The coolest use for the Vision Pro

Leveling this up: Calculate sun angles at different times of the year to simulate light entering the house. Find out if some room is going to be unbearably hot in the summer because it's got too much full sunlight; make sure there are windows that can take maximum advantage of sunlight in the winter months; maximize opportunities to accidentally catch the sunset / sunrise.

My team uses this technology on a daily basis at my company. I run a design / build firm in the Hamptons, USA. We start all of our design projects with a 3d-first approach. Schematic design starts in 3D using Rhino3D or Revit. We use visualization plugins, like Enscape, to render the models and stream to a Quest 3 headset.

So when clients come in, and feels adventurous, we'll setup the headset, set the display height to their actual, and let them walk around their beautiful new home.

The response has been powerful. My clients are able to truly understand the scale, the proportion of rooms, ceiling heights, and the smallest details.

We're able to make real-time changes to the model (within reason) and provide instant design feedback.

I've been using this technology for years and I'm surprised it's not being adopted faster - good for us right now though!

I did this in a iPad when we were designing our apartment that we were buying, including furniture and kitchen.

Yeah, we did the same thing when designing our house almost ten years ago now, using a HTC Vive running https://irisvr.com/prospect/

Just like the article says: Within a second after putting on the headset you just know if things are proportioned right, or need some fine tuning. That's really valuable!

Also, when the house was actually (partially) built, it felt exactly like the simulations we knew pretty well by that point.

Christian is a brilliant developer, that made simply the best experience for reddit that ever existed; after the ban, and when Apollo was dead, I simply stopped consuming reddit (other than an occasional kagi search that takes me there).

I hope he knows that a lot of iOS users really appreciate his work, (I even convinced one hardcore Android user to get an iPhone just for this one app, it was that good).

For that, thank you Christian!

Quest 3 has a 3d explorer (hyperscape) and you can walk around Gordon Ramsay's kitchen.. it was the first "ok, damn" app experience in the quest for me where it felt like you were there.

I can only imagine how powerful that experience would be for experiencing your future house.

Throw in some time-of-day lighting and sun-path illumination... would he great!

That's neat. Once it is built, I think a cooler use is to trace wiring and plumbing through your walls of your existing house. Your revit model may include all of this data, or at least the plan. Things change. :)

Though this is especially helpful for old homes where you have to sort of improvise ethernet wiring.

I normally just use it to consume 4k hdr media though.

It has not lived up to being a utility player device, but so far it is so good at media delivery that is sort of okay.

It seems like everything here can also be done with any iPhone using ARKit. Obviously the headset is better, but not $3500 better than just looking through your phone.

Just thought I’d raise this since it weirdly isn’t mentioned in the article.

I used a similar technique the last time I moved - scan the apartment using the iPhone, then I had a 3D model for measuring and planning out the space before/during the move. It’s a big help when planning out furniture etc.

And I scanned my old place before leaving so I can virtually step into it any time I want. iPhone via finder/preview handles showing 3D models in AR out of the box.

This is an absolutely standard feature of any VR headset that has ever been released in the history of VR headsets. Make a 3D world, walk through it. What am I missing?

I scanned my local climbing gym and have climbing videos mapped onto the wall

https://kmcheung12.github.io/climb-preview/w/a6ece004

I think 3D application is massively under utilised. There is whole family of interaction the textual web cannot provide

This can be done with any modern VR headset but pretty cool nonetheless. cheers

There are apps for displaying RevIt models on the Apple Vision Pro, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, iPhone ARKit, and Android AR [1], so if you are working with an architect it is worth asking them if they can provide in-progress models as you iterate to avoid having to reproduce them yourself.

[1] https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdc...

I did this using the Meta Quest when designing our bathroom. I used Unreal Engine to set up all the materials, lighting, and VR stuff.

It worked great. There's nothing better than walking through a design. It turned out to be the _only_ way I was able to get over my analysis paralysis and actually commit to the project. I took pictures from all angles and printed them for our contractors, and they found it very useful as well.

It's stunning how similar the real pictures are to our renders. Here's an example for those interested: https://imgur.com/a/y3KXphc

On the one hand, this a thing most VR headsets can do these days.

On the other hand, we can just do this stuff ourselves now. No movie studio level of equipment required. And THAT is pretty awesome.

3D walkthroughs are absolutely the OG[1] use for head mounted displays. I had an interesting experience of a realtor who had a couple of Vision pro headsets that they would let you use to tour properties they had for sale. Definitely faster and easier than driving around only to find you could quickly eliminate a choice. I am not sure what sort of workflow they used to capture the 3D space but I do know they had a Mac pro tower dedicated to running it. As another poster pointed out, if your building a house, having all of the wiring/plumbing/etc in '3D space' databases for your house would come in very handy later as you were doing work on the house. I'm cynical though about timeframes and having data and software for such a niche application work for more than 5 years much less the 10 to 20 you might live in a house.

[1] In the early 90's VRML was going to create a Snowcrash style metaverse of 3D places you could visit.

the irony is that the most practical use case for a ,500 headset is something a 00 Quest does just as well, but you'd never think to try it on the Quest because nobody told you it was a productivity device

I think it needs Disney's HaloTile. So he can walk the whole house in Vision Pro in his apartment.

What is special about the Vision Pro here? Tons of, as far as I can tell, identical solutions have been around for years for other less expensive devices. Other people in this thread are mentioning them. What's special here except maybe the OP is apple fan

Architecture has always been a great fit for VR. Game engines like unreal engine integrate both VR and architecture software for example.

Is it cooler than letting a legally blind person be able to see? https://youtu.be/KbS7IiLEqM0?si=itIRbX3SBDxn18IQ

There's no Apple Store in my country, but I travel regularly for work. About a year ago I was in Sydney Australia and took the opportunity to visit one of their Apple Stores to try the Vision Pro.

Having experienced other AR/VR products I was interested to see how Apples general 'refinement' of this product area worked out.

I admit, I had low expectations; and probably for the best, because nothing could've prepared me for what I experienced.

Given this was a gen1 product, I was blown away by how seamless and 'complete' the experience was. There was a few obvious places for refinement like battery-life, weight and the screen. But the immersive experience was incredibly convincing, compelling and even relaxing. The price point clearly needs to come down, and I suspect the technology was a little ahead of its time. But I can see in 5-10 years after continuous iteration and improvement that this product will be something else.

Having experienced augmented reality glasses, I have to say that integration with the external world feels much more powerful than the VR experience ever did. AR is exhilerating, while VR is mostly bland and nauseating. I had the experience of interacting with an entity in AR while in the space I was in, it tickles your brain in a way VR somehow can't.

Thanks for sharing this. The personal observations were far more interesting than another discussion I read about hardware specs. I'd love to read more long-term experiences like this

Vision Pro: when you're done sitting in the dark on your couch looking at photos of the family who left you, you can use AR to remodel your apartment. It even has textures.

I've done this quite a lot while working at a large architecture firm. It can be great for both small and enormous projects.

Often, the more effort you put into the tiniest details, textures, etc the larger the realism payoff.

I also found that immersion got better when the headset responded to the subtle head movements that we all make.

One of our engineers built a full data center walkthrough tool on an AVP (complete with data pulled from the building CAD files, as well as our internal DC operations tools): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fluidstack_our-latest-hackath...

I'm really excited to see AR take off in use cases like this, given how useful it would be to give all our technicians e.g. a legacy Google Glass (not the Intelligent Eyewear thing) and direct them to a rack, overlay information about a failed component, and walk them through the repair SOP.

We 3D scanned all the rooms in our 100 year old house to better plan renovations, it was way more helpful than I anticipated!

The (many) interior designers we consulted before renovating our house used A/VR to show us what those changes could look like. The AR experience was the most surreal and useful, though.

Apple doesn’t sell the Vision Pro in Spain yet, so acquiring one would require taking a trip to France. For Vision Pro owners: is it worth it? Do you use it often? The post does mention a very compelling use case, but it is quite narrow (how often are you remodelling your house?)

Reading the title, I expected something about mounting fans to the headset.

An effect of the heat wave, maybe.

Personally I think 3D sports for Apple TV would be a game changer. I used 3D glasses + special TV in 2010 to watch the world cup and it was awesome.

Here's an idea I hope someone steals:

Mushroom or plant recognition training through navigatable and manipulable gaussian splatters of the speciments in their habitat

You won't sell a $3.5k headset with a pitch like this where a cardboard phone holder suffices. It was supposed to take 3d videos of your children's first steps while your lenticular eyes stare creepily.

How do you tell from VR if hallway is cramped?

It is even great for those with night blindness navigating in a large space. I wish there were night vision glasses.

Nice. I would love to model all my existing furniture and while in VR be able to move things to test different arrangements!

It would be interesting to see someone apply the principles and techniques of Christopher Alexander to this - trying to "grow" the house virtually and seeing what it might feel like before committing to building it.

> On top of this, the housing market is really expensive right now in many parts of the world (ours definitely included) so making good use of every square foot feels paramount.

I mean, if you already have the land, "the housing market" doesn't really matter. The construction costs are a relatively small % of housing costs in expensive markets; usually the land is the biggest factor.

Plus, when you're building, the cost of each marginal square foot is relatively small.

I wonder if this would work with the oculus pro?

This is a killer use case, but you should also take a peek at the Human Factors Handbook -- it's got great information about how to architect buildings like homes that will help you avoid some pitfalls I've seen in custom homes that I've been the second owner of.

off topic: Is the sentry banner at the top of the blog an ad? It seems to be, but it's also embedded fairly naturally and uBlock isn't blocking it.

Am I so used to shit-tier ads that a "tasteful" ad confuses me?

Not sure what it says about Vision Pro for this to be the coolest use of it.

Sorry, usually not that snarky but.. c'mon...

Nah...

The coolest use I've seen is a research at the University of Alberta (Canada) that aims to use the Vision Pro to alleviate nystagmus[1].

This is a disease on the muscles that control the eyes' direction. It causes the eyes to twitch involuntarily. They use the Visio Pro to "twitch" the image along with the eye, so the patient doesn't feel the jitter. It enables them to read, watch movies, etc.

Another cool one is to use them to substitute the visual field test machines in ophthalmology offices. These are machines that cost U$15 000.00 dollars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nystagmus

But this use isn't specific to the Vision Pro, or am I wrong? What prevents things like that from running on any other VR headset, like my half-broken Quest 2?

Vision Pro is dead. Apple couldn't move 500k units in 2.5 years. The Vision Pro tables are disappearing at Apple Stores. Apple's major web pages no longer advertise it. Executives won't commit to follow-up Vision Pros (or Airs, or any goggles.) Retail staff at flagship stores say they haven't sold one in ages. It's over. Apple's facial computing will move to glasses and enclosed VR goggles are dead. Apple funded and partnered Vision Pro content has slowed to a trickle. eBay prices for nearly new Vision Pros are well under 50% of retail. Supply chain experts have seen zero new component purchases since the original test run maxed at 500k units. It's over. (Same for Quest at Meta.)

Back a billion years ago a friend of mine tried to start up a company visualizing architectural plans in unreal engine (very early, like maybe unreal 1 or 2 .. he tried it in the quake engine first), years later but still a million years ago while working for a retailer I set up a demo with the early oculus rift dev kits allowing us to visualize new department store 'pad' layouts and new fixture (shelves, seating, racks) designs... using unity (the unreal vr support wasn't in yet).

I imagine at least the architectural stuff just happens now.

here i was thinking this was a link to the latest wd video where he destroys a cybertruck while wearing vision pro's...

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