Thoughts on visionOS & Apple Car
OK, I know this is a reach. Might visionOS be a look ahead to the experience of riding in an Apple Car one day? I think it's an interesting muse on the future. We've all heard the rumours about Apple working on a car for a number of years.. as we can see with Vision Pro, usually where there is enough smoke.. a day will come when you can toast the marshmallows.
We’re undoubtably going to see some YouTubers strap on one of these headsets and go for a drive, it probably even has some uses.. until someone pulls the power cord or the battery dies ..and you’re plunged into complete darkness, hot at the wheel of a fast moving vehicle. Pretty clearly not advisable, with our current iteration of the Vision Pro at least. Let’s not try that one at home. So for now, let’s put the notion of wearing this gear while driving to the side, how else might it be practical to use the technology here?
Apple play the long game incredibly well - we often see this when looking back and connecting all the dots, to where we are today. Advancements with Swift, SwiftUI, Apple Silicon hardware (to name but a few) all pave the way to enable the Vision Pro hardware and visionOS software blowing our minds for the last couple of weeks. There's always a journey, a roadmap. Least of all a company of that size, needs to be re-using technology across the estate to maintain any kind of pace.. and they certainly have the pace, the legs, for all the races they are in.
So how might visionOS be related to an Apple Car one day? To immerse yourself in the visionOS experience, (simplified) you need two core things added to your environment. First, you need the video feed to your eyes that has the visionOS version of the world in it. Second, you need all the hardware sensors reading the environment and reading your movements for input, hand and eye tracking etc. The Vision Pro device imports all of this to your environment, wherever you are. You’re good to go.
So effectively you need the device to take control of any environment - to augment it. An alternative environment where this control could perhaps be achieved is within a vehicle. With the hardware put in place for sensors, perhaps the windscreen(s) is our augmented video feed, albeit less immersive depending on the size. We're skipping other advancements in technology here like eye tracking from a greater distance, the windscreen having transparent LED integrated to double as a display perhaps, things like that (from a long list) but it's not hard to imagine.
In a car you know where people will be sitting, where eyes and hands are likely to be. There are contradictions here in that, a windscreen is a letterboxed viewing experience vs being fully immersive - as intended by the Vision Pro. Squint your eyes a little, skip some of the details, you can see how a version of this lends well to a vehicle. With different arcs to the story if being piloted by a human vs self driving, autonomous.
The technology is likely to get miniaturised, maybe into glasses or contact lenses some day. The 'Spatial Computing' experience, as we see it today, essentially needs the view of the world replaced before your eyes see it and some sensors in the environment to enable interaction. Engineering, and product, wise - it's also hard to imagine Apple ever separating these from being in a single device. That said, we don't know what dots are yet to be connected down the road - the need for a headset might just be a place to start from. As good a place as any.