On Monday I got a sneak peek at Apple’s vision for the future of computing. For about a half hour, I wore the $3,500 Vision Pro, the company’s first high-tech glasses, due to launch next year.

I walked away with mixed feelings, including a lingering sense of skepticism.

On the one hand, I was impressed by the quality of the headphones, which Apple heralds as ushering in an era of “spatial computing,” where digital data is mixed with the physical world to unlock new capabilities. Imagine using a headset to assemble furniture while instructions are digitally projected onto the pieces, for example, or cooking a meal while a recipe is displayed in the corner of your eye.

Apple’s device had high-resolution video, intuitive controls, and a comfortable fit, which felt superior to my experiences with headphones made over the past decade by Meta, Magic Leap, sony and others.

But after wearing the new headset to view photos and interact with a virtual dinosaur, I also felt like there wasn’t much new to see here. And the experience triggered a “yuck” factor that I’ve never had with an Apple product before. More on this later.

Let me start at the beginning. After Apple unveiled the headphones on Monday, its first major release since the Apple Watch in 2015, I was allowed to try out a pre-production model of the Vision Pro. Apple staff took me to a private room at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley and sat me down on a couch for a demo.

The Vision Pro, which looks like a pair of ski goggles, has a white USB cable that plugs into a silver battery I slipped into my jeans pocket. To put it on my face, I turned a knob on the side of the ear cup to adjust the fit and secured a Velcro strap over my head.

I pressed a metal button towards the front of the device to turn it on. I then went through a setup process, which involved looking at a moving dot so the headset could lock on to my eye movements. Vision Pro has a variety of sensors to track eye movements, hand gestures, and voice commands, which are the main ways to control it. Looking at an icon is equivalent to hovering the mouse over it; To press a button, touch your thumb and index finger together, making a quick pinch that is equivalent to clicking the mouse.

The pinch gesture was also used to grab and move apps on the screen. It was intuitive and felt less clunky than waving the motion controllers that usually come with competing phones.

But it raised questions. What other hand gestures would the headset recognize for gaming? How good will voice controls be if Siri’s voice transcription on phones currently doesn’t work well? Apple isn’t sure yet what other gestures will be supported and didn’t let me test voice controls.

All the many uses?

Then it was time for app demos to show how headphones can enrich our everyday lives and help us stay connected to each other.

Apple first guided me by looking at photos and a video of a birthday party on the headphones. I could turn a dial near the front of the Vision Pro counterclockwise to make photo backgrounds more transparent and see the real world, including the Apple employees around me, or turn it clockwise. clockwise to make the photo more opaque and immerse myself.

Apple also had me open a meditation app on headphones that displayed 3D animations while relaxing music played and a voice told me to breathe. But meditation couldn’t prepare me for what came next: a video call.

A small window appeared: a notification of a FaceTime call from another Apple employee wearing the headset. I looked at the answer button and pinched it to take the call.

The Apple employee on the video call was wearing a “persona,” an animated three-dimensional avatar of herself that the headset created using a scan of her face. Apple introduces people video conferencing as a more intimate way for people to communicate and even collaborate in virtual space.

The facial expressions of the Apple employee seemed real and the movements of her mouth synchronized with her speech. But because of how her avatar was digitally rendered, with the smooth texture of her face and the lack of shadows, I could tell it was fake. It looked like a video hologram I’d seen in sci-fi movies like “Minority Report.”

In the FaceTime session, the Apple employee and I were supposed to collaborate to make a 3D model in an app called Freeform. But I stared at him blankly, thinking about what I was seeing. After three years of being mostly isolated during the pandemic, Apple wanted me to get involved with what was essentially a fake video of a real person. I could feel myself turning off. My feeling of “gross” was probably what technologists have long described as uncanny valleyan uneasy feeling when a human sees a machine creation that seems all too human.

A technological feat? Yes. A feature that I would like to use with others every day? Probably not anytime soon.

To end the demo on a fun note, Apple showed a simulation of a dinosaur that moved towards me when I stretched out my hand. I’ve seen more than my fair share of digital dinosaurs in VR (almost every headset manufacturer that’s given me a VR demo has shown a Jurassic Park simulation in the last seven years), and I wasn’t thrilled about this.

real people

After the demo, I drove home and processed the experience during rush hour.

Over dinner, I talked to my wife about the Vision Pro. Apple’s glasses, I said, looked and felt better than competing headphones. But he wasn’t sure that mattered.

Other headsets from Meta and Sony PlayStation were much cheaper and already quite powerful and entertaining, especially for playing video games. But every time we had guests over for dinner and they tried on the glasses, they would lose interest after less than half an hour because the experience was exhausting and they felt socially disconnected from the group.

Would it matter if they could turn the dial on the front of the headset to see the real world while wearing it? I suspect he would still feel isolated, because he’d probably be the only person in a room wearing one.

But most important to me was the idea of ​​connecting with others, including family and colleagues, through Apple headphones.

“Your mom is getting old,” I told my wife. “When you’re FaceTiming her, would you rather see her ultrafake digital avatar of her or a worse video call where she’s holding the phone camera in front of her face at an unflattering angle?”

“The latter,” he said without hesitation. “That’s real. Although, I’d rather see it in person.”