A look at Apple’s vision of future with the Spatial Web
I was chatting with Timothy Coleman, a friend of mine who graciously appeared as a guest on our podcast to talk about the future of technology.
Thanks to WDC, one of the topics that came about was Apple’s Vision Pro. This brought about a whole new discussion about the term “The Spatial Web”. Tim is a believer in the power of terminology, and he thinks this is a strategic move by Apple to focus on the term “Spatial Web”. So what’s the Spatial Web all about?
For those interested, you can find the podcast on Apple or Spotify.
What is the Spatial Web?
This is a loaded term, and deserves an article on its own but I will do my best to summarise it in a few paragraphs. The Spatial Web is a re-imagining of the current internet where we interact with digital content in a completely different way. In this future, we almost co-exist with digital content, blurring the lines between the real and the digital world. In the future of the spatial web, devices will map digital content into a 3D canvas (either standalone or mixed in with the real world) which we can move around and explore more naturally than by just looking at a static screen.
We have seen early examples of these ideas in movies like the Bourne Identity and also Ready Player One. Today, there are many different devices in development looking to be the first to capture this market. The HoloLens and Oculus are two of the biggest names, with SnapChat, Niantic, Pico, Nreal and many more building their own version of the glasses. As of about 3 weeks ago, a new player has entered the field which promises to make waves in the industry.
What the Vision Pro tells us about Apple’s vision of the Spatial Web
Full disclosure: I was not privileged enough to experience the device first hand at WDC but this comes from my personal impressions from the content and reviews I have seen online.
I’ve spoken to many practitioners in the field of immersive technology, and many of them have been waiting in eager anticipation for Apple’s take on the hardware. With an unshakeable reputation in developing products that simply work, a history with strong roots in design and a large community of developers and brand advocates that will make anything they develop work, the Vision Pro’s announcement is no doubt one of the most anticipated developments in this space to date.
Tim Cook and other Apple representatives emphasize heavily on the term “The Spatial Web”. No doubt this will be a huge factor in how people will perceive the device. They have also been careful to distance themselves from the term “Metaverse”, which is a term Mark Zuckerberg of Meta brought to the forefront of many people’s minds. If we go into the technicalities, there are a lot of similarities between the “Spatial Web” and the “Metaverse”. Sometimes these two words can be used interchangeably. For obvious reasons, Apple was smart to avoid overusing the M-word in its announcement.
But enough of the big picture analysis, let’s take a closer look at the features of the device and what makes it different from the other hardware devices out there.
Cameras, cameras and lots of cameras
If you look inside the device, it should be noted that there are a LOT of cameras. Roughly about 12 cameras in all, 8 of them positioned to capture information about the environment around you and the other 4 to track your eye movements. Eye-tracking is a key part of the experience, a key part of interacting with the digital content is to look directly at the elements of the UI you intend to interact with.
The external facing cameras also play an important role. Unlike other devices that rely on additional peripherals to control content in the environment (e.g. the Oculus Rift controllers, etc.), the Vision Pro will rely entirely on hand tracking and device-less gesture controls using the cameras located on the corners of the device.
Going back to what I said about how we developed devices specifically to interact with digital content, it looks like Apples designers are keen on moving away from introducing any more devices for people to interact with digital content. This isn’t a new idea, in fact Oculus and many other devices already come with hand tracking in some form, however it isn’t the main mode consumers are expected to work with the devices with. This was one of the most surprising features of the device to many. Early reviews have been positive in terms of how responsive the device feels, but it still remains to be seen what happens when the Vision Pro is put to the test outside of WDCs venue.
Environments
This is another telling feature of the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro glasses are not see-through. Like other recent AR devices, it uses passthrough of the surroundings captured by the many cameras and mapped onto the screen inside. There is a built-in hardware control for controlling the amount of passthrough vs. a virtual environment (looks almost like an analogue volume control). Unlike other devices that use pass-through, they have also included a display on the outside of the glasses around the eyes that do one of two things. It either reflects the image of the person’s face (to the point where it looks like the glasses are transparent to the outside viewer) or renders some impression of the content the person is looking at.
From early reviews, it looks like the device reflects a person’s face if passthrough is fully enabled and it renders a blurry scene if the person is looking at mostly virtual content. The fact that Apple’s designers took the time and effort to build in this functionality shows that Apple cares a lot about how people around you will perceive you looking at the device. By exposing clues about what a person is doing with the device, other people can pick up on that and decide how best to get someone’s attention. The best way to explain this is with an analogy. Take mobile phones for example, it’s pretty easy to determine if someone is using their phone or not (just look at where their eyes are focused). With AR glasses, it becomes much harder because the only person who knows the contents of the screen is the user themselves. Instead of just putting on an indicator light on the device, Apple took this a step further and built a full display going around the outside of the device. The fact that the user’s face is reflected in the external display is also a very intentional design choice, they want people interacting with Vision Pro users to feel as natural as possible, and key body language features like eye movements are fully revealed with this design.
Siri
It really is no surprise that Siri will play a big part in any hardware that Apple releases. But this is all the more important when it comes to spatial computing. Again, a key part of the spatial web is how much more natural interaction with a device will feel. Voice is one of the most natural ways for people to interact, devices like the Google’s Nest and Amazon’s Echo are two examples of successful products built entirely from this interaction. Siri is Apple’s equivalent, so no doubt it will play a huge part in the device’s functionality.
The Apple Ecosystem
Again, something not specific to the device but a huge part of Apple’s strength. The VisionOS was designed to be compatible with the other OSes in Apple’s ecosystem. This means that many of the apps that worked in Apple’s other devices will work straight out of the box with the Vision Pro. No doubt these apps would not be optimized at all to work with the Vision Pro (to nobody’s surprise I’m sure), but just having a plethora of apps at launch will be a huge nod at the utility of the device compared to other devices which need to work hard at building a new ecosystem from scratch.
Just like any other Apple device, there is a huge emphasis on how the Vision Pro can interact with other devices in the ecosystem. One of the things demoed in the WDC video was how you could use the Vision Pro to project an external display for your Mac laptop that can be moved around and resized at will. This will be one of Apple’s biggest advantage, they already have a big ecosystem of devices that are tightly knit which will help them make interactions feel completely seamless as you’re working between devices with Vision Pro at the center with its natural gesture/voice controls. Other hardware providers will fall short here, while the Internet of Things and other smart devices do exist, they are a long way from being as coordinated as Apple’s ecosystem to provide anything like the Apple’s experience.
Final Thoughts
There are other things I could say about Apple including how Apple would handle privacy, the (hefty) price tag, the (noticeably heavy) weight of the Vision Pro in comparison to other devices and much more. But let’s not forget, this is Apple’s first iteration of the device. Things will likely get better as we go through more years of iterations. For their first iteration, Apple has decided to pull out all the stops to provide an experience that they deem fitting to be their interpretation of the Spatial Web. Looking at the nuances of their design choices, you can tell Apple’s designers put a lot of thought and effort into making the experience using the device for the user and the people around them as natural as possible. This level of thought went above and beyond anything else available on the market to date. Will the Vision Pro be the next iPhone? Short answer, probably not while it remains at the current price tag of $3500. Apple has been careful to brand it with the “Pro” name, meaning this will be out of reach for many ordinary consumers.
However, I can’t deny this will be one of the most exciting releases in the industry for the decade. With future iterations, the price should go down and bring the device within reach of the average consumer. Even if this doesn’t happen, no doubt with Apple being held as the gold standard, we will see other device manufacturers taking inspiration from some of Apple’s ideas and releasing their own rendition of the ideas. This announcement alone should already leave many people wondering, imagining and inspiring people to build the future of the Spatial Web. Personally, I’m looking forward to the time when Ready Player One becomes a reality.
Once again I want to shout out to Tim, who was kind enough to feature on our podcast. Our discussion was a huge inspiration for this post. If you’re interested in listening to the podcast, you can find it on Apple or Spotify. Tim also writes a lot about technology, you can find his article on the Vision Pro here.
