With no set deadline or pressure to be brought to the market, Apple Vision Pro has been in the works for decades. On a recent visit to Apple Park, Alan Dye, Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design, and Richard Howarth, Vice President of Industrial Design, sat down together to explain how hardware and software came together in an unprecedented way to make an idea a reality.
‘For Vision Pro, we understood the idea that this technology of wearing something that could transport you to another place was a very powerful one. And that there were really profound experiences that could come out of it and from changing the users’ context. But we also recognised a lot of the problems that existed with these sorts of technologies, especially around isolation,’ says Dye, while stating that Vision Pro is neither AR nor VR. ‘Once we understood that the product could be used for connection, for bringing people together and helping to enrich their lives, as we do with so many other Apple products, that’s when we got fully immersed in the program and wanted to bring it to life. We got excited about what this could mean as a whole new platform. That’s why we call it spatial computing.’