If I owned an Apple Vision Pro, here's what I would use it for

The author wearing a Vision Pro headset — I tried out Apple’s new Vision Pro headset, launching in the UK on July 12 (Picture: Apple)

Yesterday I went to the moon, the top of Mount Hood volcano, and on safari to see an elephant so close it could have sprayed me with its muddy trunk.

Such bucket list experiences are out of reach for most, but I breezed through them in half an hour.

That was all thanks Apple’s debut headset, the Vision Pro.

True, I looked like a giant fly on the sofa inelegantly pinching the air, but I felt truly immersed in these scenes.

It would take more than a minute with the gorgeous mindfulness app to ground me again after a whistle stop trip through the world’s most mind-blowing experiences.

I’ve tried out VR headsets before, and found myself flailing around hitting furniture and losing my balance. They were interesting – kind of – but not something I wanted or needed.

Apple’s new ‘spatial computer’ offering, the Vision Pro headset launching in the UK on Friday, made me question whether that was still the case.

What I’d do with the Vision Pro

As the product is still so new, the apps to do all of these things may not exist yet. But trying it out made me think they would all be possible:

Start walking and see the world’s sights from a treadmill. Much better than a glitchy bike screen showing you Route 66.
‘Try on’ clothes without the faff of actually putting them on. Just view your body as a 3D model wearing them to see how they would look
Sing karaoke duets with the artists themselves
Stargaze around the universe watching distant planets and constellations in crisp definition
Watch theatre and stand-up like they were private performances
Remodel my house like the participants on ‘Your Home Made Perfect’ to see how it would look if I moved the stairs and put a hidden bath in the living room

There were moments in the product demo where I felt genuinely emotional, such as looking at a 3D photograph of a child blowing out their birthday candles. It made me feel bad for my son that I didn’t have similar photos of him; he would have to settle for iPhone clips.

To address the elephant in the room (having just seen an elephant in the room), the Vision Pro is expensive.

Starting at £3,499, it is even more expensive for Brits than for those in the US, where it has been in shops since February and is the same figure in dollars (£2731.67 if converted to Sterling).

While still just about possible to save that much, it’s not exactly accessible to the masses, who may prefer to put that money towards a house deposit.

I won’t be buying one for this reason, although if it were cheaper I would definitely be tempted.

It was crazy to me that I could control something so seamlessly using my eyes. After pressing one button on the top right to bring up a menu, I didn’t need to move my head, point to things or nod. My eyes alone were enough to select the apps I wanted, and pinching my thumb and finger together stood in place of a tap or mouse click to select.

There is also a dial to select how immersed you want to be, tuning out others around you or being able to see them as well as whatever else you’re looking at.

The product is not perfect, and there are elements I can immediately identify as targets for improvement in future versions.

But wow – what a strange and futuristic thing to be able to take home with you and set up in minutes.

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It was quick to do the scans of my eyes and hands, and as I wear glasses, I also used a lensometer to measure my prescription and use the correct optical inserts.

Maybe this is why the 3D effects felt so much more vivid to me than I have usually experienced them. Wearing cinema sunglasses and watching an IMAX film never worked that well for me, but these images were undeniably 3D.

The most impressive part of the demo was seeing clips from new Apple TV series in 180-degree immersive video, where you don’t see the edges to the screen like you would in a cinema. When you turn your head, you see different parts of the picture, with the overall effect of making it feel much more immediate.

While I knew rationally these were pixels on a screen, my brain didn’t completely accept that so I felt vertigo watching highliner Faith Dickey walk a precipitous tightrope 3,000 feet above Norway’s fjords.

The most shocking part was seeing groups of people so clearly – they seemed so close and so real they were in my personal space.

I couldn’t help but think of other uses for the technology; undoubtedly someone has already rendered a lap dance in immersive tech. Videos from warzones would be similarly immediate, making it possible to witness the deaths in Gaza in super high definition.

What would the effect be of watching content like this on demand every day? Are our minds ready for just how graphic the new graphic content is going to be?

I guess it is an endorsement of the product that these were the questions I started thinking about.