A big surprise to me using the Vision Pro over the year was first of all how good the visual quality is and then when the Mac to Vision mirroring was improved, how little–if any–latency there is when working on my Mac in XR. This is not something I do often since I love the quality of the nano-coated display on my 14” M4 machine and the 27” display I use at home.
My experience with virtual movement has not been great. Walking with a ‘joystick’ makes me quite queasy, apart from walking straight ahead for a bit. Portals don’t help much since they require a bit of recalibrating when ‘landing’. Brandel’s ‘take’ on Bob Horn’s Mural was a revelation, where instead of virtual movement we can pinch and virtually drag the massive mural around. Same effect, no bad tummy†.
Forward Facing. When using the headset with Author, of which I have a basic version working in visionOS, I kept being disappointed by how much space the Author window in XR space takes up, including the toolbar at the top of the window which is now persistent it seems, as well as just the general size. It seems lumpy.
When using the headset with 180° video however, the quality and the experience is fantastic, except for when the camera moves oddly or when the scene is cropped in odd ways. I personally think that XR is for theater, for life size persons, primarily, but hey. Concert for One, by Apple is great, though there is only one concert so far, showing a singer with a backing band in the background. Epic. So is Amaze VR (or something) which uses virtual sets to great, through cheesy effect.
360. Our work last year on Reading in XR situated the user in the center of a sphere with a neutral grey background, where the user interacted with information using a virtual ‘laser’ pointer. This afforded the user a comfortable seated position with a 360 workspace.
Table. In experimenting this year I have become a bit of a proponent of mapping the user’s physical table in XR (as Fabien has now implemented), so that the user can simply rest their arms and also put information on the table to be worked on. This reduces flexibility but provides a level of physical and emotional comfort in that the user’s physical desk does not disappear upon entering XR.
Standing. I generally sit at a desk when I am working and I’m not someone who uses a standing desk, but working in what Fabien has built has given me an understanding of the benefit of standing when working with spatial information. Standing up allows me to not only physically walk around in the information space where physical space allows, it also allows a much greater degree of stereo vision opportunity and 360° access. This is because when I sit I have primarily eye movement defending my useful space, of which only a very small part is sharp foveal vision, and some degree of neck and upper body movement which takes more effort. When standing I have all the limbs in my legs and torso also allowing for slight or large movements, making depth considerably more ‘available’ to me. This is a key issue with spatial computing; what space is available†.
All Together. Taking all of this together, allowing the user to transition between different postures as the situation suits, is an interesting design challenge.