Apple Vision Pro is out in Australia now, and although the price tag is breathtaking, you can try it for free by booking a demo session at your local Apple Store. The experience is enjoyable, low-stress, and has no pressure to buy. The sales assistant will of course ask if you want to buy one, but you can honestly tell them that you were curious to try it and would need to think about it some more due to the cost.

These are my impressions of the experience:

First, if you enjoy playing with new technology and novel user interfaces, then I’d say this is a must-do. The Apple Vision Pro demo is just plain fun, and definitely made me want to buy the thing. If I would be spending just my own money, and not my family’s, I’d probably pay the price (AU$5,999, for the record) to get to play with this thing at home.

Compared to other VR headsets I’ve used, using Vision Pro is very reminiscent of the first time I got to look at a Retina display on an iPhone: the resolution is higher than is easily perceivable, so the UI feels completely smooth, seamless, and “real” in a way that tricks your brain into believing you’re interacting with physical objects rather than collections of pixels.

Watching 4K video (e.g. a TV show in the Apple TV app) provides image quality roughly on par with a good 4K TV in ideal lighting. Although the 4K image is being scaled to part of the Vision Pro’s displays, the reported resolution of 3660×3200 per eye is sufficient to render most of the detail of that 4K image. And because I can’t perceive any of the pixels in the image, and that image has such great brightness and contrast, it’s a more vivid and pleasing viewing experience than a typical 4K display under ambient lighting. Yes, I can dim the lights in my living room and sit close to my 4K TV to get a similar or arguably better experience, but most of the time I watch my TV at a greater distance and with more ambient light than will let me fully benefit from its display quality. Long story short, if you frequently have reason to watch TV and movies alone, and you can see yourself using this device for other things as well, then the price does seem defensible to me when compared to a top-notch home theatre setup (which most people can’t afford either, of course).

The gaze-and-gesture-driven windowing UI is really fun to use, and I was definitely doing things without thinking about how to do them pretty quickly. As some other reviewers have reported, I did have a few instances of feeling like I was looking at the thing I wanted to interact with, but not seeing it highlight in response to my gaze or respond to my finger-taps. In each case, looking away from it and back seemed to resolve the issue, but I wish I knew what was going wrong there.

The only UX negative for me was the limited field of view, which while not unpleasant does make you feel like you’re “in a bubble” rather than transparently seeing the world. It’s like you have a black hoodie over your head and you’ve cinched the opening closed around your eyes.

The sharpness of text was especially impressive: I honestly could not ask for a more comfortable reading experience in terms of how crisply the text is rendered. If visionOS had the ability to run a terminal and Visual Studio Code, I think I’d find it a really enjoyable coding environment! Unfortunately, it’s locked down to App Store apps, which means the software is much more iPad-calibre, and won’t include full-fledged dev tools like VSCode, Docker, etc. You can of course use Mac Virtual Display to use the dev tools on your Mac, but you don’t get to try that in this demo experience, and my expectation is that the display quality won’t be as good when working that way. If only Apple was willing to develop this as an open platform like the Mac rather than locking it down to the App Store model!

Comfort-wise, it felt heavy and slightly painful on my cheeks when I first put it on, but after I had a second go at adjusting the Dual Loop Band it felt more manageable. I find the PSVR2 really comfortable by comparison, mostly because it spreads its weight over my forehead, so I think I’d buy the Annapro forehead strap for the Vision Pro to solve the weight issue.

The 3D/immersive video sizzle reel was indeed the highlight of the experience. The visual impact is like seeing an IMAX film for the first time. But beyond this demo there just isn’t much immersive video content to watch right now, so I wouldn’t purchase it just for that today.

I was surprised the demo experience didn’t include some of the moments I’d heard of previously, like a butterfly landing on your hand, or a T-Rex crashing into the room and staring you down. This in-store demo is not that pre-scripted experience that tech reviewers had ahead of the US launch last year; rather, throughout this demo you are actually navigating and exploring visionOS yourself. When it’s time to launch a new thing, the sales assistant talks you through returning to the home screen and either launching the next app or selecting the next piece of content to view. I appreciated getting to feel like I was in full control of the experience the entire time.

Again, I highly recommend booking a demo for yourself, if only because the experience is truly novel and entertaining. But beyond this demo, I hope Apple is able to support Vision Pro to become a more useful, accessibly-priced product for the masses.