Pleasant but underwhelming is all all I can say. The fact you can “see” through the goggles (if you want) is excellent, so it is easy to forget you are wearing them. The eye navigation and finger clicking worked great, as did window manipulation. Normal photos looked no better than a good hi-res monitor, still lots of oversharpening. Asked to zoom in on a still, it looked over processed and smoothed as usual, like most iPhone pics. The iPhone panoramas were nice to move around, but of course displayed classic jpeg artifacts. The 3D photos and videos looked better through the stereoscopic glasses, apart from some dodgy backgrounds. Still, you need a Vision Pro to see them properly. Apparently the 3D media were all taken on iPhone 15, so that was good. I was then encouraged to watch several Apple video promo’s. Of course they looked great, they have spent millions of dollars on them, so they should. Did they look better than normal video, no they looked like normal 4K video to me – that is high quality but with some special cinema adaptations.
Then it all went wrong. I went to my hi-res gigapixel website and you could not make a fullscreen view. Not only that, the resolution was not even HD, it was like viewing the internet in 2001, 720×480 pixels. I should say that I was able to actually navigate my panoramas, they just looked awful. Ok, so then I tried my 4K videos on Vimeo, same result. I actually cried out “appalling”. I then asked if there was download throttling. No response. I then asked if Safari didn’t work properly. No response. If this is actually how it works, Vision Pro is not ready for primetime. If it cannot play a normal 4K video, what is the point? If you can only properly view work specifically made for the Vision Pro, I would say wait a few years.
I should explain here that throughout the Vision Pro experience there is a personal Apple Specialist who monitors your actions and your views on a remote monitor. You talk with each other during the demo. Undoubtedly this person is following a script, as a result they do not appear to be able to answer actual questions. Not only that, but my Specialist was wearing a mask, which did not aid communication. (Have I got Covid, have you got Covid, either way it is unpleasant). I also spent 10 minutes wearing the device with an error message, while the Specialist disappeared, so probably not their best ever demo. However, that did give me time to take the selfie above, so thank you!
Nevertheless, I can see the appeal of this device in certain circumstances and enjoyed the experience. I did manage to use the virtual keyboard with eye navigation, a bit like using an iPhone keyboard in fact. As you might expect from goggles, by far the most impressive part of the experience was the best 3D I have ever seen. This is only version 1…hope it gets better!
