After a long year’s wait, Roland Denning finally got a demo of the Apple Vision Pro at a local Apple Store in London and his opinion on the device has completely changed.
A year ago I wrote a sceptical piece about the just announced Apple Vision Pro. Then, of course, I hadn’t actually seen it. Now I have, courtesy of a demo at the Apple Store, and frankly I was blown away.
Throughout the history of cinema many filmmakers have sought after a total immersive environment – widescreen, Cinerama, 3D, IMAX, Dolby audio, shaking seats and odour sprays – but they never seem to quite convince. The Apple Vision Pro is without doubt the most successful immersive environment I have ever witnessed. Pin sharp, 3D images fill the entire field of vision. Apple’s eye tracking – you select by eye movement rather than hand gesture – worked seamlessly. Like so many innovations, Apple did not invent VR and immersive computing, but it has just done it better than others. Even watching conventional flat movies on the Vision Pro is very impressive – the ‘Cinema Environment’ replicates the movie theatre experience extraordinarily well.
The Vision Pro is, of course, far more than a VR viewing device. Apple has heralded an era of ‘spatial computing’ – beyond mere entertainment, and proposes a virtual workspace within which all your computing devices function. This might end up being the big story of the Vision Pro but it’s also the most uncertain, and not one I am going to discuss now.
Has VR, like 3D, never really taken off because no one has done it well enough? Is this the product that will bring VR into the mainstream? Will movies and gaming merge? My answer to all these questions is a qualified ‘no’.
In the Vision Pro, Apple has implemented VR superbly. But do filmmakers really want an immersive environment? Without doubt, immersion is great for gaming where the participant choses a path rather than following a fixed narrative. VR is what you want for presenting an environment rather than a story – a dream for estate agents and holiday sales. Promotions that use phone-based VR headsets that works are commonplace (even my coffee company offers an VR experience of their beans). The Vision Pro is in a different league entirely, but that league is currently a very limited one.
The demo movies on the Vision Pro are sharp, bright and colourful – as you would expect. But moviemakers today yearn for shallow depth of field, character and mystery – by those standards, the Vision Pro images would be dismissed as ‘clinical’. But all the early demonstrations of HD were like that too. The potential for movies that take full advantage of the Vision Pro features could be enormous - horror films where weird stuff is happening just at the edges of your field of vision, or minor characters respond to you when you look at them.
Like the old gag about ‘who bought the first fax machine – and why?’, the Vision Pro needs to reach a critical mass for filmmakers to take full advantage of what it offers. There is an additional problem that every Vision Pro has to be personalised for the user (including a LIDAR analysis of your face and the addition of extra lenses if you wear glasses) – this is not something you can just hand out to punters like headphones at a silent disco.
As more and more cameras emerge that can make movies in the immersive format for the Vision Pro, so some of us will start doing that, testing the water while waiting for a market to emerge.
In my original piece I wrote “The shared experience of a movie theatre maybe in decline, but the shared experience of watching a great TV show with your partner or family on the sofa is something I think we all cherish. Watching TV on your own is a diminished experience and watching with your mates each wearing a Vision Pro seems frankly absurd.”
One of the stand out episodes of the Apple demo was being surrounded by baby rhinos (you have to see it). But there is also an elephant in the room - a key potential use where the solitary aspect becomes an advantage and one that Apple is understandably reluctant to promote. That is pornography, and it wouldn’t be the first technology to break into the mainstream via that route. But if I wasn’t going to discuss work-related activities in this piece, I’m certainly not going there.
The Apple Vision Pro at $3500 is, of course, very expensive. Given the amount and quality of the technology within it I would say it is actually a bargain, but it’s going to remain a niche product for a while. It may be that, like the iPod, the Vision Pro will be a game-changer that will eventually disappear entirely, subsumed into other products.
At the very least, I predict it will become the must-have accessory for club class passengers on long-haul flights. For a while, the rest of us will look on in envy, but should be start making movies for it? The audience is going to be very small for a while yet. But if the quality of the experience in the Apple Store demo can be replicated at a cheaper price, it will likely grow rapidly.