One Week with Apple Vision Pro - Exploring the Future of Immersive Reality in Fintech
“But, Why?”
These two words carry considerable weight when assessing new technology. In my years working with innovation teams, I’ve never encountered this question as frequently as in the past week, as the world gets its first taste of the Apple Vision Pro.
The evolution of this trend — from AR and VR in the 2010s to the recent Metaverse and now into Spatial and Immersive computing — is noteworthy. While I can’t pinpoint our position in the hype cycle, it’s evident that we’re not near maturity, and there might even be another identity crisis in the coming years.
There have been countless reviews from the serious to the seriously ridiculous. I’m not going to re-evaluate the hardware, but after a week of using it, I want to share my thoughts on the future.
Quick Take on Reviews
The review that aligns most with my experience came from one of my favorite tech reporters, Nilay Patel of The Verge . To paraphrase his review — It’s the best anyone has done. That doesn’t make it great yet. I encourage everyone to read his review if you haven’t formed your own opinions yet.
There are only two things I’d add from my own experience:
Pass through does not replicate real light. I spent nearly an hour in the Vision Pro in a my sunlit living room. The pass through felt so real, but when I took it off, it felt as if I was emerging from a dark movie theater in the middle of a July afternoon. It was jarring because of how much I had believed the pass through, but clearly the sun is different than 4k screens.
I want others to see what I see. I don’t mean mirroring, I mean see it. I put a UConn game on last weekend and made it the size of my living room wall, but no one else could experience that with me. The ability to place an object in space that others could see would open up a world of possibilities.
But…Why
Much like when the iPhone launched, it can be hard to predict the use cases of new tech. If we follow that adoption curve, it’ll be a few years before anyone who isn’t an ultra-early adopter buys one, and a few more before we start seeing mass appeal. The leveling-out for iPhone sales didn’t happen until around 2015, 8 years following the first launch.
With the best case being that mass adoption is years away, I know better than to share predictions for the products that will be built — too many incremental innovations have to deploy before we get the best ideas. Look no further than TikTok and the iPhone — in 2007 we never could have predicted the app’s rise in 2020 because we needed dozens of development between the two dates, not the least of which included 4G & 5G technology, better cameras, and improved processors, to say nothing for the socieltal trands that had to shift.
Instead of making premature predictions, let’s explore the big enablers the Vision Pro could provide after a week of use and some thoughts on what’s needed to get us there.
Immersive Reality for Fintech and Retail
1. Visualizing the abstract
It’s not our fault, but humans are pretty bad with abstract concepts. We struggle with time, numbers, spaces, and subjectivity.
In my 15 years in Fintech, I’ve seen countless efforts to help people visiualize numbers (and have even implemented a few myself). From personal financial management apps to get a better view of where money is going, to simplifying how we explain payoff options and compounding.
Our struggle with the abstract is probably one reason why it seems nearly everyone has made a budget at some point in their adult lives, but only a fraction manage one regularly. It’s difficult to visualize.
I recognize I’ll be met with another “but why?” here, with many questioning if a user would ever wear a headset simply to visualize information. Remember that adoption of new tech is made up of a combination of many small benefits — I doubt many people purchased their smartphone for a single use, yet they find the totality valuable.
2. Adding to the Journey
The past 25 years have seen prediction after prediction of the demise of physical stores. It turns out, though, that the physical store wasn’t the problem — it was the types items and the “why”.
When you know a specific item you need, digital shopping is a convenient fit. The more specific the request, the better online shopping gets. Consider this example — it’s before internet shopping, and you’ve decided you need a blue men’s golf shirt, size medium, wicking material. There would have been lots of back and forth to stores and considering options. Lots of time spent. Lots of waste.
But for the “unknown” purchases, discovery remains difficult online. There’s no perfect “wander” yet. For example, imagine it’t the holiday season and you need one last gift for your mother-in-law. If you begin searching online, it may feel hard to be inspired, and many of us will just end up back in a shopping mall hoping something jumps out at us. The treasure hunt still works best in-person.
Similarly, immersive reality will give us the opportunity to explore ways to add to journeys retail, but also health and wellness, entertainment, and finance. One of the best questions to start with is “what doesn’t work well now?” instead of trying to move existing experiences to new worlds.
3. Connecting the Disconnected
Finally, I think the “killer app” for Vision pro might not be an app at all, but actually future integration built into the operating system.
Wear the Vision pro for an hour, and you’ll find you’ve created a space with multiple applications running all around you. But unfortunately that natural experience fades when you realize that none of those apps speak to one another.
Connectivity among disparate apps within your field of view could make Immersive Reality truly remarkable. After all, in the real world most things I use can work with each other — it stands to reason that the augmented version should do the same. In immersive reality, my fantasy team should be able to interact with the real game I’m watching, even though neither are made by the same developer.
The precedent for interconnectivity like this exists, but making it work across all apps on the Vision Pro will require some creative software development from Apple.
But the pieces of the puzzle are there. Consider a similar approach in digital — browser extensions. The pipes built by chrome enable the user to determine when they want functionality to get added, subtracted, or connected across applications.
One week in, the Apple Vision Pro has sparked widespread curiosity, and the question “But why?” echoes in the evolving landscape of augmented and immersive technologies. Similar to the transformative impact of the iPhone, predicting the full range of use cases remains challenging, but potential enablers are emerging. Overcoming limitations in visualizing abstract concepts, enhancing shopping experiences, and fostering connectivity among applications stand out as promising developments. While mass adoption may be on the horizon, the true brilliance of the Vision Pro may lie in innovative software development that seamlessly connects diverse applications, opening new frontiers in interaction.
