The Apple Vision Pro is a surprisingly emotional computer. If the Apple Watch is Apple’s most personal device, the Apple Vision Pro is the company’s most intimate device.
After a month of regular use, I believe the Apple Vision Pro is the ultimate nostalgia machine, a portable cinema, and a Macintosh-level personal computer. In this article, I want to focus on the nostalgia component and how profound it can be.
The Apple Vision Pro is a stunning movie screen. That’s true whether you’re watching a feature-length film or catching up on the latest episode of your favorite TV show. This is also true for simply browsing your photo library and watching home videos on a full-size screen.
I don’t find myself rewatching videos I shot on my iPhone on the living room TV, but it’s a favorite activity on the Apple Vision Pro that brings me a lot of joy. Immerse yourself in an immersive environment (the moon at night is my favorite thing to focus on) and feel like you’re back in the room with family and friends, or at that concert last summer. All while my son sleeps next to me.
Then there are the plumbing fixtures. Apple Vision Pro is great for viewing giant panoramic photos or scrolling through your photo library as if you were walking around life-size prints. Spatial videos and photos taken on the iPhone or Apple Vision Pro are fine. However, it’s the visionOS 2 feature that makes me rave about Apple Vision Pro.
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I had a very similar experience when I was going through my photos and giving a spatial look to some old photos of my son when he was little. One of my favorite photos is of him when he was about 4 years old and I saw this spatial photo and then compared it in my mind to older photos of him that came up just a couple of days ago and there was this grown man looking at me who looked like that little guy and I just lost it. It was such an amazing experience for me and I owe everything to Apple and their engineers for this.
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visionOS 2 introduces the ability to spatialize traditionally flat photographs. My photo library includes dozens of photos from my childhood. Adding layers of tangible depth to photos of my late grandmother or my college friends from years ago touched me deeply.
I felt like I was transported back to 1995 and 2010. I was standing right in front of lost loved ones again. I felt the sadness that they were ghosts lost in time. I felt the love like when we were together. I felt a part of me healed. I know I miss these people, and I know I am sad that they are gone. Now I recognize again how much joy they brought me through this vivid memory. It helps me understand why missing them can be so powerful.
The experience makes you think of all the people you love in your life now. My children who were not born when these memories were captured. The new friends I had yet to meet when I was younger. And the friends and family I can still reconnect with. Seriously, a huge thank you to everyone who played a part in making spatial representations of existing photos possible in visionOS 2.
I needed to share this serendipity with someone else. My son’s great-grandfather lost his wife one summer after 50 years of marriage. I applied the spatial effect in visionOS 2 to photos of our encounters with them over the past decade, then created an album of them for him. “There she is,” he said, reaching out for it.
