Vision Pro launch: all the news about Apple’s pricey new headset

You can see that in this Slow Mo Guys YouTube Short showing the flashing of the invisible-to-the-human-eye IR illuminators of Apple’s face computer, both on the front and around the lenses’ edges.

At 1,000fps, the Guys show the Vision Pro’s very fancy micro-OLED displays alternating between images and black frames, with a ring of IR lights popping on during the dark moments to help track where your eyes are looking.

Jason Snell of Six Colors details his experience with the MLB’s visionOS app now that the season is underway. Of the Gameday feature that puts a 3D-animated baseball field in your space during a game, he writes:

I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.

Ah, the early days of the Vision Pro’s app ecosystem.

Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and Spire Blast will each get Vision Pro “spatial” apps tomorrow, Apple shared in a release emailed to The Verge.

Also, rhythm game Synth Riders — aka the only game I’ve been coming back to besides bullet hell shooter Void-X — has been updated with Game Center leaderboards and a pass-the-headset Party Mode.

Woot is selling the mixed reality headset with a one-year Apple warranty for $3,299 ($200 off), the first discount we’ve seen.

But there’s a catch: they all ship with a 21W light seal and small-sized headbands. Buying a seal separately from Apple costs $200 and the headbands are $99 apiece, so you might pay more than the retail price if you aren’t happy with the fit.

Update March 27th, 4:41PM ET: Adjusted pricing and added more specific sizing details, courtesy of Woot.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told press at the China Development Forum in Beijing that China will get it this year, according to Reuters this morning, citing a Chinese state media Weibo post.

MacRumors notes that this is the first time an Apple executive has confirmed where the Vision Pro will launch outside the US this year. Rumors have also suggested Apple will prioritize UK and Canadian launches.

It’s essentially the same thing you’d see if you were browsing the store in the Vision Pro itself — a few curated lists of native apps here, some recommended iPad apps there.

But at least there’s a way to casually cruise those sweet spatial apps without popping the headset on now.

Once Apple released the Vision Pro, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with a video saying his company’s Quest 3 headset is “the better product, period.”

Now he’s back with more takes, posting this on Threads in response to a post that said, “Apple is selling pretty much the device Meta wants to reach in 3-5 years.”

I don’t think we’re saying the devices are the same. We’re saying Quest is better. If our devices weigh as much as theirs in 3-5 years, or have the motion blur theirs has, or the lack of precision inputs, etc, then that means we’ll have regressed significantly.

Yes, their resolution is higher, but they paid for that with many other product tradeoffs that make their device worse in most ways. That’s not what we aspire to.

There’s a new Vision Pro update out, and visionOS 1.1 supposedly improves everybody’s favorite feature, Personas. But I think it’s still the stuff of nightmares. I FaceTimed my friend, and according to her: I still look too sleepy, my mouth moves more, and my eyes are better but not quite right.

“It looks more like you, but it’s still not you.” What do y’all think?

The visionOS 1.1 release candidate that’s now available to developers includes some upgrades to the Personas avatars, such as improved rendering of eyes, mouth representation, and hair and makeup appearance.

MacRumors points out that this release also has updates for the virtual keyboard, Mac Virtual Display, mobile device management, and more. With the iOS 17.4 update close to a public launch, Apple also put out release candidates for tvOS, macOS, watchOS, and Xcode.

As a nerd kid, this was one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. But I haven’t looked at the funny pages in many years, and had assumed this one had long since expired.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw a Foxtrot strip referencing Apple’s recently-launched Vision Pro.

Joanna Stern writes in The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s face computer isn’t so great for work, but serves well as an escape from day-to-day life. You know, like a VR headset.

Still, even if the Vision Pro isn’t always magic, she finds it handy for focusing “on a single task, like writing a column.”

It’s about codecs and resolution. 4K-and-up videos only use either YouTube’s VP9 codec or the royalty-free AV1. Christian Selig, developer of the Juno YouTube app, writes that 360 video of the former can’t work because it requires Apple’s blessing. And the Vision Pro’s M2 chip has no AV1 hardware decoder, so that’s out, too.

Why not 1080p, he asks? Because it looks like doo-doo.

The San Francisco Standard documents some parties where attendees are encouraged to shake their butts while wearing the Vision Pro (from pictures, it seems like most didn’t go along with the ask).

Before you dismiss the idea, consider this: If you don’t have a kid or a dog, “I gotta go; my Vision Pro died” could be a great excuse to leave a party early.

Holonautic co-founder and developer Dennys Kuhnert says he is “both disappointed and impressed” by the Vision Pro’s performance and showed off this comparison of the two headsets with a real-time visualization tool.

As he wrote in another post, “The quality and accuracy is fantastic but the lag with passthrough hands feels currently higher than on Quest 3. Could be explained by AVP’s very low passthrough latency... ~11ms vs ~35ms for Q3.”

Apple doesn’t sell a stand for the Vision Pro, so developer Christian Selig took it upon himself to create one — just like the unofficial YouTube app he made for the headset, too.

This stand allows the headset to hang vertically, making it take up a bit less space on your desk as opposed to some other storage options out there. Selig has uploaded all the design files onto MakerWorld, so you can 3D print the stand for yourself.

In this interview for the Voices of VR podcast, Apollo developer Christian Selig shares his experience creating Juno, an unofficial YouTube player he created for the Vision Pro in only a week’s time.

Despite the small number of people who own the headset, he says he’s earned enough from it to buy “multiple” Vision Pros.

I keep a pretty bushy mustache, and it seems to prevent the headset’s downward-facing cameras from seeing and translating what my mouth is doing to my Persona’s real-time expressions during a Vision Pro FaceTime call. Apparently, I’m not alone.

In fairness, Persona is still a beta feature. Maybe visionOS 1.1 will save my friends from this horror show.

While many people are excitedly entering Apple’s spatial computing future, some Vision Pro early adopters have already packed the devices up and sent them back for a refund. Reasons we’ve heard include eye fatigue, few useful apps available so far, and a lack of window / workspace persistence.

If you bought one on day one, the return window is closing now, so let us know if you’re deciding to keep your headset and why.