Pictured above: Here I am at the store, waiting for the demo. The unit I actually tried used the Dual Band loop, which was very comfortable.

Based on podcasts and reviews that I’ve seen over the past year, going into the demo I thought that:

• the eye gaze + hand pinching UX would be finicky and annoying
• the unit would be uncomfortable to wear after 20+ minutes
• that i would have eye strain 20+ minutes
• that resolution would be crisp at what you’re looking at, but maybe soft on the periphery.
• the projected Mac display would be amazing and its killer app
• environments would be neat
• immersive video would be OK and the 3D stereoscopic effects would appear natural
• that i would feel some magic

In reality I found:

• the eye gaze + hand pinching UX was great because it is really nice being able to select things without needing to have your hands up on a trackpad. It’s just really comfortable.
  both eye + hand tracking + worked really well for me, even with my hands resting on my knees. gestures like turning the hand to show your palm and access Home worked OK, but with some lag.
• the unit was comfortable to wear. I honestly never had to think about it (after i got my fit right).
• more light was coming in from around my nose than I expected, but the store was very bright
• i experienced no eye strain (like zero) over ~20+ minutes, but maybe I would after an hour – it’s impossible for me to say
• the resolution was not that crisp at what you’re looking directly at — text appeared very soft and low res. It’s very far from the “retina” quality I’m used to.
• the Mac projected display (in wide and ultrawide) was neat, but b/c the resolution wasn’t crisp .. i wouldn’t want to do much computer work in it, which hurts its appeal.
• also, i was aware of the field of view more when it came to using the projected Mac display. Meaning that, if I literally had a physical screen of the same size, to see something in the corner of it, I would just glance over with my eyes, but I couldn’t do that here b/c the AVP’s screen wasn’t wide enough, so had to swivel my head some. It’s not “bad” but I’m looking forward to increases in FOV over time. I never really ran into the FOV limitation with the other parts of the demo – just the huge projected Mac displays.
• environments were neat and immersive video was REALLY effective making me uncomfortable at times (b/c i felt like i was actually in a room with people i didn’t know), and tricking my mind into phantom sensory stimulations
• with environments and immersive video, I was able to quasi forget that I was in a very busy Apple Store, which made me less self-conscious about looking dumb, haha.
• the stereoscopic effect was effective but, on some videos, especially “home-made” videos a bit unconvincing (breaking the immersion a bit).
  — the resolution of the “home videos” was pretty poor.
• It definitely felt magical at times

My takeaway was: something derivative of this tech is the future of computing. But for it to get there, the resolution of the displays needs to become about twice as good (not just slightly better). Otherwise, tasks that require reading lots of text (basically all the things I do with my computer) are not ones i would want to do in an AVP.
I expect I’ll be going in for another AVP demo in ~3 years, ready to be convinced that the resolution is good enough and that its time has arrived. As it stands now, i’d pay $1K for a device like the AVP, far from $3.5K. It’s still really neat tho!

Another interesting tidbit: The presenter who facilitated the demo said that I was the first customer to ask him to try the Mac projection feature (not just the Wide/Ultrawide), and that he had only tried it himself once to make sure it worked.