Apple’s Vision Pro: five months later

30:32Like it came with vision OS, but you can't make more. And that drives me nuts because like, I don't like, 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 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. I don't want TikTok on my home screen being like, do you want to watch some videos?

31:11How 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. How so? Like downloading them. It takes forever to download something. Like it just 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 Wes said, it's just like having to find stuff.

31:49Like, I don't know. 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 was not what I was promised. I was in the Zillow app in there. And 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. Like, I don't know if this is useful because my eyesight is garbage. But, like, 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.

32:31And, like, I'm wearing contacts, which is extra dry. 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. I think, Wes, you said you figured out how to wear it for two plus hours. I have to tap out after an hour. 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.

33:05I'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, V, just about, like, how personal wearables are, right? Yeah. And now like like especially with like with like smart rings and stuff like that, just every every single person's body is different.

33:46And, you know, I might be able to wear the Vision Pro all day. Maybe who knows why? Maybe 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 like back of my neck now or or what. But like most of those issues are gone.

34:22I actually will lie down wearing it if I have to wear it for a longer period of time because it just relieves the pressure from the top of my head and the tightness around it. I have flat cheekbones, so there's no actual bone support to lift this thing. So I have to tighten it around my face. I think that's part of the reason why. 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 the nose bridge. Again, I have a flat face. I have a flat nose bridge.

35:00I 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. it's important sacrifices yeah as as somebody with very good vision um and ample nose i suppose the thing that always gets me is just like my my eyes get tired at the end of it and and west 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 the dent in their head 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 i actually talked to ophthalmologists 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 hydrated.

36:13And that can cause burst blood vessels in your eyes. 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 need to be putting the eye drops in your eyes if you're 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 so stimulating you're just going to blink less you're not going to be blinking normally as you would in there so that 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 eye drops and then put it 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 into your eyes every 20 minutes Just flush water and choose the saline solution.

37:11Because, 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, 20, 20. Every 20 seconds, look 20 feet away for, I think, 20 seconds. But 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.

37:45It's fair. I do have to say one thing that I thought of earlier. Right now, I'm building a bicycle from 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 califers 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.

38:23Yeah. I hope they do. Somewhere, somewhere, the Vision Pro team, someone's screaming with joy 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 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 holding the Vision Pro.

38:58And 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 OK, 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.

39:31What 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 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 like 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 the 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 do you guys think i think it depends right like um if it's lighter if it's more comfortable if the interaction still works as well.

40:29You know that thing where, you know, if you go back and you watch like a, you know, 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 SE, Vision Pro SE. They should. I just kind of wonder, doesn't that just make it a MetaQuest 3? Right. And if that's the case. Yeah, so they'd have to be really good at all the other stuff.

41:11I was using them kind of concurrently for a while, and I would go into the MetaQuest 3, 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, and I'm like, dang, this is pixelated. You know, so that would kind of just be like, you know, I can get around it. It's not the end of the world. But it is a thing that it's just like, OK, 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.

41:44And those experiences like, I don't know. I don't know. It would have to set itself apart besides being cheap. Part of the problem, I think, is like, I think it was the Gurman report from this weekend. I want to say that he said that it might actually be an even less field of view. It might not have been Gurman. 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 MetaQuest 3 or 4 or whatever.

42:36Yeah, 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 significantly lighter. It's so much easier for me to wear. And it's because the weight distribution, 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?

43:16Everything Apple makes, premium feel, super luxe or whatever. You could just make it less luxe 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, it can still feel good without having a big... Just get rid of eyesight.

43:48Nobody 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.

44:19It 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. Is that going to lower the price, Wes? Because we also have to lower the price. 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.

44:57We're going to get V a 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. Let's 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.

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46:35Welcome 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.

47:12it 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.

47:49You 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 kitschy, skeuomorphic design on an iPad or a TV screen. We've actually seen things like this on those devices, and it always seems like kitschy and skeuomorphic. 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.

48:27You 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, the Vision OS app studio, I would say I'm the creative director.

49:01My 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.

49:35Adam 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. I 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. And I have a MetaQuest at home. I was 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-founder was curious, and he said, you have a MetaQuest.

50:13Let 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?

50:45At 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 filmmakers at Sandwich and we think in terms of that 2D rectangle.

51:30And 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 orientation. 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 and you know sort of just lucked into meeting andy and explained the idea to him andy do you remember what the explanation was i'm trying to imagine how like 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.

52:13I was like, all right, I'm sold. Pretty good. Were you into all the headset VR, AR stuff at the time? Yeah, I've been into VR for a few years. I had been doing development for the Quest for a while in both Unity and Unreal. And I've just been anticipating Apple's headset for a few years now. 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 this there 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 it's definitely an interesting approach to spatial computing and it's something that i've been interested in since since they announced it and then dan where did you come into the picture I think in those early conversations with Adam, the filmmaker storytelling side of the device, it's kind of our responsibility to understand the technology that we're telling stories about.

53:15And 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.

53:46I 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 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 does that enable? What are the, what are the parts of this that we want it to look like?

54:17Like what, 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 started. 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.

54:46At 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.

55:23This 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 Cessna. 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 slides out of the control panel, stuff that nobody else was doing.

56:05This is the evergreen time right now for designing all this new language that nobody else is doing. This is when the next pull to refresh comes out, that a year from now everybody's using as 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.

56:45for 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, is it, was it what you expected and hoped it would feel like, or did you all of a sudden understand it in a new way?

57:25There's just no substitute for your actual space. You know, you could take a photo of your actual space and put it, you know, 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, of what VR is supposed to be or AR. That's the most frustrating thing as storytellers. Because, 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 with 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.

58:05So, 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. And so I was really, really nervous about that happening because we'd been using a simulator for a few months.

58:42But 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. And 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?

59:20I mean, to Apple's credit, I mean, they had sort of laid the groundwork for this stuff with ARKit 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 gonna 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 gonna wrap it in this 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.

59:53And it's gonna 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 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.

1:00:24Like, 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 missed 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 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 it's almost like 10x the challenge in the room as it is to just have the polygonal object in front of you.

1:01:16And we made it harder by saying like, we want people to be able to move around the space to, to, 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 got to figure out how 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.

1:01:45Forget 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.

1:02:19And 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.

1:02:54So 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.

1:03:34What is that interaction model? So if you can summon things, really we are, especially at this early phase of the OS as a platform, we're at the mercy of Apple because Apple, 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 features. 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.

1:04:13But 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 It 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 OS one 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.

1:04:48And in real time, it makes it feel very material. It makes it feel like 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. In 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.

1:05:27Obviously, a lot of this stuff is changing really fast. Apple just announced Vision OS 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 inside 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.

1:06:01And 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 what's more interesting from a business perspective is what are the models that it opens up that weren't possible before?

1:06:38And 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 if 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.

1:07:21And 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.

1:07:53I'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 Verge Cast Hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:09:36All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. 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 maz one of the things that apple has been really good about over the years is a miniaturization of really good computers.

1:10:16The 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.

1:11:13I'm curious what you guys see the Vision Pro Series 2 or 3 or 4 or 5, where the thing should get smaller. But just given the way 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?

1:11:52Like 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 in 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.

1:12:28And 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 ray-ban meta smart glasses are and are trying to be and it's so obvious to me at this point that the Ray-Ban meta strategy is the right one.

1:13:25I 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.

1:14:07The steps between something like the Ray-Ban 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 glasses is the answer.

1:14:48And 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.

1:15:25We 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 Ray-Ban MetaSmart 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.

1:16:03so 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 listagore 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.

1:16:38Solving 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.

1:17:11And 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 ray-man 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 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 wear ability 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.

1:18:03And some of the reporting, particularly from Mark Kerman 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.

1:18:35We 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 one one is the hotline. The email is verge cast at the verge.com. Reach out. I want to hear everything. All right, that is it for the verge cast. Thank you to everybody who's on the show. And thank you as always for listening.

1:19:08We 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's lots more on everything we talked about at TheVerge.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's going to be really interesting. Also, read TheVerge.com. Surprising amount of news going on this summer.

1:19:38This 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 vergecastattheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. 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.

1:20:06Rock and roll.

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