by My first thought, as I put on the Apple Vision Pro headset, was that I was somehow going to fail at virtual reality. For 20 minutes I watched as people in front of me at the Apple store pushed the air, interacting with invisible stimuli. They seemed ridiculous in the way that grown adults were trying to adopt new technology – okay, Grandma – which prompted my second, more geriatric thought: what if there was a fire while you were in one of these things and it didn’t give you noticed and burned to death?
In fact, the most impressive thing about the release of Apple’s new virtual reality headset in the United States last week was the nationwide scramble to book appointments for demos, and with it, the chance to win a nearly $4,000 wear. The Vision Pro won’t be available in the rest of the world for a while and, while Apple hasn’t released sales figures, pre-orders were said to be somewhere between 160,000 and 180,000 during the first pre-order weekend.
At my local store, in a relatively tourist-free part of New York, the Apple associate who fitted me with my headphones told me they were selling about 200 Vision Pros a day, many of them to foreign visitors. “Imagine what they’re doing at the Fifth Avenue store,” he said, and asked me to take off my glasses so he could—okay, this is pretty cool—he could put them in a machine that would read the recipe and adjust the Vision. Pro settings accordingly.
The advent of VR and “spatial computing” is part of a Philip K Dick-style future that, to most of us, still seems very absurd. I hadn’t even heard the term spatial computing before I turned up at the store on Monday; it means an overlay of computer elements – desktop tabs and icons – onto the physical world, mimicking the effect of an internalized operating system. When the headset was on, I could see the “reality” of the Apple store in front of me, and a bank of apps lined up in my peripheral vision. To open one, I simply glanced in its direction, which triggered a vision activation, then air-clicked by pinching my fingers. There’s no getting around the feeling this evokes; oh yeah, I thought, I’m the man.
The hype surrounding the release of the Vision Pro has obviously been relentless. For the benefit of those outside the US, no one who isn’t making TikTok is wandering the streets with this thing on their head, or using it while driving a car. (Though a lot of people are staging Vision Pro stunts for transit officials this week to issue a warning.) First, it’s heavy. I can’t imagine wearing it all day for work or even for a two-hour movie. The Vision Pro is being marketed as a productivity tool as much as an entertainment tool, but until it’s minimized, it seems to me that it will continue to occupy gimmick status. Which brings us to the second question of use. Anyone looking to invest in VR so they can live more fully on their spreadsheet?
As technology normalizes and improves, this resistance is likely to erode and we will become as reliant on checking messages with a glance as we are now on our watches and phones. And it’s hard to resist some of the entertainment stuff. Flicking and pinching the photo feature, the Apple store disappeared and I “stood” on the Oregon coast, completely immersed in another reality. From there, I went into a dinosaur simulation that my kids later told me doubled over with laughter, which made me make furious gestures in the air as a dinosaur shoved its face into mine and drooled dripping from his teeth. “Whoa, so cool,” I said, another thing this technology does for you – yans you immediately back to adolescence.
You have to be 13 to try the Vision Pro at an Apple store, but of course there are no rules when you get home. The New York Post reported “disappointment” among users this week when they discovered that there is no porn feature in Universe Vision Pro. (Good luck with that line). However, there is something called spatial photos and videos, which allow users to effectively live a memory with full 3D immersion. I could only imagine as I watched the birthday party show how painful this recognition could be – and how addictive – for those who are grieving; a lotus-eaters type situation one would never want to leave.
As it is, the price point of the Vision Pro is so high for most of us, it will not be an issue, although when Apple stores around the world start offering displays, it is worth trying the entertainment value of. what I think is the most arresting aspect of the headset: the size of the gap between how you think you look when using one (Neo in The Matrix), and how you actually look (a blind person playing buff blind man).
