AR effects have become a key part of entrances and other aspects of WWE TV over the last several years — far outlasting the company’s experiments with VR.
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.
This video is a fun speedrun through all the VR headsets and AR glasses that Meta’s been tinkering with over the last decade. There’s a mention of Project Aria, and you even get a glimpse of some experimental smartwatch like controls. It’s a neat highlight reel, but I did chortle at how fast the video glosses over Ray-Ban Stories.
You can see that in this Slow Mo Guys YouTube Short showing the flashing of the invisible-to-the-human-eye IR illuminators of Apple’s face computer, both on the front and around the lenses’ edges.
At 1,000fps, the Guys show the Vision Pro’s very fancy micro-OLED displays alternating between images and black frames, with a ring of IR lights popping on during the dark moments to help track where your eyes are looking.
Jason Snell of Six Colors details his experience with the MLB’s visionOS app now that the season is underway. Of the Gameday feature that puts a 3D-animated baseball field in your space during a game, he writes:
I couldn’t find support for Gameday when I first used the app, though later when playing back an archived stream, I did find Gameday available—from within the video playback, so you can’t use it for a game you’re not watching on the app. And it’s immersive, so you can’t put it up and then do something else, which is also probably a mistake.
Ah, the early days of the Vision Pro’s app ecosystem.
[Six Colors]
Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and Spire Blast will each get Vision Pro “spatial” apps tomorrow, Apple shared in a release emailed to The Verge.
Also, rhythm game Synth Riders — aka the only game I’ve been coming back to besides bullet hell shooter Void-X — has been updated with Game Center leaderboards and a pass-the-headset Party Mode.
First adopters are ambassadors for the future. Glassholes need not apply.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs now uses video passthrough on Meta Quest headsets (and the Pico) to project your target for destruction onto a real-life table or whatever.
If you don’t have a VR headset with passthrough though, there’s been standalone version of the game on smartphones for years.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told press at the China Development Forum in Beijing that China will get it this year, according to Reuters this morning, citing a Chinese state media Weibo post.
MacRumors notes that this is the first time an Apple executive has confirmed where the Vision Pro will launch outside the US this year. Rumors have also suggested Apple will prioritize UK and Canadian launches.
It’s essentially the same thing you’d see if you were browsing the store in the Vision Pro itself — a few curated lists of native apps here, some recommended iPad apps there.
But at least there’s a way to casually cruise those sweet spatial apps without popping the headset on now.
[AppStore]
This is the sort of thing Zuck’s hoping you’ll ask the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. The company’s finally rolled out landmark recognition for its multimodal AI beta. You can watch it (and a few other demos) in Zuck’s latest Instagram post. Though, unlike Zuck, I don’t recommend asking AI to rate your onesies collection.
Once Apple released the Vision Pro, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with a video saying his company’s Quest 3 headset is “the better product, period.”
Now he’s back with more takes, posting this on Threads in response to a post that said, “Apple is selling pretty much the device Meta wants to reach in 3-5 years.”
I don’t think we’re saying the devices are the same. We’re saying Quest is better. If our devices weigh as much as theirs in 3-5 years, or have the motion blur theirs has, or the lack of precision inputs, etc, then that means we’ll have regressed significantly.
Yes, their resolution is higher, but they paid for that with many other product tradeoffs that make their device worse in most ways. That’s not what we aspire to.
[Threads]
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?
As a nerd kid, this was one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. But I haven’t looked at the funny pages in many years, and had assumed this one had long since expired.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw a Foxtrot strip referencing Apple’s recently-launched Vision Pro.
Meta’s CTO says there are reasons Meta thumbed its nose at Google re: AndroidXR (something The Info reported this morning). He suggests Google’s talking shit about Meta behind its back and demanding “restrictive terms.”
I can see why Google might try: Oculus was once so willing to partner, it left Samsung and Xiaomi in charge of its mobile fate — and Google has a long, successful history of tying up partners with contracts in exchange for Google apps and a cut of search revenue. But does Meta need Google, or the other way round?
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]
Oppo’s Air Glass 3 look like an ordinary pair of glasses, but it connects to Oppo smartphones to access the company’s AndesGPT LLM. Like other smart glasses, you tap the sides for controls and it can play music, display information, and take voice calls.
So far, it sounds similar to what Meta is trying to do with the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, where you can ask an AI assistant to deliver more context about the things you actually see. The catch is it won’t be available outside of China — and this is only a prototype in any case.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is South Korea-bound this week to discuss shipping a headset that incorporates webOS in 2025, Korean Economic Daily is reporting.
It’s not the first rumor that the companies might tag team the Vision Pro, and last month, LG confirmed that it was working on a new headset
The San Francisco Standard documents some parties where attendees are encouraged to shake their butts while wearing the Vision Pro (from pictures, it seems like most didn’t go along with the ask).
Before you dismiss the idea, consider this: If you don’t have a kid or a dog, “I gotta go; my Vision Pro died” could be a great excuse to leave a party early.
Meta announced Cryptic Cabinet on Thursday. The “open-source mixed reality showcase” serves as a reference app for developers who want to use its source code to make mixed reality games for the Quest headsets.
But it’s also a standalone game that generates furniture and other escape room puzzle elements in players’ environments. It’s available on the App Lab.
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.”
In this interview for the Voices of VR podcast, Apollo developer Christian Selig shares his experience creating Juno, an unofficial YouTube player he created for the Vision Pro in only a week’s time.
Despite the small number of people who own the headset, he says he’s earned enough from it to buy “multiple” Vision Pros.
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.
While many people are excitedly entering Apple’s spatial computing future, some Vision Pro early adopters have already packed the devices up and sent them back for a refund. Reasons we’ve heard include eye fatigue, few useful apps available so far, and a lack of window / workspace persistence.
If you bought one on day one, the return window is closing now, so let us know if you’re deciding to keep your headset and why.
XR designer Greg Madison has created this chrome ball as a fun way to visualize how Apple’s headset can reflect lighting in augmented reality based on your real environment.
Reflection mapping is hardly new or unique to the Vision Pro, but Madison’s experiment is commendably easy to play with — just open the file in this Google Drive link while you’re wearing the headset.
Assuming you’re going to keep your Vision Pro headset for a while, Apple has highlighted some of the spatial games already available that are optimized for its headset’s eye, hand, and voice controls.
They include What the Golf, Super Fruit Ninja, Synth Riders, and Lego Builder’s Journey (shown below), as well as some upcoming titles, like Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, and Spire Blast.
Valve Prism: the standalone Valve VR headset we’ve been waiting for? This convincing-at-first-glance site shows a chunky, heavy (850 grams!) headset with Vision Pro-caliber Micro OLED displays and claims of untethered PC-like graphics performance.
A quick jaunt into the site’s HTML code, though, repeatedly suggests the name of the company is “VaIve.” As in Vaive. As in, it includes a sans-serif letter that rhymes with “eye.”
The website also claims it offers “50-point lips, jaw, teeth, and tongue tracking.”
Update, 7:30PM ET: “Nope, this is NOT us,” Valve confirms.
