The Apple Vision Pro is an upcoming mixed-reality headset produced by Apple Inc. It was announced on June 5, 2023, at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2023. Apple says the Vision Pro will mark the “beginning of space computing”. It is expected to be available for purchase in 2024 with a price tag of $3500.
Technical Details of Apple Vision Pro
Apple Vision Pro is powered by Apple M2, which is an ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) manufactured by Apple Inc and works as a CPU and GPU. It also has a R1 chip and 16GB of RAM. There is 256GB of storage space. The battery is external.
The total set has a laminated glass display front mounted on an aluminium frame. The frame contains 5 sensors, 6 microphones and 12 cameras. There are 2 micro-OLED displays. The speaker is inside the headband so that it is placed over the ears.
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Operating System and Capabilities
Apple Vision Pro runs visionOS, which is derived primarily from iOS core frameworks, and XR-specific frameworks for foveated rendering and real-time interaction. The operating system uses a 3D user interface navigated via finger tracking, eye tracking, and speech recognition. For example, the user can click an element by looking at it and pinching two fingers together, move the element by moving their pinched fingers, and scroll by flicking their wrist. Apps are displayed in floating windows that can be arranged in 3D space. visionOS supports a virtual keyboard for text input, the Siri virtual assistant, and external Bluetooth peripherals including Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and gamepads. Calls can be presented using participants’ “personas”, or individual windows with their video feeds.
There are multiple 100-inch virtual screens, you can make one even bigger, wider and curved. A digital crown on the headset is used to control the amount of virtual background occupying the user’s field of view, ranging from a mixed reality view where apps and media appear to float in the user’s real-world surroundings, to completely hiding the user’s surroundings. The Vision Pro has an outward-facing display called EyeSight, which displays the eyes of the user’s “persona” to indicate the degree to which they are immersed. Their eyes appear dimmed when in augmented reality, and obscured when in full immersion, to give others an indication of the user’s environmental awareness. When someone else approaches or strikes up a conversation, EyeSight shows the user’s eyes normally, even when fully immersed, and the other person is visible to the user.
