A First Look at Immersive Telepresence on Apple Vision Pro

Due to the widespread adoption of "work-from-home" policies, videoconferencing applications (e.g., Zoom) have become indispensable for remote communication. However, they often lack immersiveness, leading to "Zoom fatigue" and degrading communication efficiency. The recent debut of Apple Vision Pro, a mobile headset that supports "spatial personas", offers an immersive telepresence experience. In this paper, we conduct a first-of-its-kind in-depth and empirical study to analyze the performance of immersive telepresence with FaceTime, Webex, Teams, and Zoom on Vision Pro. We find that only FaceTime provides a truly immersive experience with spatial personas, whereas others still operate 2D personas. Our measurements reveal that (1) FaceTime delivers semantic data to optimize bandwidth consumption, which is even lower than that of 2D personas for other applications, and (2) it employs visibility-aware optimizations to reduce rendering overhead. However, the scalability of FaceTime remains limited, with a simple server-allocation strategy that potentially leads to high network delay for users.