Leave it to Apple to come up with the best AR/VR headset on its first attempt. We should not be surprised. Isn’t that what they did with the phone? And leave it to Shapr3D to come up with a way to use Apple’s headset for design. Isn’t that what they did with the iPad? The brilliant little CAD company from Hungary has jumped into the Apple Vision Pro, again a chance to exploit hardware innovation to make CAD more natural. With the iPad, Shapr3D freed designers from keyboard and mice. With the Vision Pro, they free the designer from the flat screen and immerse them in a virtual reality.
We are introduced to the new Apple Vision Pro by István Csanády, CEO and founder of Shapr3D at a special event in what will be the company’s hew Budapest headquarters.
“As the founder of Shapr3D, my vision has been to create an adaptive, cross-platform CAD tool for seamless collaboration in product development,” says István Csanády in the accompanying press release. “With Vision Pro, we’re achieving a milestone in realizing this vision, enabling you to not only design but to edit directly in CAD on Vision Pro. And we didn’t stop there. We’ve integrated extended reality design reviews into the Shapr3D ecosystem to seamlessly pick up on any device, transcending traditional boundaries and enhancing productivity. It’s the next step toward our goal of making CAD collaboration accessible to everyone, regardless of their platform or location.”
We are treated to a live demo which mimics two designers collaborating on a design. Projected on the screen is the view from inside a Vision Pro headset of an automobile center console being designed. We see it on a flat screen but the designer is immersed in a virtual world with a scale model of the design in the room. We have to imagine the scene playing out in a car. He picks up the design on a computer to add detail and make changes. The transition from VP to computer is immediate and seamless. There are no glitches, blue screens of death or sweaty armpits – as far as any of us can tell.
Shapr3D, unlike Onshape, runs locally (on your computer or device) and can sync with a model on the cloud so it feels as if everyone collaborating is accessing the same model. Onshape, which runs and stores models on the cloud needs no syncing – everyone is accessing the same model, AKA a single source of truth. It is a distinction without a difference, however, as the syncing takes less time than putting down one device and picking up the other.
Shapr3D sees the Vison Pro headset as part of a workflow that involves multiple devices, each suited for the task at hand. A designer can conceptualize on a tablet with a pen-and-paper-like interface. They can detail the design on MacBook Pro or a Windows-based workstation. They can try it on for size with the Vision Pro.
The suggested workflow seems ideal for a design studio, particularly automotive design studios, which are likely to support both iPad Pros and Pencils, MacBook Pros for all and have them all share a Vision Pro.
Try It, You’ll Like It
We all got a chance to try on the Vision Pro and see for ourselves. Those that had tried other VR headsets on the market had to admit the view inside the Vision Pro was stunningly good by comparison. With 4K resolution per eye, it matches the state of the art Varjo XR-4. Because of the high resolution and brightness, the Apple headset is able to show textures as fine as the pebble grain on leather of an automobile interior and deep rich colors of Shapr3D’s physics-based rendering. Latency, a common cause of nausea, is indeed minimal. We would not get sick, we were told. However, one attendee did still find it disorienting though not to the point of asking for a vomit bag.
Unlike the first VR headsets on the market that tethered you to a workstation with wires (AKA, an electric ponytail), the Vision Pro is wireless—save one wire attached to a battery. Without the power from a workstation, it must have a battery. That’s okay. The battery is small enough to slip into your pocket and leave you free to move about the room.
You would not want to move about the room with a 1st generation VR headsets even if you could. A step in any direction and you could trip over the furniture. Rooms set up for VR had to have headsets with long ponytail, be free of obstruction and have a spotter to keep you from walking into the workstation or the walls. The outward facing cameras on the Vision Pro can show you the room that prevent you from walking into anything. You can also interact with people around you.
You put on the Vision Pro, tighten the fabric headband, and the headset configures itself for your eyes so it can do eye tracking, which it does in lieu of a mouse and cursor. You look at icons or checkboxes, which give the slightest glow to indicate they are being seen. You do a thumb-finger pinch movement in front the headset, which the device interprets a selection, as you would click a mouse button. It must get easier with practice. I find myself yearning for the simplicity and precision of a cursor and a mouse.
Shapr3D leads the field with the types of computers and devices it can run on. It made its debut on an iPad, runs on MacBooks, was ported to Windows-based PCs and now, runs in the Apple Vision Pro.
It may seem odd to pair a $38/month program with hardware that costs almost ten times what you pay for the program monthly, but in another way, you can see where Shapr3D is going with this rather high-end device :
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• The Vision Pro could be a big hit, giving Shapr3D cachet, kudo — and first mover advantage
• It helps establish Shapr3D with big manufacturers, such as automotive design studios and heavy equipment manufacturers, which had in the past made would employ VR CAVEs, whole rooms with images projected on walls, that cost between $100K and a million.
Does it matter that the Vision Pro has a price tag of in the thousands ($3499) when a flat screen can be had for hundreds of dollars? Give us technology we love, and cost is no object. CAD cost thousands when drafters’ tools (lead holders, T-squares, drafting table…) cost hundreds. The iPhone costs over a thousand when cell phones cost hundreds. The Model-T debuted with a $850 price tag, the price of two horses.
It remains to be seen if Apple Vision Pro will be one of those gotta-have-it products. There are still a few barriers to the Vision Pro and VR in general that stack up against it and be too high to jump over:
- You can’t wear glasses. If you don’t have contact lenses or don’t want to be bothered with them, you have a problem.
- Headsets are still bulky. You can’t wear them all day.
- Expensive
- Software UIs are still developing. The best eye tracking is still imprecise compared to a mouse and cursor. You can’t push and pull objects like you could with a touch screen.
I’m sure the UIs will get better. Perhaps a cursor to confirm your direction of sight. And the selection of solid objects with the cursor and a double blink? You wouldn’t look goofy pinching the air. With clash detection, you should not be able to walk or wave through objects. Perhaps some feed back, like a buzz or haptic feedback gloves?
Still, there has been no better time to get into VR, now that Apple has a device for it. The company has a way of introducing the future. And Shapr3D, the original iPad CAD program, is all in.
