Apple Vision Pro guided tour just dropped: 3 new things you may learn from it
Apple Vision Pro now has a 10-minute guided tour on YouTube, giving prospective buyers insight into how the mixed-reality headset works.
Will, an actor in the guided tour, claims to be an Apple Vision Pro “first-time user” as Allesandra McGinnis, Product Manager for the Apple Vision Pro, gives him an in-depth tutorial on how to use the head-mounted display, from employing common air gestures to communicating with funny-looking avatars called Personas.
Apple Vision Pro guided tour drops on YouTube
In the video, McGinnis guides Will through the following:
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Basic navigation. Will learns how to use eye and hand gestures to select and scroll through apps. Plus, he learns to pinch his fingers to explore photos and videos inside the headset.
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Launching apps with voice commands. The guided tour gives viewers insight on how they can invoke Siri to launch apps such as Apple TV.
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Spatial computing. Will figures out how to place multiple browser windows, which are virtual artifacts inside the headset, in his real-world environment.
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Surround-sound music. After launching the Apple Music app, Will discovers that the Apple Vision Pro delivers surround-sound tunes.
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FaceTime calls. The guided tour explains that FaceTime calls can be expanded to take over the whole room.
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Environments. To escape your current surroundings, you can choose from a number of different scenic locales that give users an immersive, 360-degree experience.
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Connecting a MacBook. Mirror your MacBook screen to Apple Vision Pro using Sidecar.
3 new things I learned from the Apple Vision Pro video
Perhaps these features were already mentioned at WWDC 2023, the widely shared event where Apple first debuted the Apple Vision Pro, but I learned the following three nuggets of info watching the guide tour:
1. You get FaceTime calls from Mac users, but ‘Personas’ from other Vision Pro users.
In the guided tour video, Will gets a FaceTime call from a woman named Yuri Imoto. Shortly after, he gets a call from Kristin Oro, and he asks, “Why does your FaceTime look different from Yuri?”
Oro explains that Yuri was taking a call on her Mac, so it looks like a regular video call. Oro, on the other hand, launched FaceTime while using Apple Vision Pro, prompting the headset to present Oro has a “Persona,” a creepy avatar that uses a mix of her eyes and preset facial features to create a simulated, in-headset presence.
2. The surround-sound experience comes from ‘audio pods’
McGinnis explained that the Apple Vision Pro has audio pods that sit just outside of users’ ears, and they’re designed to deliver “rich spatial audio.”
3. Nearby people can appear inside ‘Environments’
While you’re immersed in a 360-degree Apple Vision Pro environment, you can see people near you appear as a faint digital overlay inside your headsets, thanks to a feature called “Breakthrough.”
4. The battery pack was noticeably absent
Finally, one thing I would’ve loved to see more is the battery pack. A quick tutorial on how to use it and how to best position something that may be a bit irksome would be useful.