welcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of spatial Computing I’m your friend David Pierce and I am in Bora Bora I mean no I’m not I’m in my basement where I always am but I’m in the Apple Vision Pro in one of the immersive environments and what I’ve discovered about this thing is that obviously you can turn the Vision Pro all the way down and see your actual surroundings through pass through or you can turn it all the way up with the digital crown and be in sort of a pure VR environment but I like to turn on one of the environments but only to like 60% and what that means now is as I’m looking forward here I’m seeing my Mac monitor because I think that’s how most people use their Vision Pro is as a monitor for their Mac plus a couple of Vision Pro apps that I’ve aligned around and it looks like I’m on the beach right I’m in a lounge chair on the beach in Bor Bora it’s delightful but then if I look off to the side or I look behind me or I even look kind of down at my desk I can see my actual surroundings and that’s usually what I need to be able to see in a glance anyway like the dog comes charging down the hallway I need to be able to look and see the dog charging down the hallway but normally if I’m just looking forward I get this lovely Serene Beach environment it’s delightful and I can do it from my basement it actually like it feels so silly to talk about this but it’s kind of great anyway The Vision Pro is what I want to talk about on the show today so five months ago today as you’re listening to this on Tuesday July 2nd was the launch of the Vision Pro February 2nd 2024 that was when it shipped and regular people started getting to use it and I thought this might be a good time to just do a check-in it’s been 5 months we’ve heard a lot about new software we’ve heard a lot about new hardware developers have gotten a chance to do it people have gotten to spend real time messing around in this thing I think the novelty has worn off in a way that’s actually really useful we can just talk about this thing so that’s what we’re going to do we’re going to talk about what we’ve been up to in this headset for the last few months we’re going to talk to some developers about what they’ve been up to we’re going to talk about where all of this is headed lots to do I think the Vision Pro has sort of been through the hype cycle and really we’ve all in a certain way kind of forgotten about it honestly it was not a huge hit it didn’t change the world but I feel like there’s still a lot to talk about here so that’s what we’re going to do we’re going to talk about it all of that is coming up in just a second but first I have to go and fix my hair because dear Lord you use this thing for 10 minutes and your hair looks ridiculous and we just can’t have that lots of Vision Pro stuff to do this is the vergecast we’ll be right back welcome back so like I was saying this is a really interesting moment for the Vision Pro because on the one hand I think everybody has kind of stopped talking about and thinking about it the people who were going to buy one bought one the people who weren’t going to buy one weren’t cuz it’s $3,500 there was so much hype and so much excitement and then some disillusionment and then there were questions about whether it was a hit or whether it was a failure realistically it’s neither but it’s kind of gone out of the Consciousness and yet there’s been all this news recently about Vision OS 2 which has lots of new features coming to it and more coming later this year we’ve gotten some news about Apple’s Hardware team kind of changing gears and rethinking the way that they think about Vision Pro we’ve heard a lot about other headsets and glasses sorts of devices the Rayband meta smart glasses have been a huge hit which I think is a really interesting part of the Vision Pro story there’s just a lot going on this gadget is is 5 months old which is brand new and also in a certain way kind of old in the way the tech news World works but there’s still a lot happening and it feels like whatever is going to happen here is very early but I wanted to get some perspective from people who frankly have used this thing more than I have so I grabbed two of the folks at The Verge who have the most Vision Pro experience and that is Wes Davis and vong they have spent many more hours goofing around at this thing testing it using it in their own lives than I have and so I thought I’d grab them to talk about what they’ve seen so far how they’ve used it whether they would continue to use it over time and where it seems like all of this might go next so let’s just get into it Wes Davis welcome to the vergecast yes hello good to be here V song welcome back thank you for having me so I wanted to talk to you because you’re you’re two of the vision proest people at the Verge which is I would say it’s kind of a dubious distinction at this moment in time uh but let’s just let’s just talk about how you’re both using the Vision Pro and Wes I want to start with you because unlike V andme you paid hard-earned actual human dollars for your Vision Pro I’m still paying money for it I did the uh bought it with the installment payments through my Apple card um so I’ll be paying for it for some time oh no so when you bought one what did you buy it for what did you think you were getting I knew that I was getting a product that isn’t fully fledged I knew it was going to be basically a you know like a tech demo product I had read the review I knew the shortcomings I knew what I was getting into I think to be completely transparent like the reason I wanted to get it is because I hadn’t really used a VR thing since the Virtual Boy like Nintendo’s you know it’s been a minute drastic failure like I had played with other people’s stuff but I hadn’t owned one you know what I mean so I kind of wanted to see where I guess not just where things are but kind of where they’re going right cuz this is like it’s a little bit ahead of its time is not the right word right but like but it’s you know it’s ambitious um the the tech is pretty ahead as far as like visual Clarity and all that stuff the screen a really high resolution and did you have a thing that you were like okay even if it’s terrible at everything at least it’ll do this one thing for me and that’ll make it worth it did you have one of those in your mind that you’re like if only it’s X I can live this purchase not really I was intrigued by the whole like let’s put a big virtual screen in front of me thing I have since found out that that it’s nice for certain things but it does also do things like when you have a gigantic display in front of you I’ve never used on uh a regular basis more than like a 27in screen but when you have a gigantic screen like blow it up to you know the size of a huge HD TV or projector or whatever uh you will miss notifications because like really on Mac OS they’re all just in the top right and when when the top right is 5 miles away from you you don’t see them you mean like literally in your eyesight like screen is so large yeah okay so I don’t do that I feel like I have the exact opposite really experience with that yeah I just feel like I see everything all at once I just become Michelle yo everything every all at once I have the power you have hot dog fingers yeah with hot dog fingers uh or it feels like hot dog fing it might as well be hot dog fingers just CU like I have a lot of problem with it recognizing my finger gestures I don’t I feel like I every single time every so often I have to recalibrate using it so yes truly I just become Michelle yio I mean there are worse things to become right yeah it’s it’s in certain ways that’s the dream and another ways less so but V what about you you you you acquired this thing B basically from Nei you stole it from him like 8 minutes after we published our review in January why did you why did you want to have this thing around um basically one you wear it I’m the wearables lady so that is it is like it is a category of wearables and one that I you know I like emerging Tech a lot so I’m just curious about it because it also I wanted to see how it Stacks up to the idea of smart glasses and just kind of I feel like it’s part way on the evolution to that so I just really wanted to kind of dig into it and it wasn’t what I expected in many ways like I I don’t I think I was expecting something different than a VR headset even though everyone had said it’s just essentially a VR headset and yeah yeah it is a VR headset it’s slightly different though it’s very it’s very apple is what I’ll say when I’m in it I also have uh the meta Quest 3 yeah the the most recent one I have that so I kind of go back and forth in between them sometimes and it’s just they’re the same but it’s like the same thing written in different fonts but one of those fonts is Comic Sands and the other is like I don’t know what the hipno font is anymore is that oh okay yeah so it’s comic sense so it’s just very I’ll let people wonder which one I think is Comic sance and which one I think is the hypn font feel it’s very obvious but that’s yeah it’s good we we’ll leave it mysterious for you so okay so fast forward to now and Wes I’m I’m curious for you to what do you do when you put on on the headset like I feel like we’ve it’s been long enough part of the reason I want to do this now is it’s been long enough that the like I wonder what this is and how it’ll work is this anything I would assume that’s worn off by now and now it’s like you don’t quite have the like oh my God every time you put it on or the like GH this sucks every time the battery dies so you’re like you’re in a space where you can actually kind of use it as a person how do you use the Vision Pro now um just for cooking um no I uh I use it um I was about to be like that is the most exciting answer I believed you for a second I tried it once after reading um Joanna Stern review right yeah yeah Joanna Stern’s story but uh it’s horrible for that um don’t use it for cooking not we were FaceTiming while you were cooking that one time did we okay I forgot that we were FaceTiming in The Vision Pro while you were cooking that was an experience watching you it was a bad idea um that was something yeah don’t not safe no uh mostly so I will use it one or two times a week while I’m working um usually it’s like if I really want to focus on a uh something specific if I’m working on on you know a bigger piece or um every now and then I just just to try it just to see but I I I’m a three monitor guy which is stupid but I am I’ve gotten used to it and so when I have just the one monitor I’m like now all my stuff’s on top of each other I can’t just look over I can’t put all my apps on all the screens so there’s that I use it a fair amount actually to watch stuff um I’ve been catching up on For All Mankind which I never watched before this year so I’ve been watching that a bunch uh every now and then I’ll think like hey like this is basically a movie theater um on my face so like are there old movies that I never got to see in theater things that I missed um so I’ll I’ll do that sometimes so you use it as like a single tasking device yeah and as a I’m I’m fascinated by this idea that you’re like I have too many screens and when they need to focus I put on a headset uh which on one hand sounds so counterintuitive but is also a thing I’ve actually heard a few times from folks that it is like it is a surprisingly useful Focus device like why does it work for you that’s harder to explain I think it’s it’s sort of that it zeros me in so it’s like when I put it on it’s like I get to go into uh like mentally into a mode where I’m like like this is the thing that I’m doing right now is working whatever this task is I I don’t know it’s uh it’s helpful I like it for that is it worth $3500 to do that when I could also just get my laptop and like go do that uh exact same thing I’m I’m not sure although you know my laptop is like a tiny little rectangle and this lets me as I said earlier have a you know 500m wide screen so yeah it is a very funny thing that like years ago I had a cooworker who had a chrome book that he had rigged up to not run anything other than Google Docs and he was just like this is my this is my typewriter right like I sit here when I just need to write things and and like do you have a hundred other devices that will also run Google Docs yes of course absolutely but there was something about that space that just felt sort of better and saner and more focused to him you hear about writers right like who keep around like old Max or whatever like for the same reason George R Martin still mad at him like I’m sure part of that is just like this is the comfortable thing that I’ve been writing my novels on for you know decades I’m not going to give it up until you know it completely dies or whatever but V what about you what has been sticky for you over time actually kind of very similar to Wes when I really need to focus on a draft um like really just I have a lot of little Focus tools on my regular thing because breaking out the Vision Pro it has to be really intentional for me just because I have really bad eyes so if I’m wearing glasses is I don’t have the ice inserts so I have to be like okay it’s time for me to go upstairs and put my contacts in oh wow yeah it’s like a several step process for you just to be like I’m I’m going to open up Google Docs in the headset now yeah but I actually think that the most useful thing for me has been actually having a 500 foot Google Docs in front of me just to like really zero in on the words and actually I write mostly in the CMS so sometimes it’s just the CMS just in front of me with the chaos like just just really impressing upon me the importance of finishing this draft literally the stuff of nightmares yeah it’s a giant nightmare screen and or you know um you know sometimes I’ll watch stuff on there because I really do think it’s like best when you’re using it as a screen it kind of isn’t as good in my opinion when you’re using it for the way that I think Apple wants you to use it uh it’s really just like having an amazingly large screen in front of you and uh my problem though with watching content is the platform of content like I think if you have something that you want to watch on Disney Plus or the stuff that’s or Apple TV plus that’s integrated oh yeah that’s super easy but I want to watch my kramas because my husband won’t watch kdramas with me and this is a solitary experience so you know going to my crappy streaming kdrama uh websites where everything is like a one second away from getting malware it infects into my Vision Pro that’s kind of not quite so easy and then when you do watch it sometimes like I did watch a little bit of Bridgerton through going to Netflix in Safari and and the thing I was just like wow this is too overwhelming there’s just so much happening um real like I don’t I don’t know that I feel quite as enamored with it like a few months on as like a watching medium because I do want to I do want to like text Cray who’s the one use the sole reason why I watch bridg and be like oh my God the men on the show are stupid they just need to talk about their feelings and like you know it’s so easy when you’re just on a TV and you can just pull out your phone and be like Oh Simon is stupid and Bridgerton I can’t really do that I have to hold my thoughts and then then like tell people afterwards cuz I could type in in in the the actual yeah but it’s stupid because you have like one finger typing unless I’m what am I going to do get up from my very comfy day bed and then uh type into my computer so that yeah no with the my keyboard just to to message someone more clearly eh it’s it’s it’s not quite as intuitive you guys are talking about this sort of single tasking thing do you do this in the like immersive environments VR headset style or do you just sit in your own living room with a gigantic screen I I sit on the moon I sit on the moon just because I’m just like it’s it’s goodbye everybody every wants in a while my every once in a while my cat will just like start touching me while I’m on the moon and that kind of takes me out of the Moon that is a real thing like cat jumping on you while you’re immersed I’m sorry I just use that term but while you have that turned on um yeah cat jumping on you although I will say that my cat uh one of his favorite things to do and it feels very intentional is to jump in my lap while I’m you know holding my phone or my tablet or whatever um and be in the way of that like it it’s not absolutely yeah and he can’t do that uh when I’m using Vision Pro he has to wedge himself between your thumb and your your index finger and that’s that’s the sometimes he’ll kind of like flash like I’ll see little ears flashing into the screen but as far as like using the immersive stuff if I’m trying to type it’s uh I don’t know like trying to find the keyboard is really annoying now they fixed that in Vision os2 so if you have the beta you can you can do that and it will recognize a magic keyboard they say that it’s just for magic keyboards I’ve gotten it to recognize this NES controller that I have as a keyboard for for just a few minutes and it would kind of show it when I look down at it again and then it stopped it figured out I was lying so I love that the pro tip is just fooling The Vision Pro that’s a good strategy absolutely but no you’re you’re getting ahead of me on some of the software stuff but one of the things I’ve heard a bunch of people talking about is that the phone mirroring thing inside of Mac OS inside of the Vision Pro could be a big deal for solving kind of both the problems you’re talking about right like the the how do I input while I’m in this space and V like the thing you’re describing which I call like light multitasking is a thing I have thought so much about with the Vision Pro because like I love going to movie theaters I go to movie theaters alone all the time to see movies just because I’m not allowed to use my phone it is the best and it’s just like I’m going to sit here I’m going to watch this whole movie like a maniac right like I’m going to just look at the movie the whole time and and there is something about the Vision Pro that is really compelling in that way I found especially in like the good streaming apps and really it’s basically like Disney and like Max a little and that’s kind of it Apple TV is good uh but there aren’t many but the ones that are good I have found I actually like really enjoy watching stuff in uh but V I’m with you like if it’s a matter of loading up a browser it just it doesn’t at that point I’m like this is worse than watching on my television what am I doing here I wish all the stuff that I wanted to watch on my own was in the good apps but they’re not which is kind of you know the whole thing about the loneliness in The Vision Pro it’s it’s a real I think that’s like my biggest problem with it is that I would enjoy it so much more if I had more people to hang out with in there otherwise yeah otherwise I’m just kind of like everyone’s out here who am I that tension sort of both sides of that I I was one of the things I wanted to ask you both about because you both live in households with other people and also are like big nerds who are online talking to people all the time for me as a person in a in a household with other people I cannot bring myself to wear this around other people like and I that’s probably just a me thing maybe I’ll get over it but I’m curious what your experience has been like like do you sit on the couch around your your partner family friends whoever and I have been roasted within an inch of My Life wearing that thing I actually wore it in a car one time uh just to test the travel mode uh I was not driving be clear I was not driving I was a passenger and that was just that was not fun the the windows were it was it was trying to fight me the entire time cuz I think it knew that I wasn’t supposed to be in a car with that thing but when I was testing it more frequently my spouse would walk by would just look at me and go oh I’ll talk to you when you’re a human again okay bye like no or he would go that is just so cursed cuz you have the eyesight on the other side and he’s just like that’s not that’s not your eyes that’s just m yeah eyesight’s not the solution it’s just not I get why they did it I get why they did I think it’s actually like very oddly human and thoughtful why they did that because eye contact is so they’re actually like talking about the social cues with by creating that particular feature but I have not I never had a single person go wow that’s so cool can I try it I’ve like derided cuz most of the people in my life are not huge Tech nerds like my husband’s just they he gets so mad seeing it and he’s like why do you have this thing what is the purpose of this what is the perp meanwhile they love they love the meta ravan glasses like they they can’t stop using them but they look at me in the Vision Pro and they’re like why humanity is like yeah the one thing that I do kind of in like the common space in the in the living room is I will go in there because it’s the one room that’s bright enough and big enough in my house where I can play games on it which like I don’t do a lot of but there there is one rhythm game which uh called synth writers um and it’s basically beats saber right um kind of it’s like you have balls flying at you and you have to catch them in time with the music or whatever it’s stupid but uh it’s also I enjoy it those games are very fun and and the good news is you look so cool doing it you look cool yeah and so like every now and then uh like my my wife will come uh down downstairs and walk in and I’m just standing there like doing like all these weird movements waving my arms around and stuff but uh she also has played it and has fun with it she never asks to play but if I’m playing and I’m like do you want to do the thing and and then she you know often will take me up on it um because she also secretly thinks it’s fun but her reaction she’s not as angry I think as uh or upset by it she’s not offended by it she’s just like she’ll come in and and just be like oh look it’s my robot husband yeah I think the I’ll talk to you when you’re done in there reaction is so common and so fascinating because that is like the the precise thing that Apple was trying to solve right this thing where like I and they did so many interesting technical things to make it work like the the thing where a person sort of Fades into your view as you come in like technically incredible it works shockingly well it’s only alarming at least for me the first couple of times like it freaked me out pretty legitimately the first couple of times and then I got used to it but it doesn’t it it fixes the problem for you as the wearer a little bit but I’ve had the exact same reaction every time I’ve been ringing around somebody else that like as soon as they see me in the headset it’s like oh we’re not interacting like we can’t you’re somewhere else I can’t you even if you can see me even if you can see the space you are somewhere else we are not going to talk I wonder if that’s because eyesight itself is the problem or if it’s because it’s just not bright and High Fidelity enough because you know when you look at it it looks like a like a like you’re looking at one of those hologram cards of of somebody’s like you know eyeballs I think that’s part of it and just like the uncanniness of it at the same time just like that really cuz you know like it it kind of you see the eyes but it’s like there’s like tinge there’s a tinge with blue I think if you’re in an app so they know that your full Focus isn’t there but unless you sit down with someone and explain to them what that means and they’re aware of what those cues are I think just people are going to look at that and just go like uh-uh yeah they’re just going to do a big uh friend and Frasier in the mummy just going uhuh so let’s let’s talk about like where we go next right because I think it is it is we’re 5 months in this thing is brand new like every time I talk to people who love division Pro they’re like what about the iPhone after 5 months and like that’s true it’s none of it none of it was any good after 5 months so like it’s fine sure uh but Wes you’ve been writing a bunch about Vision os2 which I think my read on Vision OS 2 is basically like this is now fixing all the sort of table Stakes stuff it’s basically Vision os1 now what in there are you excited about give me the rundown so the thing I’m I’m most excited about is the big curve display thing U for the reasons I mentioned earlier just not having all the space that I’m used to and it’s weirdly like a lot of the things that they brought in for this version are things that I like had thought specifically that I wanted and a curved display was like I had thought like you know we all well not we all but a lot of people were saying in forums and stuff like we want multiple displays in The Vision Pro why aren’t there multiple displays and one day I was thinking like why why do we need multiple displays it’s a virtual environment why can’t you just have a big you know a big long display or whatever um and then they announced that and I didn’t expect that like I I thought it was going to be a multiple display thing but like why not why not have a big curve display thing another thing that uh that I had really wanted uh was some better ways to get to things in in the Vision Pro so like launching the uh launching your apps for instance like the home screen before your two options were to reach up and push the little button on the top the digital ground uh or you could go into the control center by looking up hoping you get the Little Dot tapping the dot that whole process it’s like a three-step process now you just like do this funky like little flourish with your hand and I love it it is like a little it’s it’s the very end of a magic trick kind of vibe it is you’re just like you you flourish your hand and there’s a little dot that shows up right here it’s shows up pretty reliably and then you tap your fingers together and you’ve got your home screen it’s easy and then while you’re doing that if you want to quickly check the timer the battery which is like not a thing you can do normally I mean you can by again looking up and finding the dot but it’s not I don’t know it’s not as somehow it’s different than this motion which is just like turning your hand over and um I kind of likened it when I wrote about it before to to being like turning your hand to look at your wrist to see what time it is I don’t know if that’s what they were going for but it’s what I immediately thought and they you know that that seems app right to kind of think about it that way and that will show you the time the battery level and you can tap there to get to the control center or you can tap and hold to like change the volume stuff like that just bringing in easy quick gestures to do stuff inside of the Vision Pro get to menus and and all that stuff instead of having to go through all this riger roll I would love it if there was like a way to get to settings for instance um that way too because this being a new product I’m still you know months later constantly going in and changing settings right just tweaking little things and I do that anyway on all my devices but you know it’s just it’s more pronounced on the Vision Pro how often do you guys use Siri on the Vision Pro because I feel like my answer to all of the weird UI stuff is I just yell at Siri I use Siri three times as much on the Vision Pro as on any other Apple device am surrounded by homep pods oh fair enough um and phones and all kinds of things I do use it and it does seem to prioritize The Vision Pro but my experience over the last several years of using like the Apple home stuff has been that like while it has improved it still frequently enough misunderstands Siri still sucks is what you’re saying Siri like I my phone is not like still doesn’t have Siri turned on because of that like if I want Siri on my phone I will press the button I use Siri most while driving and even then half the time when I’m driving it’s like no that’s not what I asked for oh my God stop and some of that is just me like I have to I have to like know what I want to ask and how I want to ask it in a way that the voice assistant is going to understand and I’m not too good at that because I just word vomit half the time what I want so it’s not like a coherent sentence I feel like you have to say you know Siri see I don’t even know what to say in a fake Siri prompt besides like setting timers before that I’m just like it’s like Siri and then my brain like buffers I’m like what do I want her to do how should I say that that brain buffer thing is real yeah yeah it’s like that’s my main issue with it and it’s why I don’t but it’s frustrating because when I’m in there and I’m on Safari and I’m you know trying to type I go like oh it would be so much easier if I could just talk to to Siri and do it and then I’ll look at the microphone and try and to and not working and so then I just give up and then I and yeah so that’s that’s my issue I will say though like yeah um to your point David like opening apps that way is actually like I I do do that somewhat frequently the part of the reason that I don’t is because I’m always forgetting the name of Vision Pro apps cuz they have weird names sometimes and then other times it’s like until recently until Vision OS 2 you couldn’t rearrange the home apps and now you can that’s another thing I’m excited about I guess like I don’t know like it feels weird to say I’m excited about so much of vision os2 is like now you can copy and paste on the iPhone right it’s like yeah okay great that is good and useful and hoay and also how on Earth did this not exist until now AB yeah and you still can’t like uh as far as I know um and V if you’ve figured out how to do this but I don’t think you can U make folders um in inside the home there is a folder for iPad apps that’s already there and you have to use it like it came with with vision OS but you can’t make more and that drives me nuts because like I don’t like like on my iPhone I have it very intentionally set up where um most of my apps live in the library and only a few are actually on my home screen in any way and it’s organized so that I uh only have the things that like that I use regularly so like uh my podcast app is there and my books app uh stuff like that otherwise it’s like everything else is shoved over in the app Library I will search for it when I want it um I don’t want it there like I don’t want Tik Tok on my home screen being like do you want to watch some videos wow how responsible of you but like with the Vision Pro you can’t do that there’s no app Library it is the app Library um it it’s very old school iPhone in that way it’s just pages and pages of apps and um thankfully you can re rearrange them but that’s annoying too the whole app experience in The Vision Pro has been annoying downloading them it takes forever to download something like it just you’re just waiting and then by the time it’s downloaded I forget that it’s there so it takes me a while to go back and find the new app or something and like with Wes said is just like having to find stuff like I’m I’m I don’t know it’s it’s it’s just easier to do it on my phone sometimes and then sometimes the apps that are in there I I’m just like that this this is this was not what I was promised I was in the Zillow app in there and not that’s not what I wanted from a Zillow app on the Vision Pro I want to talk about the Zillow app in a minute but I’m curious V can you actually read your phone because I’m want like I can’t no like I mean I could if I like I have really bad eyes like I don’t know if this is useful because my eyesight is garbage but like I have tried looking at my phone and it’s just kind of I have to squint and I’m already like so my eyes are already dry in the Vision Pro because my eyes are so wide on the inside and like I’m wearing which is extra drying and so then I have to squint really hard to look at my phone so it’s just not worth it really yeah and I still can’t wear it for very long at a time like I I I think Wes you said you figured out how to wear it for like two plus hours like I I have to tap out after an hour like it doesn’t matter how I arrange it on my head doesn’t matter what strap I’m using just after a while I really feel it so I kind of have to take it off and it’s not that way for me every time most of the time I can legitimately get away with wearing it for an hour two hours I’ve I’ve gone even longer than that not all day or at least I haven’t tried it all day it took a while to get to that like it took a lot of fiddling with the strap um like I still I still use the solo thing I tried the other the one that’s supposed to be the comfortable one for a while and it made the top of my head numb and that bothered me so so I switched back and I figured out a way to make it work but I think you’ve written about this uh the um just about like how personal wearables are right yeah and now like like especially with like um uh with like smart rings and stuff like that um just every every single person’s body is different and you know I might be able to wear the Vision Pro all day maybe who knows why maybe it maybe I have like an extra fat forehead or something and it’s just got a lot of padding there I don’t know we had Parker who’s our our product person like went through hell to get that thing to like to fit his face yeah um whereas me I got lucky but it it took a while like at first it was like you know it would press too hard here or press too hard here or it felt heavy my neck hurt from wearing the thing I don’t know if I just have an extra strong like back of my neck now or or what but like most of those issues are gone I actually will lie down wearing it if I try to if I have to wear it for a longer period of time because it just like relieves the pressure from the top of my head and like the tightness around it I it’s I have flat cheekbones so you know there’s no actual bone support to lift this thing so I have to like tighten it around my face and so I think that’s part of the reason why I have no like I have no bone structure with which to hold this thing up and that is like a thing with wearables like your face everybody’s face is going to be structured differently and like with the glasses it’s it’s the nose Bridge again I have a flat face I have a flat nose bridge I have nothing to hold these things up so if there’s no supportive structure in there I it just slides down my face all the time so I don’t have a face made to wear it comfortably but I do so for the blog so it’s important sacri yeah as as somebody with very good Vision um and ample nose I suppose the thing that always gets me is just like my my eyes get tired at the end of it and and Wes like that’s the thing that is most surprising to me like I can fight through the you know my head hurts thing like do you guys ever see the Tik toks of the people who have the the dent in their head for wearing headphones all the time I’m convinced The Vision Pro is going to end up doing that to me but I can Soldier through all of that but I get like physically exhausted just from looking at this stuff all the time and I think to some extent that’s just like it’s just the light in your eyes all the time like if I sat close to my TV and watched it for hours at a time it no no no I actually talk to opthalmologist it’s on the verge.com about is it dangerous to have a screen that close to your face and the answer is not really the like that’s a myth about having the screen so close to your eyes it’s actually that your eyes are just open for too long you’re not blinking as much so your eyes become less hydrated and that’s can that can cause like burst blood vessels in your eyes uh it’s it’s benign generally I had a friend in high school who used to play Doom so much that he would come to school with burst blood vessels in his eyes because he would forget to Blink for hours at a time shout out Tim so you do you do need to be putting the eye drops in your eyes if you’re prone to prone to dry eye and it’s like also again with me with my contacts contacts are drying so because the the the display is so stimulating you’re just going to Blink less you’re not going to be blinking normally as you would in there so that I do think that the eye fatigue is a thing that we haven’t necessarily talked about because you know you’re in an immersive environment every so often are you going to hit pause to like just like open oh like take off the things squirt in some eye drops and then put it you should build into the Vision Pro it’s like the opposite of the thing in the watch that expels the water it just flushes water into your eyes every 20 minutes just flush water into use the saline solution cuz I you know that is eye hygiene there there is like like good health and good practices that you have to use with these devices that we don’t always do so like the screen distance like talk to actual opthalmologist the screen distance is not the problem it is the fact that you are not blinking that can cause actual eye strain and that’s not great for you so it’s there’s they said 20 2020 every 20 seconds look 20 ft away for um I think 20 every 20 minutes look 20t away for 20 seconds that’s what it is but you can’t do that in a Vision Pro right cuz it’s all an inch and a half away it’s fa I do have to say one thing that um I thought of earlier I right now I’m uh uh I’m building a bicycle from a frame that old frame that I had um and I realized I didn’t have the measurement of something and I don’t own calipers there’s an app in the Vision Pro called hand calipers you go did you put calipers on in virtual reality that you don’t put them on you hold your fingers up and two little dots show up and it shows the measurement between your fingers and it’s delightful and I used it and it gave me an accurate measurement and that’s all I want to say they are going to make a Vision Pro commercial about you tomorrow yeah I hope they do somewhere somewhere the vision The Vision Pro Team someone’s screaming with Joy saying yes they used it the way I want oh it’s nobody on the vision pro team it’s just some guy who made me up as far as I could tell but uh but that’s that’s the stuff right like you talk about spatial Computing like that is that is the stuff and there need to be a million more things like that but that is if if this stuff is ever going to be the thing it’s things like that but David’s like uh when you were talking about like not ever wanting to wear the Vision Pro around people like I had to walk out to my garage which is a separate building uh holding the Vision Pro and I was like holding it on the side of my body so that like my neighbors wouldn’t see [Laughter] I have to go to Home Depot this afternoon and I’m going to bring the Vision Pro and just wander the aisles holding stuff up to the Vision Pro just to see what happens see how quickly I can get kicked out of the store it’s going to be great but okay other than calipers so there are two great uses for the Vision Pro there’s calipers big screens and hand calipers the big screen thing is really interesting to me because I think that’s where most people have landed right whether you use it as a as a big giant display for your Mac or as kind of a a personal television it’s a big screen what what goes on on it who knows it’s a big screen but then there’s all these rumors about like okay the thing apple is doing and Mark kman at Bloomer has been reporting this over and over is trying to figure out how to make these things cheaper and the way that Apple seems to be making it cheaper is by making the screens worse that that apparently the pixel density of the next Vision device might be half of what the current one is and on the one hand that makes absolute perfect sense these screens are ridiculous this is how you get it to be this good it’s also why it’s this expensive like it’s why it takes so much power on and on and on does that work like if you take away the fact that this is such a good screen on your face does a cheaper version of this become more compelling or does it become less compelling because you’ve just made the only really great feature half as good I don’t know I’m so torn what do you guys think I think it depends right like um if it’s lighter if it’s more comfortable if the interaction still works as well you know that thing where you know if you go back and you watch uh like a you know a DVD even on the right screen like maybe a 1080p TV or whatever you kind of forget that it’s lower resolution for the most part until like some text shows up and you can see all the like aliasing around it or whatever I wonder if that could be the case with the Vision Pro 2 not the Vision Pro 2 but the Vision Pro cheap whatever whatever they call it oh like light SE Pro they should I just kind of wonder doesn’t that just make it a meta Quest 3 and if that’s the case yeah so they’d have to be really good at all the other stuff I was using them kind of concurrently for a while and I would go into the to the you know the meta Quest 3 and I’d be like oh my God it’s so much lighter it’s so much easier to use there’s so many more things to do and then I’d be in the app I’m like dang this is pixelated you know so that would kind of just be like a you know I can get around it’s not the end of the world but it is a thing that it’s just like okay then what does what is setting it apart cuz like right now what’s setting it apart is the screen the pass through is just like oh wow this is a noticeable noticeably better and those experiences like I I don’t know I don’t know it would have to set itself apart besides being cheap part of the problem I think is like I think I think it was the German report from this weekend um I want to say that uh he he said that it might actually be even like less field of view it might not have been German but like if if that’s the case if it’s lower resolution and it’s like you know suddenly you you don’t have that impressive thing to look at then abruptly the $500 meta Quest 3 versus the maybe $2,000 Vision Pro like the calculus is suddenly like really wonky cuz like uh the experience inside the Vision Pro would have to be sign significantly better than a meta 3 or four or whatever yeah I don’t know that compromising on the screen is the right move so much as making the materials lighter and cheaper cuz like isn’t it made out of some like I forget what exactly it’s made of but you have actual glass on the on the front of the I mean it’s metal and glass yeah that’s that That’s Heavy well the quest 3 is not that much lighter right than the Vision Pro like really it’s light it’s significantly lighter it’s so much easier for me to wear and because the weight distribution it’s not so front heavy The Vision Pro is very front heavy and it’s all that glass and I kind of think that is sort of it it has a very premium feel when you touch it because apple right everything Apple makes premium feel super Lux or whatever you could just make it less Lux and keep the thing that makes it really special which I think is the screen or try to keep that as as close to possible I don’t know if that’s possible but if I were going to make this thing cheaper which you should make it cheaper because it’s more fun when more people you know are in there I I don’t know if that’s the right move I think the right move would be make it lighter and feel cheaper yeah I mean take the glass off like it can still feel good without having a big just get rid of eyesight nobody needs that really I actually agree with that yeah put googly eyes on the front of it yeah honestly I think people would have more fun if you just put giant googly eyes you know what we we really will make it like everything everywhere all at once just put Giant googly eyes on the front I can pretend I’m a rock perfectly in keeping with Apple’s entire design ethos and branding too it makes sense I really like I never thought I would sit on this podcast and try to convince Apple to make a plastic Gadget but like here we are it’s it it would probably be better if it were a plastic catchet it probably would be just because the wearability I like I’m going to say this until I’m bleue in the face with a wearable device it has to be wearable if you’re not going to wear it it’s not successful ful so if making it plastic means that more people will wear it not only because it’s more comfortable but because it’s cheaper make it plastic just do it or titanium is that going to lower the price Wes cuz we also have to lower the price okay Wes is paying for this thing every month just make it $5,000 Wes won’t even notice it’ll be fine oh god well that is a good note to end on uh we’re going to get v a cheaper one we’re going to get Wes a more expensive one and everybody’s going to be happy it all works about $110,000 love it let’s take it to the moon thank you both thanks right thanks for having us all right we got to take a break and then we’re going to come back and get a bit of a different perspective on what it’s like to make stuff for and live inside division Pro we’ll be right [Music] back welcome back ultimately as we’ve been talking about the success or failure of division pro has absolutely everything thing to do with the App Store if Apple keeps caring about the Vision Pro which I would say is not guaranteed but pretty likely the hardware will get better there will be a cheaper one but if there’s nothing to do in the headset no one’s going to use the headset I really think it’s just that simple and I wanted to get a different perspective on the state of Vision Pro apps so I called up the developers behind one of vision os’s most interesting apps that app is called television and it does what you might think it lets you put a virtual television in 3D space think of it like a bridge from where we’ve been to where we’re going in here you can watch on any TV from our curated collection or grab more from an expanding catalog across the decades the television can be lots of things it can be an old wooden cabinet TV from like the 1950s it can be this tall teal thing right out of the Jetson it can be one of those big flat screen TVs with those huge speakers on the sides lots of things whatever set you pick you then plop the set down in your physical space and then you can put whatever kind of video you want on it you can stream stuff that you’ve shot you can play stuff from YouTube all kinds of stuff it’s just a television I like the app because it’s Charming but also because it’s the kind of thing that could only work on a device like The Vision Pro it would seem like ridiculous kind of kitchy skoric design on an iPad or a TV screen we’ve actually seen things like this on those devices and it always seems like kitchy and skoric but when it’s a physical seeming object that you can actually walk around and place in space it’s just more fun and since the TV stays right where you left it I kind of use it like a background TV like you might find in a waiting room or whatever you know you just put on the news and then turn around and look at it every once in a while it’s kind of great anyway television was developed by a company called sandwich which you might know from the super dead pan and fun commercials it’s been making for a long time I’m here to tell you about coin it solves a problem I think most of us have see my wallet is filled with cards this is a coin I talked to three of the folks at Sandwich all of whom worked on the app I’m Adam lore I’m the founder of sandwich in the context of Sandwich Vision the vision OS app Studio I would say I’m the creative director my name is Dan Sturm I am the visual effects supervisor at sandwich I’m Andy Roth and I’m the engineer on both television and theater oh right to Andy’s point they also just made app called Theater which is similar to television except instead of putting a funky old TV in your living room it sends you to a big immersive movie theater style place anyway I asked the sandwich team to go back to the beginning a bit to even before the app existed even before the Vision Pro was really a thing people could buy and tell me about what it takes to dream up build ship and sell a Vision Pro app Adam said the idea came to him kind of out of nowhere personally speaking 6 months ago I did not assume I was going to be building for the platform I was just not in software development headspace at all I didn’t become activated until I was sitting down I’m working on another startup sort of more in the SAS space and my co-founder had not really had experience with VR that much and I have a meta Quest at home I’ve been a I was a dk1 user an Oculus dk1 user early on so I’ve been paying attention and tracking the space but never thought it was worth developing for the Vision Pro had been announced my co-founders was curious and he said you have a meta Quest let me see how it’s changed since the one time I used it so we spent kind of half a day just exploring different things in the medaquest platform and it was fun to see him get activated again and then we started talking about Vision Pro that was coming and just wondering what are things what things are going to happen in this space and then that night I kind of was laying in bed and I just kind of like my imagination started popping off and I started writing down app ideas in terms of just thinking what does this device make possible that the other devices don’t make make possible how can we take advantage of our space like what at that point spatial Computing as the nomenclature was kind of a laugh right it felt like a branded Apple thing that they were making up just to differentiate and not say VR cuz they’re contrarians which I and I love that about them of course so what is spatial Computing what does that mean it means using the space of the world around you as your display as your you your interaction model with the software and then suddenly starting to think about okay what can happen when computer stuff happens in your space that can’t happen when it’s on the black rectangle that’s where my imagination started really going into overdrive because we’re filmmakers at sandwich and we think in terms of that 2D rectangle and then obviously in non-spatial Computing we think in terms of the 2D rectangle even the people who have you know their whole desk is filled with displays at in vertical and horizontal orientations so like what does it mean when you see past the black rectangle and the world is your display and then that’s when we started I started dreaming up the television app and that’s when I got in touch with Andy and you know sort of just L lucked into meeting Andy and explained the idea to him Andy do you remember what the explanation was I’m trying to imagine how like the four sentence pitch of what television is yeah they go was basically let’s throw some old school 3D TVs in your space and you can watch anything I was like all right I’m sold pretty good yeah were you into all the headset VR AR stuff at the time yeah I’ve been into VR for a few years I had been doing development for the Quest for a while in both unity and unreal and I’ve just been anticipating Apple’s headset for a few years now just waiting to see what they could bring to the table and do differently than the other headsets like even before it launched and before you started building like had you seen what the Vision Pro was were you like convinced this was the one like this they they’ve done the thing I’m still not convinced it’s the one okay but fair enough I’m with you on that um but it’s it’s definitely an interesting approach to spatial Computing and it’s something that I’ve just been interested in since since they announced it and then Dan where did you come into the picture I think in those early conversations with Adam the the filmmaker storytelling side of the device like it it’s kind of our responsibility to understand the technology that we’re telling stories about and to a certain point getting ahead of it because we’re kind of assuming that there’s going to be more Vision OS developers who are going to come to us to help tell that spatial Computing story and we don’t want to be guessing at what that’s like we we want to know what it’s like intimately to to use the device and what what are the what are the amazing parts of it what does it feel like to use what’s the stuff that’s going to really attract people to a product and that really starts with us using it you know we saw all the the videos that Apple released and that’s great and it shows what it can do but there’s no way to prepare you for what it feels like when you first put it on I mean even in our very early tests with 3D models that didn’t have video on them cuz I’m not a VR guy I’ve never really been a VR guy but when I put this thing on and I started manipulating a 3D TV in my space like it was incredible like I I’ve never felt anything like that before it’s just like I stood up and I walked in a circle around a 3D TV in my office and it’s like what is this like this is incredible so you know getting our feet on the ground like with just Vision OS in general was where we started and then what does that enable what are the what are the parts of this that we want it to look like like what what is our ideal version of this app you know what are the things that we wish it could do that sort of stuff that’s where we started I think Adam you just reminded me we were texting I think it was a Saturday about this idea and you had one of the models I think it was the Streamline media stand or whatever and you texted it to me and I was sitting in a chair watching my kid play and I put my iPhone up in AR mode and I put the TV over there and I just kind of turned and saw a TV and then turned back to my kid and I was like yeah that’s awesome I want that I just have a TV over there to the side of my room and there’ll be stuff on it at this point again I should mention the Vision Pro wasn’t for sale all the sandwich guys had all anyone had was a simulator that they could use to get a rough idea of how it might work so the team here started with an off-the-shelf 3D model of a retro TV just kind of spinning it around and seeing how it picked up light and if it felt sort of realistic in this virtual space inside a simulator on a computer screen that worked pretty well ad said so then they were Off to the Races they found more TV types sent them to Dan to turn into 3D models and basically tried to figure out how you’re actually supposed to interact with all of this stuff this thing is so new this whole category of devices is so new that nothing about how we use them is settled how do you select stuff where did buttons go what should those buttons look like nobody knows which is fun and kind of daunting we made the classic Dev mistake of like making one control panel that had like 18 different buttons on it oh sure that feels like a cockpit of a of a Cessna and then figuring out okay what are the use things the user always needs access to and what are the things we can hide behind settings and Andy came up with some ingenious stuff like the drawer gallery that that slides out you know of the control panel stuff that nobody else was doing this is the Evergreen time like right now for developing all the designing all this new language that nobody else is doing this is when the next pull to refresh comes out you know that now like a year from now everybody is using as a pattern their first real experience with television in a headset came at one of Apple’s developer labs in Cupertino Apple did a lot of these before the Vision Pro came out just to give developers a way to see what their app would look like and how it would feel when real users put on real headsets and had real experiences with their apps it’s a big moment honestly for a lot of these developers it’s a thing I’ve heard a bunch of is you either put it on and it either feels magical and great or it feels totally broken for the television crew it was pretty good I looked over at Andy cuz he got the app up and running before I did I look over at him he’s got a big smile and he goes it works you know and then as soon as I got the app up and running it was like oh this TV that we only have seen flat on the simulator it now feels like a substantial 3D object in front of me and I can look around it and view it from different angles it picks up the light that was boom that was like everything how true was the simulator in retrospect like was it when you load it up for the first time in the headset is it was it what you expected and hoped it would feel like or did you all of a sudden understand it in a new way there’s just no substitute for your actual space you know you can take a photo of your actual space and put it you know use it as your environment you can model your own room and put it into the simulator it doesn’t even come close to 1% of the experience of of what VR is supposed to be or ar that’s the most frust ating thing as storytellers or cuz if you I mean if we’re designing products we know that the end user is going to experience the same product as we’re experiencing in their own space if you’re telling the story in 2D like we had to do like we often have to do with software like Dan alluded to it’s so frustrating because you can’t even come close to the feeling of it until these Technologies are pervasive where everybody’s using it so you know there’s no disparity between The Superficial simulation of it and the real thing yeah Andy you were smiling as he was saying that what was that experience like for you yeah that experience in the dev lab was a little more nerve-wracking for me I think than Adam uh with other VR headsets I have some experience where you know you build something on a PC and it is running great on this Nvidia graphics card and then you go to build it on the quest and everything just falls apart right and so I was I was really really nervous about that happening because we’d been using the simulator for a few months but luckily the simulator is pretty representative of how the device works the software at least you don’t get you know the full experience of wearing it when we went to that Dev lab and it just worked like I expected I was just I was so excited yeah that’s pretty cool to Apple’s credit because they really have built a supercomputer device in that thing it’s just it’s not hobbled even the version 1.0 of it the processor is not hobbled it can do what they want you to do with it Dan what about you like building all this stuff making it work like you’re you’re sort of deep in the details of it what is that experience like the first time you’re actually sort of inside of the space getting to look at the space I mean to Apple’s credit I mean they they had sort of laid the groundwork for this stuff with arkit on the phones and playing around with these models on an iPhone you you get a decent sense of like what level of quality you’re going to get out of it you know all of the usdz format stuff which is all very boring but it’s great that it worked out of the box basically so you kind of understood that they’re going to wrap it in this sort of like soft world sphere of lighting so it accepts some of the light around you but in the film making World from visual effects if a 3D model doesn’t look good you just like give it a million more polygons and render it and it’s going to take a day to render a frame but it it’ll look great and you can’t do that kind of stuff in VR or in any of these systems so finding ways to not destroy all of Andy’s work with a model that’s you know 3 gigb or something is very complicated work it’s it’s a it’s a delicate Balancing Act between detail and performance at all times I mean there are a few tests we did that just they were just Dead on Arrival where it’s just like yeah just throw all the detail in the world at it because it look great and it’s like oh my computer is dying The Vision Pro doesn’t like this like let’s take a step back for a minute and figure out like what we actually need to do to optimize it which is very interesting because there’s not a lot of people a there’s not a lot of people trying this sort of stuff within their apps and B there’s definitely not a lot of people talking about how to do it I think only recently we’ve gotten some guidance from Apple in terms of like how to optimize your app for vision OS and it’s like oh we missed those targets by a long shot but you know we’re doing our own version of that so you know trying to align with what they want us to do it’s interesting it’s it’s fun work too yeah and this level of detail is even more apparent and frustrating and challenging in our Theater app that we’re you know that we’re sort of building out right now because it’s not just a 3D object in front of you it’s an immersive space that really does require detail in order to render believably at a massive scale so like it’s it’s almost like 10x the challenge in the room as it is to just have the polygonal object in front of you right and we made it harder by saying like we want people to be able to move around the space too to to like actually experience the theater if we just sat in one place and everything 20 yards away was you know fewer polygons and cheapen detail like that would be great for performance but we don’t want that out of our experience so we got to figure out how to make that work this is the thing I’m so stuck on when it comes to Vision Pro and the thing that I keep feeling as I use it there’s so much Cool Tech in here and to a large extent it is remarkable that it works as well as it does forget about the fact that it’s $3,500 which I think is ridiculous forget about the fact that it’s so big forget about the battery life it’s impressive that this thing exists at all but like are we sure this is how it should be should I really have to laser focus my eyes on a button for the entire time it takes to click it do I want to do some things with my hands and other things with buttons is a virtual keyboard floating in the air a good idea what is the best way to move Windows around or send something to someone or open an app or anything else these things get decided and then we treat them as if they were inevitable but it just isn’t that way and it doesn’t have to be that way and there’s something exciting about the fact that on the Vision Pro all of this feels new and unknown and also there’s something deeply annoying about the fact that so much of it right now just feels weird to use but from a big picture perspective I really like the way Adam described how he thinks about the user experience and how the Vision Pro ought to feel we’re an interesting space with its own opportunity because we’re trying to build experiences that feel like the real world but better right so just imagine you go outside and suddenly you want the information of the world at your fingertips so what is the interaction that your mind would design in that moment how do you want to reach up and access the information and then have it go away that’s essentially what we’re doing we’re sitting our users down in a movie theater if you were in a movie theater that you could just chill out in all the time and be by yourself and you can summon any content to that big screen how would you do that what would be an interaction model or you know a lot of it just translated to the outside space I think that’s how designer UI designers have to think about this stuff is knowing that eventually 50 years in the future there will be no hardware and the world in front of us will always be sort of like have a digital layer to it that feels organic and real what is that interaction model you know so if you can summon things you know really we are especially at this early phase of the OS as a as a platform we’re at the mercy of Apple cuz Apple you know they’ll let you do new cool things that they’ve deemed worthy of the SDK and then we will be able to do new cool Futures and I think that at some point there’s an inflection point where developers kind of invent new stuff and then Apple follows but right now I think we’re in the Apple leading time of the of the process do you feel like that’s the right way for things to be right now I think that’s probably pretty normal for a new platform like this but are you are you like chafing at the edges of what Apple will let you do or does it feel like we’re in the a good Zone yeah but a perfect example is like playing with light to reflect what the real world feels like we know that we want when you use a real TV especially a vintage one with a a bezel the light that casts from the screen is reflected on the edges of the TV right well that is not easy to do with especially in os1 of reality kit we know that in Apple’s own immersive of Cinema when something is playing on that big screen the light bounces off the screen to the ceiling and the floor and in real time it makes it feel very material it makes it feel like the light is real and the surfaces are real and apple doesn’t make that easy because working with light as a source in reality kit version one was really not possible and version two Apple’s decided let’s make these tools available to developers and that means that we can start to build in this new replication of reality that wasn’t possible before and in in our app in theater Andy came up with an ingenious way to fake it of Reflections from the screen bouncing off the walls in the ceiling and floor but now we get to do it for real which is very exciting obviously a lot of this stuff is changing really fast Apple just announced Vision OS 2 which has a bunch of big changes including some of what Adam is talking about with Reflections and light I mean these are the things right you have to change the way that light works in an API in order for apps to be able to build things that feel real like this is how long the pipeline is television has been out since February and it has already changed a lot you can now browse and watch YouTube inside of Television you can use share play to watch stuff with friends there are a few new ways to fast forward and Rewind and control playback speed and you can now play spatial video on any of the screens too that’s kind of the Vision Pro thing right Ultra retro TV playing the file format of the future supposedly anyway anyway the last thing I asked the sandwich crew was how it’s going being someone who sells Vision Pro apps it’s funny cuz you know in the early days of iPhone I think everybody assumed app millionaires you know you’re just the business model for app development is you make the app and then you sell a billion copies of it and you get rich but I think it’s what’s more interesting from a business perspective is what is what are the models that it opens up that weren’t possible before and in our case it’s like for delivering content you have app is a Content delivery system then where are the business opportunities in that it’s pretty fascinating stuff the Mind reels with possibilities but I don’t know like what in terms of app sales oh it’s definitely been a loss I mean like this business runs at a cost at a net loss and I expected that to be the case I mean I held out hope you know we didn’t none of us knew we didn’t know if like we were going to get 100,000 downloads on the first day we did not but it turns out like that’s not the exciting part of this the exciting part is like building a new it’s a whole new infrastructure for creating software and running a business and that’s where it really gets interesting like a lot of developers I’ve talked to they’re really optimistic about where all this could go and I sort of hope that they’re right it’ be fun to have the Vision Pro become a huge new platform with lots of new kinds of things to do and the more there is to do the better the headset is and the better the headset is the more people will buy it and the more people who buy it the more developers will get on board and the more developers get on board the more there is to do and then the flywheel is off and running this is the thing you need if you want a platform like this to work I’ve got a Vision Pro sitting right here next to me luckily I didn’t buy it I think the Verge did and I just stole it for a while and as impressive as it is I just don’t use it very much the only way that is going to change is if more developers find more of these silly fun weird things to make for it I really hope they do all right we got to take one more break and then we’re going to come back and take a question from the vergecast hotline we’ll be right [Music] back all right we’re back let’s get to the hotline as always the number is 866 Verge one1 the email is vergecast the verge.com we love all your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week this week I’m doing a weird thing which is I’m going to try and answer a question from many months ago because it’s one I’ve been thinking a lot about ever since this thing came out it’s a Vision Pro question it’s an old one but I actually think it says a lot about where this is headed so here it is this is MZ one of the things that Apple has been really good about over the years is a miniaturization of really good computer the problem with division Pro for me is that the actual computer aspect of that product is already pretty compact if you take off the light seal and the headband um and even like the stems where like the speaker is and just look at the sort of like eye mask is part of it it’s pretty slim and most of the bulk that you get from the headset is actually the distance needed or like presumably needed to not fry your eyeballs off of just looking at really small screens and really bright light so how do you expect Vision Pro to progress to something more wearable or more socially acceptable if the size of it is not actually the tech and is actually just like natural human physiology of not being able to strap LCDs to your eyeballs really closely I’m curious what you guys see the Vision Pro Series two or three or four or five um where the thing should get smaller but just given the way they’ve built this around pass through and LCD displays I don’t expect it to follow the same path as some of their other products thank you bye so I think this is the question right I think if you’re Apple you have to do one of two things here you either have to figure out how to take what the Vision Pro is basically in in its relatively current Hardware form and make it more palatable to people and I think what that looks like is just making it cheaper right like take this exact Vision Pro and make it half the price and I think it would be more than twice as compelling to more than twice as many people that’s a hard thing to do that is the kind of thing that happens over time just as you get better technology but it doesn’t happen quickly and it doesn’t happen easily and so a lot of the stuff that we’ve seen for Apple’s new cheaper simpler push that we’ve heard about has to do with the screens in particular these screens are ridiculously expensive they’re hard to produce they are as good as you will find a headset and I think what we’re going to see is Apple try to just pull all of that down a little bit to make it cheaper and in theory lower resolution would mean lower power it would mean less need for things like cooling it would solve some other problems just by not having to drive so many pixels all the time and so you might get a little bit smaller and more wearable there but I don’t think so the question is right that this thing is already pretty small like as a pure piece of Hardware it’s pretty remarkable it’s it’s made of metal so you could get some weight back on that front it’s definitely rigid in a way that I think over time these things will want to be a little more flexible which will make them wearable but I don’t know how you make this thing that much smaller and that much lighter without fundamentally changing what it is which brings me to the other point I just can’t stop thinking about the difference between what the Vision Pro is and is trying to be and what the Rayban meta smart glasses are and are trying to be and it’s so obvious to me at this point that the Ray Ban meta strategy is the right one I think especially if you believe that AI is going to change how we talk to computers having something on your face that is essentially a very good microphone a good set of speakers and a camera actually gets you a shocking amount of power out of your device you can do so much with a simple wearable thing that can see the world and talk to you that is massively powerful especially if you believe AI is really the future what Apple has built here is that plus a screen and an entertainment device and I think that’s interesting and that’s where we will go in the future but the road from here to there I think looks a lot more like smart glasses than it does like headsets if that makes sense the steps between something like the Rayband meta smart glasses and something like the quest even if you want to take the other meta product out there are super unknown too it’s a lot of really hard problems to solve in displays and in processor efficiency and in how to get a GPU on your face that is good enough to work all day how to solve battery life like people talk about making a lot of huge progress in Tech as like solving multiple physics Miracles all at once and that’s kind of what apple and meta need if you believe that these all-encompassing headsets are the thing but if you don’t and I’m not sure that I do then smart glasses is the answer and I think if you’re Apple you had the iPod before the iPhone you could look at smart glasses as the iPod they don’t do as much but they do it very well they are the right form factor they feel good people like them they solve a couple of very specific problems and then years later once the tech gets better once people get more comfortable with the idea of the form factor once you’ve found a couple of new things to do and new ways to interact then you do the iPhone we weren’t ready for the iPhone in 2001 when they started shipping iPods the technology wasn’t there the world wasn’t ready we didn’t have the sort of cultural understanding of how all this stuff would work it just wouldn’t have worked as well as it did 6 years later and I think headsets might be the same thing and apple just tried to skip all the way to like the iPhone 10 instead of shipping the iPod and I’m totally brutalizing this metaphor but I think I have no evidence for this but I think that if you’re on Apple’s Hardware team you’re looking at the Rayban meta smart glasses and saying oh what we should have done is built something that does less stuff and is wearable instead of trying to build the thing that does all the things including some things that people don’t really want and isn’t all that wearable so the idea of what the Vision Pro is now it’s going to be hard to make this thing more wearable there are some things Apple can do with the straps like just having the overhead strap built in instead of having just the one around goes a long way towards making it wearable actually Adam Lor from Sandwich said in our interview that he has actually taken out the light seal he uses the overhead strap and uses it essentially like an AR device so he can see around it and uses it much less sort of immersively but it’s still very comfortable for him and I think that’s really clever and there are more ways that Apple can start to press on that solving some of the battery stuff will go a long way like just having that cord on your face is a real wearability problem I think putting the battery on the headset is also a bad idea again physics Miracles but that’s one thing you’ll start to see I wouldn’t be surprised to see apple use a less heavy material even if it’s slightly less impressive again if you want to get the price down that’s another way to do it and it’ll also have the delightful side effect of pulling some weight off of the device so again there are little things Apple can do around the edges here but I think if you want to see apple do something more wearable it’s going to have to look like a different device and I would bet I wouldn’t bet a lot but I would bet a little that what apple is going to do next with the Vision Pro is going to look less like a worse Vision Pro and more like something else entirely I could be wrong maybe this is just wishful thinking because I would love for apple to make something like the meta Rayban smart glasses but that connects to Siri and all of my other devices as seamlessly as like a pair of airpods does I want that so maybe I’m just hoping for that but you can see it right like all the things that airpods are on your face plus a camera that feels powerful it feels like apple and you could see that being the vision and then this being The Vision Pro that’s how you get to wearability as far as far as I’m concerned because I don’t think we’re anywhere close to a world in which you can build something that is as powerful and capable as The Vision Pro and feels as good on my face as a pair of glasses or even close and some of the reporting particularly from Mark kman at Bloomberg has said that apple is working on something more like AR glasses but that’s still a couple of years away that wouldn’t totally shock me but again from what I’ve seen from these meta glasses they don’t have to do that much to be really useful to people camera speaker microphone incred powerful and I think there’s a lot more to do there and I think we might see apple do it sooner rather than later anyway that’s all L of conjecture I’d love to hear what you think if you have had a vision Pro for any of the last 5 months I want to know what you think we got a lot of feedback from folks when we published our review and in those early days but now that things have settled has the Vision Pro found a way into your routine are you still using it all the time did you return it because it’s $3,500 are you finding new ways all the time to use it do you use it for something totally unusual that no one talks about tell us I want to hear everything 866 Verge one1 is the hotline the email is vergecast verge.com reach out I want to hear everything all right that is it for the Verge cast thank you to everybody who’s on the show and thank you as always for listening we are off on Friday by the way we’ll be back next week but everybody’s taking a few days off for the holiday if you’re also celebrating July 4th this weekend I hope you have a wonderful holiday there is lots more on everything we talked about at the verge.com I’ll put a bunch of links in the show notes you should go read all of our old Vision Pro coverage and especially some of the news about what’s coming up in the next couple of versions of this thing I think the Vision Pro is going to change a lot it’s going to be really interesting also read the.com surprising amount of news going on this summer this is usually like the Dead period of the tech news cycle that ain’t happening and it’s about to be phone season again so it’s going to get crazy as always if you have thoughts questions feelings or Vision Pro apps you think I should try you can always email us at vergecast atth verge.com call the hotline 866 Verge 111 we love hearing from you this show is produced by Andrew Marino Liam James and Will por vergecast is Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network as I mentioned we’ll be back next week after the break everybody have a great holiday we’ll see you then rock and roll [Music]

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