I’m definitely interested in the Vision Pro. And I say that as someone who’s been a VR enthusiast since the Oculus DK2 and someone who spent a few years making a VR product for healthcare, but *not* a fan of Meta and their “leadership” in the space. It’s been great that they put a tremendous amount of money into trying to build out a VR ecosystem, and a lot of absolutely brilliant people have worked under Meta’s umbrella. But Zuckerberg’s obsession with “social” as a driver for *VR* is about as big a mistake as I’ve ever seen at that scale.

I’d love to have seen someone with that kind of $ work on VR as a great “transportative”, isolating experience, which is what VR does extraordinarily well.

While Vision Pro’s price is obviously limiting, it’s clear that this is a “top-down” approach that I think is likely to work. And it’s likely to work because VP offers a competent, usable AR *work* device, where the Quest Pro/2 have been limited by their screen resolution and comfort, and their general … “social-first” approach.

It feels to me like Apple’s approach has been a focus on AR. But instead of getting sucked in to the massive problems that Hololens and Magic Leap and nReal have had trying to make waveguide-based “overlay” tech work, they’ve instead cranked up the resolution and fidelity of pass-through tech… which seems like the correct option to me given the fatal problems of the current crop of AR headsets.

I do *not* think Vision Pro is the thing that will make AR/VR take off like a rocket. There’s a technology limitation that will keep this a niche device for a few generations, IMO, around either “true” AR, or some sort of trickery that lets passthrough-style VR appear invisible. When that happens, AR will instantly become a gajillion-dollar industry faster than anything else, ever. This isn’t that.

But VP is a *huge* step in the right direction if it works as advertised, which, given Apple’s history I presume it will. Which will baffle folks looking at specs and $, and wondering why not Meta Quest Pro?

But the last bit of this puzzle is trust. XR requires a huge amount of environmental and personal data. I *do not want* Meta to have that data about me, because I know it’ll be abused at every opportunity. While all big companies are highly incentivized to utilize that data as much as possible, Apple’s shown a commitment to data privacy that’s well beyond anything their competitors are even willing to talk about.

And this means that once there’s a viable alternative to Meta, I’m going to drop Meta’s products like a hot rock and never look back. And that means as a developer, working on VP is a prospect I’m unlikely to pass up.