Apple has produced a stand-alone, augmented reality headset, the Vision Pro, that it sees as the future of computing. Given how central Apple has been to the computing experience, from the desktop to the smartphone, we should take this large claim seriously.
The headset looks like a giant pair of ski goggles. Everything a user sees while wearing it is processed by internal and external cameras. The Vision Pro’s operating system ‘places’ apps in the user’s field of view. The user can select apps by simply looking at them because the device tracks eye movements. He can then ‘click’ to launch them by pinching his fingers because the Vision Pro’s external cameras track hand movements.
So, like Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, you can wave virtual windows into view via gestures, conduct full motion video FaceTime conversations, watch immersive 3D movies, dictate columns, shoot 3D video, play games, basically do most things you need an iPhone or a Mac to do, without monitors, keyboards, or trackpads. The Vision Pro enables computing without hardware in any space that you happen to occupy, which is why Apple wants you to believe that the Vision Pro inaugurates a new era of ‘spatial computing’.
Will it fly? Reviewers’ reservations about its price point (it costs $3,500), its battery life (two hours), its bulk and weight, can be ignored. Apple will iterate cheaper, sleeker, lighter versions with better battery life. If the gesture-based OS system works, if the video quality is as hi-res as real life, if you can fine-tune your awareness of the real world so you’re not a menace to people around you — and all the reviewers say that the Vision Pro ticks those boxes — people will give this gadget a whirl.
The real question isn’t technological, it’s social and psychological. Will the strangeness of spending hours of your life in these goggles looking like a dorky diver on dry land, the weirdness of viewing your immediate world through digital camera arrays instead of your own eyes, the unsociability of being ostentatiously distracted in the company of others, limit widespread adoption?
No, no and no. People who walk around wearing massive noise cancelling devices bolted on to their skulls like head handles are unlikely to baulk at Apple’s goggles. The large male constituency for branded headphones is more likely to revel in the cyborg coolness of it all.
Noise cancelling headphones are, in fact, the lineal ancestors of Apple’s Vision Pro. These headphones announce to the world that the wearer is in an aural world of his own. Not only is he listening to sounds that people in his vicinity can’t hear but he is also wearing a device that’s specifically designed to exclude the soundscape he inhabits. When he switches from noise-cancelling mode to ‘pass-through’ mode and lets the sounds around him leak in, those sounds are transmitted to him through external microphones. It is electronically processed and amplified sound, not the acoustical soundtrack of the real world.
This is exactly analogous to the way in which the wearer of a Vision Pro can toggle between a view which wholly shuts out the world around him as, for example, when he is watching a 3D film, and a view that accommodates his surroundings to varying degrees, by turning a dial. A person accustomed to processed sound is unlikely to be spooked by processed vision.
The argument that potential users will be put off by the oddness of gesturing to themselves in a public setting as they open apps or resize windows is silly in a world where people seemingly talk to themselves or their earpieces in public without self-consciousness. That ship sailed twenty years ago when the mobile phone became ubiquitous. We live in an age of performative self-absorption, of involuted individualism.
The more interesting case against the widespread adoption of the Vision Pro is the device’s use of near-lifelike animation. A video call on FaceTime will feature not the wearer’s face but an animated, hyper-real avatar of his face based on the preliminary face scan Apple requires as part of the device’s setup process. This is a peculiar arrangement given that the intimacy of face-to-face conversation is premised on the realness of the faces in question. The other uncanny part of the device are the virtual eyes projected onto the exterior of the Vision Pro to simulate eye contact.
The weirdness of this is obvious and some reviewers have cited the revulsion provoked by near-perfect but not-quite-right mimicry of humans by robots or digital avatars, the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ response, as an argument against the Vision Pro’s acceptability. It is hard to see this as a deal-breaker. Users who would rather show their real faces to their friends will likely just use their phones for that purpose. Also, if the Vision Pro’s virtual eyes are persuasively animated, they might seem like an improvement on the visor-like blankness of other VR headsets like Meta’s.
Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, who promises to transport users to a virtual reality, a self-contained metaverse, Tim Cook and Apple are pushing augmented reality, a less ambitious but more strategic offering. By emphasising the everyday nature of this technology, Apple hopes to persuade us that virtual computing grafted on to scenes from real life is a familiar, non-disruptive transition from the way we do things now.
And it might work... except for one thing. Apple’s publicity film for the Vision Pro features a clip in which a father wearing the headset films his child’s birthday party. The Vision Pro will be able to not just display 3D video but also shoot 3D video. Apple chose the most cosy, domestic setting possible to show off this capability, the birthday home movie, but even that looked odd and alienating.
It’s hard to imagine how a wearable device that can shoot hi-res 3D photos and video by just ‘looking’ can ever become socially acceptable. Apple might argue that high quality phone cameras have inured people to shutterbugs everywhere, but there’s a difference between a point-and-shoot device (which is what a phone camera is), where the subject of the video is broadly identifiable, and an all-seeing uber-bionic eye that can capture people without them being able to tell that they are being filmed by a total stranger.
This was the fatal defect of the original take on an optical wearable, Google Glass, and given Vision Pro’s vastly more capable camera, this privacy-invading feature could be even more of a menace. It could turn college classrooms, clubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies, offices, lavatories, dinner parties, beaches, public pools and gyms into movie sets for stalkers, voyeurs and snoops. If Apple’s looking to crack ‘spatial computing’, it’ll have to scrub the Vision Pro’s potentially creep-enabling camera. Or else this cool piece of kit might achieve notoriety as the plaything of a dodgy demographic. Incel inside is not an endorsement a world-changing wearable needs.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
