Technologies

Apple Vision Pro Hands-On: Far Better Than I Was Ready For

I experienced incredible fidelity, surprising video quality and a really smooth interface. Apple’s first mixed-reality headset nails those, but lots of questions remain.

I was in a movie theater last December watching Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D, and I said to myself: «Wow, this is an immersive film I’d love to watch in next-gen VR.» That’s exactly what I experienced in Apple’s Vision Pro headset, and yeah, it’s amazing.

On Monday, I tried out the Vision Pro in a series of carefully picked demos during WWDC at Apple’s Cupertino, California, headquarters. I’ve been using cutting-edge VR devices for years, and I found all sorts of augmented reality memories bubbling up in my brain. Apple’s compact — but still not small —headset reminds me of an Apple-designed Meta Quest Pro. The fit of the back strap was comfy yet stretchy, with a dial to adjust the rear fit and a top strap for stability. The headset’s sleek design, and even its glowing front faceplate, also gave me an instant Ready Player One vibe.

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I couldn’t wear my glasses during the demo, though, and neither will you. Apple’s headset does not support glasses, instead relying on Zeiss custom inserts to correct wearers’ vision. Apple did manage, through a setup process, to easily find lenses that fit my vision well enough so that everything seemed crystal clear, which is not an easy task. Also, we adjusted the fit and tuned spatial audio for my head using an iPhone, a system that will be finessed when the headset is released in 2024.

From there, I did my demos seated, mostly, and found myself surprised from the start. The passthrough video camera quality of this headset is good —really, really good. Not as good as my own vision, but good enough that I could see the room well, see people in it with me, see my watch notifications easily on my wrist. The only headset that’s done this previously was the extremely impressive but PC-connected Varjo XR-3, and Apple’s display and cameras feel even better.

Apple’s floating grid of apps appears when I press the top digital crown, which autocenters the home screen to wherever I’m looking. I set up eye tracking, which worked like on many other VR headsets I’ve used: I looked at glowing dots as musical notes played, and got a chime when it all worked.

An app menu in Apple's VisionOS. — A list of apps as they would appear inside of the Apple Vision Pro headset.

Apple/Screenshot by CNET

From there, the interface was surprisingly fluid. Looking at icons or interface options slightly enlarges them, or changes how bold they appear. Tapping with my fingers while looking at something opens an app.

I’ve used tons of hand-tracking technology on headsets like the HoloLens 2 and the Meta Quest 2 and Pro, and usually there’s a lot of hand motion required. Here, I could be really lazy. I pinched to open icons even while my hand was resting in my lap, and it worked.

Scrolling involves pinching and pulling with my fingers; again, pretty easy to do. I resized windows by moving my hand to throw a window across the room or pin it closer to me. I opened multiple apps at once, including Safari, Messages and Photos. It was easy enough to scroll around, although sometimes my eye tracking needed a bit of extra concentration to pull off.

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Apple’s headset uses eye tracking constantly in its interface, something Meta’s Quest Pro and even the PlayStation VR 2 don’t do. That might be part of the reason for the external battery pack. The emphasis on eye tracking as a major part of the interface felt transformative, in a way I expected might be the case for VR and AR years ago. What I don’t know is how it will feel in longer sessions.

I don’t know how the Vision Pro will work with keyboards and trackpads, since I didn’t get to demo the headset that way. It works with Apple’s Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and Macs, but not with iPhone and iPad or Watch touchscreens —not now, at least.

Dialing in reality

I scrolled through some photos in Apple’s preset photo album, plus a few 3D photos and video clips shot with the Vision Pro’s 3D camera. All the images looked really crisp, and a panoramic photo that spread around me looked almost like it was a window on a landscape that extended just beyond the room I was in.

Apple has volumetric 3D landscapes on the Vision Pro that are immersive backgrounds like 3D wallpaper, but looking at one really shows off how nice that Micro OLED display looks. A lake looked like it was rolling up to a rocky shore that ended right where the real coffee table was in front of me.

man using keyboard to work using apple vision pro headset

Raising my hands to my face, I saw how the headset separates my hands from VR, a trick that’s already in Apple’s ARKit. It’s a little rough around the edges but good enough. Similarly, there’s a wild new trick where anyone else in the room can ghost into view if you look at them, a fuzzy halo with their real passthrough video image slowly materializing. It’s meant to help create meaningful contact with people while wearing the headset. I wondered how you could turn that off or tune it to be less present, but it’s a very new idea in mixed reality.

Apple’s digital crown, a small dial borrowed from the Apple Watch, handles reality blend. I could turn the dial to slowly extend the 3D panorama until it surrounded me everywhere, or dial it back so it just emerged a little bit like a 3D window.

Mixed reality in Apple’s headset looks so casually impressive that I almost didn’t appreciate how great it was. Again, I’ve seen mixed reality in VR headsets before (Varjo XR-3, Quest Pro), and I’ve understood its capabilities. Apple’s execution of mixed reality felt much more immersive, rich and effortless on most fronts, with a field of view that felt expansive and rich. I can’t to see more experiences in it.

Cinematic fidelity that wowed me

The cinema demo was what really shocked me, though. I played a 3D clip of Avatar: The Way of Water in-headset, on a screen in various viewing modes including a cinema. Apple’s mixed-reality passthrough can also dim the rest of the world down a bit, in a way similar to how the Magic Leap 2 does with its AR. But the scenes of Way of Water sent little chills through me. It was vivid. This felt like a movie experience. I don’t feel that way in other VR headsets.

Avatar: The Way of Water looked great in the Vision Pro.

20th Century Studios

Apple also demonstrated its Immersive Video format that’s coming as an extension to Apple TV Plus. It’s a 180-degree video format, similar to what I’ve seen before in concept, but with really strong resolution and video quality. A splash demo reel of Alicia Keys singing, Apple Sports events, documentary footage and more reeled off in front of me, a teaser of what’s to come. One-eighty-degree video never appears quite as crisp to me as big-screen film content, but the sports clips I saw made me wonder how good virtual Jets games could be in the future. Things have come a long way.

Would I pay $3,499 for a head-worn cinema? No, but it’s clearly one of this device’s greatest unique strengths. The resolution and brightness of the display were surprising.

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03:59

Convincing avatars (I mean, Personas)

Apple’s Personas are 3D-scanned avatars generated by using the Vision Pro to scan your face, making a version of yourself that shows up in FaceTime chats if you want, or also on the outside of the Vision Pro’s curved OLED display to show whether you’re «present» or in an app. I didn’t see how that outer display worked, but I had a FaceTime with someone in their Persona form, and it was good. Again, it looked surprisingly good.

I’ve chatted with Meta’s ultra-realistic Codec Avatars, which aim for realistic representations of people in VR. Those are stunning, and I’ve also seen Meta’s phone-scanned step-down version in an early form last year, where a talking head spoke to me in VR. Apple’s Persona looked better than Meta’s phone-scanned avatar, although a bit fuzzy around the edges, like a dream. The woman whose Persona was scanned appeared in her own window, not in a full-screen form.

And I wondered how expressive the emotions are with the Vision Pro’s scanning cameras. The Pro has an ability to scan jaw movement similar to the Quest Pro, and the Persona I chatted with was friendly and smiling. How would it look for someone I know, like my mom? Here, it was good enough that I forgot it was a scan.

We demoed a bit of Apple’s Freeform app, where a collaboration window opened up while my Persona friend chatted in another window. 3D objects popped up in the Freeform app, a full home scan. It looked realistic enough.

Dinosaurs in my world

The final demo was an app experience called Encounter Dinosaurs, which reminded me of early VR app demos I had years ago: An experience emphasizing just the immersive «wow» factor of dinosaurs appearing in a 3D window that seemed to open up in the back wall of my demo room. Creatures that looked like carnotauruses slowly walked through the window and into my space.

All my demos were seated except for this one, where I stood up and walked around a bit. This sounds like it wouldn’t be an impressive demo, but again, the quality of the visuals and how they looked in relation to the room’s passthrough video capture was what made it feel so great. As the dinosaur snapped at my hand, it felt pretty real. And so did a butterfly that danced through the room and tried to land on my extended finger.

I smiled. But even more so, I was impressed when I took off the headset. My own everyday vision wasn’t that much sharper than what Apple’s passthrough cameras provided. The gap between the two was closer than I would have expected, and it’s what makes Apple’s take on mixed reality in VR work so well.

Then there’s the battery pack. There’s a corded battery that’s needed to power the headset, instead of a built-in battery like most others have. That meant I had to make sure to grab the battery pack as I started to move around, which is probably a reason why so many of Apple’s demos were seated.

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What about fitness and everything else?

Apple didn’t emphasize fitness much at all, a surprise to me. VR is already a great platform for fitness, although no one’s finessed headset design for fitness comfort. Maybe having that battery pack right now will limit movement in active games and experiences. Maybe Apple will announce more plans here later. The only taste I got of health and wellness was a one-minute micro meditation, which was similar to the one on the Apple Watch. It was pretty, and again a great showcase of the display quality, but I want more.

2024 is still a while away, and Apple’s headset is priced way out of range for most people. And I have no idea how functional this current headset would feel if I were doing everyday work. But Apple did show off a display, and an interface, that are far better than I was ready for. If Apple can build on that, and the Vision Pro finds ways of expanding its mixed-reality capabilities, then who knows what else is possible?

This was just my fast-take reaction to a quick set of demos on one day in Cupertino. There are a lot more questions to come, but this first set of demos resonated with me. Apple showed what it can do, and we’re not even at the headset’s launch yet.

Technologies

Apple and Google Broke Their Own Rules by Promoting ‘Nudify’ Apps, Report Says

A new report from the Tech Transparency Project found over 100 apps on app stores are designed to «undress people» from photos.

If you want an app you built to be downloadable from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, it has to pass a slew of criteria, including safety standards.

But a new report on Wednesday alleges that Apple and Google broke their own rules by promoting «nudify» apps that are outlawed in their app store policies.

The Tech Transparency Project, part of a nonprofit tech watchdog, first revealed in January that Apple and Google app stores had over 100 nudify or undressing apps. These are apps with the sole purpose of taking images of people, usually women, and editing them to appear to be that person without clothing, creating what’s called nonconsensual intimate imagery. Many of these apps use generative AI to create deepfakes.

Apple removed some of the prohibited apps at the time. But many are still out there, as evidenced in a subsequent investigation.

In April, TTP found that Apple and Google still allowed users to search for a number of troubling keywords, including «nudify,» «undress» and «deepnude.» After a deep dive on the top 10 apps across both app stores, TTP found that 40% of the apps advertised themselves as able to «render women nude or scantily clad,» according to the report.

The new report also found that Google and Apple actually promoted such apps in their stores, increasing their visibility, with Google in particular creating «a carousel of ads for some of the most sexually explicit apps encountered in the investigation.»

Apple and Google both have language in their policies that prohibits apps with «overtly sexual or pornographic material» (Apple) and «sexually suggestive poses in which the subject is nude, blurred or minimally clothed» (Google). And they’ve both enforced these policies in the past — particularly by going after porn apps.

But Apple and Google make money from app developers by running advertising and taking a part of paid app subscriptions. Analytics firm AppMagic found that these «nudify» apps were downloaded 483 million times and made more than $122 million in lifetime revenue.

«This revenue stream may be why the two companies have been less than vigilant when it comes to nudify apps that violate their policies,» TTP writes.

After news broke this week, Apple told Bloomberg News that it removed 15 of the reported apps. Google confirmed it removed seven. Apple also said it blocked several of the search terms TTP flagged in its report. Apple and Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s requests for comment and any updates since Wednesday.

Nonconsensual graphically sexual content is a growing issue, due in part to AI. We saw in startling clarity how apps with AI can be used to make this illegal and abusive content at the beginning of the year, when Grok users made 1.4 million sexualized deepfakes over a nine-day period.

Some US senators at the time called on Apple and Google to remove Grok from their app stores, but neither removed it.

We learned this week that Apple privately reached out to Grok to express its concerns about its abusive AI capabilities and threatened to remove it. Grok is still available in the Apple and Google app stores and is still reportedly able to create abusive AI sexual images, despite the company saying otherwise.

Technologies

OpenAI Has a New AI Model Built for Biology and Science

GPT-Rosalind is intended to help scientists streamline their research and drug discovery.

OpenAI’s latest AI model is built to do far more than offer cooking advice or create a spreadsheet. GPT-Rosalind, the company’s first model specifically built for life science, is meant to help scientists with drug discovery, biology and translational medicine.

The model is named after Rosalind Franklin, whose research revealed the structure of DNA and formed the foundations for modern molecular biology. Scientific research relies heavily on data, and GPT-Rosalind is designed to help sort through it, while also helping reduce the time it takes to develop and get new drugs approved and out on the market.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

It can take 10 to 15 years for a new drug to be developed and approved in the US, OpenAI said in a blog post Thursday. GPT-Rosalind is intended to improve the selection of research targets and create stronger hypotheses for higher-quality experiments.

The model has been tested on topics such as its understanding of organic chemistry, proteins and genetics. Researchers can use it to find relevant scientific literature for their work or design experiments.

This isn’t the first time an AI model has been developed with medical advancements in mind. Google DeepMind has developed many AI models for scientific research, such as AlphaFold, which earned its creators a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

«For me, the best use case for AI was to improve human health and accelerate scientific discovery,» Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said in a recent interview. Anthropic introduced Claude for Life Sciences in January with the same purpose.

Some scientists have expressed concerns in the past about how quickly AI has infiltrated the science space and have warned of vulnerabilities, potential misuse and issues with data representation.

OpenAI said GPT-Rosalind has safeguards to protect it from misuse — like the creation of a biological weapon — and has teamed up with various biotechnology, pharmaceutical and life sciences technology organizations to support research and scientific discovery.

Sean Bruich, senior vice president of artificial intelligence and data at the biopharmaceutical company Amgen, said in a statement that scientific work requires precision: «Our unique collaboration with OpenAI enables us to apply their most advanced capabilities and tools in new and innovative ways with the potential to accelerate how we deliver medicines to patients.»

GPT-Rosalind is available only through OpenAI’s trusted-access system as a research preview.

Technologies

Was This Game Just On Sale? Steam May Show Price Shifts Over the Past 30 Days

A price tracker would make it easy to tell if you’re getting a good deal on a game or not.

Steam is the largest video game platform with more than 129,000 games and counting. With so many games and the company offering frequent sales, it’s hard to keep track of whether a game has is at its lowest price or if its been discounted further in the past, but that may change.

Lines of code found in the Steam platform seemingly refer to the recent price history for a game, according to a post on Wednesday from the X account for the Half-Life fan site Lambda Generation. The code was discovered by data miner SigaTbh, who found it on SteamDB, a database and tracking site for the gaming platform. While price history is already a feature on Steam in the European Union, this update could be the first sign that it will become the norm for the platform over in the U.S.

In the image posted by Lambda Generation, there are six lines of code referencing «Price_History» and each line reflects a certain detail that could show up on a game’s page to give some context about its price. The price history would show the normal price for the game, the current price, whether the current price is a 30-day low or if the game was at a lower cost sometime within the past 30 days.

Valve is planning to add a 30 day price history for Steam games.
Found by @SigaTbh on SteamDB pic.twitter.com/BtQNpcAfIF

— LambdaGeneration (@LambdaGen) April 15, 2026

Valve didn’t immediately respond to a request for confirmation about the new feature.

Back in 2023, Valve added the price history feature to Steam in the EU as part of the Omnibus Directive. The directive is a series of rules set by the EU focusing on consumer protection. Companies with digital storefronts were required to institute a price tracker on their platforms to display the lowest price of an item for the past 30 days. Even though the Omnibus Directive is in full effect, however, it’s not available in every member state of the EU, as individual countries have to adopt the directive.

Certain rules in the EU that require certain changes to be made to a product or service eventually find their way to the U.S. Apple was forced to add USB-C to its iPhone 15 lineup due to EU legislation requiring standardization of charging ports.

It’s unclear why Valve would make the move to add a price tracker to Steam in the U.S. The company is reportedly working on an AI bot for the platform dubbed «SteamGPT,» and the price history could be part of its features.