The Apple Vision Pro: A Mobile Virtual Reality Headset with TVs and a New Way to Watch Disney Sports, Shows, and Movies

We finally got our first look at Apple’s highly anticipated mixed reality headset at today’s WWDC event, including a sneak peek at a new immersive way to watch your favorite Disney sports, shows, and movies. Disney CEO Bob Iger showcased the Disney Plus streaming service as a way to access the Apple Vision Pro, which is a virtual reality headset that will be on sale next year.

Disney Plus users will be able to use the Vision Pro headset to watch sports games in virtual reality, a feature that Apple leaker Mark Gurman mentioned in his Power On newsletter in April. This is demonstrated in a few ways: the first of which features a regular 2D football game surrounded by useful information in widget-like boxes, such as the score, win probability, and player stats. Another example involves a 3D top-down view of a basketball game projected onto a coffee table in the user’s lounge, allowing them to see a courtview replay of the match from every angle.

Back in 2015, around the time Apple began working on headset projects that would ultimately lead to the Vision Pro, it was widely reported that Apple had shelved its plans to build a TV set. It wanted to ship a high-resolution display and integrate cameras so it could make video calls but it couldn’t figure out how to make that be compelling and cheap enough to win over the TV market. Back then, we assumed that a combination of PrimeSense based motion control and a TV app store would be compelling enough as a unique feature set for the device.

As a portable viewing device, the Vision Pro is better than anything I’ve ever tried. I can absolutely see why it might appeal to frequent fliers or those who don’t have a TV in every room. You can already see it struggle in the places that have TVs. Are you going to go through all the work of putting on and booting up your headset when you can turn on your TV with a single button click? You’ll miss the end of a movie if the battery lasts for two hours. What do you do with external devices like game consoles, which are crucial to the TV experience? What will happen when you’re watching something on your headset and someone wanders into the room, plops down on the couch, and wants to watch with you?

There will be many questions to answer in the time between now and Vision Pro shipping. Streaming platforms will have to decide if they want to go all in and create new immersive spaces for their apps or if they’ll just ship lightly adapted iPad apps like so many other things on the Vision Pro. Apple will probably use Apple TV Plus as a way to push that envelope but in the early days of visionOS, I wouldn’t bet on many other streamers dedicating huge resources to such a niche product.

Generally speaking, people watch the most convenient thing in the most convenient way — which is why you might sometimes find yourself sitting on the couch in front of your beautiful big-screen TV watching YouTube on your phone. Nothing about strapping a headset to your face is convenient, which makes the quality bar even higher.

Many of Apple’s other demos felt familiar, too. I saw an ultrawide clip of an NBA game, shot from just above the backboard; a soccer game from atop the goal; some rhinos being cool; and a brief moment of Alicia Keys singing in a recording studio with such a wide field of view that I could turn my head and look at the whole band and space. These are some of the things you can see on headsets, which are used to create virtual and augmented reality content.

The whole “see your movies in a virtual theater!” It is not a new idea. It is a demo of a lot of headsets. Netflix’s app for the Meta Quest lets you watch movies on a big virtual screen in a cozy virtual cabin living room, Bigscreen built a whole digital cineplex, and platforms from Prime Video and Peacock to Starz and Pluto TV have their own apps for VR.

The first thing Apple showed me when I demoed its Vision Pro was a 3D clip fromAvatar: The Way of Water and to my eyes, it looked pretty good, but not as good as it did in a theater. (3D content works so well in the headset because it’s just simulated depth on the two screens in front of your eyes.) By default, the movie played on a screen floating in front of my face, about three-quarters the size of the wall in front of me. I could either move the window or keep it farther away from me in the room. And if I hit a button in the Apple TV app for visionOS, it launched “cinema mode,” which put the movie on a big theater-like screen and blacked out all of my surroundings.

Which brings up the bigger question: what is this thing for? Adding more monitors to your office setup is one of the reasons Apple has, but it is also why you should look at a 3D human heart.

We’ve seen Apple struggle to adapt the iPad for creation over the years, even after the company blurred the lines with the iPad Pro — a hybrid device much like the Surface Pro that blends laptop and tablet. During the announcement of the iPad Pro, Apple showed productivity apps like Office and Photoshop, with a focus on professionals getting work done. Almost 10 years later, I still grab a laptop when I want to get work done because iPad apps and the OS still haven’t quite caught up to macOS or Windows for multitasking and creation.

The Vision Pro headset is powered by the same software frameworks that are found on iPadOS and Apple’s other operating systems. Hundreds of thousands of iPad and iPhone applications will be available on Vision Pro at launch, according to Susan Prescott, Apple’s VP of worldwide developer relations. How well developers can adapt them is a big factor in whether Apple can replace or help existing tools.

A few demonstrations went beyond consumption. Apple showed off a lot of new things, but it looks like the D jay app for Apple Vision Pro will offer some impressive interaction.

I believe Apple made the experience more compelling to use as a mobile workplace, but at a much higher price than other virtual reality headsets that can create giant workspace and TV screens for you.

Video calling looks like it will be an area where the Apple Vision Pro will excel. There is a room filled interface that expands as life-size people join the call. It’s not too dissimilar to what both Microsoft and Meta have been working on for immersive meetings, but once again, it’s all about consumption, not creation. Apple admitted that. “This is powerful for so many activities, like reviewing a presentation, sharing photos and videos, or watching a movie together,” said McGinnis. When you want to make edits, what happens when you are reviewing a presentation? Again, we don’t know.

In fact, it looks like you’ll need a physical keyboard and mouse for that precise type of control on the Vision Pro. Because, like theiPad, developers will need to adapt their apps for this new input When you want to type long emails or fill out information in a spreadsheet, Apple demonstrated the ability to use its Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard. You can connect a Mac screen to the headset and use it as a portable 4K display, running behind the Vision Pro headset’s apps.

We saw the ability to drag and drop 3D content from Messages, but we didn’t see people creating that 3D content within the headset. There is a brief demo that shows how a virtual keyboard is used to send a message, but not the complex interactions that we are used to seeing from pro devices with a mouse and keyboard attached.

The label of pro lost meaning since the early days of the MacBook Pro. OnePlus, Huawei, Xiaomi, and others started using “pro” monikers on phones before Apple decided to do the same with its iPhone 11 Pro in 2019. At the time, former Verge senior reporter Chaim Gartenberg (damn, I miss that nerd) asked what it even means for a phone to be “pro,” and here we are nearly four years later asking the same about a new headset.

One of Apple’s first Macs to go against tradition was the MacBook Pro, an iMac with a built-in i-Sight camera, and a bundle of digital lifestyle apps. It was the performance per watt that was important to justify the switch to Intel from Apple. Steve Jobs stood onstage and even showed off SPECint benchmarks for CPU integer processing power during the announcement. Apple did not use any benchmarking to justify their “pro” label on Vision Pro.