SpireTech purchased a couple of Apple’s new Vision Pro augmented reality headsets to determine if it’s useful for typical day to day work, doing the type of office work our clients (and ourselves) are involved in.
What is Apple Vision Pro?
It is an augmented reality headset that allows you to have unlimited size screens placed throughout your environment and room. The screens are apps, just like apps available on your iPad or iPhone. If you are familiar with using an iPad, you could think of the Vision Pro as a giant virtual iPad screen.
Is it useful for office work?
The short answer is no, not yet. We’ll get into the reasons why below, but a big one is that even though Microsoft 365 is available on the device, and typical apps like Excel, Word, Outlook, and Teams are functional – there are simply some things you cannot do on it that require you to go back to a PC. If you’ve ever tried to live a day using an iPad Pro, you’ll understand – you can do most things, but sometimes you just need a computer.
Here’s a list of the pros and cons of the device we’ve discovered so far:
Pros
- Your eyes are your mouse. This means that “clicking” on things can be extremely quick once you get used to it.
- Unlimited, huge screens. This is the main reason for this thing to exist.
- “Environments” allow you to immerse yourself in a place besides your room, like sitting in Mt Hood national forest near a lake, complete with natural sounds.
- You can connect an Apple keyboard and trackpad to it, which we believe to be necessary for business use (extra cost).
- While not applicable to most of our clients doing professional services and office work, there are impressive applications for video and immersive 3D, including cinematography.
- You can shoot immersive, 3D videos with a recent iPhone or the Vision Pro itself.
- In the Apple TV app, there are some preview videos of watching sporting events, which if Apple can start doing, could be disruptive. Many sports fans would pay to have a better-than-front-row seat to their favorite sport.
- Panoramic photos turn into very realistic, wrap-around photos when viewed in the Vision Pro.
Cons
- Your eyes are your mouse. This is a con because sometimes clicking things can be difficult, particularly if they are close together, or are apps not yet designed for Vision Pro.
- Highlighting text with your eyes can be imprecise. You’ll probably need a trackpad to do this frequently. Sometimes you’ll highlight the wrong thing, or can’t quite get the selection correct with your eyes alone.
- Cost. It starts around $3500, and with accessories you are probably around $4000 out the door to start.
- App catalog is still limited. Common missing apps include things like YouTube, Netflix, and Facebook. You can still access these apps through the web browser, but the experience is not optimized for eye use.
- The “Persona”, which is what Apple calls your Avatar, looks more like a ghostly apparition than you, and often does not include a torso – so when attending meetings you look more like a floating computer-animated head than yourself. Although it is quite good, it’s not good enough yet. There is no way I would allow a client to see me in this manner in one of our frequent on-camera teams meetings – instead, I will revert to a traditional device for those meetings.
- It’s on your face. This adds a certain anti-social element to it, and some people find it heavy.
We believe that over time, the application catalog and functionality of the Apple Vision Pro will improve. Unfortunately for now, for business use, we can’t quite recommend our clients part with their hard-earned cash for this for daily productive use. However, if you want a fun device, go into an Apple Store for a demo. You’ll probably be blown away.
Note: this article was written in MS Word using the Apple Vision Pro.