Daring Fireball:

When you watch regular (non-spatial) videos using Vision Pro, or view regular still photography, the image appears in a crisply defined window in front of you. Spatial videos don’t appear like that at all. I can’t describe it any better today than I did in June: it’s like watching — and listening to — a dream, through a hazy-bordered portal opened into another world.

Several factors contribute to that dream-like feel. Spatial videos don’t look real. It doesn’t look or feel like the subjects are truly there in front of you. That is true of the live pass-through video you see in Vision Pro, of the actual real world around you. That pass-through video of actual reality is so compelling, so realistic, that in both my demo experiences to date I forgot that I was always looking at video on screens in front of my eyes, not just looking through a pair of goggles with my eyes’ own view of the world around me.

Between this post about Spacial Video today from John Gruber and Federico Viticci’s post over on MacStories back in June, I’m truly captivated by what the Apple Vision Pro may be.

I am still deeply cynical about wearing a headset that blocks me out from the world, and how dystopian some of imagery was in the reveal video, of people just embedded in their headsets…

…but at the same time, this is feeling like some “This is the future that we were promised” level of advancements in technology.

We’ll see next year. Those of us with $3500 to spend, that is.