Neuralink live & AVP reviews are in - MetaVisions #16

Hi all, hope you’re all doing great. Yes, I will write about the Vision Pro AGAIN, because the first reviews are out and honestly some of it surprised me! Elon Musk has been speaking about Neuralink for time now, but their first milestone has been hit, what do I think?

Neuralink - this wasn’t some sort of joke?

SpaceX and Tesla are two of Elon’s musk’s most famous ventures, but there is another name that has always peaked my curiosity, but to be honest with you, I have always been skeptical and never really thought it would see daylight. This is Neuralink.

On paper it could bring some great innovation that will genuinely benefit humanity, such as bringing back the ability to walk to immobile people, by picking up on brain signals and bypassing the damaged spinal cords to send the right signals to the rest of the body. Fantastic, right?

Neuralink reminds me of this great game, called Cyberpunk, where the world was taken over by giant tech organisations and physical implants are common, as they boost people’s cognitive and physical abilities.

Last week, Elon reported on X that Neuralink has been successfully implemented in their first ever human trial.
It shocked me.
I am someone that loves innovation and creativity, but I was not expecting Neuralink to get out of paper anytime soon. Is this bad or good? Well, only time will tell really, but realistically implants of this type will always have two sides of the coin: the one where we can improve people’s quality of life and the one where we start to slowly lose our humanity.

Has Apple delivered the future of computing?

Several media outlets and content producers have received their Apple Vision Pro a couple days before it’s availability to general pre-order sales, I have taken the last two days to read and watch several reviews and unboxing videos to understand what the overall sentiment is. Don’t worry, I won’t cover everything, or even all of the important bits, I want YOU to go and watch some amazing reviews that I will link later on.
PS: Apple, don’t take anything personally. I still want a free Vision Pro.

None ever throws away Apple boxes…

If you read that and disagreed then congrats, you are better than me. I have kept every box of all Apple items I have owned in the past 10 years. I am not an accumulator, it’s just that Apple has somehow made packaging and unboxing part of their experience. From air tight packaging, the boxes that slowly drifts away from each other, the classic stickers, all the way to the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ memo. There is a standard experience across their products. This is no different for the Vision Pro.

Marques does an excellent job at showing the unboxing experience, you catch watch it by clicking here.

No controllers, no problems?

So far the standard user navigation experience for VR & MR headsets has been both joysticks and hand tracking. Apple being Apple decided to throw a curve-ball and shift the paradigm on this. The Vision Pro can be navigated by the user through a combination of eye and hand tracking.
There is a word that is used by many reviewers, which is magic. The initial experience feels that you have superpowers and telepathy of some kind, where your eyes and a simple pinching gesture allow you to navigate and move these virtual windows.

However, that initial impression starts to deteriorate as time goes by, as users start to lose this feeling of magic in certain scenarios. Having your hands below a desk or under a blanket , will quickly remind you that it is the hand tracking sensors that are doing all the work, which means that if it can’t see your hands, it won’t work. After the few initial challenges with this, any user will lose the sense of magic, as they will start to think about where their hands are placed.

I have experienced this with other headsets, such as the HoloLens 2, where at times it feels magical, but that can be destroyed quite easily.

That being said, I am a huge fan of hand tracking, I only really use joysticks if the app demands it. However, I do know that for mass adoption, especially in the enterprise space, joysticks are the way to go, clicking buttons on a controller is curiously more natural than clicking the air.

The strange eye thing…

I won’t say much around this, but Apple’s Marketing really did a great job with all the advertisement pictures for this, abit too good really.

This is what we expected:

This is what we got - a low-res Oled that is nowhere near as impressive or cool:

The display and the passthrough

A huge selling point for the Vision Pro has been it’s Oled 4K Display, which theoretically is why the headset is so damm expensive! Good news is that none has said anything specifically negative about this headset’s display, but it suffers from all traditional VR display problems, such as vignetting, color distortion and reflective highlights. Additionally, it seem that it’s Field of View is smaller than Meta’s Quest 3.

The Mixed Reality experience seems to be great, not perfect, but great. Everyone claimed that it definitely is the best MR experience compared to what’s available in the Market.

What lasts longer - a movie or comfortably?

This one was not a surprise. Let’s put all of the headset’s weight in the front end, where the weight is sitting on your nose and cheekbones, I am sure it will create a totally balanced product for comfortably…
Watching something longer than an episode of The Office, will be a real struggle, 30/45 minutes seems to be the optimal session. Which kinda sucks, right? If you buy the AVP to work in a virtual space, you can’t really go into deep-work mode, as your body will ask for a break and soon enough you’ll just go back to your monitor. If you want to use this headset as an entertainment center for movies and shows, then you better have toilet and popcorn breaks.

Can this be solved? Probably yes, other headsets like the Quest 2 suffered from the same problem, but Meta and 3rd party vendors have managed to create special straps that aim to distribute the weight better, and some reviewers have found Apple’s secondary strap option to provide some improvement on that front.

Overall, let’s not forget, this is the OG iPhone

The Vision Pro is a demonstrator what is possible with current technology, but it is simply the first step in Apple’s journey in creating this new computing era.

Some reviews worth watching:

The Verge - Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not
Marques Brown - Using Apple Vision Pro: What It’s Actually Like!
Brian Tong - Apple Vision Pro EPIC Review - Is This The Future?

_{See you next week,
Davi, Metavisions}