Apple unveils new $3,499 augmented reality headset that blends “real world with the virtual world”

• Posted on June 6, 2023June 6, 2023
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

As expected, Apple has officially taken the wraps off its highly anticipated mixed-reality headset at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Apple kept us guessing until the very end of the event, leading with some new Mac updates and its usual assortment of software updates before returning the stage to Tim Cook at about 80 minutes in, who then segued into the new headset announcement with a “One More Thing” that Steve Jobs would have been proud of.

The Apple Vision Pro

While Apple’s new headset aligned with much of what we’ve heard from analysts and leakers over the past few months, we saw one twist that wasn’t surprising in retrospect. It’s the one thing that nobody ever knows for sure about a new Apple product until the company’s executives are ready to show it off: the name.

Apple’s new headset didn’t get the “Reality Pro” moniker that had been adopted as a placeholder by most folks in the past few weeks. Instead, it’s known as the “Apple Vision Pro.” The “Pro” suffix implies it’s a flagship device — and, as expected, it has the $3,500 price tag to match — but that also leaves room for Apple to introduce a more affordably priced “Apple Vision” somewhere down the road. Reliable reports suggest it’s already working on that for a 2025 release.

Beyond the name, Apple’s new Vision Pro lined up with everything we’ve been hearing, but the rumor mill still didn’t prepare us for the experience of actually seeing it showed off on stage.

Naturally, Apple CEO Tim Cook led the intro, describing it as “the first Apple product you look through and not at” and something that “seamlessly blends the real world with the virtual world.”

Cook clarified that this goes beyond what others have done in the virtual reality space, and it shows. Control is handled entirely through eyes, hands, and voice, yet it doesn’t cut the wearer off from the real world around them. While it can act as a fully immersive VR display for gaming, meditation, and similar experiences, it’s also an augmented reality (AR) display that places apps and other objects as virtual displays against your real-world environment. Hence the term “mixed reality.”

Following his introduction of the Vision Pro, Cook handed the virtual stage over to a series of other Apple executives and managers to explain various aspects of the device in a 45-minute presentation. Alan Dye, who is Apple’s VP of Human Interface and one of the executives who has taken up the legacy of former Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, showed off the user interface, describing the meticulous detail with which Apple has crafted icons, screens, and other elements with a physicality that makes them look and feel truly present in whatever room you’re in.

The Vision Pro’s operating system allows apps to be scaled and placed anywhere in your field of view or beyond. For example, you can move apps, windows, and other objects to the left and right and then look at them by turning your head.

In its normal mode, Vision Pro will show apps hovering in the area around you, but Apple has also added an “environments” feature that allows you to transform your space with either a partial backdrop or a completely immersive world, with the extent controlled by a Digital Crown on the headset.

The Digital Crown isn’t the primary control mechanism, though. Instead, you’ll open and “click” on interactive elements by looking at them with your eyes to highlight them and using subtle and natural finger gestures to activate them. For example, tapping fingers together to select an item or flicking your fingers to scroll through a document or webpage. Siri is also available to provide the usual voice control features, including Dictation for typing or calling up functions like opening and closing apps, playing media, and most other things you’d expect to be able to do with Siri on an iPhone or iPad.

As Alessandra McGinnis, the product manager of the Vision Pro, explained later on in the presentation, there’s also a virtual keyboard that can be called up to type, plus full support for Bluetooth accessories like Apple’s own Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad for folks who find the virtual keyboard doesn’t quite cut it for serious work.

EyeSight

As we’ve heard from a few sources recently, in the early stages of Apple’s headset design, Jony Ive had insisted that the headset not isolate the wearer from the world around them. Ive also reportedly remained actively involved in the project even after his departure from Apple in 2019, and maintained that insistence throughout. This led to fears that the headset would feature virtual “googly eyes” on the outside so people speaking to someone wearing the Vision Pro could see more human-like expressions.

While some were skeptical that Apple would do something that might look “goofy,” not to mention the additional cost of such a display, it turns out the rumors of the outward-facing display were true, but Apple has also pulled this off in a way that we could have only imagined.

Apple is dubbing the feature “EyeSight,” and as Dye notes, it’s designed to reveal your eyes and provide important cues to others about what you’re focused on. However, it’s so well done that when it was first shown in the demo, it looked as if the front of the headset was shifting into a transparent mode to allow the person’s real eyes to show through.

Later, when Apple VP Mike Rockwell, who led the headset engineering team, showed off the hardware inside, it became obvious that the front screen had to be nothing more than a projection of the user’s eyes. However, Apple’s powerful processing and machine learning allows it to render a realistic virtual representation of the wearer.

The same logic ties into using the headset for FaceTime. Since there’s no actual video camera looking at your face like there is on an iPhone, the Vision Pro actually uses an advanced neural network to build a natural representation of your face and mirror your face and hand movements. It’s the technology Apple first developed for Face ID taken to incredible new heights.

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