I'm in Europe, Vision Pro isn't available here yet. I'm a developer / designer, and I want to find out whether it's worthwhile to try and sell the idea of investing in a bunch of Vision Pro devices as well as in app development for it, to the people overseeing the budget for a project I'm part of. The project is broadly in an "industry" where several constraints apply, most of them are security and safety.
So far, all the Vision Pro discussion I've seen is about consumer-level media consumption and tippy-tappy-app-stuff for a broad user base.
Now, the hardware and the OS features and SDK definitely look like professional niche use cases are possible. But some features, such as SharePlay, will for example require an Apple ID and internet connection (I guess?). This for example is a strict nope in my case, for security reasons.
I'd like to start a discussion of what works and what doesn't work, outside the realm of watching Disney+ in your condo.
Potentially, this device has several marks ticked with regards to incredibly useful features in general.
- very good indoor tracking
- pass through with good fidelity
- hands free operation
The first point especially, is kind of a really big deal, and for me, the biggest open question. I have multiple make or break questions with regard to this. (These features are not available in the simulator)
For sake of argument, lets say the app I'm building is Cave Mapper. it's meant to be used by archeologists inside a cave system where we have no internet, no reliable compass, and no GPS. We have a local network that we can carry around though. We can also bring lights.
One feature of the app is to build out a catalog of cave paintings and store them in a database. The archeologist wants to walk around, look at a cave painting, and tap on it to capture its position relative to the cave entrance. The next day, another archeologist may work inside the same cave, and they would want to have synchronised access to the same spatial data from the day before. For that:
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How good, precise, reliable, stable is the indoor tracking really? Hyped reviewers said it's rock solid, others have said it can drift.
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How well do the persistent WorldAnchor objects work?
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How well do they work when you're in a concrete bunker or a cave without GPS?
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Can I somehow share a world anchor with another user? is it possible to sync the ARKit map that one device has built, with another device?
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Other showstoppers?
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in case you cannot share your mapped world or world anchors: How solid is the tracking of an ImageAnchor (which we could physically nail to the cave entrance to use as a shared positional / rotational reference)
Other, practical stuff:
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can you wear Vision Pro with a safety helmet?
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does it work with gloves?
