by If you ever worry that technology might be getting too smart and that robots are ready to take over the world, I have a quick and easy way to deflate those fears: call a company and try ask them a simple question. You will be put through to an automated voice system and spend the next 10 minutes yelling NO, DON’T DATE ME! WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ‘YOU DON’T COMPLETELY GET THIS?’ HE DOESN’T WANT ANY OF THOSE OPTIONS! SEND ME THROUGH TO MAN, O God!
That was certainly my experience calling Apple and trying to reconfirm my Vision Pro display, which was suddenly canceled due to snow. But if my phone experience felt ancient, the Apple Vision Pro headset itself felt like a terrifying glimpse into the future. As it should be: the thing costs $3,499.
My expectations, myself, were quite low. Over the past decade or so we’ve been told that virtual reality and augmented reality are just around the corner, but have consistently failed to break into the mainstream. The headphones were clunky and impractical, the prices were sky-high, and the experience itself was great but not exactly exciting. The metaverse (a rebranding of virtual reality) was similarly disappointing.
The Vision Pro, however, was very impressive. I felt like Usher, I kept saying “woah” so much during the demo. The Vision Pro is branded as “spatial computing”, rather than an entertainment device, and is meant to be used for everything from answering emails to browsing the internet – you navigate with your eyes and scroll through your Pin your fingers and move your hands like you. ‘an invisible orchestra is conducting.
Despite the use cases on the market, its most impressive feature is the immersive video. Everything else feels a little gimmicky: do I want to see my PC apps floating in front of me? Not really! When you watch a movie, however, you feel like you’ve been transported into the subject. If money were no object, I’d pick up headphones right away because watching movies is so much fun.
And that’s basically the size of the market for the Vision Pro right now: people who don’t really have any money. The headset is great but still not comfortable (and good luck drinking coffee while wearing it) and not at the point where it justifies the price tag. We are still in the early stages of this technology and it will be some time before it gains steam in the wider culture.
But while it’s hard to say when spatial computing will be as ubiquitous as the smartphone is today, it’s pretty clear that it will be widely adopted and when it won’t. There is no debating that we are moving towards a world where the “real world” and digital technology blur seamlessly. The internet is moving away from our screens and into the world around us. And that raises serious questions about how we view the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate to defeat this technology but it’s not clear how worried they are about the consequences.
Some of these consequences are easy to predict. Give it a few weeks and we’re sure to hear about a car accident that happened when someone used the headset while driving. There are already plenty of videos circulating of people using the Vision Pro outdoors, including in their cars. (Apple, by the way, tells people not to use the headset while driving but doesn’t include any guardrails that stop someone behind the wheel from using the technology.)
It also seems inevitable that without some sort of radical intervention, these headphones will take online harassment to a whole other level. Over the years there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metric: an experience that feels truly terrifying because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between the real and the digital world blur to the point of being almost unrecognizable, will there be a significant difference between an online attack and an attack in the real world?
Also daunting is the question of how, more broadly, spatial computing will change what we think of as reality. Researchers from Stanford University and Michigan recently studied the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature that brings VR content into the big world around you so you can see what’s around you and the using a device) and some stark warnings emerged about how this technology could rewire our brains and “disrupt social connection”.
Essentially, these headphones give us all our private lives and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your surroundings – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it can erase all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.
“What we’re about to experience is using these headphones in public, the common ground disappears,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford and one of the study’s lead researchers. by Business Insider. “People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We will lose common ground.”
It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might change that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how big tech already has an impact on what we see, and then multiply that a million times over. Do you think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they look more realistic.
We are witnessing a global rise in authoritarianism. If we are not careful this type of technology is going to accelerate it greatly. Being able to draw people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s the author’s dream. We are entering an age where people can be manipulated and manipulated like never before. Forget Mussolini’s bread and circuses, the young fascists now have donuts and Vision Pros.
