First contact with Apple glasses: Vision Pro faces reality | Technology

At Apple stores in the Washington area these days, they describe the appointment to try on their Vision Pro glasses, recently put on sale in the United States, as “an invitation to a guided journey to an incredible place.” Destiny, they warn, “has nothing to do” with the metaverse or virtual reality. It’s something else: “spatial computing,” as they call it.

And frankly, it’s a bit like seeing life from inside an iPhone, iPad or Mac computer.

To try out the company’s latest launch, the first of a new product in years, you have to book half an hour with a specialist and, in some stores, the wait can be several days. There is a worse suspense: in Europe, the product will not arrive until an as yet undetermined time in 2025.

Once the appointment is made, the first thing to do is to take a facial recognition exam to measure the skull. This won’t be the only occasion where the potential buyer, who may not have the $3,500 the glasses cost, goes through this big contemporary box in which what is apparently free is paid for with personal information.

After a while, they bring a model adjusted to the size of your head. It’s connected to a two-hour battery life, which is the equivalent of a pocket-sized wireless microphone; Without it, the gadget does not work, so, the seller clarifies, anyone who wants to go out with it on the street must reserve space in their pockets to carry it.

There Apple’s main innovation Compared to other glasses – which, like those of the competitor Meta, isolate the user from the environment and can make them dizzy – it is possible to move around with them without losing contact with the outside world. In other words, the Vision Pro allows you to be in another world and also in this one. It’s the first thing you notice when you put them on: after the home screen, with its panoramic view of apps available, you continue to see what is happening in reality, so to speak, even if this reality is a version mediated by the 12 cameras and six microphones that the device integrates.

So many accessories influence its weight, between 600 and 650 grams, and its size, which covers half the face. It’s hard to contemplate carrying them around until the battery dies, let alone on a sweltering summer day. For the rest, the device is a display of design, in the seductive line of Apple, which this time also dares with the textile of the part that protects the glasses and the band of spongy material that holds them to the head.

There are three key buttons: the one that takes photos and videos, a dial for adjusting the bracelet and another, called the “digital crown”, which is used for almost everything else: from turning on the device to turning it on. volume increase or return. At first. The rest is managed on sight. If you want, for example, to open a photo, fix your gaze on it and bring your index finger and thumb together, as if you were pinching a pinch of salt.

In store, the test focuses on the audiovisual part, which is clearly the strength of the invention. The presentation of the images is panoramic, so before you know it you’re in the middle of an Icelandic landscape that you can admire from left to right, and top to bottom from where the image was taken. The Vision Pro also allows you to immerse yourself in a video recorded with an iPhone 15 Pro, the company’s newest phone model and the one recommended for getting the most out of the glasses. The clip chosen for the test shows the moment when a child blows out the candles on his birthday cake, and watching it, it is inevitable to think how technology will change the future of mourning, when it is possible to relive this or that in three dimensions, a moment of happiness with a deceased loved one.

The Vision Pro can be used for writing (although it is recommended to connect a wireless keyboard), viewing Internet pages or reading the newspaper, tasks which can be combined by opening several windows at the same time. They are also useful for watching a movie, better if it is three-dimensional and if it lasts no more than two hours, of course. The potential buyer, who should know that Apple has blocked the consumption of pornographic films in virtual reality in a move that has earned comparisons to a “chastity belt”, is shown two: a trailer for Super Mario Bros, and another, a pastiche in which he swims with sharks, watches with dizziness as a tightrope walker covers the distance between two peaks or sees from behind the goal how a player from Inter Miami (Messi’s team) scores a goal into the top corner. , with which Apple signed a million dollar exclusivity contract).

After this part of the test is completed, the salesman asks, “Isn’t that amazing?” And it certainly does, although it may not be practical. Large platforms like Netflix or Max have not yet developed applications for use in this environment, so the large catalogs available are those of Apple TV and Disney+. And the availability of three-dimensional films, making it possible to make the most of technological innovation, is still rare. It is also, at this moment, that of apps, not only audiovisual, available, around 600, according to Apple, as well as official information on sales of the device during its first weeks. The company has not yet shared its figures, but some estimates speak of around 200,000 units.

meme meat

Since its launch at the Fifth Avenue store in New York by Tim Cook, CEO of the technology company, the Vision Pro’s first users in the United States have attracted media and social media attention and even provoked controversy. The intervention of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who advised against using them in the front seat of one of these driverless vehicles, after the video of a guy in a Tesla Cybertruck doing nonsense but with his hands has gone viral, take the wheel. The price of being among the first also carries the risk of becoming a meme, with these ski-shaped glasses from which a white cable comes out and drawing movements similar to those of Tom Cruise in Minority report.

To Nikias Molina, one of them, He’s amused that his adventures with glasses on the New York subway have gone viral. A 25-year-old content creator from Barcelona, ​​who specializes in reviewing Apple products on his YouTube channel, traveled to the American city to buy a pair the same day they were released. “Actually, I think they are for use sitting down, at home,” he explains during a video call after two weeks of use. “When I took them to New York or on the plane home, people asked me a lot of questions, and it was funny to see how they looked at me, because many don’t yet know that you can see them too. ” He loves them, he adds, for their “entertainment” (“there’s no better way to watch a movie, even if it’s a solitary experience”) and “productivity” (” it’s like carrying the desk on your back). ). “The price can be debated, and they could be lighter, but I think the technology is revolutionary, like looking into the future,” he adds.

Molina confirms that the impatience of some European Apple fans to take a look at the latest technological ingenuities has given rise to a parallel market on platforms like eBay, where new American owners of glasses resell a product that is already expensive to begin with. The potential buyer on both sides of the Atlantic should know that at this price you have to add the necessary additions to complete the experience: the case, the additional storage, the wireless headphones… In total, the price The final Vision Pro actually exceeds $4,600. And it’s a reality check for many users.

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