As Apple Vision Pro Turns 2 The Experience Keeps Getting Better
Apple Vision Pro first shipped on February 2, 2024 with both Civ VII and Retrocade coming this week and a Dual Knit Band dramatically improving comfort near the two year mark.
Civilization VII is about to launch on Apple Vision Pro this week as well as a fully-realized 1980s arcade from Resolution Games to visit in VR.
Last October, Apple released the Dual Knit Band alongside the M5 upgrade, allowing both generations of headset to carefully distribute weight better across the head using a single dial adjusting both soft straps. On a weekly basis right now, people are even attending live Lakers games in Apple Immersive VR. There’s even support for multiple types of spatial inputs, with a pen for art and PlayStation VR2 controllers for games.
The tiny touches being added to Apple Vision Pro are so subtle even regular users might not notice them. My favorite place in VR can be reached about 10 seconds after Vision Pro touches my head sitting on the rock Amalthea around Jupiter. You have to pause and take a breath to notice the clouds slowly moving down on the planet, but you can also set time to move faster so you can see it happening more quickly. Some team at Apple even seemed to sneak in rings around Jupiter in a recent update to this virtual environment. I have a tip for Apple Vision Pro owners who want the ultimate cinematic experience in a headset right now. Set the sun behind Jupiter and stop time there, then enjoy what feels like a black hole as the theater to your movie.
Taking all these pieces together, one could almost think Apple is building up to something.
Meanwhile, Meta laid off large chunks of its gaming division in January and you can take a tour through the reviews of Civilization VII as it was built for the Meta Quest platform requiring “a Meta account” to play one of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite games online with others. A one star review for the game left 15 days ago (the title only has 330 reviews overall) states: “Abandoned game. 1 year after release and only 2 updates (last update was 6 months ago). This VR version is only 30% of PC version and definitely not worth the money.”
(Also, good luck trying to find details online about Oculus Arcade. It was the same basic idea as Resolution’s upcoming Retrocade for Apple Arcade, but the service was killed in its crib under Facebook a decade ago)
Developers Building To A Vision
I’m in contact with dozens of developers spread across the globe and many of them continue to whittle away at spatial ideas across a great number of headset designs.
Only a small percentage are using Vision Pro to imagine software for a wide range of situations, but those that do see a long-term vision they believe in. There are even some developers who built software for the Meta Quest ecosystem that would be an ideal fit for Vision Pro, but because of the cost of the headset and the small market, they can’t afford to get their software up and running there just yet.
Nonetheless, at the two-year mark, interesting things are happening in Apple headsets on a weekly basis now as more and more things get added to the system.
If you’re working on something interesting in Apple Vision Pro, I’d love a code sent to ianontherecord@gmail.com so I could check it out.