Apple’s Vision Pro virtual-reality headset went on sale this week. Influencers, reviewers, and people with a few thousand dollars to drop have entered what the company calls a “new era of spacial computing.”
As with any Apple product, the company has plans for future generations of the Vision Pro, and some Apple engineers think it could take up to four generations to get the product just right. Prototype or not, the device is revolutionizing human interaction (or, non-interaction?).
It may be jarring to see individuals wear futuristic goggles and frantically swipe at the air, but for some, the $3,499 headset is a real game changer. One Washington Post reviewer used the device for two weeks. “People treat you a little differently when you’re wearing a Vision Pro,” Chris Velazco wrote for the Post, and the hazy-eye effect unnerves some individuals (Chris’s fiancée on FaceTime, for example, was freaked out). The headset is bug-prone like any first-generation Apple device, but it has potential, Velazco notes, to maximize work productivity, make daily chores less dull, and help individuals multitask to the extreme.
CBS’s David Pogue wrote in the Intelligencer that Apple nailed the software’s concept yet faltered on its execution. The headset is clunky and uncomfortable for glasses-wearers, Pogue writes, but with many advantages: “Vast, bright, crisp screens — for your movies and your software — no matter how cramped, dim, or grubby your space in the real world.”
When you wear the goggles, you’re not looking at the world around you (you’re viewing a live video feed), nor are people looking at you (they see your “Persona,” Apple calls it, a 3-D rendering of your head that the device calculates during its setup process). And while the device can indeed replace a dim, grubby world with a vibrant, fake one, the question of course is not if it can but if it should.
Apple lauds the device as a new way to “be together,” as can be said about many of Apple’s technological feats (such as FaceTime). But a face computer is a scarier, more unfamiliar concept, and with perhaps worse implications than we realize. I direct you to John Fechtel’s “In Your Face,” a piece run by the New Atlantis last year, that’s worth your time if you’re interested in how this new era of virtual reality seeks to remove the barrier between humans and their devices. Apple will all but eliminate any obstructions between humans and screens in the name of convenience. Fechtel writes:
We seem only happy enough to be partners in the abolition of the body. Consider again the trend in now broadly accepted body modifications that presaged the Apple Vision Pro and that may offer ingress to the implants of the future. It is a trend that affects how all of us view ourselves and each other. Are any of us really happy with our body and its stubborn limitations? The technologies available to us for modifying our bodies help to warp the ideas we have in our heads about what other people want to see in our bodies, identities, personalities, voices, and minds.
If tech companies are radical enough to see the body as a distraction, one that can be manipulated to achieve freedom from that which limits man (i.e., nature), they will turn the body into the device — into an experimental tool, a utilitarian masterpiece. The “human body will be the next computer interface,” analysts predicted in 2013.
Fechtel continues:
Most of us do not have a strong enough sense of the indispensability of the body to resist having yet another layer of ourselves peeled away and a device put on us instead. Most of us already have devices too close to us, and our digital persona feels too real, and too far from our physical life, to resist the closing circle of each new epochal device. We need to get comfortable in our own skin again. To do this, we need courage and optimism. . . .
The body’s physical reality is better than the alien reality of the digital world. All of us are more beautiful than the most beautiful AI-generated model, because we are real and it is not.
I think that’s correct, and also why technology is so great, to begin with. If we use the Vision Pro not as our “new eyes,” but as a way to view the world through a different, albeit fake, lens, the technology will do some real good. The headset could help the visually impaired see and can transcend language barriers with real-time translation apps, for example. It just depends on how we use the technology: as a means to escape reality, or as an instrument for good.