The Vergecast - Apple’s Vision Pro: five months later

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of spatial computing: The Verge’s David Pierce chats with Victoria Song and Wes Davis about using the Vision Pro for the five months that it's been available to the public. The group details what works, what doesn’t, and what’s next for the device. Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not Apple announces visionOS 2 with 3D photo transformations and an ultrawide Mac display The Vision Pro isn’t destroying your eyes, but maybe get eye drops The Vision Pro is a computer for the age of walled gardens Apple’s Vision Pro team is reportedly focused on building a cheaper headset The Vision Pro will get Apple Intelligence and ‘Go Deeper’ in-store demos David chats with the folks at Sandwich Vision, who create Vision Pro apps called Television and Theater, about why they made 3D-rendered versions of CRT TVs in virtual reality. Sandwich Vision Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship of spatial computing. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in Bora Bora. I mean, no, I'm not. I'm in my basement where I always am. But I'm in the Apple Vision Pro in one of the immersive environments. And what I've discovered about this thing is that obviously you can turn the Vision Pro all the way down

and see your actual surroundings through pass-through, or you can turn it all the way up with the digital crown and be in sort of a pure VR environment. But I like to turn on one of the environments, but only to like 60%. And what that means now is as I'm looking forward here, I'm seeing my Mac monitor, because I think that's how most people use their Vision Pro

is as a monitor for their Mac, plus a couple of Vision Pro apps that I've aligned around. And it looks like I'm on the beach, right? I'm in a lounge chair on the beach and Bora Bora. It's delightful. But then if I look off to the side, or I look behind me, or I even look kind of down at my desk,

I can see my actual surroundings. And that's usually what I'm, I need to be able to see in a glance anyway. Like the dog comes charging down the hallway. I need to be able to look and see the dog charging down the hallway. But normally, if I'm just looking forward, I get this lovely, serene beach environment. It's delightful. And I can do it from my basement.

It actually, like, it feels so silly to talk about this, but it's kind of great. Anyway, the Vision Pro is what I want to talk about on the show today. So five months ago today, as you're listening to this on Tuesday, July 2nd, was the launch of the Vision Pro. February 2nd, 2024, that was when it shipped, and regular people started getting to use it. And I thought this might be a good time to just do a check-in. It's been five months. We've heard a lot about new software. We've heard a lot about new hardware. Developers have gotten a chance to do it. People have gotten to spend real time messing around in this thing. I think the novelty is worn off

in a way that's actually really useful. We can just talk about this thing. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about what we've been up to in this headset for the last few months. We're going to talk to some developers about what they've been up to. We're going to talk to about where all of this is headed. Lots to do. I think the Vision Pro has sort of been through the hype cycle and really we've all in a certain way kind of forgotten about it, honestly. It was not a huge hit. It didn't change the world. But I feel like there's still a lot to talk about here. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about it. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I have to go and fix my hair because dear Lord, you use this thing for 10 minutes and your hair looks

ridiculous. And we just can't have that. Lots of Vision Pro stuff to do. This is the virtual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it. on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back.

So like I was saying, this is a really interesting moment for the Vision Pro. Because on the one hand, I think everybody has kind of stopped talking about and thinking about it. The people who were going to buy one, bought one. The people who weren't going to buy one weren't because it's $3,500. There was so much hype and so much excitement. and then some disillusionment, and then there was questions about whether it was a hit or whether it was a failure.

Realistically, it's neither. But it's kind of gone out of the consciousness. And yet, there's been all this news recently about Vision OS2, which has lots of new features coming to it and more coming later this year. We've gotten some news about Apple's hardware team, kind of changing gears and rethinking the way that they think about Vision Pro. We've heard a lot about other headsets and glasses, sorts of devices. The Rayban meta smart glasses have been a huge hit,

which I think is a really interesting part of the Vision Pro story. There's just a lot going on. This gadget is five months old, which is brand new and also in a certain way, kind of old in the way the tech news world works. But there's still a lot happening, and it feels like whatever is going to happen here is very early. But I wanted to get some perspective from people who frankly have used this thing more than I have. So I grabbed two of the folks at the Verge who have the most Vision Pro experience, and that is West Davis and V-Song.

They have spent many more hours goofing around at this thing, testing it, using it in their own lives than I have. And so I thought I'd grab them to talk about what they've seen so far, how they've used it, whether they would continue to use it over time, and where it seems like all of this might go next. So let's just get into it. West Davis, welcome with the Vergecast. Yes, hello. Good to be here. V-Song, welcome back. Thank you for having me.

So I wanted to talk to you because you're two of the vision proe-eest people at the verge, which is, I would say, it's kind of a dubious distinction at this moment in time. But let's just talk about how you're both using the Vision Pro. And, Wes, I want to start with you because unlike V&Me, you paid hard-earned actual human dollars for your Vision Pro. I'm still paying money for it. I did the, bought it with installment payments through my Apple card. So I'll be paying for it for some time.

Oh, no. So when you bought one, what did you buy it for? did you think you were getting? I knew that I was getting a product that isn't fully fledged. I knew it was going to be basically a, you know, like a tech demo product. I had read the review. I knew the shortcomings. I knew what I was getting into, I think, to be completely transparent. Like, the reason I wanted to get it is because I hadn't really used a VR thing since the virtual boy. Like Nintendo's, you know, it's been a minute. drastic failure. Like, I had played with other people's stuff, but I hadn't owned one. You know what I mean? So I

kind of wanted to see where, I guess not just where things are, but kind of where they're going, right? Because this is like, it's a little bit ahead of its time is not the right word, right? But it's, you know, it's ambitious. The tech is pretty ahead as far as like visual clarity and all that stuff. The screen's a really high resolution. And did you have a thing? that you were like, okay, even if it's terrible at everything, at least it'll do this one thing for me and that'll make it worth it? Did you have one of those in your mind? That you're like, if only it's X, I can look at this purchase. Not really. I was intrigued by the whole like, let's put a big virtual screen in front of me thing. I have since found out that that it's nice

for certain things. But it does also do things like when you have a gigantic display in front of you, I've never used on a regular basis more than like a 27-inch screen. But when you have a gigantic screen, like blow it up to, you know, the size of a huge HD TV or projector or whatever, you will miss notifications because like on Mac OS, they're all just in the top right. And when the top right is five miles away from you, you don't see them. You mean like literally in your eyesight. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. So I don't do that.

I feel like I have the exact opposite experience with that. Yeah, I just feel like I see everything all at once. I just become Michelle Yo, everything, everything all at once, and I have the power. You have hot dog fingers? Yeah, with hot dog fingers. Or it feels like hot dog finger. It might as well be hot dog fingers just because, like, I have a lot of problem with it recognizing my finger gestures. I don't, I feel like every single time, every so often I have to recalibrate using it. So yes, truly, I just become Michelle Yo. I mean, there are worse things to become, right? Yeah, it's, in certain ways, that's the dream. And in other ways, less so. But Vee, what about you? You acquired this thing basically from Nilai. You stole it from him like eight minutes after we publish our review in January. Why did you want to have this thing around?

Basically, one, you wear it. I'm the wearables lady. So that is, it is a category of wearables. And one that I, you know, I like emerging tech a lot. So I'm just curious about it. because it also, I wanted to see how it stacks up to the idea of smart glasses and just kind of, I feel like it's part way on the evolution to that. So I just really wanted to kind of dig into it. And it wasn't what I expected in many ways. Like, I think I was expecting something different than a VR headset,

even though everyone had said it's just essentially a VR headset. And yeah, yeah, it is a VR headset. It's slightly different, though. It's very, it's very Apple is what I'll say. say when I'm in it. I also have the MetaQuest three. Yeah, the most recent one, I have that. So I kind of go back and forth in between them sometimes. And it's just, they're the same, but it's like the same thing written in different fonts. But one of those fonts is Comic Sans and the other is like, I don't know what the hip-new font is anymore. It's Comic Sans. Okay, yeah, so it's Comic Sans. So it's just very, I'll let people wonder which one I think is comic sans and which one I think is the hip new font. I feel like it's very obvious. But that's, yeah, what's good? We'll leave it mysterious for you.

So, okay, so fast forward to now. And Wes, I'm curious for you to, what do you do when you put on the headset? Like, I feel like it's been long enough. Part of the reason I want to do this now is it's been long enough that the like, I wonder what this is and how it'll work. Is this anything? I would assume that's worn off by now. And now it's like, you don't quite have the like, oh my God, every time you put it on. or the like, ugh, this sucks every time the battery dies. So you're like, you're in a space where you can actually kind of use it as a person. How do you use the Vision Pro now? Just for cooking. No, I use it.

I was about to be like, that is the most exciting answer ever. I believed you for a second. I tried it once after reading those Joanna Stern's review, right? Yeah, yeah, Joanna Stern's story, but it's horrible for that. Don't use it for cooking. We were FaceTiming while you were cooking that one time. Did we? Okay, I forgot that.

We were FaceTiming in the Vision Pro while you were cooking. That was an experience watching you. It was a bad idea. That was something. Yeah. Don't, not safe. No, mostly, so I will use it one or two times a week while I'm working. Usually it's like if I really want to focus on something specific if I'm working on, you know, a bigger piece or every now and then I just, just to try it, just to see.

but I'm a three monitor guy, which is stupid, but I am. I've gotten used to it. And so when I have just the one monitor, I'm like, now all my stuff's on top of each other. I can't just look over. I can't put all my apps on all the screens. So there's that. I use it a fair amount, actually, to watch stuff. I've been catching up on For All Mankind, which I never watched before this year.

So I've been watching that a bunch. Every now and then I'll think, like, hey, like, this is basically a movie theater. on my face. So, like, are there old movies that I never got to see in theater? Things that I missed. So I'll do that sometimes. So you use it as, like, a single-tasking device. Yeah.

And I'm fascinated by this idea that you're like, I have too many screens and when they need to focus, I put on a headset. Yeah. Which on one hand sounds so counterintuitive, but it's also a thing I've actually heard a few times from folks that it is like, it is a surprisingly useful focus device. Like, why does it work for you? That's harder to explain. I think it's sort of that it zeroes me in.

So it's like when I put it on, it's like I get to go into, like, mentally into a mode where I'm like, like, this is the thing that I'm doing right now is working on whatever this task is. I don't know. It's helpful. I like it for that. Is it worth $3,500 to do that when I could also just get my laptop and like go do that? exact same thing. I'm not sure, although, you know, my laptop is like a tiny little rectangle, and this lets me, as I said earlier, have a, you know, 500 mile wide screen. So, yeah. It is a very funny thing that like years ago, I had a coworker who had a Chromebook

that he had rigged up to not run anything other than Google Docs. And he was just like, this is my typewriter, right? Like I sit here when I just need to write things. And like, do you have a hundred other devices that will also run Google Docs? Yes, of course. Absolutely. But there was something about that space that just felt sort of better and saner and more focused to him. But you hear about writers, right? Like, who keep around like old Max or whatever, like for the same reason. George R. Martin's still mad at him. Like, I'm sure part of that is just like, this is the comfortable thing that I've been writing my novels on for, you know, decades.

I'm not going to give it up until, you know, it completely dies or whatever. But, V, what about you? What has been sticky for you? time. Actually, kind of very similar to West when I really need to focus on a draft, like really just, I have a lot of little focus tools on my regular thing because breaking out the Vision Pro, it has to be really intentional for me just because I have really bad eyes. So if I'm wearing glasses, I don't have the Zeiss inserts. So I have to be like, okay, it's time for me to go upstairs and put my contacts in. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's like a several step process for you just to be like,

I'm going to open up Google Docs in the headset now. Yeah. But I actually think that the most useful thing for me has been actually having a 500-foot Google Docs in front of me just to like really zero in on the words. And actually, I write mostly in the CMS. So sometimes it's just the CMS just in front of me with the chaos, like just really impressing upon me the importance of finishing this draft. Literally the stuff of nightmares. Yeah, it's a giant nightmare screen and or, you know, you know, sometimes I'll, watch stuff on there because I really do think it's like best when you're using it as a screen. It kind of isn't as good in my opinion when you're using it for the way that I think Apple wants

you to use it. It's really just like having an amazingly large screen in front of you. And my problem, though, with watching content is the platform of content. Like I think if you have something that you want to watch on Disney Plus or the stuff that's or Apple TV Plus that's integrated, oh yeah, that's super easy. But I want to watch my. K-dramas because my husband won't watch K-dramas with me. And this is a solitary experience. So, you know, going to my crappy streaming K-drama websites where everything is like a one second away from getting malware, it's infected into my vision pro. That's kind of not quite so easy. And then when you do watch it sometimes, like I did watch a little bit of Bridgeton through going to Netflix

in Safari and the thing. I was just like, wow. this is too overwhelming. There's just so much happening. I don't know that I feel quite as enamored with it, like a few months on as like a watching medium. Because I do want to, I do want to like text Cranes, who's the one, use the sole reason why I watch Bridgetton and be like, oh my God, the men on the show are stupid. They just need to talk about their feelings. And like, you know, it's so easy when you're just on a TV and you can just pull out your phone and be like, oh, Simon is stupid and Bridgetton. And I can't really do that. I have to hold my thoughts and then then like tell people afterwards because I could type in the actual.

Yeah, but it's stupid because you have like one finger and typing unless I'm going to do. Get up from my very comfy daybed and then type into my computer so that, yeah, no, with my keyboard just to message someone more clearly. It's not quite as intuitive. You guys are talking about this sort of single tasking thing. Do you do this in the like immersive environments VR headset style? Or do you just sit in your own living room with a gigantic screen? I sit on the moon. I love this.

Okay. Just because I'm just like it's goodbye everybody. Every once in a while my cat will just like start touching me while I'm on the moon and that kind of takes me out of the moon. That is a real thing. Like cat jumping on you while you're immersed. I'm sorry I just used that term. But while you have that turned on, yeah, cat jumping on you, although I will say that my cat, one of his favorite things to do, and it feels very intentional, is to jump in my lap while I'm, you know, holding my phone or my tablet or whatever and be in the way of that. Like, it's not.

Yeah. And he can't do that when I'm using Vision Pro. He has to wedge himself between your thumb and your index finger. And that's the only way. Sometimes he'll kind of like flash, like I'll see little ears flashing into the screen. But as far as like using the immersive stuff, if I'm trying to type, it's, I don't know, like, trying to find the keyboard is really annoying. Now they fixed that in Vision OS2. So if you have the beta, you can you can do that and it will recognize a magic keyboard.

They say that it's just for magic keyboards. I've gotten it to recognize this NES controller that I have as a keyboard for just a few minutes. and it would kind of show it when I look down at it again and then it stopped. It figured out I was lying. I love that the pro tip is just fooling the Vision Pro. That's a good strategy. Absolutely. But no, you're getting ahead of me on some of the software stuff, but one of the things I've

heard a bunch of people talking about is that the phone mirroring thing inside of Mac OS, inside of the Vision Pro, could be a big deal for solving kind of both the problems you're talking about, right? Like the how do I input while I'm in this space? And V, like, the thing you're describing, which I call like light multitasking is a thing I have thought so much about with the Vision Pro because, like, I love going to movie theaters. I go to movie theaters alone all the time to see movies just because I'm not allowed to use my phone. It is the best. And it's just like, I'm going to sit here.

I'm going to watch this whole movie like a maniac, right? Like, I'm going to just look at the movie the whole time. And there is something about the Vision Pro that is really compelling in that way. I found especially in like the good streaming apps. And really, it's basically like Disney and like Macs a little. And that's kind of it. Apple TV is good. But there aren't many.

But the ones that are good, I have found I actually like really enjoy watching stuff in. But VM with you, like if it's a matter of loading up a browser, it just, it doesn't. At that point, I'm like, this is worse than watching on my television. What am I doing here? I wish all the stuff that I wanted to watch on my own was in the good apps, but they're not. Which is kind of, you know, the whole thing about the loneliness in the Vision Pro. It's a real, I think that's like my biggest problem with it, is that I would enjoy it so much more if I had more people to hang out with in there. Otherwise, yeah, otherwise, I'm just kind of like, eh, everyone's out here.

That tension, sort of both sides of that. I was one of things I wanted to ask you about because you both live in households with other people and also are like big nerds who are online talking to people all the time. For me as a person in a household with other people, I cannot bring myself to wear this around other people. Like, that's probably just a me thing. Maybe I'll get over it. But I'm curious what your experience has been like, do you sit on the couch around your partner, family, friends, whoever? And I have been roasted within an inch of my life wearing that thing. I actually wore it in a car one time just to test the travel mode. I was not driving. Just to be clear, I was not driving. I was the past. and that was just, that was not fun. The windows were, it was, it was trying to fight me the entire time because I think it knew that I wasn't supposed to be in a car with that thing. But when I was testing it more frequently, my spouse would walk by, would just look at me and

go, oh, I'll talk to you when you're a human again. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Bye. Like, no. Or you would go, that is just so cursed because you have the eyesight on the other side. and he's just like, that's not, that's not your eyes.

That's just, mm-mm. Yeah, eyesight's not the solution. It's just not. I get why they did it. I get why they did it. I think it's actually like very oddly human and thoughtful why they did that. Right. Because eye contact is so, they're actually like talking about the social cues by creating that particular feature.

But I have not, I've never had a single person go, wow, that's so cool. Can I try it? I've been like derided because the most of the most of the same. Most of the people in my life are not huge tech nerds. Like, my husband's just, he gets so mad seeing it. And he's like, why do you have this? What is the purpose of this? What is the purpose?

Meanwhile, they love, they love the meta-ray-van glasses. Like, they can't stop using them. But they look at me in the vision prone, they're like, why? Humanity is like, yeah. The one thing that I do kind of in like the common space in the living room is I will go in there, because it's the one room that's bright enough and big enough in my house where I can play games on it, which I don't do a lot of, but there is one rhythm game called synth writers. And it's basically beat saber, right? Kind of it's like you have balls flying at you and you have to catch them in time with the music or whatever.

It's stupid, but it's also, I enjoy it. Those games are very fun. And the good news is you look so cool doing it. it. You look very cool. Yeah. And so like every now and then, uh, like my, my wife will come, uh, downstairs and walk in and I'm just standing there like doing like all these weird movements, waving my arms around and stuff. But, uh, she also has played it and has fun with it. She never asks to play, but if I'm playing and I'm like, do you want to do the thing? And, and then she, you know, often will take me up on it, um, because she also secretly thinks it's fun. But

her reaction, she's not as angry, I think, as, uh, or upset by it. She's not offended by it. She's just like, she'll come in and, and just be like, oh, look, it's my robot husband. Yeah. I think the, I'll talk to you when you're done in there. Yeah. Reaction is so common and so fascinating because that is like the, the precise thing that Apple was trying to solve, right? This thing where like I, and they did so many interesting technical things to make it work. Like the thing where a person sort of fades into your view as you come in, like, technically incredible. It works shockingly well.

It's only alarming, at least for me, the first couple of times. Like, it freaked me out pretty legitimately the first couple of times. And then I got used to it. But it doesn't, it fixes the problem for you as the wearer a little bit. But I've had the exact same reaction every time I've been ringing around somebody else that, like, as soon as they see me in the headset, it's like, oh, we're not interacting. Like, we can't. You're somewhere else.

I can't, you can, even if you can see me, even if you can see the space, you are somewhere else, we are not going to talk. I wonder if that's because eyesight itself is the problem, or if it's because it's just not bright and high fidelity enough. Because, you know, when you look at it, it looks like a, like, like, you're looking at one of those hologram cards of somebody's, like, you know, eyeballs. I think that's part of it and just like the uncanniness of it at the same time, just like that really. because, you know, like, it kind of, you see the eyes, but it's like, there's like tinge, there's a tinge with blue, I think, if you're in an app so they know that your full focus isn't there. But unless you sit down with someone and explain to them what that means and they're aware of what those cues are, I think just people are going to look at that and just go like, uh-uh.

Yeah. There's going to do a big Brendan Fraser and the mummy just going, uh-uh. So let's talk about like where we go next, right? Because I think it is, it is, we're five months in. This thing is brand new. Like, every time I talk to people who love the Vision Pro, they're like, what about the iPhone after five months? And like, that's true.

None of it was any good after five months. So, like, it's fine. Sure. But, Wes, you've been writing a bunch about Vision OS2, which I think my read on Vision OS2 is basically, like, this is now fixing all the sort of table stakes stuff. It's basically Vision OS1 now. What in there are you excited about? Give me the rundown.

So the thing I'm most excited about is the big curve. thing for the reasons I mentioned earlier, just not having all the space that I'm used to. And it's weirdly, like a lot of the things that they brought in for this version are things that I, like, had thought specifically that I wanted. And a curved display was, like, I had thought, like, you know, we all, well, not we all, but a lot of people were saying in forums and stuff, like, we want multiple displays in the Vision Pro, why aren't there multiple displays? And one day I was thinking, like, why do we need multiple displays? It's a virtual environment.

Why can't you just have a big, you know, a big long display or whatever? And then they announced that. And I didn't expect that. Like, I thought it was going to be a multiple display thing. But like, why not? Why not have a big curve display thing? Another thing that that I had really wanted was some better ways to get to things in the Vision Pro. So like launching your apps, for instance, like the home screen.

before your two options were to reach up and push the little button on the top, the digital ground. Or you could go into the control center by looking up, hoping you get the little dot, tapping the dot. I hate that so much. Yeah, that whole process. It's like a three-step process. Now you just like do this funky, like little flourish with your hand, and I love it. It is like a little, it's the very end of a magic trick kind of vibe. It is. You're just like you flourish your hand and there's a little dot that shows up right here. it shows up pretty reliably,

and then you tap your fingers together and you've got your home screen, it's easy. And then while you're doing that, if you want to quickly check the timer, the battery, which is like not a thing you can do normally, I mean, you can by, again, looking up and finding the dot, but it's not, I don't know, it's not as somehow it's different than this motion,

which is just like turning your hand over. And I kind of likened it when I wrote about it before or to being like turning your hand to look at your wrist to see what time it is. I don't know if that's what they were going for, but it's what I immediately thought. And they, you know, that seems appally, right, to kind of think about it that way. And that will show you the time, the battery level, and you can tap there to get to the control center. Or you can tap and hold to like change the volume. Stuff like that, just bringing in easy, quick gestures to do stuff inside.

of the Vision Pro get to menus and all that stuff. Instead of having to go through all this rigamarole, I would love it if there was a way to get to settings, for instance, that way, too. Because this being a new product, I'm still, you know, months later, constantly going in and changing settings, right? Just tweaking little things. And I do that anyway on all my devices. But, you know, it's more pronounced on the Vision Pro. How often do you guys use Siri on the Vision Pro? Because I feel like my answer to all of the weird UI stuff is I just yell at Siri. I use Siri three times as much on Vision Pro as on any other Apple device. I am surrounded by HomePots.

Oh, fair enough. And phones and all kinds of things. I do use it. And it does seem to prioritize the Vision Pro. But my experience over the last several years of using the Apple Home stuff has been that while it has improved, It's still frequently enough misunderstands. Siri still sucks is what you're saying. My phone is not like still doesn't have Siri turned on because of that.

Like if I want Siri on my phone, I will press the button. I use Siri most while driving. And even then half the time when I'm driving, it's like, no, that's not what I ask for. Oh my God, stop. And some of that is just me. Like I have to I have to like know what I want to ask and how I want to ask it in a way that the voice assistant is going to understand. And I'm not too good at that because I just word vomit half the time what I want. So it's not like a coherent sentence.

I feel like you have to say, you know, Siri. See, I don't even know what to say in a fake Siri prompt. Besides like setting timers. Before that, I'm just like, well, it's like Siri. And then my brain like buffers. I'm like, what do I want her to do? How should I say that? That brain buffer thing is real.

Yeah. It's like that's my main issue with it and it's why I don't. But it's frustrating because when I'm in there and I'm on Safari. and I'm, you know, trying to type, I go like, oh, it would be so much easier if I could just talk to Syria and do it. And then I'll look at the microphone and try and tap and it's just not working. And so then I just give up and then I, and yeah, so that's my issue. I will say, though, like, yeah, to your point, David, like opening apps that way is actually, like, I do do that somewhat frequently. The part of the reason that I don't is because I'm always forgetting the name of Vision Pro apps because they have weird names and

times. And then other times, it's like, until recently, until Vision OS2, you couldn't rearrange the home apps and how you can. That's another thing I'm excited about, I guess. Like, I don't know. Like, it feels weird to say I'm excited about that. So much of VisionOS2 is like, now you can copy and paste on the iPhone, right? It's like, yeah, okay, great. That is good and useful and hooray and also how on earth did this not exist until now. Yeah. And you still can't, like, as far as I know, And V, if you've figured out how to do this, but I don't think you can make folders inside the home. There is a folder for iPad apps that's already there, and you have to use it. Like, it came with VisionOS, but you can't make more.

And that drives me nuts because, like, I don't like, on my iPhone, I have it very intentionally set up where most of my apps live in the library, and only a few are actually on my home screen in any way. and it's organized so that I only have the things that I use regularly. So, like, my podcast app is there and my books app, stuff like that. Otherwise, it's like everything else is shoved over in the app library. I will search for it when I want it. I don't want it there. Like, I don't want TikTok on my home screen being like, do you want to watch some videos?

Wow, how responsible of you. But, like, with the Vision Pro, you can't do that. There's no app library. It is the app library. It's very old-school iPhone in that way. It's just pages and pages of apps. And thankfully, you can rearrange them, but that's annoying, too. The whole app experience in the Vision Pro has been annoying, like downloading them.

It takes forever to download something. Like, you're just waiting. And then by the time it's downloaded, I forget that it's there. So it takes me a while to go back and find the new app or something. And like West said is just like having to find. stuff. Like, I'm, I don't know. It's, it's, it's just easier to do it on my phone sometimes. And then sometimes the apps that are in there, I'm just like, this, this is, this was not what I was promised. I was in the Zillow app in there. And it's not, that's not what I wanted from the Zillow app

on the Vision Pro. I want to talk about the Zillow app in a minute. But I'm curious, V, can you actually read your phone? Because I'm, like, I can't. No. Like, I mean, I could if I, like, I have really bad eyes. I don't know if this is useful because my eyesight is garbage, but I have tried looking at my phone, and it's just kind of, I have to squint, and I'm already, like, so my eyes are already dry in the Vision Pro because my eyes are so wide on the inside, and, like, I'm wearing contacts, which is extra drying.

And so then I have to squint really hard to look at my phone. So it's just not worth it, really. Yeah, and I still can't wear it for very long at a time. Like, I think, West, you said you figured out how to wear it for, like, two plus hours. Like, I have to tap out after an hour. Like, it doesn't matter how I arrange it on my head. It doesn't matter what strap I'm using just after a while. I really feel it.

So I kind of have to take it off. And it's not that way for me every time. Most of the time, I can legitimately get away with wearing it for an hour or two hours. I've gone even longer than that. Not all day. Or at least I haven't tried it all day. It took a while to get to that. Like, it took a lot of fiddling with the strap.

Like, I still use the solo thing. I tried the other, the one that's supposed to be the comfortable one for a while. And it made the top of my head numb. And that bothered me. So I switched back and I figured out a way to make it work. But I think you've written about this, just about, like, how personal wearables are. Yeah. And now, like, especially with like smart rings and stuff like that, just every,

every single person's body is different. And, you know, I might be able to wear the Vision Pro all day. Maybe who knows why? Maybe I have like an extra fat forehead or something and it's just got a lot of padding there. I don't know. We had Parker, who's our product person, like, went through hell to get that thing to like to fit his face. Yeah. Whereas me, I got lucky. But it took a while. Like at first, it was like, you know, it would press too hard here or press too hard here or it felt heavy. My neck hurt from wearing the thing. I don't know if I just have an extra strong back of my neck now or what, but most of those issues are gone. I actually will lie down wearing it if I try to, if I have to wear it for a longer period of time because it just like relieves the pressure from

the top of my head and like the tightness around it. I have flat cheekbones. So, you know, there's no actual bone support to lift this thing. So I have to like tighten it. around my face. So I think that's part of the reason why. I have no, like, I have no bone structure with which to hold this thing up. And that is like a thing with wearables. Like your face, everybody's face is going to be structured differently. And like with the glasses, it's, it's the nose bridge. Again, I have a flat face. I have a flat nose bridge. I have nothing to hold these things up. So if there's no supportive structure in there, it just slides down my face all the time. So I don't have a face made to wear it comfortably, but I do so for the blog. So it's important.

The sacrifices. Yeah, as somebody with very good vision and ample nose, I suppose, the thing that always gets me is just, like, my eyes get tired at the end of it. And Wes, like, that's the thing that is most surprising to me. Like, I can fight through the, you know, my head hurts thing. Like, do you guys ever see the TikToks of the people who have the dent in their head for my headphones all the time? Yeah.

I'm convinced the Vision Pro is going to end up doing that to me. But I can soldier through all of that. But I get like physically exhausted just from looking at this stuff all the time. And I think to some extent that's just like it's just the light in your eyes all the time. Like if I sat close to my TV and watched it for hours at a time. No, no, no. I actually talk to ophthalmologist. It's on the verge.com about is it dangerous to have a screen that close to your face?

And the answer is not really the like that's a myth about having the screen so close to your eyes. It's actually that your eyes are just open for too long. You're not blinking as much. So your eyes become less high. hydrated and that can that can cause like burst blood vessels in your eyes it's it's benign generally i had a friend in high school who used to play doom so much that he would come to school with burst blood vessels in his eyes because he would forget to blink for hours at a time shout out tim so you do you do need to be putting the eye drops in your eyes if you're prone to prone to dry eye and it's like

also again with me with my contacts contacts are drying so because the the the display is stimulating, you're just going to blink less. You're not going to be blinking normally as you would in there. So I do think that the eye fatigue is a thing that we haven't necessarily talked about. Because, you know, you're in an immersive environment. Every so often, are you going to hit pause to, like, just like open, oh, like take off the thing, squirt in some eyedrofts and then put it in. You should build that into the vision pro.

It's like the opposite of the thing in the watch that expels the water. It just flushes water in your eyes every 20 minutes. Just flush water and use the saline solution. Because, you know, that is eye hygiene. There is, like, good health and good practices that you have to use with these devices that we don't always do. So, like, the screen distance, like, talk to actual ophthalmologists. The screen distance is not the problem. It is the fact that you are not blinking that can cause actual eye strain.

And that's not great for you. So it's, there's, they said 20, 2020, every 20 seconds, look 20 feet away for, I think 20 seconds. Every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. That's what it is. But you can't do that in a Vision Pro. Right, because it's all an inch and a half away. It's fair. I do have to say one thing that I thought of earlier.

Right now, I'm building a bicycle from a frame, an old frame that I had. And I realized I didn't have the measurement of something and I don't own calipers. There's an app in the Vision Pro called hand calipers. There you go. Did you put calipers on in virtual reality? You don't put them on. You hold your fingers up. and two little dots show up, and it shows the measurement between your fingers, and it's delightful,

and I used it, and it gave me an accurate measurement, and that's all I want to say. They are going to make a Vision Pro commercial about you tomorrow. Yeah. I hope they do. Somewhere, somewhere, the Vision Pro team, someone's screaming with Joy, is saying, yes, they used it the way I want. Oh, it's nobody on the Vision Pro team. It's just some guy who made me up as far as I could tell. But that's the stuff, right?

Like, you talk about spatial computing. like that is that is the stuff and there need to be a million more things like that but that is if this stuff is ever going to be the thing it's things like that but david's like when you were talking about like not ever wanting to wear the vision pro around people like i had to walk out to my garage which is a separate building uh holding the vision pro and i was like holding it on the side of my body so that like my neighbors wouldn't see me i have to go to home depot this afternoon and i'm going to bring the Vision Pro and just wander the aisles holding stuff up to the Vision Pro just to see what happens.

See how quickly they can get kicked out of the store. It's going to be great. But okay, other than calipers. So there are two great uses for the Vision Pro. There's calipers, big screens and hand calipers. The big screen thing is really interesting to me because I think that's where most people have landed, right? Whether you use it as a big giant display for your Mac or as kind of a personal television,

it's a big screen. What goes on it? Who knows? It's a big screen. But then there's all these rumors about like, okay, the thing Apple is doing, and Mark Kerman at Bloomberg has been reporting this over and over, is trying to figure out how to make these things cheaper. And the way that Apple seems to be making it cheaper is by making the screens worse, that apparently the pixel density of the next vision device might be half of what the current one is. And on the one hand, that makes absolute perfect sense.

These screens are ridiculous. This is how you get it to be this good. It's also why it's this expensive. It's why it takes so much power on and on and on. Does that work? Like, if you take away the fact that this is such a good screen on your face, does a cheaper version of this become more compelling or does it become less compelling because you've just made the only really great feature half as good?

I don't know. I'm so torn. What are you guys saying? I think it depends, right? If it's lighter, if it's more comfortable, if the interaction still works as well. You know that thing where, you know, if you go back and you watch like a, a DVD even on the right screen, like maybe a 1080p TV or whatever, you kind of forget that it's lower resolution for the most part until like some text shows up and you can see all the

like aliasing around it or whatever. I wonder if that could be the case with the Vision Pro 2, not the Vision Pro 2, but the Vision Pro cheap, whatever, whatever they call it. Oh, like, light S.E. Yeah, they're like Vision Pro S. They should. I just kind of wonder, doesn't that just make it a metaquest three. Right. If that's the case. Yeah. So they'd have to be really good at all the other stuff.

I was using them kind of concurrently for a while. And I would go into the, to the meta quest three. And I'd be like, oh, my God, it's so much lighter. It's so much easier to use. There's so many more things to do. And then I'd be in the app. I'm like, dang, this is pixelated. You know, so that would kind of just be like a, you know, I can get around.

It's not the end of the world. But it is a thing that it's just. like, okay, then what does, what is setting it apart? Because, like, right now, what's setting it apart is the screen, the pass through is just like, oh, wow, this is a noticeable, noticeably better. And those experiences, like, I don't know, I don't know. It would have to set itself apart besides being chief. Part of the problem, I think, is, like, I think it was the German report from this weekend. I want to say that he said that it might actually be an even, like, less.

field of view. It might not have been German. But like if that's the case, if it's lower resolution and it's like you know, suddenly you don't have that impressive thing to look at, then abruptly the $500 metaQuest 3

versus the maybe $2,000 Vision Pro, like the calculus is suddenly like really wonky because like the experience inside the Vision Pro would have to be significantly better than a at Quest 3 or 4 or whatever.

Yeah, I don't know that compromising on the screen is the right move so much as making the materials lighter and cheaper. Because, like, isn't it made out of some, like, I forget what exactly it's made of, but you have actual glass on the front of the... I mean, it's metal and glass, yeah. That's heavy. Well, and the Quest 3 is not that much lighter, right, than the Vision Pro, like, really? It's like, it's significantly lighter.

It's so much easier for me to wear. And it's because the weight, It's not so front-heavy. The Vision Pro is very front-heavy, and it's all that glass. And I kind of think that is sort of, it has a very premium feel when you touch it because Apple, right, everything Apple makes. Premium feel, super lux or whatever. You could just make it less lux and keep the thing that makes it really special, which I think is the screen or try to keep that as close to possible. I don't know if that's possible. But if I were going to make this thing cheaper, which you should make it cheaper because it's more fun. when more people you know are in there. I don't know if that's the right move. I think the right move would be make it lighter and feel cheaper. Yeah. I mean, take the glass off.

Like, you can still feel good without having a big... Just get rid of eyesight. Nobody needs that really. I actually agree with that. Yeah. Put googly eyes on the front of it. Yeah.

Honestly, I think people would have more fun. If you just put giant googly eyes, you know what? We really will make it like everything everywhere all at once. Just put giant googly eyes on the front. I can pretend I'm a rock. Perfectly in keeping with Apple's entire design ethos and branding, too.

It makes sense. I really, like, I never thought I would sit on this podcast and try to convince Apple to make a plastic gadget. But, like, here we are. It would probably be better if it were a plastic gadget. It probably would be just because the wearability, I'm going to say this until I'm blue in the face. With a wearable device, it has to be wearable. If you're not going to wear it, it's not successful. So if making it plastic means that more people will wear it, not only because it's more comfortable, but because it's cheaper, make it plastic, just do it.

Or titanium. Hmm? Is that going to lower the price, Wes? Because we also have to lower the price. It's okay. Wes is paying for this thing every month. Just make it $5,000. Wes won't even notice.

It'll be fine. Oh, God. Well, that is a good note to end on. We're going to get via cheaper one. We're going to get Wes a more expensive one, and everybody's going to be happy. It all works out $10,000. Love it. Take it to the moon.

Thank you both. Thanks. All right. Thanks for having us. All right. We got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and get a bit of a different perspective on what it's like to make stuff for and live inside Vision Pro. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thing. thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S., from established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online

presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Welcome back. Ultimately, as we've been talking about, The success or failure of the Vision Pro has absolutely everything to do with the App Store. If Apple keeps caring about the Vision Pro, which I would say is not guaranteed, but pretty likely, the hardware will get better.

There will be a cheaper one. But if there's nothing to do in the headset, no one's going to use the headset. I really think it's just that simple. And I wanted to get a different perspective on the state of Vision Pro apps. So I called up the developers behind one of Vision OS's most interesting. apps. That app is called television, and it does what you might think. It lets you put a virtual television in 3D space. Think of it like a bridge from where we've been to where we're going. In here, you can watch on any TV from our curated collection, or grab more from an expanding

catalog across the decades. The television can be lots of things. It can be an old wooden cabinet TV from like the 1950s. It can be this tall, teal thing right out of the Jetsons. It can be one of those big flat screen TVs with those huge speakers on the sides, lots of things. Whatever set you pick, you then plop the set down in your physical space, and then you can put whatever kind of video you want on it. You can stream stuff that you've shot. You can play stuff from YouTube, all kinds of stuff. It's just a television. I like the app because it's charming, but also because it's the kind of thing that could only work on a device like the Vision Pro. It would seem like ridiculous, kind of kitsy, skeuomorphic design on an iPad or a TV screen.

We've actually seen things like this on those devices, and it always seems like kitsy and skemorphic. But when it's a physical seeming object that you can actually walk around and place in space, it's just more fun. And since the TV stays right where you left it, I kind of use it like a background TV, like you might find in a waiting room or whatever. You know, you just put on the news and then turn around and look at it every once in a while. it's kind of great. Anyway, television was developed by a company called Sandwich, which you might know from the super deadpan and fun commercials it's been making for a long time. I'm here to tell you about coin. It solves a problem I think most of us have. See, my wallet is filled with cards. This is a coin. I talked to three of the folks at Sandwich,

all of whom worked on the app. I'm Adam Lissigore. I'm the founder of Sandwich in the context of Sandwich Vision OS App Studio, I would say I'm the creative director. My name is Dan Sturm. I am the visual effects supervisor at Sandwich. I'm Andy Roth and I'm the engineer on both television and theater. Oh, right, to Andy's point. They also just made an app called theater, which is similar to television, except instead of putting a funky old TV in your living room, it sends you to a big, immersive movie theater style place. Anyway, I asked the Sandwich team to go back to the beginning a bit, to even before the app existed, even before the Vision Pro,

was really a thing people could buy. And tell me about what it takes to dream up, build, ship, and sell a Vision Pro app. Adam said the idea came to him kind of out of nowhere. Personally speaking, six months ago, I did not assume I was going to be building for the platform. It was just not in software development headspace at all. I didn't become activated until I was sitting down. I'm working on another startup, sort of more in the SaaS space.

And my co-founder had not really had experience with VR that much. much. And I have a metaquest at home. I've been a, I was a DK1 user, an Oculus DK1 user early on. So I've been paying attention and tracking the space, but never thought it was worth developing for. The Vision Pro had been announced. My co-founders was curious and he said, you have a meta quest. Let me see how it's changed since the one time I used it. So we spent kind of half a day just exploring different things in the MetaQuest platform. And it was fun to see him get activated again. And then we started talking about Vision Pro that was coming and just wondering, what are things, what things are going to happen in this space?

And then that night I kind of was laying in bed, and I just kind of like my imagination started popping off and I started writing down app ideas in terms of just thinking, what does this device make possible that the other devices don't make possible? How can we take advantage of our space? Like what, at that point, spatial computing as the nomenclature was kind of a laugh, right? It felt like a branded Apple thing that they were making up just to differentiate and not say VR,

because they're contrarians, and I love that about them, of course. So what is spatial computing? What does that mean? It means using the space of the world around you as your display, as your interaction model with the software. And then suddenly starting to think about, okay, what can happen when computer stuff happens in your space that can't happen when it's on the black rectangle? That's where my imagination started really going into overdrive because we're going. We're filmmakers at Sandwich, and we think in terms of that 2D rectangle. And then obviously in non-spatial computing, we think in terms of the 2D rectangle,

even the people who have, you know, their whole desk is filled with displays in vertical and horizontal orientations. So like, what does it mean when you see past the black rectangle and the world is your display? And then that's when we started, I started dreaming up the television app, and that's when I got in touch with Andy, you know, sort of just lucked into media. Andy and explained the idea to him. Andy, do you remember what the explanation was? I'm trying to imagine how the four-sentence pitch of what television is.

Yeah, I think it was basically, let's throw some old-school 3D TVs in your space and you can watch anything. I was like, all right, I'm sold. Pretty good. Were you into all the headset VR-A-R stuff at the time? Yeah, I've been into VR for a few years. I had been doing development for the Quest for all. the quest for a while in both Unity and Unreal. And I've just been anticipating Apple's headset for a few years now. I'm just waiting to see what they could bring to the table and do differently

than the other headsets. Like even before it launched and before you started building, like, had you seen what the Vision Pro was, were you, like, convinced this was the one, like, they've done the thing. I'm still not convinced it's the one. Okay. Fair enough. I'm with you on that. But it's definitely an interesting approach to spatial computing, and it's something that I've just been interested in since they announced it. And then, Dan, where did you come into the picture? I think in those early conversations with Adam, the filmmaker's storytelling side of the device, like, it's kind of our responsibility to understand the technology that we're telling stories about. And to a certain point, getting ahead of it, because we're kind of assuming that there's going to be more Vision OS developers who are going to come to us to help tell. that spatial computing story. And we don't want to be guessing at what that's like. We want to know

what it's like intimately to use the device and what are the amazing parts of it. What does it feel like to use? What's the stuff that's going to really attract people to a product? And that really starts with us using it. You know, we saw all the videos that Apple released and that's great and it shows what it can do. But there's no way to prepare you for what it feels like when you first put it on. I mean, even in our very early tests with 3D models that didn't have video on, them because I'm not a VR guy. I've never really been a VR guy. But when I put this thing on and I started manipulating a 3D TV in my space, like it was incredible. Like I've never felt anything like that before. It's just like I stood up and I walked in a circle around a 3D TV in my office and

it's like, what is this? Like this is incredible. So, you know, getting our feet on the ground like, which is Vision OS in general was where we started. And then what is that enable? What are the, what are the parts of this that we wanted to look like? Like what is our ideal version of this app? You know, what are the things that we wish it could do, that sort of stuff. That's where we start. I think. Adam, you just reminded me we were texting. I think it was a Saturday about this idea. And you had one of the models, I think it was the Streamline Media Stand or whatever, and you texted it to me. And I was sitting in a chair watching my kid play, and I put my iPhone up in AR mode, and I put the TV over there. And I just kind of turned and saw a TV and then turned back to my

kid and I was like, yeah, that's awesome. I want that. I just want to have a TV over there to the side of my room, and there'd be stuff on it. At this point, again, I should mention, the Vision Pro wasn't for sale. All the sandwich guys had, all anyone had, was a simulator that they could use to get a rough idea of how it might work. So the team here started with an off-the-shelf 3D model of a retro TV, just kind of spinning it around and seeing how it picked up light and if it felt sort of realistic in this virtual space inside a simulator on a computer screen. That worked pretty well, Adam said. So then they were off to the races. They found more TV types, sent them to Dan to turn into 3D models and basically tried to figure out how you're actually supposed to interact with

all of this stuff. This thing is so new. This whole category of devices is so new that nothing about how we use them is settled. How do you select stuff? Where do buttons go? What should those buttons look like? Nobody knows, which is fun and kind of daunting. We made the classic dev mistake of like making one control panel that had like 18 different buttons on it. Oh, sure. That feels. like a cockpit of a of a sessna and then figuring out okay what are the things the user always needs access to and what are the things we can hide behind settings and Andy came up with some ingenious stuff like the drawer gallery that that slides out you know of the control panel stuff that nobody else is doing this is the evergreen time like right now for developing all that designing all this new

language that nobody else is doing this is when the next pull to refresh comes out you know that now like a year from now everybody is using has a pattern their first Real experience with television in a headset came at one of Apple's developer labs in Cupertino. Apple did a lot of these before the Vision Pro came out just to give developers a way to see what their app would look like and how it would feel when real users put on real headsets and had real experiences with their apps. It's a big moment, honestly, for a lot of these developers. It's a thing I've heard a bunch of is you either put it on and it either feels magical

and great or it feels totally broken. for the television crew, it was pretty good. I looked over at Andy because he got the app up and running before I did. I look over at him, he's got a big smile and he goes, it works. And then as soon as I got the app up and running, it was like, oh, this TV that we only have seen flat on the simulator, it now feels like a substantial 3D object in front of me. And I can look around it and view it from different angles. It picks up the light.

That was boom. That was like everything. How true was the simulator in retrospect? Like was it when you loaded up for the first time in the headset, was it what you expected and hoped it would feel like? Or did you all of a sudden understand it in a new way? There's just no substitute for your actual space. You could take a photo of your actual space and use it as your environment.

You can model your own room and put it into the simulator and it doesn't even come close to 1% of the experience of what VR is supposed to be or AR. That's the most frustrating thing as storytellers or, Because if you, I mean, if we're designing products, we know that the end user is going to experience the same product as we're experiencing in their own space. If you're telling the story in 2D like we had to do, like we often have to do a software like Dan alluded to, it's so frustrating because you can't even come close to the feeling of it until these technologies are pervasive where everybody's using it so you know there's no disparity between the superficial simulation of it and the real thing. Yeah, Andy, you were smiling as he was saying that. What was that experience like for you? Yeah, that experience in the dev lab was a little more nerve-wracking for me, I think, than Adam.

With other VR headsets, I have some experience where, you know, you build something on a PC, and it is running great on this Nvidia graphics card, and then you go to build it on the quest, and everything just falls apart. Right. And so I was really, really nervous about that happening because we'd been using a simulator for a few months. But luckily, the simulator is pretty representative of how the device works, the software at least. You don't get the full experience of wearing it. When we went to that dev lab and it just worked like I expected, I was just, I was so excited.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. To Apple's credit, because they really have built a supercomputer device in that thing. It's not hobbled. Even the version 1.0 of it, the processor is not hobbled. It can do what they want you to do with it. Dan, what about you? like building all this stuff, making it work. Like you're sort of deep in the details of it.

What is that experience like the first time you're actually sort of inside of the space getting to look at the space? I mean, to Apple's credit, I mean, they had sort of lay the groundwork for this stuff with AR kit on the phones. And playing around with these models on an iPhone, you get a decent sense of like what level of quality you're going to get out of it, you know, all of the USDZ format stuff, which is all very boring. But it's great that it worked out of the box, basically.

So you kind of understood that they're going to wrap it in the sort of like soft world sphere of lighting, so it accepts some of the light around you. But in the filmmaking world from visual effects, if a 3D model doesn't look good, you just like give it a million more polygons and render it and it's going to take a day to render a frame, but it'll look great. And you can't do that kind of stuff in VR or in any of these systems. So finding ways to not destroy all of Andy's work with a model that's, you know, three gigabytes or something is very complicated work. It's It's a delicate balancing act between detail and performance at all times. I mean, there are a few tests we did that just, they were just dead on arrival.

Where it's just like, yeah, just throw all the detail in the world at it because it'll look great. And it's like, oh, my computer is dying. The Vision Pro doesn't like this. Like, let's take a step back for a minute and figure out like what we actually need to do to optimize it, which is very interesting. Because there's not a lot of people, A, there's not a lot of people trying this sort of stuff within their apps. And B, there's definitely not a lot of people talking about how to do it. I think only recently we've gotten some guidance from Apple in terms of like how to optimize your app for Vision OS. And it's like, oh, we miss those targets by a long shot.

But, you know, we're doing our own version of that. So, you know, trying to align with what they want us to do is it's interesting. It's fun work, too. Yeah. And this level of detail is even more apparent and frustrating and challenging in our theater app that we're, you know, that we're sort of building out right now because it's not just a 3D object in front of you. It's an immersive space that really does require detail. in order to render, believably, at a massive scale. So, like, it's almost like 10x the challenge in the room as it is to just have the

polygonal object in front of you. And we made it harder by saying, like, we want people to be able to move around the space to, like, actually experience the theater. If we just sat in one place and everything 20 yards away was, you know, fewer polygons and cheapened detail, like, that would be great for performance, but we don't want that out of our experience. So we've got to figure out to make that work. this is the thing I'm so stuck on when it comes to Vision Pro.

And the thing that I keep feeling as I use it, there's so much cool tech in here. And to a large extent, it is remarkable that it works as well as it does. Forget about the fact that it's $3,500, which I think is ridiculous. Forget about the fact that it's so big. Forget about the battery life. It's impressive that this thing exists at all. But like, are we sure this is how it should be? Should I really have to laser focus my eyes on a button for the entire time it takes to click it?

do I want to do some things with my hands and other things with buttons? Is a virtual keyboard floating in the air a good idea? What is the best way to move windows around or send something to someone or open an app or anything else? These things get decided and then we treat them as if they were inevitable, but it just isn't that way and it doesn't have to be that way. And there's something exciting about the fact that on the Vision Pro, all of this feels new and unknown. And also there's something deeply annoying about the fact that so much of it right now just feels weird. to use. But from a big picture perspective, I really like the way Adam described how he thinks about the user experience and how the Vision Pro ought to feel. We're in an interesting space with its own

opportunity because we're trying to build experiences that feel like the real world but better, right? So just imagine you go outside and suddenly you want the information of the world at your fingertips. So what is the interaction that your mind would design in that moment? How do you want to reach up and access the information and then have it go away. That's essentially what we're doing. We're sitting our users down in a movie theater. If you were in a movie theater that you could just chill out in all the time and be by yourself and you can summon any content to that big screen, how would you do that? What would be an interaction model? Or, you know, a lot of it just translated to the outside space. I think that's how designer, UI designers have to think about this

stuff is knowing that eventually 50 years in the future, there will be no hardware. And the world in front of us will always be sort of like have a digital layer to it that feels organic and real. What is that interaction model? You know, so if you can summon things, you know, really that we are, especially at this early phase of the OS as a platform, we're at the mercy of Apple because Apple, you know, they'll let you do new cool things that they've deemed worthy of the SDK and then we will be able to do new cool futures. And I think that at some point there's an inflection point where developers kind of invent new stuff and then Apple follows. But right now, I think we're in the Apple leading time of the process. Do you feel like that's the right way for things to be right now?

I think that's probably pretty normal for a new platform like this. But are you, are you like chafing at the edges of what Apple will let you do? Or does it feel like we're in a good zone? Yeah, but a perfect example is like playing with light to reflect what the real world feels like we know that we want when you use a real TV, especially a vintage one with a bezel, the light that casts from the screen is reflected on the edges of the TV, right? Well, that is not easy to do with, especially in OS1 of reality kit. We know that in Apple's own immersive cinema, when something is playing on that big screen, the light bounces off the screen to the ceiling and the floor and in real time it makes it feel very material. It makes it feel like the

the light is real and the surfaces are real. And Apple doesn't make that easy because working with light as a source in reality kit, version one, was really not possible. And version two, Apple has decided let's make these tools available to developers. And that means that we can start to build in this new replication of reality that wasn't possible before. And in our app, in theater, Andy came up with an ingenious way to fake it of reflections from the screen bouncing off the walls and the ceiling and floor. but now we get to do it for real, which is very exciting. Obviously, a lot of this stuff is changing really fast. Apple just announced VisionOS 2, which has a bunch of big changes,

including some of what Adam is talking about with reflections and light. I mean, these are the things, right? You have to change the way that light works in an API in order for apps to be able to build things that feel real. Like, this is how long the pipeline is. Television has been out since February, and it has already changed a lot. You can now browse and watch YouTube and such. of television. You can use SharePlay to watch stuff with friends. There are a few new ways to

fast forward and rewind and control playback speed. And you can now play spatial video on any of the screens too. That's kind of the Vision Pro thing, right? Ultra Retro TV playing the file format of the future, supposedly. Anyway, the last thing I asked the sandwich crew was how it's going being someone who sells Vision Pro apps. It's funny because, you know, in the early days of iPhone, I think everybody assumed app millionaires. You know, you're just the business model for app development is you make the app and then you sell a billion copies of it and you get rich. But I think it's what's more interesting from a business perspective is what are the models

that it opens up that weren't possible before. And in our case, it's like for delivering content. If our app is a content delivery system, then where are the business opportunities in that? It's pretty fascinating stuff. the mind reels with possibilities, but I don't know. Like, in terms of app sales, oh, it's definitely been a loss. I mean, like, this business runs at a cost, at a net loss. And I expected that to be the case. I mean, I held out hope, you know, we didn't, none of us knew. We didn't know of like we were going to get 100,000 downloads on the first day. We did not. But it turns out, like, that's not the

exciting part of this. The exciting part is like building a new, it's a whole new infrastructure for creating software and running a business. And that's where it really gets interesting. Like a lot of developers I've talked to, they're really optimistic about where all this could go. And I sort of hope that they're right. It'd be fun to have the Vision Pro become a huge new platform with lots of new kinds of things to do. And the more there is to do, the better the headset is. And the better the headset is, the more people will buy it. And the more people who buy it, the more developers will get on board, and the more developers get on board, the more there is to do. And then the flywheel is off and running. This is the thing you need if you want a platform like

this to work. I've got a Vision Pro sitting right here next to me. Luckily, I didn't buy it. I think the verge did, and I just stole it for a while. And as impressive as it is, I just don't use it very much. The only way that is going to change is if more developers find more of these silly, fun, weird things to make for it. I really hope they do. All right, we got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125

categories so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow.

That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-V-E-Rge-1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, I'm doing a weird thing, which is I'm going to try and answer a question from many months ago,

because it's one I've been thinking a lot about ever since this thing came out. It's a vision pro question. It's an old one. But I actually think it says a lot about where this is headed. So here it is. This is Mazz. One of the things that Apple has been really good about over the years is a miniature radiation of really good computers.

The problem with the Vision Pro for me is that the actual computer aspect of that product is already pretty compact. If you take off the light seal and the headband, and even like the stems where like the speaker is and just look at the sort of like eye mask-ish part of it, it's pretty slim. And most of the bulk that you get from the headset is actually the distance needed or like presumably needed

to not fry your eyeballs off of just looking at really small screens in really bright light. So how do you expect Vision Pro to progress to something more wearable or more socially acceptable if the size of it is not actually the tech and is actually just like natural human physiology of not being able to strap LCDs to your eyeballs really closely? I'm curious what you guys see, the Vision Pro series two or three or four or five, where the thing should get smaller, but just given the way that you're going to be, they've built this around pass-through and LCD displays.

I don't expect it to follow the same path as some of their other products. Thank you. Bye. So I think this is the question, right? I think if you're Apple, you have to do one of two things here. You either have to figure out how to take what the Vision Pro is, basically in its relatively current hardware form, and make it more palatable to people. And I think what that looks like is just making it cheaper, right?

Like take this exact Vision Pro and make it half the price, and I think it would be more than twice as compelling to more than twice as many people. That's a hard thing to do. That is the kind of thing that happens over time just as you get better technology. But it doesn't happen quickly and it doesn't happen easily. And so a lot of the stuff that we've seen for Apple's new, cheaper, simpler push that we've heard about has to do with the screens in particular. These screens are ridiculously expensive. They're hard to produce. They are as good as you will find.

a headset. And I think what we're going to see is Apple try to just pull all of that down a little bit to make it cheaper. And in theory, lower resolution would mean lower power. It would mean less need for things like cooling. It would solve some other problems just by not having to drive so many pixels all the time. And so you might get a little bit smaller and more wearable there, but I don't think so. The question is right that this thing is already pretty small. Like as a pure piece of hardware, it's pretty remarkable. It's made of metal, so you could get some weight back on that front. It's definitely rigid in a way that I think over time these things will want to be a little more flexible, which will make them wearable. But I don't know how you make this thing

that much smaller and that much lighter without fundamentally changing what it is. Which brings me to the other point, I just can't stop thinking about the difference between what the Vision Pro is and is trying to be and what the Rayban meta smart glasses are and are trying to be. And it It's so obvious to me at this point that the Rayban meta strategy is the right one. I think especially if you believe that AI is going to change how we talk to computers, having something on your face that is essentially a very good microphone, a good set of speakers, and a camera actually gets you a shocking amount of power out of your device. You can do so much with a simple, wearable thing that can see the world and talk to you.

That is massively powerful, especially if you believe AI is really the future. What Apple has built here is that plus a screen and an entertainment device. And I think that's interesting and that's where we will go in the future. But the road from here to there, I think, looks a lot more like smart glasses than it does like headsets, if that makes sense. The steps between something like the Rayban meta smart glasses and something like the Quest, even, if you want to take the other meta product out there, are super unknown, too. It's a lot of really hard problems to solve in displays and in processor efficiency and in how to get a GPU on your face that is good enough to work all day, how to solve battery life. Like people talk about making a lot of huge progress in tech as like solving multiple physics miracles all at once. And that's kind of what Apple and meta need if you believe that these all encompassing headsets are the thing.

But if you don't, and I'm not sure that I do, then smart glass. is the answer. And I think if you're Apple, you had the iPod before the iPhone, you could look at smart glasses as the iPod. They don't do as much, but they do it very well. They are the right form factor. They feel good. People like them.

They solve a couple of very specific problems. And then years later, once the tech gets better, once people get more comfortable with the idea of the form factor, once you've found a couple of new things to do and new ways to interact, then you do the iPhone. We weren't ready for the iPhone in 2001 when they started shipping iPods. The technology wasn't there. The world wasn't ready.

We didn't have the sort of cultural understanding of how all this stuff would work. It just wouldn't have worked as well as it did six years later. And I think headsets might be the same thing. And Apple just tried to skip all the way to like the iPhone 10 instead of shipping the iPod. And I'm totally brutalizing this metaphor. But I think, I have no evidence for this, but I think. that if you're on Apple's hardware team, you're looking at the Rayban meta-smart glasses

and saying, oh, what we should have done is built something that does less stuff and is wearable, instead of trying to build the thing that does all the things, including some things that people don't really want and isn't all that wearable. So the idea of what the Vision Pro is now, it's going to be hard to make this thing more wearable.

There's some things Apple can do with the straps, like just having the overhead strap built in instead of having just the one around goes a long way towards making it wearable. Actually, Adam Lissigore from Sandwich said in our interview that he has actually taken out the light seal. He uses the overhead strap and uses it essentially like an AR device so he can see around it and uses it much less sort of immersively, but it's still very comfortable for him. And I think that's really clever. And there are more ways that Apple can start to press on that.

Solving some of the battery stuff will go a long way. Like just having that cord on your face is a real wearability problem. I think putting the battery on the headset is also a bad. idea. Again, physics miracles, but that's one thing you'll start to see. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple use a less heavy material, even if it's slightly less impressive. Again, if you want to get the price down, that's another way to do it. And it'll also have the delightful side effect of pulling some weight off of the device. So again, there are little things Apple can do around the edges here. But I think if you want to see Apple do something more wearable, it's going to have to look like a different device. And I would bet, I wouldn't bet a lot, but I would bet a little that what Apple

is going to do next with the Vision Pro is going to look less like a worse Vision Pro and more like something else entirely. I could be wrong. Maybe this is just wishful thinking because I would love for Apple to make something like the Meta Rayban smart glasses, but that connects to Siri and all of my other devices as seamlessly as like a pair of AirPods does. I want that. So maybe I'm just hoping for that. But you can see it, right? Like all the things that AirPods are on your face plus a camera. That It feels powerful. It feels like Apple. And you could see that being the vision and then this being the Vision Pro.

That's how you get to wearability as far as I'm concerned. Because I don't think we're anywhere close to a world in which you can build something that is as powerful and capable as the Vision Pro and feels as good on my face as a pair of glasses or even close. And some of the reporting, particularly from Mark German at Bloomberg, has said that Apple is working on something more like AR glasses. But that's still a couple of years away. That wouldn't totally shock me. But again, from what I've seen from these meta glasses, they don't have to do that much to be really useful to people. Camera, speaker, microphone. Incredibly powerful.

And I think there's a lot more to do there. And I think we might see Apple do it sooner rather than later. Anyway, that's all a lot of conjecture. I'd love to hear what you think. If you have had a Vision Pro for any of the last five months, I want to know what you think. We got a lot of feedback from folks when we published our review and in those early days. But now that things have settled, has the Vision Pro found a. way into your routine. Are you still using it all the time? Did you return it because it's $3,500?

Are you finding new ways all the time to use it? Do you use it for something totally unusual that no one talks about? Tell us, I want to hear everything. 866, Verge 1-1 is the hotline. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. Reach out. I want to hear everything. All right. That is it for the Vergecast. Thank you to everybody who's on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. We are off on Friday, by the way. We'll be back next week. But everybody's taking a few days off for the holiday. If you're also celebrating July 4th this weekend, I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

There is lots more on everything we talked about at the verge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes. You should go read all of our old Vision Pro coverage, and especially some of the news about what's coming up in the next couple of versions of this thing. I think the Vision Pro is going to change a lot. It can be really interesting. Also, read theVirge.com.

Surprising amount of news going on this summer. This is usually like the dead period of the tech news cycle. That ain't happening. and it's about to be phone season again, so it's going to get crazy. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or vision pro apps, you think I should try. You can always email us at verge.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge11. We love hearing from you.

This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Pore. Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. As I mentioned, we'll be back next week. After the break, everybody have a great holiday. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.