Analysts and media, including Reuters, tried Apple Inc.‘s $3,499 Vision Pro headset on Monday.

The device is not yet ready for mass production: a test drive requires a setup session with Apple employees and a short visit with a vision specialist to check the headset fits and works properly. In addition, the price may deter Apple fans and corporate customers.

Instead of starting with a consumer version and working up to a “Pro” model, Apple is starting with the premium tier and hopes to lower pricing as the technology matures, said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies.

Apple announced the Vision Pro to compete with Meta Platforms Inc (META.O), which has released multiple headsets but struggled to break into a virtual reality market dominated by video games.

A “digital crown” like an Apple watch crown may be tapped and rotated to smoothly transition the Vision Pro headset’s display between the real world and the virtual world. For example, watching a virtual butterfly land on the user’s palm is as natural as walking around a room or watching a 3D film.

Apple personnel had to reboot the gadget at least once during a demonstration to Reuters, suggesting that the iPhone maker still has some bugs to work out.

The demonstration’s main lessons:

The real world and people are constantly there. Wearing the device shows the world in color. Even in virtual reality, external cameras watch for people. If someone approaches the user, they appear in the virtual world.

– Hollywood will likely be interested. For example, apple showed “immersive videos” filmed using proprietary cameras that let viewers look around.

– Place can shock. A tightrope walker perched between two mountain edges toward the viewer in one video generates an uncomfortable impulse to gaze down at a terrifying gulf below. Likewise, a cheap plastic water bottle on the piano during a recording session with a famous singer can look out of place in a polished production.

– Apple has promoted Vision Pro’s business case by showing how to run numerous apps in the headset, like having several high-resolution displays. In addition, it illustrated how two people might share and modify three-dimensional virtual objects during a conference call. Both abilities could be useful in the business world, where Vision Pro’s price tag would be on cost centers rather than household budgets.

–  Video calls require some adjustment. For example, Apple demonstrated a headset-based FaceTime call. The caller’s image is projected using complex technology rather than a face-pointing handset or monitor camera.

– The system uses pre-loaded photos and data from the Vision Pro’s inside the eye-tracking system and external hand-tracking cameras to create a virtual “persona” of the caller with facial expressions. But the net result is human-but-not-quite, a phenomenon robotics specialists term the “uncanny valley” effect, where faces that resemble people but are slightly off can make users feel uneasy.