-I got to try out the new Apple Vision Pro headset,
the $3,500 headset that Apple will launch sometime in 2024.
And I'm honestly still kind of processing it.
It is, in many ways, one of the coolest new products
I've tried in a very, very long time.
But I think it's also fair to say
this very much feels like a rough draft.
It's not done.
The polish is not fully and uniformly applied.
Because I know you have questions,
let's not think of this as a definitive take,
but a quick sense
of what Apple's Vision Pro brings to the table
and whether or not you might actually want to use one
down the road.
What is in the Vision Pro headset?
You've got two screens in front of your eyes.
They're said to be higher than 4K resolution per eye,
so you get a really crisp view of your digital content
and, to some extent, the stuff around you.
And you can see that stuff around you
because there are 12 cameras baked into the headset,
some of which are meant to give you
sort of a pass-through view of the space you're in.
It's tracking your hands.
There are trackers and illuminators inside the headset
to look at your eyes so it knows what you're looking at,
which allows you to use it without additional controllers.
You also have audio pods baked into the bands
that you wear that give you spatial audio,
so audio that sounds more immersive,
to give you a sense of space and dimension.
The headset is not heavier than any other VR headset,
but those don't generally bother me anyway.
But if you're prone to a sore neck,
headsets like this just might not be
on the table for you at all.
About battery life, Apple says the tiny attached battery pack
gives you two hours of battery life,
or you can run the headset just plugged into the wall.
I didn't get a chance to stress-test this headset.
So it's possible that two hours is an optimistic figure,
but we'll find out.
I've also gotten questions about whether I got nauseous,
which is no, but then again,
I generally don't with these headsets.
And if you have experienced that in the past,
I'd encourage you to try one first,
because Apple will have demos.
I've also been asked how you get these things set up,
which was kind of weird for me
because I had to ride a golf cart to a weird structure
near Apple's basketball courts and volleyball courts.
An employee scanned my glasses and then scanned my big head
and then scanned my ears.
You will have a version of that
either in the Apple Store app or in the actual Apple Store.
So what does all that stuff actually allow you to do?
Well, I think there are a couple different buckets,
the first of which feels like work or productivity.
And to me that was expressed
when I got to throw up a bunch of different app windows
and move them around, which is actually a bit more intuitive
than you might think.
To select something on an app window
in the world around you, you simply look at it and pinch.
And because there are so many cameras
looking kind of all over the place,
your hand can be in your lap,
your hand can be off to the side.
Like, it kind of doesn't matter.
You can be loosey-goosey that way, which I appreciate.
You can move your hand around
to drag things in the space around you,
and if you move your hand forward or back,
things move into and out of the foreground,
which is kind of helpful as you're trying to find a setup
that works for you.
Apple did talk about
some work-use cases during its keynote.
It mentioned being able to futz around in a spreadsheet,
which I did not get to try,
and I also didn't get to try to type anything,
which as a writer and as a person who has to edit documents
I really need to know about.
But I was able to use the Freeform app,
which is Apple's sort of whiteboard collaborative tool,
and in it was embedded a 3-D model of an apartment.
So I could sort of move my head around
and see what the space was like.
I could see if the little painting on the little wall
made sense next to the little dining room table
and just generally got a feel
for how collaboration could work.
It's not my workflow.
It might not be yours, but it's something.
The next bucket is entertainment.
I couldn't try any games because there weren't any ready for it,
but Apple did build a couple of experiences
into this demo version of the headset
that did kind of give us a sense of what it's like
to lose yourself in a virtual world,
the first of which was using photos and video
to wrap around you.
So as you're watching some of this content,
if it's capable of doing so,
you can sort of tweak the digital crown
that sits above your right eyebrow.
And you can watch as the field of view
sort of expands around you.
The field of view is not the best.
I think it's roughly on par with other VR headsets,
but because the visual clarity, the resolution of those screens,
because that's so high,
you kind of don't think about it so much.
So when a space does kind of stretch
to encompass the world around you,
no, you're not seeing everything.
Your peripheral vision does have a sort of dark halo
at the edges,
but you get used to it pretty fast.
And again, this was a lightning-fast demo
but kind of felt like I could live
with that limitation for field of view.
We also got to see "Avatar 2" in 3-D, and I hate 3-D movies,
but I got to say, like, watching 3-D content
on a headset that was designed for it
made me feel like this might be the time
that 3-D content gets its fair shake,
but imagine what artists could do with this
or filmmakers or the next generation of creatives.
There's a lot of canvas to play with here,
and I'm really excited to see how that all kind of shakes out.
The last bucket is what I would characterize as personal stuff.
I'm talking about things like the meditation app,
which dims your view of the world around you
and gives you this weird digital flower
that expands and contracts in time with your breathing.
The thing that I love the most, though,
and I know this is not going to be everyone's choice,
is spatial photos, which you can capture
by clicking a button above your left eyebrow.
This is 3-D photos and video,
and as you're swiping through your photos
and you see one of these pop out,
it is kind of meaningful.
Look, I'm a person who moved away from my family
to work for "The Post."
That includes my aging parents and my 2-year-old niece,
who is my favorite person in the world.
And seeing a child blow out a birthday cake in 3-D
made me wish I had those kinds of moments
of my family captured.
But that comes with caveats, too,
because you have to be wearing the headset
to actually capture it.
You can't sort of hold it in your hands like a camera
and not look like a crazy person while there's a party happening.
Now, this is all clearly a work in progress.
But if there's one thing
that feels more like a work in progress than anything else,
it's FaceTime, which feels weird to say,
'cause I think a lot of us rely on it all the time
and it's generally pretty drama-free.
But with FaceTime on the Vision Pro,
one of the things you can do
is create a virtual avatar of yourself.
Basically, you point the headset at yourself,
it scans your face
and generates this sort of realistic version of yourself
that appears to be talking on FaceTime calls.
And it, friends, is the creepiest thing
I saw in my 30 minutes.
I've met the person I was having a FaceTime conversation with,
and seeing her virtual avatar,
her lips, like, not matching the words
and the eyes blinking sort of erratically sometimes,
it was deeply off-putting.
I know I've just kind of rambled at you
about this headset for a while,
but that's the effect I think it has
on at least the people that I saw.
We were kind of processing and trying to work it through,
because in no way
does any other VR or AR headset I've ever tried
even stack up to the clarity and the elegance
of what I experienced at Apple Park that day.
Does that mean it's worth $3,500?
Look, I don't think so.
But things could change between now
and when this thing becomes available in 2024.
I got a really narrow slice of experiences,
and what I saw was honestly so cool.