VISION PRO DEMONSTRATION
Finally I got to see the Vision Pro and what it could do from a salesperson who acted as if he didn’t expect me to buy it and if I did buy it expected me to return it in two weeks for a full refund. I am writing this a week later and I am not going to return it but not because of his demonstration.
This was because his demonstration didn’t demonstrate what I needed to see. I came with my spatial videos from Sri Lanka and India, eager to see them on the Vision Pro. But that was not allowed. The Vision Pro presentation was a prepared presentation to show off the most striking things that the Vision Pro could do. But all along I was thinking, and said to the guy demonstrating it, that everything was very beautiful but was done on much better cameras than I owned. I had already read on line that there were $5000 cameras that could make extremely high quality spatial videos. I wanted to see what my iPhone could do.
I think he could have put one or two of my videos on but he didn’t. The videos he did put on, of a dinosaur sniffing around and Alicia Keyes recording a song, were terrific. But I knew they were done with better cameras. And the totally immersive environments of sitting on the moon or in snow covered Yosemite Park with a rocky stone face rising hundreds of feet and sitting on a rock in Joshua Tree park were stunning, even breathtaking. It was all too neat and too perfect. But it was enough to show me that the Vision Pro was a tremendously capable computer which wasn’t overpriced and would let me do anything that I was capable of doing. I was hooked or hooked enough to buy it with the promise that I could return it it in two weeks. It was probably the best sales pitch that could be done. Again Apple knew just what it was doing.
As soon as I got home I tried it out. It was easy to set up even though Apple offers no manual and no more advice on how to use it than the guy gave me in the half hour demonstration. I had to figure it out for myself.
By doing this I learned two things which I will describe later.
The first was that using it was actually very intuitive and was based on the way I am already using an Apple iPhone or an Apple iPad. I could pretty quickly figure it out. My only big problem was that because I am leaving so soon again for Europe I am not connected to regular high speed internet and rely on my iPhone hotspot. My 50 GB of high speed Hotspot Wifi quickly ran out. That was not an Apple caused problem, it was mine. I managed to buy 10 GB of Hotspot wifi and used all of it to download my best spatial movies and panoramas onto the Vision Pro. And once on the Vision Pro I was able to look at them fairly easily and they looked terrific. I was sold.
The second thing I learned almost immediately when I tried to show Susie my spatial videos is that it is very hard to show someone else how to use the Vision Pro. That is the reason that the demonstration was so tightly controlled and regulated. When someone else tries to use it they are locked behind the goggles. When they have trouble making something work the demonstrator has no idea what is going on under the goggles and can’t give any advice leading to miscommunication and great confusion. This is partly because when you get it all set up on a movie and put it on someone’s head the Vision Pro senses the new person and starts all over again, setting up the Vision Pro for that person, adjusting for their eyes and starting from the beginning, making it very hard to get back to the video you are trying to demonstrate. This is a maze of finding your way along that the demonstrator stayed away from.
In later posts I’ll try to deal with these two issues.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 