Influencer takes the Vision Pro to Times Square to show us the future of Apple devices

With everyone staring at him as though he were an alien, internet influencer Casey Neistat took his 12.6 million YouTube subscribers on a cool journey through the heart of New York City while wearing the Vision Pro. Some New Yorkers knew exactly what the device was and approached him or smiled. Others just gave him a look. If Apple does, as this writer suspects, have a road map for Vision Pro that ends with Augmented Reality (AR) spectacles that will replace the iPhone, this video shows us how this will work.

While wearing the Vision Pro headset, Neistat was able to make his way down the steps to the subway, get on a train, and even describe what the person in front of him was wearing. One negative: while Casey tried to watch video on the subway car, the movement of the train would cause the feed to suddenly stop.

One of the most dangerous things that Neistat did while wearing the headset was climbing up the steep steps out of the subway station while typing on a virtual QWERTY keyboard to respond to some texts. To outsiders who didn't know what he was doing, Neistat looked like an escapee from Bellevue. But the camera that showed us Casey's point-of-view revealed how he was actually typing on the virtual keyboard while standing on the steps. One slight move backward and he would have tumbled back down the stairs and probably would have sustained a serious injury.

Standing in Times Square surrounded by New Yorkers and bright lights, Neistat compared the Oculus headset to the Vision Pro and called the former a toy. "The Vision Pro," said Casey, "feels like a little glimpse inside the future of what computing could be like down the road." There he is, sitting on a bench in Times Square with a virtual QWERTY in front of him, a screen showing Apple TV+ and YouTube (via Safari) on his right "And it all kind of works," he says.

Perhaps the wildest thing was when Casey entered a Krispy Kreme store in Times Square while running the Encounter Dinosaur feature that allows the Vision Pro user to interact with various creatures. For example, through the headset, Neistat saw a butterfly landing on his doughnut while in real life nothing was touching it.

The short battery life (2-2.5 hours between charges) and the fact that the battery can't be hot swapped (switched for a fresh cell without the device turning off) made it seem that Vision Pro would rarely be used outside. But after seeing Casey's video, we really can see how future versions of the device will be more and more mobile until the AR Apple smart glasses are released and the vision Google showed us when it introduced Project Glass in 2012 becomes real. And these glasses will eventually replace the iPhone.