Apple Vision Pro’s new world view

Imagination is a pretty big place. On several levels. Beyond the entrance lobby, on Store St in Bloomsbury, it’s a bit of a maze of stairs and corridors that lead me to the pristine-looking Imagination Lab in the global agency’s basement. I’m here to enter a new version of reality, and to see where it takes me. 

It’s not super-useful at the moment, but it will be. Spatial computing is where we’re going.

Imagination’s chief tech officer Anton Christodoulou is on hand with the kit. Not yet available in most of the world, the Apple Vision Pro is, for those who’ve already dipped a toe into AR, VR and Meta, a game-changer. 

But it’s a long game, and what the future holds for high-end headsets that change your reality is yet to be determined, especially when to comes to imagining how brands and advertising will emerge, thrive and survive in those tech-driven liminal spaces.  

Tim Cumming testing the Apple Vision Pro

“It’s definitely version one, and not a device we’ll see everyone wearing,” says Christodoulou. “Not least,” he adds, “because of the cost.” True, at $3,500, it’s more executive toy than the game-changer the iPhone turned out to be. “But it is incredible,” adds Christodoulou. “The level of fidelity, quality, the stability of creating a spacial interface and being able to have objects and images exist in your field of vision is incredible. It’s not super-useful at the moment,” he adds. “but it will be. Spatial computing is where we’re going.” 

It puts hi-fidelity photo assets in front of me and they behave the way I’d expect them to so convincingly that my brain buys into the magic.

Down in the lab, I watch Christodoulou don the headset, which is plugged in to an external battery pack, and he talks me through getting the device up and running. His thumb and forefinger twitch over apps visible only to him, that are appropriately placed and visualised in his AR world view. 

Not that there’s a lot of apps to choose from, especially outside of the US. But soon I’ll be taking my first ever steps into AR, VR or anything but R, really (beer goggles excepted). The headset is a weighty thing, comfortable enough for the length of a movie, but, like beer goggles, not something you’d want to have on all day. It begins by calibrating your eye’s focus and where it’s looking, and then you’re in. 

A door opened and a dinosaur came into the room. It genuinely felt like a dinosaur was with me. It was tracking my pupils, maintaining eye contact.

A few days earlier I’d talked to Ty Curtis at Brisbane’s Activate Studios, who, like Anton Christodoulou, is one of the first early adopters outside the US. “I’ve been studying VR for 10 years,” he says, “using augmented and mixed reality for my clients. But it hasn’t gained the mass adoption I expected it to get. But I thought that, once Apple began that race, things would change.” He pauses. “My expectations were by far exceeded. It puts hi-fidelity photo assets in front of me and they behave the way I’d expect them to so convincingly that my brain buys into the magic.”

"It puts hi-fidelity photo assets in front of me and they behave the way I’d expect them to so convincingly that my brain buys into the magic."

He tells me about the first app he tried in Vision Pro’s AR environment. “A door opened and a dinosaur came into the room. It genuinely felt like a dinosaur was in the room with me, and because it’s tracking my pupils, it could maintain eye contact with me all the time. And it felt different – it’s about presence. You feel these assets are looking at you in a really believable way.” 

I didn’t feel dumb at all when using it – and that’s something they had to get right with this device.

Like Christodoulou, he enthuses on how the apps become part of your home environment as if they had always belonged there. “It’s very intuitive,” he says. “It’s very easy to pick up – you’re not moving anything but your eyes, or snapping you fingers together. I didn’t feel dumb at all when using it – and that’s something they had to get right with this device, for people to feel comfortable in that spatial environment.”

So there I was, having my eye movements ‘read’ by Vision Pro, eagerly envisioning my own dinosaur encounter at Imagination’s Labs, but real-world complications – the need for an American Apple account and bank account to install the apps that have been created thus far for the Vision Pro – means it’s not dinosaurs I’ll meet, or the funky sounding Disney+ app Ty Curtis describes, where you get to choose the VR location in which you’ll watch your Disney movie (“you feel a real connection to the brand, personalised, like this is all built for me”). 

There was a cartoon pig at my feet you could pet. I petted it.

No, my first step into AR was into Fruit Ninja, not a game I’d ever played, but it proved pretty easy – slashing cartoon fruit convincingly conjured in the real space I was in, a cartoon clown figure yawning to my right when my fruit-slashing got a bit slow. There was a cartoon pig at my feet you could pet. I petted it. 

Tim Cumming and Anton Christodoulou wearing the Apple Vision Pro headset

The potential for AR entertainment is vast within this visionary new arena. With the promise of individual tailoring, too. But is it a place where brands can bloom, and advertising find a form that attracts rather than repels, as it consistently has for gamers? Anton Christodoulou outlines the dangers: “It’s going to be an interesting and challenging journey for ads. It’s so potentially intrusive. How likely am I to turn on any form of advertising that’s going to be in the headset? There’s the potential, but it will have to be incredibly carefully managed.” 

It’s so potentially intrusive. How likely am I to turn on any form of advertising that’s going to be in the headset?

For Ty Curtis, the secret key for brands to unlocking AR, is to make themselves useful. “If you have this thing on your face that’s personalised to you and you can turn off and on anything you want – like turning on your navigation when you’re driving your car – that power in the world of brands will be really prolific if you can harness and personalise that usefulness. And the concept of it being branded would fall into the background when it’s something you actually use.”

You’re not just projecting something into that world, you have to abide by the rules of how people live in that world.

Producer Ingi Erlingsson is the founder of animation studio Golden Wolf, and another early adopter who is looking at how AR and brands will eventually settle in together. “It’s a very similar moment to when TikTok came out,” he says, “when brands realised their glossy content didn’t work on people anymore. AR and VR aren’t just another medium or platform, they’re a reimagining of reality. You’re not just projecting something into that world, you have to abide by the rules of how people live in that world. We don’t know what they are yet, because we’ve not seen mass adoption.”