Hi everyone
I have a chance to play around with Apple Vision Pro, so I will dump some thoughts about how well it works.
Long story short, we are not planning on releasing VR Sketch for Vision Pro any time soon or ever for the current generation of the device.
The longer version of the story is that I’m both thrilled and disappointed, both at a somewhat large degree. Let’s start with the plus side of things. It’s an incredibly slick device that has very large resolution, amazing pass through, it is very intuitive for me to pick up and the content inside just looks gorgeous. It is also not a copy cat of Quest, trying to innovate around eye tracking, gestures, hand tracking and in general the way the device is being used. Also, unlike Quest, at least for the small time I had a chance to use it, it just worked, without reboots, errors or any of the things I’m quite used to with Quest.
That said, the innovation I’m seeing is largely not in the space that I find interesting. I would imagine most readers of this forum would agree with me on that, but unlike Meta I think that gaming and entertainment are not the most exciting place to deploy VR. I’m looking for use cases in architecture, but also biology, construction, training, engine design etc. I think there is a massive underutilized professional space where a very good VR headset can be thriving with largely no incumbents. That said, apple does not try here to address that niche. The main use case for vision pro is a lot like a fancy iPad - watch movies, consume entertainment alone etc. I do that, but at the same time I find that part the most boring part of my day. I don’t particularly care about the raw quality of that experience either - I can play atari games if they’re exciting. For the use case of professional use, I think Vision Pro comes short. It lacks the ability to render immersive 3D enviornments, from what I can tell the interaction is not friendly for manipulating 3D objects as it is not generally intended as a highly engaging highly interactive experience. It is also meant to be used alone, where I do believe a lot of important VR usecases are social in nature, whether it be beat saber or VR Sketch.
Overall, we are waiting what comes next for Apple. Are they happy with their experiments and are willing to release more devices that address some of the shortcomings while keeping the good parts or not. We have zero insight into what are they doing, so we will see what comes next and inform you.
Feel free to ask me questions or have suggestions! We love interacting with our clients.
Best,
Maciej Fijalkowski