Daring Fireball: First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS

When it comes to new Apple products my go to reviewer is John Gruber of Daring Fireball. Gruber knows the Apple world better than anyone else. He is also demanding of details, and focuses on the experience.

Vision Pro and VisionOS feel like they've been pulled forward in time from the future. I haven't had that feeling about a new product since the original iPhone in 2007. There are several aspects of the experience that felt impossible.

That "felt impossible" is where magic can happen. 🪄

His take on the "pass through" view when you put Vision Pro on.

Again, it doesn't look at all like looking at screens inside a headset. It looks like reality, albeit through something like a pair of safety glasses or a large face-covering clear shield. There is no border in the field of vision -- your field of view through Vision Pro exactly matches what you see through your eyes without it. Most impressively, and uncannily, the field of view seemingly exactly matches what you see naturally. It's not even slightly wider angle, or even slightly more telephoto

The ability to present you with a view of the real world that maps exactly with what you see normally seems very important. It should limit any disorientation, and allow you to navigate the environment with little modification.

If anything is going to seem weird or wrong about long-form reading in VisionOS, it's not the visual fidelity, but rather the fact that I've never once in my life read an article or email message in a window that appeared 4 or 5 feet tall.

Multiple times in Gruber's review he goes to the lack of limits when you are in an AR environment. I doubt this can be fully appreciated without experiencing it first hand. But this removal of limits is interesting to me. With a good enough experience, do you trend to a future where you ditch the large monitors and just put a Vision Pro on with a keyboard and do your computer stuff? That seems like a clear path.

Then, a dinosaur -- a velociraptor-looking thing, seemingly about 9 or 10 feet tall -- approached the "portal" in the wall and came halfway through into the room. I was invited to stand up from the couch and approach it. There was a coffee table in front of the couch, a possible shin-banging accident waiting to happen, but the pass-through video experience is so seamless, so natural, so much like just looking through glasses, not looking at a screen inside a headset, that it took no concentration or carefulness at all on my part to stand up and walk around the coffee table and approach the dinosaur. The dinosaur was not pre-recorded. It reacted, live, to me, keeping eye contact with me at all times. It was spooky, and a significant part of my own lizard brain was instinctively very alarmed. I got extremely close to the dinosaur's head, and the illusion that it was real never broke down. Even up close, there was no sign that it was composed of polygons stitched together or something. It looked like a 10-foot tall dinosaur that could kill me with a snap of its jaws, right there in the room with me, as close to my face as the MacBook Pro display on which I'm writing these words is right now.

The dinosaur experience is similar to that done on other headsets, but I’m curious to see if the significantly improved experience of the Vision Pro makes this so much more believable. Existing VR experiences I've done have always been obviously digital, and obviously not real.

I walked away from my demo more than a bit discombobulated. Not because it was disorienting or even the least bit nauseating, but because it was so unlike anything I've ever experienced.

I can’t wait to try this thing myself.

There are a number of other Vision Pro reviews that I thought were good reads as well:

• I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever. - The Verge
• Eyes (and head) on with the Apple Vision Pro – Six Colors
• First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good | TechCrunch
• Introducing Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer - Apple