in many cases there’s a subtle sound cue to let you know you’re looking at something that is… Gesturable? That’s not a word! Or it least, it wasn’t.

Instead of pointing your fingers where you want to click, you just point your eyes.

Looking up causes a small arrow to appear that brings up the main menu, so you can easily jump from app to app and access the control center, as well as Environments, which I’ll get to later because they deserve their own section.

There were very few instances where I encountered troubles with the UI, but they did happen. More than once during a movie, when I went to pinch the button to move the screen, I glanced at the playback controls without realizing it and ended up scrubbing through the movie instead. The two interactive elements are just a little too close together and I had to make a point to be very deliberate with my gestures to prevent it from happening again.

I also accidentally triggered some UI options just by moving my hand during the movie and inadvertently making a pinch gesture, or at least something close enough the Vision Pro thought I was pinching. All it did was bring up the controls, which I quickly hid again.

Maybe the weirdest thing I encountered during my time with the Apple Vision Pro was a strange drifting of all the floating elements slowly to the left. I first encountered it while playing Synth Riders, a Beat Saber-like game, in Apple Arcade. Everything, from the menus, to the game itself, was affected. Figuring it was just the game, I backed out and opened up the main menu, only to have that slowly drift as well. I was in disbelief for a second – this isn’t a joystick, how is it drifting?

Well the answer was weird but simple. My Roku-enabled TV had gone into its rest mode, slowly scrolling through Roku City, and for whatever the reason, the Vision Pro was matching that slow scroll with its UI elements. I turned the TV off, re-centered the display and everything was fine again.

Moving windows, resizing, opening and closing apps and menu widgets is straightforward and easy.

While moving windows, resizing, opening and closing apps and menu widgets is straightforward and easy, I’m not a fan of the typing interface. You have two options when composing a message: you can either tap away at the virtual keyboard in front of your face, or you can simply look at a letter and pinch it. I don’t like either option, to be honest. Both methods are somewhat error prone unless you slow yourself down quite a bit. I’m so used to hammering out messages quickly on my keyboard or on the iPhone’s touch interface that it’s frustrating to have to slow my roll and methodically go from letter to letter with my eyes, or stumble over a letter and mis-type it. I’m sure it’s something I’ll get used to, and therefore better at, but I feel like there has to be a better way. And there is! Kind of. But I’ll get to that later.

Fit and Finish

As giddy as I find myself when experiencing the apps and immersive movies the Vision Pro offers, I kind of dislike wearing it. All of its 1.4 pound weight is in the front, and for me, the entirety of that weight feels like it’s concentrated on a single point on the bridge of my nose. I found myself constantly pushing the headset up to relieve the pressure, but then the Vision Pro would ask me politely to pull it back down again for the purposes of accurate eye-tracking.

I endured the discomfort because I really like using the Vision Pro. But it does get distracting. I appreciate the mindfulness app, but it’s kind of hard to relax to a guided meditation when your nose is distracted by a state of constant, low-grade pain. Perhaps that’s part of the meditative process – the cause of suffering, after all, is desire.

All of its 1.4 pound weight is in the front.

Other than the fact it feels like the entire weight of the device is resting on the bridge of my nose, I didn’t find any other problems with the way it fits on my face. Adjusting the strap is really easy, with a dedicated knob on the right side that’s oddly satisfying to turn. The strap is an elastic webbing that, in spite of the Vision Pro being totally front-heavy, never felt like it was pushing on the back of my head. The visor liner itself doesn’t put pressure on any other part of my face, and does a very good job of blocking out the real world, although there is a little bit of light bleeding in under my nose.

Power to the Vision Pro is fed into the unit via a connector on the left side of the strap that clicks, then locks, into place. The cloth-covered cable to the battery is really supple, but it does tend to have a little memory of its coil if you don’t straighten it out before you drop the battery pack into your pocket. It’s definitely the most inelegant part of the Vision Pro, to be honest. I accidentally dropped the battery pack while it was connected and it jarringly pulled the headset down the left side of my face.

A Magsafe connector would be so much better, but since there’s no onboard battery, disconnecting the battery pack shuts the headset down instantly. If it did have a Magsafe connector, the worry I have of catching the cable on something and destroying either the cable or the connector itself would evaporate. But since cutting power places you in complete blackness instantly, I can see why that’s not a viable option. I don’t know what the real solution is, other than a small capacity battery in the headset itself, but for now, weight issues are already a problem and it seems like this was Apple’s best compromise.

The design of the Vision Pro itself has never quite sat right with me. Honestly it looks like something a talented designer would do for a mock-up of a hypothetical Apple VR headset more than it does an actual Apple product. Its curved glass front screen and aluminum features feel very Apple, but it doesn’t have the sleekness of Apple’s other modern line-up of products. Personally I think they should have ditched the aluminum in favor of the translucent plastic look of the late 90s/early 2000s iMac, because the Vision Pro’s bulbousness resembles the products and excitement of that era more than it resembles modern tech. I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t really like the aesthetics of the Apple Vision Pro, but I also don’t know what Apple’s designers could have done better given the sheer amount of tech they crammed into it.

Gaming on Apple Vision Pro

Apple wants you to know the Vision Pro is NOT a virtual reality headset, but rather a spatial computing, paradigm-shifting, dynamic leap forward in how we interact with our computers. Which, OK sure. With its incredible resolution and frankly fantastic motion tracking, the Vision Pro would be the king of the virtual reality headsets were there virtual reality games for it. But there aren’t. At least, not for now.

That being said, there are Vision Pro games (and experiences) you can enjoy as soon as you’ve finished setting it up. I downloaded LEGO Builder’s Journey, a cute little puzzle game where you need to guide one LEGO “person” across a map to meet the other. You have a few pieces you can use in each level, and it’s up to you to figure out the route for your LEGO-person to take. It’s really fun, although I did have a little trouble virtually placing the pieces from a seated position.

The Vision Pro would be the king of the virtual reality headsets were there virtual reality games for it.

To maximize enjoyment of the game, you need to stand up and move around the game board, which simply floats in space (in my case, the middle of my living room). It’s a fun little distraction, but what blew me away was how the reflections on the LEGO bricks in the levels were true to the lightning of my living room. I “moved” the board closer to the window, and it shifted the reflections from my artificial lighting to the natural light coming in from outside.

There are other Apple Arcade games built for the Vision Pro that are similar in functionality to LEGO Builder’s Journey in that they’re augmented-reality experiences rather than fully-immersive VR games. But they’re also not really any different from what’s already out there. Other than the excellent resolution, the games on Vision Pro would be right at home on pretty much any other AR or VR headset.

Fruit Ninja, for example, has been adapted to the Vision Pro as Super Fruit Ninja, and at first I was wondering “Well why didn’t they just make this into a VR experience?” Then the little cartoon pig side-kick character jumped up onto the recliner in my living room and started napping, and I thought “Well, this is fine.” If you’ve played Fruit Ninja, and statistically you probably have, you know what you’re getting here. I did have a couple of weird glitches while playing that were really jarring, because they shifted all the graphics and there was a weird pixelation in the periphery of my left eye, like I was briefly seeing through the Matrix. Other than that, it’s a fun, simple game that makes OK use of the technology.

If you have a game console and you’re wondering if you can use the Vision Pro to play, the answer is “kind of?”

Now, if you have a game console and you’re wondering if you can use the Vision Pro to play, the answer is “kind of?” There’s no way to hook a console directly to the headset, so you can forget about playing your Nintendo Switch. However, since PS5 and Xbox both have remote play options, you can play them on gigantic virtual screens. After trying it out, I don’t think I can recommend it, though.

Firstly, there are no native Xbox or PlayStation apps for the Vision Pro. The iPad version of the Xbox app is compatible with the device, and can be downloaded from the App Store and installed. The PlayStation app is nowhere to be found in the Vision Pro App Store interface, but there is an app called Mirror Play that works to stream PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 remotely.

I tried out the Xbox app and my advice is don’t bother. The Xbox app caps resolution at 720p, which is a fine experience if you’re playing on a phone. But if you have dreams of streaming Starfield to a virtual screen encompassing an entire wall in your living space, that 720p resolution just looks awful.

When I shrank the screen down, the resolution wasn’t as noticeable, but I ended up with a screen floating in space that was slightly smaller than my actual television. Which, sure, is fine, I guess, and would be nice for playing in areas where you don’t otherwise have a TV, but I was really hoping to play on a virtual television screen of a size only the five richest kings of Europe could afford.

With Mirror Play, there’s a little bit of extra set-up involved, but the nice part is you can adjust the PlayStation 5 streaming resolution to 1080p. Which I did, and then proceeded to stretch the screen out to the size of the entire back wall of my living room. Sadly, 1080p at 10-feet wide shows its limitations, and maybe even more of a bummer, the streaming experience wasn’t very good. I don’t know if it’s Mirror Play itself, but Prince of Persia was choppy and laggy, which makes that particular game pretty much impossible to play. The choppiness more than anything made my experience less than stellar, and I was a little surprised given how great my experience was streaming PS5 on the PlayStation Portal. Oh well.

If you’re hoping it will take your gaming experience to the next level, you should probably temper those expectations.

In short, if you’re hoping the Vision Pro will take your gaming experience to the next level, you should probably temper those expectations. There are too many confounding factors involved for me to nail it down to any one particular piece in the chain, but my video game streaming adventures on the Vision Pro were not something I’ll be revisiting. Now movies, on the other hand…

A True Home Theater

Since the new Dune movie is almost upon us, I took this opportunity to re-watch the first movie on the Vision Pro, renting the 3D version from Apple TV. Fun fact about me, I don’t have depth perception and can’t really see in 3D but for a couple of exceptions: the Nintendo 3DS and 3D movies. Turns out, 3D movies on Vision Pro work great, too.

When you watch a movie you have the absolute perfect seat in the house no matter where you are.

When you watch a movie with the Vision Pro in the native AppleTV app, it plays on a giant movie-sized screen where you have the absolute perfect seat in the house no matter where you are. The spatial audio from the astoundingly clear speakers on the headband adds even more to the experience. The biggest downside to watching a movie like Dune on the Apple Vision Pro is you can’t go from start to finish on a single battery charge, which really sucks. You can plug in the battery pack and stem the tide of depletion, which is a nice consolation. I was actually surprised by how quickly it charges while in use, but try not to forget you’re tethered to the wall if you get up to get something to drink.

The theater experience on the Vision Pro is amazing. It looks and sounds better than any movie theater I’ve ever been to in my life. One of the environmental options during movie watching is, of course, a theater, but I decided it would be better to watch Dune in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park under the stars. That was a good choice, but what really blew my mind was how the light from the movie scenes would dance realistically on the desert floor. Apple didn’t have to add that in, but it did, and it’s just another one of those intangible things the company does that makes the experience better without really seeming like it should.

I switched from Joshua Tree to lakeside in the Mount Hood environment, sitting on a granite outcropping near the edge of a lake with Mount Hood in the distance. It was then I remembered I was in full control of where the screen was, so I reclined my chair to its maximum relaxation level, moved the screen to the sky, and laid there looking up at Timothée Chalamet brooding his way across Arrakis. I had achieved peak comfort – so in control of my surroundings that reality was now bending to my truest considerations of being relaxed. It was easily one of the coolest movie watching experiences I’ve ever had – until the battery died at least.

Hands down my favorite part has to be AppleTV’s immersive video experiences.

As cool as it is to be fully relaxed while watching a traditional Hollywood blockbuster, hands down my favorite part of the Vision Pro has to be AppleTV’s immersive video experiences. There are only a few right now: one where you’re in the studio with Alicia Keys, one where you’re on a rhino preserve, an experience with pterosaurs during prehistoric times, and a documentary called Highliner, starring and narrated by professional highliner Faith Dickey.

Highlining is walking a tightrope over a gap for the thrill of it, and in the immersive experience I was taken to the top of a 3000-foot sheer cliff face, where Dickey had set up a line across a gap. And I was right there with her.

There was a moment during the documentary where I literally shouted. It was tense and almost terrifying. It’s not a 3D environment in which you’re free to move, but the movie encompassed 180-degrees on both the X and Y axes. That meant short of turning or tilting my head a full 90-degrees in any direction, my entire field of view was filled with the sights and sounds of a lone woman walking a precarious line over an impossibly long fall.

I’m not really an Alicia Keys fan, but I appreciate musical talent, so I sat in on a practice session she was playing with her band. Again, my entire field of view was filled, giving me the feeling of sitting there in the studio with a group of talented, professional musicians. It even made me feel a little uncomfortable and self-conscious – like, why is this man in sweatpants sitting here watching professionals prepare for a global music tour?

The immersion is made even more impactful by the 4K resolution of the screens.

The immersion is made even more impactful by the 4K resolution of the Vision Pro screens. At some points during the highlining and Alicia Keys movies, it almost felt voyeuristic, because in normal, polite company you’d never get so close to a human being you don’t know. And in the rhino reserve movie, one of the baby rhinos came up so close to me that I instinctively moved my head out of the way to avoid being knocked into by its horn. In other words, the apocryphal tale of early cinema-goers being whipped into a frenzied panic at the sight of a runaway train barreling toward them on a movie screen kind of happened to me, only with modern technology.

Oh Yeah, You Can Use it For Work, Too

The idea that the Vision Pro is going to change how we collaborate in our careers might be a reality in the future, but for now there are a few common workplace apps you’d expect to find on any computer. Do you like spreadsheets? Have I got good news for you. You can now float a 10′ Excel worksheet in front of your face at any time and anywhere and do some sick formulas.

You can project your Mac screen into your space and make it as large or small as you’d like.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I like Excel spreadsheets – but the Apple Vision Pro is not the way to use Excel. It’s a pared-down version of the full desktop experience, and it’s hard and slow to enter in numbers and formulas. I was hoping Vision Pro would have turned Excel into some magical experience of 3D numbers and a reality in which dividing by zero could actually happen, but instead it’s essentially the iPad Excel floating wherever you want it to float.

There’s also a version of Microsoft Word, which I can’t imagine using strictly with the Vision Pro’s keyboard given my lack of enthusiasm for typing out even short text messages with it.

However, if you really do want to use it for work, you can use it to project your Mac screen into your space and make it as large or small as you’d like. It works kind of like magic, actually. Provided you’re signed into the same account on your Vision Pro as you are on Mac, when you look at your computer screen, a dialogue box will appear on your Vision Pro asking if you want to connect. And if you do, boom. Your Mac screen is now floating in front of you, accepting the inputs from your touchpad and keyboard. This is probably the best way to use a Vision Pro for getting work done, but it’s also maybe the most unnecessary. Yes, it’s super cool to have your computer screen looming gigantic in front of you, but you could also just use your Macbook with its built-in or connected screen.

The trackpad and keyboard on your Macbook can be used as input for Vision Pro apps.

That being said, it is a convenient way to work. Since you can place screens anywhere you want, you can have your Macbook screen floating on the left of you and your messages open on the right, with whatever else you feel like adding. You can actually use the trackpad and keyboard on your Macbook as input for Vision Pro apps. You just look at the app you want to interact with, and a small little dot appears as your mouse pointer. Click on a text field in a Vision Pro app window with the trackpad on your Mac and start entering in text with the Mac keyboard. It’s so much better than the Vison Pro’s floating ghost keyboard. Since it requires a Macbook with a recent version of macOS, though, to get this functionality adds the cost of a laptop to an already pricey piece of hardware.

Having your computer screen floating in front of you is also a way to get around some of the limitations for Vision Pro apps. For example, there’s no dedicated YouTube app on the Vision Pro, so your choices are to use YouTube through the Vision Pro’s instance of Safari, or use it through the browser on your Mac. Either way, it’s a pretty great way to watch YouTube videos.

When you figure out your personal “flow,” that’s when it starts to feels like a necessity.

But honestly, typing away on a computer screen that’s 10 feet tall and floating in 3D space while you have a YouTube video running in another window, AND your messages floating in the corner of your vision.. it’s a pretty awesome way to work. The cherry on top is turning the crown in the visor to transport yourself to the edge of a dormant volcano, with all your spreadsheets and meeting reminders floating there in front of you. I’m really looking forward to this becoming the norm. When you figure out your personal “flow,” that’s when the Apple Vision Pro starts to feels like a necessity more than a fun diversion.