Apple released its first video ad promoting the company’s Vision Pro. Aptly titled “Get Ready,” the short ad follows on the heels of yesterday’s official launch announcement for the headset.
This new ad clearly aims to make strapping a bulky set of goggles to one’s face cool. To do this, Apple pulled from films and TV shows with noteworthy, inspiring characters that don a variety of masks, goggles, headsets, and helmets. It begins with a scene from Young Frankenstein, with Gene Wilder exclaiming, “Get Ready!” From there, clips includes the likes of Carl Fredricksen from Up!, Marvel’s Ant-Man, Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Snoopy, Geordi LaForge from Star Trek, the Krabby Patty Burglar from SpongeBob SquarePants, Tony Stark from Iron Man, Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, and more.
The end of the ad shows a woman putting on the Vision Pro in her home and pulling up the floating home screen. It ends with the simple tagline “Get Ready.”
It seems clear that, according to Apple, if these popular characters wear things on their heads, you should, too. Apple designed the headset to be a productivity, collaboration, and entertainment tool, which means it intends users to wear the goggles for long periods of time. That may take some convincing for some, hence the push to make it cool.
For long-time Apple fans, the ad may feel very familiar. It is remarkably similar to the company’s very first iPhone ad, released in 2007. That ad also utilized a simple title (“Hello”) and featured television and movie clips of people saying “Hello” as they picked up the phone. It seemed to have worked for the iPhone, and the format works equally as well for the headset ad.
The Vision Pro headset promises lots of impressive specs and features. “Vision Pro is a revolutionary spatial computer that transforms how people work, collaborate, connect, relive memories, and enjoy entertainment,” Apple explains. It even offers photography-specific features, such as the ability to view immersive panoramic images. But whether those features are enough to make users want the fancy goggles on their faces for hours on end remains to be seen.
The Vision Pro headset will be available for pre-order on January 19 at 5 AM PST, with units arriving in stores on February 2. All the fancy tech inside commands a steep price of $3,499.