This is Technology Bytes, episode 50, for February 17th, 2024.

Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.

My name is Joel.

Enjoy, and here we go.

Well, here we go again.

This week, I’m talking about the Apple Vision Pro once again.

But this time, I’ve touched it, I’ve held it, I’ve put it on my head.

I actually finally went to the Apple Store for a demo.

And, in fact, I went twice, and I will share that with you as well and how that happened and give you my thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro having actually had it on my face.

So I finally decided that I needed to set a demo appointment at an Apple Store.

And so I did that last week or early this week, I think on a Tuesday, something like that.

Anyway, and I went to the Apple Store, tried it on.

It was not a very good experience, and I’ll talk about that and probably just compare and contrast the two times that I went.

And so it was quite disappointing.

And so I decided that maybe I should try it again and see if I did something wrong, if the person who did the demo for me didn’t quite get it, or what the case might be.

So I went online and tried to set a second appointment.

I was going to go to a different Apple Store, but I used the same email address.

I used my name, of course.

And it said, we don’t have any shopping appointments.

And then I would go back and try to reset it and try to get in.

And then I realized that Apple already knows that Joel Merig at joel.merig at merigfamily.com has already done a demo.

And so if he’s going back, it’s just to set up an appointment to potentially purchase, which is not what I wanted to do at all.

And so I ended up using my middle name and signed up as Andrew.

And then I used the email from this microcast, the technologybytes at merigfamily.com.

And with that change, I was able to set up another demo at a different Apple Store and try it all over again.

The second demo went better, but there are still things that I thought, from what I’ve listened to and had told to me over the airwaves through podcasts or whatever, that just didn’t fly in my experience.

So the Apple Vision Pro is a little bit heavy, and it’s quite uncomfortable.

And the first demo I did, when I took it off, my wife said, you’ve got a big red line across your forehead.

And in my second demo, the gentleman who helped me said, if you have an indent in your forehead after the demo, then you wore it wrong.

And I’m like, it’s too bad that the first demo people didn’t tell me that, because it was not comfortable.

And then the other thing that happened is the field of focus was very narrow.

The immense screens that are in front of your eyes and the size of the apps that you can put out there, those were really neat things.

The technology was really cool.

It was quite fascinating to try.

But the text on the screen or the picture on the screen was only in focus for me in a very narrow band.

And at the first demonstration, I thought maybe it was the Zeiss lenses that they chose.

So they took my glasses, put them in a device to check my prescription, and then that chooses the right Zeiss lens inserts for me.

And so in the first demonstration, I asked the guy, are the lenses in the Vision Pro?

And he says, yes, they’re in there.

And I said, because this is very blurry.

I can hardly see anything.

So we took it off, he reset it, put the lenses back in, had all kinds of trouble getting the Apple Vision Pro to go back into demo mode and to repair the Zeiss lenses with it.

It was a mess.

And I don’t know if that would be an experience when you own one, or once the setup’s done, it’s done.

I’m not sure.

But I don’t know.

When I wear glasses, and I wear them all the time, I don’t have the limit in periphery vision that I did wearing the Apple Vision Pro.

And it was uncomfortable.

The home screen, I would have to look at the middle row of icons and the ones on the top and the ones on the bottom, totally out of focus.

And so I’d have to move my head.

And in the second demo, the guy says, you’re moving your head too much.

What’s happening?

And so I told him, and he goes, okay, you need to adjust the strap in this way so that the pressure on your head and cheeks and face is the same all the way around.

And when I made that adjustment, it worked very well and a whole lot better.

I think most of the problem was the fit and the adjustment.

And that solo band, if I was to own an Apple Vision Pro, would not get used unless maybe I was having a family member try it or whatever.

I think I’d always be using the one that straps over my head so that the Apple Vision Pro is sitting perfectly in front of my eyes.

It goes through a system where it aligns the lenses with your eyes so it can do the eye tracking.

And even in the blurriness of the first demonstration, the eye tracking worked quite well.

And I realized a couple different times that as I was looking at things to set up and learn how to do the gestures and all of those kind of things, that I was moving my head to look at the targets that I needed to, you know, touch my fingers and thumb together to activate.

And at some point I realized all I have to do is move my eyes and I just have to look to the left or look to the right, up, down, down to the left.

And I don’t have to move my head at all to see those things.

You can do it that way, and sometimes when you have apps open, you must do it that way just to see what you’re actually looking at and focus on it.

But I got a little bit better with that over time.

One of the other things that I heard a lot about is how good the cameras are at picking up your gestures.

So at the two demos that I did, the chair that they sit you in was exactly the same at both demos.

The chair that the person doing the demo sat in was the same, not as the one I sat in, but the same at both stores.

And the chair that they sit you in to do the demo is super heavy.

I tried to slide it out so I could sit without jamming my knees against the demonstration table, and it just didn’t move.

I had to use two hands I had to pull because they want that chair to be stable.

They don’t want it moving at all.

They don’t want you to feel disoriented or uncomfortable.

In fact, after my first demo, when it just was a bad experience, the people in the store that were part of the demonstration, the person who did it for me and the people around who had done it for others and kind of their manager, were super disappointed that my experience was so bad.

And they’re like, do you want to try it again?

I was like, no, I don’t really want to try it again.

It was terrible.

But it’s interesting in the chair that it just doesn’t move, and I think that’s all part of it.

And then the other thing is that the first demonstration I got to see the dinosaur, and one of the things that I’d heard over and over again is the butterfly comes out, you hold out your finger, and no matter what you do, your brain just tricks you into thinking the butterfly lands on your finger.

Now, I don’t know why they say that.

I thought I was an Apple nerd.

Maybe the people I listened to are even more than I.

But there’s a quarter-inch gap between the legs of the butterfly.

Don’t get me wrong here.

The graphics were fantastic.

But there was such a big gap between my finger and where that butterfly supposedly landed on my finger.

No thought of that being real at all.

And being scared by the dinosaur and ducking under a tail, any of that, no, not for me.

So interesting how different my physical experience was than from what I’d heard online.

So one of the things that I had going in at preconception was that it was going to be awesome, and I had huge expectations.

And I left the first demonstration hugely disappointed.

And I so desperately wanted to really like it.

And the second demonstration, while a whole lot better, was still not mind-blowing.

And it just disappointed me because I’d heard so much about how it was.

In fact, everyone I listened to said, you need to do a demo so that you can better understand what we’re talking about.

But leave your wallet in the car because you will buy it.

I’m like, not in a heartbeat because it was not good.

It was not comfortable.

The vision was not super.

And it was not an experience that made me want to buy it at all.

And that was the big question that my wife asked.

Would you still want one?

And I said, yep, absolutely.

But your experience was so bad.

And I said, I blame that on the store.

I blame that on the people at the store.

I don’t think my setup was right for my head.

I think if I had my glasses prescription, that the Zeiss lenses would be better matched to my vision.

And, of course, I had all the Apple nerd excuses for why I would get it.

And I would need the two weeks.

I would need to use it regularly.

I’d love to have it.

I just can’t afford it.

I will not be buying it anytime in the near future.

But I’m real curious.

If I had it for a two-week demonstration of my own, using my own apps in my own environment, would my recommendation or experience differ that much from the demo at the Apple store?

I’m not really sure.

And at the second demo, they said, you know, what would you use this for?

And I don’t really have a good application necessarily.

It would just end up being another computer in my life, I guess.

But watching movies, those kind of things, I think that would be pretty cool.

So the one thing that was neat and was countered by my disappointment of much of the rest was the experience of the panorama pictures.

Those were fantastic.

I was looking really closely.

It felt like there was a lot more focus in that than in the other areas.

But that was just amazing.

And then the 3D video, spatial video, that was pretty neat, pretty amazing.

The 3D pictures, that was pretty cool.

So there is some really neat technology there that would be very interesting to have and try over time.

And the movie experience from listening to people has been quite fantastic.

In the demo, you watch a couple short clips, and yeah, it’s pretty neat.

But if you’re so uncomfortable with the thing on your head, you’re not going to spend the whole time watching a movie.

That just doesn’t make sense.

And I really just haven’t heard people having that much of an issue with the comfort.

In fact, many people say it’s overblown, but not in my case.

I only know what I experienced, and the experience was not good.

I still want one.

I’d still buy it in a heartbeat.

But not because of the demonstration, mostly because of the reviews of people that I trust in technology.

Well, I think I’m done rambling on.

I probably won’t talk about the Vision Pro for a while unless by some weird circumstance some rich uncle shows up and buys me one.

So that is all I have for today.

If you have any comments or suggestions, especially if you have a Vision Pro and think I’m way off base, please tell me.

And you can send them to technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.

That’s B-Y-T-E-S M-E-A-R-I-G family.

Thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast.

I look forward to the next time we’re together taking another bite of technology.

Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com