Changing the Game: Apple Vision Pro’s Simple Feature That’s Making a Big Impact

The entire industry is looking at the new Apple Vision Pro. And not only the industry, but also us as future users and developers as the ones responsible for creating new experiences for this space computer. We still know very little about the Vision Pro, and with what we already know—such as its speed limit or guest mode—we have been amazed by its capabilities. Because there is one feature of the Apple Vision Pro that can change everything.

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Digitizing our world is just the beginning

Directly integrated with the visionOS operating system, the Vision Pro is equipped with a feature that, while already known on our iPhone or iPad, takes on a new meaning when implemented in glasses: we’re talking about Visual Search. It’s a feature that is rarely discussed but has a lot to say about how we navigate in this new hybrid environment between the physical and the virtual.

The Visual Search feature allows us to obtain information about almost any object (plants, animals, books, paintings, and more) simply by wearing the glasses. It also enables us to detect and interact with text in our environment, whether it’s printed or handwritten, and accurately copy it to save, paste it into the applications we’re using, or even translate it in real-time into, currently, 17 different languages.

It may seem like just another functionality, but we’re talking about easily digitizing our entire environment when it comes to papers and texts. A glance at the shopping list on the fridge can be transferred to Reminders. A look at an instruction manual, page by page, to extract the content and ask ChatGPT how to fix a household appliance, for example. Seeing a book on a table and instantly knowing not only the author and full title but also being able to search for it in Apple Books to read later. Reading the ingredients of a recipe book and automatically seeing the units that correspond to our settings or being able to transfer shipment tracking information to the Wallet app after just a quick glance at the tracking number—these are all great examples.

The possibilities are enormous and depend solely on a capability that we now take for granted in a device like this. It’s true that in its initial version, the utility of this feature is more focused on the workplace or home environment, as the Vision Pro is not intended for use while walking down the street. However, the first step of the journey has already been taken.

Even with this apparent limitation, imagine what we can do in a hybrid work setup where we sit down with our paper correspondence and can schedule events in the calendar, save complete texts, set reminders, write emails, or compare physical documents with versions stored in the Vision Pro. It’s simply impressive.

For some of the examples we’ve discussed, the development of specific applications or tools is still needed to go a step further. Some will arrive with iOS 17, but many cases already have everything we need. The Files, Notes, Calendar, and Reminders apps are already present in visionOS, and the ability to identify text fragments from the real world is more than enough to take our productivity to the next level.

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Indeed, this is an innovation that should not go unnoticed. The world is already filled with information, and the Visual Search feature of the Vision Pro seems ready to make that information even more accessible and usable. These are clearly fantastic news for when this device hits the market.

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