Your hands will be your Apple Vision Pro controller

Apple just unveiled its wildly expensive, yet still intriguing Vision Pro augmented reality (and virtual reality) headset this morning, but you might notice that the physical controls were missing.

That’s because the Vision Pro doesn’t come with what you would expect for a traditional controller or set of controllers. Now, the headset isn’t supposed to release until early next year, and Apple doesn’t appear to have let anyone have hands-on use time with it. So you won’t be seeing anyone actually interacting with the interface for quite some time. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook does explain how you’ll control the headset and engage with content.

You’ll use “the most natural and intuitive tools” you have at your disposal. Your hands, eyes, and voice.

Apple’s Vision Pro controls will rely on the user’s own hands

Your hands won’t be the only tool for navigation. But it wouldn’t be surprising if this is what feels most natural to the majority of people who may pick one of these up.

You can flick your wrist to scroll through content and tapping your fingers will allow to select something. Say you’re scrolling through Apple TV+ for something to watch. Like the season 3 finale of Ted Lasso for instance. With Vision Pro, you can scroll through Apple TV+ content either by looking at it or by flicking your wrist in a similar way you might scroll through your feeds on your smartphone or tablet.

Then once you find what you want to watch, you make sure it’s highlighted and then tap your fingers together to select it and hit play. Of course not everyone is going to want to interact with the user interface this way. And that’s fine as you’ll be able to use your voice to dictate navigation too.

Apple doesn’t give too much information on the specifics. But it does show off the technique during the event. Now granted, this probably isn’t going to be the way you play those more than 100 Apple Arcade games coming to the headset at launch. But there will doubt be some developers who take advantage of this new input system eventually.