Question Of The Week: What's an app you'd like to try in visionOS?
Can be an app that exists on other platforms or a new idea, as long as you don't mind sharing.
Since we're still a relatively small magazine it might be fun to have a conversation starter as a sticky post each week. Next Saturday I'll start a thread to collect ideas for the following week's question!
Trying out art on my actual walls. I know I can kind of do that right now with ARKit, but it's not great; it's the kind of thing that Vision will handle beautifully. Also bringing home furniture. I'm looking for a new dining table, and the idea that I have to just drop two grand on this thing when I've only ever really imagined it in the space is kind of nuts. Sure, I can tape it out on the ground to see how big it is, check it fits, but that's still not going to help me know how it feels in the room.
I think it also would have been great recently when I got about fifty swatches of material in the post for blinds. While I think seeing the real thing is still going to be necessary, seeing the full blinds in Vision would have helped immensely.
Yeah, a lot of the hands-on reviews talk about the apparent permanence of objects in Vision Pro – that they don't shift about like objects in ARKit and other implementations. That alone would make a huge difference for applications like this.
3D immersive art installations would be amazing. I can see contemporary artists and art museums taking advantage of this technology to create amazing art experiences. Live performances could incorporate AR elements to their shows, things that are not possible in the meat world.
I do a lot of audio/video installations. I'd love to be able to get real-time measurements of spaces I'm working in, and then use an app to "draw" a plan of what needs to go where, etc, that I could export and share with a customer Throw in a visualizer for spatially testing the audio acoustics of the space and I'd sell my soul.
Really simple - Plex. I would be happy simply consuming my media on a big screen. I am very curious to see how the image fidelity is, if there is any chromatic aberration, how clear text is, and how convincing it is. I tried bigscreen on oculus and was not impressed at all. The font scaling combined with the display and lens quality made it unusable.
I have a Meta Quest 2 through no fault of my own and honestly a meditation app that's actually got good development and solid hardware behind it would be a lifesaver.
Cities skyline in vr where the geography is modelled off your interior. i.e. the sofa in your living room could be a hill and you have to zone for buildings around walls or tables etc.
I don’t want to hate on AR/VR, I think it has its place, but I feel like adding more information and more technology in our faces is going in the wrong trajectory. So far it isolates us more from the people right in front of us. I guess if it turns out that with AR we can exist in the same room as friends and family that live in different places in a way that isn’t weird, then that might change my mind.
It's interesting: Vision Pro is the first headset with so many features intended to reduce isolation – EyeSight, Breakthrough, AudioPods – but it seems to get this criticism much more than others. (It's not just you: a lot of people feel this way, and Apple's attempts to address the issue don't invalidate the viewpoint.)
I wonder if it's because Apple's marketing is the closest most people have come to seeing a headset used in actual public spaces or in everyday life, as opposed to seeing it in the isolated rooms and workspaces of Meta, Microsoft, and Sony's marketing. By drawing attention to their workarounds, Apple's also drawing attention to the issue.
It reminds me of the increase in public concern about stalking after Apple released AirTags – the first keychain tracking device with features intended to combat stalking. Tile had been on the market for years at that point, but it was Apple that received the criticism because they'd drawn awareness to the issue.
I'm also old enough that I remember these same concerns being raised about personal stereos, and it was certainly true: earphones are still my favorite way to shut out my surrounding environment, especially somewhere noisy like a bus or train. But it's not as though the older generation complaining about them were engaged in empathy-expanding conversation with each other: they'd bury themselves in books and newspapers in the surrounding seats.
Ok fine I'll be the nasty and say I'm interested to see how the porn industry adopts this technology, like going to a virtual strip club or something. VR Porn looks interesting.
Google street-view has already been a small game changer to my line of work, previously we had to go on location to check local conditions for quotations and now it's often enough to check street-view and I believe even more "local presence" you'd get with this headset might be helpful for that.
I'm hoping Apple has had the Vision Pro on the roadmap long enough that their cars are capturing stereoscopic images...
The battery takes USB C and lets you use it indefinitely plugged in. We'll have to see the power draw but there effectively has to be the ability to use a third party battery pack with the official one.
The price is high but for what it is I think it's super aggressive honestly. I don't think you'd find anyone else bringing a dumb headset at that resolution and latency without passthrough or the fact that it's a computer for much under $2k.
(Definitely out of my budget, but I'm using it as motivation to get my shit together and finally start writing apps to sell and see if I can make enough to justify the price to myself.)
Unless they had another battery in the headset itself (more weight), there isn't really another way to do it. The choices they made all make sense (though I'd prefer support for arbitrary desktop apps, which I'm assuming won't be a thing).
If I do manage to earn enough extra cash to justify the cost, I'll likely get a significantly bigger battery and rig up a pouch or mini backpack or something for longer portable use when I want to do that. But there is a reason they're sticking to a proprietary connector. It means you can do all the power regulation in the block and just receive it where it needs to be on the part on your face, which means less weight.
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