Buried inside Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro VR headset is a feature that continually wows me, but you've probably never heard of it. The feature, called Personas, involves two or more users, all wearing Vision Pros, chatting with one another in real time but as virtual replicas.
Now out of beta, Personas are part of Apple's avatar system for the Vision Pro, creating replicas of yourself via a 3D photo scan.
Taking a scan of myself isn't a new thing. Some five years ago, I tried telepresence with 3D-scanned avatars on Nreal AR glasses with a company called Spatial. I've gotten peeks at Meta's realistic codec avatars. I explored cartoon avatar telepresence with Microsoft in HoloLens. And I've even scanned myself into all sorts of bizarre AI deepfakes using OpenAI's Sora phone app.
Still, no one is doing anything in VR or AR headsets or glasses as advanced as Apple's Vision Personas. And we haven't seen the beginning of how good things could get.
To learn more, I donned an M5 Vision Pro headset and jumped into a FaceTime for an exclusive chat with Apple's senior director of the Vision Products Group, Jeff Norris, and the senior director of product marketing, Steve Sinclair. The two showed up as Personas in my home office. We wandered in like ghosts when the meeting started, face to face, so to speak. After a few minutes, it felt like we were actually spending time together in person.
Apple doesn't discuss the future. But Norris and Sinclair did explain some of the very cool 3D tech that makes Personas seem so realistic. As we chatted, I imagined that similar scans could be done on places other than Vision Pro, like maybe your iPhone, which would be accessible to more people.
Apple's Personas seem uncanny outside the headset, but not inside. Apple
Real telepresence is expensive magic
It's hard to find another person who has a Vision Pro, but when I have, the eerie sense of someone ghost-walking into my home is like wizardry. Apple's VisionOS has evolved to allow collaboration between Personas, flexing virtual spaces out for up to five people to see and share virtual objects and apps together. Multiple people in the same room wearing Vision headsets can collaborate with Personas that can beam in remotely, as well.
I've dreamed of that Tony Stark-like, Star Wars-hologram telepresence idea for years now. It's basically here. It's just walled into very expensive hardware.
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