I expected to be impressed by the demo of Apple's Vision Pro when I went to the Apple Store. I was more impressed than I expected to be.
My reaction, in hindsight, parallels the subtle sense of awe and excitement the Apple Store employees who greeted me all had about the product. They knew what I was about to experience — an experience akin to the before and after response to climbing Kilimanjaro that Michael Crichton describes in his memoir Travels. It’s an experience (rather than a bit of knowledge) you can only understand and convey after the fact.
Apple has maximized its chances at giving users that experience by making the demo an experience. I don't say this to minimize what they have done to provide this — from the scheduled appointment to the greeters to the employees who lead you through the demo to the runners wearing rubber gloves who bring out the VisionPro that has been configured for you. Not only is it Apple’s job to make this a compelling experience (They have products to sell.) and not only does Apple have a reputation to maintain, Apple has a new computing concept to explain to a large public — much larger than the public they introduced the Mac to — that will only be able to "get it" when they experience it.
Make no mistake: Spatial computing is not a gimmick. It has promise and potential that is apparent in a version 1.0 demo that leans into the wonder and magic and pushes the potential for "productivity" and/or creativity into the background.
Let me offer one potential example that points towards this. And keep in mind what Apple's executives have been telling us. They have been working on this device and its attendant experience for some time. Few would have guessed when they gave us Desk View, for example, that we were looking at a preview of the way the Vision Pro might track our hands.
The first example is the roll out of Freeform, which may now become a collaboration space with an even more infinite canvas. It was interesting when it came to the Apple ecosystem. Now, Freeform has a new dimension — one that will let users simultaneously interact with the whiteboard-equivalent in front of them and/or on the device (Mac, iPad, or iPhone) at hand while collaborating with others remotely. Unfortunately, as someone who does not have a Vision Pro, this is something beyond my ability to test. My guess, however, is that the ability to collaborate with yourself and others via iCloud will initially appear awkward to those of us who are not used to Wacom tablets. Nevertheless, it will permit a powerful level of collaboration.
I suspect the same will be true, albeit to a more limited extent, for Notes and the iWorks suite. Here, I am interested to see if the Notes collaboration feature for iPadOS 17 (as seen about 41 minutes into the WWDC keynote) will be part of Apple’s roadmap for this.
That leads me to two opposing truths — truths that will be challenging for organizations to reconcile.
Truth #1: I suspect this is a platform people should be experimenting with and those that do not run the risk of giving others a head start at understanding this emerging future.
Truth #2: I am not sure I could persuasively justify the cost to the powers that be via a normal purchasing process — especially since it is so attached to a single user rather than being the kind of device you could pass around.
I think it will take, if you can forgive the word play, a certain kind of vision on the part of leaders to understand the need for someone to try and wrap their head around this.