More from Everything we know about Apple’s Vision Pro
Marvel says What If...? – An Immersive Story will have viewers (players?) casting spells, fighting battles with Marvel characters, and using the infinity stones. Judging from the trailer, that means making Doctor Strange’s magic sparks with your hands.
This edition of What If...? will be “free for a limited time” when the app is available on May 30th.
An Apple “wearable computer” made by the Vision Pro’s manufacturer received the necessary quality and safety accreditation for it go on sale, according to the website of the Chinese product standards body that granted its approval.
The report aligns with recent rumors suggesting the Pro will roll out internationally after WWDC on June 10th, though an exact date is still unknown.
I have finally justified my Vision Pro purchase with the iOS version of the Delta emulator.
The second episode of Prehistoric Planet Immersive will be available on April 19th, according to the Apple TV Plus page for the series.
The first episode was a pretty demonstration of the Vision Pro, rather than the David Attenborough-narrated, pretend nature documentary that Prehistoric Planet is. But the younger version of me that saw Jurassic Park and Prehysteria in theaters welcomes it, anyway.
That’s what I kept asking myself when testing out spatial Personas with Wes. The short of it is your ghostly Personas are now free to interact in any SharePlay enabled app, so you can watch movies, play games, and collaborate on projects. It’s neat — and you can interact more with other people. But seeing Wes’ head just float in my office also reminded me he really wasn’t there.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon is now available in 3D on the Vision Pro Apple TV Plus app, joining free-for-subscribers films that Apple added to its streaming service in March.
New, but not in 3D, are several other movies that probably should be — including the first three John Wick films, Armageddon, Taken, and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. The new crop of movies is available for between four and eight weeks, reports MacRumors.
Woot is selling the mixed reality headset with a one-year Apple warranty for $3,299 ($200 off), the first discount we’ve seen.
But there’s a catch: they all ship with a 21W light seal and small-sized headbands. Buying a seal separately from Apple costs $200 and the headbands are $99 apiece, so you might pay more than the retail price if you aren’t happy with the fit.
Update March 27th, 4:41PM ET: Adjusted pricing and added more specific sizing details, courtesy of Woot.
A source tells MacRumors that Apple is working on just that, potentially allowing Vision Pro wearers to use the Pencil with drawing apps like Freeform and Pixelmator. Rumors suggest that Apple is planning to take the wraps off of a new Pencil next month, but there’s no word on whether it will come with visionOS support just yet.
I’m not the one making this very big claim. That’d be Hugo Barra, former VP of Android and head of Oculus. Go check out his in-depth blog about his Vision Pro experience. It’s a great read overall, but this bit stood out:
Intentionally making the Vision Pro optics blurry is a clever move by Apple because it results in way smoother graphics across the board by hiding the screen door effect (which in practice means that you won’t see pixelation artifacts).
I’ve been hopping between both headsets and... I see what he’s saying!
There’s a new Vision Pro update out, and visionOS 1.1 supposedly improves everybody’s favorite feature, Personas. But I think it’s still the stuff of nightmares. I FaceTimed my friend, and according to her: I still look too sleepy, my mouth moves more, and my eyes are better but not quite right.
“It looks more like you, but it’s still not you.” What do y’all think?
The visionOS 1.1 release candidate that’s now available to developers includes some upgrades to the Personas avatars, such as improved rendering of eyes, mouth representation, and hair and makeup appearance.
MacRumors points out that this release also has updates for the virtual keyboard, Mac Virtual Display, mobile device management, and more. With the iOS 17.4 update close to a public launch, Apple also put out release candidates for tvOS, macOS, watchOS, and Xcode.
[MacRumors]
Joanna Stern writes in The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s face computer isn’t so great for work, but serves well as an escape from day-to-day life. You know, like a VR headset.
Still, even if the Vision Pro isn’t always magic, she finds it handy for focusing “on a single task, like writing a column.”
It’s about codecs and resolution. 4K-and-up videos only use either YouTube’s VP9 codec or the royalty-free AV1. Christian Selig, developer of the Juno YouTube app, writes that 360 video of the former can’t work because it requires Apple’s blessing. And the Vision Pro’s M2 chip has no AV1 hardware decoder, so that’s out, too.
Why not 1080p, he asks? Because it looks like doo-doo.
[christianselig.com]
If you miss the kitchen TV, then this Television app for Apple’s headset has got your back. You’re able to watch videos (even spatial ones, if you like) on a whole bunch of different 3D models of TVs, from a portable CRT to a Samsung Frame lookalike.
I want to watch iCarly on a big bulky silver 2000s console.
Holonautic co-founder and developer Dennys Kuhnert says he is “both disappointed and impressed” by the Vision Pro’s performance and showed off this comparison of the two headsets with a real-time visualization tool.
As he wrote in another post, “The quality and accuracy is fantastic but the lag with passthrough hands feels currently higher than on Quest 3. Could be explained by AVP’s very low passthrough latency... ~11ms vs ~35ms for Q3.”
Apple doesn’t sell a stand for the Vision Pro, so developer Christian Selig took it upon himself to create one — just like the unofficial YouTube app he made for the headset, too.
This stand allows the headset to hang vertically, making it take up a bit less space on your desk as opposed to some other storage options out there. Selig has uploaded all the design files onto MakerWorld, so you can 3D print the stand for yourself.
I keep a pretty bushy mustache, and it seems to prevent the headset’s downward-facing cameras from seeing and translating what my mouth is doing to my Persona’s real-time expressions during a Vision Pro FaceTime call. Apparently, I’m not alone.
In fairness, Persona is still a beta feature. Maybe visionOS 1.1 will save my friends from this horror show.