"Space computing" implies "eye-tracking + brain-machine technology", Apple's Vision Pro hardcore defines "iPhone moment".

"We welcome one more thing, a brand new augmented reality platform, a revolutionary new product..."

Professional manager Cook, full of excitement, introduced to the world at the WWDC developer conference, the first head-mounted display created by Apple after seven years of hard work - Apple Vision Pro.

This marks Apple's official entry into the MR market, and it is also the most significant achievement under Cook's leadership.

At the press conference, the long-awaited One more thing, the classic font of the Apple era, reminded people of the epoch-making "Apple moment."

The "Apple Moment" Remembered by the Times

16 years ago, Apple, wearing its iconic black jacket and sneakers, took the stage and released the product that changed the world - the first-generation Apple. From that moment on, the entire smartphone industry was overturned, and the way of life of countless people was completely changed.

At this historic product launch, Apple showed us how the first-generation Apple "redefined the phone":

A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet device, three products integrated into a cross-era new smart device.

It also realized the direct interaction between the natural tool "hand" and the device:

Introducing multi-touch technology, no keyboard or stylus, precise operation of the screen with fingers, making the phone page smooth zooming and sliding.

It can be seen that the innovative value of the first-generation Apple lies in simplifying complexity, integrating multiple product functions, and greatly expanding its usage scenarios, which can be used anytime, anywhere. Secondly, it iterates from keyboard interaction to finger interaction, reducing the threshold for operation, and greatly improving efficiency exponentially.

Technically speaking, Apple was not innovative at the time. Multi-touch technology can be traced back to the 1960s, and Motorola launched the world's first touch screen phone A6188 in 1999. Apple's connection with multi-touch technology dates back to 2003 when Apple's design team mentioned the idea of touch to Apple. At that time, Apple felt that "this is the future." Later, Apple acquired FingerWorks, a touch product company, in 2005 and applied for a multi-touch technology patent.

After the birth of Apple, the entire mobile Internet industry and even the whole society have undergone earth-shaking changes.

Touch screens have become standard on all phones, attracting countless peers to imitate. Almost all mobile applications have been rewritten. Phones have become essential digital tools, and the industry has ushered in a golden age. Apple has grown into a global technology giant.

All these huge changes began with the "Apple Moment"-a moment of revolutionary change.

In fact, standing on the dimension of history, the change of the times follows a similar development trajectory.

The popularity of personal computers is closely related to the appearance of graphical user interface operating systems. In the 1970s, researchers from Xerox Corporation in the United States developed the first graphical user interface, and it was further optimized by Apple to launch the first graphical user interface operating system Mac OS in the commercial field, which made the personal computer market take a big step forward.

Similarly, with the graphical user interface operating system, people no longer need to learn programming languages to operate computers, which greatly reduces the threshold for use and improves efficiency. Similarly, graphical user interface and other technologies are not pioneered by Apple, but it has pushed computers to thousands of households and become a real productivity tool.

Today's Vision Pro is also very similar to the first generation of Apple. It can be operated with eyes and gestures without external devices, realizing a more natural and efficient human-computer interaction. It breaks the barrier between reality and virtuality, greatly expands the usage scenarios, and outlines the future life style of people, defining the "Apple Moment" of the MR industry.

Revolutionary innovation in human-computer interaction

Vision Pro brings a new way of interaction: users can interact with virtual reality through gestures, eye movements, and voice commands, and the operation process does not require external controllers. This method provides people with a new computing environment, which Cook calls the era of spatial computing.

What kind of experience is it to break through the limitations of physical objects and virtualize computing devices?

You can automatically select the APP you want to choose by looking at it with your eyes, and then open it with a light tap of your finger in the air;

Swipe your hand down, and the page will scroll with it. Pinch the page with your fingers, and you can zoom in and out at will. Pinch your fingers lightly, and the window can be pulled closer.

You can also use Siri to input with voice commands.

It's like science fiction becoming reality, with the three major interaction methods of eyes, hands, and voice merging into one, without relying on external objects and being more intuitive and natural, effectively reducing the learning curve and improving interaction efficiency.

The reason why it is called "revolutionary" is not because these interaction methods were first introduced by Apple, but because these existing technologies have brought users a breakthrough experience. From the details of the evaluation, users generally report that the interface is smooth, eye tracking is accurate and natural, and it outperforms current mainstream AR/VR headsets.

For example, when using it, the hand can be placed anywhere, even on the leg, and it can be accurately recognized, without the need to move the hand to a fixed position like the Meta Quest.

Also, Apple's eye and gesture recognition have high accuracy and sensitivity.

Most importantly, Vision Pro has almost no learning curve, and users can easily get started by learning a few gestures.

The improvement of the interactive experience is due to two major "weapons": eye tracking + brain-computer interface technology.

Eye tracking is one of the most important interaction methods for VR products and is currently a relatively mature technology. By capturing the user's eye movement trajectory, the device can accurately calculate where the user's gaze is focused on the screen, thereby achieving browsing, control, and other functions. Eye tracking combined with gaze point rendering technology can greatly improve rendering efficiency and significantly enhance the user experience.

Specifically, Vision Pro has 12 cameras, 5 sensors (including 1 laser radar sensor), and 6 microphones, including eye tracking and hand tracking cameras. The luxurious hardware configuration is the reason why Vision Pro can accurately recognize user eye movements and gestures.

What's even more amazing is that Vision Pro has a hidden non-invasive "brain-computer interface", which uses sensor data to sense user emotions and predict user behavior, thereby enhancing the user experience. According to Sterling Crispin, an Apple neurotechnology researcher, Vision Pro uses machine learning to monitor signals from the body and brain to predict human emotions and create more suitable virtual environments to enhance the user experience.

Admittedly, the application of various technologies in MR is not new. As Zuckerberg said, Apple's head-mounted display actually has no major technological breakthroughs.

However, Apple's strength has always been exploring the various possibilities of scene interaction, making products to the extreme, taking the lead in industry changes, and defining people's lifestyles.

For example, multi-touch technology was not invented by Apple, but it became an industry standard because of the iPhone. Although the technology of Vision Pro is similar to mainstream products in the market, the improvement of eye-tracking and brain-computer technology makes the product performance much better and provides users with a better experience.

Looking at the three revolutions in human-computer interaction, computers, mobile phones, and MR, each upgrade of mobile computing devices has brought revolutionary innovations to human-computer interaction, and each iteration has developed towards efficiency and naturalness.

Each upgrade of interaction technology also provides huge growth space for technology giants. In the PC era, operating system manufacturer Microsoft and chip giant Intel benefited, and in the era of touch-screen phones, giants such as Apple emerged. This upgrade of interaction methods will also bring incremental space to the technology market.

This is why the revolution in human-computer interaction has epoch-making significance. As Cook said, just as Mac brought us into the personal computing era, and Apple brought us into the mobile computing era, this device will now take us into the era of spatial computing.

Expansion of Scenes, Extension of Space

Unlike Meta's bet on the concept of the metaverse, Apple is building space computing.

One of the characteristics of VR devices is closed immersion, completely disconnected from reality, which limits the development of VR to the gaming field. Compared with the virtual world created by VR, Vision Pro pursues the fusion of reality and virtuality, allowing users to not be completely isolated from the surrounding environment when using it.

This greatly expands the usage scenarios, and scenarios are often the key to the survival of products.

In order to open up the ceiling of scenarios, Apple has made great efforts:

Establish a virtual and real connection through Eyesight and full-color perspective functions. The "Eyesight" perspective function scans the user's face through sensors and displays it on the screen, thereby conveying emotions and eye contact with the outside world; the full-color perspective function is to capture real-time images through the camera, allowing users to see the external full-color real world.

When users are fully immersed in the virtual world, the external screen will darken. When someone approaches, the headset will display both the user and the outsider. At the same time, the Vision Pro headset is equipped with a crown button, which allows users to adjust the degree of realism or immersion through the button, and feel the combination and transition of the real environment and virtual scene, thus breaking the barrier between virtual and reality.

Secondly, to integrate real people into the virtual world, the Spatial Persona function allows users to project their real image into the virtual world, thereby enhancing the connection between reality and virtuality.

Achieving the integration of virtual and reality is not easy. At the hardware level, Vision Pro is equipped with two chips, M2 provides computing power, and R1 processes images. Apple's R1 chip can transmit new images to the display screen within 12 milliseconds, which is almost imperceptible to the naked eye, about 1/8 of the average human blink time. The two super-speed chips solve the problem of delay, which is the main cause of dizziness in MR products, making the immersive experience of virtual reality and augmented reality better.

When Apple launched Vision Pro, it also emphasized the usage scenarios in real life, such as games, communication, work, and learning.

Just as the first-generation Apple integrated revolutionary phones, widescreen iPods, and breakthrough Internet, Vision Pro may replace TVs, computers, watches, and even phones in the future, achieving unity of all screens.

In the past 20 years, every successful Apple product has in some way integrated into people's lives, Apple put in pockets, Apple Watch on wrists, AirPods in ears...

AR will also be integrated into people's lives in the future. Cook once mentioned in a speech that we are essentially social creatures, and AR is more in line with human needs and will eventually become a daily routine like three meals a day.

Essentially, Vision Pro will eventually integrate virtuality into reality, extend real space, and help reality benefit from the virtual digital world. The fundamental productivity contribution and economic significance of spatial computing lies in the production of the limited human experience space. Therefore, Apple defines Vision Pro as a spatial computing device that seamlessly integrates digital content into the real world.

Waiting for the "Apple 4 Moment" of Virtual Reality

However, Vision Pro is not perfect and has some drawbacks.

Analysts criticize its high price, which is difficult for ordinary consumers to afford; the design of the split power supply "one wire ruins all"; the weight is heavy, and long-term wear can easily cause fatigue; the software ecosystem is not perfect, lacking applications and content, which can easily affect the user experience, and so on.

The market also has doubts. On the day of the release of Vision Pro, Apple's stock price finally fell by 0.76%. However, this week, Apple's stock price once hit a historic high, and its market value is only one step away from "3 trillion US dollars."

Looking back at the first generation of Apple, it also faced many doubts. Some people thought it was too expensive, and some complained that its operator was too single.

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bluntly pointed out that Apple is the most expensive phone in the world, but it has no appeal to business customers. It has no physical keyboard and cannot be used as a tool for sending and receiving emails.

But as Apple evolved to the fourth generation, software and hardware improved significantly, driving the rapid penetration of smartphones and unprecedented prosperity in the consumer electronics industry.

Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst at Creative Strategy, believes that Vision Pro is not aimed at the mass market of consumers, but early adopters and developers. Even if this device is currently unattractive, it is still an important attempt, and Apple may eventually launch a consumer-grade MR product.

Standing at the fusion point of virtual and reality, Vision Pro may only be the beginning of the future, waiting for its "Apple 4 Moment".