Apple’s recently unveiled Vision Pro is a technology created by humans for humans.
Two features about the product stand out. First, the Vision Pro is both virtual and augmented reality. It allows you to be totally engrossed in the virtual world (the VR part), but Apple
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went out of its way to also allow you to interact with the real world – people – while you have the headset on (the AR part).
In other words, if I am wearing my headset and my wife comes into the room with a question, my virtual world can interface with the real world — I can see my wife and talk to her as I pause my movie or continue talking to her while working on my wall sized spreadsheet, virtually projected between my couch and coffee table.
Vision Pro is not a see-through device that looks like a ski mask. There is plastic and a lot of electronics standing between you and the outside world. This headset has 12 inward- and outward-looking cameras that capture the movements of your eyes and the world around you. This is the genius of Apple. It added a curved screen that displays your eyes (captured by the internal cameras). This screen makes the device look like a see-through unit. Thus, when your spouse is talking to you, she feels like she is seeing your eyes, though she is looking at the display of your eyes.
In contrast, Meta Platforms’s
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Quest Pro, which only has VR and no AR, makes its device incredibly antisocial. It cuts you out of this world to the point where you cannot even drink coffee while you watch a movie.
Read: The headset face-off: How Apple’s Vision Pro compares with the Meta Quest Pro, beyond a huge price gap
Second, and this really shows off Apple’s creativity, Meta created cartoonish avatars to let people interact with each other in the metaverse. Apple took much more creative route. When you set up the Vision Pro, it asks you to point it toward you, and using its array of cameras, it creates a video image (almost like a hologram) of you. Thus, when you interact with folks inside the virtual, the cameras in the headset are capturing the muscle movements of your face and manipulating your “hologram.”
Vision Pro also underscores the moat that surrounds Apple’s ecosystem. There is continuity among all Apple devices and applications. You can start writing a message on a MacBook or iMac, continue on an iPad, and finish it on your iPhone – or now on Vision Pro. You’ll be able to bring apps that are running on your MacBook Air to your Vision Pro, except that instead of being constrained by a 13-inch screen, your only size constraint will be your imagination.
Apple comes into this fight with an army of developers who are writing apps for its ecosystem. Also, a lot of apps that work on its other devices will work on Vision Pro. Apple is able to use the custom processors it created for Macs and iPads for Vision Pro. Because of its enormous scale, it can manufacture them cheaper than anyone else on the planet.
For most of us, the price, $3,500, makes this device a nice but questionably affordable product. I am a bit less skeptical. I read somewhere that when the brick phone came out in the 80s it cost $11,000 in today’s money. Now you can buy a phone that is 10,000 times better for $30. Vision Pro will be adopted first by Apple fanatics and maybe by corporations. But I get a strong feeling that with Vision Pro, Apple has once again showed us what the future looks like.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is CEO and chief investment officer of Investment Management Associates. He is the author of Soul in the Game – The Art of a Meaningful Life. Neither Katsenelson nor his firm have a position in Apple or Meta Platforms.
Here are links to more of Katsenelson’s views of the U.S. inflation landscape (read, listen) and how to invest in inflationary times (read, listen). For more of Katsenelson’s insights about investing, head to ContrarianEdge.com or listen to his podcast at Investor.FM.
More: Apple CEO Tim Cook has not answered the $1 billion question about his Vision Pro VR headset
Also read: Metaverse true believers say ‘I told you so’ after Apple’s Vision Pro launch
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