We had our mind blown by Apple Vision Pro, now YOU can experience this cutting-edge gadget free of charge
Anyone can experience the Apple Vision Pro in a free demo in 40 Apple Store locations across the UK
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Apple Vision Pro, a cutting-edge headset that brings your favourite applications into your surroundings, went on sale in the UK today. Eager shoppers braved the British summer weather to queue outside the Apple Store on Regents Street, London and become some of the first in the country to test (or purchase) the £3,499 device.
First released in the United States at the start of the year, the Californian company confirmed plans to launch Vision Pro in other countries last month during its annual developer conference. Following launches in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore last month, the first entry into a major new product category for the $3.49 trillion company since the debut of the Apple Watch in 2015 arrives on British shores.
Anyone can book a demo with the Vision Pro in any of Apple's 40 shops across the UK. You'll be able to wear the Vision Pro and experience some of the headline new features in a crash course that takes roughly 30 minutes.
There's no obligation to buy, so it's well worth checking availability.
Ahead of the launch, we had the opportunity to experience the Apple Vision Pro.
Vision Pro is equipped with ludicrously high-resolution displays — with some 23 million pixels shared between two screens the size of Royal Mail stamps — and processes images on-screen 8x faster than the blink of an eye
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Apple Vision Pro: First Impressions
Wearing the Vision Pro for the first time is magical.
If you've seen the adverts, you'll have a rough idea of what the Vision Pro is capable of — but nothing prepares you for the breathtaking experience of donning the headset for the first time.
Vision Pro is packed with new concepts, from navigating the operating system by looking around with your eyes, pinching your thumb and forefinger to select from app menus, and adjusting the level of immersion with a spin of the Digital Crown, but it only takes a few minutes for all of these to become second nature.
GB News Technology Editor Aaron Brown experiencing the Apple Vision Pro for the first time
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It reminded me of pinching on the iPhone's multi-touch screen to zoom for the first time. It was simultaneously completely new and immediately familiar — like a gesture that I'd always known to do, but had somehow forgotten. Vision Pro delivered the same dizzying feeling multiple times during the demo.
So, what's it like?
Vision Pro lets you place interactive applications in your surroundings. These apps will stay in place, even as you move around. Peering through the 23 million pixels that comprise the high-resolution internal displays, each roughly the size of a Royal Mail stamp, windowed applications hover like ultra-crisp 4K monitors floating from invisible supports around you.
Since the laws of physics don't apply, you can expand these apps to vast cinema screen-like sizes or lie down and hover everything above you.
This lets you watch a film on an IMAX-like screen from a cramped seat at the back of an aeroplane, transform any room into a home office with screens surrounding you so you can multi-task like you're working from the MI6 nerve centre, or hover an app with step-by-step cooking instructions above the hob that remains in place even as you rush around the kitchen to find ingredients, for example.
By default, you'll be able to see your surroundings, with digital elements overlaid on the real world. But turning the Digital Crown lets you immerse yourself in an entirely virtual environment. Apple has included several stunning locations, including Yosemite, Mount Hood in Oregon, and the surface of the moon.
These gorgeous vistas — like immersive desktop wallpapers that allow you to focus on your applications — move and interact with your apps. During our demo, we watched a clip from Avatar: The Way Of Water on top of a mountain in Hawaii, with a glow from the film reflecting on the whispy clouds.
Navigating around the 2,000 apps designed specifically for the Vision Pro (it's also compatible with 1.5 million apps originally launched for the iPad) is done using your eyes.
As you peer around the user interface, playful animations will show your current selection. Tapping your forefinger and thumb together acts as a "click".
Clicking the Digital Crown on top of the Vision Pro summons the Home View, which will be instantaneously familiar to anyone who has used an iPhone or iPad. Each icons will respond with a playful animation when you glance at it — showing that it's selected
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To scroll through webpages and swipe between photos, you'll need to pinch the air and drag your hand — as if you're pulling on an invisible thread. With 12 separate cameras dotted across the Vision Pro, there's no need to hold your hands out unnaturally high ..although that was our first instinct.
Pretty quickly, we learned to trust the wide field-of-view of the cameras and let our hands rest wherever they fell naturally — a relief as otherwise using Vision Pro for longer than a few minutes could start to feel like a game of Wii Sports tennis.
Applications float in physical space around you. With a quick pinch gesture, you can reposition and resize these windowed apps to create the ideal set-up
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As well as the slick new gestures, you can use voice assistant Siri to open and close apps, queue up songs, answer a question, or press play on your latest boxset binge. The beam-forming microphones are impressively accurate and Siri responded to our requests immediately — even with other people talking in the room.
You can dictate text, type on a virtual keyboard that hovers in front of your hands, connect a Bluetooth keyboard, or a combination of all three.
Vision Pro has all of the Apple-designed apps you'd expect, including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, as well as the Safari web browser, support for FaceTime calls, Messages, and Apple Maps. With a tap, you can also beam the screen from your MacBook into the headset to work on a larger screen.
There's no need to be constrained by the laws of physics, with Vision Pro wearers able to expand films to an IMAX-like size in confined spaces — like a cramped economy seat at the back of the plane
APPLE PRESS OFFICEAll of this takes an incredible amount of processing power. Vision Pro comes equipped with an Apple M2 system-on-a-chip — the same model under the bonnet of the MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and the entry-level MacBook Pro released in 2022. Coupled with this, Apple has designed a first-of-its-kind R1 chip to handle input from 12 cameras, five sensors, and six microphones dotted around the device.
Everything is processed and displayed on the screens in front of your eyes, each packed with as many pixels as a 4K TV, in roughly 12 milliseconds — that's 8x faster than the blink of an eye. It's a mind-boggling feat.
But what's even more remarkable is how little you even think of these impossibly complex processes taking place millimetres from your eyes. Using the Vision Pro feels so natural — so instinctive — that it's easy to forget that you're peering at the world through a computer as powerful as a MacBook.
Vision Pro comes equipped with built-in speakers and attaches using an adjustable headband, while a wire leads from the device to a battery pack which lets you move around while wearing it.
The speakers leverage the same clever Spatial Audio technology found inside the AirPods Max that maps out sounds into three-dimensional space. The effect is incredibly immersive with Vision Pro, since sounds emanate from the virtual windows suspended around you.
If you want to get some work done, you can pair a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard with the Vision Pro and run multiple windowed applications side-by-side in vast virtual screens bigger than any monitor you'd be able to physically squeeze into the room with you
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The phone-sized battery pack lasts for two hours of use, Apple says. That's likely to be an issue on long-haul flights, especially if you want to watch movies back-to-back on your own private IMAX screen. You can connect a USB-C charger to use the Vision Pro all day ...although you'll be tethered to a wall plug.
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This is the sort of compromise that you'd expect with a first-generation product — something that was easy to forget at times because of the amount of polish in so many aspects of the Vision Pro experience.
Apple Vision Pro lets you view Spatial Videos, which shifts perspective as you move around, like peering through a window. It's possible to capture this unique footage from the Vision Pro headset itself, as well as any iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max running iOS 17.2 or later
APPLE PRESS OFFICEOne of the unexpected aspects of our time with the Vision Pro was the way it recontextualises how incredible the iPhone in your pocket is. In the Photos app in visionOS, the all-new operating system designed for this mixed-reality computer, it's possible to wrap panorama images around you like an immersive gallery.
And while it's hardly headline news that the iPhone has a good camera, the sheer level of level packed into the Panorama shots is only truly revealed when you're surrounded by the image from every direction. Likewise, iPhone 15 Pro owners can already shoot Spatial Video, which brings an Avatar-like level of depth to footage.
During our demo, we watched a short clip of a family blowing out candles on a birthday cake — with smoke suddenly swirling around us and the decorative bunting stretching into the distance well beyond what the physical space where we were seated would actually allow.
It feels like you're living in the future predicted by Steven Spielberg in Minority Report, and it's incredible.
Apple Vision Pro is awe-inspiring and its intuitiveness belies the years of gruelling work that undoubtedly went into creating this feat of engineering. It feels like the future, and we'd encourage anyone to book an appointment in their nearest Apple Store to experience this magical taste of the future.
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