I Tried Holding a Vision Pro Workshop at Summer Coworking

A coworking space that opens only on Wednesdays in August is being held around the exact middle of the Boso Peninsula in Chiba Prefecture. I thought it would be boring to go empty-handed, so I brought my Vision Pro as a small topic.

Some people may not immediately understand what "the exact middle of the Boso Peninsula" means. In the first place, the place people imagine as "around the middle" probably differs from person to person. The location is around Yoro Keikoku. It does not seem to be announced very publicly, so if you know someone involved, it may be best to ask them directly.

The organizer is Kawamura-san, who used to run Shimokitazawa Open Source Cafe. How many years has it been? He is someone I had not seen for a long time. Since the COVID period, there have been especially many people like that, people I have not seen for at least five years. So of course the greeting becomes, "Long time no see."

I live in Funabashi, so even though it is in the same prefecture, it is not somewhere I can reach immediately. After traveling by JR to Goi Station, I take the Kominato Railway, and from there it is fairly long. It takes about an hour. That said, if you have never ridden the Kominato Railway, I recommend it because you can easily experience a rural atmosphere. Many of the stations along the way have a nice nostalgic feel. Of course, there are also plenty of unmanned stations.

I Tried an Impromptu Vision Pro Workshop

I brought the Vision Pro as a conversation topic, but I thought I would simply take it home if nobody showed interest. Since people reacted quite strongly, I tried doing something like an impromptu workshop. That said, I had not prepared anything, so it was simply a chance for people to try it.

In my case, my introduction to Vision Pro happened suddenly on the day of a hackathon, so the time I spent as a beginner was very short. That makes it educational to see what other people stumble on. Broadly speaking, people seem to stumble on the following points.

• They wear glasses, making it difficult to see the screen clearly in the first place
• They do not know what to do during calibration when entering in Guest Mode
• They operate it for a while, but cannot get the "tap fingers together" gesture to work well
• Selecting menu items with gaze does not work well
• Some content cannot be mirrored, making guidance difficult in some cases

Regarding the glasses issue, if I were to hold a full-scale workshop, I think I would need to prepare several lenses. In reality, that may be difficult, but I wonder what people who run workshops do about this. Some people stopped the experience midway because they could only see vaguely. If there is a good method, I would like to adopt it.

This time I tried to support participants' operations by mirroring the Vision Pro screen to an iPad. However, with 3D video in Apple TV, not only was mirroring impossible, but the headset screen itself also went black. It was probably some kind of DRM handling, but at first I did not know the cause, and I ended up making someone experience a black screen with only subtitles. I felt bad about that.

The other three items are probably problems caused by Vision Pro's approach being too new. For example, Quest 3 uses, in a good sense, a legacy interface such as controllers, making it easier for beginners to understand. With Vision Pro, some people could not "pinch" well and gave up on operating it. For a workshop intended to encourage adoption, that would be remembered as a negative experience, so if left as-is, I thought it could become a negative workshop.

Probably, a presentation beforehand is necessary. I think it would be good to have classroom-style time to explain the operation system. This seems necessary if I am going to run workshops properly.

I also felt that it is necessary to properly create a program for what experience people start with and how the workshop progresses. There should be a flow where people get used to the controls and understand the appeal of Vision Pro by experiencing things in that order. If someone still has a negative opinion of Vision Pro after that kind of support, then that cannot be helped.

Even just discovering these various issues made it worth doing, and I want to thank the people who participated in this test even though I was not fully prepared. I will think a bit and try holding the first proper workshop.