2024-07-11 17:15:37
Apple’s Vision Pro is coming to the German market on Friday. Are the glasses, which cost just under 4,000 euros, the future of digital reality? A test.
It took a long time, but now it’s here: Apple’s entry into augmented reality, affectionately called “spatial computing” by the iPhone company. The high-tech glasses called Vision Pro are intended to bring digital content into real environments and establish a new computer platform. What can the device do for just under 4,000 euros, which is coming onto the market in Germany on Friday?
From the outside, the Vision Pro looks a bit like ski goggles with an aluminum frame. The front is filled with a display. It can also display the eye area of the person who is currently wearing the headset. The battery is housed in a luxury version of an external battery with an aluminum casing. This saves weight on the head and also helps to be able to wear the Vision Pro for longer periods of time.
To ensure a perfect fit, the face is scanned – similar to setting up Face ID facial recognition. This selects the correct light seal, which then shields the field of vision from outside light.
From a purely technical point of view, the Vision Pro could be called a VR headset: As with other devices for displaying virtual reality, you see displays instead of transparent glasses. But the Vision Pro is consistently designed to blend digital objects into the real environment. So: Augmented Reality (AR), but also the possibility of VR.
Once put on and switched on, you can see the room you are in – and the app icons float some distance away in the middle of the room. The Vision Pro has several cameras that capture the surroundings, detect movements and record the position of arms, hands and fingers. The image is then transmitted to the screens in front of the eyes. Each display has more pixels than a 4K TV. This means that the image is completely clear, without the “fly screen” look that you know from some other headsets.
At the same time, you can also be transported somewhere else entirely – for example to a lake or to the moon. This can be done continuously by turning the digital crown, as you know it from the Apple Watch or the AirPods Max headphones. The real environment is then gradually faded into the virtual image. If there are other people in the room and they speak to you, they are faded into the artificial environment, a bit like a ghost.
Pressing the crown calls up the app icons. The crown is on the right side of the glasses, and there is also a second button on the left side. You press this twice, for example, when you buy an app. Similar to the facial recognition Face ID or the fingerprint sensor, there is also biometric identification on the Vision Pro. Optic ID recognizes the person by the pattern of the iris. This works even more smoothly and error-free than Face ID on the iPhone.
There is a speaker on each ear that can reproduce 3D audio. The direction from which you hear the sound adapts exactly and without delay to the position of the source.
To operate the Vision Pro, you have to learn one gesture in particular. Pressing your thumb and index finger together has the effect of a mouse click. The gaze takes on the role of the cursor: whatever you are looking at is what you click on.