The Apple Vision Pro is now on sale. People are getting their hands on them, and sharing their opinions. People who haven't got their hands on them are sharing their opinions. There are a lot of opinions flying around.

First thing - sure, I'm interested in the headset, and the device actually getting in 'normal' people's hands (or on their faces) is this week's news; I'm not going to buy one, because it's ridiculously expensive and if I had that sort of money to throw around, I probably wouldn't be driving a car that's approaching either its 18th birthday or its last trip to the scrapyard and has done the equivalent milage of 5 times around the circumference of the earth.

But I do want to have a play with it. I want to build some projects in Xcode/Unity and see what they look like. I want to see how it compares as a computer display to the Meta Quest 2 (brief review: really cool, but if you want to use the keyboard and actually do anything productive its still too clunky.) I want to see how easy it is to build "AR" stuff that interacts with the real world. I want to get my hand around the restrictions imposed by the platform vs the limitations of the hardware. I want to see if my kids are as excited about it as they are about the Meta Quest. I want to see if my wife has any interest in it at all (other than one very charming 3d animation series I found, nothing on the Quest has really interested her in the slightest.)

What I'm really interested in is the Vision platform; the bits in the software that are going to be the same when the next headset device is launched.

This isn't about the headset getting on people's faces, but in people's lives - in the real world, after they've done (and written about, and made YouTube videos of) the initial setup, trying out some stuff, figuring out how things work. Then, after the launch hype has died down, comes the interesting bit.

As part of the PR promotion, a bunch of journalists/bloggers/influencers were given demos a couple of weeks ago - similar to the ones at the launch event by the sounds of things.

This time, Apple PR took photos of them wearing the headset.

Or people - like me - who cram as many games as possible on the PS5's internal storage, then a load more on an external hard drive - then only play one game at a time for a couple of months, until a new game comes along and you have to spend ages deleting things to make room for it… ↩

Apple PR photos of people invited to demo the Vision Pro in Jan 2024

Notice anything?

9 people. One of them is definitely standing (top right) - I'm pretty sure the other 8 are all sitting down. (Not 100% sure about middle-left though- could be standing, but looks more like sitting on the edge of the sofa.)

I think this is a big deal that doesn't seem to have got a lot of attention so far.

If you do a Google Image search for "wearing vision pro" and "wearing meta quest 3", you'll probably see a similar trend - Meta Quest headsets being mostly worn by people standing up, and Vision Pro being mostly worn by people sitting down. Of the people who are sitting while wearing a Quest headset, most look like they are either sitting at a desk, or just look like they are posing for a photo rather than being photographed while using the headset. (Admittedly, its very hard to tell the difference between someone wearing and using a headset; this might just be my preconceptions coming through.)

Before Vision Pro was announced at WWDC, I wrote;

Meta have a VR paradigm that they seem to be locked into; you stand up, you put on a headset, and you wave your arms around. In Meta’s offices (or Mark Zuckerberg’s house) that probably works really well - but for most households, the idea that you can have a space where you can stand up and wave your arms around without being massively disruptive (read: annoying) while other members of your household want to watch TV, have a cup of tea, cook dinner, read a book etc. just isn’t a good fit. Maybe its just because I’m a middle-aged man, but I like to sit down; sitting down with a VR headset feels kind of like sitting down playing Wii Sports; you can do it, but it feels kind of like a hack. When Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone, he was standing up on stage. When he demoed the iPad, he was sitting down in a comfortable chair; the idealised iPad experience.
I’m really hoping that, assuming Apple have someone wearing the headset on stage that we see them sitting down; a sign that their experience is designed for someone at a desk or on a sofa - ie. they have considered the physical space it lives in at least as much as the virtual space it creates; not requiring kind of space that doesn’t actually exist in the majority of households.

Back in October (2023), I posted about the need for a (virtual) sofa;

[...] my prediction is that when the 'killer app' for VR does arrive, it will work perfectly well when you are sitting down. Because although it isn't the way VR is currently designed, 'sitting down' is a space in people's lives that it could actually fit much better than 'standing in a 2m by 2m space that isn't in everybody's way'.

What I think matters the most is not about how heavy the headset is and how it fits on your face. Its where it fits, in the spaces in people's lives. Where is it additive - like using a phone at the bus stop instead of doing nothing, and where is it substitutive - like reading a website instead of a newspaper?

What makes them pick it up to actually do something for the sake of doing it - not for the sake of using their new toy. How much of a friction point is booting up the headset and figuring out where to put the battery? Is enough to make watching a trailer for a film you're excited about something you'd watch on a massive virtual screen, or would you just watch it on a phone/tablet and plan to come back and watch it on a massive virtual cinema screen later? (The way that I would generally prefer to watch it on my TV, but its just enough hassle that I won't bother unless I'm really excited about it.)

Is it the kind of thing where, if you're sitting down with your partner on the sofa, you'd just get it out and use it - like reading a book, or scrolling through feeds on a phone - or that you'd go to another room to do - like taking a phone call when you're watching TV? Is it any more antisocial than watching a video with headphones on? When the novelty has worn off, is anyone going to be wearing one of these in the office? (Is there any actual point to the 'fake eye screen'?)

The "fit in your life" part of the Meta Quest is - I think - still a big problem, and I think the assumption that you'll be standing up when you wear it is a big part of that. You put on a Quest headset and the first thing you need to do is clear the area around you and calibrate it so that the 'virtual ground' is at the same level as your feet. If you're sitting on a sofa, there's an implicit signal that 'you're doing it wrong'. So, apps and games tend to be designed around the assumption that you're standing, because its an affordance of the software. The Vision Pro doesn't need to do that - whether thats a conscious design decision, or just a consequence of the pass-through video (if you can see the real floor, you don't need to worry about a misaligned virtual floor) I don't know - but its a platform difference more than a device difference. (Maybe thats what is behind the whole "spatial computing" ≠ VR/AR thing?)

At the beginning of 2021, I gave a presentation at a Metaverse event where I talked about where 'metaverse' activity was likely to fit in people's lives. (Or more to the point, where it wasn't.) I talked about how the media/technology landscape had transformed over the last 20 years - connecting to the internet has gone from 'a thing you do' to a perpetual state of being, smartphones have gone from a weird geek toy to the place where people live their lives, TV channels have proliferated (there were still quite a few households with analogue TV limited to 5 channels), video services have exploded... And yet, according to the IPA Touchpoints data that tracks how people are spending their time with media, despite revolutionary changes in virtually every medium people's behaviour (or "consumer media need states") has remained remarkably consistent.

We might be reading words on a screen where we used to be reading words on a printed paper, we might be streaming video where we used to watch broadcast video, we might be getting personalised feeds through social platforms where we used to surf the web or read magazines - but whether these reflect fundamental shifts in media behaviour is a different question. Yes - the industry of planning and buying advertising has transformed, almost beyond recognition. But daily routines? Not so much...

So - what does that mean for VR - sorry, for 'spatial computing'? Its a very focussed, immersive experience - compare that to listening to audio (whether thats music, radio, podcasts etc.), which is naturally suited to multitasking, and I don't think there's any room for 'substitution'. I'm simply not going to swap listening to an audiobook while driving or cooking dinner/cleaning the kitchen for wearing a headset. (Well - I can imagine occasions where I might follow a cooking video while I'm preparing food - but not as a routine.)

"OOH" ("Out Of Home" - think 'posters' etc.) is obviously a bad fit for today's headset technology - a big, expensive thing that covers your face with a 2 hour battery life just isn't going to be a thing people will want to routinely put on when they are out of the house. (The fact that Apple are charging $200 for a case suggests that they aren't exactly encouraging people to take them out and about...)

"Text" - now, maybe the Vision Pro's resolution and quality will make for a good reading experience, but I just can't imagine wanting to put on a headset to scroll through a social media feed, or read the news headlines when I've got a phone in my pocket and an iPad in my bag/on the coffee table. Maybe if I'm doing stuff with a headset on then I'll open up the Threads/BBC app and take a look - but if I'm deciding to look at those media apps, my preference is probably going to be iPad>Laptop>smartphone>headset.

Which leaves video - an experience which generally involves sitting down on the most comfortable chair in the house at the end of the day, with the rest of the family... If I'm alone, then I can imagine a headset becoming a first-choice 'screen' - watching a film on a screen bigger than my living room with full surround sound in 3D seems like it could be a better experience than on my 50" 4K TV with 2-channel sound.

But TV? Well - I think we're back to a point I love to make at any opportunity; its not really about the screen, the choice of channels, the 'on demand' technology or even the content - its more about whats on the sofa than whats on the screen.

But if I'm looking at a substitute for today's video experience - even if I have a convenient 2m x 2m space where I can wave my arms around blindfolded while chatting to people who aren't in the room (always fun for other people who are...), I'm unlikely to want to be standing up.

The story goes, when Steve Jobs was shown a prototype of the original iPad, he asked for it to be turned into a phone. When the iPhone came out, the general vibe seemed to be that it was a bit of a joke - certainly in the online communities I was a part of (smartphone owners/hackers who loved the Windows Smartphone/Mobile platform and thought the Nokia N95 was the pinnacle of mobile technology) it was most notable for its deficiencies; not even 3G, no external storage, no way to swap out a flat battery for a spare, no 3rd party apps, and deep scepticism about how well a hardware keyboard would work for replying to emails.) But for those who had got their hands on one and used multitouch with Mobile Safari, those concerns just fell away.

My feeling is that the Vision Pro is going the other way around - we're seeing something analagous to an iPad Pro soft launch before the more affordable iPad - let alone the iPhone - existed, and there's certainly something based on the same software platform being prototyped in Cupertino right now that won't be "Pro", will be smaller/lighter/cheaper, and will basically make the Vision Pro look like a dev kit. (I mean, it is a dev kit...)

So, what clues are there about the future of the platform?

What happens to the weight and price if you don't have the weird 'virtual eyes' screen?
What happens when you swap out some of the heavier parts for plastic?
Is 16GB of memory enough? Are the storage upgrades worthwhile, or only for particular specialist use cases?¹ What happens when the M2 gets replaced by an M3, then an M4, then an M5? How will computing power and battery life trade off with each other? Will it be like the Apple Watch that got the same battery life with a smaller and lighter battery - or will it be like the Macbook Air when it went from Intel to Apple silicon, and the battery stayed the same size but battery life went up massively?
What happens if you swap out the connection to a battery pack with, say, a desktop Mac, or a Macbook Pro? What if its connected to something like an iPad, with its own battery and processor?
What happens when the super-high resolution video pass-through gets replaced by a transparent display with a video overlay? (Will the 'full screen' VR experiences go away? Will they be missed, if you can see your iPhone apps/widgets with your phone in your pocket?) Will it ever be a 'better' UI than mouse, keyboard and touchscreen? Is it even an either/or question - might headset and keyboard be the best combination? (Which would imply that the best place to use it for 'creativity' might be at a desk.)

Lots of questions that probably won't get answered soon...

Some Random Nerd