An illustration of Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft.Illustration: Rocket Lab
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off this week while carrying 72 small satellites, including the first in-space manufacturing spacecraft with a mission to produce pharmaceutical drugs in orbit and return them back to Earth.
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Varda Space Industries’ first space factory is operating in orbit after launching on board a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Monday, according to a press release. The spacecraft itself was built by Rocket Lab and is designed to provide power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control to Varda’s 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsule, which is designed to manufacture and carry the products on its way back to Earth.
The California-based startup wants to manufacture products in space that can benefit from being created in the microgravity environment and delivered back to Earth at a fast rate. Varda’s vision is aided by the increased access to space over the past couple of years, making it easier to launch its capsules into orbit.
The first capsule sent to space will attempt to produce pharmaceutical drugs while in the microgravity environment and return those products in the re-entry capsule. The spacecraft is set to spend about three months in orbit and send around 90-130 pounds (40-60 kilograms) of finished product on a trajectory toward Earth.
Varda was founded in 2020 (one of its cofounders was a former SpaceX engineer) and aims to use space to create better products for Earth. The microgravity environment provides some benefits that could make for better production in space, overall reducing gravity-induced defects. Protein crystals made in space, for example, form larger and more perfect crystals than those created on Earth, according to NASA.
The startup raised $42 million less than a year after its inception. Varda ordered four Photon spacecraft from Rocket Lab for its in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing capsules, the second spacecraft is currently undergoing assembly, integration, and testing, according to the company. If all goes well for its first mission, the Varda capsule will return to Earth soon, packed with a payload of space drugs.
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After you slip on the knitted head strap and turn a small dial to get a light-tight fit, the view of the real world through Apple’s Vision Pro headset is nearly seamless. Nearly. You’re not seeing the world through a transparent lens, but instead, a real-time video recreation of it beamed from external cameras onto a pair of better-than-4K screens.
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The colors were crisp, the lag nonexistent, and the resolution high enough to be free of the screen door effect that plagues other virtual or mixed-reality headsets. But there’s just enough of a gap between the experience and real life to land in an uncanny valley. That’s why taking a hands-on test drive of Vision Pro during Apple’s WWDC event last week made me think of the 1995 cult cyberpunk noir film Strange Days. In the film, 3D recordings of real events can be replayed and re-lived through a piece of wearable tech, and Vision Pro’s slight flattening of reality reminded me of those virtual memories.
Stranger still was the experience of watching new 3D video clips recorded through the Vision Pro and played back for me like a high-tech pop-up greeting card. I predict that will be a standout feature of the device, which will cost $3,500 and be available sometime in early 2024.
More meta than Meta
Most everything else about the Vision Pro was an improvement on or evolution of features already found on devices like the Meta Quest, HoloLens, or PSVR. For example, the Meta (formerly Oculus) Quest started pushing virtual office environments with floating video chats and wall-sized spreadsheets when parent company Meta rebranded itself as a metaverse pioneer. And AR devices like HoloLens and Magic Leap already offer a view rooted in the real world, carefully layering augmented content on top.
Vision Pro plays with both of those concepts, letting you pin apps, videos and web browser windows all around you. It improves on what has come before by selectively letting elements of the reality intrude — like a real-world visitor visibly bleeding through your virtual background just by proximity.
The fabric headstrap was an improvement over other VR headstraps I’ve tried. Photo: Dan Ackerman
Virtual visitors can also intrude in your mixed reality experience. What you or I might call virtual avatars for FaceTime calls were, in AppleSpeak, dubbed “Personas.” They were the most impressive, and unsettling, part of the experience.
If I didn’t know the Persona I was talking to a real-time 3D recreation of a real person’s face, I might have been fooled into thinking I was seeing a live video feed. The 3D face scans, which Apple says you’ll be able to create from scratch using the headset’s external depth-sensing cameras, are extremely naturalistic, especially at first glance. Could you impersonate a loved one? No, at least not yet. But if this is the Day One demo version, we’re only a few iterations away from that. I’m sure Apple will lean on the device’s eye-scanning identification for security to lock down fake face phishing, but it’ll be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game to prevent it.
Hands down
Eschewing handheld controllers, the Vision Pro relies almost entirely on simple gesture controls. Many of the pinch and swipe movements feel similar to the ones used by the Quest, but there’s one major difference. On the Quest, trying to use gesture controls accurately feels like playing a carnival game — a steady eye and serious concentration are required. Even then, it can be hit-or-miss. The Quest is not seamless enough to use full-time, so you need to keep its handheld controllers nearby.
Vision Pro’s simple hand gestures, mostly pinching to tap and swiping from side to side, worked every time. The hand and finger movements required are subtle, can be activated from your lap, and are augmented by eye tracking to select options from a menu. It’s miles beyond what the gesture controls for the Quest are capable of, as it should be for a device that costs seven times as much.
The name game
During its WWDC keynote and the subsequent hands-on demo sessions, Apple avoided even mentioning buzzwords like VR or AI. Instead, the Vision Pro is described as a “spatial computing device” that uses machine learning.
Now, this isn’t my first VR headset rodeo. I first experienced modern VR back in 2012 when I tried out a very early Oculus Rift prototype. I know a VR headset when I see one, and the Vision Pro is a very fancy, very nice, very expensive VR headset.
In a way, VR headset design has almost come full circle since that 2012 demo. The new Vision Pro has been accurately described as looking like a pair of high-tech ski goggles. The original Rift prototype I saw was literally built into a pair of real ski goggles with a screen shoved inside and the exterior covered with black tape.
That original Rift was bulky and uncomfortable, and its lack of mitigating technologies for motion sickness meant my stomach was in knots for the rest of the day after using it. Vision Pro feels a million times more evolved, showing how VR hardware and software have made huge leaps in a relatively short 10 years. Despite its light weight and comfort features, I didn’t forget I was wearing the Vision Pro during my hands-on demo time, but my brain quickly adapted to being a few degrees from reality.
The idea of working in a virtual office surrounded by giant floating app windows doesn’t necessarily excite me, and the isolation issues inherent in any head-mounted wearable are magnified by the high price — it’s hard to imagine any household buying multiple headsets, or even one, in spite of all the home entertainment features. But the slightly voyeuristic thrill of creating and playing back 3D video clips — that Strange Days effect — sets the Vision Pro experience apart from other headsets I’ve tried and makes it standard future virtual, augmented or spatial experiences will be judged against.
