by Hugo Barra (former Head of Oculus at Meta)

Friends and colleagues have been asking me to share my perspective on the Apple Vision Pro as a product. Inspired by my dear friend Matt Mullenweg’s 40th post, I decided to put pen to paper.

This started as a blog post and became an essay before too long, so I’ve structured my writing in multiple sections each with a clear lead to make it a bit easier to digest — peppered with my own ‘takes’. I’ve tried to stick to original thoughts for the most part and link to what others have said where applicable.

Some of the topics I touch on:

• Why I believe Vision Pro may be an over-engineered “devkit”
• The genius & audacity behind some of Apple’s hardware decisions
• Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment
• Why the Vision Pro software/content story is so dull and unimaginative
• Why most people won’t use Vision Pro for watching TV/movies
• Apple’s bet in immersive video is a total game-changer for Live Sports
• Why I returned my Vision Pro… and my Top 10 wishlist to reconsider
• Apple’s VR debut is the best thing that ever happened to Oculus/Meta
• My unsolicited product advice to Meta for Quest Pro 2 and beyond

The Apple Vision Pro is the Northstar the VR industry needed, whether we admit it or not

I’ve been a VR enthusiast for most of my adult life, from working as an intern at Disney Quest VR in the 1990s, to being an early backer of the Oculus Rift DK1 on Kickstarter in 2013, to leading the Oculus VR/AR team at Meta from 2017 to 2020 (and getting to work alongside VR legends like John Carmack, Brendan Iribe and Jason Rubin), and always testing every VR product or experience I can get my hands on.

Back in my Oculus days, I used to semi-seriously joke with our team (and usually got a lot of heat for it!) that the best thing that could ever happen to us was having Apple enter the VR industry and become a direct competitor to Oculus. I’ve always believed that strong competition pushes a team to do their best work in any industry. This became clear to me especially after living for nearly 10 years at the center of the iOS/Android battle of ecosystems where each side made the other infinitely better by constantly raising the bar on UX, features, performance, developer APIs etc, and seeing each side respond by not only fast following but usually also improving on what the other had released. (And this definitely went both ways: iOS copied Android as much as Android copied iOS).

But in the case of VR at Oculus, we also never really felt like the world had a Northstar that could truly capture human hearts and minds, and without that it would be impossible to transition VR from being a niche gamer tech to the incredible spatial computing paradigm that we always thought it potentially represented (which I still very much believe in). Apple could really help us if they cared about VR.

The Vision Pro launch has more or less done exactly what I had always hoped for, which is to build a huge wave of awareness and curiosity that elevates the spatial computing ecosystem and could ultimately lead to mass-market consumer demand and a lot more developer interest than VR has ever had. Now it’s up to the industry to create enough user value and demonstrate whether this is in fact the future of computing.

The Vision Pro’s instant magic comes down to just: (1) an unprecedented new level of presence in VR, and (2) a new UI superpower using gaze & pinch

Using Vision Pro is an instantly magical and intuitive experience — whether or not you’ve used other VR headsets — purely because of Apple’s unrelenting focus on delivering two specific capabilities that speak to our humanity:

1) Feeling present and connected to your physical world: thanks to a high-fidelity passthrough (“mixed reality”) experience with very low latency, excellent distortion correction (much better than Quest 3), and sufficiently high resolution that allows you to even see your phone/computer screen through the passthrough cameras (i.e. without taking your headset off).

Even though there are major gaps left to be filled in future versions of the Vision Pro hardware (which I’ll get into later), this level of connection with the real world — or “presence” as VR folks like to call it — is something that no other VR headset has ever come even close to delivering and so far was only remotely possible with AR headsets (ex: HoloLens and Magic Leap) which feature physically transparent displays but have their own significant limitations in many other areas. Apple’s implementation of Optic ID as an overlay on top of live passthrough is a beautiful design decision that only enhances this sense of presence.

MY TAKE: The Vision Pro high-fidelity passthrough experience parallels Apple’s introduction of the iPhone’s original retina display, which set a new experience bar and gold standard in mobile display fidelity. While much remains to be improved in the Vision Pro passthrough experience, Apple is unquestionably setting a new standard for all future headsets (by any vendor) that VR passthrough must be good enough to closely resemble reality.

2) Having a new UI superpower with gaze & pinch, thanks to a very precise eye tracking system (with 2 dedicated cameras per eye) embedded into the lenses, coupled with a wide-field-of-view hand tracking system that can “see” a finger pinch even with your hands are down or resting on your lap. Because it works so effortlessly for the user, it really feels like having a new “laser vision” superpower.

The hardware needed to track eyes and hands in VR has been around for over a decade, and it’s Apple’s unique ability to bring everything together in a magical way that makes this UI superpower the most important achievement of the entire Vision Pro product, without a shadow of doubt.

MY TAKE: The Vision Pro’s new “gaze + pinch” input modality is the VR equivalent of the iPhone’s capacitive multi-touch gestures. Introduced by Apple with the first iPhone launch nearly 17 years ago, multi-touch instantly became a new standard that changed computing forever. “Gaze + pinch” is so groundbreaking that it’s an instant de facto standard for VR interaction that future VR headsets will be forced to adopt sooner or later. It’s also going to be a huge developer unlock that leads to gaze-based interaction ideas that will blow our minds.

Hardware

Vision Pro is a meticulously over-engineered “devkit” that is far too heavy to have product-market fit but good enough to seed curiosity into the world

The Oculus VR story began with the 2013 launch of Oculus Rift DK1 (short for “devkit v1” or “development kit v1”). This was a headset launched by the original Oculus startup team — years before it was acquired by Facebook — with the explicit goal of seeding developer interest well before a commercial release. Given that VR was a non-existing market then, releasing a devkit was the correct and necessary strategy there and then for a startup to start building a content library as well as momentum among enthusiasts ahead of launching a consumer product. The team released a DK2 about a year later in 2014, and finally launched the first Oculus Rift consumer headset in 2015.

When I joined Facebook to lead the Oculus team in 2017 after the acquisition, one of the many battles I found myself in the middle of almost immediately was the “devkit war”. The Oculus team’s DK1 and DK2 legacy was so strong that it was not uncommon to hear arguments in product meetings pushing for us to launch VR headsets still in prototype stage as “devkits” to end users. Since Oculus was no longer a startup — and had the resources to both extensively test prototypes without launching them as products and run extensive pre-launch developer programs — it no longer made sense for Oculus devkits to exist. This stance often didn’t make me very popular amongst some of my Oculus OG colleagues.

Fast forward to 2024. After the Vision Pro launch, the VR hardware enthusiast community (including Oculus OG folks I’m still in touch with) quickly arrived at the conclusion that Apple really played it safe in the design of this first VR product by over-engineering it. For starters, Vision Pro ships with more sensors than what’s likely necessary to deliver Apple’s intended experience. This is typical in a first-generation product that’s been under development for so many years. It makes Vision Pro start to feel like a devkit.

Here’s a quick comparison with existing VR headsets:

Sensor	Vision Pro	Meta Quest 3	Meta Quest Pro
Environment passthrough cameras	2	2	1
World tracking cameras	6	4	6
Depth sensors	2	1	–
Eye tracking cameras	4	–	2
Total	14	7	9

This over-spec’ing is unsurprising and characteristic of a v1 product where its creator wants to ensure it survives the hardest tests early users will no doubt want to put the product through. It’s also a way for Apple to see how far developers will push the product’s capabilities, as Apple is no doubt relying on that community to produce the majority of software/content magic for this new type of computer, as they’ve previously done with every other device class.

Apple’s decision to over-spec the Vision Pro does, however, lead to the inevitable consequence of a headset weighing above 600g — heavier than most other VR headsets in the market to date — that makes it difficult for most people to wear it for more than 30-45 minutes at a time without suffering a lot of discomfort. Most of the discomfort comes in the form of pressure against the user’s face and the back of the person’s head.

MY TAKE: Because of its heavy weight, Vision Pro has inevitably landed in the world as a high-quality “devkit” designed to capture everyone’s curiosity, hearts & minds with its magic (especially through the voice of enthusiastic tech influencers) while being realistically focused on developers as its primary audience. In other words, the Vision Pro is a devkit that helps prepare the world to receive a more mainstream Apple VR headset that could have product-market fit in 1 or 2 generations.

All things considered, I do believe Apple’s calculus was correct in prioritizing launching a first-generation product with fewer experience and design compromises at the expense of user comfort. And while many people have argued Apple could have avoided this major comfort issue by redistributing weight or using lighter materials, those attempts would have come at the expense of beauty and design. (I’ll come back to the weight issue shortly.)

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand two particularly important decisions Apple made for the Vision Pro launch:

• Designing an incredible in-store Vision Pro demo experience, with the primary goal of getting as many people as possible to experience the magic of VR through Apple’s lenses — most of whom have no intention to even consider a $4,000 purchase. The demo is only secondarily focused on actually selling Vision Pro headsets.
• Launching an iconic woven strap that photographs beautifully even though this strap simply isn’t comfortable enough for the vast majority of head shapes. It’s easy to conclude that this decision paid off because nearly every bit of media coverage (including and especially third-party reviews on YouTube) uses the woven strap despite the fact that it’s less comfortable than the dual loop strap that’s “hidden in the box”.

The existence of Vision Pro in 2024 is entirely a function of Apple managing to ship a first-of-its-kind ultra high-resolution display

One of our biggest product positioning struggles within the Oculus VR team from the very beginning — especially when trying to convince reviewers — was always related to having underwhelming displays. Every single Oculus headset that ever shipped (including the latest Quest 3) has suffered from resolution/pixelation issues varying from “terrible” to “pretty bad”. It’s like we’re living in the VR-equivalent world of VGA computer monitors.

MY TAKE: In order For Apple to make a huge splash entering the VR market — a category that’s been around the consumer world for nearly 10 years — they needed to launch a product that was unambiguously better than anything that had ever existed. The obvious way to do that was to attack the Achilles heel of all existing headsets and reinvent the VR display, and that’s exactly what Apple did with the Vision Pro.

Vision Pro is the first VR headset that offers good enough resolution and visual acuity with little semblance of a screen door effect or pixelation artifacts. This level of presence and fidelity could only be made possible with an ultra high-res display, and it’s 100% clear that achieving a first-of-its-kind level of display quality was the internal launch bar for Vision Pro at Apple.

Apple’s relentless and uncompromising hardware insanity is largely what made it possible for such a high-res display to exist in a VR headset, and it’s clear that this product couldn’t possibly have launched much sooner than 2024 for one simple limiting factor — the maturity of micro-OLED displays plus the existence of power-efficient chipsets that can deliver the heavy compute required to drive this kind of display (i.e. the M2).

Micro-OLED displays differ from any other previous consumer display technology because they are manufactured on top of a silicon substrate (similar to how semiconductor chips are made). To put the insanity of micro-OLED displays in perspective, the Vision Pro panel has a 7.4x higher pixel density than the latest iPhone and nearly 3x the Quest 3:

Feature	Vision Pro	Bigscreen Beyond	Quest 3	iPhone 15 Pro Max
Display Type	Micro-OLED	Micro-OLED	LCD	OLED
Resolution (pixels per eye)	3660 x 3200	2560 x 2560	2064 x 2208	2796 x 1290
Total Pixels	23 million	13 million	9 million	3.6 million
Pixels Per Inch (PPI)	3386	(unknown)	1218	460
Pixels Per Degree (PPD)	34	32	25	94 (at 1 foot distance)

(See the appendix of this essay for a quick explanation of Pixels Per Degree or PPD)

The folks at iFixit created this stunning GIF using a scientific microscope to compare the pixel size of the Vision Pro display — which measures 7.5 μm, the size of a human red blood cell — with the pixel size of the latest iPad and iPhone displays:

The Apple Vision Pro’s micro-OLED display has created a lot of chatter in my hardware supply chain world, with lots of companies — predominantly smartphone OEMs — quickly racing to try and build a product that can deliver a similar experience to Vision Pro. Apple has secured a 1-year exclusive with Sony Semiconductor Solutions Group and its second supplier SeeYA Technology. There are also rumors Apple is dropping Sony as a display supplier and replacing it with BOE (whose website says a panel equivalent to Vision Pro is at “sample” stage).

MY TAKE: I fully expect the recently announced Meta/LG partnership to be all about creating a supply chain advantage for Meta so they can race a Quest Pro 2 product into market that can compete with Vision Pro with LG putting some skin in the game to lower the street price of the headset.

(P.S. For anyone who wants to dig into more details of the Vision Pro display and pass-through system, I highly recommend this article from iFixit and this article from Karl Guttag, who’s an amazingly talented expert in display devices).

Apple made the Vision Pro display intentionally blurry in order to hide pixelation artifacts and make graphics appear smoother

There is a very good reason Apple has not used the word retina anywhere in their marketing materials for Vision Pro. It’s the simple fact that Vision Pro’s display does not pass the retina test — which is a resolution high enough that the human eye can no longer discern individual pixels. The Vision Pro display is nowhere near retina quality for a VR headset (see appendix for details) and yet our eyes cannot see individual pixels when looking at it. What gives?

During the first few days using Vision Pro, there was something that kept calling my attention but which I struggled to get my arms (or eyes) around. Everything my eyes saw in the headset felt a bit softer than I expected, and I initially attributed this to the seemingly refreshing absence of any screen door effect — a pixelation artifact that has essentially doomed all VR headsets created up until now.

Well, as it turns out, the incredible Karl Guttag ran a meticulous photographic analysis of the Vision Pro display and came to a curious and possibly disturbing conclusion: Apple intentionally calibrated the Vision Pro display slightly out of focus to make pixels a bit blurry and hide the screen door effect “in plain sight”.

This image from Karl’s blog explains this well by comparing Vision Pro and Quest 3 displays side by side at a close enough distance where it’s possible to see individual pixels and clearly see the intentional blur that was added to the Vision Pro display:

What Karl concluded is that even though Quest 3 has a much lower display resolution than Vision Pro (1,218 PPI vs. 3,386 PPI), Quest 3 appears objectively crisper especially when showing high-contrast graphics. In other words, Quest 3 is squeezing the highest possible resolution out of its display at the expense of a “harsher look” while Apple is giving up some of the Vision Pro’s display resolution in order to achieve a “softer look”. Karl may disagree with my conclusion on this point:

MY TAKE: Intentionally making the Vision Pro optics blurry is a clever move by Apple because it results in way smoother graphics across the board by hiding the screen door effect (which in practice means that you won’t see pixelation artifacts). This is also where Apple’s “taste” comes in, essentially resulting in the Vision Pro display being tuned to have a unique, softer, and more refined aesthetic than Quest 3 (or any other VR headsets). This is certainly a refreshing approach to designing VR hardware.

With this design decision, Apple is no doubt giving up a bit of the Vision Pro display’s high pixel resolution in order to achieve overall smoother graphics. You are definitely losing some text crispness in order to gain a higher perception of quality for images, video and 3D animations. This is a big benefit of starting with an ultra high-resolution micro-OLED display — Apple had enough pixels to work with that they could afford to make this trade-off. This is the kind of thing that our hardcore VR engineers at Oculus would have fought against to the end of the world, and I doubt we could have ever shipped a “blurred headset”, LOL!

Sadly, the Vision Pro display suffers from significant motion blur & image quality issues that render passthrough mode unusable for longer periods

While Apple’s decision to make individual pixels blurry on the Vision Pro display was extremely clever, the headset unfortunately suffers from a completely different type of blur that’s extremely problematic for the overall experience.

From the very first time I put on my Vision Pro, I noticed a lot of motion blur in passthrough mode even in excellent ambient lighting conditions and a still noticeable amount even when viewing immersive content. While my immediate instinct was to think that all VR headsets have that kind of motion blur and it’s just more noticeable on Vision Pro, a side-by-side comparison with Quest 3 quickly proved it’s significantly more serious on Vision Pro. This is particularly surprising considering that the passthrough cameras and display are both running at 90 hertz.

Since none of the initial Vision Pro reviews pointed out this issue, I ended up even calling Apple support to find out if this might be a known problem or possibly even a hardware defect. But then more in-depth reviews began pointing out the same problem (I highly recommend this review by Snazzy Labs).

Motion blur in passthrough mode ended up being one of the many reasons why I decided to return my Vision Pro, because it’s just uncomfortable, leads to unnecessary eye strain, and really gets in the way of anyone using the headset for longer periods of time in passthrough mode.

There are other noticeable issues as well which affect passthrough mode, including very little dynamic range, incorrect white balance in most indoor use cases, and signs of edge distortion and chromatic aberration. Some of these might be addressed by software updates, but I expect most will not as they probably are limitations of the hardware stack.

The Vision Pro packs a lot more computing power than most people might realize — the M2 + R1 combination puts it at the level of a MacBook Pro

Any standalone VR headset is basically a 2-in-1 system: a regular “computing” computer and a spatial computer bundled together.

• A regular computer in charge of running applications and performing general computation: this is everything that happens on your smartphone, tablet or notebook, including running the OS, executing applications across CPU/GPU loads, and doing computation work in the background.
• A spatial computer in charge of the environment: it keeps track of the whole environment, tracks your hands & eyes, and ensures that everything — your surroundings, the OS system UI, and your apps — gets rendered in the right physical place in space and updated at 90 to 120 times per second while your head and body are moving around.

These two “computers” must operate together without missing a beat — any latency above 20 milliseconds becomes quickly noticeable in VR and will often translate very quickly into user perception of unresponsiveness or jankiness, which can cause discomfort, eye strain or even dizziness for many people.

Enter the Vision Pro dual-chip design:

“A unique dual‑chip design enables the spatial experiences on Apple Vision Pro. The powerful M2 chip simultaneously runs visionOS, executes advanced computer vision algorithms, and delivers stunning graphics, all with incredible efficiency. And the brand-new R1 chip is specifically dedicated to process input from the cameras, sensors, and microphones, streaming images to the displays within 12 milliseconds — for a virtually lag-free, real-time view of the world.“

Apple Vision Pro website

The Vision Pro ships with the same M2 chip as the 2022 iPad Pro (or 2022 MacBook Air) alongside the new R1 chip which handles the massive amount of data coming from the 20+ tracking cameras and depth sensors (sensor fusion). What’s interesting to note is that Vision Pro actually does perform largely like an iPad Pro in benchmark tests that push CPU and GPU to their limits in both single-core and multi-core scenarios (see chart below). 

This is more impressive than it seems, and demonstrates that the R1 chip is doing a very significant amount of heavy lifting — essentially the vast majority of the spatial computing workload — leaving a lot of compute room for the M2 chip to deliver the same level of performance as if it was just running inside an iPad Pro.

By all accounts so far, the R1 chip appears to be of a fairly similar package size as the M2 chip (though built using a specialized architecture), which puts the Vision Pro well ahead of any current generation iPad or MacBook Air, and likely more on par with a MacBook Pro from a silicon performance perspective. Definitely an impressive achievement by the Apple Silicon team.

This also begs the question… what if you could completely offload the Vision Pro’s compute to another Apple device?

Apple’s decision to use a tethered pack will enable future Vision headsets to be much lighter by offloading compute to an iPhone, iPad or MacBook

One of the most controversial aspects of Vision Pro is the fact that it sports a tethered battery pack, differently from all other commercially available standalone VR headsets. Many people have heavily criticized Apple for this decision because of the inconvenience of the “hanging” external battery.

I agree with Palmer Luckey (from his recent interview with Peter Diamandis) that this was a necessary short-term decision on Apple’s part given the reality of the hardware shipping inside the Vision Pro, but more importantly it was a very intentional long-term decision, which I’ll explain.

As I mentioned earlier, the Vision is a meticulously over-engineered computer with a very significant collection of power-hungry components:

• 2x laptop-class processors (the R1 chip is almost the same size as the M2, which is the same processor shipping on MacBooks)
• 2x very bright micro-OLED displays with high pixel density
• 1x auxiliary EyeSight display
• 12x cameras and other sensors
• 2x blower fans
• 2x speakers

As Quinn Nelson from Snazzy Labs carefully explains in his excellent review, the Vision Pro likely draws as much as 40 watts of power, which is more than most MacBook laptops. This also means it has a power supply with the potential of generating a lot of heat. So, in addition to transferring the battery weight out of the headset, the decision to move to a tethered pack also keeps a huge heat source safely away from your head.

MY TAKE: All that said, the long-term strategic reason for having an external battery pack is to set expectations with Vision Pro users that there will always be an external box connected to the headset. In future Vision headsets, Apple should be able to comfortably start moving a lot of electronics off the headset, possibly shaving off as much half of the weight over a few generations and target around 300g. This also opens an extremely interesting path for Apple in a few years to use an iPhone, iPad or MacBook as the tethered computer driving the headset, which would dramatically simplify the headset.

Interestingly, there is a tethered VR headset in the market today that demonstrates this desirable end state. It’s the Bigscreen Beyond, the world’s smallest PC VR headset (i.e. needs to be tethered to a computer) that is lighter than even most ski goggles at 127 grams. Bigscreen’s ability to build this product is in many ways a bit of cheating since the headset was stripped of all sensors (no external cameras or eye tracking), but its existence nonetheless plays an important role in letting us experience what the future holds and where Apple’s sights are focused.

Software

The Vision Pro software story is a bold antithesis of VR — and the lack of exciting AR apps at launch paints the product into an empty corner

“Welcome to the era of spatial computing” is Apple’s leading slogan for Vision Pro and, and as expected by everyone in the VR industry, Apple is going all-in on AR (augmented reality) to deliver on this proposition. The company has gone out of their way to actively ignore everything that VR has been known for over the last decade.

At the center of Apple’s marketing for Vision Pro is “keeping users connected to their surroundings and other people”. Reading in-between these lines, it’s not hard to see that Apple is taking an anti-VR stance that borderline accuses Meta’s approach to VR of promoting human isolation while positioning Vision Pro as the antithesis of that.

MY TAKE: Apple’s anti-VR stance is a risky move because it negates most of the traditional immersive content that has made the VR medium popular until now, and at least for now is painting Vision Pro into an empty corner. This reminds me of Apple’s broad stance on privacy — built to be in complete opposition to Meta/Google — which has put them in a tight spot by severely limiting their options and restricting innovation in the age of Gen AI.

There are no fully immersive games in the Vision Pro app store, whereas easily >90% of the Oculus Quest catalog is made of immersive VR games. Instead of leveraging the existing community of high-quality immersive VR content developers, Apple is focusing all of its energy exclusively on AR use cases that play to the company’s ecosystem strengths — iOS apps and MacOS productivity — which I’ll dive into over the next few sections.

The launch roster of 3D AR apps & games is a tremendous disappointment — in both quality and quantity — and mostly includes a few simple casual games, some of which are originally 2D games hastily converted into 3D art. The fact that ARKit has been available for so many years on iPad and iPhone (despite its limited success) should have made it possible for Apple to easily round up developers into building a sufficient number of exciting and impressive AR titles for Vision Pro. Instead, we’re seeing an initial lack of developer excitement for the category that should have been the most defining and inspiring category on Vision Pro.

Ironically, Meta made almost exactly the same mistake launching Quest Pro in 2022. That headset shipped with close to zero AR apps despite their emphasis in the launch messaging on “full-color mixed reality”.

MY TAKE: This may be the first device category where Apple’s “build it and they will come” approach to creating developer traction may simply not work as previously. It will be many years (and possibly even more than a decade) before there are tens of millions of active Vision Pro users willing to pay for spatial AR apps. Apple will need to take a page out of the Oculus playbook and actively motivate developers financially to develop for Vision Pro.

Vision Pro’s positioning as a productivity & movie watching “big screen” is dull & unimaginative but Apple is unashamedly owning it

With a weak and limited launch roster of AR apps that doesn’t include a single flagship 3D app or game, Apple had to focus the entire positioning for Vision Pro at launch almost entirely on how it plugs into the existing Apple ecosystem of 2D apps.

In the usual Apple-style product marketing, the launch messaging for Vision Pro is very explicitly codified in the product webpage and every single marketing asset is consistent with it. How Apple has chosen to sequence their product messaging matters just as much as the messages themselves. Vision Pro is 60% about 2D productivity and 40% about watching media/movies on a big screen:

Use case	Apple Slogans
Productivity	“Free your desktop. And your apps will follow.” “How to work in all‑new ways.”
Media	“The ultimate theater. Wherever you are. “An immersive way to experience entertainment.”

On a side note, FaceTime with Persona avatars and spatial photos & videos are also pushed as core pillars in the Vision Pro product messaging, but they’re clearly just ancillary use cases to support marketing. Though too small to matter for now, they may (and for Apple’s sake, hopefully will) end up playing a much bigger role in the future.

MY TAKE: The Vision Pro launch is a significant missed opportunity, with Apple “welcoming us into the era of spatial computing” with a software and services stack that is practically only focused on 2D use cases. Though the in-store demos paint an exciting future, the experience delivered by Apple at launch is dull and unimaginative at best.

Putting aside my criticism of Apple’s focus for the Vision Pro at launch, the next few sections will offer a deep dive into my thoughts and opinions on the software and experience enabling Productivity and Media use cases.

ONE MORE THING: (1) Why Meta’s Android moment is finally here, (2) My unsolicited product advice for Quest Pro 2 and beyond

As I said at the beginning of this essay, while working at Meta/Oculus I used to semi-seriously joke that the best thing that could ever happen to us was having Apple enter the VR industry. One of the main reasons for me to say this was that I knew Apple would do the best job of any company making people really want VR through its unparalleled brand, design and marketing. Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey puts it best:

“VR will become something everyone wants before it becomes something everyone can afford.”

Palmer Luckey, 2015 tweet

For Meta, the Vision Pro launch is the best marketing tool for Quest VR that the company could have dreamed of but could have never achieved on its own, for a few reasons:

• It elevates VR to a level of mainstream consumer curiosity and breaks away from gamer and VR enthusiast niches; in media coverage alone the Vision Pro probably had 1,000x more reach than any Oculus/Quest launch in history
• It sets a new experience gold standard for VR especially by pushing the existing boundaries in display resolution and creating a new paradigm of “UI magic” with gaze & pinch which may be an instant de facto standard
• It establishes a pricing envelope that enables Meta to break away from the $500 price point that Quest has been stuck in, and specifically allows them to ship a Quest Pro 2 headset priced at a $1,000 to $1,500 (but likely not higher) without being completely rejected by consumers
• It creates a formidable competitor for Meta teams to maniacally chase and will almost certainly force the company to move with a much greater sense of urgency internally (which would be a great outcome as friends on the inside are constantly complaining Meta Reality Labs moves too slowly)

What should Meta do in response to the Vision Pro launch?

In order to really seize this moment and opportunity created by the Vision Pro launch, Meta would need to ship a VR headset by mid-2025 that both builds on the new experience gold standard created by the Vision Pro and is objectively a better product across as many dimensions as possible.

I put together my own Top 10 wish list for Quest Pro 2:

1. Double down investment in micro-OLED as it’s likely the only way to achieve display resolution at or near Vision Pro; I suspect this may be exactly what the recently announced LG partnership is about
2. Build an ergonomic headset that can be worn for 2-4 hours without causing any major discomfort issues; ideally offering two battery options: (1) a head-strap with a built-in battery in the back of the head, and (2) a wired pack (like the Vision Pro) that moves the battery off the head and reduces the headset weight to below 500 grams while increasing energy capacity.
3. Deliver better passthrough than Vision Pro by dramatically improving Quest 3’s latency and distortion correction and improving upon all of the Vision Pro passthrough issues — ensure no perceivable motion blur, high dynamic range, accurate white balance
4. Take Apple’s gaze+pinch UI to the next level by productizing all of the amazing research on hand tracking done at Meta (ex: Rob Wang’s super talented group) to enable fine-grained gestures such as scrolling and D-pad selection by detecting small finger movements solely via camera input (this is not the CTRL Labs stack… that’s for the future)
5. Partner with Microsoft to make Windows computers 1st class citizens in Quest Pro 2 and enable advanced desktop productivity use cases that go well beyond virtual monitors (ex: make it possible to take any window and place it in space)
6. Launch Android 2D tablet apps natively on Quest to match the Vision Pro iPad compatibility library either by partnering with Google to license Play Store (which seems unlikely these days though I still believe Ash Jhaveri and Hiroshi could work together to pull it off) or just build a curated tablet app store directly (which we had considered in the past at Oculus but passed on)
7. Launch human-like avatars with Quest Pro 2 by productizing Meta’s mind-blowing Codec Avatars technology, likely one of the VR research areas that has received the most R&D dollars for the last 7+ years, used by Lex Fridman in his interview with Mark Zuckerberg in late 2023
8. Launch high-definition room scanning and unlock teleportation using technology that has existed within Oculus Research for several years now; it is time for Meta to make this future a reality where people can be remote but feel truly present by visiting each other’s home, office or favorite place

Appendix: Other Fun Things

Despite all of its hardware insanity the Vision Pro display is still a far cry from a VR retina display (and may never get there)

As noted above the Vision Pro display delivers insane pixel density at over 3,000 PPI (compared to 500 PPI for the highest resolution smartphones), but because the panel is so close to our eyes, it still doesn’t come even close to the resolution it would need to have in order to qualify as a retina display.

A retina display, by Apple’s definition, is a display with a high enough resolution that the human eye cannot resolve individual pixels. Because different devices are used at varying distances from the eye, there is no single PPI (pixels per inch) standard for retina across all device categories. Instead, it’s useful to look at PPD (pixels per degree), which is a measure of angular resolution independent of viewing distance, or specifically the number of horizontal pixels per degree of viewing angle. See this article from SimulaVR for an excellent explanation, and here’s an image from that article:

A human eye with 20/20 vision has a resolution of 60 PPD. This means very specifically that we can resolve 60 pixels per each 1 degree of viewing angle (or 1 pixel per arc minute, which is 1/60th of a degree). The Vision Pro has an angular resolution of 34, which is 1/3 more than the Meta Quest 3 but still very far away from the 60 PPD we’d need for a retina-quality display.

Achieving angular resolution anywhere near 60 PPD in a VR headset is likely not possible with any technology in the mid-term horizon.