Man builds his own 'knock-off' Apple Vision Pro and everyone has made the same comment
Turns out making a mixed-reality headset might not be so hard, after all.
Featured Image Credit: Basically Homeless/YouTube
Apple's Vision Pro headset was a bit of a sensation when it was released earlier this year, with YouTubers and influencers the world over fighting to get their hands on one.
Things have arguably gone a little quiet since then as people get more used to the Apple Vision Pro, working out how it actually fits into regular life.
One YouTuber, though, has been hard at work with a truly impressive project, which he's now finished at last - a home-made Apple Vision Pro.
The channel, Basically Homeless, has a history of trying to jerry-rig products together to see how close it can get, and this time it's truly a DIY attempt.
The idea the creator had was to basically attach all of the gadgets that the Vision Pro includes to his head using a sort of strap, meaning he has to get a camera, monitor and PC onto his head all at once.
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This quickly proved impossible due to the weight of all these devices, so he moved on to use a helmet instead, trying to ignore the heaviness.
If that all sounds like a joke, though, the amount of work that gets put into trying to mimic some of the Vision Pro's features is really impressive.
Take, for example, one of the Vision Pro's best and most advanced options - its pass-through video, which lets you see the world around you even as you wear the headset.
Basically Homeless managed to ape this in an ingenious way, by writing some code that would effectively turn the wallpaper or background of his miniature monitor into a constantly updating video feed captured from the mounted camera.
This eliminated the need for a dedicated software package on the computer, instead letting Windows itself become the augmented-reality system.
In full use, this monitor was then replaced by some augmented-reality glasses, but he uses a monitor in the demonstration so that people can more easily see what he's doing, which is a smart move.
The results when he gets everything on at one time are pretty impressive, albeit extremely homebrew, and they've prompted a wave of comments making the same point.
Namely, people are convinced that this project, as barebones as it might be, shows that Apple will have major competition very soon.
One person said: "Apple has been real quiet since this dropped." Another joked: "I heard Apple had an all hands on deck meeting because of this guy. He is going to single-handedly bring down Apple."
Now, Apple might not in reality be scrambling to come up with a counterpoint to this home experiment, but the video is an interesting showcase. It demonstrates both how impressive Apple's engineering is, to have shrunk all this down to a comfortable design, but also how close a normal person can get to it on their own - even if that's not actually all that close at all.