Apple’s Vision Pro is in US stores, but a see-through glass isn’t on the horizon yet

One Thing Today in Tech

Apple’s Vision Pro headsets are now available for sale at stores in the US, but first a couple of other headlines that caught my attention.

A UK minister on a trade mission last year assured Infosys that he would do what he could to help the company grow in the country, where founder NR Narayana Murthy’s son-in-law Rishi Sunak is prime minister, The Mirror reported.

The paper obtained details of the April 2023 visit of Dominic Johnson, a minister in PM Sunak’s cabinet, using Britain’s freedom of information laws. Sunak has faced intense scrutiny over his wife Akshata Murty’s ownership of close to 1 percent of Infosys.

Freshworks, a Chennai-to-Silicon Valley software company, will report its fiscal fourth quarter and full year earnings results tomorrow, according to the investor page on the company’s website. The Nasdaq-listed provider of cloud software for customer engagement and IT services management expects to end the year with revenue of about $595 million, a growth of about 20 percent. Analysts will also be watching Freshworks’s net dollar retention, an important SaaS metric, that the company has projected at 105 percent.

One thing today

Apple, on Feb. 2 announced that its Vision Pro AR headsets were available for sale in stores in the US. Apple calls the headset a spatial computer, which works by tracking natural hand gestures and movement of your eyes.

Last year, after Apple unveiled this, I’d spoken with Milind Manoj, an AR expert and founder and CEO of a company called PupilMesh here in Bangalore. I thought a quick recap of the features of the Vision Pro from that conversation might be interesting, so here goes.

The first takeaway was that, like with any other Apple product, there's a lot that’s gone into the design and specs. Especially given that they have a dedicated processor, the R1 chip, that helps to make functions like the display rendering seem like near real time although it's a pass-through headset, is remarkable.

In a pass-through headset, one is not really seeing the world around directly, but through the cameras on the headset, and then being streamed to the display. This is an interesting, and important, question according to Milind, because the user is seeing what the device sees.

Therefore, the question is if you’d be okay with a device controlling what you are actually seeing because you are essentially blocking out one of your senses and relying on cameras – this might be okay or not, depending on what you’re using the device for.

This is the biggest difference versus what are called optical see-through headsets which don’t block off your vision. These kinds of headsets will become increasingly important as the sophistication of AR applications that overlay digital information on top of the real world that we can see and touch and feel increases – think of applications like surgery, for example, where precision is critical and therefore what you’re seeing through the headset has to be accurate.

The original Apple Glass project probably had such ambitions, where one could see through. Apple must surely be continuing to work on that technology, but we don’t know anything about a commercial product.

The second takeaway from my chat with Milind was that unlike other Apple products so far, the Vision Pro still feels a little bit experimental, especially because it has a waist-mounted external battery pack that connects to the headset via a cable.

This is obviously the best trade off that Apple’s engineers could think of with respect to the design and how long people could use the headset at one go, but it does make the Vision Pro a somewhat inelegant gadget in my view – you may be perfectly fine with an outside battery pack.

The headset costs about $3,500 and its success will depend on the applications that developers come up for it. It’s unlikely to be in India any time soon, but Apple will probably show off the headset at its own stores in Mumbai and Delhi – just to pique your curiosity.