Inside a Vision Pro Store Demo: How Apple Makes You Want It

Okay, now there's rhinoceroses on top of me. Does everyone do this when they get the demo? Do they start putting their hands up? The way most people will experience the Apple Vision Pro is by walking into an Apple Store and getting a demo. I have been covering the Vision Pro for weeks, but this reporter had one more area to explore. What does Apple show customers when they test drive a luxury headset? I had to get my own Apple Store demo to find out. If this is the only interaction people may have with mixed reality, Apple needs to make a good first impression. What happens in 30 minutes to make customers want to spend their money and take the leap into spatial computing? So earlier this week, I visited the flagship New York City store on 5th Avenue to get the full Apple experience. I'm Bridget Carey, and this is one more thing. All right, taking Vision Pro for a test drive. Apple Store employees are your guide on your Vision Pro journey. My store guide was Quinn, and he made sure everything fit well and he walked me through all the controls and directed me toward apps to try. The whole time your guide can see what you are doing on an iPad, and that makes it pretty smooth. Okay, I wouldn't need you to teach me that or watch some sort of tutorial. I wouldn't even know that. I should point out here that I could not capture what was going on inside the headset during my demo, but I'm going to show you examples of what I saw. Some things we recreated, some footage is what Apple made in promotional videos, and the whole 30-minute demo really flew by for me, but I'm just going to give you the big highlights. After the headset is calibrated to your eyes, you learn just by jumping into it. It starts with the Photos app. You are seeing these vibrant, professionally shot photos, which are way more stunning than any of my vacation photos. The cool stuff is the panoramic nature scenes, and of course, spatial photos and videos in 3D. You may have seen example videos that Apple shows where you see kids blowing out candles on a birthday cake, but I am telling you that in the demo, it is so big in front of you, it's like I can stick my nose in the birthday cake. There is a very strong brain connection because of how close it all feels. That's really cute. They upped the cuteness on that one. There is an artistry to the types of 3D scenes Apple created and while you're in the demo, you're thinking, what could I do with 3D video? Yeah, it's very big. It's like if you were standing there, but I also still know I'm in the Apple Store. We then jumped into the immersive background environments. This is what I think of as the Vision Pro wallpaper. You turn the dial up on the crown and you leave the Apple Store and find yourself at a peaceful lake at Mount Hood in Oregon. Mount Hood, that's so neat. Your eyes see everything so crystal clear. Now, this recording does not do it justice because the only thing clear in the screen capture recording is what your eyes are focusing on at the moment, but I could see every little detail. Honestly, when you pause and you can see all the tiny little minute pebbles and gravel, you expect your foot to be there. I expect to just be standing right there. That's the detail that wows me the most. They had me read some text on Safari, I opened up a recipe app, and then just a few minutes later, we are back at Mount Hood and it's raining ever so lightly. You can see each droplet hit the lake. It's raining, it's raining now in my environment. It was not raining before. I don't feel wet, but I see it, I hear it. I can see the rain really far away, too. It's a light rain, it's like a sun shower, if you will, but that's weird. It just, wait, the environment's just changed throughout the day. It does, it does. So not only are people going to feel wowed by being transported to what is essentially a living wallpaper, but at this point in the demo, I have complete ownership of my space. I am moving windows anywhere I want, I am reading things up close or further away, and now it's the finale. They're taking me to the movies. You open up Apple TV and we are taken to clips from Avatar, The Way of Water. It's a movie designed for 3D, and I'm seeing characters swimming with sea creatures just coming right at me. Apple is using James Cameron to sell this thing, but also, Apple used Mario, as in the Super Mario Brothers movie. Just a few seconds of a scene with Princess Peach, Mario, and Toad looking out over the kingdom in awe with an epic soundbite. They knew exactly what clip they were picking for this. And same with the water. These short clips are invoking feelings of bigness, of otherworldliness, like the hope of the future is just placed right in front of you, even though I'm still at a plain wood table in a store. The grand finale pulls out all the best tricks of 3D. There's this collection of immersive video clips from special shows on Apple Vision Pro. Now it starts with this shock. What? That you're seeing Alicia Keys singing right smack in front of you. I didn't expect that. This was not like a normal movie. All of this content is just hugging you in 180 degrees of 8K 3D. Okay, I'm seeing Alicia Keys singing right in front of me. Like, I can touch her Steinway. I can touch her mic even, oh my gosh. You are jumping from clip to clip, big open landscapes, then bam, closeups of baby rhinos walking right up to you. These are stunning visuals. Places I will likely never visit. And someone is walking a high line 3,000 feet above Norway's fjords? Yeah, it was a good thing I was sitting down. There were teases of what is possible with sports. I saw unique perspectives. I'm watching a soccer game from the top of the goal net. I'm watching baseball from near the dugout as a player runs to first base. It's just a couple of minutes of sensory overload and I am eating it all up with a spoon. I would watch a whole nature program like this. This was not my first time putting on the Vision Pro headset. I got a walkthrough when I borrowed the headset from CNET reviewer, Scott Stein. I have a link here to the whole video on what it's like to share Vision Pro with someone else if you wanna check that out. And what was really different about this demo compared to sharing one with someone else is if you take off the headset in your demo, you can put it right back on without recalibrating. You do not have to go through setup again like you do if you share it with someone else. That also strengthens this feeling of ownership and control and confidence you have during your store demo. Makes you feel like it's yours. But this store demo taught me what Apple believes is the best feature and that is entertainment, 100%. Before leaving my demo, I asked what if someone comes here and has questions about what it's like to work on this machine? What about typing on it? And yes, your demo guide can pivot to help answer your questions. I was shown what it's like to practice a keynote presentation in the Steve Jobs Theater and I opened up a notepad to try typing, which was not impressive after watching all those cool 8K immersive videos. I think if I was to do a demo again, I would want to try typing with a real keyboard in front of me. But I think by focusing on family home movies of kids and showing you what's possible in the very best of entertainment, Apple is hitting on the unique and emotional side of this tech, making you think about your own family memories, making you want to dive into new worlds and feel a sense of awe. Yeah, Apple is spending that demo moment tugging on your dreams and your heartstrings. And it did tug on my face, if just a little. I found myself trying to adjust it a bit throughout, so it didn't feel too tight or too heavy. And I think if the demo went longer than 30 minutes, I would be feeling it more. I walked away confident in using it with a little bit of desire to keep poking around. There was no talk about gaming. What else could I see with just a little more time? I want more baby rhinos for sure, though. Please transport me to baby rhino land anytime. I'm not feeling like I need to buy one right now, but it did really make me curious on what could potentially come with entertainment. I might get the FOMO feelings later. This is going to be an interesting time of people tinkering with 3D content and seeing what's possible. Oh, and there's one more, one more thing. A lot of folks are testing out what is possible with 3D photos and videos in Vision Pro. And it's being shared for anyone to check out. There's a crowdsourced database of spatial videos and panoramas. The site is called sharespatialeverything.com. And some Vision Pro fans got together to create this place to share their photography. If you go to an Apple store to demo the Vision Pro, there are all these professional 3D photos and videos preloaded in the walkthrough. But when you take it home, you only get to see what's in your photo library. So the best way to see what's possible in 3D is to just have people share their own spatial content with others. You can take your own spatial videos with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. In landscape video, you just gotta click on the little Vision Pro icon to record it in 3D. And if you do not have a Vision Pro to view it, well, these files also can be viewed inside a MetaQuest headset. If you want to do your own Vision Pro demo, you can book an appointment on apple.com or the Apple Store app. And you can also talk to someone in the store if there is availability for walk-ins. If you had a store demo, please tell me in the comments how you felt about the experience. And was it much different than mine? What is the biggest thing you wanna test out if you got to take it for a spin? Thanks for watching, and I'll catch you next time.