More Than Just Code podcast - iOS, visionOS and Swift development, news and advice · Tim Mitra, Jaime Lopez Jr, Mark Rubin

Looking Ahead on Apple Vision Pro: Oliver Weidlich

·51 min·3 clips

Oliver and his team built a Vision Pro “desk accessory” that shows meetings as colored capsules inside a glass capsule.

1. More Than Just Code Podcast episode 381 focuses on Apple Vision Pro, spatial computing, and Oliver Weidlich’s user-experience work. 2. Dimitra hosts from Toronto, Ontario, and Oliver Weidlich joins from Sydney, Australia, where he says it is 5 p.m. for him and 7 a.m. for her. 3. The episode asks what Vision Pro changes for developers and designers who are trying to build for a new computing platform. 4. Oliver says his background started in psychology and human-computer interaction around 1999 and 2000, with an interest in memory, learning, and perception. 5. He describes early consulting work on websites, airline kiosks, in-car systems, and mobile interfaces, including BlackBerry-era screens with three or four lines of text. 6. He says his interest in Apple platforms goes back to playing on a “2C,” then later to the iPhone launch in 2007 and Android devices. 7. Oliver explains that he founded a company called Mobile Experience in 2010 and renamed it Contextual about 18 months before the episode. 8. He says a turning point came around 2016, when a friend showed him HoloLens and he saw “a new way of interacting with computing.” 9. He describes sketching a farming scenario for an app that could show wind direction, soil, irrigation, weather, and crop yield in augmented reality. 10. He says that same thinking expanded into scenario planning for board directors managing multiple wineries. 11. Oliver argues that augmented reality research goes back to the 1950s and 1960s, which gives the field a long academic history before today’s consumer devices. 12. He says HoloLens introduced gesture, voice through Cortana, and mixed-reality interaction, while Magic Leap One let users open multiple apps in landscape mode and pin them to surfaces. 13. He says Magic Leap One could leverage LiDAR-style understanding of the real world for surface detection, which Vision OS does not yet do in shared space. 14. Oliver says he has given about 106 Vision Pro demonstrations and has not seen anyone fail to make the gaze, pinch, swipe, and pull interactions work after onboarding. 15. He says Vision Pro’s quality comes from the combination of hardware, software, display resolution, and passthrough quality rather than any single feature. 16. He says the Apple ecosystem makes Vision Pro immediately useful because photos, calendar, mail, Apple TV purchases, and Apple Music are already there. 17. Oliver says the device works as a transition platform because users can bring in iPad apps like Notion and Slack and also bring a Mac screen into the headset. 18. The conversation has an exploratory interview tone, with Dimitra pressing for comparisons, workflow examples, and advice for VisionOS developers. 19. Listeners who build iOS, iPadOS, or VisionOS apps will get the most value from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for celebrity news or entertainment gossip should probably skip it.

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