By Mark Wilson
Apple’s Vision Pro launches in February, but don’t expect to order the $3,500 headset like a typical iPhone or iMac. Unlike these more typical one-size-fits-all products, the Vision Pro’s headband and lightseal are being produced in different sizes that need to be fit to your face. But Apple has figured out a pretty seamless way to size people perfectly.
As Apple shared in a preorder email spotted by 9to5mac, anyone ordering a Vision Pro will need to scan their face with an iPhone or iPad with FaceID during the process. Why? Because, while most of us think of FaceID as a simple way to unlock our phones, FaceID is a serious 3D-tracking technology. It projects thousands of points of invisible light to map your face’s unique shape, with so much accuracy that Apple says someone else passing for you is less than a-once-in-a-million chance. And so Apple is leveraging its FaceID scan to size up your noggin, matching you to the right-size components without forcing you to pull out the measuring tape.
Obviously we don’t know exactly what this process will feel like yet, whether it’ll feel instantaneous or require you to tilt and line up your head in all sorts of different ways to get the measurements of your head beyond your face. But Apple seems to be solving for potential sizing issues in about as accurate and seamless a way, bar having to come into a store to be personally fitted.
It reminds me of how retailers have experimented with virtual sizing through both cameras and AR. Amazon, in particular, tried leveraging body scans with both the phone and its Echo Look to fit people to garments. But those ideas tend to be better in theory than execution. Scanning your body is still an awkward, self-conscious practice to take part in, and even a high-fidelity sizing doesn’t mean that a bunch of third-party clothing companies are making garments that actually fit your unique morphology!
Still, in the case of Vision Pro, Apple is linking a behavior every customer knows (too well!)—looking at their phone—with a product that’s been carefully designed internally . . . and presumably in enough sizes to work for everyone.
(5)
