One of the Vision Pro's unique features is its "EyeSight" lenticular front-facing display, which shows nearby people a rendered view of the upper half of your face as they approach. EyeSight displays a translucent colored pattern in front of your eyes when an app blocks your view of your physical environment, and turns opaque when you're in a VR app.
However, Vision Pro prices will start at $3,500, so developer Adam Xuezhen decided to recreate it using the $1,000 Meta Quest Pro, which he attaches to the front of the head-mounted display with his own iPhone. Adam's VR app reads the Quest Pro's eye-tracking data and sends it to his iOS app for rendering, displaying an avatar.
Adam even took advantage of the iPhone's FaceID sensor suite to locate the correct angle of the face and eyes to the viewer, and to return the screen to a color pattern when no one was nearby. It's a neat alternative to the Vision Pro's lenticular display, but unlike Apple's solution, it only works for a single nearby person, not multiple people.
To be clear, this is just a fun experiment, not an actual accessory. This only works with the specific VR app Adam developed for this project, as the Meta Quest platform doesn't support third-party background apps.
In addition, the iPhone blocks the view of the Quest Pro's front-facing tracking and color cameras, rendering the reality-travel feature unusable and forcing positional tracking to use only the side cameras.
Still, it's a technically impressive experiment, and could hint at ways future headsets might use to display eyes without a lensed display.