Ask HN: Anyone Tried Apple Vision Pro? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone Tried Apple Vision Pro?

18 pointsherval34 comments

First impressions? Thoughts? Is this the future of computing?

Yes. I also own a Meta Quest Pro and abandoned it to leave it collecting dust soon after getting it.

The Vision Pro wildly exceeded my expectations.

I would say that it feels very good and feels like a real consumer product, not just a toy. Apple having full vertical integration and great software really helped here.

I put it on upon receiving it and then didn’t take it off until the evening, charging it whilst using it along the way. It didn’t strain my neck or feel heavy. I should note that I switched to the Dual Loop band after the first hour: the Solo Loop put some stress on my face. I should caveat that I didn’t find AirPods Max to be super heavy, which others do.

It gets a lot of subtle things right, it feels intuitive to use, the image quality is incredibly good and I can do everything using the pass through cameras, including reading very small text. Apps are crisp and Mac mirroring is very good.

Using it in parallel with a Mac is great, because it absorbs the screen and also the keyboard and mouse, making it very easy to navigate and use on the couch or at a desk.

The virtual environments are beautiful and immersive and you can adjust immersion level to bleed through objects and the world around you.

The weakest points so far are…

- my contacts mess with the eye tracking (my lens inserts are being delivered late)

- there are some accidental ‘clicks’ with the pinch to click

- this is only partially a Vision Pro thing, but Apple’s Screen Mirroring still causes a very slight amount of blur, I presume due to their video codec

Thanks for sharing this! Sounds like a neat toy if they ever get it down to the sub-$500 range.

I have almost no interest in current VR or AR and would order one right away if it would be $500-700

I'm doing most of my work in here now, so I'd say much more than a toy.

It's incredibly helpful being able to travel to wherever and sit in any random room and have multiple screens and an expansive setup to accompany the Mac, in such a small form factor.

Hell, the tiers are:

- With the Mac, incredibly productive.

- With just a small external keyboard, very productive.

- With no keyboard, still way more productive than with a phone.

If you're rich, this sounds great! For the rest of us, a $150 USB C monitor would give you most of the same advantages. It's hard to justify a slightly bigger screen for 20x the price.

> my contacts mess with the eye tracking

I've heard of people with stereo blindness able to perceive VR in 3D thanks to the eye tracking. Do you have any idea whether it could benefit a wearer with intermittent amblyopia ("lazy eye") by dynamically realigning the images accordingly?

It is very good. The gesture recognition, the eye tracking, video quality etc are great. The immersive video demo is outstanding, the immersive env are great, the spatial videos and photos (captured from the device) look amazing, although at this stage of the device you probably wouldn't have it on all the time at memorable moments to capture video.

It is heavy. Not 'my head hurts' heavy, but 'fatigue sets in after a while of wearing heavy'. Untethered battery life isn't amazing, but I doubt this is something you would take too far from your home / office setup (at least in its current form). There is some slight latency in the pass through camera feed but its not a dealbreaker.

It needs to get lighter, but I think the future will move in this direction. I don't think 'drop the phone' moment is right around the corner (although we're getting there), but I could be reaching for a vision pro, mouse, and keyboard for work in a not too distant future.

It's great. It is the future, it just needs to be lighter. It's actually relatively small, but it's heavy. Once it's as heavy as actual ski googles and has all day battery I'll drop the phone.

“I’ll drop the phone” is a pretty big statement. I wonder how eyesight will be impacted. Will more people get myopia because of Apple Vision Pro..?

why would they? you can present the "virtual" items to appear far from you, a similar distance that you would hold your phone.

Isn't everything on the same focal plane?

I only used in store but the software seems to have some way of tricking your eyes, but no macro or anything like that.

Since it has eye tracking, it could hypothetically blur objects at different distances to give a stronger impression of depth. I have no idea if this is done, feasible in practice, or completely impossible and would cause your eyeballs to explode.

Yes, but VR headsets tend to focus everything at infinity, which is the most relaxed position for your eyes (and the opposite of starting at a nearby screen all day).

So if you want to quickly check/reply to a notification you'd pull out ski goggles, put them on, then take them off?

No, I’d keep them on all of the time. They would be like AirPods. I’d only take them off in particular situations.

In my case I bike a lot so they’d be doubly useful assuming latency is very low.

It would need to be extremely reliable also. Imagine crossing the road and your vision just randomly freezes. I'd assume it would be so disorienting that you'd immediately lose balance and fall over.

People may get seriously injured if they're actually wearing these things all the time. Even if they're 100% reliable you could imagine someone getting a low battery warning running down stairs to fetch their charing cable only for their vision to shut off as they're running down the stairs...

100% agree. Apple actually says a few times during the setup not to use it outside.

Even if small and light I doubt that they’d ever change that messaging.

Having a safety HUD, like in a fighter jet but on a bike, would be pretty cool. It can warn me about cars I missed, or someone about to open a door, or a turn I'm about to miss.

Or, you know, this being the shitty dystopia we deserve, probably it'd just advertise the nearest McDonald's.

Comparing them to AirPods really painted the picture for me. In that case, I feel they'd have to be smaller, or at least lighter. I haven't tried it so I can't say that with certainty but this is probably the start of something very interesting. It's basically a wearable.

Why would you need to take it off? Assuming you’re in the iOS ecosystem, the majority of your apps are on the headset.

If you get a notification, you can respond straight from it.

You can also see your phone through it too to respond.

I mean, reason number one is not looking like a complete dork in public...

Irrelevant to the discussion at hand and a complete non-sequitur

At a certain point, it'll normalize. Looking at a small screen (laptop) is as weird if you don't know what a laptop is.

Because your interacting with people in the real world and they want to see your face?

What improvement does it bring? I actually hope it can argument my ordinary life but that probably depends more on software.

Right now, not much. But I imagine it being pretty neat. You should go to the Apple Store and check it out.

The ability to pin menus at locations is actually really cool. I see why it’s called spatial computing

Thanks. I just can't imagine wearing this all day on my head. It needs to be smaller, lighter and ideally as an extra pair of glasses. And also cheaper.

Other than that it needs a lot of good softwares. I have a lot of usages I can think of from top of my head.

Yes it needs a lot of work to be something you have on all the time. Totally agreed. I’d say by 2050 for sure.

If needing to be tethered, Apple Vision Pro should’ve put more of the compute in the battery pack.

Sure there are latency concerns, but Goggles should be “lite”, more “heavy” compute with the battery pack.

Also seems redundant walking around with iPhone and Vision Pro battery pack. Future Vision Pros should be powered by iPhone Pro or MacBook Pro, with limited R1 chipset embedded in Goggles

I hope they release a version with minimal onboard compute, no AR or fancy gizmos, just a basic gyro for stabilization. I'd only use it tethered to the Mac as a wearable usb c screen. But I guess that's not their vision...

Yes! Go demo it! It is indeed the future of computing.

Can it run VScode or IntelliJ yet?

Connected to a mac, yes

Or using GitHub codespaces

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