apple vision pro

A Hands-On Experience with the Apple Vision Pro

August 1, 2024VR Article

I am not all that easily pleased when it comes to Virtual Reality headsets. As someone with multiple sclerosis, I have problems with my vision in general and find that such headsets usually give me a headache.

When I used the Meta Quest 3 demo device in a shop a few months ago, I had to stop doing so because it made me feel sick. The person I was with found the same because it triggered their motion sickness, which is not something that I suffer from. It was with some trepidation, then, that I entered the Apple Store in order to experience the Apple Vision Pro for the first time during a 30 minute demo session. Boy was I wrong.

Book a Demo Appointment Immediately

The first thing that should be said about the Apple Vision Pro is that it is expensive. Very, very expensive. When it first hit the market the entry level model cost £3,499 with 256GB of storage, whilst the middle option had 512GB of storage and cost £3,699. The biggest model, meanwhile, offered 1TB of storage for a cool £3,899.

That puts it in the bracket of being one of the most expensive things that Apple has ever sold, so it is fair to say that the majority of people are likely to steer well clear of even thinking about buying one. My advice would be to ignore the pricing structure and head to an Apple Store as soon as you can.

You don’t need to be able to buy one in order to enjoy the experience of seeing what the company’s spatial computing device is able to do. The demo features are, as you would expect, put in place to blow you away when it comes to showing off the device’s capabilities and it is genuinely thrilling to see what it offers.

From the manner in which you control things by simply looking at what you want to select and then tapping your fingers together to make said selection through to the sheer quality of the screens in front of you, Apple has done an excellent job of getting you to the point where you want to shout ‘TAKE MY MONEY!’, even if you don’t have any.

It Feels Like the Future

The most important thing about any new tech is that it feels futuristic. There is no point in someone designing something that has already existed for 50 years, nor is such a thing likely to blow us away when we use it. The Apple Vision Pro gives you a really good insight into what the future of technology is likely to look like.

By offering a mixed-reality universe, in which you can see what’s around you at the same time as being able to look at a photo in minute detail or even just do a bit of work, it offers the kind of visual that looked a million years away when we watched a film such as Minority Report back in 2002.

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As you sit now reading this, imagine if you were doing so on a floating screen in front of your eyes. Now picture another floating screen to your right where your iTunes library sits, whilst on the left is a screen offering you your Twitter feed. There are no limits to what you can do with the Vision Pro’s real estate, which is why it is so appealing to people that have to work with multiple screens in the real world.

You can also watch a film in ‘Theatre Mode’, which effectively puts you into a cinema but without all of the annoying people around you talking, using their phones or eating noisy popcorn. I’m not sure there’s any price I wouldn’t pay for that.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t issues with it. It is very heavy for starters. There are also limits to the apps available for use on it, which isn’t ideal. For some people, headaches will come relatively quickly and your eyes might tire before you get a chance to do any real work.

Then there’s that insane price point, which is just too prohibitive to many people and actually gets even more expensive if you need to wear glasses because you won’t be able to do so and will have to pay for a lens to be put into the Vision Pro. Even so, being able to watch sport and feel as though you’ve got pitch side seats will rightly thrill most people.