In mid-July, Apple launched the Apple Vision Pro headset in Australia. The marketing sells it as a productivity tool, while quietly showing you how great it is for watching TV shows and movies. And yes, there’s some cool productivity functions. And yes, watching your stories in the Apple Vision Pro headset is eye-popping.
At a per unit cost of AUS$5,999, it’s going to be some time until average day-to-day people are using this for day-to-day work or entertainment. But you know who will be able to get some real value out of the Apple Vision Pro? Educators and training facilitators.
First of all, what is it?
It isn’t virtual reality (VR). It isn’t augmented reality (AR). It’s what Apple is branding “spatial reality,” but really, it’s what industry professionals call extended reality (XR) and that is basically when VR and AR are smooshed together.
The Apple Vision Pro is a headset that lets its users engage with a digital reality layered over the real world. Think of it snow goggles that take you out of that real world and place you into your phone.
This promo from Apple is a surprisingly impressive (and quick!) way to get a feel for the Apple Vision Pro experience:
Hands-on experience
The headsets are on sale now and Apple is very keen to sell some. This means you can go into an Apple store, and they will demonstrate the headset with you.
The first thing you’ll notice is the weight of the headset. It’s a bit heavy, but not as heavy as you might expect. The weight is offset by the fact the Apple Vision Pro is actually quite comfortable on your face. The caveat here is that the guy writing this article has a huge, oversized Irish head. So, your experience may vary.
You don’t have a mouse or other type of hand control. So, when using the headset, it will track your eyes, and you use them like a mouse. To select it – like you would while clicking a mouse – you just pinch your thumb and index finger together. How it recognises your bare hands are doing that remains a mystery – Apple Witchcraft.
A lot of what you will be shown is pretty cool …up to a point. Being shown photos from the generic photo library is good when the photos are displayed at what is effectively the size of a wall. Even cooler are the panoramic photos that look so big through the headset that you almost feel like you are there. Sitting in your own private cinema is also pretty nifty. Because you are wearing a headset, videos can interchangeably be 2D or 3D.
But where the headset really dazzles is with its immersion videos, which are promotional videos filmed using special camera rigs that record in an especially large format that’s designed to completely surround your 180-degree vision. Being so large and, well, immersive, you genuinely feel you are there – watching a football match behind the net, standing beside elephants, and (most impressively) looking a singer directly in the eyes as she sings with her band.
Without much imagination, you can easily envision how that sort of technology can be applied in a professional and educational setting.
The idea of putting on your headset to do day-to-day work on your computer seemed silly initially, but Apple start to justify it by pushing the boundaries on what you expect from that experience. It has some standard Mac software installed on it called Keynote. If you’re not a Mac user, Keynote is basically the Apple version of Powerpoint. Does that sort of computer work need to be done in a virtual space? Obviously not. But within the Vision Pro, the software is pushed that one step further by giving you virtual spaces to practice in. That’s fantastic for the majority of us who fear public speaking.
Read your presentation off your screen in either a board room or a lecture theatre. That’s a cool, useful application.
The Apple staff member will guide you through the experience. Using the headset is intuitive enough, but you will need some initial guidance. Again, Apple actually have another rather good promotional video that replicates one of the tours. Just note that:
- It is waaaaay more impressive actually experiencing this yourself. The whole experience was joy inducing and is genuinely remarkable.
- The tour guide in the video is perhaps a little too infantilising in that Apple way that is both comforting and annoying.
The Apple Vision Pro in education & training
For years, there has been the idea of using virtual reality for education and training. The really easy way into thinking about this are ideas like school classrooms learning about history by being placed into virtual simulations of Ancient Rome, World War 2, etc. Or biology students walking with the dinosaurs. Or any number of ideas that sound great in initial concept, but don’t really work when you start thinking about implementing them into teaching.
The problem with all those simulation ideas is that they are great for exposure to the subject, but they block the teacher out of the experience. This is where the Apple Vision Pro actually creates a really compelling use-case. Because the headset is built with augmented reality as the default experience for users, it enables the teacher to be visible and present through the lens of the headset, while the user is being presented digitally created objects, spaces, and experiences.
It is worth noting that this is not a device that is suitable for users 13 and under, which rules out educational applications for primary school-aged students.
Where the real strength of this hardware will be is more with tertiary and training institutions which often demand greater real-world and hands-on engagement with their fields of study. Consider the benefits of medical students able to interact with responsive digital patients, or similarly with TAFE students studying building and construction trades, design students, etc. Consider language learning and the ease of better understanding cultures.
Don’t expect an egalitarian future
A lot of people look at this technology and think that it has the potential to break down geographic and economic restrictions put on students. Now, it certainly does have that potential, but we’re not there yet in terms of its capabilities.
Yes, this does bring us closer to the idea of being able to engage with educational facilities from the comfort of home (regardless of where they may be located in the world), but all of the online engagement with other people is only marginally more sophisticated via the Apple Vision Pro than just getting on a Zoom call is. That capability will eventually be a thing of (extended) reality, but it’s not quite there yet.
And because we are talking about still requiring geographic ties to educational institutions, the same costs will still be applicable – if anything, the added costs of development and production of apps, combined with the expense of the $6k Apple Vision pro headset is likely to make the cost of education more expensive.
But, it will in all likelihood be a better, more engaging, more enriching education.
That’s just the reality.
