Vision Pro’s Single-User Nature Hampers Apple’s Healthcare Aspirations
Breakthrough health and wellness apps are designed to take advantage of the infinite canvas in visionOS, unveiling spatial experiences that benefit users in clinical settings and at home…
And with the unique capabilities of visionOS, healthcare developers are creating new apps that were not previously possible, transforming areas such as clinical education, surgical planning, training, medical imaging, behavioral health, and more.
It’s a rosy-eyed vision of the future, but one clouded by the Vision Pro’s single-user nature, which is both digitally and physically enforced. I can easily imagine visionOS supporting multiple users, although Apple doesn’t offer that for regular iPadOS users, despite obvious shared-device scenarios. Some sort of inflatable bladder might allow the light seal to be customized to different users, but the real win would be in eliminating the need for custom prescription lenses, such as through MIT’s 2014 research into vision-correcting displays or auto-focus lenses such as those in the ViXion01 glasses (hat tip to Allison Sheridan).
Once anyone can use a Vision Pro immediately after putting it on, shared-device and multi-user scenarios for education, training, collaboration, and presentation within a mutual AR or VR environment become significantly more realistic.
I’ve sometimes wondered why my iPad is so personal to me. I understood with the original iPad, which was so limited in both processing power and memory that it was a wonder it worked at all. (Just like v.1 Newton and v.1 iPhone.)
If I’m understanding the underpinnings of Vision Pro correctly, it’s conceptually like a pair of goggle-monitors with several iOS devices bolted on. So Apple can leverage things like iPadOS capabilities such as acting like an auxiliary monitor, but it does not currently have the code for multiple accounts because it’s iOS-oriented.
Or is it something else? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me that such an expensive device is “one to a customer.”
Once there are enough scenes to use, I can imagine it being useful for doing exposure work with people who have phobias. simulating flying on an airplane, being at a crowded concert, etc should all be very helpful. I don’t know how they would move through the environment, but especially being able to look around would be help with the realism and intensity of the exposure. Not to mention more intense scenarios (combat, fires) that could help people with PTSD to augment their usual therapy.
That’s where things like Disney’s HoloTile floor come into play.
There are other, consumer-level VR treadmills available, but none with the versatility and multi-person capabilities of HoloTile. I could easily see interfacing HoloTile with the Vision Pro to create multi-user shared environments in which such things as phobia exposure therapy could be readily performed.