There are many virtual reality and immersive reality headsets available out there. However, the Apple’s newly previewed Vision Pro is in its own league. It comes with huge improvements over any headset available out there. It eliminates the need for controllers and instead uses the parts of human body for gestures to select and navigate through the visible UI items.
Amazing thing is Apple Vision Pro uses the body parts which are already normally used for communication, like hands and eye. For example, to select an item on screen, you need to just look at it and pinch your fingers together. Similarly, to scroll through, you have to look at stuff, pinch your fingers together and now you can drag the view.
There are several cameras on the inside as well as outside the headset. The inside cameras, which are several in quantity, measure the movement of eyes with huge precision. So precisely that if you look at an icon, they can detect that. Similarly, the outside cameras are positioned in a way that they easily capture the movement of your body. Specially, your hands, wherever they are, headset have no difficulty in detecting the guestures.
When looking from the front, seems like, the headset is transparent and you can see the eyes of person wearing it. However, there is actually a horizontal screen on front of headset, which projects the video of eyes of person wearing it, on the front screen in realistic manner. It does not mean that person wearing it cannot see outside world but instead the video of outside is projected on the view of the person.
For view of person wearing it, there are two screens inside the headset, each one as capable and sharp as a 4k display, so text and items are very sharp. Also person wearing it also experiences the 3D view of outside world in great detail.
Like your iphone, huge number of apps are available inside the headset. The interface look similar to what you see in your phone. When you open an app, the text and images are super sharp. One more thing, if you have an apple computer, you will be able to project its screens inside the apple vision pro headset. You can open as many screens as many you like, with no limitations other than how many windows fit in the view easily.
To improve the sharpness and save the power overall, one thing which apple have done is, the part of the screen user is looking on, is super sharp while other parts may not be so much. So with the help of active eye tracking, the device is able to figure out that on which part of screen user is seeing and then the device focuses all the computing power on that part while lazily rendering the other areas, not as sharp as the area in focus of user.
As a background of all the apps etc, user can choose between the real world or some virtual reality scenes. Also as the videos and movies can be watched, inside the device, when user is watching something, on the outside screen his/her eyes not projected but some random mix of changing colors are shown.
Currently the battery life of device is only just two hours. Battery brick have be put in the pocket separately and is connected to the headset via a wire. Battery life may very well improve in the future, as the headsets will go out for sale in early next year.
Apple is going to offer the headset initially in price of $3499 USD. Which seems very expensive however, according to what is revealed to people, only materials’ cost of headset is over $1500 USD and when we include other huge expenses of R & D, equipment, markets and other costs, the price point of $3499 looks fair. However, according to many, the price of product is going to go down for consumers, when apple will introduce the non pro versions of Vision Pro device.