Vision Pro

Vision Pro: What features were killed and what could still be coming

Zac Hall | Jun 21 2023 - 7:30 am PT

Vision Pro trademark | FaceTime usage shown

With the Vision Pro now revealed, The Information is out with a bit of a status update on what it previously reported about the headset before it was official. In the piece, Wayne Ma deciphers future features from canceled plans while reporting new details about Vision Pro development.

Fitness

Apple has shown how meditation and mindfulness sessions will work with Vision Pro, but Apple Fitness+ content didn’t make the cut.

“Former team members said Apple may have hesitated to discuss fitness use cases publicly because the device has a cumbersome external battery pack, and the front-facing glass screen could be too fragile to survive a bump from furniture or a wall,” Wayne Ma explains.

While we saw one version of the Vision Pro headset strap in the keynote (and another view with an over-head strap on Apple’s website), The Information report details a fitness-focused flavor.

Some employees discussed collaborations with brands such as Nike for working out with the headset, while others investigated face cushions that were better suited for sweaty, high-intensity workouts, said one of the people.

The report adds that Apple also considered a Peloton-like stationary bike experience using Vision Pro. Yoga apps that used cameras to measure breathing and an instructional tai chi app were also in development.

Despite the form factor, it’s hard for me to imagine Apple not doing something with fitness when Vision Pro actually launches next year. Hopefully there’s more to this part of the story in the future.

Gaming

What about gaming? Wayne Ma says that Phil Schiller in particular pushed for gaming on Vision Pro to be a focus, but the reliance on hand tracking may have that on the back burner for now:

In the Apple-hosted Slack conversation with developers after the event, an Apple engineer wrote that while hand tracking was great for performing gestures, providing visual feedback and some finer interaction tasks, it wasn’t the best choice for tasks that required very precise interactions, something that is crucial for gaming.

Apple did say some 100 Apple Arcade titles will come to Vision Pro next year, but there’s no indication that they’ll be immersive yet.

Mac apps

One thing planned that was killed is the ability to actually run Mac apps on Vision Pro, according to Wayne Ma.

[Engineers] had explored giving people the ability to drag Mac apps from that windowed display into a user’s 3D space, essentially running Mac software on Vision Pro. However, Apple killed this feature early on because the Vision Pro’s operating system, VisionOS, wasn’t capable enough given that it was based on iOS, which is already a stripped-down version of the Mac operating system.

What will ship is the ability to extend a Mac desktop using Vision Pro, and the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps or native Vision Pro apps on the headset. No real loss.

What about full body avatars? Apple showed off what appears to be rather impressive “Persona” virtual representations of user faces, and that’s as far as V1 appears to go. The report describes a version of “co-presence” that hasn’t yet made the cut:

Another experience Apple worked on, dubbed “co-presence” by the headset team, gave people the feeling that they could talk to a friend who lived far away as though they were standing in the same room. That feature involved tracking a person’s body movements and representing their likeness in 3D space.

More to come for this space, it seems.

Finally, The Information flags the lack of “augmented or 3D content” for Apple TV+, despite having a team called Z50 work on this content. The report also casts doubt on the practicality of streaming sports in 3D. In both cases, this seems like a matter of actually showing the content when consumers can actually consume it.

Top comment by BarelyLucid

Liked by 2 people

"What will ship is the ability to extend a Mac desktop using Vision Pro, and the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps or native Vision Pro apps on the headset. No real loss."

Limiting mac apps to a single virtual monitor and requiring a separate Mac to run the apps is a massive loss.

$3500 would have been a lot more palatable if Apple's keynote said "and it can replace your Macbook".

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Vision Pro has only been previewed for now, and there’s as least another six months of work to do before shipping.

While Apple probably isn’t saving much of anything for closer to launch, it’s likely that we’ll see many more details about content availability and finished features the next time it presents Vision Pro.

It’s also very hard to compare what Apple has shown so far with what Apple could have shown for Vision Pro. Whether or not you care about mixed reality headsets, Vision Pro appears to be leagues ahead of the best of the rest so far – including hardware that costs much more.

The $3,500 mixed reality headset goes on sale starting in the US in early 2024.